Word: wilmot
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German Documents. Neither thesis is new, but Author Wilmot has fortified his arguments with something more than hindsight opinion. He seems to have made more thorough use of captured German documents than any other writer on the war; and the list of officers, Allied and enemy, with whom he has talked, reads like a Who's Who of the war in Western Europe...
...Because Wilmot knows that Germany's General Model was guarding the Ruhr in September 1944 with scraps of beaten units and only enough tanks (239) for one armored division (the Allies could have mustered twelve divisions), he is confident that Monty would have broken through had Ike turned him loose. The German generals are on Wilmot's side of the argument. Says Major General Blumentritt, Model's chief of staff: "Such a breakthrough . . . would have torn the weak German front to pieces and ended the war in the winter...
Stalin's Architects. What Bradley and Patton did in Normandy and after, says Wilmot, was made possible by Montgomery's canny generalship around Caen that enabled the Americans to break out. Only occasionally is Monty chided for caution; in the end his virtues completely swamp his faults. Bradley gets sterner treatment. Heavy U.S. casualties during the Normandy landings, says Wilmot, were largely the result of Bradley's refusal to use British-invented armored weapons and machines that helped cut British losses to a minimum. Bradley declined to use the British "Crabs" (flailing tanks that could smash...
...Wilmot pays handsome tributes to Eisenhower's genius as an Allied coordinator, but in his opinion, Ike frittered away his strength, failed to control Bradley and Patton when they were wrong, and above all lost the chance...
Writing of Yalta with the perspective of the past half-dozen years, Wilmot tries hard to be fair to Roosevelt, but is distressed by F.D.R.'s naive belief that "Uncle Joe" would keep his promises. Shrewdly, he points out that the meeting took place after Hitler had shaken up the Allies in the Ardennes and when the Russian armies had the Germans on the run in the East. Through Yalta, Unconditional Surrender, and the green light to Stalin in Central Europe, thinks Wilmot, the West gave Stalin what it had denied to Hitler. The Struggle for Europe will convince...