Whenever anyone argues that “it was Stalin who defeated Hitler”, I always counter by observing that by the end of 1945, America alone would have had nuclear weapons and strategic delivery systems while neither the Third Reich nor the Soviet Union would have anything besides millions of soldiers with rifles and flea-ridden overcoats. That assertion, of course, proves nothing. Nobody knows how history would have turned out given different decisions. We only know how it actually turned out. God is funny in that way. He only tells us what He decided. We are never told what other options He was considering.
But I did an internship after graduating from the Kennedy School with an interesting fellow, who was not only of Romanian extraction and Jewish, but also a graduate of the US military academy and the Harvard Business School, not to mention being a former Special Forces Officer. He was then writing a doctoral thesis (for Oxford University) on the subject of whether Hitler could have actually defeated the Soviet Union given the resources available.
The death-struggle between Hitler and Stalin exercises a lasting fascination because it represents a moral singularity. It is a narrative of how men and great states act when they are completely unfettered by such considerations as humanity, morals or even sanity. Even though I never found out how my friend’s doctoral thesis went, I can understand why those long ago events were so interesting to him.
I spent a little time watching Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, an account of the last days in the Fuherbunker, with the definitive portrayal of Adolf Hitler by Bruno Ganz. Even though it only partially captures the despair, nihilism and utter god-devilishness of men at the logical ends of their thought, Downfall is powerful enough to give us a glimpse into the ultimate Black Hole, that moral singularity –man unfettered without God, able to think anything he wants, do anything he wants, without the slightest remaining restraint.
The power of the film lies in quite naturally showing that everything the inner Nazi coterie did was completely logical given their premises. When Hitler says that “I have been loyal to the natural law that weakness is punished, and therefore the German people, having failed do not deserve to live,” ; when Hitler has his brother in law shot because “it is his will” and when Eva Braun agrees because “you are the Fuhrer” or when Frau Goebbels poisons all her children because it is not “worth living in a world without National Socialism” we feel the force of the logic. But it is not the syllogisms that are sick; it is the premises.
The Eastern Front calls into question whether we can ever be so smug in our idealism; for the Nazis were in their own twisted way well intentioned; in fact almost as least as idealistic as the Soviets, who were no morally better and whose sole claim to justification is the fact that they survived. The fact of their success, the realization they were about to kill him won Hitler’s grudging admiration. In one his rants Hitler says, “I should have been like Stalin and shot the lot of you.” At the end Hitler’s logic was the same as Stalin’s. The only possible regret was to lose; the only lesson to learn was that he was not as ruthless as Uncle Joe.
‘Next time, no more Mr. Nice Guy.’
The psychohistorical attraction of the Eastern Front is that it provides the only actual recent laboratory in which we can observe men who are like gods. On the Eastern Front one could order the death of millions; order the burning of entire nations; send however many people one liked into concentration camps. One could order ‘subhumans’ from the Soviet eastern republics to walk over minefields to clear the way for tank armies. The only constraints were resources.
But of morals, there was none. All other historical tableaus restrict the writer’s palette. Only on the Eastern Front, in the battle between Hitler and Stalin, were all colors completely unrestricted. It was where anything goes. Lincoln Steffens was wrong when he said, after visiting Soviet Russia that “I have seen the future and it works”. The real future of Communism, the portrait of its ideals carried to the ultimate limit, were the Eastern Front and the Downfall.
If I were to do the doctoral dissertation today, my premise would be different. It would not be to identify the specific operational decisions which if done differently would have resulted in the “victory” of Nazi Germany. That would be to miss the point. It would be to ambitiously claim that Hitler never knew what victory was. Could not have ever known what victory was. Although Hitler’s plans were operationally expressed in start and stop lines, I would argue that in a very real sense Hitler was grasping for a metaphysical goal. There would always be something else. My claim would be that deep down inside Hitler — and perhaps Stalin — were making war on God.
They did not want anything so tangible as x more grams of bread, or y more liters of fuel for Ivan or Hans. Those were goals not worth pursuing. Neither wanted to gain something as mundane as a 40 hour work week, or two weeks of vacation for the populations. They cared nothing for meals, clothes — Hitler was a teetotal vegetarian — or works of art. Nobody was interested in increasing the leisure time available for barbecues and bowling. That language had no place in the world of the Titans. Both Hitler and Stalin were after power, power so pure they could never really grasp it in the form they desired it most. And that therefore the tragic events on the Eastern Front, involving though it did the deaths of millions, were really about nothing at all that you could grasp upon this earth.
That is an astounding claim, but today, two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I think the claim can be fairly made. Nothing permanent was achieved by that titanic struggle, that Downfall. It was strangely enough, a bad dream, as insubstantial as its goal. It left no permanent imprint upon the land after the barriers were down, when people went back to drinking beer and eating sausages and playing video games. People went back to the real and forgot about the nightmare.
Returning to the question of “who won the war”, perhaps the most salient thing about the US atomic monopoly in the late 1940s is that America didn’t use it. They didn’t conquer the world, they demobilized. Something about America saved it; made it want to buy cars, and radio receivers; to go out and buy an ice-cream soda at the drug store. Some have accounted that foolish, but in retrospect, it may have represented the only sane thing to come out of that decade. Hitler — and ultimately Stalin — failed because they never understood what winning was all about. In that analysis, it was the Normandy invasion, not the giant battles of the Eastern Front that were the true Hinge of Fate.
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I’ve always felt the Eastern Front of WWII was as dark a chapter in history as humanity has ever witnessed. The word that always leapt to mind was “futile”, or perhaps “pointless”.
Millions (yes, millions) dead, all to decide which mass-murderer rules over a certain swathe of the Earth: Hitler and his naziism, or Stalin and his notion of socialism.
What an incomprehensible waste of human lives and time.
It’s like Napoleon in 1807- if he’d quit then he’d have been master of Europe.
But if he’d quit he wouldn’t have been Napoleon.
Precisely those qualities that lead to Hitler’s downfall were those that pushed the German Army into a war it didn’t want in the first place. It was Hitler’s drive that conquered Poland and Western Europe when the Wehrmacht said it couldn’t be done. The same character traits that led to victory in France in 1940 led to defeat in 1945. Hitler didn’t know when to quit.
Unlike Hitler, Stalin did know limits. That is why Korea was a proxy war and not World War III. That’s the difference between the two men.
God is funny in that way. He only tells us what He decided. We are never told what he other options he was considering.
He also doesn’t tell us whether He is deciding on something as part of a plan or whether He is playing dice with the universe. We don’t really know whether God is acting randomly or not; He could be. And then again, He might not be. We don’t know.
The nature of the American Empire is that it doesn’t rule directly. It just makes it easy to cooperate and difficult to resist. Note the long list of our enemies that have passed into history, and note the trouble our current enemies have. Iran, Venezuela, North Korea et al. aren’t successful countries. Meanwhile we protect rivals like Japan and the EU.
Unlike a lot of people this doesn’t bother me- empires can be bad or good and the USSR was a lot worse.
The United States really does want a peaceful world where countries trade with each other while ruling themselves. The world is full of such countries and we do not stir. It’s only the warlike and the genocidal that gain our attention. My standard reply to the radical critique of US foreign policy is, “why does the US only go to war with aggressive dictatorships?” It’s never a peaceful country that’s minding its own business. At the very least we require an excuse, right?
There’s a world order and it’s primarily guaranteed by the US. Critics need to propose a workable alternative, which I’ve never seen.
THE RED AND THE BLACK
Still dark on the morning of 22 June
The guns lit the sky with false dawn
And men in feldgrau singing gaily marched east
As the black met the red daggers drawn
They died by the millions, for what you may ask
Beyond the sheer will of the men
Who set them afoot in the land of the dead
And would, if we let them, again
The red and the black both are dead and are gone
No memories are there for the young
The nations they died for are dim in the mists
And only the sad songs are sung
Fascinating insights. But couldn’t it be said that several things did last, and that those things have been extremely harmful. Perhaps it is a unique feature of the Christian European civilization that the entire race is tarnished by the actions of the few. One lasting legacy of Nazism is the permanent tarnishing of the entire white race in the eyes of all other races and civilizations. Despite the fact that Nazis represented the smallest proportion of European civilization, and white Europeans destroyed them, one frequent smear of whites is the accusation of “Nazi!” – and it is only whites who receive this abuse, often by their fellow whites.
Think about accusations of “Racism!, which is, after all, a ubiquitous trait of all human cultures, but which is mainly used to smear whites, and most particularly American whites, despite the fact, again, that the formal system of slavery was limited to a small proportion of whites in America, and that slavery was ultimately defeated almost solely by American whites. The taint nevertheless remains. Even the taint of the Crusades persists 700-900 years later, and the violent chapters of Protestantism and other religious European strife is still actively exploited to demoralize and marginalize the heirs of European Christian (white) civilization.
What other society or civilization suffers the same crushing burden of perpetual guilt for long past crimes, real and imagined?
I suggest that this is just one lasting and damaging legacy of Nazism; pathological guilt which is exploited by the societal cancer of multiculturalism. This disease curses the heirs of the most magnificent and accomplished civilizations stretching from Greece and Rome and 2000 years of Christianity, and robs it of pride. This is nothing less than the multicultural rape of the Western legacy, these libels are something that is destroying our civilization from within and without.
We owe nothing to the world. Most of the rest of the world is a cesspit of failure and corruption and brutality and backwardness. To the extent that they are not these things is often the extent to which they’ve emulated what is best in the West. Yet still we cannot atone, and apparently are not meant to, but rather deserve to be destroyed and subverted. Most other societies get a pass on their innumerable crimes, atrocities, enormities, and transgressions, while the heirs of the European legacy are eternally indicted…
One of the problems with the premise of “Intelligent Design” is not a question of God’s intelligence, but rather whether He designs anything. That is a metaphysical question, not one for mundane science. If God does play dice with the universe, then one could argue that God may not be designing anything; perhaps He is a divine tinker who doesn’t have a “divine plan” but is still present in our lives.
I think there is enough room in the universe for a belief in divine randomism as much as a belief in predeterminism. Human architecture may be in straight lines, but the architecture of nature is fractal. At heart, I think Hitler and Stalin sought to impose human geometry onto nature, rather than seeing beauty in the leaves, in the hills, and in the sky. Theirs was a common fault in central planning.
Perhaps God can be found not in the loudest roar, but rather in the faintest whisper.
I find myself overly fascinated with the technological influences of war, for example what effect on the Eastern Front did the Germany’s commitment of 88 mm guns for air defense against allied bombing have on the needs of the German army’s need for anti-tank weapons. Ifa thisa ifa thata and etc.
I remember reading about a line about a comment by Rommel when Hitler downplayed the importance of the US entrance into the war. IIRC Hitler said all the US was good for w as manufacturing things like razor blades. Rommel reportedly said, “I wish I had some of those razor blades.”
Thus underneath the weapons, underneath the logistics, underneath the economies, we come to the Ideas of Governance.
Monarchies and all the forms of centralized power either produce or attract the narcissists. “The Country is Me” delusion.
Deluded to one extent or another seems to be the fate of mankind. It is only the least deluded that survive.
Pessimistic comments to follow.
The thing I have always wondered about is why the German General Staff, upon seeing Hitler’s plan, did not say to themselves: “He is mad. Napoleon failed with that plan, and so will Hiter”. And then killed him.
The death-struggle between Hitler and Stalin exercises a lasting fascination because it represents a moral singularity. It is a narrative of how men and great states act when they are completely unfettered by such considerations as humanity, morals or even sanity.
Or civility. All too often, bullies wrap themselves in the mantle of an historical grievance and then wrap themselves in the foundational mythic riot. It could be the storming of the Bastille. It could be Watts. It could be Stonewall. It could be the October Revolution. It could be the Beerhall Putsch. Or the Klan’s epic night rides during Reconstruction. The important thing is to have an epic story of violence and vengeance – to create a new reality where the “sleeper has awakened”. The story doesn’t even need to be true.
Hitler and Stalin were not only unbound by morality, but they were also unbound by civility. They were rude, expertly using their enemies’ good manners against them while being unbound by etiquette themselves. Theirs was a Pharaonic state with modern technology whose essential message was an ancient one – of the Pharaoh ceremonially bashing the captured prisoner on the head.
Setting theology aside; Hitler was our enemy, Stalin was the enemy of our enemy. Both men were nasty pieces of work and a total waste of space.
“He only tells us what He decided”
Correction.
He only tells us what WE decided.
This whole Earth thing is a self-determining exercise.
God’s in the stars, viewing the latest supernova … occasionally being distracted by those sinful and sinning earthlings.
“Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, as it is in heaven”.
At one time He even sent his Son down to help us out.
Silly buggers, we ignored the advice of His Son and have been happily destroying ourselves ever since.
The religeous truth is like mathematics or physics or any other avenue of science.
True religion is all about truth.
Humanity and what we go through is EXACTLY like what happens when a star is created and destroyed.
Purified through the flame.
Well, not as dramatically drawn as the European “Eastern Front”, but the casualties and death involved with the growth and then defeat of the Japanese “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere” were probably nearly as great, when you also overlay the ongoing Chinese Civil War between the Reds and the Nationalists. Mass killing and death were the signature events of that period of time. There was a viral idea loose, and it was the idea of the totalitarian state, where indeed the rulers wished to be gods on Earth.
When Nietzsche declared “God is dead”, and he feared for the future, it wasn’t that far into the future when the darkness in the souls of men grappled with Totalitarianism, trying indeed to make themselve gods on Earth, and tried to shed any moral strictures in pursuit of that goal. Ultimate corporeal power on Earth to decide Life and Death.
Perhaps it is the strongest evidence of a fundamental moral structure to life itself that they ultimately failed – a subtle but overwhelming piece of evidence that God did form the world, with certain immutable moral laws as well as physical laws, which we are more aware of. After flouting and defying every moral law and stricture created in Western Civilization for millenia in search of becoming gods on Earth, both Nazi Germany and ultimately Soviet Russia died on the ash heap of history.
It wasn’t just that America had nuclear weapons that we wouldn’t use, it was also the unwillingness to become mass murderers, which some thought we should do, and some also still think that way toward the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world.
Not yet. We have still not become a people that will gaze into the abyss, yearning to destroy and lose our souls as well.
