This is the third volume of a work commissioned by the DOD to determine if a systematic historical study could provide accurate relative evaluation of military effectiveness. Millett and Murry established a conceptual frame work for evaluating political, strategic, operational and tactical military effectiveness for the armed forces of France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Russia, Japan, and the United States and set out on a project to track these seven nations through the first half of the 20th century.
As the second world war, much more so than the first, set the context for the American national experience in the decades to follow it still a subject of deep and justified interest. This book contains, as did the first two volumes, essays that cover each of the seven countries and how effective their militaries were in WW2. It also contains three concluding essays that attemept to summarize, first the WW2 experience, and then the questions of assesing overall effectiveness at the operation/tactical levels and at the political/strategic levels.
As always in any work with ten authors there will be some variation in style, content, and value. The essay by Jurgen Forster on The Dynamics of Volksgmeinschaft is brilliant, challenging, and thought provoking showing just how well a university professional can do with thorough mastery of primary souces and an ample supply of courage of conviction. On the other side the essay by John Jessup on the Soviet Armed Forces is disappointing. Part of that may be due to the date at which it was written, in 1988 at the very end of the Soviet era, but Jessup only accesses secondary sources and shows too much tendency to assert vauge generalities colored by Cold War perceptions. Following the work of David Glantz and others in the last decade this essay seems dated and shallow.
The summary chapter on WW2 military effectiveness by Earl Ziemke would perhaps be subject to a little revision by recent work on the Russian side of the war, but overall stands up well as a judgement. His position that there was an Allied strategy and an Axis strategy to be compared does not match my perception that there were actually four "sides" to the war, not two. The essay by Lt Gen John Cushman on Challenge and Response at the Operational and Tactical levels is little short of brilliant and is an impassioned plea for professional development in the US Army. It takes as it's bases Bill Slims' reconstruction of the British Army in India/Burma and a German assessment of the 1949 edition of US FM 100-5. It would be interesting to know what Gen Cushman would say today about how the US Army has learned to respond to challenges of a tactical/operational nature. The final essay by Russell Weigley on the politcal and strategic dimesions of the military effecitveness pulls no punches in making quite clear that armed forces confronted with strategic goals beyond their means cannot be effective no matter what they do at the operational/tactical level. He also points out the paradox that greater civilian control of the military has led to a militarization of civilian policy making.
All in all this series of books from 1988 remains, and I will expect continue to remain, a strong framework on which to look back at the extraordinarily destructive and tragic wars that defined the first half of the twentieth century and understand how they unfolded as they did in the military actions of the contending parties.
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