Sublime

The human heart, and the psychology of the individual fighting man, have always been the ruling factors in warfare, transcending the importance of numbers and equipment. This old maxim held during World War II and I think it will always do so.34

Kesselring, with sixty thousand troops, had held back two Allied armies for thirty-eight days, inflicting twenty thousand casualties at a cost of twelve thousand.48

But he witnessed firsthand the art of direct command. “The commanding General’s method of operation is to announce policies and major decisions in definite terms and then to require his Chief of Staff to see to their execution,”

“Division, corps, and army commanders must be capable of sitting in front of a map and dictating a complete field order,” Conner proclaimed.

M.D.1. was under the direct control of the War Cabinet, for there was no Ministry of Defence at this time, although there was a Minister of Defence — the Prime Minister. It was not surprising, therefore, that those who wanted to disparage the establishment should choose to call it ‘Winston Churchill’s Toyshop’. The toys we produced were rather dang

Believing that Conner was “exceptionally well qualified” to carry out the critical planning functions required of the Operations Section, Palmer resolved to “pry him loose” from the Inspector General. Palmer took his request to Chief of Staff Harbord, who warned Palmer of a potential problem with Conner’s transfer to the Operations Section: Conner

After being briefed by Stirling on an impending attack on Benghazi, and the way that the SAS represented ‘a new form of warfare’ which had ‘awesome potential’, Churchill quoted to Smuts the lines from Byron’s Don Juan: ‘He was the mildest-mannered man / That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat.’ The next day, he summoned Stirling to the Embassy to d

But “an initial American landing without British ground forces offers a real chance that there would be no French resistance or only a token resistance.”55 If the United States was to provide most of the troops for the invasion of North Africa, it was logical that the operation should be commanded by an American. Eisenhower was in London, he was ma