Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/May 2021/Book reviews




 * By Nick-D

This book is yet another example of the gaps that remain in the vast literature on World War II. It covers the wartime efforts by American library professionals and spies to collect open source intelligence on Germany, and the wartime and post-war efforts to locate valuable book collections stolen by the German Government. Professor Kathy Peiss is an academic historian who doesn't appear to have written any previous books on the war.

I found this book to be somewhat disjointed, but fascinating. It's really two or three books in one, as the material on open source intelligence collection isn't strongly connected to the material on recovering stolen books. Peiss covers these topics well, however, and despite its somewhat dry topic the book is very readable. For instance, it was fascinating to learn about the Library of Congress' intrepid collector who stayed behind in occupied Paris, the 'T-Force' strike teams who operated just behind the front lines to seize documents, and the industrial-sized effort to collect and distribute books that continued for years after the war. As you would expect by a work written by an academic and published by a university press, this is all well referenced and fact-checked.

There are some areas where the book could have been stronger. Peiss appears to have been unable to find previous assessments of how effective the open source intelligence collection effort actually was, and doesn't reach strong conclusions on this - which is a bit odd given that her narrative suggests that it delivered a good return on a pretty modest investment. Similarly, she never fully engages with the morality of how the books stolen from Jews were treated after the war, despite noting some significant problems with how these works were handled at the time and today (many such works seem to have ended up in American and Israeli university libraries where it is now impossible to trace them). Instances of theft by the government book hunters she notes also aren't fully explored.

Overall, this is an excellent book which makes a useful addition to the literature on the Allied intelligence effort against Germany and the post-war era.

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 * By Nick-D

The Bomber Mafia is a discussion of the decision made by USAAF Major General Curtis LeMay in March 1945 to switch from the force's doctrinal focus on precision bombing to firebombing during the air raids on Japan and the consequences this had. It is the first military history book by the well-known writer Malcolm Gladwell, who has previously focused on sociology but holds a history degree.

I bought this book for a couple of reasons. First of all, I find the air raids on Japan and the 9/10 March firebombing of Tokyo to be fascinating and under-covered topics, and I was interested to see the perspectives Gladwell would bring to them. Secondly, and to my utter surprise, the book includes a photo I took - this image of the Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage. The photo is properly credited and the CC licencing details are included so the usage is fine, but I was a bit surprised that this best-selling author's publishers wouldn't pay for a professional image!

The book itself is interesting, but also somewhat flawed. The main issue Gladwell investigates in the book is what the USAAF did when the precision bombing tactics it had based its entire doctrine around turned out to be unworkable due to shortcomings of the technologies available at the time. This led a force which had championed precision attacks as a humane and efficient way of waging war to instead mount an astonishing series of area bombing attacks which destroyed most of urban Japan within a matter of weeks. Gladwell contrasts the first commander of the attacks on Japan Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell, who was a true believer in precision bombing and continued using this tactic despite a lack of results, with LeMay who had little interest in doctrine and believed in winning the war as quickly as possible regardless of civilian casualties. Without reaching a conclusion himself, Gladwell asks readers to consider whether a largely ineffective but fairly moral strategy was better than an immoral but successful approach to waging war. While this is a much-debated topic, Gladwell's approach is refreshing given that most authors who cover it can't resist launching into a polemic on their views. The well-rounded portrait he provides of LeMay is also useful - LeMay is often caricatured as a thoughtless butcher, but Gladwell makes a good case for him being a complex and sophisticated military leader who acted rationally, albeit distastefully at times.

