I've been spending the past few columns discussing "the narrative" of World War II, our accepted version of the conflict, and how important it is to challenge it when we think it needs changing.

I've obviously touched a nerve. There have been some very stimulating posts on the "comments" section, in my email, and on my Facebook account. Unsurprisingly, not everyone is happy with me, and many of the comments have been pretty feisty. It's something that goes with the territory, I've learned. It has to be jarring when some wiseacre comes along and challenges what you know to be right. Most Americans still know and feel in their hearts that World War II was a good war, fought for the right reasons, and conducted about as humanely as we possibly could.

Look, I get that, and I'll tell you why: I was raised in "the narrative." I learned it as a kid. Hell, I MEMORIZED it as a kid. I've been eating, drinking, and sleeping the narrative as far back as I can remember. I am old enough to remember 78 rpm records—yeah, that I'm that old—and my folks had a copy of Edward R. Murrow's I Can Hear it Now series dealing with the war. With one of the century's greatest journalists as my guide, I could literally hear that war coming. Murrow laid it out: while the democracies slept, the dictatorships spent the 1930's arming and preparing. It sure seemed that way. I listened to Mussolini boasting about his new Roman Empire in front of screaming crowds. I heard the Japanese soldiers roaring out their "Banzai" war cries in China. Above all—and it made an indelible impression on me—I listened to Hitler snarling his bloodthirsty threats against Czechoslovakia in 1938 at the time of the great crisis that culminated in the Munich Conference.

I even remember asking my dad that question that ALL sons ask at some point as they grow to manhood: "Dad, what's the Sudetenland?"

OK, so I was a weird kid. But even today, I think of that little boy sitting in his living room in Cleveland, Ohio,, listening to a pile of ancient 78s, and I remember feeling certain that what Murrow was telling me wasn't one mere "narrative" among many. It wasn't one account that he was "privileging" above others, or some post-modern "construct." To me, it was something real. It was the truth.

So sure, as a professional historian, I challenge the narrative wherever possible and when I think the facts warrant it. But where I get off the train is when it starts down the "we were all at fault" track and assigns equal moral demerits to the democracies and the dictatorships. It ain't all up for grabs. World War II may or may not have been a "crusade," but I still think the Allies had little choice but to fight and win it, and I'm glad they did. Even today, "I can hear it now."

Next week, we'll let Frank Capra tell us "Why We Fight."

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Last week I urged you all to challenge the "accepted narrative" of World War II, to come up with things you used to believe about the war that no longer hold water.

I received some great answers! Some of you used to think the western Allies won the war all by themselves and tended to downplay the massive contributions of the Soviet Union. Others used to believe that strategic bombing was a fairly low-cost and easy way of bringing Germany to its knees. Still others now question the notion that the veterans who returned after 1945 slid back into their civilian lives smoothly and easily and had little trouble readjusting. And some of you used to think that most Frenchmen fought in the Resistance.

Oh, well.

Today, informed students of the war would question each and every one of these once-accepted "truths." The point is not to laugh at how naïve we once were, or to enjoy a cheap laugh at the expense of the French, but merely to point out that the "narrative" about a given event has a way of hardening early on, and can be very difficult to break.

It is easy to see how it happens. With regards to the "Missing Soviet" narrative, for example, the 1950s saw the Cold War and U.S. anti-communism in full flower, and few people were in much of a mood to credit Stalin with helping to defeat Hitler, or to recall the in-convenient truth that just a few short years ago Washington and Moscow had been on the same side.

Since you were all so forthcoming with your confessions, let me give one of my own, another part of the traditional narrative that I once swallowed whole, but no longer believe. It is the notion of World War II as "the great crusade." General Eisenhower enshrined the idea in the title to his memoirs (Crusade in Europe), and by and large it's still the way we perceive the war.

Calling it a "crusade" sets a high bar. A crusade is, after all, a consecrated undertaking. The warrior embarks on the adventure not for power or personal aggrandizement, but rather because it is God's will. He willingly risks life and limb for a higher cause; indeed, he follows Christ on the "way of the cross," the literal meaning of the term.

Certainly, no sane person will deny that beating Hitler was the classic definition of A Good Thing. But if U.S. participation in the war was a "crusade" against evil, we certainly took our time getting involved. World War II lasted for seven campaigning seasons from 1939 to 1945, inclusive, and American forces missed the first three. Indeed, Germany's best chance at victory had probably come and gone before U.S. troops even joined the fighting. When we finally got into World War II, it wasn't by choice, which would seem to be one prerequisite for a "crusade," but because we got bombed (by the Japanese) and had war declared upon us (by the Germans). And once we did get involved, military necessity impelled us to do a lot of very unpleasant things: indiscriminate use of firepower, massive aerial bombing of densely populated urban areas, and—in the most truly horrific expression of war's destructive power—even a couple of atomic bombs.

I'm not trying to second-guess strategic decisions that were made under pressure a long time ago or to try our forebears by our supposedly more "enlightened" modern standards. I know why we dropped the atom bomb; I explain it to my students all the time. It's just that the longer I study World War II the more I realize how horrible it was, and I'm uncomfortable dignifying anything that horrible as a "crusade."

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A crazy question: what do we really KNOW about World War II?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the annual conference of the Society for Military History (SMH). The site this year was Lisle, Illinois, and the host was the First Division Museum at Cantigny, located in the nearby town of Wheaton. What a great facility, and what great people running it—it's as professional and determined as the "Big Red 1" itself! Be sure to visit them when you're in the vicinity, or click here to visit their website. And while you're at it, be sure to join the SMH. You don't have to be a professor. You just need to have an interest in military history, and I know you all have a lot of THAT.

Besides nitty-gritty, tooth-and-nail arguments about every battle from Pharsalus to Fallujah, one of the things that happens at the annual conference is the Awards Luncheon, where the society honors the best books and articles that have appeared in the past year. It's always a feel-good moment (and in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I know this better than anyone, having won the SMH Distinguished Book Award in 2005 for my book Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm).

This year, one of the award winners was Marc Milner, a professor at the University of New Brunswick in My Absolutely Favorite Country to the North, Canada. His article "Stopping the Panzers: Reassessing the Role of 3rd Canadian Infantry Division in Normandy, 7–10 June 1944," appeared in the Journal of Military History in April 2010 and has generated a lot of buzz for all the right reasons. It's a fundamentally new view of a well known battle (at least among the World War II cognoscenti), jam-packed with deep research in the archives and written by a hard-headed author who isn't inclined to believe everything he grew up reading.

