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Snow & Steel — Peter Caddick-Adams

Published on January 6, 2022Leave a comment

Cover of Snow & Steel

Snow & Steel: the Battle of the Bulge 1944 – 45
Peter Caddick-Adams
872 pages including notes and index
published in 2014

Nuts!

The story of the Bulge should be familiar. Hitler’s last roll of the dice, an offensive that nobody expected. The goal: to split the western allies apart by reconquering Antwerp. Elite panzers racing through the Ardennes, reliving the glory days of May 1940, expecting little resistance from the outnumbered and inexperienced American forces stationed there. the allied airfoces, grounded by bad weather and unable to come to the rescue. The unexpected resistance and Hitler’s hopes smashed at Bastogne, when after an imperious demand to surrender now the town was surrounded, the commanding American officer responded with a simple “Nuts!”

It’s a great story, a story the town of Bastogne dines out on to this very day. When I was there on holiday last October literally every second shop window had something about the siege in its display. It also has the benefit of being mostly true. But it isn’t the entire truth of the Ardennes Offensive, or Peter Caddick-Adams wouldn’t have needed almost nine hundred pages to tell its story. There were other sieges beside Bastogne, other places where American resistance held up the Nazi attack long enough for it to ultimately fail, other tales of heroism and tragedy to be told. Arguably, one could say that the fate of the offensive had been determined long before Bastogne had even been reached. Similarly, the story didn’t end when the siege of Bastogne was lifted. There was more hard fighting to be done, fighting which lasted into January and February of 1945.

It’s Snow & Steel‘s ambition to tell the entire story of the Battle of the Bulge, knowing full well it’s impossible to do so. As the author himself has admitted, the air war for example is barely covered in this book. Similarly, some important battles are barely touched upon, some phases of the campaign less exhaustively treated than others. What Snow & Steel instead provide is as good as possible an overview of the campaign as a whole, set in context of both what gave birth to it and how it in turn impacted the rest of the war. Not only that, Caddick-Adams also looks at its impact after the war, on the people that fought in it but also those who sought to learn from its lessons. He himself has a background in the (Cold War) UK military and knows from first-hand experience how the Ardennes Offensive was studied to prepare for the expected Soviet attack on West Germany.

The first third of the book therefore is all about establishing the context in which the offensive took place, why it was planned and how it was planned. The conventional idea about the Ardennes Offensive is that Hitler thought it up on September 16th, when he announced it to the commanders who would lead the operation. As Caddick-Adams shows though, Hitler had from almost the start of the fighting in Normandy aimed for a decisive counterattack against the Anglo-American forces landed there, there had been attempts to do so but ultimately it wasn’t until the Germans had been driven out of France and Belgium that there was an opportunity to do so. Once the situation had stabilised, both the target of Antwerp as the Ardennes as the sector to attack through made sense. Antwerp was the closest harbour to the front the Allies had, only recently opened. Without it, supplies needed to come all the way from Normandy and Bretagne again and it was this logistic strain that had stopped Allied progress in the first place. Doing it through the Ardennes, repeating the success of May 1940 made sense both psychological as military. It was a quiet sector, undermanned and with a number of green divisions just arrived in theatre. If it could be done by surprise and if it could count on the absence of Allied air support, the operation had a chance of succeeding, at least in its initial goal, crossing the Meuse.

Not that many of the actual commanders believed that was possible, let alone reaching Antwerp, but this was 1944 and Hitler was in no mood for dissent after having almost been killed in a Wehrmacht plot. A more realistic plan would’ve been to try and encircle the American troops in the Ardennes and at the border with Germany, to try and destroy 15-20 divisions that way to buy time to prepare the defence of Germany, but that was rejected. To be fair, such a success wouldn’t have mattered much, only postponed the inevitable. Only if Hitler’s plan succeeded and had the effect of tearing apart the western allies would Germany have a chance at a negotiated peace. As Caddick-Adams shows, this was an idle hope. Both the goal and the effects it would have were unrealistic. Even getting to the Meuse, basically the start line for the drive to Antwerp would require a miracle, everything going to plan and the Allied responding exactly like Hitler wanted them to. But it didn’t and they didn’t and by the end of the first day it was already clear that it would not work.

