I’m currently reading Rick Atkinson.
The Army at Dawn is about the North African Campaign. Good book, Patton didn’t shine there as much as I thought.
I found the Day of Battle about the Italian Campaign to be the most tedious, reflecting the hard drudgery of that theater. An Allied offensive handicapped by the diversion of resources to the upcoming invasion of Normandy.
Currently I’m on The Guns at Last Light, Monty has just bullheaded through the disaster of Market Garden and equally bullheaded American Generals are feeding GI’s into the meat grinder of the Hurtgen Forest and the Siegfried Line.
After sweeping across most of France in four weeks the Allies have been stalled for six weeks.
One thing Atkinson does really well is describe the role of logistics, and also the human cost of war. For example I had no idea that the Germans lobbed literally hundreds of V1’s and V2’s onto the port city of Antwerp after the capture of that city by the Allies.
Before reading Supreme Commander I never fully knew of what the British were doing in the Low Countries, mostly due to concentrating on books that told the story of American troops. Obviously I knew they were there and even casual students of WWII know of Market Garden but now I understand it was part of Monty's "single big thrust" strategy into the Ruhr and toward Berlin. Ike wanted to bring all of his troops up to the Rhine all along its length, cross it and then sweep through Germany from there with the flexibility to take advantage of any point where the Germans cracked. Plus by then Ike and everyone else believed Monty would never do anything quickly and that had lost them the opportunity to capture and kill a lot of Germans more than once. Once the Allies got across the Rhine and Bradley started advancing rapidly that turned into the "single big thrust", somewhat to Monty's dismay. Plus, Monty and the British wanted desperately to take Berlin while Ike wanted them to secure the Danish peninsula to keep the Soviets from taking it.
Churchill was thinking of British security after the war and worried greatly about how far Soviet troops would advance and those political ends colored his recommendations and requests to Ike, Ike just wanted to win the war militarily by the quickest way possible. The back and forth between Ike, Churchill, Roosevelt, Monty and the American Army group generals was very interesting. Nobody said they wanted to take Berlin for the sheer glory of it but that was definitely part of the reason since by the last months of the war it was not a strategically important target, just a public relations prize.
Anyway, very interesting stuff. This is what I was looking for when I started this thread - not so much the personal accounts from the foxhole view which I've already read, but a comprehensive study of just what it took to win the war from a top level view.
