|
|
Mythos revisited: American Historians and German
Fighting Power in WWII
by Thomas E. Nutter
|
Chapter Eight
John Ellis, BRUTE FORCE. ALLIED STRATEGY AND TACTICS IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Peter Mansoor lumps together John Keegan, Max Hastings and John Ellis,
contending that they "round out the field of authors who praise the combat
effectiveness of the Wehrmacht at the expense of the victors of World
War II." Mansoor asserts that Ellis, like his two fellow Englishmen, has
swallowed uncritically the alleged contentions of Russell Weigley and Martin
van Creveld that the German army was more competent and combat effective than
those of its opposition. While Ellis apparently remains unknown to Bonn, Brown
and Doubler, nevertheless it is worth dealing, however briefly, with Mansoor's
charge.
John Ellis is neither a soldier nor an academic historian, thus differentiating
him from the authors whose work is the principal focus of this work. He is,
nevertheless, an accomplished author whose works include, among others, The
Sharp End of War, a paean to the individual fighting man. As the title
Brute Force suggests, however, the book of which Mansoor is so critical
takes a broader view of war (in this instance, the Second World War), focusing
on the relative ability of the opposing forces to marshal military resources
and apply them to their respective foes. As he indicates in his preface, his
first major theme is that the stupendous collective industrial potential of the
Allies gave them such a preponderance of the means for warmaking---weapons and
soldiers---that it was incumbent upon the Axis to force a quick negotiated
peace in their favor, and when they did not, their inevitable defeat was
assured by the "prosaic arithmetic of natural resources, generating capacity,
industrial plant and productivity." His second theme is that in applying this
overwhelming force, "American, Russian and British commanders made considerably
less than optimum use of the resources at their disposal and in almost every
theatre serious mistakes were made." The result was that Allied "commanders
seemed unable to impose their will upon the enemy except by slowly and
persistently battering him to death with a blunt instrument." These are the
lines of argument of which Mansoor is so directly critical, a criticism shared
by Bonn, Brown and Doubler, though in the case of the latter three, the
criticism is not particularized to Ellis.(88)
It should be observed, as Mansoor does not, that Ellis does not take the view
that the Allied victory over the Axis was simply a numbers game. Ellis makes
this clear in the preface to his work.
|
This book, then, is highly critical of Allied operations throughout the war,
but I would like to make it quite clear that there is absolutely no intention
of casting a slur upon the bravery (or competence) of millions of ordinary men
and women, in uniform and out, who gave mightily that Western democracy might
survive. If it is easy for me, comfortable at my desk, to pontificate about
eventual victory being certain, about such and such an Army moving
unconscionably slowly, this Fleet being in the wrong place at the wrong time,
that aircrew dying in vain, I do not mean to minimize the suffering or in any
way demean the memory of those who perished amidst the nightmare of Huertgen
Forest, Cassino, Stalingrad, Okinawa or Imphal, who burnt to death in the skies
above Germany, or choked in oil in the freezing Atlantic.
|
|
When this commentary is taken into account, along with the fact that Ellis has
devoted an entire work to the sacrifices of the ordinary soldier in wartime, it
must be plain that Mansoor's complaint is ill founded.(89)
It is not too much to say, indeed, that Mansoor's criticism of Ellis is
entirely off the mark. The principal assertion, that Ellis favors the prowess
of the Wehrmacht over that of its enemies, is in fact totally without
foundation. To the extent that Ellis credits the abilities of Germany's
soldiers and their leaders, he does so by raising the question, quite properly
asked it would seem, of how it was that such a force, miserably led as it was
by the Nazi regime and its toadies, chronically under and poorly equipped, and
pressed on all sides by lavishly supplied soldiers in overwhelming numbers, was
able to "stay in the game" for as long as it did. Ellis' answer is not, as
Mansoor would suggest, that the Wehrmacht was a superior fighting
machine, but that the Allies failed to use their preponderance of resources to
the best effect. That this occurred was not the result of cowardice or
incompetence on the part of the men in the field, but of a want of determined
and aggressive leadership at the highest levels in the Allied camp.