This is going to be an interesting thread (I’ll have to be conservative with my 4 comments).
I own a DVD copy of “Downfall (Der Untergang)” and consider it an excellent movie (definitely buy the DVD). Like “Das Boot”, “Der Untergang” is best seen “auf Deutch” with English subtitles (yes, the YouTube parodies of the bunker scene are hilarious and worth watching).
The movie is mainly from the perspective of Hitler’s personal secretary, Traudl Junge. Hitler is first presented in the movie performing a job interview with Frau Junge. He initially appears as a very polite, soft spoken man, well dressed as a conservative middle class Bavarian. This brings home a point that I sometimes make at Belmont Club, that dangerous demagogues never have horns growing out of their head and never initially come across as crazed fanatics. During his rise to power, Hitler appeared like Grandpa Walton or Uncle Fritz, i.e. the soft spoken, personable late middle aged member of the family who was always giving presents to the kids and loved by everyone. One of the reasons why Obama initially terrified me was how he came across as inoffensive and then gave speeches that hypnotized his audience. This was essentially Hitler’s modus operandi (we got lucky that Obama later proved to be incompetent).
One of the main threads of the movie “Downfall” was Hitler’s mental deterioration from his initial calm self assured state into the raving fanatic prior to committing suicide. As Wretchard mentioned, there is this very nasty scene near the end of the movie where Joseph Goebbels’ wife Magda Goebbels murdered their six beautiful children. The children knew they were about to me murdered by their mother and their reactions were heart breaking. As a father, I found this scene extremely unpleasant to watch. However the scene did make it clear why it was relatively easy for Joseph and Magda Goebbels to commit suicide after murdering their children.
Wretchard said:
“Although Hitler’s plans were operationally expressed in start and stop lines, I would argue that in a very real sense Hitler was grasping for a metaphysical goal. There would always be something else. My claim would be that deep down inside Hitler — and perhaps Stalin — were making war on God.”
One can argue around-and-around about this. Albert Speer’s book “Inside the Third Reich Memoirs” makes it clear that Hitler had a well defined set of goals. Hitler intended to create an empire that stretched from Calais to Vladivostok that would last a thousand years. This empire would have established the German people as modern day Spartiates ruling over millions of Eastern European slaves toiling in the fields as helots to their German overlords. Hitler intended to create this empire before 1950, hand off political power to a Nazi minion in a fashion similar to Lucius Cornelius Sulla and then devote the reminder of his life to overseeing the remaking of Berlin as the capital of the world and fashioning a cathedral to Nazism in the Austrian city of Linz (Hitler was a frustrated architect). Hitler intended to build his own mausoleum in the crypt of this Nazi cathedral. As a point of interest, the cathedral of Braunschweig with its crypt to Heinrich der Löwe was the prototype for Hitler’s cathedral and mausoleum.
Hitler had little hope of achieving his end goal after opening a two front war against both Britain and the USSR. All hope vanished after he declared war against the United States. Hitler probably could have achieved victory if he had honored the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact until after he had conquered Britain and refused to declare war against the United States as required by the Tripartite Treaty. Both actions were acts of national suicide. It is an indication of Germany’s military prowess that Hitler committed two successive acts of national suicide but Germany was still able to go on fighting from 22 June 1941 to 8 May 1945. It is truly amazing that a people as capable as the Germans allowed themselves to be seduced by a demagogue like Hitler. However we Americans voted in Obama as President so we’re really in no position to criticize the Germans for abject stupidity.
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Can somebody link to a translation of the video? I kept wishing for a tomato or a rotten egg.
The struggle was not between Hitler and Stalin. This was not some medieval dynastic struggle writ large. Stalin did not defeat Nazism. The Russian people with help defeated the Wehrmacht. FDR did not defeat the Great Depression, and neither did WW-II. The American people endured them and were productive enough to create the wealth to end the Depression, win the war, and create enough wealth for the Boomers to make fools of themselves. Churchill deserves some credit for reminding the British what they were capable of. That is really what Reagan did for America. Pity that those lessons did not stick.
Leaders can make a difference. Bad leaders can destroy and good leaders can empower. Ultimately it is the Army of Davids that slays the Philistines.
Wretchard, perhaps you’ve been reading “Bloodlands”
http://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stalin/dp/0465002390
A brutal history.
The hinge of fate WRT WWII was Crete. It caused Hitler to stop using his ultimate weapon: the Fallschirmjager.
Had they been correctly deployed in Barbarossa — deeply across the limited Soviet rail net — Hitler would have defeated Stalin before Pearl Harbor.
It will shock the modern mind, but Soviet Russia had strikingly few rail lines in 1941. Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group was successful via one basic gambit: driving deep into the rear ( with resupply by air/ Ju 52 ) and cutting off rail transport 200 kM behind the front.
The impact was vast. Lacking trucks, there was no way to get critical munitions up to the battle line. Naturally the most effective ammo ran out first. Shortly there after the wheels come off the defense.
Guderian did not use his panzers to encircle the Soviet front at all. Such thinking is a misconception based upon later events in the war.
Instead, hard marching Jagers were expected to encircle what were entirely static infantry armies.
Stalin, himself, had disbanded deep strike tank formations — following the logic of the French. Also, like Britain and France, his tanks were severely under radio’d.
Not so Germany. Guderian was a RADIO SIGNALS officer in WWI. It’s all spelled out in his war bio.
http://www.amazon.com/Achtung-Panzer-Cassell-Military-Classics/dp/0304352853
Guderian looked upon tanks as tracked radios inside a pill box. He was the first to see that the heart of tank Formations and their tactics is their RADIOS. All other metrics were well down the list.
This was proven in 1942 when cheesy Mark III tanks overwhelmed radio-less T-34c tanks all summer long.
( Hoth had overrun the SOLE Soviet radio tube factory at the western out skirts of Moscow. The installation was so modest that the Germans didn’t begin to realize what they’d done. Stalin was able to hide this fulsome disaster from all eyes long after the war was won. The destruction of this factory was almost enough to destroy the entire Soviet state. It is entirely behind the debacles that ensue right up until Uranus. This campaign is the first to use imported LendLease radio tubes — from America — which are of the highest quality, state of the art.)
( The other hidden import: Western Electric ( AT&T ) field grade military phone sets. LendLease land lines replaced Soviet phones — entirely — at the front. ( Plug & Say ) These were the ‘overnight’ source of communications security.)
And, with that, the wheels came off of the Nazi invasion.
BTW, it was Stalin that started WWII. He’s the one who picked the date. Up until the Pact Hitler was entirely frustrated. He wanted to make war — but was all alone.
Even Munich was a personal disaster: Goering managed to defuse the whole situation — and prevent war. Adolf was so furious he wouldn’t speak to Goering for weeks. Only later did he come around to the idea that Goering was wise to delay the war. Suddenly, Goering was back in favor.
You will note that, come 1939, Goering is ENTIRELY out of the loop. There’s to be no repetition of that ugly peace-nic crap of 1938. It is highly notable that in his big speech to his generals ( August 23, 1939, IIRC ) Goering is missing! Adolf give a major pitch for the campaign and the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine are not there. It made the Heer proud.
——
In many ways Adolf was bi-polar: one moment the boldest warlord — the next the cowering lion. This oscillation was seen repeatedly in Case White. ( France 1940 ) It became so severe that Guderian faked the warlord out by leaving his radio troops behind — and rolling land-line with the leading panzers. ( The exact opposite of expectation. )
Going AGAINST Hitler’s orders is how the campaign was won.
As time went by, Hitler redoubled his intrusions to the point that no general could disobey his bad commands.
Such is doom.
And what would be the Islamic concept of victory?
“Even though it only partially captures the despair, nihilism and utter god-devilishness of men at the logical ends of their thought, Downfall is powerful enough to give us a glimpse into the ultimate Black Hole, that moral singularity –man unfettered without God, able to think anything he wants, do anything he wants, without the slightest remaining restraint.”
The first thing that came to my mind upon reading this was the subject a couple of threads back, “State vs. The State of Nature”. What does this history have to say to us if we are entering an age where each of us, as individuals, may have the legally-protected right to do likewise? Perhaps this is the dream of the progressive–unfettered personal liberty without the antiquated moral codes of one’s percieved oppressors. Yet, I must wonder if we as a society are beginning to go the way of the fabled Krell from the movie “Forbidden Planet”. That same black hole illustrated here, that singularity of will and desire, exists in each and every human being. In most cases, in absence of the fear of divine judgement, it lacks only the power to be realized. How, at a societal level, do we avoid this fate?
blert, that was excellent, thanks.
What I am curious is by how much the Nazi war machine was hindered by its attempt to exterminate the jews — the logistic and engineering drain from the war effort.
batman, I imagine you know the answer to that — the return of Allah’s lands from the hand of the infidel to the House of Submission and placing some classes of “subdued” infidels under “protection” contract (dhimma) while converting (or killing) others. M. already had a successful 1000-year reich and it is now having a third attempt (could be the charm) to take Europe.
“There would always be something else.”
-indeed. That is the essence of the esthetic of modernism, the ever renewed quest for the ever new, and the call to harden oneself for the heroic struggle that will “liberate” and bring the new to bear. Perhaps what is fascinating about the Eastern Front is that it realized in military and ethnic cleansing terms the full logic of the esthetic that reigned throughout the West in the twentieth century.
It may be correct to laud America for its lack of interest in some “final victory” over the totalitarian foe. However, what it provided instead, by way of a “peace” does deserve critical reflection. No real treaty. Yalta and the UN for heaven’s sake. Eastern Europe and China more or less abandoned. How many around the world were unnecessarily fed to the totalitarian maw by America’s nice liberal-Utopian version of the ever new?
“What I am curious is by how much the Nazi war machine was hindered by its attempt to exterminate the jews — the logistic and engineering drain from the war effort.”
-Wretchard is right to say Hitler didn’t know what victory looked like and the reason for this, i believe, is that he was primarily motivated by Jew hatred (you can kill the Jews but there will always be the psychological equivalent of “the Jew” around to torment you if you are so motivated). The genocide was not a side show that hampered the greater war effort; the war effort was primarily about destroying the Jews and their subhuman kin (something that could not be done without a total war). If you look at how often Hitler called for the sacrifice of German – Aryan – youth, to redeem the fallen of his generation and to birth a new Germany, one may well get the feeling that he never expected to leave many young German men standing. The destruction of Germany was really the necessary outcome of his impossibly Utopian quest to “save” a nation that was already past its prime, through some magical furnace of re-inventing warfare, and that could only save itself by ridding the world of its enemies, or at least dominating the more acceptable among them. One who thinks in these terms can never know “victory” nor devise a sane strategy to achieve it.
As for what the difference between Hitler and Stalin was, there’s a telling bit from the Stalin Archive where Stalin tells his misbehaving son that even he isn’t ‘Stalin’. A megalomaniac like Hitler is scary enough; a man who plays the role when it suits him while being perfectly aware of the horrors he is committing and doing it anyways… that’s another thing entirely.
Speaking of the morality of government. It seems the one party states have the fewest anti-bodies against “corruption.” China struggles between wanting to keep their Internet and cell phone service working to aid the economy and trying to suppress evidence of corruption on the part of officials. North Korea, and host of others the same thing.
The Obama Administration has turned Pelosi’s “Ethical Administration” line into a constant joke. I was reading that there is a white paper circulating in the executive branch and among Democrats about the advisability of doing away with the ATF….I expected them to throw somebody under the bus for the Fast and Furious fiasco but it has to be awfully bad if they willing to throw an whole agency under there. They need to get a bigger bus.
In other news, Germany’s fun-meter is pegged. http://www.france24.com/en/20111001-germany-wont-give-more-eu-bail-out-fund If not Greece, then Italy or Spain will burst the damn and then what follows is anyone’s guess but if history provides any lessons it is chaos and entropy. Time to gird our loins boys and find something that floats, this isn’t going to be pretty.
I’m not sure if the fat lady is going to sing or if it’s these Four Men of the Finnish Apocalypse. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH1g-pEl_jQ)
Exit light
Enter night
Take my hand
We’re off to never never-land
Blert- Guderian points out in one of his books that the engine of the tank was it’s most valuable weapon.
Another great essay.
“it provides the only actual recent laboratory in which we can observe men who are like gods”
Except for the Five Olds Campaigns, Hundred Flowers Campaign, Anti-Rightist Movement, Great Leap Forward, etc., which killed more people than WW2 and none, not one, as an act of war. No doubt your correct example was chosen because of its familiarity to your readers.
#24 GyLar – Rather off topic, but here’s another example of violin metal, with better-looking players:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axfxboOXj-w
Wretchard, your take on this is surprisingly similar to VDH’s.
Which is to say, very insightful.
eggplant #14:
“One of the reasons why Obama initially terrified me was how he came across as inoffensive and then gave speeches that hypnotized his audience. This was essentially Hitler’s modus operandi (we got lucky that Obama later proved to be incompetent).”
Perhaps it isn’t luck. Perhaps it’s simply a manifestation of the adage “first as tragedy, then as farce”.
God may play dice with the universe. A more interesting question than whether or not He does might be whether or not He’s playing alone.
While we are on the subject of the mass killings perpetrated by Stalin and Hitler, this website might be of interest to Belmont Club readers. Professor R.J. Rummel at U. of Hawaii has tried to compile the numbers killed by various governments in the 20th century. Be sure to click on the links at the top to see how he breaks this down and to read about his methodology.
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
Like Amalekites?
I’ve good reason to think that you know you are describing Amalekites, but few I’ve met even know of the trait, not even Jews. From Exodus 17: The Lord will have war from Amalek generation to generation.
Though they could still exist as a sub-bloodline, I think the label Amalek also describes a condition, proven to arise out of the best of families, that leads to this never-ending, dead-ended drive you have noted here.
So who are the Amalekites of this generation? Chief among them, look for those for whom the lust for power is insatiable, and those who are Green with envy.
hmm Guderian based his warfare tactics on de Gaulle book “Le fil de l’épée” of 1932, and on the Brit Fuller and Liddell Hart works
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA509926
Fletcher, if you’re into sex with a violin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JmHiYgO58s
31. Pascal:
I’ve good reason to think that you know you are describing Amalekites, but few I’ve met even know of the trait, not even Jews. From Exodus 17: The Lord will have war from Amalek generation to generation.
