Puttering in the Study

D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II – Stephen E. Ambrose

Ambrose's book is ten years newer than D'Este's Decision in Normandy, but that isn't what makes it different.  What makes it different from any of the other D-Day works I have read recently is its sheer weight of personal accounts.  Ambrose presents the story by scene the way a painter fills a canvas, adding this story here, then that one there, gradually moving the narrative forward.  This is immensely helpful for later reference since you can go back to the story you remember, whether it's the destroyers off the beaches or a part of the story of the airborne troops.

Each chapter is filled with firsthand accounts, and after a while I began wondering how much of the book's tone and theme was actually just the veterans' words, but when I went back to the beginning I realized that Ambrose was in fact telling an overarching theme in the book.

I actually already knew that, because about 20 years ago I was at a judicial conference in New Orleans at which he spoke, and he described D-Day as the place where we would see which system would prevail. Would it be the young men trained in the Nazi system in Germany, or the young men brought up under freedom?  Who would take the initiative when the time came, and make decisions and move forward?  The book begins with the same question Ambrose posed at the conference he spoke at probably a year before he passed away.

It then provides a riveting setting of the stage before moving into the episodic treatment of the actual battle. The book takes forever to read, but it was never a slog.  It was a collection of stories, well-told, although in places credit certainly belongs to the men that were telling them for coming up with the right words.  They frequently reminded me of Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed in the way that he calmly describes something that really beggars description, and you finish reading it wondering how he managed to find the words. 

There's a phrase in Hamilton that I thought of a number of times where Eliza says about the death of her son that "there are places that the words don't reach" and with that in mind I'm filled with appreciation that the men, their interviewers, and Ambrose found the words to tell their stories.

Decision in Normandy – Carlo D'Este

D'Este published this book in 1983, and the date is significant, because it differs from more recent scholarship in several ways.

First, D'Este actually spoke with numerous people who are mentioned in the text, and was able to include personal observations or comments by several of the commanders who were still living, either because they were made to him or because he is in many cases reciting the history of the ... history of D-Day. By that I mean that he spends much time, especially at the end of the book, reciting how the official histories of the armies were written in the United States and in Great Britain, and in many places that required reference to letters from Eisenhower or Montgomery or others who were commenting on accounts that were being or already had been written.

Why?  Because given the time period that the book was being written, the two sides were still arguing over who was right and who was wrong in the conduct of the campaign.  No, no, not the Allies and the Germans - the Americans and the British.  At the time D'Este was writing, the campaign in Normandy was still a subject of serious controversy between, basically proponents and detractors of Field Marshal Montgomery, with the sides breaking down largely on national lines.  According to D'Este, the U.S. Army's account of the war was largely balanced and correct, but the British account was, for political reasons, decidedly not, and gave Montgomery far more credit than was appropriate. At bottom this was because of Monty's decision both during and after the campaign to pretend that everything had gone according to his plan, and absolutely so at his end of the front. Pay no attention to the Germans holding Caen for six weeks longer than predicted, in other words. As a result, D'Este spends an inordinate amount of time documenting what Montogomery had said he would do, and what he did, seeking to disprove this claim. He does not present this as a negative on Montgomery's generalship - had he admitted that he had had to changes his plans to deal effectively with changed circumstances on the ground it would have been to his credit that he did so as effectively as he did.  But he steadfastly denied that was the case, and the British accounts generally backed him up.

Decision in Normandy is one of the older of the World War II books I have read lately, and it shows. Closer to the time of the events it recounts, it shows the grudges that the Allied military leaders brought back at the end of the war, and how they affected the history that was being written - so much so that almost 40 years after the events D'Este finds it appropriate to document the history of the documentation of the history of the campaign. But it also means that he is frequently noting that certain sources are not yet available, or have just become available, which makes the thought of being able to read texts that have the benefit of over three decades of additional sources exciting.  (That I am sitting at home on a Friday night writing that this is exciting is perhaps best not examined too closely). I don't note the age as a bad thing - it just means that things are emphasized a little differently than they would if the author was dealing with the controversies over McClellan's conduct as head of the Union Army.

