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The Power Five => Big Ten => Topic started by: Cincydawg on June 05, 2019, 02:06:05 PM
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75th Anniversary tomorrow. I was pondering what if it had failed.
Imagine the Germans had held Omaha Beach and the US forces were withdrawn. The two SS Panzer divisions had been released earlier and managed to blunt the British and Canadian invasion near Caen. Utah beach had little opposition, so it's logical to think perhaps it could have been reinforced and the Cotentin could have been overrun, leaving a small beachead rather far to the north which perhaps would have been withdrawn.
So, the Allies have a peninsula, with the bocage country impeding further breakouts attempts, and perhaps they get effectively bottled up there. Meanwhile, the Soviet war machine is in high gear and meeting less and less effective German resistance in the East. German forces might have been reduced in France to give them more problems, but it's likely they would have overrun Germany perhaps by the Fall of 1945, leaving Stalin in control of the entire country. Perhaps France is allowed to be under western control, but Italy? Maybe not.
June 6, 1944 was important.
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So many what-ifs. I'm left grateful to the people who planned it, the men who executed it, and for the aftermath that led to a safer, better world.
Can the Allies hold a single beach head (Utah)? It would take a great deal of naval and aerial support--both of which the Allies had. And it would take a huge effort to pour men, weapons, and supplies in there under intense fire and counter attacks. Would have been ugly, either way.
Certainly the Germans would have been able to better concentrate on the Russians if they were able to turn the invasion back. Enough to stem the tide of the war and sue for peace with the Russians? Perhaps. If so, how do the U.S. and U.K. respond to a Nazi western Europe and a Communist eastern Europe?
If not, a Russian dominated Europe would have looked much, much different. Would Russian occupation of western Europe lead to the U.S. and U.K. going to war with Russia at a time when only the U.S. had nuclear capability? Certainly possible.
And that nuclear capability thing--coming essentially in August '45--puts an interesting spin on any potential direction for an ongoing war in Europe.
Lots of bad possibilities.
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I like the phrase "Lots of bad possibilities". Very apt summary.
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Even domestically, some big differences. Does a defeat there cause FDR's health to fail more quickly. MacArthur was already a popular choice for the GOP nomination, and maybe calls for a change in a commander in chief bolsters him to a nomination, and ultimate victory.
Even if 1944 goes the same, there's no way Truman wins in 1948. Is it Dewey? Does the Dixiecrat/Progressive split actually divide the party into a true three party system, rather than splintering off, without Truman sort of holding the middle ground?
Eisenhower is certainly out of his command, and obviously not a presidential candidate in 1952.
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The country was also becoming war weary by that time, and certainly into 1945. While there were no protests of any significance, a lot of people were just starting to get tired and think about how to end it more quickly. An invasion of Japan was in the offing and not viewed as being any fun at all.
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Another interesting twist is that we may have wound up with the Kennedys, simply sooner. Joseph Sr.'s anti-war, anti-Britain, anti-semetic leanings may have made him a popular choice as a Democrat alternative (not sure anyone but Ike would have swung the country red anytime soon), and he almost certainly would have negotiated with Hitler
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It's a good alternate-history question, but I think that the answer is that it was almost certainly not going to fail. Not in the sense of the invasion forces being withdrawn, anyway.
The Allies had enough manpower, shipping, air power, naval gunfire, and logistical support that it was going to succeed even if there had been a withdrawal from Omaha Beach. The follow-on troops of the 1st and 29th I.D.s would have landed at Utah or elsewhere. There was nothing at the British and Canadian beaches anything like the near-failure at Omaha.
But the Germans would have been able to delay longer, postponing the American breakout in Operation Cobra, holding on to Caen even longer than they did, probably causing the Allied advance to halt significantly farther to the west than it did. OTOH, maybe there wouldn't have been the overconfidence that led to the failed Operation Market-Garden. Maybe Courtney Hodges' First Army isn't all strung out in the Ardennes in December 1944, and the Germans don't launch the Ardennes Offensive, so there's no Battle of the Bulge. Maybe the 8th and 15th Air Forces, and RAF Bomber Command, are use more in support of ground operations rather than strategic bombing, and German industry holds up better.
Maybe with more success in the West, the Germans do a better job against the Soviets in the East. And the war goes on into the summer of 1945.
And the atomic bombs are used on Berlin and whatever other German city was producing the most war materiel. And we don't have 74 years of critics saying that we dropped the bombs on Japan because of racism.
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Would Russian occupation of western Europe lead to the U.S. and U.K. going to war with Russia at a time when only the U.S. had nuclear capability? Certainly possible.
I don't think a failure on June 6, 1945 would have led to complete Soviet domination in Europe for several reasons.
First, the US/UK invasion of Italy was still proceeding and the later US/UK invasion of southern France could still have been conducted. Additionally, even if the invasion on June 6 had failed, it still would have been reasonably possible to simply keep stockpiling material in Britain and try again later.
Second, and more important, the US conducted the Trinity Test just a 13 months and 10 days after D-Day. On July 16, 1945 the world entered the nuclear age about 35 miles from Socorro, New Mexico.
As it happened, the Russians got to Berlin in early May, 1945 but Europe's preeminent anti-communist had wasted huge amounts of German war-making capability on a futile effort to turn back the US/UK forces the previous December (See Battle of the Bulge). Without a US/UK army conquering France and threatening Western Germany as well as capturing much of Germany's industrial heartland in the Ruhr it is obvious that the Germans would have been better able to delay the Soviet advance. I'm not saying that they could have stopped the Russians, just that they could have slowed them down more than they already did.
What this means is that even if D-Day had been a colossal failure, there still would have been viable German targets for US atomic weapons when those became available in August, 1945. The net result would have been a MASSIVE increase in German civilian casualties as US Atomic weapons obliterated German Cities. B29's operating out of southern England could have reached any city in Germany.
There is also another scary possibility. In preparing to invade Japan, one possibility that was considered was to use a/an Atomic Bomb(s) to clear the beaches immediately before landing. The long-term consequences for the US/UK troops landing on recently nuked Japanese beaches would have been catastrophic but that wasn't well understood then and the Army had a war to win. If D-Day had failed it is not unlikely that A-Bombs would have been used to clear the way for a second try in August, 1945 with the Russians probably still in Poland.
I don't think that Soviet domination of Europe would have been total largely because from July 16, 1945 until August 29, 1949 the US had an absolute monopoly on nuclear weapons. Even after that, the US had much better delivery systems than the Soviets for another decade or so.
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It's a good alternate-history question, but I think that the answer is that it was almost certainly not going to fail. Not in the sense of the invasion forces being withdrawn, anyway.
This is well said and I agree with the whole post, not just the part I quoted. As a practical matter, @CWSooner (https://www.cfb51.com/index.php?action=profile;u=1544) is absolutely right. The allies had near-total air-supremacy, near-total naval-supremacy, and LOTS more men and equipment than the Germans could put up in resistance.
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Was there a German city of any consequence left standing by August 1945?
One reason for targeting Hiroshima and Nagasaki was they had been largely left unbombed, Kyoto in an attempt to preserve history as I recall.
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My scenario has to be strained obviously and the points made above are good. The worst I could manage was an Omaha failure coupled with a British near failure.
Had the US been bottled up in the Cotentin, it would have been a struggle to break out from a fairly narrow front that the Germans could have held with fewer troops. It wasn't easy as it was with supply issues.
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Was there a German city of any consequence left standing by August 1945?
One reason for targeting Hiroshima and Nagasaki was they had been largely left unbombed, Kyoto in an attempt to preserve history as I recall.
From Wiki, here is a map of what the Germans still held as of the Dresden Bombing in February, 1945:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II#/media/File:1945-02-15GerWW2BattlefrontAtlas_reworked.jpg
I thought that the Belligerents list from the wiki article really sums up the German situation at the time. The RAF sent 769 heavy bombers while the USAAF sent another 527 heavy bombers and 784 P-51's as escorts. Against this massive aerial armada of more than 2,000 aircraft the Germans put up 28 fighters.
Southern German cities had only recently come into US/UK range so yes, I think there definitely would have been plenty of targets available in an alternate history in which the Germans pushed Ike back into the Channel on June 6, 1945.
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Was there a German city of any consequence left standing by August 1945?
One reason for targeting Hiroshima and Nagasaki was they had been largely left unbombed, Kyoto in an attempt to preserve history as I recall.
One there one specific Joint Chief who stopped Kyoto? He had gone there on his honeymoon or something?
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This is well said and I agree with the whole post, not just the part I quoted. As a practical matter, @CWSooner (https://www.cfb51.com/index.php?action=profile;u=1544) is absolutely right. The allies had near-total air-supremacy, near-total naval-supremacy, and LOTS more men and equipment than the Germans could put up in resistance.
Yes, I took the question as what if the entire plan failed.
Hell, Ike at least thought it enough a possibility that he had a letter in his pocket for release in that event.
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One there one specific Joint Chief who stopped Kyoto? He had gone there on his honeymoon or something?
I can't remember who, but I remember reading that exactly. He went there on his honeymoon. That saved that city.
Incidentally, when people think of devastating bombings, they usually think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki first but the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of March 9/10, 1945 definitely killed more than the Nagasaki Atomic bombing, and may have killed more than the Hiroshima bombing.
The US manufactured cluster bombs that were specifically designed to destroy Japanese paper houses and nearly obliterated almost every major Japanese city.
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Yes, I took the question as what if the entire plan failed.
Hell, Ike at least thought it enough a possibility that he had a letter in his pocket for release in that event.
He did and it was possible, I just think that it was extremely unlikely.
