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




 * By Peacemaker67

Peter Brune is a celebrated Australian military historian and author, who has written extensively on the campaigns in New Guinea and Papua during World War II, along with a recent work on the Thai-Burma Railway. This book takes the reader to the Western Front in the second half of 1918, when the Australian Corps of five divisions participated in the Hundred Days Offensive that brought World War I to an end.

After a couple of introductory chapters covering the development of British Expeditionary Force (BEF) war-fighting doctrine and tactics during the preceding years of the war, Brune starts with the Battle of Hamel in July, and works his way through the battles of Amiens and Mont Saint-Quentin and the Battle of St Quentin Canal which broke the formidable Hindenburg Line defences. Through this narrative, Brune examines the art of war as practiced by the commander of the Australian Corps, Lieutenant General John Monash, and his subordinate commanders, and the performance of the Australians under unified national command. Prior to May 1918, the Australians had been under British command, and had only been combined into a single corps in November 1917. By this stage of the war, the Australian formations were very experienced but seriously depleted, and the fourth battalion in many brigades had been disestablished to strengthen the remaining ones following the German Spring Offensive of 1918. It is a masterful re-telling and analysis of the Hundreds Days Offensive from the Australian perspective, and includes an emphasis on the combined arms approach to "bite and hold" operations that had become standard BEF practice by the end of the war. Brune concludes with some pointed criticisms of those who have overreached in their praise of Monash, including those that urge his posthumous promotion to field marshal (he was promoted to general after the war). His conclusion is that Monash was an excellent corps commander, but he considers the idea that he could have risen further had the war continued to be fanciful.

Having read Brune's work in the past, and having a great interest in the Hundred Days Offensive because my grandfather was severely wounded at Péronne, I ordered this book as soon as found out about its publication. I found it easy to read and the analysis made excellent sense. One significant criticism that I have is the limited use of maps. Throughout the book I found I was struggling to visualise the formations and their dispositions, lines of attack and objectives, and whilst there are a dozen or so maps in a 457 page book, I consider that Brune should have made much greater use of them to illustrate the action, even on a half-page scale, because descriptive narrative can only achieve so much. From an Australian World War I perspective, the gold standard for this type of illustration of battles remains Charles Bean's Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918. Some of the maps appeared out of place in the narrative. There were photographs of the main protagonists and a few of the battlefields, but I would have liked to see more of the obstacles that had to be breached during the operations described, as well as the aerial photographs that were heavily relied upon by the Australian commanders. All in all, a quality book that advances our understanding of these crucial final battles of World War I from an Australian perspective.

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 * By Hawkeye7

Robert M. Citino has written a series of books on the war in Europe and North Africa, starting with The Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 (2007). This is the second book in the series. They are based on his ideas about the German way of war, which in turn derives from his reading of German literature, since hie speaks fluent German. If you want to write military history, and you don't want to be restricted to that of English-speaking countries, then you should seriously consider learning another language.

The Germans have a rather rich vocabulary when it comes to military matters. (So does English, for that matter, but on Wikipedia you have to watch out for the proof readers who do not realise that an otherwise innocuous word has a more precise meaning.) Prussia (and later Germany) lie in central Europe, with potential enemies on all sides. This cultivated a certain perspective, which is not shared by people from English-speaking countries, for whom war normally means expeditionary warfare. The Germans evolved a fast-moving form of warfare known as Bewegungskrieg (maneuver warfare). Occasionally it worked. So there is a kernel of truth in the notion of a German way of war.

The book is written in a style which tries to address both the scholar and the mundane reader at the same time. Sources are mostly secondary ones, in English and German. (Many of the latter are available in English.) This doesn't really work. The book is divided into seven chapters, each about a different campaign from late 1942 or 1943. Four are about Northwest Africa and Italy, while the other three are about the campaigns in southern Russia and Ukraine. Because of the scale of operations on the Eastern front, the narrative is sketchier. The book comes off as something akin to a monologue.

Of Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, the commanding general of the US Fifth Army, Citino asks: "Was generalship an issue at Salerno? Clark's presents us with a classic historical question, and judging him is a tough call. It has not been easy to find many historians saying good things about him. The indictment is a lengthy one..." (p. 266) The consensus is that Clark got his army into an entirely avoidable near-disaster situation. Citino's defence is lame. He notes correctly that many of Clark's failings were those of the US Army, which was being rapidly expanded, and was ill-prepared for the conflict. He notes correctly that Clark was not as rapidly promoted as much as Eisenhower, and that he was not as egotistical as Patton (few people were). Other charges against Clark that he mentions are left unanswered.

