I wish I’d found this review before I purchased it. Just got started and came across this series of sentences: “… The New Zealanders and Indians were some of well over half a million Allied and Axis troops who poured into central and southern Italy in 1943-44. They comprised a mixture of men hardened by combat in Stalingrad, Leningrad, Tobruk and Tunis…” Huh? New Zealanders were in Stalingrad? And this is just the preface. Bummer. I was looking forward to a good book today.
It doesn't say the Kiwis were in Stalingrad. It says Allied & Axis men that had fought in various battles.
I also read Ballantine/Purnell WWII paperbacks in 70s and agree with you but Jukes, his Kursk was awful and mostly because he had access to 60s Soviet histories and memoirs and he seems to have taken their info at face value so his numbers were badly off and he in his part imported Rotmistrov’s Kursk myth into West, with claim of massive Germans losses on 12 July at Prokhorovka, all that T-34s ramming onto SS Tigers etc. IMHO the book was worse than useless. OK at least some in West heard on Manstein's counter-attack in Feb-Mar 1943 and the Kursk offensive and someone maybe read more of them from better books.