To summarize briefly, the accepted view for years—no, make that decades—had an SS-Standartenführer (Colonel) by the name of Kurt "Panzer" Meyer launching a counterattack against the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division, advancing towards Carpiquet airfield on D+1, June 7th, 1944. According to a story I'd read a thousand times, Meyer waited coolly as the North Nova Scotia Highlander battalion, the "North Novas," unwittingly offered him their flank, then smashed into them and drove them back in some confusion. It was a classic tale of a hard-bitten, experienced force sending a novice to school.

Milner's article exploded all that by carefully looking at the planning documents and after-action reports—the only two things that count, for the most part. He found a very different tale: a Canadian force that, even as it advanced, was quite prepared for an eventual German counter stroke and, through solid use of combined arms (armor, infantry and especially artillery), managed to land a big hurt on Meyer's overly reckless attack.

Listening to Milner give his "thank you address" was a revelatory moment for me. I am paraphrasing here, but he said something along the following lines: we think that the "story" of World War II is already set in stone, but in fact, much of the "history" was written in the immediate wake of the event; it was filled with immediate impressions, and it was rarely based on documentary evidence.

Milner is onto something here. What we see as "the history of World War II" is actually a "construct." You take a few early impressions (often drawn from notoriously inaccurate newspaper headlines), mix in a few post-1945 biases—some minor and some major—and then stir and over again until "truth" forms. Perhaps you add a drop or two of "bitters," personal axes that all historians have to grind, and you wind up with a cocktail named "The Narrative." It is delicious, intoxicating, and you keep coming back for more. But the more we study this greatest of all wars, the less satisfying the cocktail becomes.

I relate to this. I used to believe in "Blitzkrieg." I used to think that the Polish army launched cavalry charges against the German Panzers. I used to believe that the German tanks of 1940 were technologically superior to their French adversaries, and I used to think the same thing about the German tanks of 1941 in the Soviet Union. I now know that each of these things was false. Sometimes I have to laugh. The more the years pass, the less certain my knowledge of World War II seems to become.

A question for the readers: Is there anything that you used to believe about World War II that no longer makes sense?
 

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I'm sitting in LaGuardia Airport at the moment, returning home from a trip to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. I'm proud to have a tie to the Academy: I taught there as a visiting professor during the 2008–09 school year, and I've spoken a number of times at their annual Summer Seminar, which assembles younger scholars from all over the country for an intensive three-week immersion into the craft of military history. I'm one of their "hired guns," so to speak, brought in to speak on their areas of expertise. It's always a blast to meet and get to know young up-and-comers in the field, and West Point never looks more picture perfect than it does in the summer. Speaking at the seminar is always one of the highlights of my year.

This year was different.

Oh, don't get me wrong. The seminar was amazing—well organized, packed with interesting ideas, and a wonderful opportunity to get to know some amazing people. For me, however, there was a pall over the whole thing. A few weeks ago I heard the kind of news you're never really ready for. One of the cadets I had taught two years ago—his name was John—had been killed by a roadside bomb in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, along with six other U.S. servicemen.

I remember him well. His examinations are still in the hard drive of my computer, and the senior thesis he wrote, something all the history majors at West Point have to do, was a very solid critique of the Wehrmacht's brutal anti-partisan operations in the Soviet Union. He was a good guy, a bit older than the other cadets, since he had had prior service in the Army.

Visiting West Point this year, I couldn't get John out of my mind. I've been teaching for a long time. Undoubtedly, some of the students I've taught over the years have passed away. But this was still something new for me. It made me reflect on what really makes West Point or any of the other military academies unique. The young people in your classes are not merely "students." They are also "cadets," future officers and platoon leaders. When you discuss military history at West Point, you're not just talking to buffs or budding young scholars, although many of the cadets are both of those. You're also talking to future "operators," those who will someday have to fight the same kind of battles you're discussing, and may also be called upon to give their lives in the service of their country.

John did all those things, and finally, on May 26th, 2011, he did what so many others before him have done: he gave the last full measure of devotion.

I'd like to ask my readers to give a thought or prayer today to our soldiers fighting overseas. We're currently involved in no fewer than three wars (whatever the government likes to call them), combat is still a highly dangerous business, and a very small number of young people are bearing the burden for all of us.
 

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It sounds like a joke, I know: a conference of history professors. Oh yeah…that's a party. You better hunker down, locals. Lock your doors. Call the police!

But I just returned from a conference of history professors, the annual gathering of the Society for Military History (the SMH, as it's called), and let me just say: what a feast. Imagine an entire hotel outside of Chicago filled with the authors whose books you've read in the past year. They turn out to be down to earth and approachable men and women who know their military history cold, who can throw down on the details of campaigns and battles like you wouldn't believe, and who love nothing better than to thrash out the details of every conflict from ancient Macedon through World War II to the modern coalition struggles in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

In the course of the weekend, you could see a lot of good stuff. For example, I was lucky to attend a debate between two U.S. Army colonels—Conrad Crane (ret.) and Gian Gentile—over our current counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in the Mideast. It was like watching a ping-pong match between two expert players, no surprise, since that's exactly what they are. Crane is the author who penned the army's current COIN doctrine (Field Manual 3-24). Gentile is an armor branch guy who commanded an armored cavalry squadron in West Baghdad in 2006 and currently teaches at West Point. Crane thinks we're on the right track in these conflicts, more or less. Gentile thinks we've gone off the rails altogether. Neither one was shy about disagreeing with the other. Verdict: two good men; one great debate.

Another conference session discussed whether or not there is a distinctive "American way of war." The panel consisted of Brian Linn, the ultra-sharp author of the recent book Echo of Battle; Tony Echevarria, a former lieutenant colonel now at the U.S. Army War College; Adrian Lewis, a former major and now a professor at the University of Kansas; Brian Holden Reid, a prolific British scholar from King's College (London); and Thomas G. Mahnken from the U.S. Naval War College and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy planning. Suffice it to say that, although it was eight in the morning and many of us were not yet in full command of our faculties, the atmosphere was electric. Ideas were zinging around the room, some pretty smart people were disputing one another in the sharpest possible terms, and even the audience was feisty and combative. Lewis, in particular, was impressive—reminding everyone present that debates over U.S. military doctrine and policy aren't just about words or rhetoric. They have real consequences, and the stakes are high. If we get this stuff wrong, we should remember, good soldiers (and our fellow citizens) pay the price.

