1. After our UN report group initially suggested major constitutional changes at the very top of the world organization—that is, amending the United Nations Charter to admit new permanent veto members to the Security Council—and discovered the great political roadblocks to proposals of that magnitude, it became obvious that the best way the UN could help itself was by ensuring that it was effective in the middle, in on-the-ground peacekeeping, development, and human rights work. Compare the larger agenda suggested in P. Kennedy and B. Russett, “Reforming the United Nations,” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 5 (Sept.-Oct. 1995): 56–71, with the more cautious formulations in P. Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present and Future of the United Nations (New York: Random House, 2006), ch. 8.
2. The syllabus, for any reader interested, is available at http://iss.yale.edu/grand-strategy-program.
3. For some exceptions to this generalization, see many of the essays in W. Murray, M. Knox, and A. Bernstein, The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States and War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)—a very deliberate counterpoise to an older classic, E. M. Earle with G. A. Craig and F. Gilbert, eds., Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), with its emphasis upon strategic writings and thought.
4. See, respectively, G. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); P. Padfield, Guns at Sea (London: Evelyn, 1973), ch. 10 and 11; J. C. Riley, International Government Finance and the Amsterdam Capital Market 1740–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); P. M. Kennedy, “Imperial Cable Communications and Strategy 1870–1914,” English Historical Review 86, no. 341 (1972): 728–52.
5. These operational directives are most sensibly summarized by State Department historian Herbert Feis in Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 105–8.
6. The best way to test this remark is to examine four of the most useful histories of the Second World War that I quote repeatedly in my own text and check their descriptions (or lack of mention) of such jigsaw puzzle pieces as the Merlin-powered P-51 Mustang, the cavity magnetron, the Hedgehog, and Hobart’s Funnies. See B. Ellis, Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War (New York: Viking, 1990); R. Overy, Why the Allies Won (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995); W. Murray and A. R. Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (London: Cassell’s, 1970). Another useful point of comparison would be with two recent and much acclaimed works on World War II. The first is Ian Kershaw’s Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World 1940–41 (London: Penguin, 2007), a wonderful read, though deliberately constructed as a set of top-down stories—see ch. 2, “Hitler Decides to Attack the Soviet Union,” ch. 7, “Roosevelt Decides to Wage Undeclared War,” and so on. The second is Andrew Roberts’s gripping book Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2008), which to an amazing extent can be seen as the top-level complement to the middle-level thrust of my book.
1. B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (London: Cassell’s, 1970), 316–17. For Alanbrooke’s comments on the travel delays, see the pertinent pages in his War Diaries, 1939–1945: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, ed. Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001).
2. Liddell Hart, History, 386. The actual math calculations from Liddell Hart’s figures would suggest that Doenitz possessed 204 operational submarines (out of a total of 366) by the end of 1942, but the difference is insignificant. Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz was of course the remarkable C in C of the German submarine arm, then the Kriegsmarine itself. There have been so many books written on this campaign over the past sixty years that it is difficult to know which ones to list. Readers might begin with Marc Milner’s fine summary, Battle of the Atlantic (Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2005), and take things from there, that is, from his brief bibliography on 265–67. The U.K. official history is S. W. Roskill, The War at Sea, 1939–1945, 3 vols. (London: HMSO, 1954–61). The U.S. official history is S. E. Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, 15 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1947–62), vols. 1 and 10 being those most relevant, because they are specifically on the Battle of the Atlantic. Milner’s additional value is that he brings in the increasingly important role of the Royal Canadian Navy and Air Force. There are useful Navy Records Society volumes by the late David Syrett and by Eric Grove and a great amount of further information in the many publications of the German Military History Research Office.
3. The quote is from Roskill, War at Sea, 2:367.
4. For the general strategic theory here, see John Winton, Convoy: The Defence of Sea Trade, 1890–1990 (London: Michael Joseph, 1983); S. W. Roskill, The Strategy of Sea Power (London: Collins, 1962); and Sir Julian Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (London: Collins, 1962).
5. A.R. Millet and W. Murray, Military Effectiveness (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1989).
6. The most available tables are in Roskill, War at Sea, vol. 3, part II, various appendices, where the naval war as a whole is summed up.
7. The fall of France? Perhaps, but only for the French. Stalingrad? Perhaps, though the German army was advancing eastward again in the spring of 1943. Midway? But it marked the limit of Japan’s expansion in the Central Pacific, not the start of Nimitz’s great counteroffensive, which was well over a year away.
8. There are lots of fine works on the critical months of the Battle of the Atlantic, including Roskill, War at Sea; Milner, Battle of the Atlantic; and Correlli Barnett, Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991). But perhaps the most remarkable of them all is German historian (and former naval officer) Juergen Rohwer’s The Critical Convoy Battles of 1943 (London: Ian Allen, 1977), a feat of historical reconstruction. Also very impressive: Martin Middlebrook, Convoy (London: William Morrow, 1986).
9. Rohwer, Critical Convoy Battles, 55.
10. Ibid., 211, for technical data on the U-boat types.
11. Barnett, Engage the Enemy, 599.
12. On this theme more generally, see D. Howse, Radar at Sea: The Royal Navy in the Second World War (London: Macmillan, 1993), an impeccable study; Sir Arthur Hezlet, The Electron and Sea Power (London: Stein and Day, 1976); and the excellent study (one of many by the same author) by G. Hartcup, The Effect of Science on the Second World War (Basingstoke: St. Martin’s, 2000), especially ch. 3–4.
13. Rohwer, Critical Convoy Battles, 113.
14. Ibid., 121.
15. For Alanbrooke’s many concerns in this critical period, see his War Diaries, ca. 330–425.
16. See, for example, Vice Admiral Sir Peter Gretton’s analysis in the final chapter of his book Crisis Convoy: The Story of HX 231 (London: P. Davies, 1974), “Why Did the Germans Lose the Battle of the Atlantic in the Spring of 1943?” which feints and ducks around that very question. Gretton is by no means the only author to do so, and he is someone who witnessed and played a major role in the turn of the tide.
17. Roskill, War at Sea, vol. 2, map 38 (opposite p. 365).
18. Milner, Battle of the Atlantic, 127.
19. See again Roskill’s War at Sea, vol. 2, ch. 5, and the scatter-map of the lost merchantmen of Convoy PQ 17, opposite p. 141.
20. Barnett, Engage the Enemy, 600.
21. Assessing the significance of HX 231’s contribution to the Battle of the Atlantic is something of a puzzle. Roskill, in War at Sea, vol. 2, does not mention it at all. Perhaps this is what prompted its escort commander, Peter Gretton, to write Crisis Convoy, a self-important work, though with some interesting tidbits on morale and training, plus details of what the merchantmen were carrying, the number of tankers, and so on. Milner, Battle of the Atlantic, gives this clash a mere sentence on p. 158, mentioning Doenitz’s disappointment that only six ships were lost from the convoy. R. Overy, Why the Allies Won, 2nd ed. (London: Pimlico, 2006), 69, writes, “Convoy HX 231 from Newfoundland fought its way through four days of gale-force winds against a pack of seventeen submarines. Four U-boats were sunk for almost no loss.” But Roskill’s fastidious compilation of German U-boat losses (Appendix J, p. 470) shows only two U-boats sunk in the North Atlantic in these days.
22. Gretton, P. Crisis Convoy: The Story of the HX 231 (London: Naval Institute Press, 1974), 157.
23. Ibid., 173.
24. The warships’ performances—and group photos of the remarkably young commanders of each vessel—are in Sir Peter Gretton’s Convoy Escort Commander (London: Cassell, 1964); the narrative is on 149–62.
25. Barnett, Engage the Enemy, 610.
26. For Doenitz’s political character, see P. Padfield, Doenitz: The Last Fuehrer (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). For his mid-May report to Hitler, see Liddell Hart, History, 389–90. For his assessment of the role of Allied airpower in blunting the attacks upon convoys HX 239 and SC 130, see Barnett, Engage the Enemy, 611.