Moreover, there is no lack of criticism of the Wehrmacht in Ellis'
work. The very first section of Brute Force is devoted to a
consideration to that greatest of German follies in the Second World War, Operation
Barbarossa and its aftermath. In a passage reminiscent of more recent
scholarship on failure of German leadership to manage the war, Ellis observes
that the speed and totality of the Allied collapse in the West in 1940 led
Hitler and his high command to the wrongheaded conclusion that war was a
psychological contest in which the side with superior tactics and an
"inflexible will to win" would prove victorious. The Germans ignored the
Wehrmacht's shortcomings, namely its reliance upon aircraft with limited
payloads, undergunned and underarmored tanks, and infantry formations that
moved at the same pace as Caesar and Napoleon. More importantly, and again in a
vein consistent with the views expressed by more recent scholars, Hitler and
his generals willfully ignored the logistics of modern warfare. Typical of this
lack of foresight was the Marcks plan for the invasion of Russia, in which the
plan's author, then Generalleutnant Erich Marcks, opined that the Red
Army "will soon succumb to the superiority of the German troops and
leadership." Likewise, the OKH Deployment Directive of 31 January 1941 blithely
asserted that the Russian armies would be separated and destroyed by the
Wehrmacht. As Ellis observes, these assumptions were made less upon the basis
of detailed analysis, of which there was little or none, than upon simple
wishful thinking.(90)
Ellis points out, furthermore, that the ultimate failure of the Ostheer
was the result not merely of an almost criminal level of overoptimism on the
part of the German high command, but also of the inherent incapacity of the
German war economy to match the industrial capacity of even this single
opponent, a factor compounded by totally irrational policy decisions made by
the German leadership. The conviction that the war in the East would be quickly
won at relatively little cost meant that the Germans failed to appreciate the
strain that the new campaign would place on the personnel replacement system.
The result of this miscalculation was immediate. In the first two months of the
eastern campaign the German army sustained approximately 440,000 battle
casualties; in the same period, German replacements totaled only 217,000. Over
time this disparity only grew worse, and the German army never recovered from
it. Of equal importance were two decisions made by Hitler, one in September
1940, and the second in late July 1941, when the eastern campaign was little
more than a month old. In the first, Hitler ordered a reduction in aircraft
production, so that by February of 1941 it had been cut by 40%. The second
involved cutbacks in the production of fundamental weapons systems---infantry
weapons of all kinds as well as field and anti-aircraft guns---so that the
production of field artillery, to give one example, was reduced by nearly 70%.
Added to all of this was the logistical problem already mentioned. The Germans
unaccountably failed to appreciate the rate of expenditure of ammunition and
fuel that would be required by the eastern campaign. Equally disastrous was
their failure to understand the kind of strain that the new war would place
upon motor and rail transport. This lack of understanding was equally criminal,
given the fact that it was well known to the military leadership that the
Russian rail system operated on a different gauge, a fact that would require
either the complete rebuilding of the rail net as the German forces advanced,
or reliance upon a time consuming system of offloading and reloading of
supplies and equipment at the point where the two systems intersected.(91)
If Ellis were in fact the apologist for the German army that Mansoor says he
is, it is reasonable to assume that he would not have concluded that for all of
the above described reasons, as well as the fighting qualities of the Russians
and their ability to learn from their foes, "the Wehrmacht was simply
not powerful enough to conquer Russia." Anyone with a modicum of familiarity
with the field knows that this is decidedly not the view of the Wehrmacht's
champions, who raise a variety of excuses---the Balkan campaign and the rainy
spring of 1941, the meddling of Hitler, the perfidy of the Italians, Romanians
and Hungarians---to explain the victory of the Red Army. Indeed, Ellis is at
some pains to refute these contentions out of the mouths of German officers who
were there. He relies, for example, upon the words of SS Gruppenfuhrer
Max Simon, who admitted that the German failure before Moscow was due not to
the vastness of the terrain, but to the resistance of the Red Army; upon Generalfeldmarshall
Fedor von Bock's chief of staff, then Generalmajor Hans von
Greiffenberg, who denied that the German defeat at the Russian capitol was due
to weather conditions, assigning the blame upon the German command's
misjudgment of the relative combat strength and efficiency of their own and the
Russian troops; and upon Generalfeldmarshall von Bock himself, who gave it as
his opinion that the German failure resulted from their underestimation of the
strength and resilience of the Russian enemy.(92)
As previously noted, Mansoor takes the position that Ellis denigrates the
fighting qualities and competence of the "victors of World War II" in favor of
those of the Wehrmacht. Yet, in the second chapter of his work, Ellis details
the tremendous contribution to Germany's defeat made by the Soviet Union.
