In this study, the author traces the reasons for the British Army's tactical weakness in Normany to flaws in its training in Britain. The armour suffered from failures of experience. Disagreements between General Montgomery and the War Office exacerbated matters.
In this study, the author traces the reasons for the British Army's tactical weakness in Normany to flaws in its training in Britain. The armour suffered from failures of experience. Disagreements between General Montgomery and the War Office exacerbated matters.
Ulysses Lee's The Employment of Negro Troops has been long and widely recognized as a standard work on the subject. Although revised and consolidated before publication, the study was written largely between 1947 and 1951. If the now much-cited title has an echo of an earlier period, that very echo testifies to the book's rather remarkable twofold achievement; that Lee wrote it when he did, well before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and that is reputation - for authority and objectivity - has endured so well. This is a landmark study in military and social history. As a key source for understanding the integration of the Army, Dr. Lee's work eminently deserves a continuing readership.
The second volume in Dick Taylor’s three-volume illustrated history of the evolution of armored maneuver warfare in the British army covers the period of the Second World War, in which the tank came of age and developed into the principal land weapon of decision. He describes how, during the first half of the war, the British army came close to disaster from the armored warfare perspective and how the bitter lessons of failure were learned in time to deliver success in 1944 and 1945. As well as providing a fascinating overview of the tactical use of armor during the main campaigns, he considers such much-neglected aspects as the role of training and organization, officer selection and recruitment, and the mechanization of other arms. His wide-ranging book also features extensive, well-laid-out tables giving key information about British armor during this period. This expert account quotes heavily from the vivid recollections of soldiers who served in armor, and is not afraid to criticize as well as praise.
This book looks at several troop categories based on primary function and analyzes the ratio between these categories to develop a general historical ratio. This ratio is called the Tooth-to-Tail Ratio. McGrath's study finds that this ratio, among types of deployed US forces, has steadily declined since World War II, just as the nature of warfare itself has changed. At the same time, the percentage of deployed forces devoted to logistics functions and to base and life support functions have increased, especially with the advent of the large-scale of use of civilian contractors. This work provides a unique analysis of the size and composition of military forces as found in historical patterns. Extensively illustrated with charts, diagrams, and tables. (Originally published by the Combat Studies Institute Press)
Discusses the Allied invasion of Normandy, with extensive details about the planning stage, called Operation Overlord, as well as the fighting on Utah and Omaha Beaches.