This is all very interesting, but at times the argument is not well grounded. Most seriously, Gladwell fails to properly contrast the USAAF's experiences with those of the Royal Air Force or the USAAF's experiences in Europe with those in Japan. He implies that the RAF adopted area-bombing tactics on the outbreak of war because the British political and military leadership were psychopaths, which simply isn't right - the RAF also preferred daytime precision attacks, but adopted night-time area raids when this proved unsuccessful (as many histories note, the real problem was that it didn't switch to day-and-night precision attacks when this became possible in the second half of 1944). While Gladwell covers the early USAAF daylight precision raids in Europe, he also doesn't really acknowledge that they often ended up as deliberate area attacks on cities due to the problems of spotting and hitting the right target due to bad weather. This led the USAAF to gradually move towards widespread acceptance of area bombing over the war. Gladwell also oversimplifies LeMay's tactics in 1945: his approach was to conduct daylight precision raids when weather conditions permitted (which wasn't often) and area raids at night when they did not. LeMay also was a strong supporter of the aerial mining campaign against Japanese shipping and devoted much of his force to this, despite inter-service rivalries and a prior lack of enthusiasm for the tactic by USAAF bomber commanders, in the correct belief that this was an efficient and effective way of harming the Japanese war effort. As these issues are extensively discussed in the literature on the air campaign against Japan, there's no excuse for Gladwell to have papered them over.

Overall though, I think that this is a worthwhile book which military historians will find interesting. Gladwell sets out most of his arguments well, and raises good questions about air warfare which have no clear answers.

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 * By Hawkeye7

In the wake of the Vietnam War, the US armed services conducted some soul-searching. There was a recognition that while the politicians and the media could be blamed, many of its failings were internal. Soldiers like William E. DePuy and Donn A. Starry undertook the task of rebuilding the US Army through reconstructing its doctrine, and refocusing on the challenge of defending Europe after years of engagement in South East Asia. The result of their efforts was a doctrine known as AirLand Battle.

Into this theoretical void stepped US Air Force Colonel John Boyd, who had devised the OODA loop, a decision-making framework that he developed as a fighter pilot, which was adopted by the USAF. He then extended this tactical concept to an operational concept in ground warfare in his book, Patterns of Conflict (1976). This was called maneuver warfare, and was adopted by the US Marine Corps, but neither totally nor wholeheartedly by the US Army. The idea behind manoeuver warfare was to defeat the enemy by incapacitating their decision-making through shock and disruption.

Boyd based his theory on the writings of B. H. Liddell Hart and works about the German blitzkrieg during World War II, for which he used secondary sources available in the 1970s. This created something of a castle built on sand. Much of this book is devoted to demolishing the foundations of Boyd's work. Hart promoted his indirect approach after the Great War, based on a misunderstanding of German stormtrooper tactics in that war, which were incorrectly characterised as infiltration tactics. Hart argued that the best use of armour was to infiltrate and cause disruption behind the lines. He forecast German defeat in the Battle of France in 1940, and his reputation was in tatters when he was proven spectacularly wrong.

In defeating France, the Germans relied on their traditional concept of kesselschlacht (encirclement and annihilation); the objective was destruction, not disruption called for in manoeuver warfare. Other German concepts also seem to have difficulty in translation into English, such as schwerpunkt (the main point of effort) and our old friend auftragstaktik (mission command). Part of this obfuscation was distortion caused by cultural differences, but some of it was the result of deliberate deception. This started with Hart, who had passages inserted in the English translation of the memoirs of Heinz Guderian falsely stating that the blitzkrieg was based on Hart's indirect approach theories.

The German generals also contributed, their accounts of World War II advancing their myth of the clean Wehrmacht and blaming defeats on Hitler, who was conveniently dead. Some were still alive and selling books in the 1970s and 1980s, and Hermann Balck and Friedrich von Mellenthin participated in seminars and panel discussions at the US Army War College. They did their best to debunk the concept of maneuver warfare though. Although sometimes touted as a triumph of maneuver warfare, the 1991 Gulf War saw American units moving according to a fixed timetable, with little or no flexibility accorded to the battalion commanders.

This book is a something of a polemic. The author, Stephen Robinson, is a military historian and Australian Army Reserve officer. He is a graduate of the Australian Command and Staff College, and was an instructor at the Royal Military College, Duntroon. I suspect he too got tired of the endless stream of military alternative facts emanating from America, enough to write this book about it. It would make a fine text at staff colleges, but the reader would need to follow up by reading through the sources. If someone would use the book as a jumping-off point to could clean up the articles on doctrine mentioned here so at least Wikipedia is not peddling nonsense, that would be greatly appreciated.

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