Steven H. Newton

The battle of Kursk, fought in the summer of 1943, involved six thousand German and Soviet armored vehicles, making it the biggest tank battle of all time and possibly the largest battle of any kind. Students of military history have long recognized the importance of Kursk, also known as "Operation Citadel," and there have been several serious studies of the battle. Yet, the German view of the battle has been largely ignored. After the war, U.S. Army Intelligence officers gathered German commanders' post-war reports of the battle. Due, in part, to poor translations done after the war, these important documents have been overlooked by World War II historians. Steven H. Newton has collected, translated, and edited these accounts, including reports made by the Chiefs of Staff of Army Group ...… (mer)

I’m no Johnston fan, but fortunately, Newton explicitly limits his assessment of Johnston to his actions in Virginia leading to his wounding at Seven Pines. He insists that we have to judge Johnston’s Virginia campaigns without reference to his later failures in the war. That seems fair, and Newton makes a good case. This is no polemic and no hagiography of Johnston. He offers plenty of criticism of Johnston but also much context. He’s even fair to Jefferson Davis. The writing is excellent, well paced and fluent.

This volume incidentally serves as an excellent book on the Confederate side of the early Peninsula Campaign, especially the battle of Seven Pines. Surprisingly, the battle - the largest in the East at that time - has had no separate book published except for Newton’s own treatment which is out of print and unavailable except at high cost.… (mer)

Seeing as Walther Model is a somewhat notorious figure, even by the standards of the Third Reich, Newton's conclusions are rather interesting. At the very least it seems as though Model was anything but a toady in regards to Hitler, but was so indifferent as to how an end was achieved that it's hard to tell. There is also the matter of his abrasiveness and idiosyncratic command style, which was guaranteed to alienate the General-Staff types who wrote the post-war apologies for the German army, while neglecting to note that Model achieved his commands due to seniority and performance, not through courtiership. Still, despite Model's ability at front-line defense under broken-backed conditions, Newton considers Model to have lacked a real flair for offense and the vision to be a theater-level commander. Finally, Newton believes that Model's suicide was less about honor and more the case of a hollow man who lacked the character to continue when his world collapsed; though this made him a convenient scapegoat for the aforementioned post-war apologists.… (mer)