Anyone read John Mosier?

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

He's written three books that I've read:The Myth of the Great War, The Blitzkreig Myth, and Cross of Iron. All three are somewhat "revisionist" I guess, and they certainly portray the World Wars differently than I'd been taught/read about. Basically Great War suggests that Germans were doing much better than is often believed, and were only soundly defeated on the Western Front by the American Expeditionary Force. The Blitzkreig Myth claims the idea of an armored or airpower breakthrough in WW2 is mostly fallacious. And Cross of Iron discusses how the Whermacht in both World Wars was a better army than those it faced. It also points out the moral failings of the Whermacht, as opposed to the idea that "it was only the SS" that shot POWs and the like.

I was wondering if anyone else had read any of them and if they had any comments. I'd recommend them if you're at the library and see one of them, as they were fairly enjoyable (though they contain a healthy amount of statics, so if you don't like numbers... :help: ).

[TinCow]

I've read The Blitzkreig Myth and would recommend it to all serious WW2 historians. It is certainly revisionist and I suspect somewhat controversial, though I have never seen a discussion of it before. He supports his thesis very well and the facts seem to back him, but for some reason I still had difficulty embracing the idea even by the end. His argument seems to revolve around an essential misinterpretation of what the "Blitzkreig" tactics were and why they worked. The feeling I was left with was that he might be right, but it seemed more like a semantical argument rather than a seriously different perspective on the war. It's been several years since I read it though, so perhaps a re-read is in order.

[Geoffrey S]

Not so certain about how revisionist such views are, though. First, I've always been under the impression that the American intervention was the main (military) cause of the German defeat because they came at a time when all sides were exhausted, and pushed Germany towards revolution. Second, the Blitzkrieg's main use was against enemies who were already politically unstable; it wasn't a breakthrough, but a tactic extremely well-suited to use against such nations as France, Poland and the Netherlands.