Raymond Callahan

All in all this is a very nice synthesis of the last 20 years or so of how the British Army came to fight World War II, with particular emphasis on how command relationships influenced the strategic and operational choices that were made. For Callahan the greatest irony is that the phoenix-like emergence of Bill Slim's 14th Army remains so under-appreciated in terms of importance, as the rise of the Indian Army as a modern force was probably the real death knell of British empire in terms of representing the bankruptcy of British resources. Apart from that the author's biggest questions relates less to the household names such as Brooke, Montgomery & Slim, but to men such as Harold Alexander & Henry Wilson and the issue of whether there was any real substance there, or whether they simply owed their positions in the British command hierarchy due to good relations with Churchill.… (mere)