[Graham Boak]

• Agreed – but totally uncontroversial, I think?
• As above
• Ah, no. I think the blockade and the arrival of the Americans made the German defeat inevitable. See 6. (As an aside, so Monash was the only general, amongst all those on the Western Front, who saw things properly? I think it was more due to the entire staff finally learning the lessons of the preceding years, and being given the tools to put them into practice. And it was the excellent ‘Commonwealth’ infantry….I think your prejudices are showing.)
• Not agreed, but certainly arguable.
• Devastated morale? Arguable again, I think. I haven’t come across it in my readings about RAF thinking postwar, though there may well be some truth in it. How does the concept of this being never forgotten fit with your first sentence in 9? However, the DH 5 was never more than a very minor player, so why mention it?
• Half-decent and few. You appear to have a built-in assumption that the British air support was not effective, which doesn’t seem to be backed by the comments of the time. I don’t know that it has been demonstrated that the German air support, even though it had theoretically more capable aircraft, was actually much more effective.
• see 3 above. The German “all-arms tactics” were not that successful in mid-war. The late German successes were due to changes in their tactics, particularly the Strumtruppen prefiguring the blitzkrieg approach. This inspired the thinking of post-war theorists such as Liddell-Hart: see later.
• The Salamander was not an equivalent to the J-1. It was basically an armoured Snipe. Just as the armoured Typhoon of 1944 was just an armoured version of the 1942 fighter. You seem to have missed this point throughout – the Typhoon was not unarmoured in 2 TAF. However, as demonstrated by the German use (and losses) of armoured Fw.190, the benefit of heavily-armoured aircraft over the battlefield is debatable. The losses due to ground fire are reduced but the resulting aircraft are cumbersome and losses due to enemy fighters go up. Fine if you can rely on total air superiority – as the A-10 can. Without that, you might like to reconsider the value of the Russian armoured CAS aircraft. Over 30000 Il 2s were built, but no more than 5000 were maintained in service throughout the war because of a level of losses that would make Western commanders blanch. Some simple maths suggest that 5000 a/c in front-line service needs a similar number in training and support units, giving an average loss rate of 5000 a/c per year. Half of these will be non-combat, suggesting an AVERAGE combat loss over the whole war (early months of low service numbers and stationary winters included) of over 200 a/c a month. Yes, this does need adjusting to allow for true sortie numbers and utilisation. But so does any simple measure used to denigrate 2 TAF’s Typhoons. Incidentally, this morning I noted a reference to 350 Typhoons lost in the Normandy battles only – not properly statistically referenced, I’m afraid – but see Nick Beale’s comments above.
• Does all the thinking that was carried out after WW1 not count in your book? Just because they came up with different answers to yours does not mean that thinking did not occur. Your derision of Liddell Hart doesn’t seem to be backed by the general adoption of mechanisation, nor by the successes gained using his ideas of indirect approach by generals such as Guderian or Connor. Or, for that matter, Zhukov and Schwartzkopp.
• Much of the disastrous use of the FAA in the early stages of WW2, and its lack of decent types later, was due to the inability of the Admiralty to produce a decent aircraft specification, or use properly the tools it had. Cunningham excepted. As long as the RAF controlled the FAA it was equipped with types that compared well to land-based aircraft – often basically the same types. Look what happened afterwards. Thanks goodness the Army didn’t get control of the RAF – there’d have been less priority given to radar and the design of the defensive networks that saved us in 1940. One very relevant reference may be Futtrell’s The US Force in Korea, where discussion is presented about the US Marine Corps’ very high proportion of CAS, with much lower AVERAGE support provided to equivalent Army units. The USArmy was pressing for dedicated support units: the fallacy of which is well analysed.
• The RAF provided the Army between the wars with the type of support aircraft it was asked for. A lack of joined-up thinking in the British High Command, surely, but a dual failure, not one to be laid at the feet of the RAF alone. The RAF did experiment with dive-bombing in the early 1930s, but came to different conclusions as to its general desirability.
• The Sherman was designed to US requirements, and on its entry to service was an excellent tank, well-balanced in all features. It was retained too long without significant improvements, but I think the US Ordnance Board must carry the responsibility for that, with its own misconceptions. As for the other tanks: I’ve no desire to excessively defend the poor products of the British tank industry, but the main British tank in Normandy was the Cromwell, and this was equivalent to the most common German tank there, the Pz. Mk.IV. Not every German tank was a Tiger, despite impressions given (and clearly received). At the end of the Normandy battles, the US breakthrough on the right, and its sweeping advances across France, could only have been made by fast mechanised divisions and operational practice that Liddell-Hart, Guderian and Rommel would have recognised. It would have been less possible with the slow overweight under-gunned Churchill, no less vulnerable to those deadly German anti-tank guns.
• This really is a series of gross and insulting misrepresentations. It was Coningham and Tedder who worked with the desert Armies to establish all-arms operation, of exactly the kind you glowingly describe, and developed the tactics and co-operation that worked so well then and afterwards. It was Montgomery, with his meat-grinder approach to infantry, who separated the closeness of the staffs for the Normandy operations, leading to some friction during 1944. However, you will find the Army’s own officers criticising the Allied foot-soldier for relying too much on air support before advancing: Tedder was echoing these comments. Neither officer was involved with Bomber Command at all: both were immersed in all-arms co-operation. As for the derisive dismissal of interdiction missions: I refer you back to the references presented in this series of discussions.
• I understand your hypothesis, which at the core has some merit that few would contradict nowadays, but beyond this you are misunderstanding and distorting history to fit prejudices rather than presenting a reasoned case.

Before going overboard on Western Allies BAD Russians GOOD (purely in military terms, of course), it might be worth adding that wherever a post-war Western-trained Army has met a Russian-trained Army on a conventional battlefield, it is the Russian-trained Army that has lost. But then perhaps the post-war Russian equipment and doctrines were not the equal of their wartime counterparts?