Though they could still exist as a sub-bloodline, I think the label Amalek also describes a condition, proven to arise out of the best of families, that leads to this never-ending, dead-ended drive you have noted here.
You are engaging in a strange form of projection here, my friend. The never-ending dead-ended drive you label Amalekitism was found on the Hebrew side rather, particularly in the prophet Samuel. The Amalekites smote the Israelis once in Sinai when they were homeless, sure, but that’s what tribes do, they smite other tribes to protect their grazing land. As well beat a cow for eating grass. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business. But the Israelites made it personal. It became something of an obsession with them. The Amalekites were singled out, and in 1 Samuel 15 we read of their total genocide, every man, woman, child, centuries after their ancestors first pissed off the children of Jacob (Except the Amalekites show up again in 1 Samuel 30 but that’s another story).
The people who say it was Stalin who defeated Hitler are usually hard lefty types who also say the Soviet Union only failed because of a combination of the right people not being in charge coupled with 70 years of bad winters. The USA manufactured and shipped thousands of locomotives, trucks, fighters, bombers and other essential gear to the Russians. All while we were similarly equipping our own forces fighting in three theaters on land, sea and air. Stalin may have been able to defeat Hitler without that gear, and without the distraction to Hitler of some other fronts, but it would have been at the expense of his entire population instead of a fifth of it. That gear also gave the Red Army the time and ability to adapt itself from a large immobile infantry laden WW1 type formation to a very mobile and effective counter force. And of course, their ability to adapt to the bad winters didn’t hurt either.
But the Israelites made it personal…
Funny Bible you got there, Teresita.
Or does being a “friend of God” mean that you have the (God-given?) right to airbrush out all the um, “unflattering” references?….
32. Marie Claude
NO evidence. The article linked misses the entire point of Blitzkrieg. It isn’t so much the tanks, but the communications. Guderian was A Signals officer during WW1. He was aware of the importance of a commander being able to control his subordinates, or at least give them orders. The French had better tanks, as far as armour and guns but no real communications. French tanks communicated by waving FLAGS.
Back on topic, WW2 produced two major changes in warfighting. First was the Radio, which greatly increased the pace of combat operations. Second was the arrival of air power over the battlefield. No Army with control of the air space over the battlefield has EVER lost. They don’t always win, but they never lose. Witness Vietnam. In ’75 when Vietnam fell, the S. Vietnamese airforce was grounded due to the US Congress cutting off fuel supplies. N. Vietnamese MiG-21′s were fling CAP over cities in the south. The US Navy was NOT allowed to fight them.
The Soviets won in the East because the USA sent them 5 million Radio tubes and 2 1/2 million trucks. That and the indirect effect of the 8th air force. The Nazi’s could never control more then a narrow patch of the airspace over the battle field. That was because they didn’t have enough fighters. They didn’t have enough fighters because 75 to 90 percent of their fighters were in Germany and France, trying to stop the 8th air force.
Since The War of Secession, Logistics has determined who wins. It actually became important with Napoleon and his citizen armies. Napoleon was a military genius but his real advantage was keeping several hundred thousand men fed and armed.
Without those 2.5 million trucks, over 1 million miles of steel railroad track, the Soviets had no logistics. Without the radios, they had no way of getting everything to the right place at the right time. Without the 8th air force sucking up Nazi fighter planes, they had no way of stopping those fighter planes from shooting up the trucks.
My thought is that without the USA Nazi Germany would have beaten the Soviets about ’54.
But EVERYONE in the FSU (and kindred spirits, elsewhere) knows that the Russians (led by Uncle Joe) beat the Nazis.
And that the treacherous Western “allies” delayed Overlord (by several years) just to give the Nazis a chance to destroy more of the Motherland and kill more Russians.
(Ribbentrop-Molotov? One of Uncle Joe’s more brilliant strategies. Yessir! Absolutely!…. Oh, and by the way, what’s “Lend-Lease”? Never heard of it….)
File under: Dances with Narratives
God is funny in that way. He only tells us what He decided. We are never told what other options He was considering.
Now, there’s a novel, Mr Fernandez….
Eric Hines
“My claim would be that deep down inside Hitler — and perhaps Stalin — were making war on God.”
Those who would truly make war on God must first seek to exterminate those who they have been told are God’s chosen; the Jews. This is the hallmark of their quest; their bold and public claim, “look here! Do you see what I am doing, who I am challenging?” In this Hitler surpassed Stalin, although Stalin certainly made quite the effort.
The hardest thing for an ordinary, moral, sane (by our standards) man to understand is that the fact that these efforts can only end in self destruction is completely immaterial. The final destruction of all things isn’t a disaster, it is the goal of such a one as this. He doesn’t want to survive, he wants to rise to where he can take the entire world down with him. Perhaps an ancient parallel were those kings who had all their wives and servants slaughtered so that they could accompany the King in the grave – many of these graves have been found from many cultures.
CS Lewis wrote often about evil, and much of what he said resonated. I paraphrase his ideas; the closer to being filled with True Evil a man is, the more focused on destruction he will be, especially destruction of the innocent and the weak. This is not a side effect of Evil; this is the defining mark, the one true goal. All that Evil is serves this goal, and the more a man attunes himself with that which is Evil, the more purely he will focus his efforts on enacting it.
Some have said that Stalin is more Evil than Hitler because he survived, but I say no, because Hitler embraced the totality of nihilistic destruction more completely than any man we have seen. The Death of all that he touched was One True Goal from the start; the contest was only to see how wide his fingers could spread and how much could be tainted before his time was up.
37. stoicheion: My thought is that without the USA Nazi Germany would have beaten the Soviets about ’54.
No way. Nine more years of that? The eastern front was intolerable for both sides, and chewed up millions of lives every year. When one finds a trench today and digs, one digs through strata of Germans, Russians, Germans…. Hitler was down to rag-tag boys and old men defending Berlin by 1945, but he moved markers around on the Big Board in his bunker like they were fully manned with the flower of the Wehrmacht.
What was our best general, Patton, what was his final tally? Enemy killed, 144,500 he says in his own diary. Whoop-de-do. At one battle in the east, Stalingrad, Germany lost 750,000 men. The Western Front was a sideshow by comparison.
The jingoistic history books say that the United States singlehandedly saved the Triple Entente in WW1, when the war was in it’s final two months before Americans even began offensive combat as part of the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, the third and easiest operation to straighten out the remaining German salients in the Western Front before the main Allied thrust to break the Hindenburg Line could begin.
#39.
But… Genesis XVIII:17-33 (?)
Towards the end there, in describing America after the Downfall, you highlight a fundamental difference between what are today described as “conservatives” and leftists (activists/community organizers). The left is relentless…they never stop. Conservatives, OTOH, are content to make a good days wage, then sit on the porch and watch the world go by. When someone shows up on the doorstep with a petition to enact some new law or other, that’s when they get uncomfortable.
A superb article and thread. Kudos to all.
Best,
Richard
Hi guys. I’m mystified by this thread, outside of interesting historical details. Whole thing violates Godwin’s Law to some extent. I (sadly) don’t see anything unusual about the Eastern Front. If Uncle Joe and Uncle Adolph had thumb-wrestled for the decision as to which godless national socialism was going to rule the world, I’d have been no less appalled. Beyond that it becomes speculation on first causes. Eh, no better than speculations about what-ifs, but along those lines what-if they had kept the pact, and then perhaps the US would not have even entered the war? OMG. Perhaps we should celebrate events.
Herman Cain was on Fox News Sunday, and again did a very good job. Chris Wallace praised his straightforward, honest answers. Cain’s first comment these days is that his message is more powerful than campaign spending by Romney and Perry, more powerful than the media who would limit the contest to just those two. He was willing and able to duel with numbers when Wallace presented him with a Christian Science Monitor analysis of 9-9-9. I’m not sure I’d want Wallace, Cain, or CSM to build me a bridge, but I was still impressed with Cain, he did a little math, and accurately, off the cuff and on the air. Compare and contrast to Obama, whom I’m not certain could successfully count his feet.
In college, I wrote a half joking term paper on the idea that the key campaign in Europe was actually the Italian invasion of Greece. The logic was :
1. The Italians failed to conquer Greece, which until that time was not involved in the war.
2. The Germans intervened in order to secure their southern flank in the scheduled invasion of Russia.
3. This intervention delayed the invasion of Russia be about six weeks.
4. Had this delay not occurred, the Germans would have reached Moscow well before winter.
5. Moscow was saved, in part, by the arrival of reinforcements from the Manchurian front. This arrival was possible only because the Russians had advance warning of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (through the Sorge spy ring, I think), and therefore knew that their troops would not be needed against the Japanese. The timimg of this warning was not dependent on anything done on the German front.
As I said, I was half joking. But it’s interesting to speculate about what might have happened if the Germans had managed to take Moscow on their first attempt.
Stalin won WW2–he got control over eastern Europe and the communists soon got control over China.
Stalin also killed many millions more civilians than Hitler did, Stalin was only surpassed by Mao in terms of human slaughter.
Hitler was addicted to methamphetamine-which accounts for much of his crazy decision making and paranoia.
–the German army used massive amounts of methamphetamine as did the Japanese army.
Anyone who has know or treated a methamphetamine addict has seen the face of chemical driven evil.
At the end of the war Japan had massive stockpiles of methamphetamine which they handed out to the work force to increase productivity. They ended that policy by 1950 because it was a disaster.
The main source of methamphetamine/ice in Asia these days is North Korea.
The allies also used amphetamines in WW2
– but in much more controlled doses–and mainly to keep pilots alert on long missions–we still do–we call them “go pills” and their use is now medically supervised and restricted to mission critical application.
POTUS Kennedys poor decision making during the Cuban missile crisis was, in part, a result of his abuse of amphetamines.
Josh@45:
I’m mystified by this thread, outside of interesting historical details.
Well, that makes two of us wondering “what the hey?”
wretchard: Downfall is powerful enough to give us a glimpse into the ultimate Black Hole, that moral singularity –man unfettered without God, able to think anything he wants, do anything he wants, without the slightest remaining restraint.
The Eastern Front calls into question whether we can ever be so smug in our idealism…
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols:
Man does not strive for happiness/pleasure; only the Englishman does that.
Nietzsche’s famous “will to power” critique of the English-inspired philosophy of Utilitarianism: humans are driven by power, not happiness or pleasure. That old curmudgeon.
Those Germans, back in the day, had some tough bark on them.
Karl Marx, Das Kapital:
[I]n no time and in no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so self-satisfied a way. The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he who would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With the driest naiveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard-measure, then, he applies to past, present, and future. The Christian religion, e.g., is “useful,” “because it forbids in the name of religion the same faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law.”…
Hey Josh, take a look at Richard Rubenstein’s book, “The Cunning of History.” The Eastern Front set a new benchmark for crossing decency barriers, as did Verdun decades earlier.
Would anyone venture forth on what “victory” means to the Islamists? Twice they came close to world conquest. They were stopped in October 732 in Tours and in September 1683 outside the gates of Vienna. What would “victory” mean for them today?
The funny thing about history is that, much in the way of an athletic event, the score at the end of the game stands, no matter all the “what if’s” people can come up with.
Toadold #8:
It was not AA guns but airpower that was important. By late 1942 the Luftwaffe was having to transfer fighter units from the Mediterrianian to the Western front to defend against USAAF bombers. In 1943 they had to start transferring fighter units from the Eastern front to defend against the 8th Air Force. And things went downhill rapidly from there. The top scoring fighter pilot of WWII, Erich Hartman, was credited with 352 kills, the vast majority on the Eastern front; he said that one RAF pilot was the equivalent of shooting down 6 Soviets. The top scoring tank killer of WWII was Han Rudel, who destroyed over 500 tanks, mainly wile flying the slow and vulnerable Ju87 Stuka. The USSR was prolific but no great shakes in the air.
As for the razor blades comment, here is another. In 1940 a Luftwaffe official was talking to Willy Messerschmidt and said they were well pleased with his Me-109 but they needed a fighter with more power and more range. Willy flew into a rage, saying “You can either have a fighter plane or a barn door!” He meant that more power and more range would produce a slow, clumsy aircraft, such as his Me-110.
A few years later the same two men were riding together on a train in Germany and had jump off the train and dive in a ditch because of an attack by USAAF P-47 Thunderbolts. The Luftwaffe man looked up at the powerful long-range fighters strafing targets inside Germany and said to Willy, “Well, there are the barn doors you were talking about!”
But the USSR’s helped start WWII with its invasion of Poland and its greatest contribution to the Allied victory was in not losing. An early capitulation by the Soviets or even a separate peace treaty would have given the Nazis access to the natural resources they so desperately needed.
b @ 50: the history of man has brutalities galore, so the Eastern Front had some larger armies and new technological tools, so we had the spectable of these new modernist cultures engaging in atavistic (sic) brutality. today’s mincing political correctness was not much in evidence. the US lost more casualities in the revolutionary war to hygiene than to the British, should I not be appalled at that? let’s make some attempt to keep a valid historical perspective.
Arab Islam is the war of all against all, it has no victory. Hey maybe that’s why Obama, … never mind. If there were no more Christians, Jews, Hindus, or Confucians (or whatever you want to call the modern Chinese), Sunni versus Shia would occupy them. Not to mention Arab versus Persian. Jihad does not specify the participants but it does license eternal battle. But hey so do we: eternal vigilance being the price of freedom. But seemingly we like our leisure in due measure, and Islam seems to mitigate against this in some unpleasant, obsessive-compulsive manner not *unknown* here, but generally considered dysfunctional.
Let’s not make the liberal mistake of thinking the world would be Eden if a few evil-intentioned men did not muck it up. Rather the Hobbesian view that the state of nature gives us nothing but nasty, brutish, and short lives. The world is as close to Eden as it is, because some well-intentioned men worked to make it so. That’s the miracle, and towards which we would like to work.
Oh well, I guess I will jump into this game too despite my reservations.
Had Franco not prevailed in Spain and therefore remained more or less neutral during WW II, Germany would likely have conquered Spain, taken Gibraltar, and controlled the entry to the Mediterranean. Quite often things that seem one way end up having rather different impact later.
Wretchard said: “Nothing permanent was achieved by that titanic struggle, that Downfall.” Well, there is Israel, so far still achieved.
