World War II, the tabloid version



Sooner or later, anyone who's doing any sort of reading on World War II comes across at least one book by Charles Whiting. The British author was a veritable factory, publishing some 350 works during his lifetime, and a large number were about the war.

Unfortunately, Whiting is not exactly a reliable source. Besides a fairly pronounced prejudice against American generals*, his books have a tendency to slant details in the most dramatic way possible, facts be damned. It's like reading the Sun, with maybe a little more of a slant and a lot less sexy babes. Thus the First Army divisions that were rotated from fighting in the Huertgen Forest area become the "forgotten army" in the Ardennes in Ghost Front, as the title above puts it.

As history, Whiting is unreliable. But he's definitely entertaining. A few lines at random from The Battle of Hurtgen Forest: The Untold Story of a Disastrous Campaign:

A whine. A groan. A sound like a diamond being scratched along a piece of glass. Then the frieghteningly familar, baleful shriek of the German multiple morar was heard. Fingers of black smoke poked their way up into the leaden sky, and suddenly, all was chaos and confusion. The rockets ripped great steaming holes in the earth like the work of gigantic moles. They snapped the trees, flinging their crowns high into the air, and sent huge shards of jagged metal hissing lethally to all sides.

Gotta love it. Just don't necessarily take his word for it.

* Actually, he almost likes Omar Bradley, at least to judge his magazine-article length book on him. But then Brad can be a hard general not to like, even for the British.