But for these reasons, while the book is a good one about the campaign (I wonder how it would compare to John Keegan's Six Armies in Normandy published the year before - but I'm not willing to reread that one just yet) it is equally interesting for the stories it tells about the postwar grousing by the participants about each others' version of events, and the perspective it gives on historical scholarship when the participants were still alive, kicking, and nursing grudges.

The First Wave: The D-Day Warriors Who Led the Way to Victory in World War II - Alex Kershaw

Another one of the 2019 conference package was this new book by Alex Kershaw which tells the story of the first wave of troops that landed on D-Day.  It has less of the planning and more of the actual stories of the soldiers that came ashore, and continues their stories through the end of the war and beyond.

I ended up liking this book more after I finished it and realized what it had that other D-Day books didn't.  Because it took a narrow slice of the action, it gave you a better understanding of the limited perspective of the participants.  I generally like books that tell the entire story - in this case here's what happened from the beginning of the landings through the push up the bluffs and off the beach and into the hedgerows beyond, and how the various engagements were fought and ended up resulting in this objective being successfully taken. 

This book wasn't like that.  Instead, it skipped back and forth around several different stories, but staying with the same participants.  They landed, found a way off the beach, and here's what they did after that. The larger drama isn't present, but it was a bite-sized story that was told at such a personal level that I felt like I understood what was happening.  But my favorite part of this book was the story of Lieutenant Spalding and his second in second in command Segeant Streczyk as they made their way up the bluff at Omaha, eventually attacking German trenches at the top of the bluff, and eventually making their way through the orchards and hedgerows into the countryside.

First of all, it's a great story.  Second - the path they took still exists as paths up from the beach to the American cemetery at Colleville, which has replaced the orchards and fields they passed through by 0900 that morning.  We saw it when we visited the battlefield in 2017 - the gully they worked their way up is behind us in this picture.

The book follows the men's stories through the war, showing which stayed through VE Day and which didn't, and what happened to them after the war. Often, it's sad to read, how successful they were on D-Day was often a sign that their personal lives after the war would be correspondingly unhappy, or even tragic.

One story stood out.  Many years after the war one of the soldiers who led a drastically undermanned group of paratroopers in taking a gun battery that had been assigned to them went back to the site.  He reluctantly shook the hand of one of the Germans who had commanded the battery's garrison, and later in the day saw families picnicking on grass near the battery.  He shooed them off angrily, and explained that he just didn't like people doing that where he remembered his men had bled and died. I found that interesting, because when we were at Omaha Beach and saw large numbers of tourists swimming and playing on the sand, and I had assumed that veterans of the landings would like that the place was one of pleasant things now.  It was interesting to see that his reaction was still to the contrary.

There are many ways the tell the D-Day story, and this isn't the best one for the overall story.  But it is a useful one for obtaining a better understanding of what happened to the soldiers that landed and what it was like being there.

 

Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings - Craig L. Symonds

I got this book as part of a batch I wanted to have signed by the author in November at the WW II symposium, and really enjoyed it.  It focuses on the actual landing portion of Overlord, and as such goes through the history of the concept of landing on the French coast as a means of ending the war in Europe.  Lots of interesting information about the actual landings, with less on the leaders and the overall campaign.

The Washington War: FDR's Inner Circle and the Politics of Power That Won World War II - James Lacey

Lacey followed Keep From All Thoughtful Men with this book on the broader topic of the bureaucratic warfare in Washington during World War II.  The book tells the fascinating story of the interagency decision-making process that flourished in FDR's administration during the wartime mobilization - who was effective at it and who was not. KFATM makes up one chapter of it, but interestingly Lacey's conclusion on the role of the economists has changed. He no longer believes that the economists caused Army chief of staff George C. Marshall to conclude that the D-Day invasion had to be postponed from 1943 to 1944, but instead notes that it was simply one of several factors in his decision.

 

One of the most interesting observations in the book, however, is in Lacey's introduction, where he explains that he thought the story the book would tell is how inefficient the U.S. government was at making war, especially in producing the material that was needed for combat, but when he finished, the story was the opposite.  While there were of course miscalculations and inefficiencies for a variety of reasons, some of which were hardly the result of poor decisionmaking - the pitting of agency against agency and power broker against power broker actually tended to result in a fairly optimal result in the end, since all viewpoints tended to have a chance at being heard, and the bad ones usually melted away. The inefficiencies seemed to me to be caused in large part by FDR and Harry Hopkins' desire to avoid having a strong leader coordinating the home front until late in the war, preferring to control the decisionmaking or at least the decisionmaker. 