27. K. Doenitz, Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959), 326.
28. Bomber Harris’s dismissive memo is recorded in M. E. Howard, Grand Strategy (London: HMSO, 1972), 4:21, while Doenitz’s sober assessment is reprinted in Barnett, Engage the Enemy, 611. The dismal story on the British side has been recently confirmed by the research of Duncan Redford in “Inter- and Intra-Service Rivalries in the Battle of the Atlantic,” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 6 (Dec. 2009): 899–928. Gretton’s amazing claims about his personal air-sea cooperation experiences are in his introduction to R. Seth, The Fiercest Battle: The Story of North Atlantic Convoy ONS 5, 22nd April–7th May 1943 (London: Hutchinson, 1961), 14–15. Gretton also reports that the Liverpool Tactical School had “joint classes” for Royal Navy and Coastal Command officers, which would be quite remarkable.
29. Also known, under another code name, as the Mark 24 mine. See “Mark 24 Mine,” Wikipedia, http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_24_Mine; Kathleen Williams, “See Fido Run: A Tale of the First Anti-U-boat Acoustic Torpedo,” paper presented at the U.S. Naval Academy Naval History Symposium, 2009.
30. H. P. Willmott, The Great Crusade: A New Complete History of the Second World War (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), 266–267.
31. For illustrations of a depth charge crew at work, see Roskill, War at Sea, vol. 3, part I, opposite p. 257; on improved sonar, see Hartcup, Effect of Science, 60–69.
32. Hartcup, Effect of Science, 72–74. There is a photo of a Hedgehog as illustration 9.
33. G. Pawle, The Secret War 1939–1945 (London: White Lion Press, 1956), ch. 12. However, as a fine corrective to the “British eccentrics” interpretation of how the war was won, see D. Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2011), and my discussion in “Reflections” at the end of this book.
34. Rohwer, Critical Convoy Battles, 198. Hartcup, Effect of Science, 47–49, explains how it works.
35. For the best, brief summary, see Hartcup, Effect of Science, 24–31.
36. Liddell Hart, History, 389.
37. E. G. Bowen, Radar Days (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1987), ch. 9–12, explains the technology, and his role in the transfer to the Rad Lab. John Burchard’s Q.E.D: M.I.T. in World War II (New York: Wiley, 1948) observes that “the British achievement of the cavity magnetron was perhaps the most important single contribution to technical development of the first years of the war” (219). See also Howse, Radar at Sea, 67–68, 156.
38. There is a photo of a Leigh Light in Barnett, Engage the Enemy, between 588 and 589. Earlier, on 258–59, he details the interminable delays. In general Barnett is very critical of the shortcomings of British industry and authorities to get the right weapons to the fronts. My own feeling is that the beleaguered island state performed rather well in the strained circumstances of total war, a view now much reinforced by Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine.
39. Barnett, Engage the Enemy, 609. There is a balanced (actually, rather cool) assessment of Ultra’s contribution to the Allies’ overall victory in Hartcup, Effect of Science, ch. 5. Rohwer, Critical Convoy Battles, 229–44, explains naval code breaking. The founding father of code-breaking history, David Kahn, also is cautious about ascribing too much importance to Ultra or indeed other deciphering systems; see his “Intelligence in World War II: A Survey,” Journal of Intelligence History 1, no. 1 (Summer 2001): 1–20.
40. Herbert E. Werner, Iron Coffins: A Personal Account of the German U-boat Battles of World War II (London: Arthur Barker, 1969), is a grim and fascinating account, with rather wonderful illustrations, and possibly was the inspiration for the great movie Das Boot.
41. Roskill, War at Sea, vol. 3, part 1, ch. 2–3; Morison, History, has a great spreadsheet map of the U-boat kills in the Bay of Biscay, 10:97. The glider bombs are discussed in Milner’s fine Battle of the Atlantic, 193–94.
42. On the Polish Mosquitos (and other nationalities in the squadrons), see Milner, Battle of the Atlantic, 189.
43. Barnett, Engage the Enemy, 606.
44. Most of the more detailed accounts of the Battle of the Atlantic mention Walker’s role—how could they not?—but great data, including the quotation, can also be found at an individual website, captainwalker.info/
45. Barnett, Engage the Enemy, 605; more generally on operations research, see Hartcup, Effect of Science, ch. 6.
46. Roskill, War at Sea, vol. 3, part 1, p. 395; and Morison, History, vol. 10, ch. 8.
47. Werner, Iron Coffins, 213, recounts he and fellow commanders received the orders to attack the D-Day craft “with the final objective of destroying enemy ships by ramming.” See also Morison, History, 10:324–25, on the massive Allied naval and aerial screen (and the loss of Pink).
48. This final period of the struggle is covered well in Roskill, War at Sea, vol. 3, parts 1 and 2, and in Barnett, Engage the Enemy, 852–58; Milner, Battle of the Atlantic, ch. 9, shows how tough those later battles were.
49. Willmott, Great Crusade, 273. Ellis, Brute Force, 160–61, also makes a strong case for numbers and production ultimately being key.
1. E. Bendiger, The Fall of Fortresses (New York: Putnam, 1980); quotes are from 219–21.
2. Ibid., 236, 225.
3. The literature here is vast. B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (London: Cassell’s, 1970), ch. 23, and R. Overy, Why the Allies Won (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), ch. 4, provide succinct single-chapter overviews. I found M. Hastings, Bomber Command (London: Michael Joseph, 1979) perhaps the single best volume, very critical but also discriminating. The four-volume British official history by C. Webster and N. Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany (London: HMSO, 1961), is a model of its kind.
4. N. Longmate, The Bombers: The RAF Offensive Against Germany 1939–1945 (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 298.
5. W. Murray and A. R. Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 317; also, more generally, see J. Terraine, The Right of the Line (London: Pen and Sword, 2010), which examines the RAF’s role in the European war from beginning to end.
6. Overy, Why the Allies Won, 147; Hastings, Bomber Command, 318; Longmate, The Bombers.
7. I. F. Clarke, Voice Prophesying War 1763–1984 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
8. See A. Gollin, No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers 1902–1909 (London: Heinemann, 1984), especially the later chapters. For Amery’s 1904 contention, see Paul Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy 1870–1945: Eight Studies (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983), 47.
9. See Overy’s classic comparative analysis The Air War 1939–1945 (London: Europa, 1980). There are fabulous photographs in R. Higham, Air Power: A Concise History (Yuma, KS: Sunflower Press, 1984).
10. Compare, for example, the hugely critical accounts by Longmate in The Bombers and by Bendiger, Fall of Fortresses, with that by a staunch defender of RAF Bomber Command’s policies, Dudley Saward, in Victory Denied: The Rise of Air Power and the Defeat of Germany 1920–1945 (London: Buchan and Enright, 1985). Saward is also the author of the authorized biography of Bomber Harris, whose own account, Bomber Offensive (London: Collins, 1947) was published very shortly after the war and well captures his own strong opinions.
11. Quoted from Longmate, The Bombers, 21–22, though the italics are mine. Chapter 1 of Hastings’s Bomber Command has a fine, brief survey of the RAF between 1917 and 1940, and vol. 1 of Webster and Frankland’s Strategic Air Offensive is invaluable.
12. On the theories of air warfare, see ch. 20 in E. M. Earle, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); on Trenchard, see Hastings, Bomber Command, ch. 1. Much of my analysis here derives from Tami Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality: The Evolution of British and American Ideas About Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
13. Trenchard’s remarkable statement, and the equally remarkable replies of the chief of the Imperial General Staff and the First Sea Lord, are extensively quoted in Longmate, The Bombers, 43–47.
14. U. Bialer, The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics 1932–1939 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1980). The Baldwin quotation is in Hastings, Bomber Command, 50.
15. B. Collier, The Defence of the United Kingdom (London: HMSO, 1957), sets the larger scene, as does Overy, Air War, ch. 2.
16. W. Murray, Luftwaffe (Baltimore: Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1985), 43–61, is superb here.
17. See Collier, Defence, and T. C. G. Jones, The Battle of Britain (London: Frank Cass, 2000).
18. See Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1908–1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).
19. Liddell Hart, History, 91.
20. For the best brief account, see G. Hartcup’s superb The Effect of Science on the Second World War (London: Macmillan, 2000), ch. 2–3.