Leaving aside the investment in productive capacity and human blood made by the
Russians, the author points out that from the beginning of the Russo-German war
until November, 1942, when the western Allies invaded North Africa, the Red
Army consistently confronted 70 percent of German combat formations, and an
even higher percentage of German panzer and panzergrenadier units. Even after
the invasion of France, and until the end of 1944, the Russians still faced 70
percent of German armored and motorized formations. When only German combat
units are considered, these figures rise to even more embarrassing heights,
from a high in June, 1941of 98.5 percent to a low in May, 1944 of 87.1 percent.
And as is well known, over the course of the war the Red Army inflicted 90
percent of the casualties suffered by the Wehrmacht, namely 4,900,000 German
dead and wounded in the east, as against 580,000 suffered in North-West Europe,
Italy and Africa. It is worth noting that one searches in vain in the works of
Mansoor, Bonn, Brown and Doubler for such a bloody accounting.(93)
Ellis focuses on other German failures as well. In his prologue, for example,
Ellis discusses the critical shortcomings, both quantitative and qualitative,
of the Luftwaffe in 1940-41, and the consequent German defeat in the
Battle of Britain. Ellis demonstrates that far from being outnumbered, the
Royal Air Force benefited from an advantage of 15.5 per cent in total fighter
production in 1940, a figure that rose to 49.3 per cent in the following year.
When the relative production of single engined fighters during the same period
is considered, the British advantage was 130 per cent and 150 per cent
respectively. Total production of single engined fighters between June 1940 and
April 1941 was 5,249 for Britain, and 2,500 for Germany. The Germans were
faced, however, not merely with a disparity in production of aircraft, but also
with a qualitative deficit in the aircraft with which it fought the battle.
Practically the only aircraft the Germans possessed that was comparable to the
Spitfires and Hurricanes fielded by the RAF was the Messerschmidt Bf 109, and
even this plane was inadequate to the task of protecting German bombers because
its limited fuel capacity rendered it capable of "loitering" in British
airspace for only a relatively short period of time, with the result that the
German bombers they were detailed to escort were rendered virtually defenseless
against RAF fighters. This was an unenviable situation for the German bomber
force, since every single one of its aircraft---the Ju 87, Ju 88, He 111 and Do
217---was woefully inadequate to the task set for it, being equally deficient
in the critical characteristics of speed, bombload and defensive armament.(94)
Equally disastrous for Germany was its inability to conduct a successful naval
campaign against Britain. In this campaign the Germans were forced to rely, as
they had in the Great War, upon the submarine rather than a surface fleet. And
whereas then Kommodor (later Grossadmiral) Karl Doenitz, the
commander of the U-Bootwaffe, had opined in August 1939 that a force
of 300 submarines would be necessary to conduct a successful offensive against
British shipping, when the war began the following month, only 57 boats were on
hand for the task. In addition, no particular emphasis was placed upon the
manufacture of U-boats in the early stages of the war, so that for the first 16
months of the war the number of boats at sea averaged well below 20, month in
and month out. This chronic shortage of boats meant that their tactical
deployment in groups, the so-called Rudeltaktik (in Allied parlance, the "wolf
pack"), was seriously undermined. That the German submariners enjoyed
significant success during the period in question, sinking almost 3 million
tons of shipping in the Atlantic up to the Spring of 1941, was due, as Ellis
points out, more to the shortcomings in resources deployed by the British in
countering the German offensive. Ellis argues, indeed, that had the Germans
employed any foresight whatever in 1938 and 1939, and produced a U-boat fleet
anywhere near the size envisioned by its commander, the inability of Coastal
Command to provide anti-submarine aircraft, and the failure of the Royal Navy
to deploy adequate escort ships, might well have so wrecked the British
merchant marine in the first 18 months of the conflict that Britain would have
been unable to continue the struggle. In fact, however, Ellis demonstrates that
Britain was never in any danger of being strangled by the Kriegsmarine.
