There is such a pleasure in refinding an old friend. No, no, not a person, can't be doing with them, simply too, too irritating, I mean a book! I read literally tons of books but only a very few of them stick in the memory but those that do are with me for life. Well, they would be if I didn't move house so often and some how misplace them, or if 'SoD' didn't keep nicking them - he denies all charges vehemently but 'I hae me doots!' Anyway, it's 'friends re-united' here at 'Chateaux Duff' and all courtesy of Amazon who provided me with a slightly scruffy but perfectly adequate second-hand edition of A Genius for War: The German Army and General Staff by the late Col. T. N. Dupuy, formerly of the US Army.
Being something of a masochist I am always rather happy when I read a book which makes me exceedingly uncomfortable as it blows away several of my dearly-held convictions and I realize what a prat I have been! Also, it serves the very useful purpose of softening my usually fierce opinions on other matters about which, I suspect, it will only take one well-written and researched book to knock them cold.
Col. Dupuy's prologue was enough to blow away a couple of examples of prejudicial thinking on my part. For example, until I first read his book (several years ago) I had assumed that the fighting qualities of the allied troops in WWII were roughly equal to those of the Germans and that they lost mainly because of Russian and American weight of men and materials:
There were substantial combat effectiveness differences within national contingents - British, American and German - but the overall comparisons were quite constant. On the average, a force of 100 Germans was the combat equivalent of 120 Americans or 120 British troops. Further refinements in the model began to reveal that in terms of casualties the differential was even greater, with German soldiers on the average inflicting three casualties on the Allies for every two they incurred. This relationship - a 20% combat effectiveness superiority, and a 3-to-2 casualty-inflicting superiority - was found to be still in effect during the 1944 fighting in Normandy and France, and as late a December 1944, at the time of the Germans' Ardennes offensive.
One of the other myths blown away by Col. Dupuy was the dearly-held notion that the German soldier was an unthinking, semi-automatum who did nothing without orders but when given them followed them to the last letter. Again, completely and utterly wrong, and his history of the Prussian (and then German) General Staff explains exactly how wrong that was and why. A superb book and, for me, a dear, old friend refound!