I think the most realistic possible cause of a catastrophic failure of D-Day would have been weather. If a freak storm had sunk a significant number of landing craft and prevented flying thereby neutralizing the allies' massive advantage in aerial capability that could have resulted in an overall failure of the invasion.
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The invasion was originally scheduled for 1 May. Ike postponed it for a month in order to assemble more landing craft. It was rescheduled for 5 June, and of course had already been pushed back a day (on the 4th) because of weather. On 5 June, the British meteorologist on Ike's staff believed that there was a 24-hour window of acceptable weather starting late that night. Ike said, "Go!" and the invasion went off on the 6th.
What if Ike had mistrusted the Brit and trusted his American meteorologist--who was not predicting acceptable weather--instead? There was only about a 4-day window there in early June where moon and tide conditions were acceptable. And the weather on 6 June was bad enough as it was to adversely affect the landings. It got worse on the 7th and was pretty bad for the next couple of weeks. The Mulberry artificial harbor off Omaha Beach was so badly damaged in a storm on 19 June that it could not be repaired.
Had it not been executed on 6 June, it would have been postponed into July. It is possible that the deception operations--Fortitude North and Fortitude South--might have been compromised during the additional month.
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Here's Ike's "landings have failed" letter:
"Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."
Ike had been briefed to expect something like 80% casualties among the paratroopers, which is why he visited some of them on the afternoon of 5 June.
(https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/iac3lu/picture181967601/alternates/FREE_768/US%20NEWS%20IKE-MEMORIAL%20WA)
Here he's talking to men of Easy Company, 502nd Parachute Infantry, 101st Airborne Division.
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Maybe with more success in the West, the Germans do a better job against the Soviets in the East. And the war goes on into the summer of 1945.
And the atomic bombs are used on Berlin and whatever other German city was producing the most war materiel. And we don't have 74 years of critics saying that we dropped the bombs on Japan because of racism.
Quite a few books indicate that during the BOB Hitler had been pulling men and material off of the eastern front for that western thrust.And Churchill wasn't at all on board with Overlord.That was until favorable results started trickling in
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Quite a few books indicate that during the BOB Hitler had been pulling men and material off of the eastern front for that western thrust.And Churchill wasn't at all on board with Overlord.That was until favorable results started trickling in
So, I was reading that and wondering how Hitler could have been pulling men and material off the Eastern Front in late summer of 1940, during the Battle of Britain, since he hadn't invaded the USSR yet.
Then the light bulb illuminated over my head.;)
Churchill was an infantry combat veteran of WWI. He resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty after his Galipoli brainchild turned into a disaster, and joined the army.
He feared the slaughter of the young men of Great Britain. And he could't get the disaster of the Dieppe Raid out of his head. He just didn't want his young men to have to attack the Germans head-on.
That's why Montgomery's plan for Operation Market-Garden was so appealing to him.
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What bothers me about our military now is how detached we approach it. Obviously, no one wants "boots on the ground" and risking unneeded deaths, but when you hear coverage, it bothers me that the cost of the war is so front and center.
Who gives a damn about that?
we're not the same country that transformed automotive assembly lines into tank-creation factories. We consider war to be an inconvenience now. That detachment is what doesn't sit well with me.
It's still 20 year olds out there on the front lines. It's still old men calling the shots, still politicians keeping their kids on the sidelines - same as always. But the attitude we have as a whole is just problematic.
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One there one specific Joint Chief who stopped Kyoto? He had gone there on his honeymoon or something?
It was cloudy that day over Kyoto, Nagasaki was secondary.
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Even tiny French towns have a memorial to those who died in WW I (and II and Africa, but there are fewer names). I've been in towns of 1000 people and seen the monuments with 80 names on it. The French, and British, had long memories of WW I, and did not want a repeat. This heavily influenced French strategy in WW II, they wanted to:
1. Move the war into Belgium.
2. Be on the defensive.
3. Let the Germans do mass attacks and get mowed down.
4. Hunker behind fortifications so they could hold the actual border with fewer troops (Maginot).
The French lost a generation of men in WW I, and they were suffering to have enough to fight in WW II even though they had more men, tanks, planes, etc. than the Germans. When Germany attacked Poland, the French made a desultory foray into Germany and found little resistance and retreated back into the Maginot Line. When the Germans attacked in May 1940, they rushed into Belgium to reach their defensive lines (along a river in general) and the Germans cut them off at the pivot point. The French in theory could have attacked back south and cut off the German advance, but they simply did not have an attack mentality or command structure or mobility. The British made an attack at Arras and have Rommel quite the fright, but the attack was uncoordinated and failed.
The worst outcome at D-Day I had not considered was worsening weather, as someone above noted. It was bad anyway, and later in June a terrible storm hit and really set back landing supplies (destroyed one Mulberry).
The 4th ID that landed at Utah had a fairly easy go of it though, it's hard to see how that would have failed completely unless weather was so bad they couldn't land.
But that landing zone was deep in bocage country. The Normans in that area divided their plots of land with heavy tall hedgerows.
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It was cloudy that day over Kyoto, Nagasaki was secondary.
I think Kokura was primary, Nagasaki was secondary. I believe Kyoto had been talked out of being a target
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Responsibility for the timing of the second bombing was delegated to Tibbets. Scheduled for August 11 against Kokura, the raid was moved earlier by two days to avoid a five-day period of bad weather forecast to begin on August 10.[ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#cite_note-FOOTNOTESherwin2003233–234-190)
Thanks for the correction.
At 03:49 on the morning of August 9, 1945, Bockscar, flown by Sweeney's crew, carried Fat Man, with Kokura as the primary target and Nagasaki the secondary target. The mission plan for the second attack was nearly identical to that of the Hiroshima mission, with two B-29s flying an hour ahead as weather scouts and two additional B-29s in Sweeney's flight for instrumentation and photographic support of the mission. Sweeney took off with his weapon already armed but with the electrical safety plugs still engaged.[193] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#cite_note-SM16-193)
During pre-flight inspection of Bockscar, the flight engineer notified Sweeney that an inoperative fuel transfer pump made it impossible to use 640 US gallons (2,400 l; 530 imp gal) of fuel carried in a reserve tank. This fuel would still have to be carried all the way to Japan and back, consuming still more fuel. Replacing the pump would take hours; moving the Fat Man to another aircraft might take just as long and was dangerous as well, as the bomb was live. Tibbets and Sweeney therefore elected to have Bockscar continue the mission.[194] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#cite_note-FOOTNOTESweeneyAntonucciAntonucci1997204–205-194)[195] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#cite_note-The_Story_of_Nagasaki-195)
This time Penney and Cheshire were allowed to accompany the mission, flying as observers on the third plane, Big Stink (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Stink_(B-29)), flown by the group's operations officer, Major James I. Hopkins, Jr. Observers aboard the weather planes reported both targets clear. When Sweeney's aircraft arrived at the assembly point for his flight off the coast of Japan, Big Stink failed to make the rendezvous.[193] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#cite_note-SM16-193) According to Cheshire, Hopkins was at varying heights including 9,000 feet (2,700 m) higher than he should have been, and was not flying tight circles over Yakushima (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakushima) as previously agreed with Sweeney and Captain Frederick C. Bock (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_C._Bock), who was piloting the support B-29 The Great Artiste. Instead, Hopkins was flying 40-mile (64 km) dogleg patterns.[196] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#cite_note-FOOTNOTESweeneyAntonucciAntonucci1997212-196) Though ordered not to circle longer than fifteen minutes, Sweeney continued to wait for Big Stink for forty minutes. Before leaving the rendezvous point, Sweeney consulted Ashworth, who was in charge of the bomb. As commander of the aircraft, Sweeney made the decision to proceed to the primary, the city of Kokura.[197] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#cite_note-FOOTNOTESweeneyAntonucciAntonucci1997211-197)
At 11:01, a last-minute break in the clouds over Nagasaki allowed Bockscar's bombardier, Captain Kermit Beahan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_Beahan), to visually sight the target as ordered. The Fat Man weapon, containing a core of about 5 kg (11 lb) of plutonium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium), was dropped over the city's industrial valley. It exploded 47 seconds later at 1,650 ± 33 ft (503 ± 10 m), above a tennis court,[206] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#cite_note-FOOTNOTEKerr_et_al200543,_46-206) halfway between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works in the south and the Nagasaki Arsenal in the north. This was nearly 3 km (1.9 mi) northwest of the planned hypocenter; the blast was confined to the Urakami Valley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urakami) and a major portion of the city was protected by the intervening hills.[207] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#cite_note-FOOTNOTEWainstock199692-207) The resulting explosion released the equivalent energy of 21 ± 2 kt (87.9 ± 8.4 TJ).[138] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#cite_note-FOOTNOTEKerr_et_al200542–43-138)Big Stink spotted the explosion from a hundred miles away, and flew over to observe.[208] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#cite_note-FOOTNOTEGroves1962346-208)
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The two A-bombs were of two different types. The Hiroshima bomb was simpler and based on U-235 and had never been tested. The Los Alamos test (Trinity) was of the second type based on plutonium and implosion. But, I digress.
So, imagine somehow the Allies gain a toehold only at Utah, but the other beaches failed and were withdrawn. What then?
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(https://i.imgur.com/eWthIoJ.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/nGjEnP5.png)(https://i.imgur.com/SOVw2w3.jpg)
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The day we visited Utah, we saw a guy with a horse and surrey racing down the beach.
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Would a botched D Day also have forced a change of government at Whitehall? Churchill kept hanging on, even at the helm of a wartime government. Anything going sour on the landing could have pushed him out.