Sometimes, being a military historian is a job just like any other. At other times, I'm proud to be one.

If you're interested in joining the organization or attending next year's meeting (it will be in Arlington, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C.), click here to check out the website of the SMH. Membership is open to anyone interested in military history. Hope to see you there, and be sure to come up and say hello!

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We live in an anniversary culture, one in which the media never stops telling us Why This Day Is Special. I am writing this column on June 7th—did you know this was the day Sony introduced the Betamax videocassette recorder for sale to the public, or that the inaugural Cricket World Cup began in England, both signal events taking place in 1975?

Yeah, neither did I.

Frankly, I can do without anniversary culture altogether. For thousands of years, we humans have taken note of important events: birthdays, religious holidays, days of liberation and enslavement. They gave shape to the seasons, to the year, and to our lives as a whole. What we lacked was an omnipresent electronic media constantly waving anniversaries in our faces until they became a blur, with the weighty and the trivial receiving equal billing.

Recently, however, we experienced a "twofer" that I think is worth noting. On June 4 we celebrated the 69th anniversary of the Battle of Midway, and on June 6th, of course, the 67th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. Two battles, two great victories for U.S. and Allied arms. The vast encounter in the Pacific waters surrounding Midway Island broke the back of the Japanese carrier fleet, and indeed, virtually the first words I learned in a foreign language as a kid were Kaga, Akagi, Soryu, and Hiryu. D-Day cracked open the so-called Atlantic Wall and created a firm bridgehead in Europe that the Allies would never relinquish. Less than a year later the Third Reich would lie in ruins and Adolf Hitler would be shooting himself in despair.

What struck me the most were the difference between these two victories. Midway happened for a number of reasons: brave U.S. airmen and sailors had something to with it, of course, but there was also an overly complex Japanese operational plan (something that would bedevil the Imperial Japanese Navy for the entire war) and some highly successful U.S. intelligence and counter-intelligence efforts ("AF is out of water," for you aficionados) But at or near the top of the Midway list was a great deal of luck: Admiral Nagumo's unfortunate timing in retrieving, refueling, and rearming his attack aircraft, for example, or the presence of a sitting duck U.S. torpedo squadron shot to pieces by Japanese fighters, which gave an opening to those Dauntless dive bombers coming in at higher altitude. Above all, the fact that the Americans even found the Japanese fleet at all was fortunate, the work of a lone U.S. aircraft spotting a lone Japanese destroyer that had separated from the main fleet and was hurrying to catch up. It was an amazing confluence of events.

D-Day was different. Oh sure, there were nail-biting moments during the landings, especially for the U.S. force at Omaha Beach. The preparatory bombing, supposed to be "the greatest show on earth," largely failed to materialize, and certainly did little damage to the Wehrmacht formations dug in at Omaha. The Canadians had troubles of their own getting over the seawall at Juno. The airborne drops behind Utah Beach were utterly chaotic and could well have been disastrous, had there been more Germans behind Utah Beach. None of these things, however, came close to turning Operation Overlord into a failure. That note Ike penned the night before, one to be released to the press in case things went wrong, never had to be used, and sits today in a museum. (A digital copy from the National Archives sits at left.)

So, happy anniversaries! What happened between 1942 and 1944 was this: the Allies went from being lucky to being good. And contrary to the old saying, I'd rather be good. Ask the Japanese at Midway what happens when your luck runs out.
 

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Being a historian of World War II puts you in touch with the most interesting people. It is a rare day that my email does not contain a message from someone I've never met before asking me a factual question about some aspect of the fighting, or calling my attention to a new book I ought to read, or asking my advice on some memorabilia that Dad or Granddad brought back from the war. Indeed, it's one of the great aspects of studying World War II: you meet the nicest and most interesting people.

Today's proof for that rule is Mr. Bruce Sadler of Evansville, in my former home state of Indiana. Bruce is a plain spoken guy, down to earth and a delight to talk to. He messaged me the other day out of the blue and told me that his father, Paul, had been a G.I. in the ETO, and had brought a photo album back with him when he returned to the states. My ears perked up, but only a little. Photos of World War II? Dime a dozen. It was the most photographed war of all time, after all, and anyone who studies it for a living begins to feel that he has seen every picture ever taken, anywhere.

But then Bruce sent me a couple of examples, and suddenly I wasn't feeling so jaded. These are high quality images, 1940-43, in both France and the Soviet Union—beautifully composed, nicely lit, clearly the work of a professional German war photographer. They run the gamut from action shots in the field to staff meetings, parades and ceremonies, and the commonplace of everyday life. I know the photos of this war as well as any historian, and I hadn't seen these before.

There's a back story here. Paul paid some heavy dues for that photo album. On May 1, 1945, he arrived at a small Bavarian town named Dachau, two days after the U.S. Army liberated the camp there. Dachau was never officially an "extermination camp," but by the end of the war, overcrowding, mass starvation, and epidemics of just about every contagious disease known to man had all down their awful work. Paul saw some scenes that, frankly, he didn't feel like talking about in much detail—and he never really did.

He's passed now, and his son Bruce is on an unusual quest: trying to identify the persons, places, and things in these photos, and perhaps even identify the original photographer. I told him I'd print a couple of images and see if The Best Informed Readership in America might have some hints. Let's start with these two:

 

What about it, readers? Any thoughts?
 

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Regular readers of this column will know that I don't really get excited about war movies. I read a lot, research a lot, and write a lot, and there are only so many hours in the day. In a publishing career of 25 years, I have precisely one film review to my credit, a piece I did in Variety last year on Quentin Tarantino's crazed Inglourious Basterds. I view that movie as two hours of my life that I will never get back.

I know that ignoring war movies is a fault. I preach to my students all the time that understanding culture is crucial to understanding history. The films we make—or fail to make—say a lot about the way we view our wars present and past, and they tell us a lot about the way we view ourselves. Film is important; it is THE mass communications medium of the 20th century, and it is still going strong in the 21st.

I should like them, but I just don't. So sue me.

The more I think about it, though, there is one war movie that I like, one film that stands above the others, that speaks to me. I could watch it every day, and I have a lot of the dialog committed to memory.

It's about an unusual topic. Some men march off to war and distinguish themselves in a thousand ways. Some fight in great battles. Some become heroes. And some sacrifice themselves willingly for their buddies, giving that "last full measure of devotion," as President Lincoln famously said in his Gettysburg Address.