First, in 1942, the first year of American participation in the war, combined
US and UK merchant shipbuilding was only just exceeded by the tonnage sank by
the U-boats. Yet, although this was the period of greatest relative German
success, it was precisely during this period that the U-Bootwaffe suffered
its greatest weakness in numbers of boats available for sea duty. Having failed
to gain victory in this period, the German campaign at sea was now doomed to
failure. Second, and perhaps more significantly, Ellis demonstrates that the
British merchant fleet remained steady in size throughout the entire war,
including its period of most dire travail between 1940-42. The British merchant
marine, Ellis concludes, was never close to extinction. Comparative figures for
the Atlantic and Pacific wars are telling. Between 1942 and 1945, the Japanese
merchant fleet lost 8,616,000 tons of shipping, reducing it at the end of the
war to a mere 1.5 million tons afloat. During the same period, the Allies lost
a total of 12,590,000 tons of shipping; yet the size of their fleet rose from
32 million tons to 54 million tons. The inadequacy of the German naval campaign
could hardly be more well demonstrated.(95)
Nor is Ellis particularly "anti-American" in assigning blame for the failure of
the Allies to crush Nazism with more dispatch. The principal targets for his
criticism, in fact, are Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris and Field Marshal
Bernard Law Montgomery. His criticism of these individuals, moreover, is just
that---a finding of fault with Allied leadership, rather than praise for the
martial qualities of the Germans, as Mansoor suggests. Indeed, the contrary is
actually the case, since part of Ellis' criticism of Harris, for example, is
directed to that officer's failure to appreciate and exploit not only the
inherent weaknesses in the German economy, but also the disadvantages placed
upon the Luftwaffe through the lack of foresight and poor management
by its leaders, both military and political. It will be recalled that at the
Casablanca Conference in 1943, the Combined Chiefs of Staff directed the U.S.
Army Air Force and the Royal Air Force to undertake a combined bomber offensive
against the Third Reich. The principal targets for this offensive were
submarine construction yards, the aircraft industry, the transportation system,
and oil production facilities. Obtaining the compliance of Harris, in charge of
the RAF's Bomber Command, with these directives was less than successful. Ellis
points out that Harris was convinced of the ability of the bomber alone to
bring Germany to its knees, and that he never ceased to urge this point of view
on his colleagues. More important still, Harris was the champion of so-called
"area bombing", a tactic distinguished from the concept of "strategic bombing"
long favored by the U.S. Army Air Force by the former's assumption that the
most efficacious way of destroying a specific target was to saturate the entire
vicinity with bombs, thereby assuring that not only the strategic target but
all of its supporting infrastructure, notably the living quarters of its labor
force, would be annihilated. From the point of view of Harris and his
supporters, such a policy had several advantages over precision strategic
bombing; it could be employed at night and without the need for either tight
bomber formations or a sophisticated bombsight, all of which were consistent
with the approach adopted by Bomber Command early in the war. In addition,
night area bombing was not dependent upon the provision of fighter cover.
Finally, area bombing had the distinct attribute, greatly desired by Harris and
its other advocates, of generating widespread terror among the German civilian
population.(96)
Ellis argues that Harris alone was not at fault. Culpable too were his senior
officers in the RAF, principally his superior Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal,
who failed to bring him to heel. The result was that while the USAAF devoted
its attention to attacking nearly 65% of the targets designated by the Combined
Chiefs of Staff, RAF Bomber Command attacked only 31% of such targets. Among
the targets studiously ignored by Bomber Command were the enemy's oil
manufacturing facilities and transportation network, target sets whose vigorous
pursuit by both Allied air forces would likely have measurably shortened the
war. Meanwhile, although in spite of everything the Germans had managed to
greatly increase their production of fighters in the last two years of the war,
in the same period of time the Allied production of such weapons at least
quadrupled that of the Reich. In addition, not only was the US Eighth Air Force
steadily reducing the number of German fighter pilots by its relentless bombing
campaign in daylight, but the Germans were proving wholly incapable of
replacing their pilots, owing to their pitiful lack of foresight and
mismanagement of the pilot training system. It is the failure of Harris to
exploit these weaknesses in the German economy and defense capability that
Ellis finds so inexplicable, and for which he is particularly critical. There
is nothing in his analysis amounting to praise of the Luftwaffe .(97)
As to the Western Allies' war on the ground against the Reich, Ellis
reserves his strongest criticism for General (later Field Marshal) Bernard Law
Montgomery, Viscount Alamein. Ellis refers to Montgomery's tactical handling of
armor in North Africa, where the opportunity for a truly dynamic and successful
war of maneuver presented itself as a result of Rommel's weakness and the
possession by the British of Ultra wireless intercepts detailing the
German commander's condition and military intentions, as "execrable". In North
West Europe as well, Montgomery and his adherents failed to "finish off a
distinctly groggy opponent" at the Falaise Gap, Antwerp and the Seine, when
according to Ellis more "dash" might have rolled up the German line and forced
an early collapse. Ellis' conclusions about Montgomery are telling:
|
Even in North Africa Montgomery's plans for his corps de chasse and for his
armoured hooks and end-runs have a curiously half-hearted feel about them, and
one constantly has the impression that it was in the frontal infantry assault,
with lots of artillery and a generous lead time, that Montgomery felt most at
ease. Whilst I do not suggest that Montgomery was careless of the lives of his
men, the fact remains that his style of generalship was more appropriate to the
Western Front in 1914-18. This impression is not dispelled by Montgomery's
record in Europe, where Operations Charnwood, Goodwood and Totalise smack of
naked attrition, where the failures at the Breskens Pocket and Arnhem suggest a
complete inability to conduct mobile operations, and where the deliberation
with which the Rhine Crossings and the subsequent advance to Lubeck were
planned and conducted seem to indicate a quite debilitating lack of verve or
even self-confidence.
