In a generally admiring review of Andrew Roberts' Masters and Commanders, Michael Howard concludes by praising Roberts "for his honesty, rare in British historians, over two vital matters. The first is that in the Wehrmacht the Allies were facing an army very much better than their own - better equipped, better commanded, better trained, more highly motivated - and it continued to be so until the very last days of the war. Secondly, his Masters and Commanders may have "won the war in the West", as he puts it, but they did not win the war as such. Four out of every five of the Germans killed in combat died on the Eastern Front." The last statement is certainly true, but the first seems overstated and oversimplified. The Wehrmacht had worse strategists and logisticians--which cost failings contributed very significantly to its loss of the war--and by many standards it was not better equipped: only a small fraction of the Wehrmacht was motorized or mechanized--too small a fraction, in the event, to seal the pockets its mechanized elements made in the summer of 1941, and much of the Wehrmacht effectively demodernized over the course of the war. If Mr. Howard means that German weapons were better, even this is debatable, and by no means true across the board. German tanks were sometimes worse than Allied tanks--again, in the crucial first campaigns in the Soviet Union--and German artillery was less effective than either British or American artillery, because of superior Allied doctrine. The superiority of some German equipment--the panzerfaust versus the American bazooka, or the superiority of some other German anti-tank weapons--looks less impressive when one considers that the Americans and British generally killed German tanks with fighter-bombers like the Typhoon and the P47, and when doing so, killed tanks in industrial quantities. Was the German Army more highly motivated than its adversaries? Most observers think that its treatment of prisoners taken on the Eastern Front over the first year of the war produced an extremely highly motivated Red Army, one sufficiently highly motivated to end the war in Berlin. American soldiers preferred to let their artillery or airpower deal with their adversaries when that was possible, which is sometimes and rather oddly taken as a sign of their inferior motivation, but Germans often behaved similarly when they had the technical means to do so (For example, Warsaw in 1939). Some assertions about German superiority rest on what now seem dated attempts to quantify performance (DuPuy, van Creveld). These attempts are at least disputable--for example, in one allegedly typical group of German divisions, the percentage of armored units is overweighted--and in some recent studies (for example, of the fighting in the Vosges, in 1944), American divisions look a lot better than they had in the earlier statistical comparisons. Modern studies (inter alia, Bonn, Brown, Mansoor and Doubler) have vigorously disputed the older assertions about the superiority of the German Army across the whole of the war, suggesting that the Allies got better, and other studies suggest that the Germans simultaneously deteriorated. Many armies learn from experience, but in many respects the WWII Allies learned more than did their adversaries.