And some get taken prisoner. It's a miserable fact of war, and there is nothing in the world sadder than photographs of POWs just after they've surrendered. Talk about a "1000 yard stare." A man who has lost all hope for the moment is not a pretty sight. As a result, POWs have largely been MIA in the history of World War II film. World War II films tend to privilege "the action," for all the reasons you might expect. It's simply easier to sell to the audience, and while film is an art, it is also definitely a business.

And that leads us to my favorite World War II film: Stalag 17 (1953), directed by Billy Wilder and starring Bill Holden in the unforgettable role of J. J. Sefton. The standard World War II film tended to serve up platitudes about country, cause, and heroism. Stalag 17 gave us tough talk, crackling dialog, and just enough ambiguity to make it a film for the ages. Sefton is many things—a rogue, an entrepreneur, a macher—but one thing he most definitely is not is a hero. In fact, he's the opposite—perhaps the first great World War II "antihero."

Prisoners of war have to question why they're there. Is the cause worthy of their sacrifice? Have I let down my family, friends, and country? Does being captured rob me of my self-respect, even my manhood? Sefton doesn't ask any of those questions. He wasn't fighting for a cause in the first place. He lives by his own code, and it seems to work for him. The phrase didn't exist yet, but Sefton is "looking out for #1."

He is honest about it, though, and he never claims to be doing anything else. In spite of his egotism—or perhaps precisely because of it—he has a sense of honor. He won't rat you out to the Germans, even when you and your fellow prisoners accuse him of being a traitor and beat him to a pulp. When the Red Cross man sees his injuries and asks him "What happened to you? Were you beaten?", he responds with the immortal lines, "Nobody beat me. We were playing pinochle. It's a rough game." In the end, Sefton unmasks the stooly in their midst, the guy who has been trumpeting his patriotism the loudest. Sefton's takedown of the real bad guy is still a powerful scene, and I've seen it 50 times.

I could go on, and I feel like going on. Simply listing the 100 greatest lines from Stalag 17 would make for one of the greatest blog entries ever. But I'll stop.

I guess I don't hate war movies after all.
 

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Last week we looked at the opening round of the U.S. Army's Louisiana Maneuvers in 1941. It was an exercise without a great deal of flash or excitement, but rather one designed to give a newly formed army some seasoning and a green officer corps some experience in maneuvering large formations in the field.

After four days to separate the armies, reorganize them, and return them to their start-lines, Phase 2 of the Louisiana maneuvers began. This time, the Blue Army (LTG Walter Krueger) was both twice as large as Red (LTG Ben Lear) and equipped with its own armored division, the 2nd, which had switched sides since Phase 1. Blue's mission was advance upon and seize Shreveport, Louisiana. Krueger's able chief of staff, COL Dwight D. Eisenhower, decided to send his armor on a wide sweep across the Sabine river to drive round Red's western flank, break into the rear, and attack Shreveport from the north. The Red force was much smaller and tasked largely with positional defense for a 100-mile zone south of the city. Lear decided on a slow retreat, accompanied by massive demolitions that would slow down the pace of Blue's advance.

Business as usual so far, but we need to introduce another factor into the equation. Some of you have no doubt read Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 book Outliers. In science, "outliers" are anomalous events that cannot be described by theory. Gladwell believes that there are people we can consider outliers, "men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August." Gladwell argues that every organization has its outliers, and that successful ones know how to use them and put their talents to good use. Indeed, this phase of the maneuvers would feature one of the greatest outliers in U.S. military history. Commanding Blue 2nd Armored Division on its great ride west would be none other than "Mr. Outlier" himself, MG George S. Patton, Jr.

Patton showed his flair for maneuver by launching his division on a top speed, 3-day, nearly 400-mile end run into Texas, passing through Woodville, Nacogdoches, and Henderson and slashing into the rear of the Red position (see map). By the end of the maneuver on September 29th, he had fought his way to the outskirts of Shreveport , and one of his reconnaissance battalions had actually overrun Barskdale airport, the headquarters and principal base of Red's 2nd Air Task Force, and taking the entire staff prisoner. The Red command seemed paralyzed by the threat, and in fact Lear would protest that Patton had taken his division outside of the legal maneuver area. According to one biographer, Patton came back with a snarky "I am unaware of the existence of any rules in war." During his ride through Texas, he had actually supplied himself through purchases made from local gas stations along the route (rather than the approved 5-gallon "jerry can" then in official use, hundreds of which were needed to fuel an armored unit).

Patton emerged from Louisiana one of the army's rising stars and would be heard from again. Indeed, the maneuvers determined the cohort of field commanders who would fight the war in Europe. Of the 42 divisional, corps, and army commanders who took part in the fall exercises, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall would relieve or pushed aside 31 to make way for younger officers. It had taken a while, and it was just in time, but the U.S. Army was getting ready to rumble.

The Louisiana Maneuvers were indeed a reflection of a U.S. "way of war" as it had evolved over a century and a half. It was an army that preferred the broad-front advance to the single-axis penetration. It ground you down, it didn't slice you up. And yet, it also had its share of "outliers," freethinkers who didn't mind tearing up the rulebook. Finally, the maneuvers showed that there was one thing this army could do, something that it would prove it again and again in the ETO: if it found a seam, some operational elbow room, it could move like lightning. You took your eyes off the U.S. Army at your own risk. It was something that the Wehrmacht would have to discover, but might already have known if it had paid any attention at all to the Louisiana maneuvers.

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Last time out we witnessed the German army preparing for World War II. The Great Fall Maneuvers of 1937 took place in the north German region of Mecklenburg, and showed a Wehrmacht that was out of the huddle, had its head down, and was driving inexorably towards an aggressive war of conquest against its neighbors. The star of the show was a new formation called the Panzer Division, one that was going to give a lot of other armies a lot of headaches in the next few years. Beyond that, the maneuvers showcased some distinctively German military traits: a high level of aggression, independent commanders allowed to make their own decisions on campaign, and a willingness to court dangerous levels of risk.

What a different picture we get from the 1941 Louisiana maneuvers of the U.S. Army! In many ways they were a perfect distillation of an "American way of war." First off, they were awfully late in getting started. We sometimes gloss over the fact today, but both world wars saw the U.S. sitting on the sidelines and missing most of the action. Think of it this way: World War II lasted six years, from the invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939 to Japan's surrender on board the USS Missouri on September 2nd, 1945. U.S. participation spanned less than four years of that total, a little over half the war. Of seven campaigning seasons, the U.S. missed the first three and was active only in the final four. World War I was even worse: of five campaigning seasons, the U.S. took part in just one, the last.