This is in sharp contrast, he notes, to more authoritarian planning systems such as Germany and Japan, for example, where gigantic errors in planning by unchallengeable leaders or factions remained unexamined and undisturbed.  The administration can be faulted for a less than optimal process, but at least it avoided the enormous errors that could have occurred had Donald Nelson exercised almost supreme power - and then been wrong. The system was actually very Washington - agency heads and industry heads fought each other for money, power and influence, and had opportunities to make their cases to the powers that be, and in most cases the solutions that the process generated worked out to be either magnificent (the creation of adequate aircraft manufacturing plants before the U.S. entered the war using the expected demand by foreign powers such as Britain and France) or at least adequate when it counted.  The example here is the relative priority in shipbuilding given to shipping tonnage, escort vessels and landing craft, as well as combatants such as battleships, aircraft carriers, screening vessels and so forth.  The balance changed throughout the war based on needs at any given time, but the end result that there was enough - even if only barely - of everything when it was needed.

For example, adequate shipping capacity was always a significant constraint, but it didn't cause Britain or the USSR to drop out of the war, or prevent the US from entering the European theater as a combatant within a year of Pearl Harbor.   Escort vessels for convoys was always a need, but there was enough to keep losses at an acceptable level.  And landing craft were always in short supply, but production was able to turn to maximizing landing craft in time that Eisenhower only had to delay D-Day one month, and the Anvil invasion by an additional two months due to landing craft shortages.

Again, Germany is the primary example of how wrong this could have been done.  German naval production emphasized surface combatants over submarines far too long - a decision that at least balanced the concerns in the late 1930s would likely have won Germany the war against Britain by 1941.  Similarly, German aircraft design was largely ineffective at producing the planes Germany needed from 1942 on due to an air force that was unable to get good ideas past Goering and later Hitler.  An example here is Hitler's micromanaging of the best aircraft that German industry did come up with - the Me 262 jet fighter in such a way that it contributed virtually nothing to the German war effort.

The branch politics of the American war effort nearly did the same thing with the superior piston-driven engine fighter of the war, the P-51 Mustang, but in the end, the fighter that the Allies needed finally became available as ideas that were simply too good to fail rose through the process. Similarly, the Navy's torpedoes were almost useless until 1943, but eventually their defects became known in time for improved versions to become possibly the key piece of ordnance in starving the Japanese war machine.  Time and time again, the Allies' system was able to identify and corrected problems while their opponents did not.

All in all, a really good book if you want a look at what was going on behind the scenes.

Keep From All Thoughtful Men: How U.S. Economists Won World War II - Jim Lacey

This was required reading in my WWS 562 class, and told a very interesting story about how economists played a role in planning the U.S. industrial production that generated the material necessary to fight World War II.  The subtitle is an exaggeration because while they played an important role in getting across to policymakers - primarily the U.S. joint chiefs - that the military's equipment orders needed to be adjusted, the economists didn't exactly win the war, or even make a decisive contribution. Arguably they played a role in seeing that the war in Europe ended in 1945 rather than 1946, but that's about it.

The role the book explains is the creation of national income statistics, which were still in their infancy in the years before the war, and more importantly GDP (gross domestic product) statistics, which allowed a more precise measurement of what war production the economy could sustain.

An Army at Dawn (The Liberation Trilogy) – Rick Atkinson

I enjoyed this trilogy the first time through, but none as much as the first volume, which recounted the story of the green American troops and their equally green leaders as they first engaged in combat in the European theater against Germany. I just reread it after getting the boxed set wanting to see how its analysis of events matched up against Nigel Hamilton's trilogy and found it just as interesting the second time. It isn't the FDR-centric story Hamilton tells but has far more detail on the combat and what happened ady why.

Reorganizing the Study Bookshelves (military history, U.S. history, Lincoln, space exploration, science, ocean liners, archaeology, Ian Fleming and H.P. Lovecraft)

Spent some quality puttering in the study time Sunday reorganizing the shelves to make more room for the World War II acquisitions that don’t seem to be stopping anytime soon.