Ironically it might have been the paranoid security measures Hitler insisted on to keep the operation a secret that both made it such a surprise to the Allies and led to its ultimate failure. For various reasons, the usual intelligence the Allies relied upon were already less effective now the enemy was in its homeland. No need for encrypted radio broadcasts if you can use your secure telephone lines for example. At the same time, the actual participants in the operation were kept in the dark as long as possible. Initially only the highest commanders of the offensive were in the loop, while the average soldier was only informed just before the offensive started. There was little opportunity therefore for anybody to spill the secret, but it also meant the troops were ill prepared for the actual fight. Worse, with Hitler forbidding reconnaissance efforts or anything that could give away the game, the Germans were also much less informed about the Allied positions and strengths than you would’ve wanted to be.

When it comes to the actual battle, it becomes clear almost from the start that it would fail. Initial resistance is much harder than the Germans realised and the highly optimistic targets for the first day are reached almost nowhere. Worse, the Allied response is much quicker than Hitler had anticipated. Much of the credit for that Caddick-Adams gives to Eisenhouwer, who acted decisively from day one to get reinforcements to the front and to get the shoulders of the offensive stabilised in order to counter attack. With the failure to get through the Ardennes as quickly as was needed to be able to cross the Meuse and start the true offensive, the fighting became a war of attrition which the Germans would always lose. Ultimately it set the Allies’ plans for the invasion of Germany back a couple of months, but in return many of the elite troops and weapons they would’ve faced otherwise had already been destroyed in the Bulge.

I started reading this book because I went on holiday to the Ardennes with my family, visiting the Bastogne War Museum there, but also because of the excellent series of Battle of the Bulge programmes the Youtube channel WW2TV ran in early December. If you want to get a taste of Peter Caddick-Adams writing, then watch the presentation he did for that channel on 10 Facts about the Battle of the Bulge everyone should know. I really like the methological way Caddick-Adams sets out his vision on the Offensive and why it was doomed to failure in this book and if you want a one volume overview of the campaign this is the one to get. I would however recommend that you keep both Wikipedia and Google Maps handy to look up things, because it can be a bit confusing at times. Viewing the battlefields on Google Maps gives a better grasps at the geography and flow of the battles, while Wikipedia is handy to look up some of the less explained details.

Nuclear Nightmares — Nigel Calder

Published on March 28, 2020Leave a comment

Cover of Nuclear Nightmares

Nuclear Nightmares: an Investigation into Possible Wars
Nigel Calder
168 pages including index
published in 1979

To distract myself from the current state of the covid-19 ravaged world, I read this cheery little treatise on the machinery for nuclear war. Many many years ago, sometime in the early eighties, I bought the Dutch edition for a guilder at a church fair. And boy was it worth it: I had nightmares for years. Not that you needed much to have nuclear nightmares in the early eighties; if you ever wonder why late Gen-Xers and early millennials are so cynical, it’s because we grew up with the idea that the nuclear holocaust could happen every minute just because some world leader was a bit too gung ho. Or some seemingly small mistake makes the Soviets think an American missile barage is on its way and this time there isn’t a junior officer brave enough to wait for confirmation before he launches a counterstrike…

But that is not the nightmare that Nigel Calder sketches in this book. His is a technocratic world, a world of rational men tending carefully balanced machinery designed to deliver megadeath on the enemy. Men who do not want to murder millions of people, but who will do so if and when it is asked of them. A world full of acronym littered dry, bureaucratic language that conceals the existentialist horror at the heart of it. An orderly world that calmly makes plan to destory or cripple the enemy’s ability to wage nuclear war, that worries about the vulnerability of MIRVED Minutemen III and whether they were safe enough and good enough to hit back at the Soviets after a first strike. Can we depend on the survivability of our systesm to give our leaders time enough to think about whether they want to strike back?

