Military History is Alive and Well

Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett. A War to be Won: Fighting the Second World War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. xi + 656 pp. Maps, appendices, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $28.00.

As of 1989 more than 70,000 books on the Second World War had already been published, and over the ensuing decade there was no abatement of this flood. ¹ To the contrary, the fiftieth anniversary of the war resulted in an enormous outpouring of new scholarly and popular works on the war, some of which became bestsellers. The process continued after 1995, a fact most clearly illustrated by the popularity of Stephen E. Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany (1997) and Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation (1998).

Many factors account for this continued outpouring and popularity of World War II studies. Full declassification of key archival records did not occur until the 1970s, and the previously unknown material contained in these records, most notably but far from exclusively regarding ULTRA and other cryptographic intelligence, forced a reassessment of numerous wartime events and issues. Furthermore, that reassessment was often undertaken by scholars belonging to a generation that had not lived through the war and that therefore possessed a perspective on it quite different from those who had. But at least as important as these factors was the continuing, enormous impact of this largest of all wars on people's lives and memories, both individual and collective. The aging and passing of the generation that fought the war has only heightened that impact and with it the resulting interest, as children and grandchildren rush to take down the memories of their relatives who lived through and are willing to talk about the war--while they still can. World War II veterans are dying at the startling rate of 1,100 a day. ²

Given this fact, much of the recent interest in the war has focused on the presently "hot" issues of culture and memory. ³ A War to be Won does not. Instead it offers the reader a much more traditional history--on the military course of the war. It is based upon the most up-to-date military history research and scholarship, however, much of which has dramatically revised the original assessments that came out soon after the war ended. Consequently A War to be Won challenges much of this still-standard wisdom about the war. It is also beautifully written by two of the foremost military historians in the field. Furthermore, although it advertises itself as an up-to-date analysis of what is referred to in military history as the "operational" aspects of the war--an area that falls between grand strategy and tactics--in reality it offers much more. In truth it is a comprehensive reassessment of the entire military history of World War II, one that synthesizes decades of recent scholarship on strategy, policy, diplomacy, and military leadership as well as operations per se. It by no means attempts to encompass all or even most of the aspects and findings of the "new" military history. Nor is it as sweeping in its coverage as Gerhard Weinberg's A World at Arms (1994) or Richard Overy's Why the Allies Won (1996), two of the most notable and highly regarded of the recent World War II histories. Yet it clearly joins these volumes in illustrating that military history, much maligned and marginalized in the past few decades by social and cultural history, is alive and well.

Williamson Murray and Allen Millett are very well-known in the field of military history in general, and World War II in particular. Each has authored numerous major works, with Murray focusing on Europe and Millett on the United States. Together they have also edited and contributed essays to the highly regarded three-volume Military Effectiveness (1988), which covers each of the...