International: Defeat Through Victory

THE STRUGGLE FOR EUROPE (766 pp.)—Chester Wilmot—Harper ($5).

No one can be more irritating than a Monday-morning quarterback—particularly when he may be right. Australian-born Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe will probably set more U.S. teeth on edge than any book yet written about World War II. As a political and military history, Dunkirk to V-E day, it could easily be labeled anti-American. Yet it deserves a fair hearing and not just as a matter of courtesy. Wilmot, a BBC war correspondent who went in with the British airborne troops on Dday, has written a better and more readable account of the fighting in Europe than any of the generals or their ghosts, British or U.S.

Author Wilmot is a historian with not one unpalatable thesis, but two:

1) U.S. generalship, particularly that of Eisenhower and Bradley, was generally unimaginative and costly, and prolonged the war by insisting on a broad front in Europe. Montgomery could have won the war with one massive strike for the Ruhr after the Normandy breakout.

2) Franklin Roosevelt and General Marshall fought the war without regard for postwar realities, left the way open for Russia in central Europe and the Balkans, naively trusted Stalin at Yalta and helped throw away the peace with just about every major decision they took.

German Documents. Neither thesis is new, but Author Wilmot has fortified his arguments with something more than hindsight opinion. He seems to have made more thorough use of captured German documents than any other writer on the war; and the list of officers, Allied and enemy, with whom he has talked, reads like a Who’s Who of the war in Western Europe.

Because Wilmot knows that Germany’s General Model was guarding the Ruhr in September 1944 with scraps of beaten units and only enough tanks (239) for one armored division (the Allies could have mustered twelve divisions), he is confident that Monty would have broken through had Ike turned him loose. The German generals are on Wilmot’s side of the argument. Says Major General Blumentritt, Model’s chief of staff: “Such a breakthrough . . . would have torn the weak German front to pieces and ended the war in the winter of 1944.”

Stalin’s Architects. What Bradley and Patton did in Normandy and after, says Wilmot, was made possible by Montgomery’s canny generalship around Caen that enabled the Americans to break out. Only occasionally is Monty chided for caution; in the end his virtues completely swamp his faults. Bradley gets sterner treatment. Heavy U.S. casualties during the Normandy landings, says Wilmot, were largely the result of Bradley’s refusal to use British-invented armored weapons and machines that helped cut British losses to a minimum. Bradley declined to use the British “Crabs” (flailing tanks that could smash a path through minefields), “Crocodiles” (flamethrowing tanks) and “AVREs” (armored vehicles used in demolishing fortifications). Says Wilmot: “It took 3,000 casualties on Omaha [Beach] to persuade the Americans that gallantry is not enough.”

Wilmot pays handsome tributes to Eisenhower’s genius as an Allied coordinator, but in his opinion, Ike frittered away his strength, failed to control Bradley and Patton when they were wrong, and above all lost the chance to win the war in 1944.

Writing of Yalta with the perspective of the past half-dozen years, Wilmot tries hard to be fair to Roosevelt, but is distressed by F.D.R.’s naive belief that “Uncle Joe” would keep his promises. Shrewdly, he points out that the meeting took place after Hitler had shaken up the Allies in the Ardennes and when the Russian armies had the Germans on the run in the East. Through Yalta, Unconditional Surrender, and the green light to Stalin in Central Europe, thinks Wilmot, the West gave Stalin what it had denied to Hitler. The Struggle for Europe will convince a lot of readers that Hitler’s blunders contributed as much as Allied generalship did to the winning of the war; it is almost equally persuasive in its argument that the Allied leaders were the unwitting architects of Stalin’s postwar world.