Touj ours le lampiste
Sir : I can only assume that Sir Denis Brogan makes his deliberate mistakes for the fun of seeing which of his many admirers catches him out. Perhaps I might be allowed a turn?
He refers to MacArthur's landing at Inchon (your 15 December issue, which has just reached me) as the only 'brilliantly successful landing operation of modern history.' Yet it was followed by one of the worst disasters ever experienced by the us army when, with divided command—MacArthur's personal fault—and faulty intelligence, the Chinese got between them and their main forces, and they only extricated themselves with great difficulty from the trap. In any case, what of the Sicily land- ings and the invasion of Italy, the Normandy land- ings, the many successful American landings during the Pacific war, usually attributed to MacArthur, though perhaps more justly to Admiral Nimitz? All these were not merely successful landings, but led to military victories. Not to leave the opposi- tion out, what of the Japanese landings in the Philip- pines and Malaya, or the German invasion of Norway?
As to his comparison of El Alamein and Stalin-
grad as the 'decisive' battles of the Second World War,- it is true that Sir Claude Auchinleck rarely gets due credit for First Alamein (Alam el Haifa) but it is also true that Montgomery was respon- sible for Second Alamein. Whether or not one accepts Correlli Barnett's thesis of Montgomery's slowness in pursuit, this battle and the North African landings—another successful specimen, surely?—led to the loss of as many troops as were destroyed at Stalingrad. In any case, accord- ing to Guderian, who should know, the really fatal damage to the German army in Russia was inflicted in the disastrous armoured battle at Kursk, a short time later, when they lost almost their entire armoured strength in the east, amounting to about
1,200 of their latest tanks.
Incidentally, like Sir Denis, I was lucky enough in my late history master at school to have been taught the importance of the battle of Malo- Jaroslavets!
Lionel H. Grouse Department of History, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John's. Newfoundland, Canada
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