42 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A non-American pespective on World War II, October 1, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: German Generals Talk (Paperback)
Liddell Hart's interviews with German generals immediately after WW II ended provides the reader with a essential perspective from inside the defeated military command. The author candidly calls Hitler "too brilliant" a strategist when criticizing the traditional Allied view that all Germany's mistakes were Hitler's and all her success were due to the German generals. Hart points out the political ineptitude of the German generals when assessing their military prowess. Politics are not divorced from military affairs in this study. The superb blend of Eisenhower's political skills and solid military judgement is contrasted with the utter failure of the German military to address political issues in the Reich. Hart lets the vanquished foes tell their own stories in an easy to read narrative form. He allows the German perspective to point out strengths and weaknesses in the British, American, and Russian militarys. An example is the German disregard of any threat of allied invasion along the French Bay of Biscay coastline because they correctly judged the Allied invasion of the European continent would never be carried out outside of the range of air cover. After Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio the Germans were able to use allied predictability against them. Hart uses this example to champion his "strategy of the indirect approach" that has become his hallmark, and surmise about what might have been if bolder leadership had prevailed in England in 1944. An easy read with some of the great minds that opposed the allies in World War II. Never pretentious or overloaded with unit designations or historical snobbery. A straight forward view from the "other side of the hill" that is presented to help the allied military and the lay reader learn from history.
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"We have ways of making you talk.", February 24, 2006
This review is from: German Generals Talk (Paperback)
B.H. Liddell Hart was one of the foremost military historians and theoreticians of the 20th Century. His interwar writings on the future of armored warfare were read down to the last period by Heinz Guderian, who used them (and others) as the basis of Germany's "armored idea" well before Adolf Hitler assumed the chancellorship in 1933. Ironically, Hart's conclusions -- that tanks should be deployed en masse rather than distributed evenly among infantry formations to give them "backbone" -- were ignored by his own side, and it was not until 1940 that he could point to the crushing Allied defeat in France and say, "I told you so!"
Shortly after the war, Hart was granted access to many of the seniormost German generals in Western captivity: his interviews with these gentlemen constitute the basis for "The German Generals Talk", a terse, easily readable and absolutely fascinating must-have for historians, history buffs, professional soldiers and armchair generals.
Hart starts with a brief overview of the German army's officer corps pre-Hitler, its relationship to the NS state and the development of the armored concept. He follows with a history of the war through the eyes of the particular field marshals and generals he was interviewing -- Blumentritt, Rundstedt, Thoma, Kleist, Heinrici, Manteuffel, Student, etc. Interspersed with this are his own analyses and conclusions on such matters as Hitler's leadership, the quality of the Red Army, and so on.
Hart unmistakably had a sizable ego, no doubt stroked thoroughly by the admiration with which he was regarded, and I can't disagree with those who feel his interviews with the officers in question, as well as his conclusions, tended to be conducted in such a way as to validate his prewar writings and ideas. He unsparing with self-praise and occasionally breaks up the narraitive to show how his prognostications were always "proven" right. This is a bit annoying but it doesn't detract much from the enjoyability of the book.
The book is a bit shallow in some of its analyses and there are chapters which are not much more than bloated paragraphs. Sometimes I felt he was making conclusions based on very limited data and other times I felt he was holding back too much of what he had learned in the name of word-economy. At barely 300 pages, I can sympathize with readers who felt that it was simply bones without flesh, but I believe Hart presupposed a fairly advanced knowledge of the subject among his readers.
It goes without saying that some of what the Germans had to say must be taken with a grain of salt. FM v. Kleist, for example, seems to have either been disingenuous or befuddled about dates, times, places, etc. when speaking to Hart about the German summer offensive of 1942, and he is not alone in his errors. It must also be remembered that a few of these gentelmen were on the legal hot seat and others were settling old scores, protecting their reputations and likewise engaging in the type of glossing-over that is rampant after every war, most notably a lost one.
Having said that, the honesty of some of the men is refreshing. Manteuffel was direct in his admiration for Model, and Heinrici, who disliked Hitler and whose nickname in the German army was "our tough little bastard", admitted frankly that "the troops confidence in Hitler was the dominant factor (in the remarkable performance of the German army), whether one liked it or not." You may not like or agree with Hart's methods or his conclusions, but it would be a mistake to at not least give "The German Generals Talk" a full and fair hearing.
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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Deep Insight Into The Strategic Thoughts of Nazi Generals, June 27, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: German Generals Talk (Paperback)
Nazi generals confess, recollect, and explain hundreds of their key decisions in the campaigns of World War Two. Fascinating accounts of battles fought with one eye on the enemy and another on Der Fuhrer. Speaking to their pre-war mentor, B.H. Liddell-Hart, these men seem to bear all. Their unbounded admiration of Liddell-Hart's pre-war theories of armored warfare induce them to a degree of candor and specificity that military historians rarely obtain. Were we only able to have such accounts from Antony or old Parmenio. Alas, the ancients are long dead. But this book yeilds a bumper crop for those desiring to learn specifics about German Strategy in the Second World War. Explicit technical accounts delivered with German detail. For example, receive eye-opening glimpses of strategies abandoned and aborted on heart-breaking orders from Hitler himself. Monteuffel's expliots in Southern Russia particularly gripping.
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