The German Way of War by Robert M. Citino

Since mid-1941, it had done nothing but add enemies. The Reich had been locked in a conflict with Great Britain since September 1939, one that it tried half-heartedly to end in the summer and fall of 1940. Could the Allies, even with their sheer superiority in materiel and men, pull it off? But for that year to live up to its billing as the “hinge of fate,” in Churchill’s memorable phrase, a fatal blow had to be dealt to the German armed forces, the Wehrmacht. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, before 1942 the Allies never won a victory, and after 1942 they never suffered a defeat. It was, after all, the year of El Alamein in the African theater, and of Midway and Guadalcanal in the Pacific. Still, it is clear that something important happened in 1942. It involved hundreds of millions of human beings, from the freezing cold of the Arctic to the sweltering heat of the Burmese jungle, and the notion that there was a single discrete moment that “turned” it is problematic, to say the least.

This conflict, more than any other before it, was a vast and sprawling set of interlocking campaigns on land, sea, and air. Like much of the received wisdom on the war, however, the concept of its “turning point” requires a certain amount of nuance. That 1942 was the turning point of World War II is one of those “facts” that everyone knows. In 1942, the German Army, turning one last time to its traditional Prussian tactics of maneuver, met its end.

The German Way of War by Robert M. Citino