A German vision of war

Each new volume in Germany's monumental, semi-official history of the Second World War is a major event for historians of the period. The work of the team from the German Army's Freiburg Military Archive offers a meticulous, scholarly perspective on the conflict from Germany's side, though the authors write with an almost bloodless absence of national sentiment. Their prose might be the work of Martians utterly divorced from the period, rather than that of children and grandchildren of the German generation which waged the struggle. There is no hint of admiration for fallen German heroes or for superior fighting performance - merely a cool, dispassionate analysis of what Germany did and why, based on vast archival research.

In a door-stopping 1,240 pages, the latest volume describes the world at war in 1942-43 from North Africa to the Russian front, Midway to the Atlantic convoy war, the early Allied bombing of Germany and the diplomatic workings of the Axis. Once Hitler's attempt swiftly to crush Russia had failed and America entered the war, serious German strategic debate atrophied. Any rational analysis could only conclude that German defeat was inevitable. Therefore, Germany's military leaders were forced to take refuge in conducting their campaigns by what one might call grand tactics rather than in accordance with any credible strategy for victory.

The book notes "the helplessness of the German conduct of the war, which - as had happened in the First World World War - spent itself, even at the highest level, in operational rather than strategic decisions". The authors express their astonishment that Germany's leaders did not in new circumstances "develop even the beginnings of a political or military alternative. Germany's conduct of the war was from late 1942 reduced to the simple social-Darwinist slogan of 'All or Nothing'".

Stalin's chronic mistrust of the Western allies made a concerted global strategy impossible for the Grand Alliance, yet at least America and Britain achieved close military co-ordination. This escaped the Axis powers: "The typical virtues of an alliance such as co-operation, power-sharing and compromise, were fundamentally alien to the authoritarian regimes". The German High Command's December 1941 evaluation of likely Allied intentions correctly assumed that a big landing in France would take several years. It anticipated that, meanwhile, Germany would face a long series of attacks on the periphery, first in the Mediterranean and thereafter in Spain and Norway.

Through 1942, Hitler clung to a belief that Britain might make a separate peace, driven by fears that American hegemony threatened the British Empire. It was obvious that Germany's best, if not only, hope lay in finishing off Russia. A marginal measure of the cost of that vast struggle: in addition to human casualties on the Eastern Front in the winter of 1941 alone, Germany lost 180,000 horses. Berlin continued to delude itself that Russian military and industrial power was crumbling, while in reality it was growing. Even when the Afrika Korps was at the gates of Cairo, Hitler denied Rommel the handful of reinforcement divisions that might have taken him to Suez, because he regarded North Africa as an Italian theatre, of marginal importance to Germany.

The authors believe that Ultra was not merely important, but decisive in the Battle of the Atlantic. A German statistical analysis suggests that in 1941, Germany would have sunk 3.5 million tons of Allied shipping rather than the two million tons achieved, if Bletchley had not been reading Uboat codes. The authors argue that the Allied bomber offensive was " - if not alone, yet quite certainly - decisive in the war by forcing Hitler to expend vast resources on defending Germany against air attack". In other words, they importantly endorse the verdict of British historian Richard Overy. They take no moral view about area bombing, but point out that fundamental RAF doctrine called for the ruthless conduct of air war against civilians, in a manner Luftwaffe doctrine did not.

When it became plain in 1942 that Russia would survive and become the dominant force in the land war, America shifted huge manpower from its planned ground army to its air and naval forces. The result was that in 1945 US armies in north-west Europe were too weak to push deep into the East, even if the West's political deal with Stalin had allowed them to do so.

Just a smidgen of German national sentiment surfaces when the authors record - for instance - an episode in North Africa in June 1942 in which New Zealanders overran a German position and medical station, bayoneting to death every one of its 80 occupants, including doctors and wounded. Please note, the authors delicately imply, that while Germany's wartime crimes were vast, Germany's enemies were not without moral blemish. Historians are unlikely to find fault with this book's brilliant analysis of how Germany fought its war, but they may quibble with some of its assertions about what the Allies did, and why.

In places, either the original prose or the English translation is notably inelegant. Because Oxford insists on publishing this magisterial work as an academic title, at an academic price, few general readers will buy it. But anybody who wants to know exactly what Germany did and why in the Second World War should know that it exists. And I hope that before the 10-volume series reaches its conclusion, the authors will show themselves brave enough to acknowledge the simple and not boastful truth that, at operational level, the German army was far more effective than its enemies, even if its command decisions were crippled by inability to confront the truth that only defeat for their armies and damnation for their cause awaited them from 1942 onwards.