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Topic: OT - D-Day, what if?
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CWSooner · « **Reply #154 on:** June 11, 2019, 12:47:59 PM »

Lincoln went through a few generals during the Civil War.

Fortunately, he found a Grant and not a Monty.

In a way, he had already had to fire his "Monty," as I think McClellan and Monty had more than a few characteristics in common.

Cincydawg · « **Reply #155 on:** June 11, 2019, 12:53:56 PM »

Yeah, McClellan does seem a bit like Monty. And of course Lincoln went back to McClellan once again. Mac could have ended the war in 1862 with a bit more verve and less fear of Lee and his millions of troops.

I see Sherman as an able general in the CW. Bedford Forrest gets a lot of acclaim but he never so far as I know commanded large bodies of troops, just cavalry.

I've become more interested in the Atlanta campaign for some reason. The Cyclorama painting was moved to the Atlanta History Center and restored to something close to the original depiction without the spin" that the Confederacy somehow won that one.

There is a creek called Peachtree Battle Creek a bit north of me and one of the larger set pieces took place about 2 miles southeast of me. The area here was just farm land at the time of course.

CWSooner · « **Reply #156 on:** June 11, 2019, 01:23:49 PM »

“Very few of Sherman’s Yankees were professional soldiers. The majority of his officers—most promoted from the enlisted ranks—were not raised in a hallowed tradition of military academies and genteel chivalry. Sherman, a West Point man, knew this and understood that the very tenets of free yeomanry lent a natural distaste for the binary world of serf and plantation, giving his recruits a moral impetus to wreck Georgia. They marched out of Atlanta singing “John Brown’s Body,” and ravaged plantations to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” . . . [N]o strangers to physical work, and eager rather than reluctant to live off the land—[they] were to become lethal destroyers when given an ethical imperative, free rein, and a leader to drive them on. From November 1864 until it vanished in June 1865 . . . Sherman’s Army of the West was . . . the most impressive and deadly body in the history of armed conflict—a truly ideological army that reflected the soul of its creator, Uncle Billy Sherman”

~ Victor Davis Hanson

The Soul of Battle

Cincydawg · « **Reply #157 on:** June 11, 2019, 04:31:15 PM »

We adopted Battle Hymm of the Republic as our own.

MrNubbz · « **Reply #158 on:** June 11, 2019, 06:17:29 PM »

Quote from: Cincydawg on June 11, 2019, 04:09:57 AM

Firing Monty would not have gone over well with the British people, and Ike was sensitive to that, as was Monty.

If he didn't back down(twice)Sepy'44,Dec/jan'45 he would have been relieved it got bad,as Monty quite frankly was shit.He always sounded like a vindicitive school girl who ad her locks lopped off

MrNubbz · « **Reply #159 on:** June 11, 2019, 06:23:31 PM »

Quote from: CWSooner on June 11, 2019, 01:23:49 PM

From November 1864 until it vanished in June 1865 . . . Sherman’s Army of the West was . . . the most impressive and deadly body in the history of armed conflict—a truly ideological army that reflected the soul of its creator, Uncle Billy Sherman”
~ Victor Davis Hanson
The Soul of Battle

Gen Joseph E.Johnston said, “When I learned that Sherman’s army was marching through the Salkehatchie swamps, making its own corduroy road at the rate of a dozen miles a day or more, and bringing its artillery and wagons with it, I made up my mind that there had been no such army in existence since the days of Julius Caesar.”

Cincydawg · « **Reply #160 on:** June 11, 2019, 06:46:56 PM »

Yeah, Sherman's army was mostly farmers and workers from the west and very used to the outdoors. This could be a reason the North did better faster in the west than in Virginia.

MrNubbz · « **Reply #161 on:** June 11, 2019, 09:45:39 PM »

Sherman was the 1st President of what would later become LSU

medinabuckeye1 · « **Reply #162 on:** July 15, 2019, 03:15:29 PM »

Quote from: Cincydawg on June 11, 2019, 12:53:56 PM

Yeah, McClellan does seem a bit like Monty. And of course Lincoln went back to McClellan once again. Mac could have ended the war in 1862 with a bit more verve and less fear of Lee and his millions of troops.

McClellan's overestimates of enemy strength would be hilarious if they hadn't had such serious consequences. His estimates of enemy strength were often off by more than double.

medinabuckeye1 · « **Reply #163 on:** July 15, 2019, 03:20:07 PM »

Quote from: Cincydawg on June 08, 2019, 01:02:57 PM

I believe the Allies took Rome right around the same time as D-Day and knocked Italy out of the war. Hitler set up a rump state in Northern Italy and Kesselring continued his very good defense on the peninsula until the end of the war despite having left overs.

Italy surrendered long before D-Day, on September 3, 1943. The precipitating event, I believe, was allied bombing of Rome.

Rome did fall immediately prior to D-Day. That may sound odd since the Italians surrendered nine months earlier but the Nazi's sent German troops to keep as much of Italy as they could and, as you mentioned, set up a client state with Mussolini in charge. The German rescue of Mussolini from Italian custody is a very interesting historical tidbit.

medinabuckeye1 · « **Reply #164 on:** July 15, 2019, 03:26:15 PM »

Quote from: Cincydawg on June 07, 2019, 02:29:57 PM

we might have had some surface battles between Iowa and other class BBs and the Yamato and associated. People of course debate the Yamato-v-Iowa thing endlessly.

