Victories of WWII rested on more than blitzkrieg

THE BLITZKRIEG MYTH: HOW HITLER AND THE ALLIES MISREAD THE STRATEGIC REALITIES OF WORLD WAR II

By John Mosier

Harper Collins, $27.50, 338 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY MARTIN SIEFF

In “The Myth of the Great War” John Mosier recently produced one of the best books on the combat tactics of World War I ever published in the English language. Here he aspires to set conventional wisdom on its head for World War II the same way — but fails to do so.

“The Blitzkrieg Myth” is a curious book, full of first-class insights and riveting nuggets of research but ultimately far less than the sum of its parts. Yet just in the questions he raises, and the conventional wisdom and sacred cows he challenges, Mr. Mosier makes it well worth the ride.

Mr. Mosier tries to argue that the idea of blitzkrieg — of masses of armor backed by air power punching through the enemy lines and bringing the enemy to defeat — was a chimera through all of World War II and that all the great victories of either side in the West were due to other causes.

The author has a fine time rightly poking holes in the “pure armor” theories of British Maj. Gen. J.F.C. Fuller and Italian air theorist Giulio Douhet, and he is indeed correct to point out how the obsession with their theories extracted a high price — strategic as well as tactical — from the generals on both sides who swallowed them wholesale.

Indeed, Mr. Mosier makes many excellent points almost unknown in popular historical writing and all too seldom noted even in scholarly and technical studies. The French army did fight gallantly and well against the Wehrmacht in the battles of 1940, suffering well over 100,000 fatalities in only two and a half months. It was true that French tank designs in general were far superior to German ones and that the French had many more tanks as well.

It was also true that the Germans far outstripped the Allies in their use of air power as close-in ground support and flying artillery. And in the Western Desert battles, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s abilities and achievements were vastly exaggerated by both his British foes and his own fuehrer.

Furthermore, the very real and crucial battlefield command achievements of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery have been scandalously ignored and falsely criticized by his own British historians. (Largely out of rancor: “Monty” was a remarkably insufferable and unlikable fellow who drove his fellow officers to distraction. Only his soldiers loved him. He saved their lives.)

Mr. Mosier also scores on the disastrous consequences of Winston Churchill’s insistence on driving up the Italian peninsula. Montgomery and U.S. Gen. George C. Marshall were both rightly against this plan. In the event 400,000 German soldiers held up 1,100,000 Allied troops for nearly two years on their own terms and inflicted hundreds of thousands of casualties on them.

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