And then no two years later you got a fake cowboy in the White House talking about the Evil Empire, mentally disintegrating on the job and joking on live tv that the bombs will drop in five minutes. All while promoting implausible future wonderwaffen that would make America safe from nuclear attack forever.

And on the other side, a succesion of half dead paranoid survivors of Stalin convinced the west could and would attack them any minute. For all the Western hawks worrying about Soviet plans for world domination, more concerned with Dmitri in Leningrad finally getting a fridge and colour television, but worried that the imperialistic west was plotting to abuse a period of weakness.

But even when Calder was writing his book, he was chronicling an illusion. The neat, orderly world of calm dispassionate technocrats making brilliant plans for the end of the world was fake. The reality is shown in a much more recent book, Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control. In reality, there were at least half a dozen incidents in which an American nuclear weapon would’ve detonated on American ground but for a bit of luck, where nuclear bombs are safeguarded with nothing more than a simple bicycle lock, where instead of intricate control mechanisms and the decision to launch made only at the highest level, any Italian soldier could’ve launched a leased American nuclear missile because there were no safeguards.

In hindsight, I’m not sure if Schlosser’s reality wouldn’t have frightened me more than Calder’s already terrifying portrait of a mechanism that could sleepwalk into nuclear war. What comforts me is that the actual military commanders involved at the time seemed to think a nuclear war would never happen, that the entire idea of the Cold War turning hot was a fantasy. Just read the reactions of senior Warsaw Pact commanders (PDF) to the idea of actually going to war and how likely that had been. If only I had know that in 1984, having nightmares every time the news was about arms limitation negotiations or tensions in Europe.

Of course, within a decade this whole system would be obsolete, that existential threat vanquished, the whole complex revealed to be irrelevant, as the people of Eastern Europe rose up and overthrow those seemingly invincible ‘socialist’ dictatorships. That seventies idea that the only choice the world had was between an uneasy detente between twho hostile systems or nuclear annihilation that sets the tone for Calder’s book was shown up to be false by the actions of ordinary people, completely powerless to do what it was built for, safeguard the existence of its masters’ world system.

The late 1970s were a strange time, the Soviet Union slowly rotting from the inside out while the lunatics of Team B –the people who thirty years later would bring you the War on Iraq — were busy screaming their heads off that America was doomed because the commies were so much better armed and so much more ruthless. All that was fake, but at the time we didn’t know better. All the clever clogs and military commentators really thought that the West was losing the Cold War, that our vulnerabilities meant a nuclear war was inevitable if we didn’t want to go Red. So much of eighties pop culture is steeped in that American paranoia, from Red Dawn to Pournelle’s CoDominion stories where detente was interstellar. Meanwhile here in Europe we grew up knowning our towns were just a megaton apart from each other and we were busy cataloging the likely nuclear targets near our home towns.

A real great time to grow up in. Never thought I’d make it to adulthood, but here we are.

Furies — Lauro Martines

Published on December 15, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Furies

Furies: War in Europe 1450 – 1700
Lauro Martines
320 pages, including index
published in 2013

A lot of history books about war and warfare, even when they look at the impact war had on wider society, on the civilians and soldiers caught up in it, are remarkably clinical and dry about the violence it brings with it. Not so Furies: War in Europe 1450 – 1700. Before it’s good and well started, you get the first grizly massacre to process, no horrid detail spared, all the better to prepare you for the rest of the book. This is not an easy read, not your average military history wankfest, this is a book with a message and that message is that war in Early Modern/Renaissance Europe was hell, a total war where nobody cared if you lived or died.

That period from roughly 1450 to 1700 was one in which a military revolution took place, with Europe emerging from feudalism and war as a noble pursuit for knights and aristocrats giving way to mass warfare by any means necessary. It was a revolution brought about through the introduction of gundpower weapons making possible new ways of making war, as well as the growing strength of the emerging European nation-states. Add to that increasing religious schism and you have a recipe for warfare on an apocalyptic scale and Martines is not afraid to show what that meant on the ground, for the people caught up in the war.

