A remarkable war story told with clarity and wit.
A well-researched military history about how getting your enemy to look in the wrong place can be the key to victory.
Sun Tzu once wrote, “All warfare is based on deception.” This concept formed the basis of Operation Fortitude, a strange undertaking that played a pivotal role in the D-Day landings of World War II. Cambridge historian Downing, author of The World at the Brink, Spies in the Sky, and Churchill’s War Lab, among other works of military history, draws on recently released documents and ably draws all the narrative threads together. The aim was to make the Germans think that the invasion would take place in Pas-de-Calais, not Normandy. The Allies built fake tanks, trucks, and airplanes from wood and canvas; troops marched back and forth, pretending to be a large army, and soldiers pushed out radio signals. The most convincing piece, however, was the “commander,” Gen. George S. Patton. He had established himself as a brilliant tactician but had caused serious problems for Dwight Eisenhower when he slapped several American soldiers suffering from battle trauma. Threatened with exile, he threw himself into the new role with gusto, making speeches and swaggering around with his pearl-handled revolvers and polished helmet. Even when the invasion was underway, some German generals still believed that Normandy was a diversion and the real attack was yet to come at Pas-de-Calais. Downing has a good time with his cast of colorful characters, but he sometimes seems surprised that the ruse was so successful: “A small group of men and women in a few top-secret planning departments, supported by a few hundred model-and-dummy-tank, aircraft-and-landing-craft makers, several hundred signallers, a top American general and his staff…managed between them to keep a German army of 140,000 kicking their heels in the Pas de Calais.”
A remarkable war story told with clarity and wit.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781639367542
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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