Grandpa GR went ashore in Normandy later in the afternoon. He was an artilleryman, was awarded two Bronze Stars for bravery, and came back as deaf as a post in one ear. Unfortunately, he never told any of this to anyone prior to his sudden death in 2001. We only learned about it by reading his DD214. He passed before the movement to record the vet's stories really reached critical mass. We're taking some of our wedding flowers out to his headstone at Fort Snelling later this morning.
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Many of the amphibious landings of note in WW II did "go bad" to an extent, all of them had flaws. The initial day at Guadalcanal and Okinawa went OK because the Japanese didn't counterattack, same as with Iwo early. Anzio was a near disaster. The British attack on the toe of Italy was bungled. I guess Sicily went fairly well considering. North Africa went against French troops. In WW I, Gallipoli was a disaster.
Obviously these things are hyper complicated, I can't even see how anyone could plan them, and entailed interservice rivalries that could be effective. IN reality, D-Day went pretty well. The British were slow getting to Caen. The airborne troops were widely dispersed, but to some extent that aided in baffling the Germans.
The Navy really did good work at Omaha, especially the destroyers who risked grounding to come in close. The heavy bombers missed their targets by several miles.
Once Omaha was secured, it was a success, even if everything didn't go perfectly, which could never happen.
It is plausible that even if the Allies were down to only Utah Beach, they would have secured the peninsula quickly and then plodded at great cost up to Avranches, and then they would break out, and perhaps that meant a delay of perhaps 1-2 months, not sure.
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Churchill was an infantry combat veteran of WWI. He resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty after his Galipoli brainchild turned into a disaster, and joined the army.
He feared the slaughter of the young men of Great Britain. And he could't get the disaster of the Dieppe Raid out of his head. He just didn't want his young men to have to attack the Germans head-on.
That's why Montgomery's plan for Operation Market-Garden was so appealing to him.
Churchill's Galipoli catastrophe is not well known in the US, but if you ever travel to New Zealand, they remember it quite well. A LOT of the troops killed in that mess were ANZAC's (Austrailians and New Zealanders).
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I should be able to visit Gallipoli next May on our trip.
I think it was a sound strategy but the implementation was atrocious, really atrocious.
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@Cincydawg (https://www.cfb51.com/index.php?action=profile;u=870) quoted the mission history of the Nagasaki bombing above but I have long suspected that it is not accurate. If you read closely, you will note that the bomb was WAY off target and if you read more about the mission you will learn that Bockscar was running low on fuel and could not have made it back to even Okinawa if they had lingered much longer, especially with the heavy Fat Man Bomb still on board. Worse, it would have been extremely unsafe to attempt landing with the bomb on board and AFAIK they didn't have explicit permission to drop the thing over the ocean in the event of this problem.
Consequently, I have long suspected that the Bockscar crew (or just the bombardier) simply dropped it by radar without visual confirmation and that is why it ended up about 2mi away from the intended aiming point. My theory is that either:
A) The crew simply decided to ignore the order to get visual confirmation, dropped the bomb by radar, and agreed among themselves not to ever tell anyone, or
B) The bombardier got increasingly optimistic as fuel got increasingly scarce and simply thought he saw the aiming point even though he actually didn't.
Note that the Nagasaki bomb was considerably more powerful (21kt vs 16kt) and yet did less damage and killed less people because they botched the aim.
Side note:
I visited the Trinity site a few years ago (it is open to the public two days a year so check and plan ahead if you want to go). The Hiroshima bomb was, as someone above noted, untested. That was because it was a simpler design.
I'm not a physicist so I don't know this stuff very well but my limited understanding is roughly this:
In order to achieve a nuclear detonation you need to compress fissile material. The Hiroshima Bomb was a "gun type" bomb. It achieved this compression by essentially shooting a uranium bullet into a Uranium mass. This was fairly simple (to the geniuses that designed the bombs) so they didn't feel a need to test it. The Nagasaki Bomb was an implosion bomb. It was cylindrical and there were a bunch of conventional shaped charges surrounding the fissile core. Blowing up the shaped charges created the compression. They tested it first because if anything went wrong with the charges (ie, if they were not spaced correctly) the fissile material would simply blow out one side instead of detonating.
The decision not to test the gun type bomb was risky and that is why they did test the other one. If the bomb had failed to detonate the Japanese would have found it and known exactly what we were up to. Worse, they would have acquired our fissile material.
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Many of the amphibious landings of note in WW II did "go bad" to an extent, all of them had flaws.
In WWII, the worst one may have been Tarawa. It was early in the advance against Japan so lots of ideas were still being tested and they somehow screwed up the calculation of the tides and ended up with a near-disaster.
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Your description of the two warhead types is accurate. The challenge with the implosion technique is to ensure all the charges fire at the same time, as you imply. The design also was based on plutonium, which is used in the most efficient devices today (not uranium). Plutonium is an artificial element that was generated in the reactors at Hanford, Oregon, and one reason that area is rather polluted.
The US had enough fissile material for a third bomb, but a fourth would be delayed while more was generated. The U-235 in the first type was separated from U-238 at Oak Ridge using long tubes that separated gases by weight, they used UF6 which is highly corrosive but gaseous. The first trickle out would be enriched in U-235. (gaseous diffusion process). The B-29 Bockscar is at the AF Museum in Dayton, OH (which is an incredible museum).
The book Enola Gay is quite excellent in my view.
(https://i.imgur.com/2i5jfc1.png)
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The Marines today in basic training have to pass a swimming test in part because of Tarawa. It's not that tough to pass the basic test but some recruits can't swim. If you pass the 4th class, you can try for 3rd and so on, I understand the 1st class is quite difficult. My daughter says she was the first female recruit in over a year to pass it.
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Anyway, I'm pondering the Allied advance through the bocage if the only beachead was Utah. The British around Caen soaked up the German armor because it was open country, the bocage would been mostly infantry and antitank battles and artillery, not armor, I think. The Germans might have been able to move a 2-3 panzer divisions to the East, or they could have held them in reserve against any allied breakout. As it was, the German 7th Army got chewed up in the Falaise Pocket.
My guess here, and CWS can chime in since we're guessing, is that the Allies might have needed another 2 months to break out.
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What bothers me about our military now is how detached we approach it. Obviously, no one wants "boots on the ground" and risking unneeded deaths, but when you hear coverage, it bothers me that the cost of the war is so front and center.
Who gives a damn about that?
we're not the same country that transformed automotive assembly lines into tank-creation factories. We consider war to be an inconvenience now. That detachment is what doesn't sit well with me.
It's still 20 year olds out there on the front lines. It's still old men calling the shots, still politicians keeping their kids on the sidelines - same as always. But the attitude we have as a whole is just problematic.
While I--and probably most who served or are family of those who have--largely agree, there is a bright side to this. One reason we're detached is because we haven't needed to mobilize in this way since Vietnam. Even Vietnam was a provincial war (in scope) relative to WWII. The reality is that we live in a very peaceful time in the history of humanity, which is remarkable given how many more of us (people) there are now, and how much better we are (mechanically/scientifically) at killing each other.
And for all of that, the impact of war on those who fight it, and those close to them, doesn't change.
For my own part, serving in the military exposed me to a broader cross-section of America than anything else I've done, and that gave me a better appreciation for who we are as a nation. Despite all our differences--and the tropes from war movies about farm boys from Iowa, factory workers from the Midwest, good ol' boys from the South, and city kids getting blended together have some truth to them--we are quite capable of setting aside our differences to get things done.
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Another item mentioned by someone is operation Anvil, the invasion that followed in southern France. That likely would have occurred and faced little resistance unless you think the Germans could have reoriented some troops in that direction. Those troops basically had a route march hampered only by supply limitations. So, if the D-Day invasion is somehow hemmed up, the Med invasion would cause the Germans great difficulty as they tried to reorient, and the new foes would be coming up through what starts to be good tank country.
That was a good point whoever posted it.
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Wasn't that originally named dragoon.Churchill oppossed it saying we would get dragooned into it.IKE pointed out that neither him or the BEF were involved with operations.It was a Franco-yank operation.I'll tell you what I've spent the last year reading about 15 books all on the European theater and Monty should have been shot and if he survived shot again.He was really a shameless lying self promoting distortion artist.Even other BEF officers wanted him removed but by the time the drunk Winnie fired half of his officers he pretty much got stuck with him.That and Alan brooke was his buddy.I liked and admired Churchill but was not a tactitician or should not have been as involved as he was in military matters
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Operation Dragoon (initially Operation Anvil) was the code name for the Allied (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allies_of_World_War_II) invasion of Southern France (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_France) on 15 August 1944. The operation was initially planned to be executed in conjunction with Operation Overlord (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Overlord), the Allied landing in the Normandy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy_landings), but the lack of available resources led to a cancellation of the second landing. By July 1944 the landing was reconsidered, as the clogged-up ports in Normandy did not have the capacity to adequately supply the Allied forces. Concurrently, the French High Command pushed for a revival of the operation that would include large numbers of French troops. As a result, the operation was finally approved in July to be executed in August.
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The British around Caen soaked up the German armor because it was open country, the bocage would been mostly infantry and antitank battles and artillery, not armor, I think.
The germans were there because of the road network and the rivers.They already threw Monty in the chanel once so they weren't exactly crapping their pants because he was there.Allied Air Corp however had the Heine's attention as did Naval Shelling.Allied ground troops would disperse different colored smoke screens indicating friendly troops.Bradley still called in ordinance on his own troops once or twice
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So, imagine somehow the Allies gain a toehold only at Utah, but the other beaches failed and were withdrawn. What then?
I'm guessing Bomber Harris gets a vote and Admiral Ramsey also
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That's why Montgomery's plan for Operation Market-Garden was so appealing to him.
