Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [219]
OCCUPATION, RESISTANCE, BOMBING, AND ALLIED PLANS AND PROBLEMS. Much is available on the German occupation of Europe and the resistance to it. The best general survey is Henri Michel’s The Shadow War: European Resistance, 1939-45 (New York, 1952). Eugene Davidson in The Trial of the Germans (New York, 1966) deals with some of the key German figures and their policy roles. A short treatment is in G. Wright’s The Ordeal of Total War (New York, 1968), and Kenneth Macksey wrote generally on The Partisans of Europe in the Second World War (New York, 1975). On the Vichy question there are R. O. Paxton’s Parades and Politics at Vichy: The French Officer Corps under Marshal Petain (Princeton, 1966) and Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (New York, 1972). Many British writers have covered the connections between the indigenous Resistance operations and the Allied attempts to channel and control them. There are also works on specific countries. P. Howarth edited a work on Special Operations (London, 1955); R. Collier’s Ten Thousand Eyes (London, 1958), B. Marshall’s The White Rabbit (Boston, 1953), and D. Howarth’s We Die Alone (New York, 1955) are all worth reading. D. Lampe covered the Danish Underground in The Savage Canary (London, 1957), and T. Bor-Ko-morowski, commander of the Polish Home Army, wrote The Secret Army (London, 1950). A great deal has appeared on the French Resistance, perhaps in some respects as an antidote to France’s military collapse. A general review is P. de Vomecourt’s Who Lived to See the Day: France in Arms, 1940-45 (London, 1961); an intriguing personal memoir, which also tells much of both the strengths and weaknesses of the Resistance movement, is Henri Frenay’s The Night Will End: Memoirs of a Revolutionary (New York, 1976). The beginning of the Resistance is covered in Martin Blumenson’s moving The Vilde Affair (Boston, 1977), from which the story of listening to the BBC is taken.
The effectiveness of strategic bombing remains a subject of contention, and there is a vast number of books on the subject generally, and on specific aspects of it. For the technical side of what the bombers could do, and how they were developed, William Green’s Famous Bombers of the Second World War (New York, 2 vols., 1959-60) is the work to start with. There have been many German works on the air war; notable were C. Bekker’s The Luftwaffe War Diaries (New York, 1972), which is regarded as a semiofficial history; W. Baumbach’s The Life and Death of the Luftwaffe (New York, 1960); and K. Bartz’ Swastika in the Air: The Struggle and Defeat of the German Air Force, 1939-1945 (London, 1956). Adolf Galland, the famous German fighter pilot chief, wrote The First and the Last: The Rise and Fall of the German Fighter Forces, 1938-1945 (New York, 1957). Specific raids or periods of the campaign have been covered by many writers. Martin Caidin wrote The Night Hamburg Died (New York, 1960), and also Black Thursday (New York, 1960), about the first American daylight raid, against Schweinfurt. D. J. C. Irving wrote The Thousand Plane Raid (New York, 1966), which describes the first of Harris’ “big raids.” Martin Middlebrook’s The Nuremberg Raid (New York, 1974) is an engrossing examination of the technical and human problems of the air war.
The Cold War prompted extensive discussion of how the wartime allies got along, and why they fell out. The newest book to review the problem,