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Of course, Hanson might do better considering the lessons of history if he actually was studying history the way it really happened, instead of the way that he imagines it to have happened. For example, he discusses the delay in closing the Falaise Gap. To review, after the Allies invaded Normandy, and spent weeks fighting their way through the hedgerows, a plan was developed to use the single most concentrated bombing attack of the war to blow a major hole in the German lines in front of the Americans. The Americans would then move two infantry divisions into that hole to stabilize the sides, and then push several armored divisions through to exploit it. The hope (which was amply fulfilled) was that it could break the war wide open, put the Germans on the run, and start things moving towards Germany. Part of that effort was to curl around towards the left to try to cut off a large part of the German forces who had been opposing the US and British forces. But this would involve American and British forces fighting directly towards each other, and when that happens there's always a dramatic danger that the two will meet and keep fighting. This can be terrible for morale; once it happens it can make your troops tentative in the future. So a plan was made, a point selected, and both sides would fight their way to that point. This area was known as the Falaise Gap, and while it was open the possibility existed for the Germans to pull their troops out of the pocket and save them. It was, of course, hoped that as many Germans as possible could be trapped and captured. Hanson describes the event as follows: At the Falaise gap in August, 1944, he begged his superiors to close the salient and exterminate the tens of thousands of trapped Panzers. A confused Omar Bradley (purportedly preferring a "soft shoulder to a broken neck"), fearful of German pressure, let entire enemy divisions escape the tightening noose — some of them Nazis who would go east, be reequipped on the other side of the Rhine, and reappear at the Battle of the Bulge to help kill thousands of Americans. Well, not exactly. What had happened is that the Americans had reached that assigned point but the British were behind schedule and hadn't closed it. What Patton wanted was to keep moving. But there actually was some danger in going forward. To review the positions, Patton commanded Third Army which had been given responsibility for exploiting the breakthrough. To his left was Hodges commanding First Army, which was responsible for holding the shoulder and most of the line on the German pocket, both on the north and south flanks. Patton's forces were the tip of the push to close the gap, but their left was being held by Hodges, and Patton was already in a salient. It may well have been the case that Hodges couldn't hold and that Patton's push might have been attacked in flank. But that wasn't the real danger: the real danger was the possibility of running head on into the British push and having combat with friendly forces. That would have been very bad. We think now of that force as being allied, but in fact such a close cooperation between the armies of two nations was unprecedented in history; and there was a real possibility of it breaking down into suspicion and distrust. On the other hand, while it's true that a lot of Germans did escape before the gap was closed, some 50,000 prisoners were taken. Furthermore, it is completely wrong to say that "tens of thousands of panzers escaped." If the Germans had had that many tanks in there, they would have pushed the landing back into the sea. The Germans never had that many tanks total at one time during the war; at most there were a few hundred operational tanks left in the pocket. But virtually none escaped; they had long since run out of fuel, and their crews simply abandoned them and fled. What escaped was soldiers, on foot; they abandoned their equipment and beat feet. Virtually nothing heavy got out of there. It was a major victory for the Allies; two entire German armies ceased to exist. It's always possible to look back and say "If only they'd done this they could have gotten an even greater victory" but that's the wrong way to look at it. Because of the success in the breakout and surrounding the Falaise pocket, Germany rapidly pulled out of nearly all of France. That's the right way to look at it. It is true that Bradley's decision to hold up Patton for a while is controversial. But it's nothing like as straightforward as Hanson would like us to believe. It has to be remembered that there is such a thing as fog of war; Bradley was there but didn't have as much information about the situation as we do looking back. What is obvious to us now was not at all obvious at the time. (For one thing, Bradley had a reasonable expectation that the British would push forward faster than they actually did.) Hanson has also been watching the movies too much. It's true that Patton (again) wanted to keep moving east at the end of the war, but it is not true that he was "at the head of the largest and most lethal army in American history". In actuality, the United States was nearly fought out; the citizens were sick of the war and wanted it to end. You cannot fight a war unless it's supported at home. Again, on retrospect it's easy to see how it might have changed the course of the Cold War had he continued to move forward, but it wasn't politically possible. For another thing, it's not correct that his army was "the most powerful" in the theater. It was more powerful than the Germans, but not necessarily more powerful than the Red Army. Among other things, the Red Army was more numerous, had more tanks, and their tanks were better. The Americans, on the other hand, had more and better artillery and had more and better aircraft. But on balance, it's likely that a head-on confrontation between the two at that point would have gone to the Russians. (Let's give credit where credit is due: the Red Army defeated the Wehrmacht. We helped, but they did most of it.) And had the Americans moved beyond the agreed-to finish line (like at Falaise) there was a possibility of such combat either accidentally or deliberately. Taking a different mistake in WWII, Hanson is to some extent correct but takes his