I was on a Youtube history message board,bad move - a bunch of British flamers.The Dutch Army Staff College final exam before the war asked students about how to advance north on just this road. Any student suggesting a direct assault up the road was failed on the spot. Only flanking well to the west was accepted as an answer.SHAEF and the BEF had directed Monty to open the Scheldt Estuary 1st.Which tactically was the right move.Because even in the highly unlikey case this hair brained scheme worked they would be out of provisions by Arnhem.And the Heer had the RUhr right around the corner.Armor and artillary coming in by rail and getting ferried over.None of which the Allies were employing on any scale.How Montgomery had a job after Caen,Goodwood,Epsom then the Falaise Gap Fiasco is a testimony to Allied ignorance.He should have been sent packing and IKE desrved a dressing down after that also for acquiesing to British Whims.Anyhow thanx to the boys 75 years ago
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German war production hit it's maximum in December 1944, despite the bombing campaign, which is still debated by military historians and strategists.
I don't know of a larger town in Germany of any consequence that was not basically leveled, including Dresden.
The Poesti raid is interesting, we never tried again from what I recall.
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/ploesti.htm (http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/ploesti.htm)
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Saw something about Maisy Battery, and the Rangers likely mistake in going after Point du Hoc. I think this is a good example of where historical narratives get off point. The general tenor is that Point du Hoc wasn't that important because the Germans had already moved the battery of guns there, whereas Maisy Battery continued to shell the Allies for days after the landing. The people who have studied this say that the Rangers blew it, and shouldn't have focused on Point du Hoc at all. But that's beside the point. It isn't that they took Point du Hoc, it's the behavior they exhibited in doing so. It's the bravery and sacrifice to go up the cliffs under brutal conditions that make Point do Hoc important. Indeed, it's always been generally acknowledged that when the Rangers got to the top, the main battery of guns they were sent after wasn't really there. So should they have gone after Maisy instead? Probably, but so what?
Things go badly in warfare all the time. Plans don't survive first contact. Commanders make mistakes. But that doesn't undermine the bravery of the people who execute (or fail to) those plans.
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I visited Pointe du Hoc. I don't think it possible that men could make it up that cliff under fire. They must have been exhausted and highly uncertain about a possible counter attack. They were left there 3 days as I recall. Expecting them to attack in another direction sounds excessive even for Rangers.
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Saw something about Maisy Battery, and the Rangers likely mistake in going after Point du Hoc. I think this is a good example of where historical narratives get off point. The general tenor is that Point du Hoc wasn't that important because the Germans had already moved the battery of guns there, whereas Maisy Battery continued to shell the Allies for days after the landing. The people who have studied this say that the Rangers blew it, and shouldn't have focused on Point du Hoc at all. But that's beside the point. It isn't that they took Point du Hoc, it's the behavior they exhibited in doing so. It's the bravery and sacrifice to go up the cliffs under brutal conditions that make Point do Hoc important. Indeed, it's always been generally acknowledged that when the Rangers got to the top, the main battery of guns they were sent after wasn't really there. So should they have gone after Maisy instead? Probably, but so what?
Things go badly in warfare all the time. Plans don't survive first contact. Commanders make mistakes. But that doesn't undermine the bravery of the people who execute (or fail to) those plans.
The guy who has made the big deal about the Maisy Battery is a former British signal officer. He's right--Maisy Battery was a better target. But he's sort of wrong, IMO, about everything else. He can't get it straight whether Lt. Col. Rudder (2nd Ranger Battalion C.O.) knew about Maisy Batter and should have told the high command (which seems highly unlikely to me) or the high command knew about Maisy Battery and didn't tell Rudder. In any event, the Rangers attacked Pointe du Hoc, and the guns weren't there, so they went inland and found 5 of them, and destroyed them. Sounds like "Mission Accomplished" to me. And the fact that there was a better mission that they should have been assigned doesn't change that.
Maisy battery was supposed to be the target of HMS Hawkins, but it continued firing until 9 June.
Lots of good stuff here since yesterday.
The bombing of Nagasaki sounds like the Keystone Cops were running the show. Did anyone follow orders? Did anyone carry out his part of the mission IAW the way it was briefed?
Yes, the invasion of southern France was going to be called Anvil and Churchill insisted on the change. I've forgotten why Churchill objected to it. It fit in so well with his "soft underbelly of the Axis" theory! Seriously, I imagine he saw it as a distraction and a consumer of American logistical support (POL and ammo) that woulda/coulda/shoulda gone to the forces in northern France, including British forces.
Market-Garden. Everything wrong with Montgomery as a senior commander was on display in this opearaton. Most glaringly, his insistence on sticking to the plan even though circumstances had changed. They knew before it started (on its own D-Day) that the German dispositions were not as briefed, and that the difference was very significant. But Montgomery could only fight set-piece battles, and only when he had overwhelming numerical and logistical superiority. He could not respond quickly enough to fight fluid campaigns of maneuver. Whether that was his own problem or due to his staff, I don't know/can't remember.
About what German cities were left to bomb by spring of 1945, Dresden came up. One of my colleagues at Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth was a civilian PhD-type named Michael Pearlman. He died a couple of years ago. He had been working on a book (I don't know if he finished it or not) about the final Soviet offensive and he came to the conclusion that the Dresden bombing was not just a demonstration of frightfulness, or of Western Air Power to intimidate Stalin, but a legitimate military operation to aid an ally. Dresden was a transportation hub, and it was on the left flank of Marshal Konev's axis of advance from Breslau to Berlin. Its transportation links needed to be destroyed, and they were.
A lot of the bad odor surrounding the Dresden bombing started the British historian John Irving, who would turn out eventually to be a Holocaust denier. He took casualty figures from East German sources, who had taken them from Nazi propaganda sources. The actual number was multiplied by something like 10. Kurt Vonnegutt also played a role in this, by spouting the same numbers, and having "street cred" of having been an eyewitness. The historian Stephen Sears used the same figures in his American Heritage Junior Library book Air War Against Hitler's Germany, which I probably read 10 times back in junior high and high school.
The Library of America is issuing a new edition of Cornelius Ryan's work that combines The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far in one volume. The editor of that volume is Rick Atkinson, author of the "Liberation Trilogy": An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, and The Guns at Last Light. He discusses Ryan on THIS VIDEO (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv2lq57jMNc). It's worth a watch.
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So, I got this in an email today.
Geopolitical Futures
June 4, 2019
By George Friedman
D-Day and Stalin
Nearly 75 years after it was fought, D-Day remains one of the most vividly recalled battles in history. It was also one of the most decisive. There are those who will argue that the Allies would have won World War II regardless of the outcome of the Battle of Normandy. Indeed, similar arguments are made for most decisive battles. Two years ago, I wrote about the Battle of Midway, on the 75th anniversary of that campaign, and argued that a defeat there would have been disastrous to the global balance. But some readers rejected this, saying that, even if the U.S. had been defeated, it would have deployed ships into the Pacific and recovered. That might well be true, but as I will try to show, the invasion of France’s Calvados coast was a turning point in the war. Had it failed, the Allies likely would not have been able to recover.
Far From Over
The pivot was the Soviet Union. By the time the D-Day invasion was launched, the Soviet Union had been fighting the Germans for three years. Germany had conquered most of the Soviet heartland and its treatment of the occupied areas was barbaric. For the first five months of the war, it seemed likely that the Soviets would lose. Only an extraordinary effort by the Red Army, aided by supplies from the United States, allowed them to stabilize the front and return to the offensive. But when D-Day was launched, the Soviets were still over 1,000 miles from Berlin. For them, the war was far from over.
(https://geopoliticalfutures.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Europe_1942.jpg)
For the British and Americans, the continued Soviet participation in the war was essential. The Soviets had tied down the bulk of the German army for years and bled it dry. Without the Soviets’ involvement in the war, an Allied invasion of France would have been impossible as Germany could have massed overwhelming force and shifted troops to Italy, blocking access from there.
But the Soviets believed that the Allies had deliberately delayed an invasion of France to allow the Germans and Soviets to weaken each other so that American and British forces could come ashore with minimal opposition and fight their way into Germany, and perhaps beyond. The Soviets had repeatedly asked for a second front in 1942 and 1943. The Allies responded with a Mediterranean campaign, first in North Africa and then in Italy. From the Soviets’ perspective, this was merely a gesture – they were fighting for their lives in Stalingrad, and the Mediterranean operations were not large enough to force the Germans to redeploy troops away from their eastern flank. And so, the basic correlation of forces between Germany and the Soviets remained as it was.
The Americans and British said they simply weren’t ready for an invasion. Stalin didn’t dispute that but argued that even a failed invasion would have forced Hitler to re-evaluate the vulnerability of his troops in the west and shift some forces there. A reduction of German forces and redirection of logistical support would have increased the likelihood of a Soviet victory and reduced the damage to Soviet forces. Stalin was left with the impression that the Western Allies wanted the Germans to do maximum damage to the Red Army and that the Americans and British were unwilling to carry out a doomed spoiling attack because they were unwilling, for political reasons, to absorb a fraction of the casualties the Soviets were absorbing.
The two sides didn’t trust each other. The British and Americans were appalled at the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, while the Soviets were angered by the Americans’ willingness to enter the war only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States. The U.S. built up its forces slowly and deliberately, minimizing exposure to minor battles in the Pacific and major thrusts at nothing important. Stalin believed that Roosevelt wanted a weak Soviet Union to emerge and that, after the Soviets destroyed the Wehrmacht, the U.S. would seize Europe and the British Empire. He once said that Churchill was the kind of man who would pick your pocket for a kopeck but Roosevelt was the kind of man who would steal only big coins. From Stalin’s view, Churchill was governing a declining power while Roosevelt, brilliant and utterly ruthless, was in charge of the future hegemon of the world.
