Much of what we think we know about the opening years of the Second World War is myth: an invincible German war machine rolling over helpless neighbors on a wave of tanks, dive bombers, and doctrinal genius. In The Rise of Germany, 1939–1941, the first volume of his War in the West series, James Holland attacks that legend at its foundations. Drawing on more than a decade of new research — interviews, forgotten memoirs, and newly accessible archives — Holland argues that Germany’s early victories concealed an economy and a military machine profoundly unsuited to the long war it had started. It is a book about the difference between operational brilliance and strategic sustainability, and that difference matters as much to today’s force planners as it did in 1940.
Holland is an English historian, prolific author, broadcaster, and podcaster (We Have Ways of Making You Talk), whose campaign histories — Sicily ’43, The Savage Storm, Cassino ’44, Brothers in Arms, and Dam Busters — are reviewed elsewhere on this site. The War in the West series is his grand-strategic canvas: an account of the entire conflict in the West on land, at sea, and in the air that deliberately weighs the economic, political, and social dimensions alongside the military. Holland’s signature method — what he calls the operational level of war, the connective tissue between strategy and tactics — is on full display: supply, production, shipping, and training are treated as seriously as generalship and battle.
The book’s central insight is that the Wehrmacht of legend was largely a horse-drawn army. Behind the panzer spearheads that transfixed newsreel audiences, the great majority of German divisions marched on foot with their artillery and supplies pulled by hundreds of thousands of horses. German industry, starved of raw materials and inefficiently organized, could not motorize the force, could not adequately replace losses, and could not match the industrial depth of the British Empire — let alone the United States looming behind it. The France 1940 campaign, in Holland’s telling, was less the inevitable triumph of a superior system than an enormous gamble that succeeded against a French and British command that failed at the operational level. Victory papered over the cracks; Barbarossa would expose them.
For the modern reader, the lesson is about net assessment. Before the war, nearly everyone — including the Germans themselves — misjudged the true correlation of forces because they counted the wrong things: divisions and dash rather than logistics, production, and endurance. Today’s intelligence and capability communities face the same trap with every potential adversary whose parades look formidable. Holland’s ledger-based approach — count the trucks, the tankers, the machine tools, and the trained crews, not just the platforms — is precisely the discipline that sound experimentation and analysis are meant to enforce. Impressions are not data.
The book’s breadth is also its principal weakness. Sweeping from U-boat pens to Cabinet rooms to Alpine passes, Holland must compress, and specialists will find their favorite subjects treated briskly; the Eastern Front, by design, sits outside the series’ scope, which can distort the weight of effort in places. Readers should also note the series’ unfinished state: the concluding volume covering 1943–45 has yet to appear — though Victory ’45, reviewed on this site, covers the war’s endgame, as Holland turned instead to the campaign histories reviewed on this site. The two published volumes stand well on their own, but the grand arc awaits its ending.
In summary, The Rise of Germany is revisionist history in the best sense — not contrarian for its own sake, but a disciplined re-audit of the evidence that overturns comfortable myth. For leaders who must assess adversaries, allocate resources, and distinguish battlefield theater from strategic reality, Holland’s first volume is the right place to start the War in the West. Continue with The Allies Strike Back, reviewed next.