The historical and global perspective that was absent for so many years is at last being attained. Now, our vision of World War II is changing. We learned a great deal less - indeed, nothing at all - about how the German soldier maintained an effective defense in Europe for 11 months under constant and unchallenged air attack, bombarded daily by devastating artillery concentrations, facing heavy odds, sustained by a fraction of the supplies and firepower available to the Allied soldier. They dwell upon fears, difficulties and triumphs of Allied soldiers as seen from Allied foxholes.
Moreover, the overwhelming majority of battlefield memoirs published in Britain and America concern, not surprisingly, Allied battlefield experience. For many years after 1945, this seemed painful to concede publicly, partly for nationalistic reasons, partly also because the Nazi legions were fighting for one of the most obnoxious regimes of all time.Ī spirit of military narcissism, nourished by such films as "The Longest Day," "A Bridge Too Far" and "The Battle of the Bulge," has perpetuated mythical images of the Allied and German armies. The inescapable truth is that Hitler's Wehrmacht was the outstanding fighting force of World War II, one of the greatest in history. This was true when they were attacking and when they were defending, when they had a local numerical superiority and when, as was usually the case, they were outnumbered, when they had air superiority and when they did not, when they won and when they lost." "On a man for man basis, German ground soldiers consistently inflicted casualties at about a 50 percent higher rate than they incurred from the opposing British and American troops under all circumstances (emphasis in original). But none has yet faulted Dupuy's conclusion that on almost every battlefield of the war the German showed best: Trevor Dupuy and Martin Van Creveld, who have subjected the respective performance of the American and German armies on the battlefield to detailed statistical study. Critics have questioned some of the theories of the controversial American military analysts Col. Liddell Hart is not alone in challenging the conventional wisdom about the war. Basil Liddell Hart wrote a paper in which he reflected upon the vast Allied superiority of forces in northwest Europe in 1944, and the reluctance of postwar military critics in Britain and America to draw appropriate conclusions about Allied performance: There has been too much self-congratulation and too little objective investigation, he said. In 1950, the great British military writer Capt. This reaction makes it more remarkable that for a generation after the moment of victory in 1945, so many myths were perpetuated not only by popular historians, but within the military institutions of the West. Most men of the Allied armies were openly contemptuous of the fantasies about themselves peddled by correspondents, with such notable exceptions as Bill Mauldin and Ernie Pyle. but all I want to do is beat these Nazi sons-of- bitches so we can get at those little Jap bastards."
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and stretch my legs under a table full of Mother's cooking. The image of the European war conveyed to the American and British public at home was of dogged, determined Allied soldiers struggling against odds towards final victory: "Forget about the glorified picture of fighting you have seen in the movies," declared a characteristic war correspondent's dispatch to The New York Times, "The picture you want to get into your mind is that of plugging, filthy, hungry, utterly weary young men straggling half- dazed and punch-drunk, and still somehow getting up and beating the Germans." An American pilot was reported telling Bob Hope: "It would be nice. Hitler's robots could never match the imagination and initiative of Allied soldiers on the battlefield. One dogface or one tommy was worth three wooden-headed krauts. In the Second World War, it was considered essential for the struggle to defeat the German army that the peoples of the Grand Alliance should be convinced of the qualitative superiority of their fighting men to those of the enemy.
PROPAGANDA IS AN inescapable ingredient of modern conflict.
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