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Mythos revisited: American Historians and German Fighting Power in WWII
by Thomas E. Nutter
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Chapter One
The Historical and Historigraphical Context
Few subjects have captured the interest of historians and the general public
more completely than the history of the conflict in Western Europe between June
1944 and May 1945. In the popular press, in professional journals and on the
shelves of bookstores and libraries, stories, articles and books on the subject
have proliferated in the last half- century. Nearly every aspect of the last
year of war between Nazi Germany and its western enemies has been examined and
reexamined, from the commanders and private soldiers who fought, to the
weapons, vehicles and aircraft they employed, and the clothes and equipment
they wore. There are many reasons why this should be so; for many of the
survivors of that war, both civilian and military, it was the defining moment
in their lives. Similarly, the descendants and other surviving relatives of
those Americans and western Europeans who shared the struggle live with its
effects still. World War II captivates the interest of yet another group of
persons, namely those whose personal connection with it is tenuous, but whose
imagination and desire to know compel them to study its every aspect.
The initiation and course of the campaign in Western Europe in the last year of
World War II owed much to the influence of the United States, whose entry into
the conflict in December 1941 changed the balance of power in favor of the
Allies. In spite of the outrage of the American public against Japan for its
surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the country's political and military
leadership agreed with their new British allies that Germany represented the
greater threat. Although there was agreement on this point, however, there
remained serious controversy between the two English-speaking nations over
where and when to best strike against Germany. The United States favored an
early direct assault at the enemy heartland through Western Europe, while the
British advocated a more deliberate and indirect approach through Italy and
Southern Europe.
Britain's caution about a premature direct confrontation on land with Germany
in Western Europe stemmed from a number of factors, not least of which were a
healthy respect for the capacity of the enemy to resist, and a disinclination
to become involved in a slugging match that might give rise to casualties on a
scale comparable to those suffered in the First World War. Events, as well as
English persistence, conspired to favor the pursuit of the indirect approach.
The venue in which Britain most directly confronted the power of the German Wehrmacht
was North Africa. This area was critical to the survival of the British Empire,
not only because of the presence of the Suez Canal, vital to the ability of
Britain to supply its home island and maneuver its navy, but also because of
its proximity to rich reserves of petroleum in the Middle East. Here the
British, Italians and Germans had struggled throughout most of 1941 in a seesaw
battle ranging over hundreds of miles of desolate landscape. By early 1942,
however, Britain had gained the upper hand and was forcing the Axis troops back
into Tunisia. At the prodding of Winston Churchill, who urged that the United
States must attack the Germans somewhere in 1942, American forces invaded North
Africa in November of that year. By May the western Allies had driven all Axis
forces from the continent of Africa.
The British now maneuvered their American colleagues into continuing to press
the Axis from the south, rather than move more directly on the path to an
invasion of Western Europe. Its ability to do so was facilitated by the inertia
which resulted from the presence of such a large body of Allied forces in the
theatre, and by a critical shortage in landing craft, the principal conveyance
by which the Allies must perforce make their way onto the continent of Western
Europe. In consequence, the Allies in the summer of 1943 assaulted and overcame
the Axis forces on the island of Sicily. That autumn, they began the long and
agonizingly painful conquest of the Italian peninsula.
The British, however, had purchased American cooperation in Sicily and Italy by
committing themselves to an Allied invasion of Western Europe in the spring of
1944. The Allies began the planning and buildup for this undertaking in January
of that year, when a planning staff took form in London, and the bulk of
American and British land forces began slowly to assemble and train in England.
In due course, overall command of the operation was placed in the hands of an
American general, Dwight D. Eisenhower; his principal subordinates were the
ground commander, General Bernard Law Montgomery, the naval commander, Admiral
Earl Ramsay, and the air commander, Air Vice Marshal Arthur Tedder, all British
officers. The Allies planned to undertake this greatest amphibious assault in
history in May or June of 1944.
The Allied invasion began on 6 June 1944. Initial German resistance, though
fierce in the American sector at Omaha Beach, was sporadic elsewhere, and the
Allies affected a solid lodgment from which they were never displaced. The
Normandy bridgehead, however, was strenuously contested for two months, as the
Allies endeavored without success to break the German defensive line so that
the superior capacity for maneuver of the British and American forces could be
brought to bear against the enemy on more open ground. The Allies achieved this
purpose by skirting the enemy's left flank and breaking out across western
France. There followed a second invasion, this time of southern France, an
event which caused the Germans to further disperse their already hard pressed
forces. By autumn the German army had fallen back nearly all the way to the
borders of its homeland.
The Allied offensive now ground to a halt, the victim of strained logistics,
difficult terrain and stiffening enemy resistance. The U.S. army suffered a
bloody repulse in the Huertgen Forest; American and British paratroopers did
the same in Holland. Hard on the heels of these reverses came the so-called
Battle of the Bulge, the product of a German offensive in the Ardennes Forest
during whose early stages the German army sent the western Allies reeling. In
the end, however, this ill-advised enterprise proved to be Germany's last throw
in the west. While hard fighting remained, within four months the Third Reich
was no more, pounded to scrap by the coalition of forces that it had brought
down upon itself. What had been one of the most traumatic periods of all time
was now relegated to the stuff of history.