21. Quoted in B. Schwarz, “Black Saturday,” Atlantic, April 2008, 85, which is a review of Peter Stansky’s The First Day of the Blitz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
22. Murray, Luftwaffe, 60, Table XI. The comparative aircraft production rates are in Overy, Air War, 33.
23. Murray, Luftwaffe, 60, 10.
24. Figures from Overy, Air War, 150.
25. Quotes from Liddell Hart, History, 595–96; see also Webster and Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, 1:178.
26. Webster and Frankland, ibid, 233
27. A. Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Penguin, 2006), 596–602, a brilliant, revisionist analysis.
28. See Hastings, Bomber Command, 246, for the damage statistics; see W. Murray, Strategy for Defeat: The Luftwaffe 1939–1945 (Maxwell, AL: Air University Press, 1983), 169, for Speer and Hitler. Note that this is a different, slightly earlier book than Murray’s Luftwaffe, though it uses a lot of the same data.
29. See Longmate, The Bombers, ch. 21, “The Biggest Chop Night Ever”; Hastings, Bomber Command, 319, gives the Harris quotes, and on 320 quotes the official history.
30. R. Weigley, The American Way of Warfare: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973); ch. 14 has his own comments on the USAAF aerial offensives.
31. W. F. Craven and J. L. Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948–1958), 7 vols., is revealing here: see vol. 2, ch. 9, Arthur B. Ferguson’s “The Casablanca Directive.”
32. Bendiger, Fall of Fortresses, 232–34. Bendiger’s language here is withering.
33. These figures come from A. Furse, Wilfrid Freeman: The Genius Behind Allied Survival and Air Supremacy 1939 to 1945 (Staplehurst, UK: Spellmount Press, 1999), 234; they are slightly different in Liddell Hart, History, 603.
34. Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Forces, 2:702–3; the actual description is in chapter 20, “Pointblank,” by Arthur B. Ferguson.
35. Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Forces, 2:706, 705.
36. Karl Mendelssohn, Science and Western Domination (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976). The story has been developed in Daniel Headrick’s Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
37. A. Harvey-Bailey, The Merlin in Perspective (Derby, UK: Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust, 1983), is very technical but also important in stressing the key role of Rolls-Royce’s managing director E. W. Hives after Royce’s death. See also H. Glancy, Spitfire: The Biography (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), ch. 1.
38. Harvey-Bailey, Merlin.
39. Glancy’s Spitfire is only the most obvious. See also Alfred Price’s The Spitfire Story (London: Arms and Armour, 1995) and Len Deighton’s remarkable Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain (London: Pimlico, 1996).
40. The Story of the Spitfire, DVD (Pegasus, 2001).
41. Harvey-Bailey, Merlin, is excellent on the steady enhancement of the engine’s power. The equally impressive efforts by Packard engineers to mass-produce Merlin 61 engines in the U.S.A. is nicely covered in Herman Arthur, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (New York: Random House, 2012), 103-105.
42. See Furse, Wilfrid Freeman.
43. D. Birch, Rolls-Royce and the Mustang (Derby, UK: Rolls-Royce Historical Trust, 1987), 10; the photo of the original plane is on the same page.
44. Furse, Wilfrid Freeman, 226–29, presents remarkable detective work.
45. Paul A. Ludwig, P-51 Mustang: Development of the Long-Range Escort Fighter (Surrey, UK: Ian Allen, 2003), esp. ch. 5, on the resistance of Echols.
46. Birch, Rolls-Royce and the Mustang reproduces Hitchcock’s letter in full on 37–39; see also 147–48. The quote by the official historians is in Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Services, 4:217–18.
47. Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Services, 3:8.
48. Lovett’s report, and Arnold’s response, are best covered in Ludwig, P-51 Mustang, 143–45, 148.
49. For two of them, see Murray, Luftwaffe, and N. Frankland, The Bombing Offensive Against Germany (London: Faber, 1965).
50. Furse, Wilfrid Freeman, 234–35.
51. See www.cebudanderson.com/droptanks.html—an unusual source (accessed May 2008), the memoir of Donald W. Marner, a U.S. mechanic serving a Mustang squadron based in Suffolk in 1944–45, whose chief task was to get his hands on enough of them from his RAF buddies. Bendiger also mentions the American fliers’ gratitude for these quaint papier-mâché drop tanks. For confirmation of the immense significance of the drop tanks (especially the paper version) in the air war, see Ludwig, P-51 Mustang, 168–70.
52. Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Forces, vol. 3, ch. 3, on “Big Week”; and Murray, Luftwaffe, 223ff. Ludwig, P-51 Mustang, 204, has comparative figures of P-38, P-47, and P-51 kill ratios. To some degree, then, as G. E. Cross points out, the P-47 Thunderbolts became overshadowed by the Mustangs, rather the way the Hurricanes were overshadowed by the Spitfires in the Battle of Britain, while in reality all four aircraft types played a vital role. See Cross’s Jonah’s Feet Are Dry: The Experience of the 353rd Fighter Group During World War Two (Ipswich, UK: Thunderbolt, 2001).
53. Furse, Wilfrid Freeman, 239–41.
54. See Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Forces, 3:63, on air battles doing “more to defeat the Luftwaffe than did the destruction of the aircraft factories.” There is a vast German-language literature, perhaps best summarized in English in the seventh volume of the German official history: Horst Boog et al., The Strategic Air War in Europe, 1943–1944/45, vol. 7 of Germany and the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
55. Overy, Why the Allies Won, 152. The figures in the preceding paragraph come from Murray and Millett, A War to Be Won, 324–25. The Kocke anecdote is from E. R. Hooton, Eagle in Flames: The Fall of the Luftwaffe (London: Arms and Armour, 1997), 270–71, also with names of fellow aces killed at that time. (This is a fine, almost intimidating statistical analysis of the air war in Europe.)
56. Frankland, The Bombing Offensive, 86, offers a really crisp account of how the coming of the American long-range fighters redounded to the secondary advantage of Bomber Command.
57. Murray and Millett, A War to Be Won, 413. Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Forces, vol. 3, is excellent throughout. See also W. Hays Parks, “ ‘Precision’ and ‘Area’ Bombing: Who Did Which and When?” Journal of Strategic Studies 18, no. 1 (March 1995): 145–74. Also, personal communication of June 30, 2008, to author from Professor Tami Biddle, whose own writings (including Rhetoric and Reality) are compelling scholars into a serious reconsideration of the challenges Harris faced from mid-1942 onward.
58. Hastings, Bomber Command, 342–43.
59. J. Scutts, Mustang Aces of the Eighth Air Force (Oxford: Osprey Military Series, 1994), 56–60, on the coming of the Me 262s.
60. On the diminishing aviation fuel figures, see M. Cooper, The German Air Force, 1933–1945: An Anatomy of Failure (London: Jane’s, 1981), 348–49, 360.
61. Hastings, Bomber Command, 422–23.
62. Saward, Victory Denied; Harris, Bomber Offensive.
63. All these works have been cited above. It will be obvious how much I am indebted to the works of Hastings, Murray, Biddle, and Overy, and how much their conclusions make sense to me. See Hastings, Bomber Command, ch. 14–15; Murray, Luftwaffe, ch. 7–8; Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality, ch. 5 and conclusion; Overy, Why the Allies Won, 149–63. But perhaps the prize goes to Webster and Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, vol. 3, and Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Forces, vol. 3, passim, as models of scholarship, objectivity, and insight.
64. The calculation about V-rocket costs versus aircraft figures is in Overy, Why the Allies Won, 294. Hitler’s bizarre demands about the Messerschmitt Me 262 are neatly covered in D. Irving, The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe: The Life of Luftwaffe Marshall Erhard Milch (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), ch. 21.
65. The later volumes of Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Forces, on the Pacific War, are best here, but there is also a great survey in Murray and Millet, A War to Be Won, ch. 17–18.
66. The infamous 9/11 attacks on Manhattan and the Pentagon claimed almost 3,000 lives.
67. The best obituary of Harker is that of the Times (London) on June 14, 1999, describing him as “the man who put the Merlin in the Mustang.” The obituarist clearly has no idea of the later opposition to the Merlin-Mustang and talks of it as being greeted “like manna in heaven in Washington.” But he gets Harker right, at least.