Slip Sliding away: God only knows and God makes His plan the information’s unavailable to the mortal man.
Richard,
You are not my favorite writer on Pajamas Media for nothing.
This article should be read by every High School Senior before Graduating for the Next Ten Years. It may prepare their thoughts about America for what is to come, in life, or in College.
stoicheion
Guderian had to define the most effective way to achieve a successful army, as he was limited in troops (100 000, I believe), when he started to organise his armored army
Camus feared the Nazis because he believed the ideas which inspirited them would never go away. That could only be true if trouble was not particularly Nazi; if it could exist in other times and places. His narrator writes at the apparent end of the plague:
This is the closest we come to an acceptable secular definition of the idea of historical evil; the notion of a potential malice which lives in every man; a thread hiding beneath the generations of men, that given the right conditions can well up again and spread its stain across the world. It can apparently take many names. National Socialism. The Great Leap Forward. The Year Zero. It might even take the name of some form of Holy War.
But it never dies. Harlan Ellison penned this opening line to the Demon With a Glass Hand.
Did someone mention the Amalekites? “In Jewish tradition, the Amalekites came to represent the archetypal enemy of the Jews.” That identification has been variously linked with the Armenians, Jewish Communists, Nazis and Palestinians. There is your Demon With the Glass Hand, “the one who never dies, called by various names in various times”, not come to save the earth, but to vex it. In our childhood we were taught another name for this evil: the devil.
Hannah Arendt went looking for for the devil at the Eichmann trial. She didn’t find it in the form expected. There was no red man with horns and a trident. But there was something. “In her reporting of the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker … she coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe Eichmann. She raised the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness—the tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without critically thinking about the results of their action or inaction.”
I think the information revolution has made it possible for us to think about the devil again; at least in an historic sense. Millions are now familiar with the concept that information can take shape; that it can materialize a 100 dollar bill at the ATM. Perhaps it can materialize two airliners over the World Trade Center too. Just the other day President Obama ordered the death of of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US born al-Qaeda preacher. His crime was that of being the most seductive recruiter for the Jihad.
Who said that we had forgotten the devil? We’ve just renamed him. Perhaps he is no longer the devil of folk description, but no longer do we laugh when we sense something watching us out in the dark.
Many of your thoughts in this post elude me, at least at first reading. Not unlike some of your other posts…I’m one of those who must sometimes read intricate thoughts like these several times before I can contextualize and fully “grok” them. But this:
“When Hitler says that “I have been loyal to the natural law that weakness is punished, and therefore the German people, having failed do not deserve to live,” ; when Hitler has his brother in law shot because “it is his will” and when Eva Braun agrees because “you are the Fuhrer” or when Frau Goebbels poisons all her children because it is not “worth living in a world without National Socialism” we feel the force of the logic. But it is not the syllogisms that are sick; it is the premises.”
This got through to me on first reading, and my first thought was that if I was to write a thesis related to this, it would be a laundry list of adjustments or tweaks that might have been made to the flawed Nazi premises to make them more successful in various ways. What changes to the core set of Nazi (or Soviet) beliefs would have made them more successful in the military arena? Would have made them more moral? Would have even made them in some ways more acceptable to America? Of course, the same could easily be said of Japan, or of other countries at other times in history, but you’re right, WWII and particularly the Eastern Front theater was unique.
And I have no suggestions for such tweaks. That’s probably why it would be a good subject for a PhD thesis. It would that level of effort and erudition to come up with interesting ideas that might actually have worked in an environment so alien to everything we know today.
Wow. In October of 2011, the nightmare of WW2 was finally recapped in the rear view mirror. This is the best analysis and summary of the 20th Century that I have ever seen or read. I now see the world more clearly than before I read this. Thank you Richard.
Josh and westerncanadian
The answer to why this thread is relevant was supplied by stephen b:
Neither the Nazis nor the Soviets were interested in a good days’ work and then sitting on the porch relaxing. Hitler may have claimed he wanted to eventually “retire” to crafting monuments, but in the end he never would have. The Thousand Year Reich would never be quite ready for the caretaker functionary. There would always be one more problem to solve, another border to secure, another source of disloyalty to address.
Communism was expansionary from the begining, seeing Russia as just the first step in the revolution. Neither ideology had any bounds, not psychological, not morale, not physical. They were willing to cross any border to pursue the next phase of their vision.
Progressive today are the Men Without Borders, the Citizens of the World. Genocide may be how we define Nazis today, but that wasn’t their objective, it was merely a step they found acceptable to take in pursuing their objectives. That’s the real scary, evil, thing about them.
All this is beside the point that Wretchard is making.
These two beings (not men who are made in the Image of God but are God in their own image) are the logical extension of the results of this study: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-09-antisocial-personality-traits-utilitarian-responses.html
Making their decisions on purely utilitarian bases results in evil. Stalin won but it doesnt matter. Two scorpions in a bottle.
Interesting speculation as to the eventual winner if left to their own devices. What would the winner do, having defeated his counterpart and exhausted his kingdom? After running through all the population and resources, cant conquer anybody else. Sit back and relax? The only thing left would be indulgence but of what?
Thank you wretchard @ 57. “Who said that we had forgotten the devil? We’ve just renamed him. ”
We are constantly renaming him, assured it is never us. Or is it?
The drift to evil sure seems, time and again, to be a condition acquired willfully (though it can be imposed through conditioning) rather something inherited genetically. We would be cast out of Eden because we challenged natural law, thinking ourselves superior because it occurred to us it ought to be. We have special insights into our condition, so we should be able to do it better, right? :rollseyes:
In Jewish tradition it is the satan: the prosecutor. His purpose is to try men souls. And what if in the trial, the soul is attracted to the dark side?
The prosecutor. To give us the opportunity to rise and distinguish ourselves above our baser appetites appears to be the test. No? At a distance, the battle is easily seen against a single type. That is how it has been in war. But for each human being, having different tastes, different lures, the line where we are drawn to evil will be different for each of us: different snares await our tripping them. What evil lures us, and how far will we fall once we succumb? Will the prodigal son return asking forgiveness or go deeper into the bowels of Hell?
Hitler and Stalin and Mao may stand today as epitomes of evil. What’s their toll: 100-200 million murders combined? But history is not yet over, and there is no knowing how low one can go. Amalek translates as dweller in the valley. The most radical Greens think 6½ billion must be reduced to 500 million. IOW, as I have never yet heard a contemporary leader speak out against those Greens, can you not foresee someone arising that would make those three megalomaniacs look like pikers?
Oh, and we are told that the Lord only scattered us, at Babel, when we raised a Nimrod to challenge Him. What have we learned since?
JMH @ 60: In my youth, there was a simple distillation of all this, which I would have thought was a permanent lesson. Today, however, it seems forgotten, along with tail fins and hula hoops:
the ends don’t justify the means
And we were supposed to have learned this specifically from and about Joe and Adolph. And is often the theme in C.S. Lewis, that evil means only ever serve evil ends – and further tend to destroy those who attempt them in any case.
Saruman tries to seduce Gandalf with the good that their betrayal of Middle Earth might eventually produce – and Gandalf recoils. More writings from the 1950s.
Agorophobic: I think another way of getting the point which Richard made about the importance of premises would be that the Premises themselves determine the final outcome of those who believe them. Premises are the absolute foundation, and because of that are the root and heart of the Evil. One could say that the crime is committed in the mind and heart long before it is consummated in practice, or “whatsoever a man thinks in his heart, that he is.”
It is not possible for these underlying premises to be “tweaked” – they are far too fundamental for games like that. Example: one of the underlying premises of our civilisation, and of our values, is the premise that All Men are created Equal. This is not just a modern idea; this premise is at the heart of Christianity itself. Of course we don’t live up to our ideal, and often it is more honored in the breach, but still we all strive to live up to that in all our public efforts. Compare to the competing premise of National Socialism – They believed that their true followers were all UberMenschen, destined by birth and skill to rule over all the lesser races of the earth. The idea of “equality” under the law was offensive to those who held this belief, because the lesser races deserved no equality with the Ubermensch. Most despised of all were the UnterMenschen, who were destined to be eradicated from this world completely by the Ubermenschen.
To a person from our society and background, this may sound insane, but you must realize that *every* loyal Nazi believed these things to his core. If he did not believe them he would not have been Nazi. There was no “tweaking” of this premise possible; they could never say “well, we will just voice our strong disapproval of the Untermensch.” If you believe anything close to this premise, then you are dedicated to a genocidal race war which will last until either your enemies are all exterminated or you are. (forunately it was the latter)
Also note how, under this premise, the idea of Democracy itself is laughable – why would Ubermensch ever subject themselves to the judgement and rule of any of those beneath them? They were born to rule, not to seek permission. Or so they believed.
Batman, Josh, Islam needs an adversary to enslave, rape , steal, pillage and plunder from. The spoils of war are Allah’s earthly rewards. Without those earthly spoils of war, there would be no benefit or organizing goal to inspire the struggle for global domination for Islam.
9. Walter Sobchak
The thing I have always wondered about is why the German General Staff, upon seeing Hitler’s plan, did not say to themselves: “He is mad. Napoleon failed with that plan, and so will Hiter”. And then killed him.
Most people don’t understand the length to which the German General Staff had been compromised by Hitler. He replaced (in the late ’30s) both the defense minister and the Chief of Staff of the army, because of sex scandals, and carefully chose successors (himself and Brauchitsch) who were more closely aligned with Nazi ideals. When 1940 came around, and there was the debate within the ranks of the high command (OKW) over how to attack France, Hitler went with the minority view, and it turned out they were fantastically correct. This led to a lot of people in the majority essentially shutting up, for fear of being proven wrong again. Brauchitsch and the rest of the Wehrmacht (the German Armed Forces, army, navy, and air force included) took a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler, and Brauchitsch himself was rewarded with an enormous loan when he became COS, then subtly told that Hitler was overlooking stuff involving him and *his* wife. Since his predecessors (Blomberg and Fritsch) had seen their careers destroyed over this sort of thing, he was gratefuly to Hitler.
Even so, the German Generals plotted unsuccessfully to kill Hitler in 1938, and when they were thwarted, let him run wild until 1943, when they tried again. There, the device that was to set off the bomb malfunctioned, and they didn’t get another shot until 1944–with disasterous consequences for themselves…
32. Marie Claude
hmm Guderian based his warfare tactics on de Gaulle book “Le fil de l’épée” of 1932, and on the Brit Fuller and Liddell Hart works
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA509926
It’s rather famous these days that the post-war account that Guderian wrote (Panzer Leader) was translated into English by Lidell Hart, who *added his own name* to the list of pre-war strategists who influenced Guderian. I don’t know where you got the reference to de Gaulle; I haven’t ever read that Guderian had anything to say about his book, and I’ve never seen anything that said he read it. My memory is that he credited “English writers” and that the only one he mentioned by name was Fuller.
A pretty good novel on what would have happened if the West and the Soviets had gone to war with each other after defeating the Germans is “Red Inferno: 1945″
But you have to wonder – if we had let Patton have his head after the breakout that followed Operation Cobra, let him close the Falaise Gap and cut off and destroy the German army in the West instead of letting Monty stop him at Argentan? Then poured the coal to him and let him do his drag race along the southern route. Then no Battle of the Bulge because no German Army left in the West, and Patton’s Shermans all the way to Poland by Christmas. Then add some backbone in the US-UK leadership. And then no Warsaw Pact is possible, the Soviets being bottled up to the east. How much sooner might the USSR have crumbled if they had less Other People’s Money to loot or more productive countries to enslave? I think that when communists and other fascists can no longer expand, they die.
The German psychologist, Alice Miller, explains Hitler from the perspective of his childhood. He was mercilessly beaten by his father and essentially saw the world as his father saw him.
There are two conclusions you can draw from the butcheries of the 20th century. The first is that they prove the existence of some “moral law” which if transgressed leads to catastrophic outcomes. In that view there are bounds — there are illegitimate ends — which are forbidden to us. Modern secular secular society doesn’t ask why such boundaries must exist, they simply accept from the experience born of pain that this moral force-field exists.
The other possible conclusion is that world is too complex and nonlinear a system to impose human will upon. We live in a larger system whose workings we barely understand. And hence, any attempts to over-engineer it — with central planning, 5 year plans, thousand year Reichs and worker’s paradises — will set up a disastrous feedback loop. That we live in a powerful workshop like unattended children, and we must mind what buttons we push.
I would argue that possibility A is functionally equivalent to possibility B. Both imply that man lives in a world that is not wholly his own. It is inhabited by a “Creator”, “God”, “Reality” or “History” — you take your pick on the word — which is not subject to human control and with which we must live in an attitude of listening. We are not ubermensch, we are along for the ride and there is no guarantee that we can even finish the session.
In any case, we don’t know the answers. Hitler made the mistake of thinking that he did. Not just him alone of course. In the 20th century the same error was made by Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Even that jumped up little dwarf Kim Jong Il thinks he’s got the formulas to the universe. Making this mistake doesn’t really require talent. It just requires ignorance and pride in equal measure. Here, hold muh beer.
Whether by luck or genius, the Founders rightly feared the possibility of the god-state; the emergence of men without restraints; the special people; the enlightened ones. By a rhetorical or logical device, they put the nation “under God”, which is another way if you are an atheist, of simply saying, that there shall be “no permanent human order, no thousand year reich”.
It is this attachment to the earth, the hearth, the little church on the corner which I think is the greatest strength of America. “God” — or reality or history — is able to speak to America in a thousand different ways; never simply through a prophet on some high hill. And he may tell us how to get to the stars, to frack all the oil we want; to cure cancer and find a better dip for doritos. None of that may interest the elite. But that’s their problem.
The fact that the US had nuclear weapons before the end of WWII is really a single link in a long chain going back to before Napoleon, to the New England elites and the British banks, to the beginning of US imperialism.
US imperialism is what the civil war was really about, and it is what gave us blood thirsty generals like Sherman, Grant and Sheridan who would later perform those same kind of actions on the Indian nations just as Wretchard describes: “how great states act when they are completely unfettered by such considerations as humanity, morals or even sanity.” The New England elite learned about the value of being the worlds reserve currency from the their English allies and they will never let go. That is why Roosevelt built up the aircraft carriers before the war, and it is why the US was ready to ramp up war production within months after Pearl Harbor. Germany never had much more of a chance than the Confederacy, the Indian nations, or the Spanish Empire.
