Fair point. He did not aim at an operational history, so can't blame him for not delivering one.Richard Anderson wrote: ↑17 Aug 2019, 22:30I think you are being a bit unfair to Richard. It is evident that he was not writing a tactical/operational history and never intended to. He wrote a from the POV of German memoir...and mostly of the Landser, not the genrals. In that sense it is highky impessionistic rather than analytical and I think deliberately so.
But even when writing from what the Landser remembered, I would have welcomed some ability to step back from the testimonies. Hargreaves never showed what the memoirs he used omit or what they infer.
E.g.,
blaming Allied superiority => blaming Luftwaffe inferiority => deflecting the defeat on another service than the army
In the end, his book is a fine compilation of testimonies, but it's not the work of a historian who criticize his sources.