1. The quotation is from R. Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), 350; the main battle is covered on 359–92. See also S. W. Mitcham, Blitzkrieg No Longer: The German Wehrmacht in Battle, 1943 (Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword Books, 2010), 66ff.
2. Vividly described in Atkinson, Army at Dawn, 212–13.
3. Williamson Murray, German Military Effectiveness (Baltimore: Nautical and Aviation Publishing, 1992), esp. ch. 1. B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (London: Cassell’s, 1970), is brief but good on the Polish campaign (ch. 3) and the defeat of France (ch. 7). On how surprising the latter result was, see E. R. May’s great revisionist book, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).
4. See Waugh’s classic Sword of Honour trilogy, especially the middle volume, Officers and Gentlemen, where he graphically describes his fictional “Royal Halbardiers” regiment being routed by the Germans in Greece and Crete. Only the New Zealanders seem to have stood up to the invaders, man for man, but at very severe cost.
5. E. L. Jones, The European Miracle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), for this thesis, and very much followed in P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), ch. 1.
6. There are nice, clear details and good maps in Archer Jones, The Art of War in the Western World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
7. T. Lupfer, The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine During the First World War (Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, 1981), and, more generally, T. N. Dupuy, A Genius for War: The German Army and the General Staff (Fairfax, VA: Hero Books, 1984). See also the running commentary in R. M. Citino, Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).
8. See M. Boot’s fine distillation of this offense versus defense spiral in his War Made New (New York: Gotham Books, 2006).
9. Some fine maps covering this campaign were lovingly put together for Liddell Hart’s History, on 110–11, 282, 292, and 300, but see also the maps in C. Messenger, World War Two: Chronological Atlas (London: Bloomsbury, 1989).
10. A simple but most useful summary of all the moves in the North African Campaign is accessible in Messenger, World War Two, 46–55, 88–93, 116–23, 134–35.
11. There is a fine article by L. Ceva, “The North African Campaign 1940–43: A Reconsideration,” Journal of Strategic Studies 13, no. 1 (March 1990): 84–104 (part of a special issue, edited by J. Gooch, called “Decisive Campaigns of the Second World War”), which among other things reminds the reader of the very significant role played by Italian forces in this campaign.
12. Quoted in The Rommel Papers, ed. B. H. Liddell Hart (London: Collins, 1953), 249. See also Rommel’s amazingly candid letters home to his wife in the surrounding pages. The critical importance of fuel shortages is stressed again and again in B. Ellis, Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War (New York: Viking, 1990), ch. 5.
13. A nice summation of this evolution is S. Bidwell, Gunners at War: A Tactical Study of the Royal Artillery in the Twentieth Century (New York: Arrow Books, 1972).
14. Liddell Hart, History, 296.
15. The best (and almost the only) authority here is M. Kroll, The History of Landmines (London: Leo Cooper, 1998). Clearly it is an unappealing topic, even for military historians themselves.
16. For Hobart’s flail tanks (actually invented by a South African captain, Abraham du Toit), see chapter 4, and the “Mine Flail” article in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mine_flail. For the mine detector, see “Polish Mine Detector,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_mine_detector (both accessed June 2010).
17. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Coningham also commanded the tactical air forces in both later major campaigns. On Dawson’s quietly outstanding organizational skills, see Ellis’s approving remarks in Brute Force, 266–67; for the larger story of the RAF in the North African campaign at this time, see D. Richards and H. St. G. Saunders, Royal Air Force 1939–1945 (London: HMSO, 1954), 2:160ff. The earlier, sad tale is in D. I. Hall, Strategy for Victory: The Development of British Tactical Air Power, 1919–1943 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008).
18. All the general World War II books referred to in this volume— H. P. Willmott, The Great Crusade: A New Complete History of the Second World War (London: Michael Joseph, 1989); Messenger, World War Two; W. Murray and A. R. Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); R. Overy, Why the Allies Won (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995); Ellis, Brute Force; J. Keegan, The Second World War (New York: Penguin, 1990); Liddell Hart, History; and so—naturally cover El Alamein and point to the usual aspects: the constrained geographical limits, the importance of supplies, the British superiority in numbers, the importance of minefields and artillery, and the Wehrmacht’s fighting skills. Nothing has emerged in recent writings to change this overall outline.
19. Mitcham, Blitzkrieg No Longer, ch. 4, is excellent on the Arnim-Rommel tensions.
20. The second volume of Atkinson’s trilogy (Day of Battle), on the Sicilian and Italian campaigns, offers an excellent analysis, plus an introduction to an enormous body of further literature, such as C. D’Este’s World War Two in the Mediterranean (1942–1945) (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1990). For the casualties claim, see Keegan, Second World War, 368.
21. T. N. Dupuy, Numbers, Prediction and War: Using History to Evaluate Combat Factors and Predict the Outcome of Battles (Fairfax, VA: Hero Books, 1985), has masses of statistics. One doesn’t need to follow the predictive part of this exercise to find the historical statistics interesting.
22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II), 2nd paragraph—accessed May 2010.
23. Messenger, World War Two, 63–64; David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995) has many other good maps.
24. Requoted in Liddell Hart, History, 169.
25. There are fuller details in the overlapping final chapters of J. Erickson’s The Road to Stalingrad (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975) and the first chapters of the successor volume, The Road to Berlin (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983). Really, with Erickson as the master, but so many other Anglo-American historians such as Earl F. Ziemke, the prodigious David M. Glantz, Ian Bellamy, Malcolm MacIntosh, Albert Seaton, and the many excellent German experts on this topic, it is difficult to stop turning the endnote apparatus on the Russo-German War into something larger than the text. For Liddell Hart’s approval of the Stavka-orchestrated advances around the greater Stalingrad area, see History, 481.
26. R. Forczyk, Erich Von Manstein (Oxford: Osprey Press, 2010), 36–42 (it has good illustrations); Erickson, Road to Berlin, 51ff.
27. M. K. Barbier, Kursk: The Greatest Tank Battle, 1943 (St. Paul, MN: MBI Publishing, 2002); M. Healy, Kursk 1943 (Oxford: Osprey Press, 1992), for remarkable detail; and Lloyd Clarke, The Battle of the Tanks: Kursk, 1943 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011).
28. A. Nagorski, The Greatest Battle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).
29. Erickson, Road to Stalingrad; Erickson, Road to Berlin. See also the reflections in Citino, “Death of the Wehrmacht,” esp. 14–19.
30. B. Wegner, “The Road to Defeat: The German Campaigns in Russia, 1941–1943,” Journal of Strategic Studies 13, no. 1 (March 1990): 122–23. A most intriguing article.
31. See J. E. Forster, “The Dynamics of Volksgemeinschaft: The Effectiveness of the German Military Establishment in the Second World War,” in A. Millett and W. Murray, eds., Military Effectiveness (London: Allen and Unwin, 1988), 3:201–2.
32. P. Carell, Hitler’s War on Russia, trans. Ewald Osers (London: Corgi, 1966), 623. Carell (actually, Paul Karl Schmidt) was an early Nazi and a leading wartime propagandist who managed to escape the Nuremberg dragnet and transform himself into a highly successful writer of military histories—works that were always informative, but with dodgy judgments.
33. Cited again from Wegner, “The Road to Defeat,” 122–23.
34. Email communication to author by Mr. Igor Biryukov, June 7, 2010.
35. The titles give this away: Ellis, Brute Force; Glantz and House, When Titans Clashed; and R. Overy’s fine Russia’s War: Blood upon the Snow (New York: TV Books, 1997).
36. D. Orgill, T-34: Russian Armor (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), is full of such quotes.
37. Carell, Hitler’s War, 75–76; see also the fine Wikipedia article “T-34,” http://wikipedia.org/wiki/T-34 (accessed May 2010), with a wonderful bibliography.
38. The Mellethin, von Kleist, and Guderian quotations come from Orgill, T-34. The amazing postwar sales of the T-34 across the globe are detailed in the Wikipedia article “T-34.”
