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Clash of Arms: How the Allies Won in Normandy (The Art of War)

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Every army prepares for and conducts combat differently, in a way that reflects its own particular traditions and culture as well as the characteristics of the society from which it springs. An army's performance depends upon a multitude of factors, many of which are beyond anyone's ability to control or simply impossible to predict before the shooting starts. In large part an army's success comes from its ability to perceive what is happening on the battlefield, learn the correct lessons from the events, develop new techniques, and train its soldiers to the new standard.

Unraveling the complexities of this process is difficult enough when one looks at one single army. Russell Hart has taken on four: the British, Canadian, American and German. In each case he has examined that army's development in the years after the First World War as well as its performance in the Normandy campaign of 1944. His conclusions will surprise some people. For example, the vaunted German Wehrmacht, which authors have lauded over the years as the best fighting force of the war, comes off a poor second to the U.S. Army in its ability to learn and adapt, while the British and Canadians rank lower still. That is not to say that the Germans were weak opponents or that the Americans never made mistakes; any American veteran of the fighting in Normandy would scoff at the idea. But neither is it true, as many German generals maintained after the war, that the Americans fought without skill and won simply because they had vastly more equipment. By the end of the Normandy fighting, the U.S. Army was clearly better than its opponent.

The strength of Hart's book is in his understanding of the issues involved and in the careful research that backs up his conclusions. This is not a book to pick up if you want guts-and-glory descriptions of the battles on the beaches and in the bocage. But if you want to understand why the battles turned out as they did, this is probably the most important book you could read.