Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
I just looked it up on Goodreads. Looks fantastic.
Currently reading The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson. It's the second in his Liberation of Europe trilogy about the American army in WW2. Atkinson really brings the generals, soldiers, and the battles they fought to life.
I'm finding more recent histories of WW2 such as this are much more critical of Allied leadership and performance than older histories, which is refreshing. Reading Atkinson's books, and Max Hastings' Catastrophe, has left me thinking the Allies won in spite of their bungling and incompetence.
Churchill, in particular, comes across as a monstrously irresponsible meddler in this book, which deals with the Sicily and Italy campaigns. An old man in a silken bathrobe, guzzling whisky and devising strategies and battle plans from 2,000 miles away. You'd think after Gallipoli in WW1 his generals would know better than to undertake his hare-brained amphibious landing fantasies.
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I haven't read Atkinson's books or Hasting's Catastrophe, but I have read the latter's
D-Day.
I just finished reading Jack Granatstein's
The Best Little Army in the World and Robert Engen's
Canadians Under Fire and
Strangers in Arms.
All three books are about the 1st Canadian Army's eventual evolution into a green, volunteer force scraped together with second-rate equipment into a first-rate (maybe the best) medium fighting force.
Normandy, and North-west Europe was a ####-tough fight. On a scale and concentration worse than anything on the Eastern Front, and with casualty rates surpassing the awful bloody grind of the First World War trenches.
The Allies basically threw green troops with brand-new, often untested equipment against well-entrenched, well-armed, and experienced German formations. The ground they fought on was incredibly well-suited for the defense, and negated a lot of the Allied advantage in material and munitions.
Engen really emphasizes how most of the action in NW Europe was small-unit action, almost indistinguishable from the trench raids of WWI. Artillery, and aircraft strikes were not effective in breaking up German defenses, but did do a significant job in reducing German logistic capability.
All in all, I think the Allies did incredibly well. Remember, the Battle of Normandy was a resounding defeat for the Wehrmact and Waffen SS.
I think you are mainly talking about the failure of Operation Market Garden, correct? A failure born out of the carnage of Normandy, its ambition was only slightly exceeded by the risks and challenges of what they were trying to do.
Amphibious assaults were never really fully utilized by the Allies until the Canadian operations in the Battle of Scheldt, where they were successful.
EDIT: Bah, you said WW2, but Catastrophe is about WW1. BTW Hastings is pretty Anglocentric, and has been criticized for diminishing the innovation and efforts of ANZAC and the Canadian Corps in actually ending the Great War.