Letters to the EditorThe Gift of the Soviets
In his review of Norman Davies’s Europe at War, 1939–1945 (“Stalin’s Gift,” May Atlantic), Benjamin Schwarz writes, “At its most intense, the war in the West was fought between 15 Allied and 15 Wehrmacht divisions.” While I have nothing but admiration for the efforts of the Red Army against Nazi Germany, Schwarz’s description of the Allied war effort in the West is incorrect. During the Battle of France, there were many times more than 15 divisions involved on both sides—the Battle of the Bulge, for example, included about 35 Allied and 26 German division-sized units. Schwarz also ignores a larger point, which is that the Western Allies were engaged in a multifront war, whereas the Soviets were fighting on only one front. U.S. forces, for example, were engaged in several theaters simultaneously, including France, Italy, China, and the Pacific. James F. Schumaker Benjamin Schwarz replies: I didn’t say that only 30 Allied and Axis divisions were deployed in the West, but that the most intense and crucial combat in the West involved 30 divisions. Richard Overy, probably the foremost scholar of the Allies’ war in Western Europe, makes this assertion in his acclaimed book Why the Allies Won, and he defines this period as June through August 1944, when the Allies, facing ferocious German opposition, broke out from the Normandy beachhead (Operation Cobra) and “the battle was still poised.” Neither Overy nor I was thinking of the Battle of the Bulge. (Contrary to James Schumaker’s assertion, the Bulge, fought in December 1944 and January 1945, wasn’t part of the Battle of France, which had ended with the liberation of Paris in August 1944.) The Bulge looms large in the American imagination because the Allies failed to anticipate it, but the Axis effort had clearly collapsed by its second day and didn’t represent a strategic threat to the Allied position—indeed, a delighted Patton, knowing that German forces didn’t have the resources to pull off the offensive, urged allowing them to drive toward Paris, since they would soon literally run out of gas and could then be isolated and destroyed. The Germans could launch that attack, which all their commanders knew would fail, only because of the rapid and temporary shift of crack German armored units from the Eastern Front. (These units had to be quickly returned to the East to counter the Red Army’s siege of Budapest.) Moreover, Schumaker overstates the number of Germans engaged in the battle. Here he’s presumably following the German generals who, in an attempt to appear to fulfill Hitler’s orders for a huge offensive, engaged in what a U.S. Army historian of the battle describes as “a kind of double entry order of battle.” In fact, the Germans deployed just over 17 divisions (most less than full strength)—a total of 200,000 troops. The U.S. did fight in the Pacific as well as in Europe, but wasn’t dividing its vast resources nearly equally between the two theaters. As Overy has calculated, 85 percent of the American effort was dedicated to defeating Germany, only 15 percent to the war with Japan. Deficit Spending
The usually astute Clive Crook misunderstands the U.S. trade deficit (“When the Buck Stops,” May Atlantic). It is untrue that the trade deficit “has to be financed by borrowing.” If, for example, Toyota sells a Camry to an American and uses the sales proceeds to buy more land for expansion of its factory in Kentucky, America’s trade deficit rises without any American borrowing a cent. The trade deficit is not synonymous with debt. Donald J. Boudreaux
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