second-guessing much too far. In this case he's talking about the attack on Pearl Harbor and criticizes Japanese Admiral Nagumo (and indirectly Admiral Yamamoto) for not sticking around for a couple of weeks to finish the job. Again, it's not quite that straightforward. To review, the Japanese made two airstrikes on Pearl Harbor. The first went off textbook perfect, with negligible losses for the Japanese. But the second attack, a couple of hours later, was not as good; the Americans were alerted and their anti-aircraft fire was not totally ineffective. Also, a few American fighters managed to get up to oppose the second attack and did shoot down a few Japanese planes. The big mistake was to not attack the tank farm which contained the fuel needed to support the fleet; had they taken that out, it would have forced the US to pull its fleet back to San Diego. So I believe that Nagumo should have ordered a third strike and then pulled out. (Nagumo was a bumbler, but not in the way that Hanson says.) But Hanson goes much further than that: After December 7, 1941, had Admiral Nagumo's Japanese fleet steamed for another two weeks off Hawaii, all the while repeatedly bombing Pearl Harbor, destroying critical fuel depots, hunting down the two sole aircraft carriers in the Pacific, and incinerating the port facilities — before moving on to the West Coast to attack San Francisco and Los Angeles — America may have been on the defensive well into 1944. That's sheer fantasy. For one thing, it wasn't a matter of "hunting down the three (!) remaining carriers"; it may well have been the American carriers hunting Nagumo. Remember, this was the very first major carrier battle of the war and no-one yet knew what carriers were really capable of -- theirs or ours. It took a few months before either side became sufficiently experienced in carrier operations before a full-out carrier-versus-carrier operation would take place at the Coral Sea. Nonetheless, had Nagumo remained in the area, Halsey would definitely have brought his two carriers back into the area and begun to hunt for Nagumo, and it might well have gone very badly. Moreover, the airfields near Pearl Harbor were worked over, but the Hawaiian Islands were lousy with air fields and it wasn't practical for the Japanese to take them out. New warplanes could have been rushed into the theater in a couple of days (by air), especially B-17 heavy bombers. And there was always the threat of US submarines, which would certainly have been out in force looking for the Japanese. (It should be pointed out that over the course of the war that American submarines destroyed many Japanese carriers. At the battle of the Philippine Sea, two of the three Japanese carriers which were lost were destroyed by American subs.) The idea of moving past Hawaii and attacking the American West Coast is a classic mistake of an armchair strategist. (I, too, am such but I'm a bit more realistic than Hanson...) That's because it ignores the logistical problem: Nagumo didn't have the fuel and supplies and cargo ships to do anything like that. Surely Hanson wouldn't suggest a one-way trip after which the Japanese fleet (including all six of their big-deck carriers) should be abandoned from lack of fuel? But that's what would have happened. It's easy to move little markers around on a map fifty years after the war, ignoring such minor details as fuel consumption; it's much more difficult to move real units around on the ocean (or land). But the most important objection to this is that Hanson has lost sight of the strategic goals of Japan. Japan never intended to defeat the US, and it absolutely required capturing the oil fields of Indonesia; they couldn't send their carriers east against the US because they were desperately needed to push south against the Dutch in Java. (Not to mention to nullify Wake Island, and to support the attack on Guam and the Philippines and... If the Japanese had moved their carriers east against the coast of the US, they might not have captured those critical oil fields -- and the war would probably have ended in the Pacific in 18 months (that being all the oil they had stored up). Hanson demonstrates again and again a concentration on the grand tactical with no vision at all of the strategic and logistical. He complains about President Bush Sr's decision to not press on to Baghdad in the Gulf War. That's another case of 20-20 hindsight. The decision was not so straight forward. For one thing, at the time Iran loomed much larger as a danger. Iraq and Iran were seen as both being enemies of the US, but as enemies of each other they tended to neutralize themselves. It was not at the time seen as desirable to eliminate Iraq for fear of overly strengthening Iran, with the possibility of the Iranian-style Islamic Revolution cascading out into ther neighboring Arab nations and causing a political catastrophe. The intent of the war was to cripple Iraq for 10 years, while leaving it sufficiently strong to continue to neutralize Iran -- and that was accomplished. (To a great extent, Iraq is still crippled, but Iran never did threaten its neighbors.) Second, the war to liberate Kuwait could not have been fought without substantial political support from Arab nations. They committed ground forces (and lots of them) but the real point was that this made it an Arab-versus-Arab war (with one side being helped by the Americans) instead of an Americans-versus-Arab war, in the eyes of the people of the Arab world. Had it been an American-versus-Arab war, there might have been political unrest and revolutions. So we had to have the cooperation of nations like Syria and Egypt and of course Saudi Arabia. But their price for that cooperation was that we would not take Iraq out. Had Bush ordered American troops Northwest to Baghdad, it's difficult to say what the Arab forces who had been involved up to that point might have done, let alone the Saudi government which controlled the territory through which the necessary supplies would have had to have flowed (not to mention supplying the vast amounts of water our armies needed). Finally, there's that piddling detail of supply again: the US forces didn't have enough on hand to continue the war the way Hanson wanted us to. He is yet again movi 
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