Talk:Middle East Theatre of World War II

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[edit] Command Structures

I don't think casual readers are sufficiently interseted in the structure/commanders for them to go at the top of the page. They want an overview of the campign more than anything and it disrupts the "flow" of the article. See the ABDACOM article for an example of what I mean. Grant65 (Talk) 02:49, May 7, 2005 (UTC)

It depends what is in the command structure. ABDACOM is not a good example because it is about a command and the second sentence says "On December 29, Winston Churchill said that it had been agreed Wavell...".

Although I would agree with you that the details as described in the "Official command structure" as shown in ABDACOM should not be placed at the top of this article. Tables like that should be placed at the bottom of the article, or not at all as IMHO they should be in the Middle East Command as they are too detailed for an overview like this.

What I envisage the "command structure" to be is the overview of the campaigns with who was in command of what and why they were replaced. Many people are interested in the high level politics which goes on in a theatre (Eg Churchill and Monty) and in biographic tipbits rather than the military campaigns. It also saves having to repeat who was in command of what in several different campaign sections. See Mediterranean Theater of Operations and South-East Asian Theatre and for prototypes of what I mean.

In most theatres it is particularly easy to follow the Allied command structure because there tendeds to be only one Allied supreme commander from start to end of one major campaign. The Axis forces often had different commanders and in the case of the Germans dual reporting lines because Hitler worked that way. So the command section should be broken into two subsections one for Allies and one for Axis. For example I am aware of the command structure of the Allies on the Western Front in 44-45 because it is easy, but I only have a hazy idea of the German command structure for most of the campaign).

The Middle East and the Med, like South East Asia the Allied command structure it is more complicated than Europe or the North Pacific and involves more overt politics. For example Monty in one of his more unusually modest and candid moments said that when an army has had a defeat and is building up for a new attack the commander is vulnerable to being replaced because he is perceived as having been defeated and then timid because the front is quiet. If he is replaced, the new commander benefits from the near completed build up for the new attack and is seen as an aggressive commander when he launches it shortly after arriving.

The reason why so many people tend to lump Africa into the European theatre is because they assume that if Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander in Europe, was also supreme allied commander in Africa, then the two commands must have been combined in some way. This perception is reinforced with the movement of the Mony from Italy to the UK along with the more famous British Divisions in the 8th army. Most people once they know that there is a diffrence are interested to know when Eisenhower left for the UK, was it after Africa, Sicily, or the invasion of Italy? Many would be surprised to learn that a Brit replaced him as supreme allied commander. Philip Baird Shearer 10:49, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

Fair enough :-) Grant65 (Talk) 10:02, May 9, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Redirect

Why does "North Africa Theater of World War II" redirect here and not to "North African Campaign"? This is the top search result on WP for "world war ii north africa", but ANY person making that search will be far more interested in that material than this. EthanS 11:13, 12 October 2007 (UTC)