The first chapter therefore is a mosaic of war waged across the period, showcasing the horrors of war. It’s beat after beat of violence and horror, laid out in quick scenes, foreshadowing the themes of the other chapters. It’s not as intense as some of the descriptions Martines offers in later chapters, but still makes for uncomfortable reading. If you get queasy reading this, the rest of the book is not for you.

In his introduction Martines puts forward his thesis of the armies of this period as “frail monsters”, prone to melt away through desertion, disease or lack of pay. That last one especially. As armies got bigger and bigger and wars more expensive, states ran their ability to finance them right to the ragged edge and quite often the soldiers in the field were the last to be fed, let alone paid. Which in turn meant they were that much more likely to plunder their way around the country, whether or not it was their own or the enemy’s. Indeed they were expected to live off the land, as the required infrastructure to feed what was arguably a mobile town on a level with the largest cities in Europe of that time just wasn’t there.

Most soldiers at the time being professionals anyway, an Europe wide brotherhood of mercenaries, with little love for the countries and princes they nominally fought for. Of course, a great many of those professionals didn’t exactly volunteer to become soldiers, but had been forcibly drafted. Whether professional or drafted, as soldiers they were subjected to what was in theory a strict discipline, with harsh punishments for ill discipline and especially desertion, but with enforcement sporadic.

Harsh through life in the army was though, Martines makes it very clear life for any unhappy civilian caught in the army’s claws was much worse. Whether trapped in a siege, or forced to house soldiers in your village, or just robbed, raped and killed, civilians almost always came out worse when encountering soldiers. They did occassionally get their own back though; any wounded soldiers left behind when an army moved on would surely be killed once it was out of sight.

After the first chapter, Furies moves from subject to subject through European history, looking at the sacking of cities, sieges, how armies are like mobile, dying cities in this period, plunder, the fate of villages in the path of an army, the growing influence of religion in war, weapons & princes and the emergence of the state, not necessarily in that order. Throughout it Martines emphasises the suffering and violence war meant, without becoming prurient.

Apart from wanting to foreground the suffering war brought with it, Martines also wants to show how war made the state, how the need for princes to grow their armies also meant the power of the state grew with it. As countries searched for the edge in financing their tax structures were strengthened, as princes had to command their armies more the power of their aristocracy lessened. The chaos that war created helped the state in this respect, as long as it wasn’t consumed by it.

Furies is ultimately only an introduction to a complex subject, as Martines himself is the first to admit. What I liked most about it was its point of view, never shying away from the reality on the ground. It’s a much needed corrective to some of the more bloodless academic treasises covering the same subject.

Kingtiger Heavy Tank 1942-1945 — Tom Jentz & Hilary Doyle

Published on June 29, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Kingtiger Heavy Tank 1942-1945

Kingtiger Heavy Tank 1942-1945
Tom Jentz & Hilary Doyle
48 pages
published in 1993

Osprey is one of the largest publishers of war nerd and wargaming nerd books in the world, publishing books since 1969. They pulbish roughly a dozen series, each focusing on a specific range of military subject; the New Vanguard series in which this was published is about military equipment and vehicles, but not airplanes. Kingtiger Heavy Tank 1942-1945 was the first book published in it and set the tone for the series.

The focus here is on the machine, not so much on how it was used, so there are a lot of pages about the development of the Tiger II, chronicling the minor and major differences between subvariants. Lots of details about armour thickness and gun lengths and calibres and such. Of course there’s only limited room for this in a 48 page book, much of which is also taken up by the drawings and pictures that are the main attraction, but Tom Jentz and Hilary Doyle are both very thorough writers. It’s only at page 36 that we get to the operational history of the tank.

But of course the main draw, pun intended, of these books is the artwork, in the very capable hands of Peter Sarson. Every New Vanguard book is build around the cut away illustration on the middle pages, but I personally like the three view diagrams on the preceding and following pages better. Sarson gives a good impression of the sheer mass and brute strength of the Tiger II. these are big tanks and they look it.

