"The Greatest Force" by Marcus Gibson

[edwest2]

A brief review posted on WW2TV:

I bought the book and have read much of it. Disappointed. There is very vanishingly little archival citation; it relies on secondary sources. Where those disagree, he cites only the ones that support him.

Biggest error so far is that Chapter 4 is based on a simple mistranslation: Gibson thinks he is discussing the "Zulieferungskrise", citing Adam Tooze's brief discussion of it in Wages of Destruction. But Gibson translates "Zulieferungskrise" as a "spare parts crisis", not "subcomponents crisis" - the latter is correct and what Tooze uses. This is not semantics: The subcomponents crisis was a real dynamic in which Germany had expanded its manufacture of finished products (airframes, engines, tanks, trucks, etc) but had not ensured the same investment into the small producers of subcomponents required to enable those "finishers" to do their jobs. Tooze argues that the RAF's Ruhr Campaign had disproportionate impact on the subcomponents manufacturers, something that historians had underestimated. Because of Gibson's mistranslation, his Chapter 4 focuses primarily on Germany Army/Luftwaffe spare parts and maintenance problems. Hopefully it's obvious how wrong this is. A tank engine, for example, is a "spare part" but is most definitely not a subcomponent as discussed by Tooze. Engine manufacturing was one of the German industries least impacted by bombing, despite Germany often lacking spare engines (especially for tanks). That German lack was due to bad planning decisions about producing spare parts vs. finished products, not about the Zulieferungskrise. Gibson's sloppiness has him thinking that he's developing Tooze's thesis but he is talking about something totally unrelated. What's annoying about this, for someone who spent time and money on the book, is that any research into the German archives would have shown Gibson this fact. But Chapter 4 has only one German archive citation, and I'd bet he lifted that from Tooze or another author rather than digging into it himself.

In general, this is an analytically confused and frustrating book. His arguments frequently run at cross-purposes. He says the German aircraft production numbers are fictional, for example, and rejects the notion that the difference between combat losses and production is the ridiculous rate at which undertrained German pilots crashed planes in training/delivery (a point highlighted/accepted by Philips O'Brien and others). But then later he's extensively discussing how bad the German pilots were, including that they crashed so many planes outside combat. Well which is it?

He casts doubt on the US and British Strategic Bombing Surveys (including by pointing out that the BBS hired W.H. Auden and that he was gay), but frequently cites their conclusions.