39. Albeit in a backhanded way, by describing the post-1942 improvements; see Orgill, T-34, 73ff.
40. “T-34,” Wikipedia.
41. Mary R. Habeck, Storm of Steel: The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), has many interesting comments on the mutual “borrowings” of various of the interwar armored services. See also “J. Walker Christie,” Wikipedia, http://wikipedia.org/Wiki/J._Walter_Christie (accessed May 2011).
42. Brief details in Orgill, T-34.
43. M. Bariatinsky, “Srednii Tank T-34-85,” Istoria Sozdania (accessed May 26, 2011, from http://www.cardarmy.ru/armor/articles/t3485.htm). I am grateful to Professor Jonathan Haslam (Cambridge) for drawing my attention to this source.
44. A very informative piece, despite its aggressive title, is A. Isaev, “Against the T-34 the German Tanks Were Crap,” in A. Drabkin and O. Sheremet, eds., T-34 in Action (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2008), ch. 2.
45. “An Evaluation of the T-34 and KV Tanks by Workers of the Aberdeen Testing Grounds of the U.S., Submitted by Firms, Officers and Members of Military Commissions Responsible for Testing Tanks,” available at http://www.battlefield.ru/en/documents/80-armor-andequipment/300-t34-kv1-aberdeen-evaluation.htr. I am grateful to Professor Jonathan Haslam (Cambridge) for drawing my attention to this source.
46. Ibid. Carell, Hitler’s War, also frequently notes the need for the T-34 commander to have a sledgehammer nearby, and their lack of a decent radio. It is amazing that they didn’t do much worse in the early years.
47. Healey, Kursk 1943, 31; Mitcham, Blitzkrieg No Longer, 132.
48. I found the best general source here to be G. L. Rottman, World War II Anti-Tank-Tactics (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2005), 45ff.
49. The Keegan quote is from his Second World War, 407. And see the confirmation in David M. Glantz, Colossus Reborn (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 29.
50. Barbier, Kursk, 55. There are similar figures in the valuable work by W. S. Dunn Jr., The Soviet Economy and the Red Army 1930–1945 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), 179.
51. Dunn, Soviet Economy, has impressive figures.
52. Glantz, Colossus Reborn, 355ff.
53. Ibid. The creation of these massive pontoon-bridge parks, containing Lego-like bridges of various lengths and load-carrying capacities, sounds very similar to the story of the Seabees (see chapter 5), but I have not yet found a Soviet equivalent to Admiral Ben Moreell.
54. Glantz, Colussus Reborn, 361–62; Barbier, Kursk, 58.
55. Barbier, Kursk, 58; see Mitcham, Blitzkrieg No Longer, 138, on the partisans’ efforts at Kursk. Stone’s observation is from A Military History of Russia (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 212–13.
56. http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/ubb/Forum4/HTML/000052.html.
57. Both W. Murray, Luftwaffe (Baltimore: Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1985), and R. Muller, The German Air War in Russia (Baltimore: Nautical and Aviation Publishing, 1992), show the tremendous effects that the RAF and USAAF strategic bombing campaigns had in pulling away the German air from the Eastern Front, leaving behind chiefly planes for supporting the ground forces. See Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin, 2008), 461, for the particular statistic.
58. Mitcham’s figures, which are based upon Niepold’s older work, are in The German Defeat in the East 1944–45 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2001), 16, 36. Hardesty, V. Red Phoenix: The Rise of Soviet Power (Minnetonka, MN: Olympic Marketing Corp, 1982) is best here.
59. W. Murray, Luftwaffe and Muller, German Air War, are good introductions here.
60. For details of the Sturmoviks, see “Ilyushin Il-2,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilyushin_Il-2; also described in A. Brookes, Air War over Russia (Hersham, Surrey: Ian Allen, 2003), 63.
61. Erickson, Road to Berlin, ch. 5; Mitcham, German Defeat in the East; Glantz and House, When Titans Clashed, ch. 13.
62. See “Operation Bagration,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation-Bagration; Mitcham, The German Defeat in the East, ch. 1; and the fuller account in S. Zaloga, Bagration 1944: The Destruction of Army Group Centre (Oxford: Osprey Press, 1996).
63. See in particular Habeck, Storm of Steel, 232–33. The irony of the Soviet armies becoming more flexible just when the German armies were seizing up is covered in the middle chapters of Glantz and House’s fine work When Titans Clashed, ch. 9–13; Stone discusses this in A Military History of Russia, 202ff.
64. Mitcham, S. Blitzkrieg No Longer, passim.
65. Ibid.; Erickson, Road to Berlin, ch. 11–16, provides enormous detail.
66. See the horrifying details in N. Fergusson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York: Penguin, 2004); now supplemented by I. Kershaw, The End: Hitler’s Germany, 1944–45 (London: Allen Lane, 2011).
67. Mitcham, Blitzkrieg No Longer, 215–16. Zeitzler’s reflective piece appeared in the April 1962 issue of Military Review, with the intriguing title “Men and Space in War: A German Problem in World War II.” It is so little known, and so worth recovering. Willmott also stresses this point, in a nifty comparative way, in The Great Crusade, ch. 5, “Time, Space, and Doctrine.”
68. O. P. Chaney, Zhukov, rev. ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), provides fine detail.
1. See, for example, D. J. B. Trim and M. C. Fissel, eds., Amphibious Warfare 1000–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2006); and, for those reliant upon the electronic media, a rather good Wikipedia piece is http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphibious_warfare (accessed May 1, 2008). There is the impressive work by D. Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (London: Allen Lowe, 2010), with great coverage of campaigns in that sea.
2. Accounts of such raids are in Bernard Fergusson’s classic The Watery Maze: The Story of Combined Operations (London: Collins, 1961), along with chapters on full invasions themselves. But Fergusson is so enthused about any actions taken against the enemy that the operational distinction is not made clear.
3. Ibid., 47.
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphibious_warfare, the “16th century” portion, is the quickest way to get to this tale. Scholars interested in most details can check on the “Terceras Landing.”
5. See B. H. Liddell Hart, The British Way in Warfare (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), especially ch. 1; and the more modern treatment by M. E. Howard, The Continental Commitment (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972).
6. For the Tanga fiasco, see Fergusson, Watery Maze, 24–29.
7. See A. Millett and W. Murray, eds., Military Effectiveness (London: Allen and Unwin, 1988), especially the introduction and the conclusion to vol. 1.
8. It is hard to know where to start (or stop) with references to Gallipoli. The military account is Alan Moorhead’s Gallipoli (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1956), with R. Rhodes James, Gallipoli (London: Batsford, 1965) best on the political side; and a very fine recent survey by L. A. Carlyon, Gallipoli (London: Doubleday, 2002). Those far from a good library can find a fair summary, with a useful ANZAC angle, in “Gallipoli Campaign,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gallipoli.
9. See Correlli Barnett, Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991), 540–43; Fergusson, Watery Maze, 36–43; and the important memoir by the ISTCD’s first director, L. E. H. Maund, Assault from the Sea (London: Methuen, 1949).
10. S. W. Roskill, The War at Sea, 1939–1945 (London: HMSO, 1954–61), vol. 1; Barnett, Engage the Enemy, ch. 3–13.
11. The two great historians of the twentieth-century Royal Navy, Arthur Marder and Stephen Roskill, disagreed on many issues. On Churchill’s interference and poor performance in the Norwegian campaign, however, there was remarkable overlap: see A. J. Marder, “Winston Is Back!” English Historical Review, supp. 5 (1972); S. W. Roskill, Churchill and the Admirals (London: Collins, 1977), ch. 8 and appendix, 283–99.
12. B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (London: Cassell’s, 1970), 226. For the Crete campaign, see Barnett, Engage the Enemy, ch. 11–12, and especially C. MacDonald’s The Lost Battle: Crete 1941 (New York: Macmillan, 1993), especially the truly scary chapter 10, “Ordeal at Sea.”
13. W. Murray and A. R. Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 106. The Norway airpower statistics are in Liddell Hart, History, 59, with the Prince of Wales/Repulse statistics on 226.
