Just finished Storm of War, a one-volume history of WWII written by a Brit with lots of rave reviews from various Brit publications.
Mixed feelings about it, one the one hand it is very good at looking at several different possible outcomes at critical points, and well-researched from a literary/historical point of view, for what that's worth. However, it is dogged with a surprising number of glaring technical errors about major weapons and equipment, the odd paragraph reeling off statistical totals that don't actually add anything informative and valuable to the text, and an annoying Anglocentricism that is unable to call out any English mistakes honestly, choosing instead to excuse their most notable debacles as 'all the fault of the Nazis for starting it.'
Good book on balance, though. I did not research the author's bona fides, but I did get the impression that like John Keegan, he is purely a historian who lacks the context of having actually served in a military command, so there is a certain blindness in spots to how and why things actually happen the way they do in a military chain of command, especially in wartime. This is particularly notable in British historians, who seem to place a charmingly child-like faith in the veracity and completeness of official unit diaries, while anyone who has actually ever participated at an operational military headquarters would know that aside from time and place of engagements, these are generally as inaccurate, self-serving, and unreliable as a general's exculpatory memoirs penned 15 years later.
After reading so much history during my life, I have come to the conclusion that professional historians have several notable weak spots in their thinking and analysis. One of the most annoying of these is petty squabbles with other professional historians over trivialities, of course within the limited sphere of academia these squabbles may make or break a career, but they poison works written for the non-academic press when they are allowed to intrude. They also have a particularly irritating tendency to denigrate anyone who has first-hand knowledge that doesn't support their own hypotheses as 'Self-serving' [Rather ironically] while minimizing the same flaw in works upon which they rely. But, the gravest sin they commit is a love for dismissing anything ugly on their own side recounted by veterans as 'Merely anecdotal,' while claiming anything similarly-sourced that agrees with their point of view to be from 'Primary sources.'