|
|
Nothing like this sort of criticism is made of any American commander by
Ellis.(98)
What is particularly disquieting about Mansoor's criticism of Ellis, and
likewise of the criticisms of his theses offered by Bonn, Brown and Doubler, is
that in the mountain of books that have been written about the Second World
War, the same arguments---that Allied commanders lacked aggressiveness, and
that the Allies prevailed because of their capacity to swamp the Axis forces
with their productive resources---have been made by many historians whose works
have found widespread favor. It would be possible to identify many of them
here, but only two will suffice. In 1983, Carlo D'Este published his Decision
in Normandy, a study of Montgomery's so-called "master plan" for the Normandy
campaign and its implementation. It would be fair to say that D'Este is both
objective and critical of Montgomery; his work focuses on the unraveling of the
"master plan", and on the Allied ground commander's subsequent efforts to
explain away its fundamental failure. In D'Este's analysis the key element in
that failure was Montgomery's inflexibility in the face of sustained and
vigorous German resistance, the effects of which were compounded by such
factors as the ineffectual efforts of some British troops and commanders and
serious shortages in British manpower. Critical though he was of one of the
"victors of World War II", D'Este is not among those routinely vilified for
denigrating Allied military prowess in relation to that of their German
adversaries. Likewise, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
, first published in 1987, was not only a best selling book, but one widely
acclaimed by academic historians as well, among them the renowned English
military historian Sir Michael Howard. As the title of this work suggests, it
is broad in scope, covering the expansion and decline of imperialist powers
from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. Because of the breadth and
depth of the subject, and because of the truly fleeting histories of the
Japanese and German empires of the mid-twentieth centuries, Kennedy devotes
only a small portion of his book to that particular subject. It is nonetheless
significant that Kennedy entitled that portion "The Proper Application of
Overwhelming Force", a phrase taken from Winston Churchill's recollection of
his reaction to the news of America's entry into the Second World War following
the attack on Pearl Harbor. Kennedy quotes Churchill as saying that "Hitler's
fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would
be ground to powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of
overwhelming force." While Kennedy concedes that there was obviously much hard
fighting in the offing before the Axis succumbed,
|
Churchill's basic assumption was correct. The conversion of the conflict from a
European war to a truly global war…totally altered the overall balance of
forces once the newer belligerents were properly mobilized. In the meantime,
the German and Japanese war machines could still continue their conquests; yet
the further they extended themselves the less capable they were of meeting the
counteroffensives which the Allies were steadily preparing.
|
|
Kennedy asks whether the success of the Allies, in the final analysis, was
merely the result of their capacity to overwhelm the Axis with material
resources. Like Ellis, he concludes that much more was at work than a mere
numbers game.