A Hard Pill to Swallow
There is ample evidence that Soviet and German representatives had met in Stockholm for serious talks. Hitler saw Stalin’s opening as a sign of weakness. Understanding the tension between the Soviets and the Americans and British, he didn’t believe in 1943 that they could mount an invasion. Since Stalin himself had doubts, Hitler drove a hard bargain, demanding that Germany retain the land it had already won, particularly Ukraine. The talks broke down, though contacts seem to have continued.
Had the Allies not invaded Normandy in 1944, it is reasonable to assume that Stalin, whose troops were still fighting far inside their own country, would have accepted the deal with Hitler, since he likely could not continue fighting without a western front or at the very least could not regain the territory on his own. Churchill, it should be noted, was never enthusiastic about the invasion, either because he feared the resulting losses would be the end of the British army or because he wouldn’t have minded if the German-Soviet war continued so the Allies could intervene at the last minute, while nibbling at Greece. Either way, Roosevelt rejected Churchill’s view, sensing that the Soviets would make peace without an Allied invasion.
Thus, the invasion was launched in June before the campaign season was lost. Had the Americans and British not seized the opportunity to invade at that time, or had the campaign failed, they would have had to wait until the following spring to mount an invasion. And by then, the Soviets may well have been forced to make peace, giving the Germans a far denser defense along the French coast that would almost certainly have made an invasion impossible. Alternatively, the Allies could have tried to attack Germany through Italy or the Balkans – through the Alps. But with the Soviets out of the war, the Germans would have gained a massive advantage. A German-Soviet truce would have been hard for the Soviets to swallow, but if D-Day had failed and if the Allies couldn’t mount another operation for another year, Stalin may not have had any other choice. He couldn’t win the war on his own.
The Americans would have had the atomic bomb within a year, and I don’t doubt they would have used it while the war raged. But if there was peace in the east, and little fighting in the west, would the U.S. really nuke Berlin or Munich and then try to occupy Germany? I don’t believe it would, but I could be wrong.
D-Day was the decisive battle of World War II not only because it unleashed the full strength of the Anglo-American forces but because it forced Hitler to fight on two fronts, easing the Soviets’ positions sufficiently for a confident advance. Had the invasion not taken place or had it failed, Stalin would likely have made peace with Hitler. Germany would have grown stronger, unless the U.S. and Britain wanted to wage war alone, which I don’t think they did. In the end, Hitler was right when he said Germany’s fate would be decided in France – on the Calvados coast in Normandy, to be exact.
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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.
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Hitler's views were somewhat clearly spelled out in his book (which I once tried to read, it's not readable). Anyone who was not "Aryan" was in trouble with Hitler. It's interesting that he was allied with the Japanese, but I suppose they were "over there" and welcome to it. Similarly, he allocated the Med to his Italian friends who are not "purely" Aryan of course. He liked Benito personally.
He liked the British because they were "Aryan". He couldn't understand why they didn't quit when he offered them rather generous terms in 1940. And indeed, after May 1`940, the Brits were "beat" except for their Navy (which is important when one considers Napoleon and Trafalgar).
Once Hitler had "living space" in the East he would have been content to dominate Europe, let Britain alone, France would be "France" like Vichy France was, etc. He would call the shots but they would nominally be independent. He wanted Russia to the Urals for metals and food and oil. The Russians would have been used as serfs, in effect, farm workers, etc. dominated by "Aryan" overlords who ran the place. Hitler's greedy henchmen would have been doled out choice portions of Russian to "run" as they wished. He nearly pulled it off, some writers like to fictionalize the "what if" of WW 2 of course, but in effect, the Germans had to make no mistakes militarily, and in war that is not possible.
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The Library of America is issuing a new edition of Cornelius Ryan's work that combines The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far in one volume. The editor of that volume is Rick Atkinson, author of the "Liberation Trilogy": An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, and The Guns at Last Light. He discusses Ryan on THIS VIDEO (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv2lq57jMNc). It's worth a watch.
I'm reading "The Guns at Last Light" right now,very informative.Also have to get Ryan's "The Last Battle" next.His sources are great just like Robert Kershaw who wrote "It Never Snows in September".Both exclusively interviewed actual combatants.There is evidence by the way that Montgomery had funtional Asperger's.Some suggest Stonewall Jackson did also,difference being Jackson was for the most part successful where Monty was just fortunate he was on the winning side
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(https://i.imgur.com/jxsOEyd.jpg)
This shows Soviet troop positions June 23, 1944, to August, 1944. I would not call this "deep inside Russia". They were at the end of this knocking on the door of prewar German proper (East Prussia in particular). Had D-Day failed, would they have reached an agreement with Hitler and stopped? Maybe, but at this point, I'd say not.
The July assassination attempt would not have happened with a failed D-Day, probably, but the Soviets were moving rather quickly in the East. A few more Panzer divisions shifted East would have perhaps slowed this a bit, but not stopped it.
The war in the East was enormous in terms of troops and space, and the book Barbarossa is a very good summary of it.
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I recall being up at Badger's boat one night and a neighbor dropped by, a Brit, and for whatever reason he started in on how Monty was a great general and the Americans were puftahs etc. I stayed quiet as he was so sure of himself that I felt any comments or questions would have angered him.
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Hitler's views were somewhat clearly spelled out in his book (which I once tried to read, it's not readable). Anyone who was not "Aryan" was in trouble with Hitler. It'
Years ago either History or Nat Geo did a great segmant on this.When the Reich annexed Austria special units went into Hitlers home town - some small hamlet.The erased all historical reference to him at city hall,birth certificate,relatives head stones quite extensive.The reason being is he may have had Jewish blood in him - it was interesting.If I ever come across it I'll link it.Good thing i wasn't there CD I would have fed him a face full of facts.Actually I would have bit my tongue on badge's behalf - I'm guessin.Most senior Brit officers hated his guts for taking credit that wasn't his and deflecting blame that was.You'd never belief the bullshit he gave IKE,who sad to say needed to grow a pair.He never brought the hammer down until crossing the Rhine - then he finally shoved the arrogant ass to the side.Which he should have done 10 months earlier.George Marshall wanted IKE to rip the Ebola Chimps head off
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He wanted Russia to the Urals for metals and food and oil. The Russians would have been used as serfs, in effect, farm workers, etc. dominated by "Aryan" overlords who ran the place. Hitler's greedy henchmen would have been doled out choice portions of Russian to "run" as they wished. He nearly pulled it off, some writers like to fictionalize the "what if" of WW 2 of course, but in effect, the Germans had to make no mistakes militarily, and in war that is not possible.
“No plan survives first contact with the enemy - van Moltke
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The notion that Hitler had Jewish relatives way back was largely discounted over the years, as I recall. I don't think there is support for it.
As for Monty, the British people had suffered defeat and bad news almost continuously since 1939. They needed a hero, and Monty was annointed. He was sacrosanct and he knew it. There is an old saying that the British lose every battle except the last one, which is hyperbole with a grain of truth in it.
The loss of Singapore in 1942 was a huge hit for British morale along with the BB and BC sent to support it in December 1941. Only Churchill could have held them together.
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What if Hitler had won and had killed all the Jews. Who would have been in the cross-hairs next?
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
-Martin Niemoller
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The loss of Singapore in 1942 was a huge hit for British morale along with the BB and BC sent to support it in December 1941. Only Churchill could have held them together.
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
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About what German cities were left to bomb by spring of 1945, Dresden came up. One of my colleagues at Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth was a civilian PhD-type named Michael Pearlman. He died a couple of years ago. He had been working on a book (I don't know if he finished it or not) about the final Soviet offensive and he came to the conclusion that the Dresden bombing was not just a demonstration of frightfulness, or of Western Air Power to intimidate Stalin, but a legitimate military operation to aid an ally. Dresden was a transportation hub, and it was on the left flank of Marshal Konev's axis of advance from Breslau to Berlin. Its transportation links needed to be destroyed, and they were.
A lot of the bad odor surrounding the Dresden bombing started the British historian John Irving, who would turn out eventually to be a Holocaust denier. He took casualty figures from East German sources, who had taken them from Nazi propaganda sources. The actual number was multiplied by something like 10. Kurt Vonnegutt also played a role in this, by spouting the same numbers, and having "street cred" of having been an eyewitness. The historian Stephen Sears used the same figures in his American Heritage Junior Library book Air War Against Hitler's Germany, which I probably read 10 times back in junior high and high school.
I can't find it right now, but I've read that the US/UK asked the Russians about Eastern German bombing targets that would be helpful and/or got an "ok" from the Russians to bomb Dresden.
The Russians probably had more tanks than the whole rest of the world combined (and the T34 was WAY better than the Sherman) and they also had a massive tactical air force but they had nothing resembling a strategic air force and their Navy wouldn't have lasted an hour against even the UK's fleet which, by that time, was vastly smaller than the US fleet.
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Hitler's views were somewhat clearly spelled out in his book (which I once tried to read, it's not readable). Anyone who was not "Aryan" was in trouble with Hitler. It's interesting that he was allied with the Japanese, but I suppose they were "over there" and welcome to it.
The Nazi's declared the Japanese to be "honorary aryans" as their way to square this circle. It should also be noted that the Japanese were just as racist as the Nazi's so this issue cut both ways.
When Japan humiliated the Brits in Singapore the German Foreign Minister wanted to make a big propaganda deal out of it but Hitler wouldn't allow it. For Hitler it was an embarrassment that the obviously non-aryan Japanese had dispatched the obviously aryan Brits.
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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.
