Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/November 2016/Review essay


 * By Nick-D

Over recent years there's been a steady stream of books re-assessing the performance of the Western Allied armies during the final years of World War II. The conventional thinking has been that the Western Allied armies facing Germany performed poorly, and achieved victory only through "brute force" (to quote the title of a popular work in this genre) and mistakes made by the Germans. Conversely, the final years of the war in the Pacific have been characterised as a straightfoward slogging match, with the Japanese being unable to compete against the superior numbers and firepower of the Allied forces.

Two recent works by an Australian and a British historian provide an interesting example of the new types of analysis which is challenging these views. John Buckley's book Monty's Men provides a re-assessment of the British Army's performance from the invasion of Normandy in June 1944 until the end of the war in Europe in May 1945. Adrian Threlfall's Jungle Warriors covers the evolution of the Australian Army's jungle warfare doctrine and performance from 1941 to 1945.

Monty's Men is structured around a narrative of the 21st Army Group's campaign in Europe. In the book's first chapter Buckley notes that perceptions of the British Army's performance deteriorated in the post-war era, and by the 1980s it was generally seen to have been "ponderous, predictable and heavily reliant on the Americans", and inferior to the German forces. His underlying thesis is that such a perception is unsustainable given what the Army achieved, and sets out to explain how it won.

In short, Buckley argues that the British Army's performance was, while not spectacular, generally highly competent. He attributes this to the Army typically playing to its strengths during battles, by drawing on the heavy use of firepower to defeat German forces wherever possible and successfully integrating armoured and infantry forces to make carefully orchestrated attacks. Buckley notes that such approaches were portrayed by German officers as cowardly in their books on the war and have been judged to be unimaginative and unagressive by many post-war historians, but finds such views unpersasive. Instead, he argues - convincingly in my view - that while the British Army did have some rough patches, its combat performance improved markedly over time as its leaders and men learnt from experience and it achieved its goals in the campaign at an acceptable cost in casualties.

Jungle Warriors is a rather different book. Based on Threlfall's thesis, it analyses why the Australian Army's performance in jungle warfare improved so dramatically over the course of the Pacific War. In doing so it challenges the traditional view among Australians that their army is somehow automatically competent at all forms of warfare, and the defeats and heavy casualties suffered during 1941 and 1942 were due to factors beyond its control.

The core of the book is a thoughtful analysis of the Army's jungle warfare doctrine and training. Threlfall demonstrates that the Australian Army was utterly unprepared to fight in Australia's own geographic region at the outbreak of the Pacific War, with the 8th Division being forced to draw on flawed British doctrines and learn "on the job" ahead of its doomed campaigns in Malaya and the islands to the north of Australia in early 1942. He's also highly critical of the Army's slow learning process, and convincingly shows how inadequate training and a slow and ad-hoc process of improving doctrine contributed to the Army's many difficulties during the fighting in New Guinea during 1942.

Over the second half of Jungle Warriors Threlfall sets out how the Army learned from its many mistakes and became what he claims was (without much comparative evidence, alas) "the world's most deadly jungle fighting force". In essence, this involved becoming what's currently called a "learning organisation". Despite initially dragging its feet, the Army moved remarkably quickly from 1942 to set up institutionalised processes to build the lessons learnt from combat into training, and developed a highly successful jungle warfare doctrine and generally-successful "Jungle division" structure for its combat units. Importantly, Threlfall shows how these improved further over the remainder of the war, with the result that the Australian forces involved in the fairly ambitious campaigns of late 1944 and early 1945 completely outclassed their opponents.

A common thread in these two books is that they break down why the Allied armies were successful. Buckley notes that many of the British Army's problems in the campaign in Normandy were due to attempts to import tactics which had proven successful in the Mediterranean to the very different tactical environment of North-West Europe. However, he argues that once the Army placed greater emphasis on genuinely combined arms warfare it became a force which the German Army was unable to match. Similarly, Threlfall demonstrates that when the Australian Army belatedly got its doctrine, training, equipment and organisation in order it was pretty much impossible for the Japanese forces to defeat.

An interesting next step in this line of thinking would be some up-to-date analysis of the performance of the Allied armies with those of the Axis. While the German Army is often thought to have been tactically highly adept, it's clear that its performance deteriorated sharply over 1944 and 1945 (much of the analysis of its successes in this period seems based around the Normandy campaign, and fails to recognise the heavy casualties it suffered in this fighting or its many subsequent tactical failures). While the Japanese Army learnt from its experiences and implemented improved doctrines - especially in regards to island defence - it seems to have failed to keep up with the Allied armies and was routinely being outfought from 1943 onwards. Analysis on why this happened would greatly enrich our understanding of the war.

Overall, Monty's Men and Jungle Warriors are useful additions to the literature on the Allied armies of World War II, and good examples of where the genre is heading.

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