The short answer is that the Iowa's, South Dakota's, and other US BBs would have shredded the Yamato for one simple reason. By that point in the war the US BBs all had radar aimed main guns and the Japanese didn't. The US BBs would have opened fire when the Japanese BBs couldn't have returned fire with any more accuracy than could be gleaned by looking at the incoming shells and guessing where they were coming from.

The Iowa vs Yamato debate is only worth having if you make the following stipulations:

That it is a one-on-one or at least relatively equal fight, and
That the adversaries can only fire within visual range

Without those stipulations the US wins easily because they had far greater effective range and realistically would have always outnumbered the Japanese in BBs, CVs, CAs, CLs, DDs, and everything else.

medinabuckeye1 · « **Reply #165 on:** July 15, 2019, 03:29:31 PM »

Quote from: Cincydawg on June 07, 2019, 09:16:27 AM

Maybe the most remarkable thing to me about WW II is how the Brits hung in there after Dunkquerque. They were in serious trouble. Hitler was going to offer very generous terms. Churchill's refusal to even discuss anything infuriated Hitler and may have contributed to mistakes he made later in the war.

Imagine a lesser "normal" leader of GB at the time. You keep everything you wanted, you eliminate the possibility of invasion and bombing (at least shorter term), you keep your colonies, you don't really lose anything but "face" and of course you'd be confronted with a potentially hostile Europe down the road. Invasion would have seriously damaged the English countryside and cities. They had very little armor, all their good heavy equipment had been left behind. The Germans seemed as unstoppable as Napoleon a few decades back. Your only assets were the Channel, the Navy, and an air arm that was hanging by a thread, and radar. The US was more than two years out.

German submarines posed a real danger of actual starvation down the road. I think most of us would have negotiated, I would have.

Your point about Napoleon is important but I think you missed why. Much like Hitler, Napoleon had a land army that the Brits would never have been able to defeat alone. This was just a little over 100 years prior to Hitler. The point is that the British had been there before.

Without the Channel and the RN, both Napoleon and Hitler could easily have defeated the British but that isn't how the world existed. Neither Napoleon nor Hitler could swim across the Channel.

medinabuckeye1 · « **Reply #166 on:** July 15, 2019, 03:32:10 PM »

Quote from: MrNubbz on June 07, 2019, 08:35:42 AM

Churchill was indeed a great statesman but fired much better generals than that little lemur.Singapore was a huge hit.Percival surrender 81,000 men to 34,000 Japanese that were basically out of ammo.But at the time he couldn't know it.The IJF were poised to move on Australia it self until the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway.Naval Intelligence had broke JN 25 - IJN code.The Dunkirk retreat left Britain with nothing but slingshots practically equipmant wise.Fortunately for the Crown the emerging wold power could keep them supplied.Lugging men,material,food,fuel,planes,provisions 4,255 miles to western England

When I was younger there was an old lady in my town who had emigrated to the US from the UK with her husband after WWII. Her husband, of course, was in the British Army during the war. Luckily for him, he wasn't captured in France and got back to Britain. After Dunkirk he was assigned to patrol a section of Southern British beach with literally a nightstick for armament. They didn't have a gun to give him.

medinabuckeye1 · « **Reply #167 on:** July 15, 2019, 03:42:50 PM »

Quote from: OrangeAfroMan on June 07, 2019, 06:50:59 AM

What if Hitler had won and had killed all the Jews. Who would have been in the cross-hairs next? Would there have been an end to any of it?
I'll never understand hatred between different cultures or races or whatever, it's so odd. They look differently than you? They pray to a different god? They speak a different language?
So does everyone else on the planet, but you're not out to get them! It's all so stupid.

For a long time I wondered if hating the Jews was something that Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy actually believed or just a convenient form of scapegoating.

Having read a LOT of history, I've come to the conclusion that it was a deeply held belief and not merely a propaganda tool. The main thing that led me to this conclusion is that the holocaust didn't really get cranked up until well into WWII. The Wannsee Conference didn't occur until January 20, 1942 and the really industrial killing was mostly done in 1944. By that time it should have been obvious to everyone involved that Germany's military situation was, to put it mildly, precarious. The fact that they continued, throughout 1944 and even into 1945, to devote massive transportation infrastructure to the project strongly suggests to me that they REALLY believed. If it had just been a propaganda tool they could have accomplished just as much with a few radio broadcasts and used the train cars to transport the camp guards to the front line as soldiers. They didn't.

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Topic: OT - D-Day, what if?

CWSooner

Re: OT - D-Day, what if?

Cincydawg

Re: OT - D-Day, what if?

CWSooner

Re: OT - D-Day, what if?

Cincydawg

Re: OT - D-Day, what if?

MrNubbz

Re: OT - D-Day, what if?

MrNubbz

Re: OT - D-Day, what if?

Cincydawg

Re: OT - D-Day, what if?

MrNubbz

Re: OT - D-Day, what if?

medinabuckeye1

Re: OT - D-Day, what if?

medinabuckeye1

Re: OT - D-Day, what if?

medinabuckeye1

Re: OT - D-Day, what if?

medinabuckeye1

Re: OT - D-Day, what if?

medinabuckeye1

Re: OT - D-Day, what if?

medinabuckeye1

Re: OT - D-Day, what if?