It wasn't until 1940, when the Wehrmacht overran France and drove the British off the continent, that the U.S began actively preparing for war. The country had made great strides, certainly. In September 1940, President Roosevelt signed the Selective Service Act into law, the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. Some 16,000,000 men registered for the draft that fall. By the end of 1940 there were 630,000 men in the army (13 divisions), and six months later (June 1941) there were 1,400,000 (36 divisions). The military budget for 1940, about nine billion dollars, exceeded all the military budgets combined dating back to 1920. As force levels exploded, big maneuvers became possible for the first time.

Nevertheless, by the time the army gathered for its first great field tests in the fall of 1941—the Arkansas maneuvers in August, Louisiana in September, and the Carolinas in November—world war had been raging for two full years. Japan had already overrun much of China, and the Wehrmacht had smashed one opponent after another in Europe and was even then in the midst of the greatest land campaign of all time: the opening drive into the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa. World War II was racing to a climax, in other words, and not only had the U.S. missed out on the action, it remained to be seen if it would see any action at all.

* * *

In operational terms, all three of these great maneuvers featured a similar approach. It was one that would have been familiar to previous generations of U.S. field commanders, especially Union generals in the Civil War. The Louisiana Maneuvers, for example, were essentially a teaching tool in battle management for an officer corps that had virtually overnight been tasked to lead mass armies in the field. "The field," in this case, was the district bounded by the Sabine and Red rivers to the west and east and the city of Shreveport to the north. In Phase 1 of the exercise, both sides were given offensive missions. Red 2nd Army (under LTG Ben Lear) would cross the Red river on September 15th and invade the Blue homeland. Blue 3rd Army (LTG Walter Krueger) would move north to intercept the invaders and drive the Red force back across the river. The Blue side was big, but ponderous; Red was smaller, but equipped with two armored divisions (1st and 2nd). Essentially, the mission for both sides amounted to a large-scale advance to contact, the most basic of all military maneuvers, but one perfectly suited for this brand new army and its green commanders.

Lear soon found that even getting across the river was tougher than he expected. Due to limited bridging capacity, he had to send his 1st and 2nd Armored Divisions on a wide sweep north to cross the river at Shreveport and Coushatta. Krueger, meanwhile, spent the first two days of the maneuver carrying out a by-the-book advance by three corps abreast: VIII, IV, and V, moving from left to right (Map 1). On day 3, he launched an assault on Lear's VII Corps along the Red river, which, after a promising start, settled down into a slugging match rather than a dramatic breakthrough. His numbers were eventually decisive here, however, and Lear had to give ground (Map 2). The next day would see Lear's armored divisions launch an assault on Krueger's left, which, after a promising start, bogged down in the face of Blue's antitank guns (Map 3). This was the situation by the afternoon of September 19th when the whistle blew ending Phase 1. Nothing revolutionary or shocking had taken place—this was operational art by way of U.S. Grant, a classic evocation of an American way of war—but again, it was probably just what this army needed the most.

Click on maps for larger images.

And that is why Phase 2 is all the more shocking. Here, the young U.S. Army would show a very different face, one that, perhaps, its enemies in the upcoming conflict should have noted more carefully. Next week: "Patton's Drive on Shreveport."

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Last time out we began a discussion of the importance of studying maneuvers. They can tell a historian a lot about the way an army trains, about its policies and procedures, about what it intends to do once war breaks out, of course. They can tell you even deeper things about a "way of war"—longstanding operational patterns that cut across the fighting style of individual generals, across wars, and even across the centuries.

Exhibit A in that contention: the Wehrmacht's "Great Fall Maneuvers" of 1937. The big story here was the debut of a new formation in the German battle array, the "Panzer Division." It was built around tanks, but also contained a full array of supporting arms—infantry, artillery, engineers, supply troops—all of which could move at the speed of the tank. It was a new animal, being formed only at the end of 1935, and this was the first big field test. There was a definite aura of excitement, and indeed, the 1937 maneuvers were the largest exercise held in Germany since the end of World War I, attended in person by Hitler, Mussolini and a whole host of foreign observers.

As always in a German maneuver, a "Blue force" faced "Red" in an imaginary theater of war, this one consisting of the rolling hills, lakes, and streams of Mecklenburg, the epicenter of the so-called North German Plain. Blue, in the East, held a bridgehead over the winding Peene river near Lake Malchin (above). Red, to the West, had to attack the bridgehead and had the 3rd Panzer Division in its order of battle for that purpose. Any doubts about the ability of a mechanized formation to mix it up in high tempo operations—and there were doubters, many of them—vanished almost immediately.

Moving up 100 kilometers from the army reserve to its assault position in a single day (September 19th, above), 3rd Panzer Division launched its assault on September 20th (below). It sent its motorized infantry brigade for-ward to help 30th Infantry Division (also motorized) engage the bridgehead frontally, while swinging its Panzer Brigade around Blue's extreme left in the South. Working in close liaison with airpower, the panzers broke through the Blue position. Lacking specific orders but seizing an opportunity that suddenly presented itself, the Panzer Brigade then drove on the town of Stavenhagen, reaching it, scattering Blue's headquarters, and cutting off Blue's supply route into Malchin.

Having encircled the entire bridgehead, still without pausing, Red now assaulted it concentrically. Blue reinforcements were late in arriving due to a vigorous Red air interdiction effort. As a result, midway through Day 4 of a scheduled seven-day maneuver, Red had smashed its Blue foe.

In the manner of these things, there were debates about whether the umpires were playing fair—specifically, whether they underestimating the effect of defensive antitank fire. In order to sooth ruffled feelings, 3rd Panzer Division was ordered out of the maneuver, which continued as a fairly trite infantry vs. infantry encounter.

Beyond testing the capabilities of the Panzer Division, the maneuver was an almost perfect distillation of the "German way of war": high tempo, independent decision making and a great deal of risk (in this case rushing 3rd Panzer Division into combat "off the march" and splitting it in two for purposes of the concentric attack. A pretty impressive package, all told: a near picture-perfect image of an army putting its game face on.

Next time? The U.S. Army in Louisiana.

