Review: Cross of Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German War Machine 1918-1945
June 2, 2007
Cross of Iron, by John Mosier.
[rating:4/5]
Mosier claims to puncture the myths surrounding the Wehrmacht and especially their weaponry. He illustrates their inability to produced new and improved tanks, fighters, strategic bombers, on and on. His theory? That it is easier for Britain and France to hype up the power of the German army in both World Wars so they don’t look so bad for losing early on. The words of “Germany’s greatest tank expert”:
In the spring of 1941 Hitler had specifically ordered that a Russian military commission be shown over our tank schools and factories; in this order they insisted that nothing be concealed from them. The Russian officers in question firmly refused to believe that the Panzer IV was our heaviest tank. They said repeatedly that we must be hiding our newest models from them, and complained we were not carrying out Hitler’s order… It was at the end of July 1941 that the T34 appeared on our front and the riddle of the new Russian model was solved.
Mosier also cuts into the idea that the Red Army was the main factor in the Allied victory. He says it was the entrance of the United States, which poured substantial resources into equipping the Soviets.
But the Soviet military establishment was a Potemkin village. Its thousands of tanks did not mean that it had effective armored divisions, nor did its thousands of planes signify that it had a tactical air force. Essentially it was an enormous warehouse, not a modern army. Its doctrines would prove calamitously unsuitable for modern warfare, its officers worse than amateurs, its command and control systems nonexistent, its logistics hopeless, its leaders appallingly incompetent.
On the German advance east:
Opposing all this was the textbook view of warfare. The Germans were not at all happy to discover that the Red Army had not yet run out of men and materiel. The losses were certain astounding: in the first ninety days of fighting, the Soviet Union had two million men killed or missing, out of an initial effective strength of slightly more than three million men. If the wounded were counted in, the Red Army lost over four-fifths of its personnel in ninety days of combat.
Cross of Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German War Machine 1918-1945, by John Mosier.
[rating:4/5]
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2 Comments to “Review: Cross of Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German War Machine 1918-1945”
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Mr. Mosier constantly knocks the technological and engineering achievements of the germans, saying their weapons were sub-par in nearly every area. On the face of it, this seems difficult to believe. At one point Mosier asserts that the german “aircraft industry was never able to move beyond planes like the Me-109 fighter…” I seem to remember that the Focke-Wulf 190 fighter, and the Me-262 jet fighter-bomber were not exactly considered obsolete or sub-par by the allied pilots who had to battle against them
in the latter stages of the war.
I think his point was that development of these advanced weapons systems took time, and the Germans didn’t begin working on the next wave of fighters, etc, until it was too late. he also pointed out the lack of a german long range strategic bomber.
-trent