In any case, the eastern elite didn’t let Patton continue his fight, with or without nuclear weapons, because the American people were exhausted and weren’t willing to fight another war. They had no choice.
In the end is there really any difference between the massacre of the plains Indians or the Moro tribesman and what Hitler and Stalin did to their opponents? These centuries old American lies are going to die with the dollar which is no more superior to any other fiat currency than American imperialism is to any other.
Re #2. john lynch
“…Unlike Hitler, Stalin did know limits…”
I guess this he managed to learn from experience: just read a diplomatic correspondence from 1941 to 1945 between Stalin on one side and Roosevelt and Churchill on another. He goes from pleading beggar to arrogant and obnoxious (still beggar). The experience did not diminish his arrogance, of course, but deep inside he knew not to push too far. He seemed to learn well that he cannot economically compete. Period.
67. David W. Nicholas
“He tried to gain every material available about motorized warfare and translated the works of Captain B.H. Liddel Hart and Major-General J.F.C. Fuller. In Britain these theorists had only limited success in seeing their ideas realised. Guderian also read a short book by a French officer, Charles de Gaulle.”
http://hosted.wargamer.com/Panzer/guderian.htm
try the Net, there are many other articles that say so !
Besides I made a error, it’s not “le fil de l’épée” 1932, but “toward a professional army” 1934
# 66 and 9:
In the 1930’s the German General Staff did plot to kill Hitler and stage a coup. They first asked the Brits and French if they would support the idea and recognize their new government. The Brits and French were horrified and said no. That ended that.
A few facts people today have a hard time believing:
1. Hitler was popularly elected, not by driving SS tanks into downtown Berlin.
2. Hitler’s greatest enemy was the professional German military, followed by the professionals in the British and French militaries, who also proposed an assassination to their horrified politicians.
3. Hitler’s greatest friends were those who wanted Peace and sought “proper” and legal arrangements.
Collectively, these constitute a complete reversal of what most people believe.
Re #7. Alexis
“…Perhaps God can be found not in the loudest roar, but rather in the faintest whisper.”
Yes, life exists in a thin boundary between chaos and order. When it shifts in either direction we have Stalin or tribal, or… Stalin AND tribal.
Stalin once asked an adivsor in response to a question, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” But the answer is today there are still Popes and a Catholic Church, but no more USSR or Nazi Germany. In the long run, the question was irrelevant, just like Stalin and Hitler. Sic transit gloria.
Re #14. Eggplant
I like it.
“However we Americans voted in Obama as President so we’re really in no position to criticize the Germans for abject stupidity.”
I’m always impressed with the quality of the conversations here. I wish I could take this blog for college credit.
Along the lines of “navel gazing” as to what might have been, I’ve always wondered about two things:
What if, after Dunkirk, Hitler had said to England, “Our argument is not with you. Stay there and do not misbehave” and then released all British POWs back to England. Would the appeasers have, given fresh political ammunition, been able to remove/negate Churchill and effectively take England out of the war? I can’t remember where I read it, but I believe this was actually discussed in the German High Command.
And had that happened, what would have happened if the Japanese Army leadership had won the argument over the Navy and they’d decided to not attack Peal Harbor.
The net result? Germany has complete focus on Russia and Japan has complete focus on Asia/India. They take Europe/Asia (and probably Africa) without America entering the war?
@#9 Walt Because they were Germans, that’s why…
+1 on the recommendation of The Badlands. I thought I knew a good bit about that era, but the book was eye opening.
The Moro Tribesmen were not massacred in the genocidal sense though whenever they made a stand, such as in the volcanoes of Jolo, they were often killed to the last man. The most effective tactic employed by the US Army was to establish the Philippine Constabulary and to open Mindanao for settlement to farmers from the Luzon and the Visayas. The fatal blow to the Moros was the Torrens Title, public health and the public school. The US Army drove the warriors from the field and then the Ilocano and Visayan farmer basically took over the empty spaces of their former domain.
In the centuries prior to the arrival of US forces, the Moros had raided the Visayas and Luzon mercilessly for slaves. You can still see all the forts up and down the coast set up to warn against the slavers.
Ironically the Army didn’t want the Moro wars. The US discovered it had been sold a pig in a poke by the Spanish under the treaty of Paris. Mindanao, for example, was not actually theirs to alienate. They barely held it. At first, the US Army tried to ignore it, because they were in no mood for another war. But US newspapers made a big issue of the slaving; and “slaving” was in the years following the civil war a hot button word.
So the campaign began. Not for the first time the “CNN effect” take place, though in this case it was more like Hearst Papers effect.
The US Commanders were veterans of the Indian Wars. The Moros could not have chosen a more formidable enemy. Basically the US commanders destroyed the Sultanate and although the Moros were not demographically destroyed to any great extent, their power vis-a-vis the Christianized part of the Philippines was broken. The Moros now see Manila as being in possession of ill-gotten gains and have been waging a low intensity conflict since the 1970s to rebuild the Sultanate. Since the US is gone, their beef is now with Manila, capital of the successor state.
But if you were to give the Philippines back to its indigenes, where would you start? The Philippines is a palimpsest of tribes. The older tribes have been pushed up into the hills (the “lumads” or old ones) and the lowlands were acquired by an assortment of other groups. Today the question of who is indigenous is probably a moot one even if you could answer it.
The lowland visayans and tagalogs are arguably less “indigenous” than the uplanders; and the Moros themseles are Johnny-come-latelies only a little older than the Spanish colonizers. The Moros were the result of the missionary wave from the Malay barrier, which clashed with the Western missionary wave from the Spain.
Two empires clashed in the Far East; ironically they were representatives of the same forces which had only recently been at daggers drawn in the reconquista. Imagine: your Spaniard sails around the world to the meet the Moor again. Moros.
In practical terms all this is moot. The Philippines is now the Philippines. Your average Ilocano, Kalahan, Manobo, Tiruray or Waray-waray man may be dimly aware of his ethnic origin, but in practice he wants his Magic Sing, cell phone, job and electric fan. Who knows who owns the earth? It’s been fought over so often I couldn’t tell you if I tried, as far as the Philippines is concerned, and I think I know it better than most.
So the best approach I think, is to devote a little time to remembering the past, and after that five minutes of silence on to the Philippine Basketball Association games! Break out the San Miguel Beer, crack open the chicharron and the Nagaraya cracker nuts. And maghapi-hapi tayo. We should all remember the past, but never forget that we live in the present.
78. lescoulee
Roosevelt wasn’t going to let Germany take over Europe, though it might have taken longer time for him to manage it
The funny thing is that Hitler wasn’t interested into the Mediterranean club, apart Greece, and later on Italy, but that was Italy’s fault, that couldn’t win its wars
62. Pascal Oh, and we are told that the Lord only scattered us, at Babel, when we raised a Nimrod to challenge Him. What have we learned since?
That repentance and remission of sins was preached in the name of Jesus Christ among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. That God justifies the heathen through faith, as it was promised to Abraham, “In thee shall all nations be blessed.” That the confusion of tongues at Babel was reversed for all time on Pentecost day. For as Jesus himself said, “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.” In short, the scattering days are over after Calvary.
61. Herb: Interesting speculation as to the eventual winner if left to their own devices. What would the winner do, having defeated his counterpart and exhausted his kingdom? After running through all the population and resources, cant conquer anybody else. Sit back and relax?
Who governs the governors? Entropy. The last enemy that shall be conquered is death, but it’s not a human conqueror who will do it.
“What if, after Dunkirk, Hitler had said to England, “Our argument is not with you. Stay there and do not misbehave” and then released all British POWs back to England. Would the appeasers have, given fresh political ammunition, been able to remove/negate Churchill and effectively take England out of the war?”
There are more than a few who maintain that this is what Rudolph Hess’s flight to Scotland was all about, with the one difference: rather than replacing Churchill, the thought is that Churchill himself briefly considered the possibility that the war was lost and a negotiated end was the only way out of the situation.
Supposedly he made some overtures through unofficial channel, and Rudolph Hess was the expendable official sent to see if face to face negotiations could yield some result.
Yes, this sounds fantastic and unbelievable, but consider the very strange restrictions put on Hess during his long imprisonment in Spandau prison: He was only allowed to speak to his family for one half hour per month, and all communications were monitored. Everything he wrote was heavily censored, he was *Never* allowed to speak freely to anyone outside of his prison guards – who were under orders not to speak to him.
Why such freakish security for 4 decades? Who were they trying to protect? Certainly not the Nazis – so that leaves only the English Government, and Churchill. What knowledge did Hess have that the English government feared so greatly decades after the war ended?
Whatever it was, Hess took it to the grave with him.
Wretchard
The power of the film lies in quite naturally showing that everything the inner Nazi coterie did was completely logical given their premises.
………..
You see this logical thought process tied to insane premises expressed a century earlier in the fanciful tales of Edgar Allen Poe.
to 34. Teresita, et.al.
re:Amalek [the spiritual aspect]
Remember what Amalek did to you on the road, on your way out of Egypt. That he encountered you on the way and cut off those lagging to your rear, when you were tired and exhausted; he did not fear G-d. Therefore… you must obliterate the memory of Amalek from under the heavens. Do not forget. (Deuteronomy 25:17-19)
The Jewish people had just experienced one of the greatest manifestations of divine power in history… How could they possibly question, “Is G-d amongst us or not”?
Yet such is the nature of doubt. There is doubt that is based on a rational query. There is doubt that rises from the doubter’s subjective motives and desires. But then there is doubt pure and simple: irrational doubt, doubt more powerful than reason. Doubt that neutralizes the most convincing arguments and the most inspiring experiences with nothing more than a cynical shrug.
Such was the doubt that left the Jewish people susceptible to attack from Amalek. Amalek, in the spiritual sphere, is the essence of baseless, irrational indifference. In the words of the Midrash:
What is the incident (of Amalek) comparable to? To a boiling tub of water which no creature was able to enter. Along came one evil-doer and jumped into it. Although he was burned, he cooled it for the others.
This is why Amalek, and what he represents, constitutes the arch enemy of the Jewish people and their mission in life. As Moses proclaimed following the war with Amalek, “G-d has sworn by His throne; G-d is at war with Amalek for all generations.”[Exodus 17:16.] Truth can refute the logical arguments offered against it. Truth can even prevail over man’s selfish drives and desires, for intrinsic to the nature of man is the axiom that “the mind rules over the heart” — that it is within a person’s capacity to so thoroughly appreciate a truth that it is ingrained in his character and implemented in his behavior. But man’s rational faculties are powerless against the challenge of an Amalek who leaps into the boiling tub, who brazenly mocks the truth and cools man’s most inspired moments with nothing more than a dismissive “So what?”
Amalek does not challenge the truth with arguments, or even with selfish motivations — he just disregards it. To the axiom, “Do truth because it is true,” Amalek says “So what?” Armed with nothing but his chutzpah, Amalek jumps into the boiling tub, contests the incontestable. And in doing so he cools its impact.
Amalek is irrational and totally unresponsive to reason; the answer to Amalek is likewise supra-rational. The Jew’s response to Amalek is to remember: To call forth his soul’s reserves of supra-rational faith, a faith which may lie buried and forgotten under a mass of mundane involvements and entanglements. A faith which, when remembered, can meet his every moral challenge, rational or not.
Based on the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson; adapted by Yanki Tauber.
Assigning the idea that “All Men are Created Equal” as a basic premise of Christianity restricts the scope and meaning of “religious tolerance” to something banal and trivial, related to practice, such as which day of the week one worships.
wretchard@70: It is this attachment to the earth, the hearth, the little church on the corner which I think is the greatest strength of America.
Or what we were taught as kids, to value something outside of ourselves. Not as literary or evocative, but we intuitively understood the message. Thou shalt not be craven (at least, not all of the time.) It is a basic premise of the human condition that we are all called upon to be greater than we are – at least once, but second and third chances are not unusual.
Re #19. lambat
“blert, that was excellent, thanks.
What I am curious is by how much the Nazi war machine was hindered by its attempt to exterminate the jews — the logistic and engineering drain from the war effort.”
blert probably will reply to you with his answer, but I think this particular drain was miniscule. It is only when he started to exterminate locals (beside Jews) the drain grew a lot to the point that he had to guard all his logistics tail.
81. Marie Claude
Adolf wasn’t happy when el Duce declared war on France, either. He wasn’t for sharing… and he didn’t want Italy as an active war participant.
As long as Italy was nominally neutral Hitler could use her as a trading puppet. More specifically, el Duce’s entry into the war meant that he’d lose his American oil connection — and become a further drain on Axis oil.
This last bit has received almost no attention whatsoever.
Italy was a disaster for Germany. She was economically dependent — and ultimately flipped sides — and in so doing completely destroying the Eastern Front in the late Summer of 43.
El Duce’s folly was raised to the limit by Tokyo. Hitler would’ve been far better served if both parties played a pat hand.
Blert
I know, Hitler dispised the Italians, that were eagering to get some Fame through Germany’s umbrella, also they hoped to be rewarded with Tunisia, the colony that the French “robbed” to Italy at the end of the 19th century, but in compensation we let Italy to rule Libya. Anyway, Musolini didn’t perdon us this conquest, as the Italians thought that Tunisia was there “private” back yard. It’s also why in the first part of WW1 Italy was Germany’s allie, that the Brit and French intelligence services reverted, through promises of getting some territory rewards on Austrian and Ottoman territories, and through large subsidies to Musolini’s paper. Anyway, Musolini hated us, he didn’t get his part of the Ottoman empire, hence his coward attack in the Alps when Hitler was attacking us in Belgium. The feny thing, a handful of french border guards pushed him back into his Italian forts, while our navy was bombing Genoa harbour.
Dunno if the same scenario could still happen, though I’m pretty sure that Italy would still side Germany today again.
MC…
How quickly you forget: Italy is currently under active military operations to support Paris, London and Washington – Berlin is out of it.
c.f. Libya.
As for Italy’s PRIMARY ally it’s America; duh!
Berlusconi said so in as many words. It was American pressure he couldn’t stand up to.
And America couldn’t stand up to British pressure.
And the British couldn’t stand up to French pressure.