It started with trying to assign numbers to some of the many books in the book database that don’t have them (yeah, I have one, and I am way too interested in it), and as I got more books in I started thinking about moving some things around to make more room in the VI - the military history stack (the right-hand one).  I pushed some of what had previously been in VII - naval history over there last week to make room in that stack (by creating a dedicated Pacific War shelf that is for anything that’s not just naval) and really liked having the WW II separated with separate shelves for Atlantic and Pacific theaters, and general histories below that, and special topics (Germany, air war, land war, etc.) above it. Way easier to see what I have.

To get more room I moved all of Miss Selma and Emma Mae Brotze's books on Lincoln that were not Civil War-related into V - U.S. history in the left top shelf, and started organizing the U.S. history books by topic, discarding old Fodors travel books to make room. That stack needs more work, but eventually it’ll be organized by U.S. history, Texas, presidents, and White House. (The last two categories get a little mixed up  because the oversize go on the bottom shelf).

That was so much fun that I moved over the mess in the IX - Science stack (left in second picture).  I created separate shelves for space exploration (promoted up to shelf 5 so it’s the easiest to see) science, ocean liners and archaeology, organizing the general shelves to make room.  

I then worked on the X - Literature stack that’s adjacent, adding my Flemings to the Tim Powers and Christopher Priest shelf, threw out some old stuff to make room (which I am getting better at - I made $14 at HP Books last week. Well, before I spent $78 but it's still progress), and created half a shelf for Lovecraft (with Cthulhu plush) down at IX - 7 so the Horror shelf could be restricted to Dracula, Frankenstein, and a little Poe and Endore. No real changes to IX-4 or 5 - the Tolkien or Forester shelves.

I'm not the only one that numbers my shelves, right?

Brothers, Rivals, Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley and the Partnership that Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe Paperback – Jonathan W. Jordan

I finished this book a month ago, and really enjoyed it.  As I mentioned about Jordan's subsequent book American Warlords, the prose is a little over the top at times, but it seems to fit this book better, since the three generals tended to speak to each other in language that is slightly stilted to modern ears.

The choice of story is magnificent. While I knew something about the three and their prior acquaintanceship in the peacetime army, the anecdotes of Eisenhower and Patton's time together at Fort Meade in the 1920's with their families were incredible.  Remember the scene in The Incredibles where Bob and Frozone are sitting in a car at night waiting to catch criminals? 

Patton and Eisenhower literally did this for fun at night with loaded pistols looking for "highwaymen."  Another time they wanted to see if a machine gun's accuracy would be affecting by it overheating, and accidentally causing it to go on full automatic with no one at the controls, spraying bullets everywhere and threatening to cook off boxes of ammunition and had to crawl through their own fire to get close enough to shut it off.

I learned a lot about the levels of corps and army group commander - something I wasn't previously familiar with.  But the best part of the book was that on almost a page by page basis, which of the three was talking sense and which was doing something dumb, or at least inadvisable would change. There wasn't a clear-cut presentation one that was always right and one that was always wrong. Eisenhower grew throughout the book, both in his ability to lead and his decisionmaking.  Bradley was almost always the most competent and reliable commander to both Eisenhower and Patton.  And Patton was the preeminent field general on the American side, but with equally great shortcomings.

The real story of the book is Eisenhower's willingness to tolerate Patton's constant incidents during the war, which was in part due to their friendship, at least early on, but later was because he knew that he would need Patton as a field commander, a decision that paid off handsomely in the fall and winter of 1944.

Again, a really good book.

War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941 - Megargee, Geoffrey P.

This is another short book, but provides an excellent background on Barbarossa, as well as a concise explanation of the first year of the campaign.  It includes a phase by phase analysis of the Nazi plan and practice for genocide against the inhabitants of Soviet Russia.  

Some of what happened was planned, some wasn’t, but the next effect was that millions of the Soviet soldiers and civilians that found themselves behind German lines were dead before the next spring.  Some were killed in combat or because they were Jews or other groups that Germans intended to kill anyway, but most died from starvation and exposure as a result of the failure of the German high command to provide for their survival.  Nor was this mere negligence - Germany never intended to provide for the survival of POWs in large numbers, and deliberately took food and winter clothing from civilians to support its home front and the troops on the Eastern Front.

Horrible story, but efficiently told.