The flood of written material about the Second World War first described above
began almost immediately after its end. A compilation of all such works would
far surpass this one in length; they cover every imaginable aspect of the war
and its participants. One of the most popular subjects, for both professional
historians and enthusiasts of various kinds, has been the German Wehrmacht.
The amount of study and writing devoted to this topic has been truly colossal.
In this subset of literature about the war, a great deal of energy has been
spent studying the battles and campaigns of the German army, including the part
played in those events by the Waffen SS . A consideration of some of
the works that treat this subject constitutes a substantial portion of the
present study.
In recent years, there has been what might be described as an academic backlash
against the study of the Wehrmacht in the United States. Several
significant works of military history reflect this development. Keith Bonn
published the first of these works in 1994 under the title When the Odds Were
Even.(2) Bonn, who was an active-duty officer in the U.S. Army at the
time he published his work, focuses upon the encounter between the US and
German armies in the Vosges Mountains of northeastern France between October
1944 and January 1945. Here, Bonn argues, the terrain and prevailing weather
prevented the U.S. army units engaged there from enjoying the benefits of
overwhelming armor and air support, elements that he admits rendered the
struggle elsewhere in Europe between the Wehrmacht and the western
Allies an unequal one. In the more pristine environment of the Vosges, however,
combat was reduced to its more fundamental components; the skill and initiative
of commanders, and the toughness, bravery and endurance of the individual
soldier. Little wonder then, Bonn contends, that the U.S. army prevailed in
this struggle, since even where the playing field was level, the GI was more
than a match for the landser.
In 1986, John Sloan Brown published Draftee Division, a history of the US 88th
Infantry Division in World War II.(3) Brown uses the history of the 88th
Infantry Division as a sort of case study to illustrate how American divisions
formed primarily of draftees trained for war and fared in combat in Europe. At
the time he wrote Draftee Division, Brown was a serving officer in the U.S.
army. His maternal grandfather commanded the 88th Infantry Division in World
War II, and his father served as an officer in its ranks. With these visceral
connections to his topic, Brown is able to render a well-grounded treatment of
it. Like Bonn, he concludes that the 88th Infantry Division, and indeed the 5th
U.S. army in which it served, were more than equal to the Wehrmacht at
the height of its combat efficiency.
Michael D. Doubler, yet another U.S. Army officer then on active service,
published Closing with the Enemy in 1994.(4) His purpose is to
illustrate beyond doubt the superiority of the U.S. army over its German
opponent. His thesis is that "[T]actical adaptation, technical innovation, the
dissemination of lessons learned, and experience allowed the army to achieve
unparalleled levels of professional competence" in the three and a half years
that it spent establishing itself, training, and meeting the enemy. It was
these characteristics of the U.S. army, and not its material superiority over
the Germans (a notion that Doubler disputes in any case), that enabled it to
prevail.
Peter R. Mansoor's The GI Offensive in Europe appeared in 1999, and is
in some ways the most virulent of its genre.(5) Mansoor wrote his work while an
active duty lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. In part, The GI Offensive in
Europe is a ruthless attack on historians whom Mansoor portrays as critical of
the performance of the U.S. army in the Second World War. Primarily, however,
it is a tribute to American infantry divisions of that war. The great
achievement of the U.S. army, Mansoor argues, was the creation of an effective
fighting force from citizen soldiers in record breaking time. The real purpose
of Mansoor's work is to refute the "flawed theory" perpetuated by "the defeated
German army and its apologists" that "the Army of the United States had
blundered its way to victory by throwing mountains of materiel at the superior
but hopelessly outnumbered forces of the Wehrmacht ." It was the
ability of the U.S. army to adapt to combat conditions and maintain combat
effectiveness, not its logistic and material superiority, that gained the
victory in World War II.
The works of Brown, Bonn, Mansoor and Doubler collectively express a new
understanding about the relative capacities and proficiencies of the German and
American armies in the Second World War. In their view, the outcome of that
struggle between two very different armed forces was determined, in the final
analysis, by superior practice of the soldier's art. This thesis runs contrary
to what each of the authors characterizes as conventional wisdom, which holds
that the German army represented the more technically skilled and proficient of
the two forces, and that it was only prevented from prevailing by the numerical
and material superiority of its foes, including the U.S. Army. A significant
element in this new analysis, then, is the necessity to first undermine the
prevailing wisdom, and this is done to a greater or lesser extent in each work,
by attacking those whom the authors view as its chief proponents. It is to the
works of those "proponents of conventional wisdom" that we must now turn.
Footnotes
(2) Bonn, Keith, When the Odds Were Even (Presidio
Press, 1994).
(3) Brown, John Sloan, Draftee Division: The 88th Infantry Division in World
War II (The University Press of Kentucky, 1986).
(4) Doubler, Michael D., Closing with the Enemy: How GIs Fought the War in
Europe, 1944-1945 (University Press of Kansas, 1994).
(5) Mansoor, Peter R., The GI Offensive in Europe: The Triumph of American
Infantry Divisions, 1941-1945 (University Press of Kansas, 1999).
Copyright © 2004 by Thomas E. Nutter.
Please send comments to Thomas E. Nutter at: tenutter@gmail.com.
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