Much of what’s in this book is only of interest to real war nerds; the emphasis is solely on the machine, not on how it was used let alone the goals it was used for. Jentz and Doyle do a good job of making the design and production history of the Tiger II understandable. They hit the usual notes of the complicated prehistory of the design, with two competing turrets, the Porsche and Henschel, the latter ultimately winning, as well as the teething problems that the relatively quick introduction of the tank caused. They go on to describe in detail the various production variants, followed by the unit history. In the end you have a good overview of the Tiger II’s history, though it’s still only an introduction. A small library has been written about the Tiger II after all.

Ivan’s War — Catherine Merridale

Published on January 25, 20121 Comment

Cover of Ivan's War

Ivan’s War
Catherine Merridale
396 pages including index
published in 2005

Though things have improved a lot since the end of the Cold War, the Eastern Front is still underrepresented in western histories of World War II. Quite naturally British and American historians have focused mostly on their own countries’ experiences in the war but even so the Russian experience is still under-represented. And often when the Eastern Front is looked at, it is from a German rather than a Russian perspective. German historians, generals and others were quite quick in putting forward their experiences in order to put the record straight in their favour, German sources were much more available to western historians than Russian sources, stuck behind the Iron Curtain as they were. So we got plenty of Konsalik novels talking about poor, intelligent middle class German officers stuck in the hell of the Ostfront facing the Slavic hordes, not so much about the poor Russian soldiers trying to liberate their homelands. What’s more, Cold War ideology, which presented an outnumbered NATO alliance trying to defend itself against the vast communist tank armies poised to overrun Western Europe at any moment, quite easily identified itself with the German experience and was fed by the same German generals that had been defeated by the Russians on how best to fight the bolshevik menace.

So it’s good to see a book like Ivan’s War be published. It’s the first book I’ve read about the Eastern Front that looks at the war there not just through a Russian perspective, but looks at the ordinary soldier’s experiences, somewhat comparable to e.g. Stud Terkel’s “The Good War” about American experiences of WWII. Catherine Merridale went to Russia not just to look at archives long inaccessible to western scholars, but also to talk to the veterans themselves and get their stories. What’s more, she didn’t just show the stories of the common soldiers, but also those of their officers and political commissars too and does so without editorialising. It’s important to hear those stories, to get an idea of what the Great Patriotic War was really like for those who fought it, without seeing it filtered through American or Western European, let alone German eyes for a change.

But, as she makes clear, there are some unique difficulties in writing such a book about Soviet soldiers. Our own western view of World War II may have its distortions, but there never quite was a systemic effort to bring it in line with government ideology, to proof the legitimacy of an entire way of life, which is what happened in Russia. From the start of the war certain embarassing truths have been airbrushed away and have only been open for discussion in the last few decades and even then it’s controversial. Many of the veterans themselves have completely embraced the idea of WWII as the Great Patriotic War, with everybody standing firm behind Stalin. The realities of their wartime experiences has often been replaced by this much more comforting myth.

The reality was of course that the Soviet Union was completely unprepared for the German attack, struggled for a long time to come up with the right strategies and tactics to stop and defeat the nazis, that Stalin like Hitler would later send hundreds of thousands of hard to replace soldiers to death or captivity by ordering them to defend the indefensible. The lifes of ordinary soldiers never was a real consideration in the general staff’s plans, while equipment and weaponry was often lacking, especially in the early years with the USSR still on the defence.

The average soldier and officer both therefore had a much harsher time of it then their western or even German counterparts. He or she — because many more women fought in the Russian armed forced than they did in any other army — didn’t often even have the comfort of the company of friends and comrades, because the casuality rate was so high that the sort of close knit platoons familiar from Hollywood war movies rarely could happen. It’s no wonder therefore that many veterans after the war rather believed the governmentally ordained myths than their own realities, especially after the war receded further and further into memory.

Ivan’s War is a good corrective to the standard, German inspired view of the war on the East Front of technologically superior nazi superwarriors against overwhelming Asiatic hordes of barbaric soldiers who knew no pain or fear winning the war just through sheer numerical weight. It gives the Soviet soldier a face, an identity other than that of the enemy that first the nazis and then our own Cold War ideology wanted to reduce him to.