Aspects of World War II

Press, 5 June 1982, Page 16

Aspects of World War II

The Soviet Juggernaut. By Earl F. Ziemke. The Mediterranean. By A. B. C. Whipple. War in the Outposts. By Simon Rigge. Time-Life Books, 208 pp. $19.95 each. (Reviewed by David Gunby) Now firmly established, with more than twenty volumes published, the Time-Life series on' World War II continues to expand with the addition of the three volumes under review. Covering entirely unlike aspects of the war, they are alike in being well-written and obviously, wellresearched. “The Soviet Juggernaut” deals with the war on the Eastern Front between February, 1943, when the Germans won their last major victory of the war, at Kharkov, to February, 1945, when the Russian armies, already on German territory, regrouped for their final drive on Berlin. With, so-massive a subject, no one book can hope to provide a detailed account, but the author of “The Soviet Juggernaut,” by a judicious mixing of intensive coverage of selected battles — e.g. Kursk, the Cherkassky pocket, and Warsaw — and a broad coverage of the rest, provides a lucid and. very readable survey of . the string of Soviet victories which effectively destroyed the German armies in the east.

The second volume, “The Mediterranean,” deals with the predominantly naval war in what Mussolini, with typical afflatus, liked to call “Mare Nostra,” but the British came, rather more colloquially, and accurately, to term “Cunningham’s Pond." And indeed the dominating figure in this volume is Cunningham himself, the right man in the right place if ever there was one. Whether

dealing adroitly with his French counterpart in Alexandria, Godefroy, at the time of the French collapse, or ignoring his timid “advisers” and deciding on a night pursuit of Italians which led to the destruction of three enemy cruisers at Matapan, he dominated events in the Mediterranean. “I should like to be an admiral,” he is reported to have said when, as a boy, he was asked what career he contemplated. The Allies had good cause to rejoice that he was so inclined. If the first volume of this trio deals with land warfare on a large scale, and the second with naval warfare in terms almost as broad, the third, "War in the Outpost,” brings us by total contrast, the minutiae of World War 11. Garrison duty on Socotra, Midway, • or Triniddd, coastguard and weather reporting duties in Greenland or Spitzbergen, communications work in Ascension orCasablanca, or running the railways in Iran: these constitute the bulk of this most interesting volume. , Even those campaigns which are included — in Iraq, Syria, Madagascar, Timor, and the Aleutians — are smallscale, and hence can be covered in considerable , detail. The result is a fascinating close-up view of little-known aspects of World War II and one of the best volumes to appear in the Time-Life series so far. The illustrations are always a strong point in this series, and the three volumes under review are no exception to this. With copious maps and diagrams to complement well-chosen photographs, the books will appeal strongly to the nonspecialist audience for which they are designed.