All this takes me back to my grad school days when I and this other fellow would stay up all night playing board games about D Day or Battle of the Bulge. I think the utility of those, and computer games of similar ilk, is to teach one about geography. But then when I visited a place like Gettysburg, it's a lot different than I had expected, mostly distances seemed further, or closer, and I wondered about how the woods may have changed.
My buddy knew his military history pretty well, I didn't then. He could easily cite, as you can, each division number at D Day and where they landed. I've since read up on things of course, but while that is helpful I think, it's not sufficient.
I have subjected my wife to an overage of military "stuff" on our trips, she's pretty OK with it, though she does mention it at times and laughs. We had one trip around France on back that I didn't realize how much I had done this until I wrote up a trip report. She did say she enjoyed seeing the Maginot Line, as did I. That one gets criticized a lot, but it did what was intended of course.
Chamberlain gets a lot of critique too of course, but it's not clear to me what else he could have done at Munich then. The French were not going to war over the Czechs.
I've learned a lot of things in "history" that get labeled "horribly awful decisions" are actually more "constrained decisions influenced by prior history" and lack of accurate information.
There may never be firm consensus on what Britain and France woulda/coulda/shoulda done at Munich (Sep 38). They both feared a repeat of the bloodletting of 1914-1918.
But the German generals feared the same thing, and they did not believe that Germany was ready for war. And at least to some extent they were right.
The Luftwaffe was not ready for modern war. The Bf 109E (the first variant with a fuel-injected engine) was only beginning to come into service. There were still plenty of biplane fighters in service. German bombers were mostly there to provide tactical air support. No strategic bomber. Walther Wever had died 2 years earlier, and with him died advocacy for strategic bombers. Much the same as with the RAF. Hurricanes coming into service, Spitfires not quite yet, and plenty of biplanes on hand. The Wellington was the biggest bomber on hand, and that would continue for at least another couple of years.
The German army was not ready. The PzKpfw I, designed as a training tank, was the most common tank in the inventory. (It would see service in Russian and North Africa, long past its expiration date.) The PzKpfw II was coming into service, but its 20mm main gun wasn't going to be effective against enemy armor.
The Kriegsmarine wasn't ready for war either. In capital ships,
Scharnhorst was not yet complete and
Gneisenau was still working up. The "pocket battleships" (
Graf Spee, et. al.)were the products of muddled thinking. More heavily armed than they needed to be for commerce raiding, but heavily enough to go up against enemy battleships. And they didn't have the range for commerce-raiding, so they were dependent on resupply ships. There weren't enough destroyers and cruisers to really form a battle fleet, even once
Scharnhorst was completed and the
Bismarcks were built. They had about 70 U-boats on hand, but that wasn't enough to wage a war for control of the Atlantic Ocean.
I think what Britain and France lacked more than weaponry was national will. Their leaders at Munich reflected public opinion, despite being obligated by treaty to aid Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain waved his scrap of paper and proclaimed "Peace in our time!." French PM Daladier, when he saw the throngs in Paris cheering him, said to his aide quietly, "Ah! The fools! If only they knew . . . ."
Churchill had this to say the next day--1 Oct 38--in the House of Commons, directing his remarks at Chamberlain:
“We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat . . . . You will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi regime. We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude . . . . We have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road . . . . We have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the first time been pronounced against the Western democracies: ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.’ And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”
“You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.”
Churchill wasn't omniscient. He could be quite foolish at times. But he nailed it here, IMO.
I wonder how this compares with the ongoing debate about strategic bombing in WW 2, especially in Germany. I've read various "studies" giving various results. I know German war production peaked in December 1944, but they had to devote a lot of resources to trying to combat the bombing campaigns.
Lemay was frustrated with the results in Japan, or so I've read, which lead to the fire bombing efforts. But I think the B29 was bombing from higher altitudes than B17s usually, and the jet stream was a new thing for them. I guess had we redirected those resources to ground forces, maybe the result would have not been much if any better as we'd have logistics issues with more ground forces in Europe I suspect.
We had'em anyway.
Yep. The jet stream. Long missions in airplanes with many lethal mechanical problems. Short time on target, with little margin for overwater navigational errors. Japanese fighter opposition. Decentralized industry, leaving few concentrated targets. Night bombing with incendiaries, from B-29s that had been lightened by having most of their defensive armament removed, was the horribly effective way to go. We didn't put any of the Japanese leaders on trial for the bombing of Chinese cities, because we had spent the last months of the war firebombing Japanese cities.
Leaving the A-bomb out of the discussion, it's still debatable whether airpower was worth what it cost to create and project it. It wasn't decisive in itself, as all the airpower advocates of the '20s and '30s had claimed that it would be.