14. Barnett, Engage the Enemy, 203–6, is withering; Fergusson, Watery Maze, 59–69, is eye-opening. See also A. J. Marder’s detailed study Operation “Menace” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
15. Fergusson, Watery Maze, 166; Barnett, Engage the Enemy, 864–68.
16. On Combined Operations’ learning curve, see Barnett, Engage the Enemy, 545–46, and ch. 11–15 of P. Ziegler’s Mountbatten: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1985).
17. The literature on the Dieppe Raid is itself a minefield. Fergusson, Watery Maze, 175–85, is unrepentant about its utility. See, by contrast, T. Robertson, The Shame and the Glory (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 1967), and Denis and Shelagh Whitaker, Dieppe: Tragedy to Triumph (Whitby, ON: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 293–304, which is very critical but ultimately comes down on the benefits of the operation for the later D-Day successes.
18. Fergusson, Watery Maze, 185; Churchill’s language was rather more circumspect—“Their sacrifice was not in vain”—when he later wrote his History. But it is clear from D. Reynolds’s illuminating study, In Command of History: Churchill Writing and Fighting the Second World War (London: Penguin, 2004), 345–48, that Churchill, Ismay, Mountbatten, and others in the British high command were embarrassed about how to explain the operation after the war.
19. On Anglo-American “jointness,” especially between 1942 and 1944, there is nothing quite like H. Feis’s classic Churchill Roosevelt Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Fought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 37–324. The more military aspect is covered by M. Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition War, 1943–1944 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1994), and M. E. Howard’s superb Grand Strategy, vol. 4: August 1942–September 1943 (London: HMSO, 1972).
20. Barnett, Engage the Enemy, 554.
21. Ibid., 563. A wonderful account of all this chaos is R. Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 (New York: Holt, 2002).
22. See M. E. Howard’s judicious The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), as well as his official history, Grand Strategy, vol. 4. Barnett’s unrelenting criticism here of Mediterranean “blue water” strategy in Engage the Enemy, ch. 17–18, 20–22, seems to me less balanced. S. E. Morison gives an American perspective in Strategy and Compromise (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958) as well as his History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Boston: Little, Brown, 1947–62), vol. 9.
23. Morison, History, vol. 9, is marvelously thorough. Liddell Hart, History, ch. 27 and 30, is nicely succinct. Atkinson’s The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944 (New York: Holt, 2007), is epic at ground level.
24. Liddell Hart, History, 445; see also Barnett, Engage the Enemy, 627–650.
25. For the above, see Liddell Hart, History, 460–65; Morison, History, vol. 9, part III; Atkinson, Day of Battle, part Two.
26. Liddell Hart, History, 526–32; Atkinson, Day of Battle, part Three; and Morison, History, vol. 9, part IV.
27. Note also the titles of the major parts of Liddell Hart’s History, part V, “The Turn,” part VI, “The Ebb,” part VII, “Full Ebb,” and part VIII, “Finale.”
28. The text is probably most easily found in David Eisenhower’s biography of his grandfather, Eisenhower at War 1943–1945 (New York: Random House, 1986), 252.
29. There are thousands of books on D-Day and the Normandy campaign, including some superb official histories (British, Canadian, U.S.) on their air forces, armies, navies, and intelligence. I thought the best single-volume works to be M. Hastings, Overlord (London: Michael Joseph, 1984); S. Ambrose, D-Day, June 6th, 1944 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); and C. Ryan, The Longest Day (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959). There are also some marvelously good maps and illustrations in Purnell’s History of the Second World War, 5:1793–942.
30. Barnett, Engage the Enemy, ch. 24–25, gives a very fine summary of the planning and organization, as does Purnell’s History, 5:1794–5, 1870–5.
31. “Bertram Ramsay,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertram_Ramsay.
32. R. Overy, Why the Allies Won (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 183.
33. C. Gross and M. Postlethwaite, War in the Air: The World War Two Aviation Paintings of Mark Postlethwaite (Marlborough, UK: Crowood Press, 2004), 78.
34. M. K. Barbier’s D-Day Deception: Operation Fortitude and the Normandy Invasion (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007) is a really important study on this topic, and nicely supplements C. Cruikshank’s Deception in World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), which has remarkable, sometimes hilarious photographs. But the serious student of this deception should also consult a more cautious work: C. Bickell, “Operation Fortitude South: An Analysis of Its Influence upon German Dispositions and Conduct of Operations in 1944,” War and Society 18, no.1 (May 2000): 91–122. The article has an excellent bibliography, although obviously not including the findings in Barbier and other later works.
35. F. H. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War, vol. 3, part 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), section 13, Overlord, is impressive in describing both deception and intelligence aspects of the Normandy operation. See also two other esteemed works, D. Kahn, Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War Two (New York: Macmillan, 1978), and M. E. Howard, Strategic Deception (London: HMSO, 1990), which is also vol. 5 of British Intelligence in the Second World War.
36. F. H. Hinsley et al. British Intelligence in the Second World War, vol. 3, part 2, 107n, 127, 153, on Resistance attacks. Quite amazing details of SOE cooperation with the French are in M. R. D. Foot, SOE: An Outline History of the Special Operations Executive, 1940–1945 (London: BBC Publications, 1984), esp. 222–29.
37. Quoted in Overy, Why the Allies Won, 195. As usual, a superb, brief summary.
38. This is probably better captured in the great scene in the 1962 movie version of Ryan’s book The Longest Day (with Curt Juergens playing Blumentritt) than in any written account.
39. There is an unsurpassed analysis (with excellent maps and tables) in Roskill, War at Sea, vol. 3, part 2, 5–74; but see also Barnett, Engage the Enemy, ch. 24–25, for another version; and Ambrose, D-Day, ch. 5–9.
40. There is a remarkable photo of four Beaufighters, coming in from all directions to attack German minesweepers and destroyers inside a Channel port in June 1944. Photo is in C. Bekker’s The German Navy 1939-1945 (Hamlyn: London/New York, 1972), 179.
41. Roskill, War at Sea, vol. 3, part 2, 53–59, details the containment and defeat of the U-boats as well as the Allied losses.
42. Hobart’s career has attracted a number of studies, including a nice biography by K. Macksay, Armored Crusader (London: Hutchison, 1967), and an extremely lively article by T. J. Constable, “The Little-Known Story of Percy Hobart,” Journal of Historical Review 18, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1999), also at ihr.org/jhr/v18/v18n1p-2_Constable.html (accessed Feb. 20, 2008). The illustrations of these weird contraptions in Purnell’s History, 5:1834–5, 1919, are worth savoring. Churchill’s directive about reemploying Hobart is in Constable’s electronic version of this remarkable story.
43. Quoted in Ambrose, D-Day, 551, a characteristically generous acknowledgment of what was happening on beaches other than Omaha and Utah.
44. Ibid., 323; he devotes nine chapters to the Omaha Beach story. See also Hastings, Overlord, 105–21; and Murray and Millett, A War to Be Won, 417–23, which is extremely critical of Bradley, the U.S. Navy, and the whole Omaha operation. I am also obliged to Professor Tami Biddle for bringing me to a better understanding of the panoply of difficulties facing the Omaha planners and commanders.
45. Ambrose, D-Day, 576; Roskill, History, vol. 3, part 2, 53, give an unusually exact total of 132,715 men landed. It is not clear when these various tallies were taken—at dusk, at midnight, or at dawn next day—or whether the airborne forces are included. It hardly matters.
46. D. Eisenhower, Eisenhower at War, 425–26.
47. Barnett, Engage the Enemy, 843–51; and, less tartly, Roskill, History, vol. II, part 2, 142–53.
48. See its use in Purnell’s History, 5:1793.
49. There is a rather nice Anglo-American synergy here, spotted by J. A. Isley and P. A. Crowl, The U.S. Marines and Amphibious War: Its Theory, and Its Practice in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 583–84: the larger landing craft ship and infantry craft were of British design, the LVTs and DUKWs were an American idea. Together the match was perfect.
50. Ibid., 581–82. Their ch. 12, “Amphibious Progress, 1941–1945,” is a fine reflection, with some cross-references to European amphibious operations as well.
