Online Book Reader

Home Category

Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [218]

By Root 1067 0
(Aldershot, 1964), and A. Moorehead’s The Desert War (London, 1965): Correlli Barnett wrote a critique in The Desert Generals (London, 1960); Sir John Smyth’s Leadership in War, 1939-1945 (New York, 1974) is also mostly on North Africa, and R. Crisp’s Brazen Chariots (London, 1959) is an evocative memoir of tank-fighting in the desert. Rommel has attracted a good deal of attention, as in P. Carell’s The Foxes of the Desert (London, 1960), H. W. Schmidt’s With Rommel in the Desert (London, 1951), and D. Young’s Rommel (London, 1950). A more recent assessment is D. Irving’s On the Trail of the Fox (London, 1977). J. H. Robertson’s Auchinleck: A Biography of Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (London, 1959) is the standard work on this ill-used general. Alan Moorehead’s African Trilogy (London, 1959) is an evocative view by one of the leading correspondents of the war. A. Heckstall-Smith, in Tobruk (London, 1959), dealt with the sieges of that small but once-famous port. Much British attention has focused on the great battle of El Alamein, but a lot of what was written on it can now be disregarded. Field Marshal Sir Michael Carver wrote a straightforward military account, El Alamein (London), in 1962; F. Majdalany did the same in The Battle of El Alamein: Fortress in the Sand (London, 1965), and so did Brigadier C. E. L. Phillips, Alamein (London, 1962). Carver mused on how strange it was that it all seemed so easy after Montgomery arrived, and wondered why it had been so hard before that. Montgomery in his Memoirs (London, 1958) rather implied that the answer to that lay in his own brilliance, and it was not until the publication of F. W. Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret (New York, 1974) that the real answer—the British reading of the Germans’ codes—came out. A far-from-fiattering view of the man some regarded as Britain’s greatest soldier of the war is in Alun Chalfont’s Montgomery of Alamein (New York, 1976).

Canadians retain strong views on the Dieppe raid, and the best single volume on that unhappy incident is T. Robertson’s The Shame and the Glory: Dieppe (Toronto, 1962).

The invasion of French North Africa and the campaign there has attracted relatively less attention than many areas of the war. Auphan and Mordal’s The French Navy in World War II (Annapolis, 1959) has chapters on it. Some of the agonies of divided French loyalties are dealt with in M. Blumenson and J. L. Stokesbury’s Masters of the Art of Command (Boston, 1975). The Darlan episode has many of the earmarks of a modern spy story, and P. Tompkins in The Murder of Admiral Darlan (New York, 1965) attempted to unravel the threads of it all. Martin Blumenson’s Kasserine Pass (Boston, 1967) thoroughly covered that traumatic event, and his The Patton Papers (Boston, 2 vols., 1972-74) deals with Patton’s role in North Africa, as well as the rest of the career of that enigmatic soldier. A biographical treatment is L. Farago’s Patton: Ordeal and Triumph (New York, 1964).

THE RUSSO-GERMAN WAR. There are several good general histories of this titanic conflict. Alexander Werth’s Russia at War (New York, 1964) is especially good on the domestic Russian attitudes and Alan Clark’s Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-1945 (New York, 1965) is a standard account. A popular German treatment is P. Carell’s Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (Boston, 1965). H. Guderian’s Panzer Leader (New York, 1965) has a good deal to say on the use of armor in Russia. The Red Air Force is treated in R. Wagner’s The Soviet Air Force in World War II (New York, 1973). A more personal account is H.-U. Rudel, Stuka Pilot (New York, 1958). A. Dallin’s German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945: A Study in Occupation Policies (New York, 1957) in a dispassionate way does much to explain the passion of the Russian reaction to the German invasions. An excellent long-range military-historical study which compares Hitler’s invasion with previous western ones is W. G. F. Jackson’s Seven Roads to Moscow (New York, 1958). As the great turning point of the war, Stalingrad has received much attention. J.

Return Main Page Previous Page Next Page

®Online Book Reader