Benoit Lemay

Written by a French-Canadian historian of who I'd like to know more, while this book feels a little uneven on the strictly operational level of military history that is not the main point. The main agenda here is to place the higher military leadership of the German Third Reich back in the context it so desperately tried to escape after defeat in World War II; a pillar of the Hitlerian regime that was willing to sacrifice professional integrity so long as its supposed caste privileges were honored. The Manstein depicted can be seen as a man so driven by ambition that he willfully blinded himself to all the crimes he helped to enable; Lemay does little to disguise his contempt and one suspects that this attitude is even more evident in the original French edition of 2010.

As mentioned, my criticisms of this book tend towards the more strictly military side of things. The Polish air force was not destroyed on the ground in 1939 without warning. Lemay's phraseology regarding the German breakthrough in returning mobility to warfare in 1939-1940 suggests that he hasn't quite grasped the new operational thinking on just what the "blitzkrieg" was really about. It would also be nice to see some of the works of David Glantz in the biography.

However, what would have most strengthened this work is to have considered Isabel Hull's "Absolute Destruction," which is probably the most insightful work to date in terms of putting the roots of German operational expediency into context.… (altro)