The one book I took to Greece on our recent vacation was volume 1 of Rick Atkinson's trilogy about U.S. Army operations in Europe in World War II. As I posted recently, I just finished listening to the second volume on the campaigns in Italy and Sicily, and was curious about the first volume on the initial action, which was the invasion of North Africa.
As I suspected, it was a horror story of poor planning, bad leadership, inadequate training, with both cowardice and courage mixed in. Eisenhower, who's pretty inadequate at the beginning, appears to grow into his role as commander as time goes on (at least that's what Atkinson tells us happens - Ike's story is actually something I'm really interested in after reading these two books). Likewise, the battlefield commanders, who appear pretty clueless initially, are gradually weeded out and replaced with commanders who can effectively lead and army into battle. The clearest example is Omar Bradley, who though a mixture of sharp thinking and tactical insubordination actually gets things done where his predecessors and colleagues often didn't. Logistical operations go from the totally disorganized to the sometimes adequate, with immediate effects at the front, when commanders like Bradley can effectively translate material superiority into battlefield success. There is also a tremendous quote along these lines from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who observed that battles are won by the quartermasters before the fighting even begins. That's so true in this book - the Allies are hampered only initially by bad logistics, and the Germans are essentially disarmed by the end of the North African campaign, with no replacements for their destroyed tanks, and no ammunition or fuel for the few that remained at the end.
Atkinson is a terrific writer, but he again suffers from reuse of adjectives - in this books panzers always "slammed into" Allied units, and defenders are always "winkled out" of their positions. But other than that, the writing is extraordinary.