I have never failed to enjoy reading your comments and analysis.
Do you have favorite WW2, American Civil War, American Revolutionary War, and Franco-Prussian war books you like to recommend?
"Germans are not beaten until they are dead or in the pen. They are masters of the counterattack. ... You could never take anything for granted with the Germans. ... That is why our deception plans were so important. A week after D-Day, they still thought Normandy was a feint, and that the really big show would come in Pas-de-Calais. They were holding a score of divisions there that should have been attacking us all out by that stage. So the deception threw out of gear their entire plan of counterattack. ... By the time they realized Normandy was the real thing it was too late ..."
I never knew this.
It still amazes me that the Allies achieved surprise as to the date of the attack.
... had it not been for the firmness of President Truman in reversing Roosevelt's policy of appeasing Stalin, it is quite possible that Western Europe too might have fallen victim to communism, and that the frontiers of Stalin's empire would only have ended at the English Channel.
Or worse.
For late WW II in the west, the US army green books are the best single source IMO. The volumes on Normandy, Lorraine, and the Bulge are particularly good. For grand strategy of the whole war I recommend just starting with Churchill. For the eastern front, read David Glantz. There are many German sources but they are uneven. Many of the early ones are tendentious (puffing the German army while blaming Hitler) - but Manstein is still indispensable. The most comprehensive are not accessible in English. Haupt's 3 volume series on the eastern front is, but can be far too brief at critical times despite the overall length. But if you've read all of these, you will have so comprehensive a picture everything else will slot in as afterthought or correction. The Pacific theater is harder, simply because there are no good Japanese side accounts, that don't have one axe to grind or another. Any of the comprehensive US side accounts will serve.
On the American civil war, Shelby Foote is better than the rest. But every civil war history I've ever read suffers from a military prejudice against the methods by which Grant actually eventually won the war - or try to reinterpret side matters as more important than they were, to save modern military theses. They don't want to admit that there is such a thing as an attrition strategy. They think of it as a process that befalls armies or wars when strategy disappears. Which is just wrong.
An adequate military picture of the revolutionary war can't be found in a single volume, that I know of anyway. No account that leaves the European and world wide aspects is going to be accurate. The world wide strain on the British navy, the need to defend India against French squadrons, the inadequate force badly led in the battle of the Chesapeake - these were far more decisive than most accounts I've seen allow. Instead we get press accounts of successful guerilla actions or raids, glorified skirmishes, and outright defeats trumpeted as pyrrhic when their costs were dwarfed by an hour of Napoleon battle a generation later. In WW II history we'd recognize that quality of material as irrelevant propaganda not military analysis.
The Franco-Prussian war is a curious one to ask about. It was vastly overdetermined. The German army was so much better organized and directed than the French, it is hard to separate real lessons from "help mates" and "own goals". There are far more lessons in the Napoleonic wars, in my opinion (read Esposito and Elting). And WW I (read the British official histories for the western front).
The overall lesson is to read thickly described operational history. If you don't read them all, read at least one. Not grand synthetic accounts that pretend to roll it all into a ball for you, or to derive all the supposed lessons and reduce them to formulas a 14 year old boy can readily understand. There is something you discover and come to really appreciate in the more detailed histories - how much happens, how many plans are tried and fail, how wide the variety of important considerations actually is. When for every neat doctrinal formula you can think of a concrete case of which it is true, and another of which it is false, freedom of thought begins, and cant evaporates.