Trial and Error115Historians turned on the generals in kind. Eisenhower Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany: 1944�945 (1981) by the distinguished and inential military historian Russell F. Weigley offered the senior American military commanders decidedly mixed reviews. Others were equally critical and not just of GI generalship. The hting character of Americans came under e. No book advanced this thesis more stridently than Martin van Creveld Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939�945 (1982), arguing that the combat effectiveness of units in the Wehrmacht was much higher than in the American Army. In a way, they had easy pickings. There was a great deal of uncritical scholarship to go after. Post-Vietnam scholarship killed one myth, only to try and replace it with another. If America military prowess had been wanting, something had to account for victory. John Ellis, in Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War (1990), summed the answer up in his title. In what he called a adical reappraisal,�Ellis argued America and its Allies proved victorious principally due to the weight of their material superiority and little more. There was no room for genius of any kind in Ellis narrative. But it was no more accurate an assessment than the stories it attempted to supplant. History built exclusively on ding or ignoring faults is just bad history. Real war is much messier. The tale of the Normandy campaign after landing on Omaha offers ample evidence. The story of how the Americans broke through the German defenses may offer the best example of all.THE BREAKOUTBradley plan for breaking out of Normandy earned a scene in Patton, which is no surprise because Bradley book A Soldier Story was used to help shape the script, and the general served as an advisor on the m. In the scene, Bradley (Karl Malden) briefs Patton (George C. Scott) on the plan for the breakout of Normandy, Operation Cobra, and offers Patton the command of the ld army that would be established after the operation succeeded. It was, in some ways, an odd choice of events to be included in the m. Patton played no role in shaping the plan for Cobra. In fact, he was rather critical of Cobra, recording in his journal that it was eally a very timid operation.� It was not a moment that Patton would have thought particularly signiant. But, perhaps it was not so strange for Bradley. For the senior commander of U.S. ground forces in Europe, it was perhaps his est hour in command, though not one without ws. Cobra was an achievement to which neither the myths before nor after Vietnam do it adequate justice. In fact, it debunks both of them. And it was
