June 1944; In France, Italy, Eastern Europe and the Pacific, Allied Armies fought Momentous Battles which Decided the War and the Future of the World Itself

Poole, Dorset, United Kingdom: Blandford Press, 1984. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good/Fair. 224 pages. The name of previous owner stamped on front free endpaper. DJ very worn and scuffed Includes Introduction (The Month in Context), Part 1 (North-west Europe and the Mediterranean), Part 2 (The Eastern Front); Part 3 (The War in Asia and the Pacific), and Conclusion (Future Implications). Also includes Glossary and Index, as well as black and white photos, maps, and charts. Hedley Paul Willmott (H.P Willmott) is a widely published military historian, author, former Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has written extensively on modern naval and military history. The author--a military historian and strategist--records and analyzes the vital military events in every theater of the war. This text analyses military events in every theatre of war during June 1944. It offers insights into the effect on Overlord of the Italian campaign and vice versa, and highlights the competition between the US, Britain and the Soviet Union to determine how the Allied forces should best be applied. This is a hardheaded analysis of the battles in June 1944 that decided the war's outcome and determined the shape of the postwar world. In Italy, the Allies achieved their aim of draining Axis resources in a secondary theatre of war, forcing Hitler to commit six more German divisions than the Allies did. But this created only a strategic stalemate that lasted well into 1945. D-Day, the US-British landing in France, was the greatest amphibious operation in history. US-British superiority in numbers and firepower swiftly proved overwhelming, trapping Germany between two fronts and so ensuring her defeat. These battles brought US dominance of Western Europe. However, more than sixty per cent of the German Army was on the Eastern Front. Having staved off the Nazi onslaught, the Soviet Union now launched Operation Bagration, the first operation of the strategic counter-offensive designed to carry the war into Germany. It destroyed Army Group Centre, 25 German divisions, inflicting 300,000 casualties. Willmott writes that the Soviet high command `displayed a formidable level of flexibility, imagination and mastery of logistic and operational procedure at the strategic level'. He observes that the Soviet Union had to liberate Eastern Europe `as an unavoidable part of the process of the defeat of Germany'. The Soviet Union would dominate Central and Eastern Europe. In Asia, the Japanese attacked from Burma into India; the British defeated them at Imphal and Kohima. Japan defeated Chiang Kai-Shek's forces in South China, the Axis' only success in this climactic month. Chiang completely failed, even with huge US aid, to develop armies able to defeat Japan. But this last Japanese success was irrelevant to the wider war; to continue the war, Japan had to control not China but her own seas. US attacks in the Pacific forced Japan to battle in the Philippine Sea, where the US navy won an overwhelming victory. Japan too could not now avoid defeat. The USA would dominate the Pacific, though not Asia's landmass.