Rooney, Dermot Slog or Swan

British Army Effectiveness in Operation Veritable, February and March 1945

Operation Veritable (February 8 to March 10, 1945) began with a 900-plane air attack and over 1,800 guns firing the heaviest barrage of the entire war. Then a XXX Corps assault force tried to break through the Siegfried Line to reach the Rhine bridges at Wesel in four days. It failed! With nearly half a million men fighting for a month in a series of battles, Veritable overshadowed the Arnhem disaster that preceded it, the Rhine crossing that followed it, and all the aforementioned operations that formed the Anglo-Canadian campaign in northwestern Europe. Veritable was one of the bitterest battles ever fought by men, and its scars are still visible today in the chain of man-made lakes that mark the course of the Allied artillery, which punched through the water table along the German-Dutch border. Despite its scale, significance and immense human cost, Veritable was sold as a mundane, enabling operation and was later wrongly referred to as a 'forgotten victory'. 'Slog or Swan' presents the first objective assessment of the British Army's performance in Veritable, to show how fundamental problems with the organization of the army and combat doctrine pushed the soldiers to the limits of their resilience. Slog or Swan draws on a wealth of previously untapped primary sources to cast new light on the effectiveness of the British Army by showing how the soldiers conducted the decisive operation of 1945. While previous works have focused on Normandy and Arnhem and passed general judgments on leadership or morale, this book delves into the tactical realities that determined British combat effectiveness.