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I was recently asked by the Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) to speak at their annual Military Affairs Symposium in North Texas. The topic was "Training Marines and the Joint Force: The Value of Simulations and Games." It was pretty exciting stuff. We had a Marine four-star there, GEN Joseph F. Dunford, Jr. Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps; RADM Ken Carodine, U.S. Navy, Deputy Commander of the Navy Warfare Development Command and IT wizard; COL Mike Flanagan, Project Manager for Training Devices (TRADE) in the U.S. Army; a pair of West Point officers who take their cadets through some amazing military simulations; experts from civilian industry, and more. Having had my mind blown for the better part of a day, I can say one thing with assurance: most of you would not BELIEVE (as I didn't) what the military is up to these days in terms of battlefield simulation as a training tool for their warriors. Virtual reality. Pods. And in the future—wait for it—pain simulation.

Yeah. That's exactly what I said.

The holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation once seemed far-fetched to me. Now it simply seems—inevitable.

While I marveled at the present and the future, I was there to talk about the past. Story of my life. Specifically, my brief dealt with the U.S. Army's first real foray into the world of "simulation": the great Fall Maneuvers of 1941 in Louisiana, a practice run of sorts for World War II. Maneuvers, exercises, and wargames generally don't get a lot of attention from military historians, and it's easy to see why. Why spend a lot of time obsessing on pre–World War II maneuvers when you can go forward in time only a couple of years and analyze how all the various armies involved fought the real thing? Even serious military historians who analyze a peacetime army are usually more inclined to look to its theoretical and doctrinal writings, rather than analyzing what they often deride as a kind of "mock battle." In my field, for example, there are a lot of German military histories that emphasize the classic thinkers and/or geniuses of the German tradition (the Clausewitzes, Moltkes, and Schlieffens), and a mountain of battle books that deal with the German army in action. Serious analyses of the way that the Germans—the folks who invented the modern military maneuver—handled them? About five, and I should know. I think I've written three of them. All of them sold in the double figures, as I like to say. Since then, I've wised up and written books on the battle of Stalingrad, and they are helping put my kids through college.

Still, it is a shame that maneuvers don't get more respect. I think that we can learn a lot about a given army by a careful study of its wargames and field maneuvers. Military historians talk a lot today about "ways of war," the unique methods by which individual armies tend to conceive, plan, and execute their wars. The point these scholars seek to make is that, no matter how often modern armies claim to be "changing" or "reforming" or "Transforming" (with a capital "T"), they seem to fight their wars in very similar ways every time out. Count the reorganizations that the U.S. Army has had in the course of its history. And then, think about the way it has fought its actual wars (I'm talking "Big Wars" here): the same massive firepower, the same heavy reliance upon technology, the same relatively straightforward operational approach of "broad front advance" and careful "battlefield management." While not particularly exciting or sexy in the operational sphere, it was an approach that served the nation pretty well in the 20th century.

To give just one counterexample, German armies over the centuries have tended to fight in a very different manner. Here the approach has been Bewegungskrieg, the war of movement, a risky operational posture that emphasized separate armies maneuvering concentrically towards the enemy and trying to trap him in a battle of encirclement, a Kesselschlacht. With their country trapped in a relatively narrow space in Central Europe, ringed by enemies or potential ones, German planners believed that they had no choice but to win their wars rapidly, since they would always be outmanned and outproduced by their foes. In order to get the job in something approximating ASAP, the commanders of these separated German armies had to be given the widest possible latitude for decision-making on their own, not be hamstrung by overly rigid orders from the top. Despite our obsession with German warmaking, we should admit that this operational scheme had a very checkered career in the 20th century. It gained massive operational victories at the outset of both world wars, but not strategic victory. Both times, the Allies held on against the initial onslaught, fought the German army to a standstill, and eventually crushed it with superior resources. [continued on next page]

With that little intro in mind, let us get down to the micro-level. Let us look at the way that each army prepared to fight World War II. Let us look at the prewar maneuvers.

Tune in next week for "Preparing for Blitzkrieg—the Wehrmacht Maneuvers of 1937."

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People committed a lot of crimes in World War II. Some were huge, earth-shattering, and we are still living with the consequences. Atrocity. Murder. Mass murder. Others were…smaller.

Consider, if you will, the "crime" of eavesdropping.

There may indeed have been an era when gentlemen didn't "read each others' mail," but if so, those days were long gone by 1944. The Allies spent a great deal of time and money reading Axis mail, successfully cracking both the German Enigma machine and the Japanese Purple Code, and, as Sönke Neitzel's book Tapping Hitler's Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations, 1942–45 shows us, secretly bugging the conversations of German officers in English captivity.

It was an operation that was both well-organized and remarkably effective. The British outfitted a mansion at Trent Park, their prison for captured German staff officers, with an immense battery of bugged rooms and ingeniously hidden microphones, state of the art gramophone recording machines manned by bilingual personnel (largely German and Austrian exiles), and even "stool pigeons" (cooperative prisoners, for the most part), whose task was to get and keep the conversation flowing along appropriate lines. From time to time, the German officers seemed to suspect they were being bugged, but it never stopped them from talking. The transcripts of their conversations—always illuminating and often shocking—form the heart of Neitzel's book.

A few points emerge immediately. By this time in the war—with all the indicators well into the red zone for the Germans—any trace of caste solidarity within the officer corps had vanished. The prisoners quickly formed two factions: an "unreconstructed" group of pro-Nazis around General Ludwig Crüwell and a smaller but vocal group of dissidents around his fellow General of Panzer Troops, Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma. Indeed, they had been the first two captured officers brought to Trent Park, they spent their first night in captivity together arguing long into the night, and their bitter disagreements highlight the fault lines within the German command by 1942. Even at this relatively late date, Crüwell still thought Germany was going to win the war, that Hitler's achievements would last "for centuries," and that the "Jewish poison" was behind Germany's misfortunes. Thoma, by contrast, thought that the war was irrevocably lost, that the Führer belonged in a "padded cell," and that the "gang of rogues" manning his regime ought to be worked to death by hard labor after the war. As more and more officers arrived at Trent Park, General of Parachute Troops Bernhard Ramcke or Luftwaffe General Gerhard Bassenge, for example, they gravitated to one or the other faction. Ramcke joined Crüwell; Bassenge was a Thoma man. The groups battled not only in word, but in deed, with the shared radio being the main battleground. When the Thoma group tuned in to Allied broadcasting, for example, Crüwell would actually march into the room, commandeer the radio, and switch to a German channel in mid-program! Things never turned violent, although they occasionally came close.

