How the West was Won

October 2008

If Roberts does have a hero it is Marshall. It was Marshall who insisted, over the opposition of the US Navy and much of American public opinion, that the war against Germany should be given priority over that in the Pacific, and that it could be won only in north-west Europe. While accepting reluctantly that concentration on that battlefield could be neither so immediate nor so total as he would have wished, he successfully resisted the increasing British pressure to convert operations initially acceptable as necessary diversions into rivals for priority. Marshall did well to accept Brooke's view in 1942 that a cross-channel attack was for the time being out of the question; but he did equally well to overrule him a year or so later, when the demands of Mediterranean operations were making Brooke as well as Churchill weaken on their original commitment.

But Marshall could not have succeeded without the backing of Roosevelt; a man who knew nothing of strategy but a great deal about politics. Roosevelt backed him over the "Europe First" strategy but insisted that, if a cross-channel operation was impossible in 1942, domestic pressure made it necessary to attack somewhere else; which left only the attack on French north Africa being urged by the British. It was then Roosevelt who backed him in restraining his allies from any further operations that would weaken the original concept, notably any exploitation of the Italian campaign after the fall of Rome. It may have been Churchill who proposed, but it was ultimately Roosevelt who disposed the strategy of the Allies.

Roberts is thorough and meticulous in his chronicle of this four-year dialogue: perhaps rather too thorough. His attempts to lighten his narrative with descriptions of the various conference venues and the personalities involved, together with his own perceptive comments and witty asides, cannot quite prevent these 600 pages from being rather heavy going.

But he is admirable for his honesty, rare in British historians, over two vital matters. The first is that in the Wehrmacht the Allies were facing an army very much better than their own - better equipped, better commanded, better trained, more highly motivated - and it continued to be so until the very last days of the war. Secondly, his Masters and Commanders may have "won the war in the West", as he puts it, but they did not win the war as such. Four out of every five of the Germans killed in combat died on the Eastern Front.

By diverting German military strength, and devastating German industry and cities with their bombing, the Western allies certainly made, as he puts it, "a vital contribution". But it was a contribution to a war being fought, and ultimately won, on the Eastern Front. It is time, after more than half a century, that we got this into proportion.

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Fred Smoler

October 14th, 2008
10:10 PM

In a generally admiring review of Andrew Roberts' Masters and Commanders, Michael Howard concludes by praising Roberts "for his honesty, rare in British historians, over two vital matters. The first is that in the Wehrmacht the Allies were facing an army very much better than their own - better equipped, better commanded, better trained, more highly motivated - and it continued to be so until the very last days of the war. Secondly, his Masters and Commanders may have "won the war in the West", as he puts it, but they did not win the war as such. Four out of every five of the Germans killed in combat died on the Eastern Front." The last statement is certainly true, but the first seems overstated and oversimplified. The Wehrmacht had worse strategists and logisticians--which cost failings contributed very significantly to its loss of the war--and by many standards it was not better equipped: only a small fraction of the Wehrmacht was motorized or mechanized--too small a fraction, in the event, to seal the pockets its mechanized elements made in the summer of 1941, and much of the Wehrmacht effectively demodernized over the course of the war. If Mr. Howard means that German weapons were better, even this is debatable, and by no means true across the board. German tanks were sometimes worse than Allied tanks--again, in the crucial first campaigns in the Soviet Union--and German artillery was less effective than either British or American artillery, because of superior Allied doctrine. The superiority of some German equipment--the panzerfaust versus the American bazooka, or the superiority of some other German anti-tank weapons--looks less impressive when one considers that the Americans and British generally killed German tanks with fighter-bombers like the Typhoon and the P47, and when doing so, killed tanks in industrial quantities. Was the German Army more highly motivated than its adversaries? Most observers think that its treatment of prisoners taken on the Eastern Front over the first year of the war produced an extremely highly motivated Red Army, one sufficiently highly motivated to end the war in Berlin. American soldiers preferred to let their artillery or airpower deal with their adversaries when that was possible, which is sometimes and rather oddly taken as a sign of their inferior motivation, but Germans often behaved similarly when they had the technical means to do so (For example, Warsaw in 1939). Some assertions about German superiority rest on what now seem dated attempts to quantify performance (DuPuy, van Creveld). These attempts are at least disputable--for example, in one allegedly typical group of German divisions, the percentage of armored units is overweighted--and in some recent studies (for example, of the fighting in the Vosges, in 1944), American divisions look a lot better than they had in the earlier statistical comparisons. Modern studies (inter alia, Bonn, Brown, Mansoor and Doubler) have vigorously disputed the older assertions about the superiority of the German Army across the whole of the war, suggesting that the Allies got better, and other studies suggest that the Germans simultaneously deteriorated. Many armies learn from experience, but in many respects the WWII Allies learned more than did their adversaries.

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