A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

When Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London from the Mediterranean Theater of Operations in January of 1944 to take command of the Allied Expeditionary Force and carry out Operation Overlord, the site of the invasion - Normandy - had already been selected. Planning for an eventual invasion of France was already well underway by January 15, 1944; before Eisenhower was selected as Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, Lt. Gen. Frederick Morgan of the British Army had already crafted a preliminary invasion plan under his title of presumptive Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Commander (Designate), or COSSAC. After taking the COSSAC assignment in March of 1943, Morgan and his planning staff looked at their maps of occupied Northwest Europe in search of possible landing sites on the northern coast of France, the likeliest target for an invasion due to its proximity to Britain and its southern ports of embarkation. The Pas de Calais was ruled out almost right away even ...

Dust jacket illustration for the U.S. edition of Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge. Design by Matt Yee. (C) 2015 Viking (a Penguin Random House imprint) On November 3, 2015, Penguin Random House UK imprint Viking published Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble , a book by historian Antony Beevor about the biggest battle fought in Western Europe during World War II. Officially known as the Ardennes Counteroffensive, the engagement that began on December 16, 1944 and ended six weeks later is better known by its more popular nomenclature – the Battle of the Bulge. (The battle earned its nickname due to the bulge-shaped salient in Allied lines on situation maps – official and those published in U.S. and British newspapers during that cold, miserable, and violent winter battle.) Published in the U.S. as Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge, the book is Beevor’s first World War II book that focuses on a campaign that was overwhelmingly a struggle between Adolf Hitler’s We...

(C) 2018 Simon & Schuster Whenever I see – or hear – Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan that he will “make America great again,” I can’t help thinking that many of his mostly white, older, and politically conservative supporters are pining for an America that – in their minds – existed between 1945 and 1961: the “age of Eisenhower.” To most Americans who long for a return to those seemingly idyllic years between the end of the Second World War and John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s Inauguration as President on January 20, 1961, the world was a better one than the one we live in now. The United States, with its huge advantage in nuclear weapons over its deadly Communist rival, the Soviet Union, was the undisputed leader of the “free world.” Its industrial capacity was second to none, and as an ascendant Republican Party reclaimed control of the Congress and the White House after 20 years of Democratic dominance, conservatives began the long process of undoing Franklin D. Roosevelt’...

Was Operation Market-Garden, one of the largest airborne operations ever mounted, doomed to fail at the start? Operation Market-Garden, along with the Battle of the Huertgen Forest, was one of the least well-conceived military operations carried out by the Allies in the Western Front. It’s all a question of bridges….. Market-Garden was the brainchild of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, who had won renown as the victor of the Second Battle of El Alamein (October 23-November 11, 1942), where he commanded the British Eighth Army. Known as “Monty” by his many admirers and detractors, in 1944 he was Britain’s most popular general due to his victories over Field Marshal Erwin “the Desert Fox” Rommel in North Africa, his successes in the ensuing invasions of Sicily and Italy, and for his handling of Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, on June 6, 1944 and afterwards. A veteran of World War I, Monty was a firm believer in training, planning, and carefully planned “se...