( Both parties had an economic identity of interest: they didn’t want their banking systems to blow up. )
but Blert, if you’re going to close some NATO bases, and or NATO Europe for economical reasons? Berlusconi doesn’t count anymore in the geopolitical spectre, the markets are waiting for his resign !
87. grrr
While the Shoah rightly gets a lot of ink… the Nazi enslavement of millions gets little press.
The numbers of ‘Displaced Persons’ — i.e. war slaves — was vast — astounding, really.
It is no exaggeration to say that trainloads of newly minted slaves were arriving every hour during 1944.
The Nazis culled essentially all of the available skilled and semi-skilled labor from all points of Europe — and placed them throughout their war economy.
Every German farm was stuffed with PWs from the Eastern Campaigns. By 1945 slaves were replacing draft horses!
And within the factories forced labor was tasked on a massive scale.
The resulting drop in quality and ramp in ‘defects’ caused the Nazis far more trouble than the loss of Jewish talent — at least in their eyes.
Railroad transport is so efficient that SD deportations were almost never a stressor of the rails.
Because weapons and ammo were so long restricted across Europe, no Minute Men or variation thereof was possible.
Instead, all munitions had to be obtained at horrific risk from the Nazi enemy most of the time.
Here an there the British would air drop — eventually being copied by the Red Army — but such supplies were a joke compared to the scale of fighting.
The military impact of the Shoah turns upon lost genius. Dr. Haber was driven off. Such leading lights were worth 50,000 fighting men. Without his raving Jew hatred Hitler could well have had the atomic bomb first.
So his hatred was a feature, not a bug. And that’s why all serious talk of moving him off his throne was considered a very bad strategic move by SHAEF.
—–
MC…
Guderian got his tank warfare insights entirely from the Soviets. He spent some time with them — as they worked on Deep Operations. It was the Red Army that invented parachute warfare, not Germany. It was the Red Army that invented deeply penetrating tank operations — later scotched by Stalin, himself. Facing defeat from them — he finally relented and permitted Marshal Zukov to bring them back.
When Guderian was kissing up to Fuller the last thing he was going to do was dredge up his Russian ‘schooling.’
As for the engine being more important than the radio set — that’s the Panzer General spewing disinformation.
For those curious, Guderian personally supervised the design of Panzer radio nets. In their final form HQ sets could be shifted from and to any regular production tank. He’d taken the art beyond HQ dedicated tanks. And he was on FM bands while everyone else was still on AM frequencies. He also took great pride in the throat microphone. It was so directional that one could be heard above the din of panzer and battle.
By comparison, all other commanders faced aural fatigue as any communication became a scream fest. It was this loudness that caused the French and others to use signal flags — as if they were asea two centuries ago.
Beyond that, Guderian is certainly the father of ANTI-RADIO emissions detection armored cars. They permitted Germany to find higher HQs based upon elint. General O’Connor was bagged this way. His boys could simply go straight for the commanders — at such a speed that the defenders couldn’t rally to the flag fast enough. This ONE tactic was why and how Soviet divisions collapsed in just a few hours of combat. They literally didn’t know what hit them.
Eventually they had to stop using radios entirely.
Excellent essay wretchard.
Interesting tie in essay by Tom Wolfe (I found it thanks to Ed Driscoll.com) from 1996 called “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died”
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/Wolfe-Sorry-But-Your-Soul-Just-Died.php
FTA quoting Nietzsche (writing in 1882) “‘The story I have to tell,’ wrote Nietzsche, ‘is the history of the next two centuries.’ He predicted (in Ecce Homo) that the twentieth century would be a century of ‘wars such as have never happened on earth,’ wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to…” and “Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century ‘on the mere pittance’ of the old decaying God–based moral codes. But then, in the twenty–first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of ‘the total eclipse of all values’ (in The Will to Power)…”
If Nietzsche’s “God is dead” was an observation or statement of fact (maybe true maybe not), perhaps Hitler (and the like) saw the same thing and thought it a call to action….
Wretch:
“Here, hold muh beer.”
Howinthehell did a Filipino revolutionary get thru Hahvahd and so get America?
Please generate for all our enlightenment generate a however long you think it takes essay on what it takes to get America. I grew up in it and I understand it but my God I cant explain it.
When the J2 was bored, we looked at the logistics of the Eastern Front in WWII. We added up what it took to field the Russian Army, subtracted what we thought the Communists were producing based on their numbers in 1941, and came up with a huge hole.
That hole was filled by Lend-Lease.
We then added up what the Russians had at the end of the war and subtracted Lend-Lease. That did not leave much. That number was smaller than official Soviet figures for what they said they produced.
Without Lend-Lease, the USSR would have collapsed in 1942. Without Lend-Lease, the USSR could not have encircled the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad nor could it have sustained the strategic offensives of 1943.
Lend Lease supplied the food and clothes for the ENTIRE Soviet Army. It supplied all the aviation gas. All the trucks. And most of the critical material to make artillery. And it supplied nearly all of the aluminum and 1/4 of the steel. Thousands of US planes and tanks were sent as well.
In my opinion the outcome of the war was decided in August 1939 at Nomonhan/Khalkin Gol. If Zhukov had not crushed the Kwangtung Army there, the Japanese might well have chosen the army’s preferred Northern Strategy of attacling the USSR in the Far East, instead of the Naval Southern Strategy of the Pacific War. Had the Japanese done so,there would have been two results. First, it would have been far harder, if not impossible for FDR to bring the USA into the war, so no lend-lease. Second, a Japanese attack in the Soviet Maritime Districts in the autumn of 1941, would have whipsawed Stalin’s attempts to shift forces from his Far East to the Western Front. It would have also increased demoralization and defeatism., and probably encouraged restive minorities to rise in resistance.
Butchery of the 20th Century?
By what standard?
The 20th Century has been tame by any comparison to the others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization
And then the Mongols. Who killed nearly 100% of everything that opposed them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Europe
The Thirty Year’s War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
King Phillips War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Philip%27s_War
Had Japan never hit Pearl Harbor and solely focused on the Dutch, French, and British holdings, and used Its Kido Butai to destroy the bases in the Raj, then the same in Australia, the US never could have entered the War in the Pacific and probably would not have done the same in Europe for at least another year. The loss of the Raj and Australia via isolation would have crippled England and would have opened the door for a 1942 strike by Kido Butai on the Suez. And Kido Butai would have been three times larger and much more formidable.
Hitler’s mistakes are well known. But it was Japan that brought the US into the War too early.
Walter Sobchak @9
Several reasons the Generals did not object to Hitler’s plan.
Repeatedly they had doubted his judgment from Rhineland occupation, to Anschluss, to Czechoslovakia, to Poland, to France 1940. Again and again they were proven wrong and the Sleepwalker Through History had been right.
Second, they had a good understandidng of just how inept the Red Army had been in Finland, and even the minimally opposed seizures of Eastern Poland, the Baltic States, and Western Ulraine. They also knew the full extent of the decapitating Generals Purge of 1938. The final straw was Stalin’s doubling down and demanding that Hitler cede to him the rest of the Romanian oil fields.
Re #82. Teresita
“The last enemy that shall be conquered is death, but it’s not a human conqueror who will do it.”
And what do you think about Singularity?
Austin 97,
Do not forget The War of the Triple Alliance that wiped out most of the male population of Paraguay.
Stalin Mao and Hitler were all totalitarian dictators who presided over mass murder but Stalin was different. Unlike Hitler and Mao and the second string supporters of such men like Beria there is little evidence of sexual depravity on the part of Stalin. The abnormality of Hitler and Mao are documented. This ties into a previous BC topic. My argument is not that Iosip Djugashvili was sane, clearly he was not, but that his pathology was unlike that of his peers. Was this a strength that helped him survive, draw back from suicidal excess, and work with others or was it a potential weakness in limiting his capacity to create an enduring fantasy? When the sample set is thankfully small we must be careful not to fall into logical fallacies.
85. PMO
I noticed that you reference the Lubavitcher Rebbe at the end. While they provided me answers to some questions many years ago, for some reason I never got an accurate answer as to where Amalek came from. By using concordance I subsequently learned. I remain stumped as to why the Chabad rabbi did not tell me. It is possible he did not know because all that begatting in Genesis can put people to sleep. Hence I had good reason earlier to say even many Jews do not know of Amalek, and those that do, apparently not enough.
Your description of Amalekite behavior is a reasonable enough analogy. But it does not warn us sufficiently where to look for Amalekites. See from where Amalek sprung and then make the comparison to Baby Boomers drenched in materialism. Then consider what sort of grandchildren may come from such shallowness, some imbued with a stark dissatisfaction with and, more ominously, to life.
So God will have war with Amalek in each generation? I fear that the war from this generation will be in spades.
Check that concordance and understand the parallel I am making. It’s never fun being blind sided, nor discovering that you have a fifth column. There may be some things you can do. Pray that it is not too late.
And then the Mongols. Who killed nearly 100% of everything that opposed them.
In contrast to the common belief is that violence springs from savagery, from the bare separation from the animal; the Nazis were the complete opposite. They were members of civilization at its highest pitch. They had a plausible reason for everything; why the weak were doomed; why the strong were destined to succeed; why the muddled and decadent democracies were inevitably going to fall.
They had a plan. If you listened to them they’d explain how they were going to save the world.
Better yet, they had the “Dancing With the Stars” factor. Nazi uniforms were created by top-notch fashion designers and sewn by Hugo Boss. Nazis produced art films directed by beautiful women; they used Liszt as a soundtrack to their newsreels. They developed jets, rockets and the assault rifle. Their leaders lived in picturesque mountain chalets when they were not tootling around in six wheel Mercedes Benzes. If you didn’t know much about the Nazis, they would seem like such a nice crowd to be part of.
By contrast the average American or British politician of the era was boring. They were interested in patronage and petty graft and in Boston at least, ate fried quahogs and corned beef and cabbage. But the Nazis and the Commies! Well those were the people to be.
And the reality was lots of people wanted to be like them. In “Downfall” Goebbels retorts to entreaties to “spare the German people” by saying that “nobody forced the German people to elect us. They wanted us, don’t kid yourself.”
And they had their admirers all over Europe too. If you were a clever young man or woman in the 1930s you were either Red or Fascist. You were John Cornford or the Mitford Sisters. Do you suppose anyone wanted to be a Republican in 1933? Or a Colonel Blimp yearning for the glories of the last century? “What ho, old chap?”
Whereas people like the Mongols can be dismissed as barbarians; the Nazis by contrast were products of the highest European civilization gone horribly wrong. You would expect that the most cruel behavior would come from the graduates of Dogpatch U; but wouldn’t it be a surprise to find all the gas chambers run by young men and women from Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Stanford? I guess that was the surprise that greeted those who trusted in the vanguards of society. Surprise, surprise.
What the Nazi episode demonstrated is that the worst cruelties can come from the most idealistic. I remember talking to a guy who had done time in both the criminal and political prison systems of the Philippines during the Marcos Era.
You’re not always safer with the special people.
with all the comments/commentators here [bravo] can someone explain the death-wish of the us/israel in funding the ‘palestinians’ and all the arabs/muslems? the arabs make no bones about declaring that they want to kill the ‘little satan’ as well as the ‘big satan’.
Rurik @ 96 said:
“In my opinion the outcome of the war was decided in August 1939 at Nomonhan/Khalkin Gol.”
This is an interesting opinion. Rurik left out that Nomonhan/Khalkin Gol was the battle that established Georgy Zhukov as a significant general. After several close calls with Stalin, Zhukov was placed in command of the defense of Stalingrad. It was at Stalingrad that the German offensive in the Soviet Union reached its turning point and was the beginning of the end of WW-II. Arguably, a less competent Soviet general might have failed at Stalingrad.
blert @ 16 said:
“The hinge of fate WRT WWII was Crete. It caused Hitler to stop using his ultimate weapon: the Fallschirmjager. Had they been correctly deployed in Barbarossa — deeply across the limited Soviet rail net — Hitler would have defeated Stalin before Pearl Harbor.”
The German military simply did not understand how to use paratroopers. Given their lack of understanding, there is no credible way the Germans could have effectively used paratroopers against the Soviets. IMHO, the WW-II military actions in Greece (and the rest of the Balkan peninsula) were mainly a side show and largely irrelevant to the outcome of the war. The only reason why the Germans were involved there in the first place was due Mussolini’s bungling (the Italians were supposed to take over Greece).
JMH @ 60 said:
“Genocide may be how we define Nazis today, but that wasn’t their objective, it was merely a step they found acceptable to take in pursuing their objectives. That’s the real scary, evil, thing about them.”
What was really scary about the Holocaust is it made no military sense and actually degraded the German’s ability to win WW-II. It was an act of mindless hate that was counter-survival to the German state. The Germans were and to some extent remain the most rational people on the planet (the Germans effectively invented modern science and mathematics). It amazes me that such a rational people were so seduced by hate that it destroyed them. Along this line, Hitler’s Final Political Testament is interesting to read, refer to:
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/documents/poltest.htm
Hitler dictated this testament just before he committed suicide. Even in the end, Hitler remained convinced that WW-II was about the Germans fighting the Jews. As a mater of interest, an original copy of this document is (or was) on display at the Imperial War Museum in London (definitely worth a visit).
[#2 of 4]
Just wanted to thank Josh, Pascal, and unsk, and of course, our host, Wretchard. Stunning discussion.
Bad human beings and not self-assessed demigods. C.S. Lewis echoes here.
The NAZIs were simply a peculiar subset of the Sustainability nuts. Their sole difference was in their mounting an evidential heavy case that they were doing the world a favor by obliterating all but arguably the best people up to that time.
Dreadfully, that kind of goal is the horror facing us still. What I refuse to grant the
ProgressivesIncrementals is demonstrated thus: At least the NAZIs were not so craven as to deny what they were aiming to do.Hitler did the world a favor by displaying his madness, his spittle showing up even in the old newsreels today. People understood what it was they had to fight, and fight they did.
Our nuts tend to be soft-spoken, making them no less dangerous, but far more creepy.
41. Teresita You are way to linear in your approach to warfare. Body counts are just body counts. They really don’t mean that much. The Eastern front went on so long because the Soviets didn’t have the skills to win and the Nazi’s didn’t have the material or men. Take the USA out of the war as a active participant and the whole picture changes. Then the Nazi’s have the troops they need and the machines for those troops to fight with. Move the fighters from Germany and France to Russia and the Nazi’s triple their air power. That would be enough to wrest control of the air away from the Soviets.