1. G. Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance (London: Macmillan, 1968), a book chiefly about how vast distances shaped Australia’s history, but with implications for the whole history of the Pacific Ocean as well.
2. For what follows, see generally R. Storry, Japan and the Decline of the West in Asia 1894–1943 (London: Longman, 1979); P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), 206–9, 298–302.
3. See R. Hackett, Yamagata Arimoto and the Rise of Modern Japan 1838–1922 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
4. Apart from Storry, Japan, see also R. Myers and M. Peattie, The Japanese Colonial Empire 1895–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
5. The best succinct coverage of the East Asian crises of the 1930s (there are many older, wonderful works) is in A. Iriye, The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific (London: Longman, 1987). The economic impulses to Japan’s outward thrust is handled brilliantly in M. A. Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security, 1919–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). Also useful is B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (London: Cassell’s, 1970), ch. 16; and H. P. Willmott, The Great Crusade: A New Complete History of the Second World War (London: Michael Joseph, 1989).
6. There is a summary of the Japanese military position in R. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Free Press, 1985), ch. 2; but above all, A. Coox, “The Effectiveness of the Japanese Establishment in the Second World War,” in A. Millett and W. Murray, Military Effectiveness, 3:1–44 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1988).
7. See a nice speculative essay by J. Black, “Midway and the Indian Ocean,” Naval War College Review 62, no. 4 (Autumn 2009): 131–40.
8. Best discussed in A. Danchev’s intellectual biography of Liddell Hart, The Alchemist of War: The Life of Basil Liddell Hart (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988).
9. Willmott, Great Crusade, 314ff. For a rather similar discussion, see Liddell Hart, History, ch. 29.
10. Apart from Willmott, Great Crusade, see P. Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy 1870–1945 (London: Fontana, 1983), ch. 7, “Japanese Strategic Decisions, 1939–45,” for a development of this argument.
11. The best brief recent analysis is by W. Tao, “The Chinese Theatre and the Pacific War,” in S. Dockrill, ed., From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima (London: Macmillan, 1994). There is also the vast library of books on Stilwell in China, the most entertaining being B. Tuchman, Sand Against the Wind: Stilwell and the American Experience in China 1911–1945 (New York: Macmillan, 1970).
12. The immensely difficult struggle by British Empire forces in the India-Burma theater is analyzed in vast detail in the official history, S. Woodburn Kirby et al., The War Against Japan, 5 vols. (London: HMSO, 1957–69); and a later rendition in C. Bayly and T. Harper, Forgotten Armies (London: Penguin & Allen Lane, 2004). As a compensation, it also gave cause for the best single-volume memoir by a general of the entire war, namely, Slim’s Defeat into Victory (London: Cassell, 1956).
13. J. Masters, The Road Past Mandalay (London: Michael Joseph, 1961). The pun on the title of Kipling’s poem/song is obvious. The clearest and most balanced book of all: L. Allen, Burma: The Longest War, 1941–45 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984).
14. MacArthur’s driving nature and his strategic opinions are covered in W. Manchester’s American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978). There are also acute running comments in Spector, Eagle.
15. For Eichelberger (and the “don’t come back alive”) instruction, see Spector, Eagle, 216; for the Marines, see the fine “1st Marine Division (United States,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Marine_Division(United_States) (accessed June 2010).
16. Liddell Hart, History, 620.
17. Ibid., 617; and, in very good detail, S. E. Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Boston: Little, Brown, 1947–62), vol. 8, ch. 9.
18. L. Allen, “The Campaigns in Asia and the Pacific,” Journal of Strategic Studies 13, no. 1 (March 1990): 175. This is an extraordinarily rich source and summation, especially for the Japanese side.
19. Ibid., 165.
20. E. S. Miller, War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan 1897–1945 (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1991), has the full story.
21. The best reminder of this important point is in M. van Creveld’s ingenious work Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
22. For massive detail, nothing will beat the official History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Marine Corps, 1958–68). The single-volume classics are A. R. Millett, Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States Marine Corps, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1991), ch. 12; and J. A. Isley and P. A. Crowl, The U.S. Marines and Amphibious War: Its Theory, and Its Practice in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), ch. 1–3.
23. The “Success … Failure” quotation is from Isley and Crowl, U.S. Marines, 14–21.
24. Millett, Semper Fidelis, 320.
25. Isley and Crowl, U.S. Marines, 26.
26. For a full treatment, see D. A. Ballendorf and M. Bartlett, Pete Ellis: Amphibious Warfare Prophet 1880–1923 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997).
27. See Millett, Semper Fidelis, 327; there is also a lively account in Isley and Crowl, U.S. Marines, 30–31.
28. Millett, Semper Fidelis, 336.
29. Both Morison’s official naval history volumes, especially vols. 5–8 and 12–14, and the U.S. Army’s official history volumes (dozens of them) cover their respective service’s record in the Pacific theater. For a smooth-running commentary on the marines, the army, and amphibious warfare, see Spector, Eagle.
30. Quotation from C. G. Reynolds, The Fast Carriers: The Forging of an Air Navy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 1.
31. A nice summary is in ibid., 4–13; for technical data, see M. Stille, Imperial Japanese Navy Aircraft Carriers 1921–1945 (London: Osprey, 2005).
32. Reynolds, Fast Carriers, ch. 3, “Weapon of Expediency, 1942–1943,” gives the context in the critical period of the Pacific War. S. W. Roskill, The War at Sea, 1939–1945 (London: HMSO, 1954–61), vol. 2, discusses HMS Victorious’s unusual experience.
33. Extremely useful details are in “Essex Class Aircraft Carrier,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/Essex_class_aircraft_carrier (accessed May 2010). The author’s notations and further references are the best I have seen.
34. These exploratory missions are covered in Reynolds, Fast Carriers, ch. 2, and Morison, History, vol. 7.
35. Spector, Eagle, 257.
36. For the Rabaul attacks, see Morison, History, vol. 6, Part 4, 369ff; see also Reynolds, Fast Carriers, 96ff.
37. The number of books and articles on the legendary Hellcat come close to the total for the equally legendary Spitfire. The best starting place may be with another one of those remarkably scholarly Wikipedia articles on aspects of the Pacific War: “F6F Hellcat,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F6F_Hellcat (accessed May 2010).
38. Ibid.; Reynolds, Fast Carriers, 57, and passim.
39. Most historians of the war in the Central Pacific realize that there was something of a hiatus in the fighting—at least in the significant fighting—between November 1943 (Tarawa) and June 1944 (Marianas, Rabaul), so they tend to devote less space to operations in those months and more to the arrival of the newer weapons systems, the coming of radar, and so on. Morison, being the official naval historian, fills this gap in History, vol. 7.
40. “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”—apart from Midway, everyone’s favorite aerial clash of the Pacific War. Reynolds, Fast Carriers, 190–204, is as good as any. Morison, History, has terrific details on 8:257–321.
41. Reynolds, Fast Carriers, makes the strongest (in my view, overly forced) argument about the Jutland analogy on 163–65, 209–10, followed by Spector, Eagle, 312.
42. Reynolds, Fast Carriers, has a rather generous ch. 9 on the performance of the British Pacific Fleet; Correlli Barnett, Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991), ch. 28, is a gloomy and almost dismissive account.
43. Two excellent introductions: C. Berger, B29: The Superfortress (New York: Ballantine, 1970); and an impressive Wikipedia entry, “B-29 Superfortress,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-29_Superfortress (accessed May 2010). Both these works have fine lists for further reading.
44. All of these details are in Wikipedia, “B-29 Superfortress.”
45. Berger, B29, has a wonderful section on “The Battle of Kansas,” 48–59. The “urgent struggle for airspeed” is a neat phrase from the Wikipedia article. Also excellent on the problem solvers of the B-29’s many defects is Herman, Freedom’s Forge, 297–322.
46. Berger, B29, 60–107.
47. John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936–1945 (London: Cassell & Company, 1971) 676, 745. For the larger issue, see the powerful reflections of M. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
48. I could not find a satisfying study of Moreell, but there are some basic biographical details in “Ben Moreell,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Moreell (accessed spring 2010).
