Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/December 2019/Book reviews




 * By Hawkeye7

The thesis of this book is that logistics played a crucial role in the U.S. Army's occupation of Germany after World War II. I don't think that would come as news to anyone buying this book. What may surprise is that the case is not well made. If you want to read about the subject, I recommend starting with The US Army in the Occupation of Germany (1975), which can be downloaded for free from here. That's not to say that this book doesn't have some new insights and cover some new aspects.

Although today considered a paragon by comparison with the disaster that was the occupation of Iraq (but what wouldn't be?), the US occupation of Germany was something of a stuff up. The idea of a civilian administration fortunately died quickly; the US Army was the only organisation equipped for the task, and it was already on the scene. Fortunately, General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower was soon succeeded as military governor by the more able General Lucius D. Clay.

The US commenced the occupation with the draconian idea of reverting Germany back to a rural economy. This was impractical for a start; as Kruger points out, Germany had not been self-sufficient in food for decades, and the majority of the agricultural land fell into the Soviet zone. It was recognised in Germany, if not in Washington, that an idle starving population did not make for good law and order. Nor, as the Cold War set it, would it be a good advertisement for the benefits of democracy.

It soon became clear that one way or another the US taxpayer was going to foot the bill for the occupation. In spite of rather than in line with policy, the Army commenced the rehabilitation of the German economy. For its own support, the US Army in Europe repaired the roads, railways and bridges. This later expanded into providing support to bring in the harvest, and propping up the economy until it could stand on its own two feet again.

Challenges included redeployment, the Army's initial need to transfer troops to fight the war in the Pacific, and later demobilisation, returning its soldiers to civilian life. In the meantime, the troops had to be kept busy and out of trouble. There were millions of displaced persons, who had been brought to Germany for various forms of forced labour. Most were processed by the end of 1945, but many refused repatriation, and US policy was not to force them. At the same time Germany was flooded with German refugees from Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. It fell on the US Army to provide for these people.

There is some interesting material on the quixotic American attempt to reform the German education system, which the American saw as elitist. Getting the schools open again was a necessity, if only to get the children off the streets, but was hampered by a shortage of teachers due to the denazification program, shortage of facilities, as most schools had been damaged or taken over by the Americans, and shortage of teaching materials, and most text-books were regarded as too pro-Nazi. The Americans went so far as to write, print and distribute new textbooks, but ultimately the attempt to transform the meritocracy-based German education system into an American-style mediocrity-based one was resisted even by the radical reformers, and failed completely.

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 * By Hawkeye7

At the height of the 1957 Sputnik crisis, during which Americans suddenly found that they were vulnerable to Soviet nuclear weapons launched by intercontinental ballistic missiles, scientist Nicholas Christofilos proposed that a series of high-altitude nuclear explosions could create a radiation belt in the upper regions of the Earth's atmosphere that would serve as a shield against missile. The electromagnetic pulse phenomenon had been known since the Trinity nuclear test in 1945, but had previously been considered an unimportant curiosity.

The idea was given credibility when the first U.S. satellite to make it off the launch pad after a series of embarrassing failures, Explorer 1, detected what we now call the Van Allen radiation belt, considered to be the first great discovery of the Space Age. An impressive array of great minds that included Herbert York, James Van Allen, Werner von Braun and of course Christofilos came together for Operation Argus, a series of nuclear weapons tests in space, a scientific experiment on a grand scale with the whole planet as a laboratory. What could possibly go wrong?

One answer might have come from the skippers and crews of the ships of Task Force 88, charged with launching the missiles from the USS Norton Sound (AVM-1) in rough and unpredictable seas in the middle of the South Atlantic winter. And did I mention how American rockets had an unfortunate habit of blowing up?

Wolverton, who wrote a fine partial biography of Robert Oppenheimer, A Life in Twilight, covering his last years, traverses less familiar terrain here. The result is a ripping yarn, covering America's nuclear weapons tests, that went on for some years, and included detonations during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Alas by the 1970s, even York was forced to concede that the golden age of mad science was over, and that such experiments would be unlikely to be approved today, even if they had not been rendered illegal by the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Well worth adding to your summer reading list.

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 * By Nick-D

London War Notes is a collection of the 153 articles Mollie Panter-Downes provided to the New Yorker during World War II. The articles provided a British perspective on the war for an American audience and cover political developments as well as the experiences and attitudes of civilians. This edition was recently published by Persephone Books, which specialises in reprinting under-appreciated books by female authors.

This is one of the most interesting books on World War II I've read in a long time. Panter-Downes was an excellent writer, and her articles are very readable. To a modern audience, the collection provides useful insights into what civilians knew at the time (far more about grand strategy than I had supposed, for instance) and how attitudes evolved. The coverage of The Blitz is a particular highlight, as are the insights into life under rationing. Panter-Downes' attitudes to the war are also interesting - she is fairly confident of victory even in 1940 and a firm admirer of Churchill, but bemoans the frequent incompetence of the British war effort. She looks forward to the second front from 1942, but always notes that this will come at the cost of heavy casualties. She is also highly sceptical of the morality of bombing German cities while never opposing this outright. She notes how the V weapons offensive against London was particularly psychologically distressing for the war weary population - a point which is under-appreciated by modern historians, who instead usually focus on the remarkable amount of property which was damaged. The final article on the VE Day celebrations in London is highly moving.

The analysis in some of the articles is not strong, but still makes for fascinating reading as a historical time capsule. Panter-Downes was very middle class, and seems to have assumed that pretty much everyone else was. She can be snobbish towards the working class, particularly during 1939 and 1940. Her political attitudes evolve over the war though, and she ends it a strong supporter of the introduction of a comprehensive welfare state as she has been convinced of the urgent need to improve the lot of the working class. This edition was handsomely published, with a good preface by David Kynaston, but would have benefited from a map of Panter-Downes' London.

This is a great stocking filler, and a good book to read over the holiday season.

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