104. f47. It can give you a quick answer that I doubt you’ll easily accept. It makes no sense if you are thinking that this is all following a Western Civ paradigm. It starts to make sense once you recognize that a much older paradigm has regained respect in the halls of influence and power.
Some years ago Francis Porretto penned a series titled “The Death Cults.’ With all that evidence, you may be willing to accept the answer. Some of Mr. Porretto’s more data filled essays that he used to support his view are mentioned in the comments at that link much like footnotes.
107. Pascal.
I had intended to end one paragraph by tying the monstrous acts of the NAZIs to C.S. Lewis’ observation.
And our contemporary nuts are weaving their web with the approval of their own conscience too. They are the true believers who will save Gaia.
Remember the hideous Green intimidation/propaganda video “10-10 No Pressure?” After it was pulled within 24 hours due to the outrage, its apologists charged everybody else with having no sense of humor. >>shudder<<
“But US newspapers made a big issue of the slaving; and “slaving” was in the years following the civil war a hot button word.
So the campaign began. Not for the first time the “CNN effect” take place, though in this case it was more like Hearst Papers effect.”
Wretchard, you put your finger right on it. It was the elites thirsting for power and empire, and the military industrial complex was already building up steam. The narrative then was that it was white mans burden to civilize the heathens, now it is the white man’s burden to civilize Islamic fundamentalists. If there were no Al Queda then the Rockefellers and Morgans would have to manufacture one. Or is that what 9/11 was really about?
@4. john lynch writes: “The United States really does want a peaceful world where countries trade with each other while ruling themselves. The world is full of such countries and we do not stir. It’s only the warlike and the genocidal that gain our attention.”
There is no “The United States” per se, there is an elite that calls most of the shots in their own interest, and they need to construct a narrative to fit their ambitions. Why is virtually all of Alaska and most of the west under the control of the Federal government in Washington? Is that what “The United States” wants or put a little differently, is this what the majority of the states want? Were the Indian nations really “aggressive dictatorships”? Was the Confederacy? Didn’t Hitler invade the Soviet Union under the pretext of the Slavs being an inferior and barbaric race?
Pat Buchannon has written a book detailing how British action in Poland on the eve could be one of the major causes of WWII, and WWI can be viewed from the prism of it really being about the Kaiser resisting the financial power of London that to a large degree rested upon the gold leveraged pound being the world’s reserve currency.
America has had the good fortune of always coming out on top and being able to write the history books, but the internet and the crumbling dollar are poised to take that privilege away.
Who was responsible for the Victory in WWII? The Allies in their totality. Had the Japanese won at Midway they would have attacked Siberia and Hitler would have taken Stalingrad. Without the East Front the Western Allies could not have returned to the continent. It goes on and on.
For those who claim that the Western Allies only fought in a sideshow I would like to point out that Stalin had only one battle to fight whereas the Anglosphere fought on four fronts in Europe — the Med, France, the air campaign over Germany and the Battle of the Atlantic They also fought in three theaters in Asia–CBI, Central Pacific , Southwest Pacific and CBI.
Blert
isn’t it funny that our actual EU was designed by Churchill (and Roosevelt) himself? that this common euro money was then forecasted too?
check:
http://tinyurl.com/65ylu53
Churchill also said it in his discourse in Zurich in 1946
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8oUyFS556s
Everyone knew what the Nazis were about. Read this book.
FDR sent a Nazi lover to Berlin and he came back a rabid Nazi hater. Reading it, I was struck by the parallels between the Islamists and their treatment of people and the Nazis, or for that matter the Leftist thugs of today.
http://www.amazon.com/Garden-Beasts-Terror-American-Hitlers/dp/0307408841
As for killing, everyone has a “justification” for it. Its just that civilization puts a brake on this.
Everywhere you look in the paleo-historical record, you find lots and lots of massacres where young womens’ remains are absent or rare. Butchery is part of some humans’ soul. There is no way around the fact that some of us are descended from a past where looting, genocide and rapine led consistently to survival by some over others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow_Creek_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talheim_Death_Pit
I do think that Leftist thought is a “justification phase” with butchery the “terminal phase” and that the roots of this lie in our past.
As for Khalkin Gol. I used to think it caused the Japanese to go elsewhere, but the history of the battle shows it was an unplanned border war with no strategic goal. And then I realized that Siberia held no oil. Ultimately, the Japanese realized that there was nothing there worth fighting for. Had Japan really wanted Siberia they could have invaded via Vladivostok which is easy to take and keep. The Czechs did this at the end of WWI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovak_Legions
The significance of Khalkin Gol was that the Russians took the lessons learned from it and applied it to the rest of the Army – training, doctrine, weapons, tactics. And the buildup in Mongolia kept a large reserve away from the Eastern Front where they could have been encircled rather than appearing on the Front in the crucial period of the Winter of 1941 when the Wehrmacht was struggling with the cold.
Austin @ 113 said:
“As for Khalkin Gol. … And then I realized that Siberia held no oil. Ultimately, the Japanese realized that there was nothing there worth fighting for. Had Japan really wanted Siberia they could have invaded via Vladivostok which is easy to take and keep.”
Siberia has lots of oil. The Japanese as a member of the Triple Entente during WW-I sent a military expeditionary force to Siberia after Russia withdrew from the alliance following the Bolshevik Revolution. That Japanese expeditionary force caused significant havoc in Siberia and provided the Japanese with a detailed understanding of Siberia’s natural resources. Logically the Japanese should have conquered Siberia. Japan probably chose not to for the purely strategic reason that they wished to first conquer China and that action required the full use of their military.
As evidenced by the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese military tended to bite off more than they could chew. Had the Japanese focused more on occupation rather than simple conquest and slowly extended their empire’s reach over a period of several decades, they might well have become the masters of Asia and the Pacific. However the whole Bushidō mindset that enabled the Japanese to be so warlike probably hindered them from a more calculated strategy. The same conclusion could be made towards German/Prussian militarism.
wretchard @ 103 said:
“Whereas people like the Mongols can be dismissed as barbarians; the Nazis by contrast were products of the highest European civilization gone horribly wrong. You would expect that the most cruel behavior would come from the graduates of Dogpatch U; but wouldn’t it be a surprise to find all the gas chambers run by young men and women from Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Stanford?”
My impression is the Mongols were driven by passion, e.g. leopards chasing after gazelles. In stark contrast, the Nazis were cold dispassionate killers. They committed genocide scientifically with the system optimized to produce money from their victims, e.g. clothing, hair, gold fillings, animal fat from corpses, etc. We can dismiss the Mongols as merely a continuation of our primitive past, i.e. savages who never achieved civilization. However, the Germans prior to the WW-I were the acme of western civilization. The moral failure of the Germans under the Nazis was an indictment against the ethical foundation of western civilization. That indictment is almost all encompassing since the rise of the Nazis was a Weimar Republic reaction to the communists who were just as evil. This last aspect puts a dissonant note on the Allies’ victory over the Nazis, i.e. we replaced Hitler with Stalin and the Nazis with the Communists. The moral victory after WW-II was ambiguous since totalitarianism was allowed to flourish through Communism until the collapse of the Soviet Block in 1990. Even then the situation remained ambiguous because the Soviets collapsed due to economic decay leaving the surviving western democracies in a state of profound moral decay due to Gramscian agit-prop. It seems that human beings “do right” more by accident than by intent.
[#3 of 4]
Assuming I’m understanding blert’s (no. 5′s) argument correctly, I don’t think paratroopers were the answer to the German problems in Barbarossa. To begin with, the Germans did not possess enough of them to make much of a difference (no more than a division and a half or so of jump-qualified troops in Spring 1941 – four strong regiments — assuming they stripped their jump schools) plus barely adequate transport assets.
(The transports were probably the weaker link — shortage of a/c and pilots — the Germans called up their flight schools to put the paras on Crete, they did it again to resupply Stalingrad. Overemployment of the transports for supply probably had at least as much to do with the decline of the German airborne arm as the attrition to jump-qualified troops).
Even if the number of railroad junctions and facilities that it was necessary to interdict had been sufficiently limited (which I beg leave to doubt) and even if you have the ability to (in addition to the Luftwaffe’s Fallschirmjäger) effectively deploy the Army’s division of air-landing troops (22. Luftlande-Division). I’m not certain this force could damage the facilities sufficiently, in any meaningful way, to affect Soviet ability to operate the railroads. The Soviets had enough deployable formations to push the paratroops off their airheads, and enough engineers and railway maintenance ability to make good any damage.
This all assumes there are objectives in reach of the German airborne force that will be decisive. I’m not convinced of that either: WWII era airborne transports, when laden, are relatively short ranged.
The pre-Crete German airborne force is big enough, when concentrated, to bag and hold maybe one big objective, assuming either land or sea reinforcement can be got to it before supplies are exhausted, and before the Soviets can focus reserves on it. It could have done interesting things for one of the Panzer spearheads (if it were my plan, I’d have employed it in support of Guderian or Kleist in the center). But in Russia in 1941, it was not going to be a war winner.
I think Viktor Suvorov’s Icebreaker thesis will eventually be proved true. For some interesting corroborating perspective try Ruth Fischer’s Stalin & German Communism, A Study in the Origins of the State Party.
105. Eggplant
The German military simply did not understand how to use paratroopers. Given their lack of understanding, there is no credible way the Germans could have effectively used paratroopers against the Soviets.
The Soviets invented paratroop tactics — specifically to use within the Soviet Union. During the Cold War 5 Parachute Divisions were maintained –under the direct control of STAVKA.
Case White ( France 1940 ) entirely rebuts your thesis.
Crete was the deviation — and proved too expensive. Whereas the 82nd suffered comparable losses in Normandy — and the US Army thought that nominal.
——
115. El Jefe Maximo
In some respects it’s worse than you know. In one of the biggest scandals of WWII military procurement the Luftwaffe found that the landing gear of the Ju-52 could not survive Russian zone landing fields. How bad was it?
It’s the PRIMARY reason for the halt of the panzers. The debacle was kept top secret while every expert available was thrown at the nightmare: virtually the ENTIRE Ju-52 fleet was grounded on broken landing gear!
The Russian tactic — dreamed up in the 20′s was to parachute elite troops upon critical nodes of the rail net. They didn’t even have to be hard on a cross roads. The key thing is to land where the enemy is not — and then pull an ‘Anderson.’ It is possible to ruin so much track that a given line is down for days. If this is repeated, then the effect compounds, rather like the USAAF wiping out the French rail net from Paris to the beachhead.
As for war winning: Soviet forces go into supply crisis the minute the rails are disrupted. They have NO TRUCK BACK-UP. Their construction crews were horse led.
As for the number of trunk lines: the truth is too fantastic to believe!
Most Soviet rail lines were UNBALLASTED. That’s right. The minute the rains came even the rail lines became subject to bog.
Next, very little double track line existed. The one of importance ran from Moscow to Karkov. That’s why Karkov keeps popping up in the battle accounts. It’s both ballasted and a double line.
The lines leading to the West were unballasted single lines with poor control circuits. The Germans had to re-gauge them and re-circuit them — even working through the night and in foul weather. As you might imagine, they felt free to compel labor from any PoW wanting to eat.
Had the commando tactics of 1940 been maintained — the Germans would’ve stung like no-see-ems — and then re-boarded their Ju-52- for a lift home. These strikes would’ve been against undefended rail lines. In and out in one day.
The critical link to Arkhangelsk was un-defendable from such tactics. All men were needed at the front.
Paras entirely beat bombing runs because they can destroy kilometers of track in one day; and un-defended bridges, too. Then, they’re gone.
Whereas Western countries have many parallel main lines — the Soviet Union did not. Just a handful of links existed between Leningrad and Moscow. One was the direct line. The other went by way of due east towards Arkhangelsk, thence southeast back to Moscow. All other rails from Leningrad were under German occupation. Then they grabbed even these links during the siege. At that point ALL of the supply going to the Leningrad front came by way of link number two. Mountainous rough country made the direct route useless.
So, if the Germans had even disrupted that one link, the Leningrad front blows up.
In the event, the Ju-52s, repaired in the field, were tasked with Panzer Group Guderian’s push into Ukraine. The horrific supply situation required the Luftwaffe to chase the panzers all over Russia. This gambit ended in 1941 because it was very expensive ( fuel wise ) and because the Red Air Force of even 1942 was too much a threat.
—–
During the Cold War the Soviet Army planned to use the exact same logistical crutch for their tanks: this time it would be heavy lift helos. THAT’S why the Red Air Force built so many very heavy lift helos — they were to become flying gas stations — as against troop transports.
Resource denial tactics don’t work when the opfor can fly in what’s needed from 200 to 400 km away.
In sum, para tactics are to hit’em where they aint — and never stick around for a fight.
Russia entirely lacks critical terrain like Eban Emael — the nearest equivalent was Brest-Litovsk — and it was already in the bag.
—-
So now you know one of the biggest German secrets of the campaign: the Lufwaffe let them down.
116. dan
There can be no doubt that Stalin fixed the invasion date of Poland — which started WWII in Europe.
It’s as open and shut as you can get.
Until Stalin went along — Hitler was economically trapped.
This last aspect, the British, French, American economic box had Hitler in a twist. Just on rubber alone — he couldn’t move.
It took Stalin’s back door to launch Case White. Without Soviet oil resources the Luftwaffe would not have been able to maintain their unheard of operational tempo. Ditto for the panzers.
The public does not understand that Hitler was already under selective economic embargoes.
The exact same policies were replicated with Japan — with notable effects.
—-
WRT the German Officer Corps: they were STUNNED to see the quantity and quality of Soviet arms — especially at the Stalin Line. ( ex-Polish border ) The KV-1 really blew them away. ( The KV-1 is the direct cause of the Tiger tank — the T-34c was the direct cause of the Panther. Just look at the stats for KV-1 and Tiger — they’re almost twins )
The Germans put their success down to Stalin’s butchery of his own army. With proper commanders, yiikes! The Soviets had a production tempo that was scary. Some of their stuff was so good — the Germans gave it a paint job and put it to work.