In between these two extreme positions, there was a more mundane discourse, as men too far from their homes and loved ones—and cursed with too much time on their hands—understandably pondered their own careers and future. There was a great deal of talk about lost pensions, lost property, and lost status: "We used to be colonels and generals," one of them lamented in late 1944, "after the war we shall be boot-blacks and porters." I've read the book in the original German, and we might translate that last line into American English as "shoe-shine boys and bellhops." Even worse, of course, a great many of them feared being tried as war criminals. [continued next page]

It will be that final point that attracts researchers to this volume. There has been much written of late about the criminality of the Wehrmacht. While the point is no longer disputed within the scholarly community, Neitzel has assembled a group of documents that establish this fact beyond any doubt. Alongside familiar battles like Smolensk, Gazala, and Kerch, the Wehrmacht's "battle honors" will forever include less well known names like Zhitomir, Lvov, and Pinsk. Here the army distinguished itself not by Blitzkrieg or Kesselschlacht, but by the grisly murder of helpless civilians en masse, more often than not in front of pre-dug graves prepared by the victims themselves. Not every officer at Trent Park took part in these horrors. Most of them had served either in North Africa or the West, fighting a kind of war very different from the apocalyptic struggle against "Asiatic Bolshevism" in the East. Still, enough of them did, and enough of them spoke of their crimes openly, to render pointless any further debate on the Wehrmacht's culpability. In fact, we find officers already laying out strategies for their own legal defense. Some were blaming the SS for the atrocities; others were experimenting with phrases that would become all too familiar at Nuremberg. "We must uphold the principle," General Ferdinand Heim told his comrades in March 1945, "of only having carried out orders."

A question for the readership: Listening in on "private conversations." Fair play?

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Last time we presented a "microhistory," a detailed look at nine days in World War II. Days in which, frankly, a lot of things happened: Kursk, Sicily, Orel. For the Germans, hope was raised, dashed, raised, and dashed again. We're looking at a specific question: why did Hitler decide to call off Operation Citadel, the offensive towards Kursk, a military undertaking usually described as the "greatest tank battle of all time." Let us pick up where we left off:

Two points emerge from this micro-chronology. The first is the immense burden of command in World War II, with reports coming in non-stop from the four corners of creation, bearing sketchy first impressions of vast operations, reports that will often prove to be wildly inaccurate. Administration, signals, and intelligence-gathering and estimation require the service of thousands of highly trained personnel. Hitler and his tiny staff (and the equally tiny staffs of all the other high command echelons of the Wehrmacht) would have been entirely inadequate to the purpose even if Hitler himself had been a much more gifted strategist and commander. In 1943, for example, the Operations Section of the German General Staff contained precisely 17 officers. Thinking back on it later, one of its members, General Johann Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg, exclaimed, "People today don't believe this number!" He would later go on to serve as the postwar Supreme Commander of NATO forces in Central Europe. He remembered one day counting the number of officers on his staff, and was astonished again: "You would have to hang a zero on that 17, and it still wouldn't be enough."

Second, clear strategic and operational links exist, far stronger than generally assumed, between Citadel and Husky, the massive clash of armor deep inside the Soviet Union and the great amphibious operation coming up out of the Mediterranean. The two worked symbiotically, rather than in isolation. Launching the battle of Kursk was the immediate problem, a great battle staring the Wehrmacht in the face in early 1943. The high command could see it and take comfort in the fact that it was preparing, arming, and planning for it. Citadel was essentially an operational question, a tough one, to be sure, but comfortable conceptual ground for an army used to this sort of thing.

Husky was the more mysterious terror. Where? When? How large? That tiny cadre of staff officers we have just mentioned could stay awake deep into the night debating such questions, and they often did just that. Moreover, Husky touched on issues of international politics, coalition warfare, perhaps even ideology. In that sense, it might have kept Hitler awake at nights, too. These were areas in which his officers had remarkably little interest, but which he viewed, quite rightly, as central to the war.

Today, western historiography reduces the question of Italian participation in the war to a series of anecdotes of military incompetence and political stupidity. That is certainly not how it looked to Hitler in 1943. Not to call forth any sympathy for the devil, but running this war was a bear, and it was completely beyond the demands of any one man. Back in late 1942, Hitler had dismissed General Franz Halder as the Chief of the General Staff, over what appears today to be a sequence of quite trivial disagreements over the operation in the Caucasus. On that occasion he had spoken to the Chief of the Operations Department (Operation-sabteilung), General Adolf Heusinger. In the course of their conversation, Heusinger had requested a field command, something he had been desiring since 1937, when he first joined the staff. Hitler refused, and Heusinger responded by offering his resignation. Hitler refused to consider it. "Your refusal troubles me," Heuasinger had replied. Hitler's retort was pithy and direct, a rare thing in such a voluble and unstable individual. It was moment of insight, and one that still held true a year later, in the summer of 1943: "A lot of things trouble me," he told Heusinger. "Believe it." ("Auch mir fällt vieles schwer, das können Sie mir glauben…") [continued next page]

Indeed, in the summer of 1943, a lot of things were bothering Hitler, the staff, and the entire Wehrmacht. The ongoing debate among historians over the question of who killed Citadel needs to take the broadest possible view, rather than relying on einseitig (one-sided) argumentation. Operation Kutuzov, the Soviet blow against the Orel salient, was certainly a massive blow, but reports about it had just started to come in and the high command was only starting to sift through them. Did it play a major role in the cancellation of Citadel? Of course. Based on the conformation of the front, with one salient curling around another, it had to. So, too, did the collapse of the Axis alliance, a grave blow to Germany's strategic position.

What killed Citadel? Given the chronology we have just examined, and the requirements of a multi-front war, the only possible answer is: a lot of things.

Next week: let's analyze this microhistory. And let us ask the question, which is more important? Operations or strategy?

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Last time out we began a discussion of the "death" of Operation Citadel, the German offensive at Kursk in the summer of 1943. At the time, Hitler claimed his decision was due to the invasion of Sicily. Ever since, a lot of people who study the war have scoffed. Call off "the greatest tank battle of all time" because of Italy? Preposterous!

