Samuel W. Mitcham

Samuel W. Mitcham Jr. is an American writer of military history who specializes in the German war effort during World War II. He is the author of more than 40 books and has been criticized for neo-Confederate views and a forgiving view of Nazi Germany.

Education and career[]

Mitcham was born in Mer Rouge, Louisiana, in 1949. He was a U.S. Army helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War. He studied journalism at Northeast Louisiana University and science at the North Carolina State. Mitcham earned his Ph.D. in geography in 1986 from University of Tennessee. He was an assistant professor of earth sciences at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. Mitcham was consulted by CBS, the BBC, and The History Channel.^[1][2]

Non-fiction author[]

Mitcham is the author of more than 40 books on military history, including orders of battle, operational studies and prosopography, focusing on the careers of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS figures. In Defenders of Fortress Europe, Mitcham utilized over 200 previously unreleased personnel files to build a picture of the German command class facing the Allied invasion. He focuses on personal and political differences among the officer class, which ultimately contributed to the defeat of the German forces in Normandy. Mitcham also explores their motivations, often highly self-serving. He shows that the in-fighting took on political as well as class dimensions, as illustrated by the power struggle between Gerd von Rundstedt, the nominal commander in the West, and Erwin Rommel, the de facto leader in Normandy.^[3]

Mitcham's work on the Eastern Front, the 2001 The German Defeat in the East, 1944-1945 utilises outdated secondary sources and provides a single-sided German perspective. The historian Lee Baker describes the book as "not about the defeat of Germany on the eastern front by the Red Army, but rather a tale of German heroism and bungled orders from German command structures". He further characterises the book as "very old-fashioned" and relying "solely upon German sources or obsolete interpretations from the Cold War era".^[4]

His 2020 book It Wasn't About Slavery: Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War advances the neo-Confederate view that the American Civil War was not, as mainstream historians and people of the period agree, about slavery. He calls the conflict "the War for Southern Self-Determination"^[5] and has written for the Abbeville Institute, the neo-Confederate^[6] organization founded by Donald Livingston. ^[7] Among his other books on the Civil War is a flattering biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.^[8]

Selected works[]

World War II[]

• With Gene Mueller: Hitler's Commanders. Cooper Publishing Group, London 1992, ISBN 0-85052-308-7.
• Why Hitler?: The Genesis of the Nazi Reich. Praeger, Westport 1996, ISBN 0-275-95485-4.
• The Rise of the Wehrmacht: The German Armed Forces and World War II. Praeger Security International, Westport 1998, ISBN 978-0-275-99641-3.
• Retreat to the Reich: The German Defeat in France, 1944. Praeger, Westport 2000, ISBN 0-275-96857-X.
• The Panzer Legions: A Guide to the German Army Tank Divisions of World War II and Their Commanders. Greenwood Press, Westport 2001, ISBN 0-313-31640-6.
• Hitler's Field Marshals and Their Battles. Cooper Square Press, New York 2001, ISBN 0-8154-1130-8.
• Rommel's Lieutenants: The Men who Served the Desert Fox, France, 1940. Praeger Security International, Westport 2006, ISBN 0-275-99185-7.
• Defenders of Fortress Europe: The Untold Story of the German Officers During the Allied Invasion. Potomac Books, Washington, D.C. 2009, ISBN 978-1-59797-274-1.
• Eagles of the Third Reich: Leaders of the Luftwaffe in the Second World War. Crécy Publications, Manchester 2010, ISBN 978-0-85979-149-6.
• Blitzkrieg No Longer: The German Wehrmacht in battle, 1943. Pen and Sword Books, Barnsley 2010, ISBN 978-1-84884-302-8.
• The Death of Hitler's War Machine: The Final Destruction of the Wehrmacht. Regnery History 2021, ISBN 978-1684511389.

American Civil War[]

• Bust Hell Wide Open: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Regnery History, 2016, ISBN 978-1684510306.
• Vicksburg: The Bloody Siege that Turned the Tide of the Civil War. Regnery History, Washington, DC 2018, ISBN 978-1-62157-639-6.
• The Greatest Lynching in American History: New York 1863, Shotwell Publishing LLC 2020, ISBN 978-1947660267.
• It Wasn't About Slavery: Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War, Regnery History, 2021, ISBN 978-1684512232.

References[]