Germany and the Axis Powers: From Coalition to Collapse (review)

The title encapsulates the content well. This is not a book about German puppets. The author cuts to the core of his subject by focusing only on those Axis countries with sufficient weight and independence to merit the description "power" and therefore to require some degree of German accommodation with their national interests—Italy, Romania, Finland, and Hungary. He then studies their bilateral military relationships with Germany (there being no other significant military relationships within the Axis) and drops each in turn as it declines to puppet status or defects. As a result, the period covered most intensively begins with Italy's entry into the war in June 1940 and effectively ends when Romania and Finland drop out of the Axis camp in August-September 1944.

In order to establish the effectiveness of the Axis as a military alliance, the author sets himself a number of questions, such as: Did Germany learn anything about the conduct of military alliances from World War I? Was Germany better at conducting coalitions at some levels, or between some services, or in some theatres than others? How capable were the militaries of the minor Axis powers? And so on.

He concludes that the Wehrmacht inherited little expertise in alliance warfare and that the Nazi leadership possessed little inclination to learn. As a result no central Axis command existed, national strategic goals were often divergent and command structures varied between the barely integrated and the hideously complicated. None of Germany's three services particularly distinguished themselves in alliance warfare, the army being especially inadequate in this regard and widely resented by its allies, on whom German training made limited impact. Technology was not readily shared and German weapons deliveries seldom matched expectations, let alone requirements, although to what degree Germany was in a position to supply more is not investigated. The author's conclusion is that Germany was inept at conducting alliances and that the Axis was fundamentally dysfunctional, the few successes in co-ordination only serving to emphasise the wider failures. To this dysfunctionality the Italians and Finns, with their own versions of "parallel" war, and the Romanians and Hungarians, with their bitter rivalry, contributed in full measure.

The author's main source and contribution to the wider literature is previously little tapped primary documentation from the various German military missions to other Axis powers during the war. These authoritatively underpin the backbone of the book—three chapters on wartime military relations with Italy in the Mediterranean and Balkans and three on wartime relations with Romania, Finland, Hungary and Italy on the Eastern Front—which are the likely focus of interest for the lay reader. However, the two opening chapters on the back history of previous German experience with alliances and the comprehensive footnoting throughout will be just as valuable to the specialist. The final two chapters briefly record the dissolution of the Axis and offer a conclusion.

Germany so dominated its European allies that the Axis is rarely studied collectively as a military alliance. Germany and the Axis Powers therefore usefully fills a considerable void.