But maybe, just maybe, Hitler was telling the truth for once. Let's start by looking at a "snapshot"—a very brief 9-day interval in what was a very long and very complex war:

Monday, July 5th. The Wehrmacht launches its assault against the Kursk bulge, with 9th Army attacking from the north and 4th Panzer Army coming up from the south. The aim is a concentric maneuver on the city of Kursk, a link-up there, and a signature Kesselschlacht against all Soviet forces inside the salient. Instead, over the next three days, the operation locks itself into a materiel-intensive Stellungskrieg, just the sort of battle the Germans cannot afford. It is a shattering disappointment to Hitler and the staff, given that this will be the major German offensive effort, indeed, the only effort, of this campaigning season. They have been slaving and arguing and wrangling over Citadel for months. It had been scheduled and canceled and rescheduled over and over again, one of the principal reasons being that it was clear the Allies were about to land an amphibious blow somewhere in the West, and no one wanted to be embroiled too deeply at Kursk when the Allies came ashore. Finally, they had taken the plunge, and ran into a wall. It is more than a lost battle. It is a year wasted.

Friday, July 9th. General Hermann Hoth, 4th Panzer Army commander, receives re-ports of large Soviet armored reserves heading into the salient and toward the front. They turn out to be the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army (General P. A. Rotmistrov). Using the traditional German prerogatives of independent command, Hoth decides to wheel his army away from its northward orientation and turn it to the northeast, intending to intercept the Soviet reserves near the town of Prokhorovka.

Near midnight, the first report come into German headquarters of U.S. and British airborne landings on the island of Sicily.

Saturday, July 10th. In the early morning, the long awaited Allied invasion of the European continent begins, as two Allied armies land on the southern coast of Sicily. Operation Husky answers thorny questions that have been the subject of intense debate within the German high command for months: the timing, place, and size of the initial Allied blow against Europe. Hitler is surprised, since he has been expecting a blow against the Balkans, but optimistic that the island can be held, and so is his "Supreme Commander-South" (Oberbefehls- haber-Süd), FM Albert Kesselring.

At noon, initial reports have thousands, and then tens of thousands, of Italian soldiers abandoning their posts, fading away into the interior, or surrendering to the Allies. The first attempt to drive the Allies into the sea, an attack on the U.S. beachhead by the Hermann Göring Parachute Panzer Division, fails.

That night, the largest port in Sicily, Syracuse, falls to elements of the British 8th Army without a fight.

Sunday, July 11th. A second and better-prepared assault against the U.S. beachhead in Sicily, near the small port of Gela, also fails. Virtually the entire Italian 6th Army in Sicily, over 200,000 men, has ceased fighting, leaving the entire defense in the hands of a mere two German divisions, the Hermann Göring and 15th Panzergrenadier.

Sunday, July 11th. The southern pincer at Kursk—4th Panzer Army and its flank guard to the right, Armee-Abteilung Kempf—begin to make progress to their front. It isn't much, but it is something. Army Group Center's contribution to Citadel, the northern pincer under General Walther Model's 9th Army, has come to a complete standstill after a tiny penetration of just 12 miles. The northern face of the salient is now relatively quiet.

Monday, July 12th. A great clash of armor takes place at Prokhorovka, with Hoth's spearhead, the II SS Panzer Corps, running headlong into the 5th Guards Tank Army. There is carnage. On the flanks, XXXXVIII Panzer corps (on the left) and III Panzer Corps (on the right) engage in equally intense fighting with Soviet forces to their respective fronts. While the first reports speak of heavy Soviet losses, it is clear that there is going to be no quick breakthrough at Kursk.

The same day, the first reports come into Rastenburg of a Soviet counteroffensive north of Kursk, where the Germans hold a salient of their own around the city of Orel. The target is the German 2nd Panzer Army, which, despite its name, hardly owns a single tank. Its mission has been essentially static, protecting the deep flank and rear of Model's 9th Army. Operation Kutuzov thus represents a clear and present danger to 9th Army, and indeed to all German forces around Orel. Kluge orders Model, the 9th Army commander, to remove two panzer divisions from the attack towards Kursk and devote them to warding off this new danger.

Also on July 12, Field Marshal Kesselring visits Sicily to view the situation for himself. Reversing the optimism he held just 24 hours before, he quickly decides that the situa-tion is hopeless. The defenders cannot hold the island and planning must start for an evacuation across the Strait of Messina. To avoid a complete breakdown in the defense while preparations for the evacuation get underway, he contacts OKW to demand the immediate transfer of another German division, the 29th Panzergrenadier, to Sicily. Hitler agrees. He also decides to call off Citadel, and summons both Manstein and Kluge to a meeting the next day, July 13th.

Next week: let's analyze this microhistory. And let us ask the question, which is more important? Operations or strategy?

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On July 13th, 1943, Adolf Hitler called the Army Group commanders currently involved in Operation Citadel to his headquarters, the Wolfsschanze in Rastenburg, East Prussia.  There he gave Field Marshals Erich von Manstein (Army Group South) and Günther von Kluge (Army Group Center) some bad news:  the battle of Kursk  was over and it was time to revert to a defensive posture on the eastern front.  Manstein argued with him.  Things were looking up on the southern front, he told the Führer.  His assault had already smashed the Soviet strategic reserve at Prokhorovka, and a breakthrough was imminent.  Kluge held a different and more pessimistic view.  The assault from the north by 9th Army had failed to make anything more than a local dent in the defenses, and the Soviets were clearly massing for some sort of counterattack against the Orel salient.  In fact, there were early reports that it had already started.    

Hitler had made his decision, however, and that was that.  He now presented his reasons.  The Allies had invaded Sicily three days before, he told his commanders, and the sizable Italian forces on the island–some 200,000 men– had apparently already collapsed.  The Axis alliance itself was in peril.  It was going to be necessary to transfer major forces from the Eastern Front to the west in order to shore Germany's collapsing strategic position. 

From our later perspective, Hitler's reasoning can appear flimsy, if not altogether specious. Was this really possible?  Could a landing by a mere seven Allied divisions on a faraway island achieve what hundreds of Soviet divisions and nearly two million soldiers of the Red Army had been unable to do:  halt the German suffer offensive at Kursk?  Did Italy really matter that much?

In fact, once we study a more precise timeline, the Führer's position seems entirely plausible.   World War II was a long conflict, embracing nearly six calendar years and seven campaigning seasons, and it covered the earth like a Sherwin Williams advertisement.  Occasionally, however,  the history of the conflict requires an analysis on the micro level. 

Let us travel back to the summer of 1943 for a moment.  Let's call it "nine days that shook the world."

Tune in next time.

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