Dr. Dermot Rooney was a presenter at the Third HAAC and will be presenting on Measuring Military Effectiveness at the Fourth HAAC. See: The Fourth HAAC is scheduled for 21 – 23 October 2025 – The Dupuy Institute
He has a new book out based upon his work: Slog and Swan: British Army Effectiveness in Operation Veritable: February and March 1945. See: Slog or Swan | Military History Book | Helion & Company
As he describes it:
The book is based on my Corvisier Award-winning PhD thesis so be warned, it’s a bit geeky. It’s got 43 maps, 300 sources, a good handful of graphs and photos, and loads of footnotes.
On the upside it’s about fighting. The maps are mainly those used by the units at the time and they’re marked up to show the detail of how British and a few Canadian troops fought in 1945. It tells the story of how those men defeated the last competent Wehrmacht formation in the west –1. Fallschirm-Armee– despite suffering from a bunch of force design problems that still matter today.
And the book is about a massive operation that’s not been seriously examined before. If you count the Germans, Op Veritable had half a million men fighting for a month in what is close to the biggest named op that Britain ever fought. It started with a (nearly) thousand-bomber raid and the biggest artillery barrage of the war, it’s got one of the few confirmed deployments of the Sturmtiger, dozens of battles where plucky Tommies took on fanatical Fallschirmjäger, and it ended with the German Dunkirk – an orderly withdrawal where they blew up the last bridge behind them.
Yet even hardened WW2 buffs are often unsure where Veritable was fought and hardly anybody knows what it was about.
So, Slog or Swan might not be for you, and it might be a little bit late for the 80th anniversary of Veritable, but it’s the perfect Christmas Easter gift for the war geek in your life.