A new slant on old battles

Most recent single-volume histories of the Second World War have been disappointing. It is a Herculean task to cover such a vast canvas of time and space. Authors wilt visibly under the strain. Here, however, is a work of exceptional quality from two distinguished American military historians. Their speciality is the operational study of armies at war. They offer a reader bold, authoritative and often original judgments on the performance of all the combatants in the greatest conflict in history. Here, for instance, is the authors' comment on the smashing German victory over the French in 1940, which they attribute to the quality of German leadership, from generals to NCOs: "It has become fashionable these days to believe that battles do not matter, or that isolated historical facts are of little significance. The Meuse battlefield between 13 and 15 May would, however, suggest a different view of the world. A relatively few individuals wearing field-gray uniforms, in a blood-stained, smashed-up, obscure provincial town, diverted the flow of history into darker channels ... The German victory came perilously close to destroying Western civilisation."

They identify intelligence and logistics as the cardinal weaknesses - the merciful weaknesses, from the viewpoint of the Allied cause - of the German army. They dismiss any realistic notion of a German invasion of Britain in 1940, but celebrate Churchill's extraordinary leadership: "He nobly gambled the last resources of a fading empire in the belief that the struggle was not yet lost."

The authors are unequivocal in their damnation of the German army as full and dishonourable participants, alongside the Nazi leadership, in the massacre of innocents throughout the struggle. They cite in evidence the shameless scorecards of Soviet commissars shot in cold blood, which each German army in Russia dutifully submitted to its Führer. Manstein, Guderian, Rommel - whom some British admirers like to view as honourable German gentlemen - were nothing of the sort.

Millett and Murray describe the Japanese triumph over the British in Malaya and the Americans at Pearl Harbor as "a celebration of Japanese superiority of the spirit against centuries of Western cultural arrogance and racism ... which discredited the British Empire".

The book is full of sobering statistics: for instance, I did not know that 36,000 of 185,000 men in Britain's Merchant Navy died on convoy duty, the highest rate of loss of any British service. The authors note, surely rightly, that the RAF's foot-dragging about participation in the Battle of the Atlantic, which airmen regarded as a diversion from their fixation with strategic bombing, was nigh-criminal.

More debatably, they conclude that the bombing of Germany played a critical part in Allied victory. It must be right to acknowledge that German war production, which soared despite bombing, would have been even higher without it. But they undervalue the argument that it was shortage of manpower rather than weapons which proved the crippling drain on Germany's fighting ability in the later years of the war.

The book castigates the strategic failures of Germany's generals. Yet, in truth, of course, neither the Third Reich's early military triumphs nor its self-immolation in 1944-45 would have taken place without the decisive role of Hitler as supreme warlord.

Some of the authors' conclusions are questionable - for instance, their assertion that Montgomery deliberately declined to reopen the port of Antwerp in September 1944, a far more important failure than Arnhem, because he wanted to force Eisenhower to supply his single-front drive into Germany. Personally, I prefer the cock-up theory of history.

But, in general, the judgments here are shrewd, mature, powerful. This is an admirable book for second-stage students of the war, that is to say readers who know the bare bones of the story, but want to learn more about realities, shorn of nationalistic myths and prejudices. The authors' views about Ultra, the conduct of the Allied armies, the shortcomings of MacArthur and Bradley, are uncommonly balanced. They admire Montgomery and Slim, but, reasonably enough, think little of other British generals, or of the general performance of the British Army. They celebrate the Red Army's extraordinary operational skills in 1944-45, but acknowledge that it would not have prevailed without accepting losses that would have been intolerable for the Western democracies.

They understand thoroughly the merits of Churchill's admonitory remark to Portal in 1942, warning him against placing unlimited faith in any one means of winning the war: "All things are always on the move at once." So they are. This book makes an important contribution to understanding both the military context and the nature of this vast global conflict.