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Had Goering kept to taking out military installations instead of responding to Bombers Harris's attacks on population centers who knows what would have happened.That reprieve gave the RAF time to refit,resupply and reinforce.Hitler turning the Heer East was a biggie for the British.The German Hierarchy wasn't as bright as the guys in the field,IMO
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The British basically were not engaged from Sept'39-May'40 save some raids.Then 20 days in May but 4 of those were withdrawals.Then just under 4 months during the B.O.B.So I don't buy the narative where the Brits boast how they were in it 6 long years.I like the Brits,specially the Tommies,but discussions on other boards has left a bad taste regarding them.Getting very creative and revisionist with the facts.
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The Brits were getting bombed, fairly heavily. They were fighting in North Africa of course, and in the Far East (Burma in 1942) and the Med (naval). They also had to deal with submarines and the occasional foray by German naval combatants and the threat from the Tirpitz (later).
They didn't have much in terms of ground forces to do anything 1939-1941 except hold on. Our shipment of tanks (Grants) to them in Egypt was huge, they had been destined for our armored divisions and we diverted them to Egypt.
They tried the Dieppe raid with Canadian troops, but that was 1942 I think.
But in terms of any large scale ground battles in 1940 or 1941, the Brits didn't have them.
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Ya that's what gets me Dieppe was a noble charge but Monty denied he planned which of course he did.The war in the desert was really lopsided but Monty wasn't the man to manipulate the numbers.Churchill made a big mistake dismissing Claude Auchinlech and Dorman-Smith after the Victory at 1st Alamain.Churchill wanted them to go on the offensive right away.But as afore mentioned needed time to refit,resupply and reinforce.Churchill sacked them both when things were just starting to turn the Allies way.Specially regarding ULTRA that put them right in Rommel's huddle.Men,material specially the tanks and artillary(105's) starting arriving from across the pond.The Allied Naval & Air Corps strangled the Afrika Corp.The Allies supply lines went 100 mile to Alexandria.The Germans went back over 1,000 miles to Tripoli.Montgomery didn't get moving until the 3rd week in October which was Auchinleck's time table to begin with.Might be noted that General Gott was supposed to take over 8th Army but died in transit when his plane crashed.Everything came together exactly right for an uber A-hole named Monty.
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As a general response to the initial question and a specific response to the recent post by @CWSooner (https://www.cfb51.com/index.php?action=profile;u=1544) about the "decisiveness" of D-Day and Midway, I think that ultimately neither were individually "decisive".
I'll submit the chart near the top of this link:
http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm
Per the link, the total economic power of each country (as a percentage of the global total) as of 1937 was:
- 41.7% USA
- 14.4% Germany
- 14.0% USSR
- 10.2% UK
- 4.2% France
- 3.5% Japan
- 2.5% Italy
- 9.5% all other countries in the world combined
Pre-nuclear modern industrial warfare is, IMHO, generally a simple equation:
stuff you have + stuff you can make - stuff your enemy can destroy <=> stuff they have + stuff they can make - stuff of theirs that you can destroy
Meaning that if you can make 41.7% of the world's stuff you are awfully tough to beat. Note also that the US/UK total is just over 50% meaning that even a global alliance of EVERYONE against the US/UK would be unlikely to win.
I'll take Midway first (it was only mentioned in passing, but it is a major interest of mine):
We are getting way off topic here but I want to make this point first: Most everyone with even a passing interest in WWII history is aware that Japanese Admiral Yamamoto was opposed to attacking the US and is credited with the quote about "awakening a sleeping giant" after Pearl Harbor (even though he probably didn't say it). What a lot of people do NOT know is that Yamamoto was far from alone. Nearly the entire Japanese naval high command was opposed to war with the US.
The Japanese Admirals were not idiots. They were smart enough to know that they simply couldn't sink ships as fast as American shipyards could launch them. In 1940 Congress passed and FDR signed what is known as The Two-Ocean Navy Act. The act authorized construction of:
- 18 Aircraft carriers
- 2 Iowa Class Battleships
- 5 Montana Class Battleships
- 6 Alaska Class cruisers (these were really Battlecruisers or even arguably small battleships)
- 27 Cruisers
- 115 Destroyers
- 43 submarines
- 15k aircraft
- and a lot more
In short, the Two Ocean Navy Act authorized the construction of a collection of ships that alone would have been the most powerful navy in the world and arguably more powerful than all other navies (including the UK) combined. This act was not secret. It was a publicly debated and approved piece of US Congressional legislation. The Japanese were aware of it and they KNEW that they couldn't possibly hope to face down this massive armada once it was constructed.
Even ignoring the Brits, the French, the Dutch, the Chinese, the Australians, and all the other US allies in the Pacific, Japanese production was less than 10% of US production.
That is why I believe that neither Midway nor any other Pacific Battle can be viewed as a "turning point". There simply never was any plausible chance that the Japanese could win militarily. Their only hope was to be part of a broader winning side.
That brings us back to D-Day and the German war situation in general:
The Germans and the Soviets had roughly equivalent productive capacity. If you add some of the areas captured by the Germans to their tally (France, Czechoslovakia, etc) then Germany held a slight productive advantage over the USSR. This, however, was not enough to give the Nazi's an advantage over the USSR and UK combined.
As a practical matter, if there had been some way to keep the US neutral (actually neutral, not the undeclared enemy that we actually were in 1940 and 1941) then Germany may have been able to hold off a UK/USSR alliance indefinitely due to other advantages like interior lines. However, once the US entered the war with nearly half of global economic capacity it was not a question of if but rather when the Nazi's would lose.
The US, UK, and USSR combined controlled around two-thirds of the total productive capacity in the World. Even if everyone else in the world had rallied to the Nazi side they still would have been facing a 2:1 production disadvantage. Superior strategy can make up for some deficiencies but not THAT big.
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The other incredible factor in WW II was the speed with which the US economy shifted to making military stuff, companies like GM and Ford turned "on a dime".
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Problem was MB that the USA's military was 17th in the World right behind Portugal at the beginning of the War *https://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2014/jun/13/ken-paxton/us-army-was-smaller-army-portugal-world-war-ii/ (https://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2014/jun/13/ken-paxton/us-army-was-smaller-army-portugal-world-war-ii/)*Industry had to be completely retooled for production.That was a mad scramble.Yamamoto was phrophetic he said for the 1st 6 months of the war Japan would run all over the Pacific.He was hoping for quick US capitulation or neutrality.He guessed wrong there,but was educated in the USA so was aware of the countries production capabilities and knew Japan would have a problem if hostilities were protracted
Another thing in 1941-'42-'43 it certainly wasn't given that what we were producing would land in our Allies laps.Given the U-Boat Wofpacks ferocious appetite
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I struggle to envision working at GM assembling Chevrolets or Cadillacs (both of which are French names). I show up for work on Dec. 8, or whenever, and the boss says finish that lot and we're going to be making tanks now. And by the way we don't have any plans for tanks really, the current ones all suck.
So, suddenly folks are making tank engines instead of car engines, and transmissions, and tracks, and road wheels and casting armored bodies that weight a LOT more than a car. They have plans for everything but the turret come down so they make Grants without a turret, but at least the base is the same for the Shermans.
Amazing. I find it hard to believe. And consider how much steel we had to make suddenly, a LOT more steel, and of course that became a critical shortage for the US, as did copper, remember the steel pennies of the 1940s?
The country shifted on a dime somehow.
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Problem was MB that the USA's military was 17th in the World right behind Portugal at the beginning of the War *https://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2014/jun/13/ken-paxton/us-army-was-smaller-army-portugal-world-war-ii/ (https://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2014/jun/13/ken-paxton/us-army-was-smaller-army-portugal-world-war-ii/)*Industry had to be completely retooled for production.That was a mad scramble.Yamamoto was phrophetic he said for the 1st 6 months of the war Japan would run all over the Pacific.He was hoping for quick US capitulation or neutrality.He guessed wrong there,but was educated in the USA so was aware of the countries production capabilities and knew Japan would have a problem if hostilities were protracted
Another thing in 1941-'42-'43 it certainly wasn't given that what we were producing would land in our Allies laps.Given the U-Boat Wofpacks ferocious appetite
I realize that the US military was small in 1941 but it was already being expanded rapidly even before Pearl Harbor. The Draft was passed long before Pear Harbor so a lot of the guys who would do the fighting were already in boot camp when the first Zero swooped over Battleship Row.
The other thing is that the US had two humongous advantages known as the Atlantic and the Pacific. Neither Japan nor Germany had anything even resembling the transport and naval logistical capacity to cross those oceans and invade the US. That meant that if the US needed time, the US could take time because nobody was going to cross our frontiers while we were building up forces.
If the US had been totally unprepared to fight prior to 1945 the US could simply have built up forces and prepared/trained until 1945 then go.
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I THINK the draft meant registration only, not actual drafting of troops. I'm not sure how much we were building up ground forces prior to Dec. 7.
And of course so many volunteered after PH that we had no way to train them. That was a huge problem as well, just providing basic training for all these guys.
The Marine Corps had never had a division before 1940. They fought in WW I as regiments in 2nd Infantry Division. We ended the war with six Marine divisions, which is pretty small compared to 88 Army divisions in Europe alone (I think). And the USAAF had huge numbers as well.
It was a bad place to be a crew member in a bomber in the ETO on or any submarine in the PTO.
We should give the women a lot of credit here also.
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It's fun also to play at a more "normal" outcome at Midway, perhaps the US loses two carriers and has another badly damaged. The Japanese have one sunk and one damaged, somewhat like Coral Sea. They probably can take Midway at that point, but maintaining it over time would be a struggle for them.
Guadalcanal might arguably have been more pivotal had the IJN and Army been better able to coordinate. ! MarDiv might have been wiped out.
