TAKING BERLIN

The author of Taking Paris returns with a look at how World War II progressed in Europe after the D-Day landings.

Unquestionably, the fight for the Nazi capital was an epic confrontation and a crucial element of the ending of the war. Yet popular historian Dugard, co-author of Bill O’Reilly’s Killing series, examines that part of the story only glancingly, offering a brief, desultory section near the end. Instead, the author focuses on the Allied push across Western Europe, starting with D-Day and including the disastrous Operation Market Garden and the Ardennes Offensive. All of these events, significant as they are, have been covered better before, whether as official history, memoir, or analytical commentary. Dugard reiterates the antagonism between Montgomery and Patton, a conflict that ran so deep it almost derailed the entire Allied effort. But this is also well-traveled territory. Dugard seeks to inject new material via colorful figures like journalist Martha Gellhorn, but her wartime adventures have already been recounted extensively—not least by her. The author also notes that there was an Allied plan to beat the Russians to Berlin with an airborne troop drop, although it never came to fruition. This is hardly a secret: There is a reference to it in Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers, among other works. One waits for Dugard to spring a surprise, in the form of new documents or a fresh perspective, but it never comes. He barely mentions the Russian army that actually took Berlin, and the eventual move by American and British forces into the western part of the city, the real start of the Cold War, receives no coverage. The postwar fate of Berlin was settled largely at the Yalta Conference, not by Patton or Montgomery. Anyone interested in more rigorous histories of this period have plenty of other options, including those of Antony Beevor, Peter Caddick-Adams, and Rick Atkinson.

For WWII neophytes.