|
[T]here were far too many examples of where the German and Japanese leadership
made grievous political or strategical errors after 1941 which were to cost
them dear. In the German case, this ranged from relatively small-scale
decisions, like pouring reinforcements into North Africa in early 1943, just in
time for them to be captured, to the appallingly stupid as well as criminal
treatment of the Ukrainian and other non-Russian minorities in the USSR, who
were happy to escape from the Stalinist embrace until checked by Nazi
atrocities. It ran from the arrogance of assuming that the Enigma codes could
never be broken to the ideological prejudice against employing German women in
munitions factories, whereas all Germany's foes willingly exploited that
largely untapped labor pool. It was compounded by rivalries within the higher
echelons of the army itself, which made it ineffective in resisting Hitler's
manic urge for overambitious offensives like Stalingrad and Kursk. Above all,
there was what scholars refer to as the ‘polycratic chaos' of rivaling
ministries and subempires (the army, the SS, the Gauleiter, the economics
ministry), which prevented any coherent assessment and allocation of resources,
let alone the hammering-out of what elsewhere would be termed a ‘grand
strategy'. This was not a serious way to run a war.
|
|
Yet, Kennedy's conclusion is identical to that reached by Ellis:
|
No matter how cleverly the Wehrmacht mounted its tactical
counterattacks on both the western and eastern fronts until almost the last
months of the war, it was to be ultimately overwhelmed by the sheer mass of
Allied firepower. By 1945, the thousands of Anglo-American bombers pounding the
Reich each day and the hundreds of Red Army divisions poised to blast through
to Berlin and Vienna were all different manifestations of the same blunt fact.
Once again, in a protracted and full-scale coalition war, the countries with
the deepest purse had prevailed in the end.(99)
|
|
It is perhaps not too much to say that the principal theme binding together the
works of Bonn, Mansoor, Doubler and Brown is the argument, forcefully made in
each case, that the victory of the Allies over the Axis was not dependent upon
the overwhelming industrial capacity of Germany's enemies. Such an argument, in
turn, provokes at least two important questions. First, how can such a
contention be advanced by professionally trained historians, in the face of the
unchallenged (and indeed unassailable) evidence to the contrary documented by
Ellis, Kennedy and others. Second, and perhaps more importantly, why do Mansoor
and the others perceive such evidence to constitute a negative reflection upon
the courage and fighting qualities of Allied (particularly American) soldiers.
In the first place, the Allied powers certainly had nothing to be ashamed of
from the fact that they were capable of swamping the Axis nations with their
industrial might. Indeed, in any other context the advocates of the American
point of view would willingly acknowledge their justifiable pride in their
country's industrial might. Moreover, it is readily apparent that the relative
productive capacity of the combatants is an entirely different question from
the bravery and fighting qualities of the soldiers who benefited from that
industrial capacity. To put it another way, there is no inverse relationship
between the level of courage and skill of American soldiers and the industrial
capacity of their homeland, in spite of the efforts of Mansoor and his
colleagues to demonstrate the existence of such a relationship.
Footnotes
(88) Ellis, pp. xvii-xviii.
(89) Ibid., p. xix.
(90) Ibid., pp. 37-42. The more recent scholarship is found in Millett, Alan
and Murray, Williamson, There's A War to be Won, (Oxford University
Press, 2001) and Megargee, Geoff, Inside Hitler's High Command (University
of Kansas Press, 2000).
(91) llis, pp. 45-49.
(92) Ibid., pp. 76-77.
(93) Ibid., pp. 128-130. Ellis' principal source for the figures in the text is
B. Mueller-Hillebrand, Das Heer 1933-1945 (E.S. Mittler und Sohn,
Darmstadt/Frankfurt, 1954-1959), vol. 3, pp. 284-315.
(94) Ellis, pp. 21-26. Ellis' figures are based on C. Bekker, The Luftwaffe
War Diaries, (Macdonald, 1966), p. 164 and C. Webster & N.
Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany (History of the
Second World War: United Kingdom Military Series), (4 vols, HMSO, 1961), vol.
4, p. 494.
(95) Ellis, pp. 133-161. It is noteworthy that Ellis does not rely, as
perhaps he could not do, upon the findings of more recent scholarship on the
subjects of (1) the deficiencies in German torpedoes during the first two years
of the war, and (2) the effect of Ultra upon the ability of the Allies
to defend against the U-Bootwaffe.
(96) Ellis, pp. 184-192.
(97) Ibid., pp. 193-221.
(98) Ibid., 533-535.
(99) D'Este, Carlo, Decision in Normandy (Harper Perennial, 1991), passim;
Kennedy, Paul, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Vintage Books, 1989), pp.
347-357.
Copyright © 2004 by Thomas E. Nutter.
Please send comments to Thomas E. Nutter at: tenutter@gmail.com.
|
|
|
|