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During '41-'43 the U-Boats were having a blast on the US east coast.There were ordered black outs so U-Boats couldn't see the silhouette of ships leaving harbors.So things weren't all cushey there.But the Oceans were a nice buffer and our country proper even if the other allies failed would not have been in hot water IMO
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I THINK the draft meant registration only, not actual drafting of troops. I'm not sure how much we were building up ground forces prior to Dec. 7.
This I'm not sure the Gov't was actually drafting.Probably Didn't matter because of the volume of volunteers
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Before Pearl Harbor, I don't think they were drafting either. Men would sign up because the economy was bad.
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We should give the women a lot of credit here also.
The WAC's got screwed metaphorically speaking.Paying for their own transportation and uniforms and many were not paid for their time or services rendered at all.God bless them talk about unselfishness
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I can't find it right now, but I've read that the US/UK asked the Russians about Eastern German bombing targets that would be helpful and/or got an "ok" from the Russians to bomb Dresden.
The Russians probably had more tanks than the whole rest of the world combined (and the T34 was WAY better than the Sherman) and they also had a massive tactical air force but they had nothing resembling a strategic air force and their Navy wouldn't have lasted an hour against even the UK's fleet which, by that time, was vastly smaller than the US fleet.
I don't know about who asked whom on the bombing of Dresden, Medina. The Soviets might have asked the Western Allies. I wish I had seen a draft of Mike Pearlman's book before he died. I'm sure he would have discussed the genesis of the operation.
About strategic air power: the U.S. built over 35,000 heavy bombers during the war. 19,000 of them were B-24 Liberators, more than the combined production of heavy bombers by Germany, Italy, and Japan.
The Soviets, by contrast, built a few dozen Pe-8 heavy bombers during the war. The total production of that type was 93, but production ran from 1936 to 1944.
Some more figures on production of military aircraft, from 1944 only:
Britain: 26,461
USSR: 40,300
USA: 96,318
Germany: 40,593
Japan: 28,180
On the other side of the world, the Battle of Midway shows in a microcosm the desperate gamble Japan took in starting a war with the U.S.
The Imperial Japanese Navy lost all 79 of the torpedo-bombers aboard its four carriers at Midway. In 1942, Japan produced 56 torpedo bombers.
In the same battle, the U.S. Navy lost 40 carrier- and land-based torpedo-bombers. In 1942, the U.S. produced 1,525 torpedo-bombers.
Production doesn't win wars. It still takes human beings at the tip of the spear to risk their lives employing those machines. But it's hard to win a war without the machines.
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"The Imperial Japanese Navy lost all 79 of the torpedo-bombers aboard its four carriers at Midway. In 1942, Japan produced 56 torpedo bombers.
In the same battle, the U.S. Navy lost 40 carrier- and land-based torpedo-bombers. In 1942, the U.S. produced 1,525 torpedo-bombers."
I've never seen that stated like that before, it sort of lays it all out.
The Kate torpedo bomber was quite good at that stage and our Avengers were just starting to come off the lines. GM built the TBM Avenger that started coming later that year I think after the TBF.
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I recall being up at Badger's boat one night and a neighbor dropped by, a Brit, and for whatever reason he started in on how Monty was a great general and the Americans were puftahs etc. I stayed quiet as he was so sure of himself that I felt any comments or questions would have angered him.
He retired to Florida, but he'll be up here for visits this summer (if we get one). That's the thing about history. It gets re-written quite a bit.
I'm not sure anything angers Andy, except maybe a challenge to British merit. That said, he likes it "here" and will never move back.
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If you want to read more about Midway, I highly recommend Shattered Sword by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully:
https://www.amazon.com/Shattered-Sword-Untold-Battle-Midway/dp/1574889249
The more I read about it the less sense it makes. Upthread someone hypothesized about a more "normal" outcome to the battle but even an absolute Japanese victory would have, at best, been only a wash for the Japanese strategically:
In theory, Yamamoto's plan was to lure the American carriers out where they could be sunk. I have no idea what made him think that this would work. Yamamoto obviously didn't know that the Americans were reading his mail. Prior to the battle the Midway garrison was substantially upgraded because we knew the Japanese were coming. If the code hadn't been broken then the reinforcement wouldn't have happened and the American Carriers wouldn't have been in the area. In that case there can be little doubt that the Japanese invasion would have been successful. What then?
Yamamoto's apparent assumption is that the Americans would have rushed their carriers out of Pear Harbor to fight off the invaders and/or retake Midway. Frankly, that makes no sense. If the Americans hadn't known about Midway in advance then most of the CV's would probably have been in the South Pacific anyway so they couldn't have responded before the Japanese carriers had to leave to refuel and rearm even if the Americans had wanted to send them.
Even if we assume, however, that the American Carriers did happen to be in the Hawaiian Islands (~1,300 mi from Pearl Harbor) it still would have taken them about about 38 hours (at 30kt) to get to Midway.
Just six months earlier the Japanese invaded Wake Island. The US garrison on Wake repelled the initial invasion fleet and USS Saratoga was dispatched from Pearl Harbor on a ferrying mission to take additional aircraft to Wake for the defense of the island. While Saratoga was en-route, the garrison at Wake reported that they were under attack by Japanese carrier-based aircraft. Saratoga was immediately recalled because the interim CiC of the Pacific Fleet reasonably decided that it simply wasn't worth losing Saratoga to try to keep Wake.
What made the Japanese think that the US would view Midway any differently?
Losing Midway to the Japanese would have deprived the US of an advanced refueling point for submarines and that is about it. Meanwhile, it would have been completely impossible for the Japanese to defend.
In 1942, 43, and 44 the biggest problem the Japanese faced was that they simply lacked the logistical ability to supply all the far-flung islands that they had captured. Midway would just have been yet another island that they couldn't possibly supply and it was reasonably close to Hawaii so the US could have basically surrounded it with submarines and attacked it with BB's, CA's, CL's, DD's, and aircraft from Hawaii (long range B24's) and from the CV's.
The US Navy could have simply toyed with the Japanese on Midway and bled them dry in the process for as long as they wanted. Then, when the US was ready to retake it the attack plan pretty much writes itself:
Day 1: Fleet of landing craft, DD's, CV's, BB's, CA's, and CL's leaves Pearl Harbor at 10pm. Travel time to Midway at 20kt, 56 hours.
Day 2: Fleet continues on course for Midway, B24's strike Midway Island and harbor overnight.
Day 3: Fleet continues on course for Midway, B24's strik Midway Island and harbor overnight.
Day 4: As fleet approaches Midway the BB's, CA's, CL's, and a few escorting DD's speed up and prepare to shell anything left on the island. B24's strike Midway Island and harbor overnight. CV's launch Dive and Torpedo bomber along with fighter escorts before dawn to arrive over Midway at dawn. At dawn the Dive and Torpedo bombers bomb anything that hasn't already been destroyed while fighters take care of any potential Japanese aircraft and strafe targets of opportunity. If there is anything left after all of that a few shells from the BB's will take care of it and the landings should be unopposed at 6am.
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FDR signed the Selective Service Act into law in Sept 1940. It had passed by large majorities in both houses of Congress. The draft began in October, and the first draftees entered service in November. It created the first peacetime draft in American history.
That law only brought men into the armed forces for 12 months. In Aug 1941, FDR asked Congress to extend the term of service to 30 months plus any extra time the president might deem necessary. THAT bill passed by one vote in the House, and only then because the Speaker, Sam Rayburn, banged the gavel and declared that it had passed. It passed easily in the Senate, and FDR signed it into law. There has always been interest in what the impact would have been had that bill failed.
By Dec 1941, the U.S. armed forces contained over 2 million service members. The Army had conducted the large-scale Louisiana Maneuvers, with 18 active-duty and National Guard divisions participating in force-on-force simulated combat.
I don't think that WACs got paid less than male soldiers. But the Women's Army Corps was not formed until Apr 1943. Before that, formed in May 1942, there was the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, and they did not get paid as well as men.
Not until July 1943 did WACs have the same ranks and wear the same rank insignia as male soldiers.
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By the way, CD, that boat you were on was a month old at the time. It's now in its 14th season. Still looks new. Time flies, eh?
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By the way, CD, that boat you were on was a month old at the time. It's now in its 14th season. Still looks new. Time flies, eh?
Wow, impossible to believe.
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Medina:
I second your recommendation of Shattered Sword. It's an excellent updating of what we know about the Battle of Midway, with more thorough use of Japanese sources than the old account by Mitsuo Fuchida.
My only complaint is what I found the excessive use of Japanese-language terminology. I'd much rather read "dive bomber" than kanbaku, especially since many contractions having to do with warships also start with kan. It's almost as if Parshall and Tully went out of their way to demonstrate their fluency.
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https://taskandpurpose.com/midway-movie-roland-emmerich-interview?fbclid=IwAR3gk5W0WxZJ3uzICgaBNUVqJiNWTTppK-ebSbk47RLNJgy5P9Bm0LX0K_Y (https://taskandpurpose.com/midway-movie-roland-emmerich-interview?fbclid=IwAR3gk5W0WxZJ3uzICgaBNUVqJiNWTTppK-ebSbk47RLNJgy5P9Bm0LX0K_Y)
Speaking of ...
(https://i.imgur.com/9caoqC0.jpg)
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Some other movies I would like to see made with current technology:
Leyte Gulf
Peleliu
Guadalcanal
The Bulge (The Fonda movie was awful).
Hurtgen Forest
Kaserine Pass ??
France 1940
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(https://i.imgur.com/iYWm8Ah.png)
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Tora! Tora! Tora! will probably stand as the last great war movie with real (as opposed to CGI) airplanes. They reused some of the Japanese airplanes from that movie in the miserable Charlton Heston Midway. For the American planes, they used WWII footage of Hellcats and Avengers from 2-ish years later in the war.
