Samuel W. Mitcham

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]

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Mitcham's work on the Eastern Front, the 2001 The German Defeat in the East, 1944-1945 utilises outdated secondary sources and provides a single-sided German perspective.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]