Thanks for the fascinating takeaways from “Freedom’s Forge.” I hesitate to add to your array of World War II books, but I recently found Alan Allport's “Britain at Bay” quite stimulating. As you may have read, Allport takes issue, rather entertainingly, with what he calls “the myth of the Shire Folk” — postwar Britons’ self-conception as gentle innocents whose main fault was their unworldliness. (It remains an appealing idea.) Allport also enjoys, maybe a bit too much, busting as many other “myths” about the war as he can.
P.S. I’ve recently been on a mini-binge of books on 1930s Germany (e.g., Andrew Nagorski’s “Hitlerland” and Shirer’s “Berlin Diary”), and I, too, couldn’t help noticing some interesting factual discrepancies between Rebecca Donner’s “All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days,” about the American-born resistance figure Mildred Harnack, and Erik Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts,” which focuses on Harnack’s flamboyant friend Martha Dodd and her father, the U.S. ambassador. “Roshomon” is definitely the operant metaphor.
I read nine or so books about Germany's defeat of France in 1940. The ones written immediately afterward were the worst (wildly exaggerating or even inventing German advantages in manpower and equipment) and the ones written decades later, by which time there were joint French-German commands in NATO were the best. From which I infer that we never really understand anything until it's too late to do us any good. If you want to continue your kick, 9 books is too many, but I recommend Frieser's Blitzkrieg Legend (only book I read that told the story from the German side), Alistair Horne's To Lose a Battle (unsurpassed literary quality), Bloch's Strange Defeat, and Ernest May's Strange Victory. If you read just one, make it Frieser.
Older books also tend to explain the defeat in terms of French decadence; the most extraordinary example is Shirer's Collapse of the Third Republic, in which just about everything that happened in France from 1871 onward is portrayed as somehow contributing to the debacle. Some of the recent books go too far in the other direction, making the German victory seem almost a matter of luck. The fact is that the German army was superior, not in manpower or equipment but in doctrine, and that helped the German generals look like geniuses and the French generals look like idiots.
US didn't subsidize West Germany or Japan into wealth, except in the sense of setting up the conditions for greatly smoothed international trade and security guarantees, which Britain (and most of the world) got as well. Britain got far more Marshall plan aid then Germany did (more then twice as much, despite being a smaller country). The reason Britain got left in the dust postwar was the quasi-socialist command economy they set up after the war, which was only seriously reformed by Thatcher.
Thanks for the fascinating takeaways from “Freedom’s Forge.” I hesitate to add to your array of World War II books, but I recently found Alan Allport's “Britain at Bay” quite stimulating. As you may have read, Allport takes issue, rather entertainingly, with what he calls “the myth of the Shire Folk” — postwar Britons’ self-conception as gentle innocents whose main fault was their unworldliness. (It remains an appealing idea.) Allport also enjoys, maybe a bit too much, busting as many other “myths” about the war as he can.
P.S. I’ve recently been on a mini-binge of books on 1930s Germany (e.g., Andrew Nagorski’s “Hitlerland” and Shirer’s “Berlin Diary”), and I, too, couldn’t help noticing some interesting factual discrepancies between Rebecca Donner’s “All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days,” about the American-born resistance figure Mildred Harnack, and Erik Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts,” which focuses on Harnack’s flamboyant friend Martha Dodd and her father, the U.S. ambassador. “Roshomon” is definitely the operant metaphor.
I read nine or so books about Germany's defeat of France in 1940. The ones written immediately afterward were the worst (wildly exaggerating or even inventing German advantages in manpower and equipment) and the ones written decades later, by which time there were joint French-German commands in NATO were the best. From which I infer that we never really understand anything until it's too late to do us any good. If you want to continue your kick, 9 books is too many, but I recommend Frieser's Blitzkrieg Legend (only book I read that told the story from the German side), Alistair Horne's To Lose a Battle (unsurpassed literary quality), Bloch's Strange Defeat, and Ernest May's Strange Victory. If you read just one, make it Frieser.
Older books also tend to explain the defeat in terms of French decadence; the most extraordinary example is Shirer's Collapse of the Third Republic, in which just about everything that happened in France from 1871 onward is portrayed as somehow contributing to the debacle. Some of the recent books go too far in the other direction, making the German victory seem almost a matter of luck. The fact is that the German army was superior, not in manpower or equipment but in doctrine, and that helped the German generals look like geniuses and the French generals look like idiots.
The US subsidized the UK more than Germany (which was paying out more in reparations than it took in) after WW2.
"Stalin's War" is also not reliable on things like uranium. See Greg Cochran on that.
US didn't subsidize West Germany or Japan into wealth, except in the sense of setting up the conditions for greatly smoothed international trade and security guarantees, which Britain (and most of the world) got as well. Britain got far more Marshall plan aid then Germany did (more then twice as much, despite being a smaller country). The reason Britain got left in the dust postwar was the quasi-socialist command economy they set up after the war, which was only seriously reformed by Thatcher.