I had a class in European Military History in college in the mid 80′s. My instructor made the point that Germany missed a golden opportunity during Barbarossa by their harsh treatment of the Ukranians. These people hated Stalin with a passion after his collectivization of their farms and the resultant famine in the 1930′s that resulted in the deaths of millions.
When the Germans first invaded, they were greeted as liberators. There were pictures of people cheering and women bringing pitchers of milk and flowers to the soldiers. It only took a few days for this goodwill to be destroyed by the rear echelon Nazi administration forces and their harsh policies.
An enraged populace eventually fought back as partisans, sapping German front line strength to guard supply routes. The situation was exacerbated the deeper the Germans drove into Russia.
Despite their harsh occupation policies, there were still Russians willing to fight for the Germans against Stalin. SS brigades were formed from Russian volunteers. Imagine how much greater the response would have been if the Ukraine had been set up as a puppet state and fielded an army of motivated auxilliaries.
But I suppose the Nazis were incapable of these actions due to their dogma. Treating the Ukranians like Denmark just wasn’t in their playbook.
#71 ConfederateH
The Plains Indians who were wiped out were largely insisting that they be wiped out. Smart tribes, like the Pawnee, made a deal – they were given passes on the Union Pacific railroad for not scalping the track-laying teams. Many of the other tribes had elders who also cut decent deals.
However, young hot heads continued to try to stop the railroad. Sherman, as General of the Army, was tasked with making sure the railroad got built. If the other side won’t deal, what do you do?
That said, with this war, as in all wars, bad things happened on both sides and were caused by both sides.
American Indian culture and ecology was bound to lose against Western, technological civilization. For a culture without wheels to prevail against a culture with steel wheels driven by steam was hopeless. The smart move was accomodation and assilimation as the bulk of the Indian population did.
Russia’s Putin says wants to build “Eurasian Union”
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/russias-putin-says-wants-build-eurasian-union-222139037.html
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he wants to bring ex-Soviet states into a “Eurasian Union” in an article which outlined his first foreign policy initiative as he prepares to return to the Kremlin as the country’s next president.
Putin said the new union would build on an existing Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan which from next year will remove all barriers to trade, capital and labor movement between the three countries.
“We are not going to stop there and are setting an ambitious goal — to achieve an even higher integration level in the Eurasian Union,” Putin wrote in an article which will be published in Izvestia newspaper on October 4.
Putin said last month he would run in the March 2012 presidential election and his current public approval ratings show that he is set to win.
alternative history may not be so alternative.
Nebelwurfer @ 119 said:
“My instructor made the point that Germany missed a golden opportunity during Barbarossa by their harsh treatment of the Ukranians. These people hated Stalin with a passion after his collectivization of their farms and the resultant famine in the 1930′s that resulted in the deaths of millions.”
This is well known to be true. Initially, victory was sitting in Hitler’s lap. However Hitler sold Operation Barbarossa to the Nazi Party through the argument of Lebensraum, i.e. Germany was overpopulated and needed to conquer Russia for living space and natural resources. The original plan called for the Slavic inhabitants to have their intelligentsia exterminated (the Nazis were doubling the extermination capacity of KZ-Birkenau) and the uneducated survivors to be made into slaves to serve their Aryan masters. Being friends with the Ukrainians really wasn’t compatible with that political narrative. This was a classic example of drinking too much of one’s own Kool-Aid.
[#4 of 4] I’m done.
Couple of points: It is said that Hitler began his speeches as if he were a trusted neighbor stopping by with some good advice. He said, once, something on the order of, Three hundred years of blood and death stand in no relation to the position of Germany today. True, and any half-educated German knew the three hundred years began with the end of the catastrophe of the Thirty Years War. IOW, blood and death following blood and death and Hitler, this political prospect, knows it as well as I (any German) and we can trust him to be as opposed to war as I (any German). That’s good.
We see file footage of the end of Hitler’s speeches, the screaming and hypnotic rantings. It’s clearer how he succeeded if we know how he began his speeches.
WRT Native Americans, I submit that what we had was a volkerwanderung, a wandering of the peoples, as has happened before. To, as it is not surprising, little or no condemnation. Muslims into India? Celts into the British Isles? Germanic tribes into the Empire? Bantus into Southern Africa displacing the Khoisan?
In 1939, C. S. Lewis scolded Roy Campbell, a South African whose “Flowering Rifle: A poem from the battlefield in Spain” rooted for the Fascists over the Communists:
To the Author of “Flowering Rifle”:
Rifles may flower and terrapins may flame
But truth and reason will be still the same.
Call them Humanitarians if you will,
The merciful are promised mercy still.
Loud fool! to think a nickname could abate
The blessing given to the compassionate.
Fashions in polysyllables may fright
Those Charlies on the Left of whom you write;
No wonder; since it was from them you learned
How white to black by jargon can be turned,
And though your verse outsoars with eagle pride
Their nerveless rhythms (of which the old cow died)
Yet your shrill covin-politics and theirs
Are two peas in a single pod — who cares
Which kind of shirt the murdering Party wears?
Repent! Recant! Some feet of sacred ground,
A target to both gangs, can yet be found;
Sacred because, though now it’s no-man’s-land,
There stood your father’s house; there, you should stand.
First, God plays dice. Not only does he play dice with the universe, he plays with loaded dice. He loves to appear to not be there, unless you know He is there. Working at understanding quantum mechanics helps me understand the paradoxical nature of God.
Second, the Japanese attacked us because they were certain we would attack their rear from the Philippines. They were sure they had to strike first. They could not accept the reality that we would not attack first. They started their attack in 1905 with a strike on the Russians,they just followed an old pattern.
Japan considered China their main front. They were just trying to keep us away while they conquered China. If they had had any brains they would have made peace with one of the Chinese factions, helped Hitler win, and then gone back and picked up the pieces of China later.
3rd, as far as Stalin being rational, there is some good evidence that if he had not died in 1953, that he was preparing to start a nuke war.
4th, Regarding Spain. A Spanish division fought on the Eastern front. Franco was also negotiating with Hitler about letting the Germans attack Gibraltar, when the Italians attacked Greece. Another own goal by Italy, since Greece was supportive of Hitler. That action by Italy convinced Franco to keep the Germans out of Spain. If Gibraltar falls, the rest of the Med goes too.
5th, Stalingrad was supposed to be a sideshow in 1942. The main thrust was for the oil. The name got to the Germans. They and the Soviets had about the same numbers of troops in the area. The Germans would have won any other battle with that ratio of German/Russian, but most German troops got stuck trying to dig the Russians out of a demolished city where the Russians could resupply across the Volga. A small number of Soviet forces tied up many more Germans. The flanks were held by third rate allies, so the outcome is not surprising.
6th, Turkey has not been mentioned. If Turkey joins the battle against the USSR, and allows Germany to cross their borders, to attack Iraq, (gee does this sound familiar) Egypt falls from the rear, and so does the Russian Southern front.
7th, our lend-lease gifts were only able to reach the Soviets because the three major routes through Iran, Vlad, and Ark, were not cut when it should have been a major strategic focus of the Axis. It wasn’t, since they were never a true alliance, except when Hitler declared war on us when the Japanese attacked us. I wonder if Hitler expected the Japanese to reciprocate with a declaration of war on the Russians? If the only thing Japan does is block one of the three sources of lend lease, that single decision does massive damage to the forces of Stalin.
8th, the universe is designed for life, yet is lethal to a level we still don’t understand. In fact, without the death of many stars to create the metals that make us up, we can’t exist. This is an aspect of the Good God that is troubling. Why so much blood? Why allow evil? Why does God have to die to give us freedom?
At it’s heart is this amazing paradox. Freedom and danger are both each 100% of one of the most amazing things in the universe. God sets us free, so we are able to come to him freely. He doesn’t seek puppets, he wants us to be free to truly choose him.
That is a painful paradox for a Calvinist like me, who is certain that God is fully in charge, and i have no ability to come on my own. Yet this the the goal of any good parent, to set their child free to love them. Yet this freedom to go, is what sets up the ability to do horrific evil. “Each man did what was right in his own eyes.” Thus we get the Eastern front.
#74
A few facts people today have a hard time believing:
1. Hitler was popularly elected, not by driving SS tanks into downtown Berlin.
But with only 33% of the vote, followed by the devious political wheeling and dealing, threats and blackmail that placed that maniac in the driver’s seat.
So I’m not sure you really want to go that route…
#74 RWE; #127, Barry M.
The fundamental political problem for Germany in the late 1920′s early 1930′s is that the power elite (financial, political, military, legal) absolutely HATED the Weimar Republic, which had been foisted on them by the Revolution of 1918-19. But the Revolution (a product of war-weariness giving the Communists and Socialists a brief, limited political opening) had limited backing, and was incomplete, because the middle classes were shocked and repelled by what happened in Russia.
Probably, right wing pro-monarchy forces in Germany could have put the Revolution down, but they stood aside to allow the left wing parties to hold power and to take the blame for the armistice and the subsequent Versailles Treaty. The Army leadership (via the 1st quartermaster general, Wilhelm Groener) agreed to support a moderate left Republic in exchange for non-interference in its internal affairs by the new government and the exclusion from government of the far left (see the Wikipedia article on the Ebert-Groener pact). In any case, the Revolution was incomplete.
What the elite really wanted was the Kaiserreich back, and by the late 20′s they wanted to use the Nazis to wreck the Weimar system. But they had no popular backing (the Center Party and upper middle classes could live with a bougeois Republic). The elite and middle class parties agreed on keeping the Socialists and Communists down, but not on changing the regime. That’s where Hitler, the Nazis, and their 33 percent came in — the cabal around Hindenburg thought to use them as sock-puppets and it wound up the other way round.
In retrospect, the German Revolution of 1918-19 was in every way a disaster, and it would have been better for Germany and the world had it never happened. Doubtfully popular, it fizzled out, and was in reality a half-revolution. Nobody wanted Weimar. It wasn’t the Soviet Republic the far left wanted; the far right wanted the monarchy, the Nazis wanted — chaos — so they could have power. Weimar was a halfway house everybody other than a very narrow center was plotting to burn. Getting rid of the monarchies without purging the military, the judiciary and the upper classes succeeded only in setting up a Republic that the governing class had no use for, and missed no chance to sabotage or subvert. The Weimar Republic was never likely to make it — the only question turned out to be the nature of the regime that would replace it.
126. Presbypoet
5th, Stalingrad was supposed to be a sideshow in 1942. The main thrust was for the oil. The name got to the Germans. They and the Soviets had about the same numbers of troops in the area. The Germans would have won any other battle with that ratio of German/Russian, but most German troops got stuck trying to dig the Russians out of a demolished city where the Russians could resupply across the Volga. A small number of Soviet forces tied up many more Germans. The flanks were held by third rate allies, so the outcome is not surprising.
This is just not so.
See the ACTUAL German and Soviet positions per official battle map:
http://www.gutenberg-e.org/esk01/maps/LageOst10Sep42c_lg.jpg
You can expand the map by left clicking.
Direct inspection will reveal four (4) entire armies under a Front HQ fighting a furious battle — think Verdun — at the Volga-Don land bridge.
THIS is where the bulk of the fighting occurred. 6th Army was a super shock army — really two armies with an additional two panzer corps.
One of those panzer corps was so tied down fighting at the land bridge that it couldn’t participate in the city battle.
The Soviets hid their staggering losses at the land bridge from everyone — accept the Germans. German accounts are replete with mounds of dead more than five feet high — with rifle-less Soviets picking up weapons from the fallen — only to be gunned down in turn.
All of these suicide charges drew ever more Germans to the battle. It was all that they could do to stay in supply — ammo was spent so freely.
Stalingrad was a Barbarossa objective. Sitting astride the Volga was considered a war winning move. It meant that bulk fuel shipments up the river — critical to Moscow — could not occur.
It cost the Russians ten men to kill one German — that’s what suicide tactics achieve. Entire reserve armies were destroyed, Verdun style, at the land bridge.
Then, during Mars, another 400,000 Russians died trying to encircle two panzer armies in front of Moscow. Mars caused Adolf to renege on his pledge to return three panzer divisions held in reserve between Moscow and Stalingrad. (They’d been removed from the southern campaign months earlier.)
Goerings famous pledge was not so crazy — he didn’t think that 6th Army would be cut off for any real length of time — because a panzer corps was already entrained for the rescue. Beyond that, he never dreamed that the German Army would permit the Soviets to strike deep enough to over run THE KEY AIRBASE holding the Luftwaffe’s heavy lift aircraft. But they did; and German airlift capacity dropped 75% at one stroke. The Soviet tank commander received the Hero’s medal. This German debacle gets very little press.
OKW could not comprehend just how much LendLease aid was coming in via Iran. If they had the slightest understanding they would’ve planned for a winter campaign across the Volga — and skipped entirely the idea of going for Moscow one more time.
hmm I remember reading Malaparte in ” the skin” depicting scenes in Petrograd, where horses and rats became a 5 star meal !
We owe to Russians their huge courage and abnegation, as much we owe to America !
I remember visiting St peterburg in the seventies, with a french cruise ship, people were incredibly sympathetic with us. I made apost a few years back:
“St Petersburg was a harbour in North and East See trip when I was a part of staff in a french cruises ship. We stayed there for a 3 days visiting. This was supposed to be first a cruise customers devoting purpose, but as we knew that they were all off, we managed to escape in the afternoons and nights !
Architecture is beautiful, much like in italian ways, palaces…
What impressed me that was the sky light, something I never saw anywhere else.
And the night, with midnight sunshine. People were walking and enjoying the day-night life.
I have a few anecdotes as it was during the cold war times.
for this voyage, we had no americans, only frenchs or europeans customers.
When I was walking in the streets with my westerny cloths on, women and girls glanced at me, not frontally. I occured it when I turn back a few meters away, that was times when there were nothing to buy in the “goums”.
I managed to talk to ancient people in german (I suppose a WW2 souvenir for them),
we exanged french cigarettes inspite of our russian guide formal forbidding, though as the persons were already old, they did not care ; our tabac was really a gift vs their miserable stuff
when we knew a bit how to manage in the city without a guide , we took the bus.
funny thing I noticed, people did not buy their ticket, they used to make their coins pass though each bus-user to the bus-driver ; none would have thought about keeping the money for himself. I thought if it was in France, the bus company would have been bankrupted soon.
anyways, beautiful place, nice people !”