49. Almost all that follows is taken from “Seabees in World War II,” another very thorough Wikipedia entry on aspects of the war in the Pacific and Far East, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabees_in_World_War_II (accessed spring 2010).
50. Ibid.
51. Spector, Eagle, 318–19.
52. The best insight into this tale of independence and resourcefulness comes from reading the memoirs of the American submariners themselves, of which there are many. For a taste, try Richard H. O’Kane, Clear the Bridge! (New York: Bantam, 1981); James F. Calvert, Silent Running: My Years on an Attack Submarine (New York: John Wiley, 1995)—withering in his comments on the Naval Ordnance Bureau; and Edward Beach, Submarine! (New York: Bantam, 1952).
53. Giving much detail is Clay Blair, Silent Victory, 2 vols. (New York: Lippincott, 1975); good comparative comments are in P. Padfield, War Beneath the Sea: Submarine Conflict 1939–1945 (London: John Murray, 1995), especially ch. 9.
54. Edwin P. Hoyt, The Destroyer Killer (New York: Pocket Books, 1989).
55. S. E. Morison, Two Ocean War (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1963), 510–11.
56. Exact statistics for Japanese losses in the Pacific are (as for so many other conflicts) virtually impossible to arrive at. For example, a heavy explosion might convince a submariner that his target had been destroyed, but it might only be damaged—or the torpedo might have exploded prematurely. And in a hectic action, an aircraft and a sub might claim to have sunk the same ship. Wartime medals were awarded on the basis of what appeared to be substantive proof of kills. But at the end of the war a Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee (JANAC) was set up to compare all claims with Japan’s own records. In almost all cases—including the overall totals—the figures were strongly reduced, yet without altering the overall picture. For the figures above, see Padfield, War Beneath the Sea, 476, and Morison, Two Ocean War, 511.
57. The story is told in every general account (and almost all memoirs) of the Pacific War. The clearest explanation, even though containing much technical detail, is a five-part article by Frederick J. Milford in the Submarine Review, appearing between April 1996 and October 1997. See in particular Part Two (October 1996), “The Great Torpedo Scandal, 1941–1943.”
58. The quotation and statistics following come from Roskill, History, vol. 3, part 2, 367.
59. Calculated from Mackenzie J. Gregory, “Top Ten US Navy Submarine Captains in WW2 by Number of Confirmed Ships Sunk,” at http://ahoy.tk-jk.net/macslog/TopTenUSNavySubmarineCap/html (accessed March 2010).
60. Quoted in Morison, Two Ocean War, 486.
61. C. Boyd and A. Yoshida, Japanese Submarine Forces in World War Two (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995). See also the various comparisons made in Padfield, War Beneath the Sea.
62. Morison, Two Ocean War, 486.
63. Padfield, War Beneath the Sea, ch. 9, is, as ever, reliable here.
64. R. Spector, “American Seizure of Japan’s Strategic Points, Summer 1942–44,” in S. Dockrill, ed., From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima: The Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, 1941–45 (London: Macmillan, 1994), ch. 4.
65. The best brief, and rather sardonic, account of the Aleutian Islands is in Spector, Eagle, 178–82.
66. Liddell Hart, History, 356–62.
67. Morison, History, vol. 8, is the most detailed.
68. Millett, Semper Fidelis, 410–19, is excellent on the Marianas campaign.
69. Morison, History, 8:162.
70. J. B. Wood, Japanese Military Strategy in the Pacific War: Was Defeat Inevitable? (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).
1. A. Bryant, The Turn of the Tide, 1939–1943: Based on the Diaries of Field Marshall Viscount Alanbrooke (London: Collins, 1957); A. Bryant, Triumph in the West 1943–1945 (London: Collins, 1959).
2. See Alanbrooke, War Diaries, 1939–1945: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, ed. Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001). This later edition is a model of its kind. It not only includes many of the more candid entries that Bryant had felt it prudent to omit while Churchill and other key personages were still alive, but it also distinguishes between Alanbrooke’s original uncensored entries, Alanbrooke’s later notes, and Bryant’s own variants (see “Note on the Text,” xxxi–xxxiv).
3. See Andrew Roberts’s clever use of the Alanbrooke diaries in Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2008).
4. Alanbrooke, War Diaries, 433.
5. Ibid., 557. “It was a wonderful moment to find myself re-entering France almost 4 years after being thrown out” (entry of June 12, 1944).
6. The phrase seems to have been invented by the great historian of Stuart Britain, J. H. Hexter, in “The Burden of Proof,” Times Literary Supplement, October 24, 1974—part of the raging debate in those years on the causes of the English Civil War.
7. The claim comes in the penultimate paragraph of Hinsley’s 1988 Harmon Memorial Lecture to the U.S. Air Force Association, “The Intelligence Revolution: A Historical Perspective.” It is actually a wonderful piece, showing due skepticism of the many popular works of the 1970s and 1980s on spy rings, decrypting geniuses, and intelligence breakthroughs. So it is odd that he put his neck so far out with this nonprovable estimate.
8. R. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Free Press, 1985), 457. Chapter 20, “Behind the Lines,” is an impressive survey on many aspects of the intelligence war—and the limitations.
9. I had already composed these paragraphs before David Kahn sent me his extremely important article, “An Historical Theory of Intelligence,” Intelligence and National Security 16, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 79–92, which I had quite missed earlier. Note especially 85–86: “Intelligence is necessary to the defense, it is only contingent to the offense.”
10. D. Kahn, “Intelligence in World War II: A Survey,” Journal of Intelligence History 1, no. 1 (Summer 2001): 1–20, a fine summation because it repeatedly asks for the proof that intelligence worked.
11. It comes as something of a relief to this author that the most powerful criticism of certain U.S. commanders toward British ideas and inventions are made by American historians themselves: see Paul A. Ludwig, P-51 Mustang: Development of the Long-Range Escort Fighter (Surrey, UK: Ian Allen, 2003), on Echolls’s opposition to the P-51; and W. Murray and A. R. Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 249–50, on the slaughters of the chiefly U.K. merchantmen along the eastern seaboard (“It was Admiral King at his worst; he was simply not going to learn anything from the British, whatever the costs”); and ibid., 418–19, about Bradley’s unwillingness to learn anything about the “tactical problems confronted by an amphibious assault on prepared defenses.” Compare this American confidence of their own sheer muscle power with Churchill’s insistence that it would not be by vast numbers of men and shells but by devising newer weapons and by scientific leadership “that we shall best cope with the enemy’s superior strength,” a key refrain in P. Delaforce’s Churchill’s Secret Weapons (London: Robert Hale, 1998).
12. P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), esp. 355, Table 35.
13. C. Barnett, The Swordbearers (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1963), 11.
14. See, among others, A. Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (London: Harper Collins, 1991); and the contrasting S. Bialer, ed., Stalin and His Generals (London: Souvenir Press, 1970), and H. Heiber, ed., Hitler and His Generals (New York: Enigman Press, 2003).
15. See D. Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2011), a sharp contrast with Barnett’s The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (London: Macmillan, 1986).
16. Malcolm Gladwell, “The Tweaker: The Real Genius of Steve Jobs,” New Yorker, November 14, 2011. In a rather wonderful way, Herman’s book on American innovation and productivity in WWII, Freedom’s Forge, passim, is simply an extended version of this story of constant improvement of an initial design to get a satisfying final product.
17. One thinks here of that brilliant work by H. Hattaway and A. Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983).
18. Neatly summarized in A. Grisson, “The Future of Military Innovation Studies,” Journal of Strategic Studies 29, no. 5 (October 2006): 905–34, paying due tribute to Barry Posen, Eliot Cohen, Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, Timothy Lupfer, and other notable figures in this field. My own brief venture here was in my 2009 George Marshall Memorial Lecture, published as P. Kennedy, “History from the Middle: The Case of the Second World War,” Journal of Military History 74, no. 1 (January 2010): 35–51. On The Genius of Design, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sjIfg. The Millett and Murray “military effectiveness” concepts run through this present text, and many an endnote.