"This is the story of the last five months of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich, from New Year's Day to VE Day, May 8, 1945." (NYU Press.org)
Full disclosure: I read this book last spring and no longer own it, so my review is from memory.
The Conquest of the Reich has a worthy goal: exploring those foggy months on the Western Front between the end of the Ardennes battles and the fall of Berlin. Why do I write “foggy?†Maybe it’s just me, but I always found this period of the war strangely vague. Sure, I read Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945, but what about the western front? What was happening during all those months after the Bulge? There was something about a bridge at Remagen, right? This is what Neillands covers, telling the story in a readable style, from the land, to the air, to the liberation of the camps, and more.
Writing this history of the climactic campaign in the west, Neillands moves swiftly through dramatic and memorable events. Some standout sections for me were his chapter on the air war (both its late-war ferocity and its sudden suspension); his retelling of Operation Varsity; and significantly for me as a Canadian, his description of the Anglo-Canadian struggle to crack the German frontier in the Roer Triangle amidst terrible, Passchendaele-like conditions. Neillands pays more attention to the Commonwealth and Free forces than most popular histories, and this alone makes this book noteworthy.
Do I recommend this book? As a "popular history," it lacks great depth in any one area. It's specifically intended to not be a scholarly work. Neillands includes many veterans’ accounts in the book, and their piercing memories are some of the book's strongest parts. One perceives Neillands’ opinions percolating onto the pages; for example, Neillands believes that the Western Allies could and should have made a stronger effort to capture Berlin before the Soviets (I’ll come back to this below). However, these opinions never come close to interfering with the overall story. There are a few strange editing mistakes; one that stands out is the repeated use of the term “Reichwald†for the German forest between the Rhine and the Meuse, rather than Reichswald. Why the missing “S� I have no idea. No amount of Googling could solve this mystery for me. It doesn’t spoil the book, but it is weird. The Conquest of the Reich may not transform your understanding of World War Two, but it will probably shine a light on some dim corners. Any work that collects so many of the veterans’ and witnesses’ experiences in their own words is worth checking out.
Recommended - 3 out of 4
The Conquest of the Reich
by Robin Neillands
The Conquest of the Reich
by Robin Neillands
Thoughts about Neillands' writing style in the book
The Conquest of the Reich was published three years prior to Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad (1995 and 1998, respectively). If you’ve read Beevor’s work, Neillands’ style will seem very familiar. Alas, The Conquest of the Reich is no Stalingrad. This is my first time reading Neillands, and while I know he's published well-regarded works on D-Day and Market Garden to name a few, this particular book seems to lack momentum, the “X factor†that makes a book hard to put down. For comparison, Stalingrad tells the story of a historic siege, a “discrete event†with a beginning, middle and an end, and a cast of characters whom the reader follows through the events. Stalingrad therefore creates more emotional investment from the reader. To achieve a similar effect in Conquest would have been a steep challenge, because Neillands tackles a huge array of different events experienced by unconnected individuals. The larger the scope of events being covered, the harder it is to link all the events together in a cohesive, narrative way that is also not overly long. By the way, Beevor faced the same challenge in his sequel to Stalingrad, which is probably one reason why that sequel lacks the impact of its predecessor.
None of this devalues Conquest; it’s simply different kind of read. Neilland’s approach breaks the narrative up into episodic chunks. You can read each chapter on its own. This can be a good thing if you are short on time. Within these chapters, the stark and harrowing memories of veterans and witnesses come into focus, opening windows on a period of time that seems so fleeting, so long ago, and yet so titanic in its importance and drama that we find ourselves returning to the tale, again and again, in awe and pity.
Neillands' suggestion that Eisenhower should've gone for Berlin
Neillands suggests the Western Allies could have driven harder for Berlin, which would have better positioned them in the postwar situation with the Soviets. I’m not a scholar and I cannot evaluate this suggestion in depth - but neither does Neillands. He raises the point, but does not closely examine it. Leaving aside the argument that the Soviet people earned the right to administer the coup de grace after everything they suffered from Nazi Germany, I see no reason why untold thousands of US, British, Canadian and fellow Allied troops needed to be killed or maimed in a cataclysmic race for Berlin, especially when most of the western Allied armies were already desperately short of manpower. In my opinion, operations like the liberation of Denmark (blocking the Soviets from doing the same) were more strategically relevant to the postwar context. Denying Berlin to the Soviets would have been a deep provocation, flying in the face of Yalta, and straining Eisenhower’s armies to the breaking point. I am glad they did not try.
I do wish that Neillands had spent more time fleshing out this argument, but perhaps this would have distracted from the point of his book. What do you think? Did Eisenhower make a mistake not to push on to Berlin? Have you seen a convincing argument for doing so? What other books do a great job of describing the conquest of the Reich?
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