The armchair strategists may enjoy these books though.

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 * By Hawkeye7

In the sequel to Wehrmacht Retreats, The Wehrmacht's Last Stand, Robert M. Citino addresses another one of the war's most controversial decisions: Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark's decision to turn his army away from encircling General der Panzertruppe Heinrich von Vietinghoff's Tenth Army and to head for Rome. Citino notes that "slithering out of a trap by the skin of their teeth was just another day at the office for German commanders by 1944." In this Clark disobeyed direct order from General Harold Alexander, his superior. (In the British Army you are allowed to do this; in the US Army you are not.) What Citino doesn't tell the reader is that Clark's maneuver was slower and more costly than Alexander's alternative.

Citino tells us that Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, the German Oberbefehlshaber-Süd, was the "one powerful figure who actually did want to fight in Italy, who revelled in it, and who kept faith to the end". This is completely untrue; it was the Allies that decided to invade Italy, and Alexander, Clark and General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson all believed that the campaign could go somewhere, that if they were given the resources, they could drive through the vaunted Ljubljana Gap and into Hitler's homeland. (They didn't get them, and the consensus of military historians is that it never a practical option.)

What Kesselring did do was assess the situation, and come up with what most military historians agree was the best possible operational concept. Italy has a mountainous spine, and the many rivers and ravines run towards the sea, at right angles to an invader moving north, and form excellent defensive positions. Moreover, the narrowest part of the peninsula is south of Rome. Here, Kesselring held up the Allied armies, using a minimum of troops (thereby freeing others for use in another theatre of war.) He thought he could delay the Allies from reaching the northern Apennines (where Rommel wanted to make a stand) for six to nine months. He managed to make it twelve. The Germans then held them there for another six months.

Citino likes panzer generals he characterises as "hard charging" like Eberhard von Mackensen. He notes that Kesselring (an aviator) fired Mackensen as commander of Fourteenth Army and replaced him with General der Panzertruppe Joachim Lemelsen, "even though the latter’s pessimistic assessment of the operational situation had been correct". (p. 106) The official history says: "The countermeasures ordered by Mackensen had been tactically sound but by 1 June impossible of fulfillment. His blunder had been less in delaying to notify Kesselring of what had happened than in allowing the gap to develop in the first place." (Fisher, Cassino to the Alps, p. 190) Citino notes that the prevailing consensus of opinion among military historians is that Kesselring was a military genius (p. 107); but in Citino's eyes, Kesselring "was the first German army commander of all time who wilfully chose to fight a Stellungskrieg" (positional war). (The general principle here is called economy of force.)

There are annoying little bits as well. Citino says that "The disaster at Stalingrad still infected the army; no fewer than three of the divisions in Italy had met their demise in the Stalingrad Kessel and had been rebuilt, either from cadre and former enlisted personnel who had managed to escape encirclement, or from whole cloth." And I'm going: "well that would be the 44th, 71st, 76th, 94th and 305th Infantry Divisions. Oh, and the 3rd and 29th Panzergrenadier Divisions, and the 16th, and 24th Panzer Divisions... how many did we say again?" (Four more were divisions that had been destroyed in Tunisia. I have the entire OrBat of both sides committed to memory. )

Sometimes Citino seems to be trying to snow job us. He writes: "Kesselring, in particular, spends much of his memoir criticizing operational decisions on both sides (except his own, which he deems to be invariably correct)." (p. 105) So what does Kesselring actually say? "We had to pay for both these mistakes—I cannot acquit myself of a share in the blame." (The Memoirs of Field Marshal Kesselring, p. 196)

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 * By Nick-D

Sink the Tirpitz 1942-44 is a short but comprehensive account of the Allied air attacks on the German battleship Tirpitz. It forms part of Osprey Publishing's new Air Campaign series, and was written by one of the firm's "regulars".

I've been disappointed with other works by Angus Konstam, but this book is a success. Despite its 96-page length, Konstam has packed in a huge range of information about the series of air raids. This includes good summaries of the geographic factors, opposing forces and tactics used. The bibliography shows that he's drawn on all the standard English-language works on the topic, though no attempt appears to have been made to conduct primary research or access foreign language sources.

As is usually the case for Osprey books, this work is amply illustrated with well chosen photographs. However, as is now becoming increasingly frequent for the firm, some of the maps are unsuccessful - especially those try to depict multiple air attacks on the same map. It would have been better to have focused more on the main attacks.

Overall, this book is both a very good introduction to this topic, and of value to readers who are familiar to it.

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Four books covering female intelligence agents of World War II