One bad thing about CGI air-combat video is that the planes are made to do things that no planes and their human pilots would have been able to do in real life.
Yes, The Battle of the Bulge was terrible. It was portrayed more on a sea of mud than on a winter battlefield.
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Were the tanks from the 741st the ones equipped with Duplex Drive (DD) Shermans that mostly sank before they reached the shore?
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I recall in B of the B a scene where German tanks pulled up to a crest line and bombarded some town, I guess meant to be Bastogne.
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Were the tanks from the 741st the ones equipped with Duplex Drive (DD) Shermans that mostly sank before they reached the shore?
I think so. You know the surf was rough of course. I can't imagine being in one of those.
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Production doesn't win wars. It still takes human beings at the tip of the spear to risk their lives employing those machines. But it's hard to win a war without the machines.
I agree wholeheartedly and I don't mean to disparage or minimize the bravery and sacrifice of the troops at, as you put it, the tip of the spear.
That said, as you acknowledged, it is hard to win a war without the machines. Minor shortcomings can be overcome through superior strategy or bravery or luck but as the material difference becomes larger, those things become less relevant. Ie, if your enemy has 10-20% more material than you do, that might be a winnable war. However, if your enemy has 100-200% more material than you do then your only plausible strategy is essentially the Ho Chi Minh strategy of extending the war until your enemy unilaterally decides to quit.
Interestingly, Ho Chi Minh wasn't the first person to devise that strategy and he wasn't even the first to attempt to employ it against the US. Toward the end of WWII the Japanese fully realized that a military victory simply was not going to happen. Then their strategy became one of inflicting maximum casualties on the US in an effort to get the US to decide that winning wasn't worth the cost. It didn't work for Tojo mostly because we simply didn't give him enough time. A couple decades later in Vietnam (which was known as French Indochina during WWII and occupied by the Japanese) the US tried to win without getting heavily involved and that gave Ho Chi Minh the time he needed.
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Speer's autobiographys is worth a read to understand German war materiel production. He doesn't make excuses, which I found unique.
The Germans veered off into making all sorts of armored gear and an aircraft carrier and tricky things that they made two off, like massive guns.
Had they focused on making Panzer IVs and Panthers later and Stugs and perhaps Jagdpanthers later they would have been able to make a lot more of them.
The Panzer IV with the better 75 mm gun in the F model was a pretty good tank.
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Medina:
I second your recommendation of Shattered Sword. It's an excellent updating of what we know about the Battle of Midway, with more thorough use of Japanese sources than the old account by Mitsuo Fuchida.
My only complaint is what I found the excessive use of Japanese-language terminology. I'd much rather read "dive bomber" than kanbaku, especially since many contractions having to do with warships also start with kan. It's almost as if Parshall and Tully went out of their way to demonstrate their fluency.
That was my only real complaint as well. It was overdone to the point of just needlessly showing off.
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Some other movies I would like to see made with current technology:
Leyte Gulf
While Leyte Gulf is interesting to me, I think it would be difficult to make an entertaining movie about it because there really was never any doubt about the outcome or even how it would be achieved. By that point in the war the US was so vastly numerically superior that it would be difficult to build any kind of suspense.
Bull's Run (Halsey taking the ENTIRE screening force with him after the "bait" carriers) is probably the most interesting part but it would be hard to get typical movie audiences to understand what was going on and why his leaving was so problematic and controversial until after they knew about the Battle off Samar.
To explain what I mean, here from wiki, is the strength of the adversaries:
- The US had 34 carriers (8CV, 8CVL, 18CVE), the Japanese had 6 (1CV, 3CVL, 2 hybrid carrier/battleships that weren't good at either function)
- The US had 12 battleships, the Japanese had 7
- The US had 24 cruisers, the Japanese had 20
- The US had 166 destroyers and destroyer escorts, the Japanese had ~35
- The US had 1,500 aircraft, the Japanese had ~300
When you look at the same comparison for Midway it is roughly comparable. Either side could have won. At Leyte Gulf the Japanese were facing an adversary that hopelessly outclassed them.
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I would focus on the battle of the small boys against Kurita.
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Falaise gap residual.(https://i.imgur.com/KvnUXml.png)
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I would focus on the battle of the small boys against Kurita.
Last stand of the Tin Can Sailors is a great book about that. I read it a few years ago. The bravery necessary to take your ~2,000 ton "tin can" destroyer or an even smaller Destroyer Escort and go charging straight at a 70k ton Battleship (surrounded by other enemy Battleships and Cruisers) is hard to fathom. Those guys deserve our eternal respect and admiration.
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A good description of the horror of war and D-Day that ends on just enough of a high note in the Atlantic by SLA Marshall from 1960:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1960/11/first-wave-at-omaha-beach/303365/ (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1960/11/first-wave-at-omaha-beach/303365/)
The Japanese knew they couldn't win a protracted war with the U.S. in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor was a long shot that succeeded tactically, but failed strategically. That count of dive-bombers built presents a stark contrast that highlights both why the Japanese couldn't win in the long run, and why they wanted to expand their area of control in the Pacific: to increase their industrial might.
But as that piece by Marshall vividly shows, all the material might in the world can't remove the suffering war causes--even to the victors. My great grandfather was a Captain in the Navy in the Pacific during WWII and at least by '44 was commanding a Transport Group, part of the amphibious commands. Under his command were the attack transports that brought landing craft full of Army and Marine infantry to the beaches (and themselves would bring heavier equipment once the beachhead was established). His was a long and difficult war, but from the bridge of ships, not on the ground (though my grandfather, in the Army in the Pacific Theater, implied his father-in-law was often in close enough to be involved in a lot of action, more than my grandfather was). In something of a coincidence, he participated in the Marshall Islands campaign, including Eniwetok. Eniwetok is perhaps most famous for the photo of a Marine depicting the thousand yard stare (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand-yard_stare#/media/File:WW2_Marine_after_Eniwetok_assault.jpg), one of the iconic shots of WWII. Operationally, it was a relatively easy victory, but on the ground it was brutal. Here's the coincidence. SFIrish's great uncle Teddy was killed at Eniwetok. It's possible, likely even, that a ship under my great grandfather's command took Teddy to shore. No matter how easy the victory, SFIrish's grandmother, who I knew well, lost her older brother--the family's only son--there.
That's something that has always touched me because I knew two of my great uncles well. They also both fought during the war, one as a junior naval officer mostly in the Atlantic, I think, and one as a tanker in Europe. The latter didn't land at D-Day, but was involved in the Bulge (which was where he saw most of the action that he was in). He didn't like talking about it, and he didn't like talking about seeing the aftermath of bombed German cities that he came through, but sometimes he would. It's all very, very ugly--even when your side wins, and even when it's a necessity.
Last stand of the Tin Can Sailors is a great book about that. I read it a few years ago. The bravery necessary to take your ~2,000 ton "tin can" destroyer or an even smaller Destroyer Escort and go charging straight at a 70k ton Battleship (surrounded by other enemy Battleships and Cruisers) is hard to fathom. Those guys deserve our eternal respect and admiration.
It's harder to personalize ship-to-ship combat than it is to capture the desperation of a bayonet charge, but no doubt that was one of the U.S. military's great exploits--similar in the scope of bravery to the Frozen Chosin and Bastogne.
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He retired to Florida, but he'll be up here for visits this summer (if we get one). That's the thing about history. It gets re-written quite a bit.
I'm not sure anything angers Andy, except maybe a challenge to British merit. That said, he likes it "here" and will never move back.
Andy's confused facts with merit then either way Monty did not shine favorably ;D
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I'll mention again "With the Old Breed" for anyone who hasn't read it.
You almost get a 100 yard stare just reading it.
Yeah, I think the Leyte Gulf thing would make a good movie, and perhaps educate a few in so doing. The night battle at Surigao could be touched on along with Halsey's charge north, which still is debated. Had he left some BBs back covering the straits, 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.
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Falaise gap residual.(https://i.imgur.com/KvnUXml.png)
In May 1947 Dr. Forrest Pogue interviewed Montgomery's intelligence officer, Brigadier E.T. Williams. Pogue quotes Williams as telling him when Bradleys troops came up to the inter-army group boundary line, "Monty said tell Bradley they ought to get back. Bradley was indignant. We [Williams and Freddie De Guingand, Montgomery's Chielf of Staff] were indignant on Bradley's behalf." Quoted in Rohmer's "Patton's Gap" and in Carlo D'Este's "Decision in Normandy," p. 449,450.
After Patton raced around Monty in Sicily The Crown didn't need another black eye in the media/papers.IKE knew but didn't interfere but Monty faffed around and let between 30,000 - 80,000 or more troops escape depending on what source you want to believe.Troops that did a lot of killing a couple months later in th Netherlands
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I would focus on the battle of the small boys against Kurita.
Yep.
There's an excellent book of that fight: Last Stand of the Tin-Can Sailors, by Hornfischer, I believe.
That's an example of when all our production advantages didn't matter. It was those few CE, DDs, DE', and the sacrificially brave sailors manning them and their airplanes, that kept a mighty Japanese task force from attacking the landing beaches left uncovered by Halsey's pursuit of Ozawa.
Our industrial supremacy was necessary but not sufficient.
We could have lost the war, or at least failed to win it. We could have botched it strategically. American combat leaders and fighting men could have failed--as they did at Savo Island and Kasserine Pass--over and over again. The American people could have given up, as they did with Vietnam.
The British had overwhelming industrial and military supremacy over their rebellious colonies in 1776. They botched it and lost.
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(https://scontent.fdsm1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/61990108_10161935289415626_1523734575623176192_n.jpg?_nc_cat=108&_nc_oc=AQlmI1hN92yf7q_aNr2kCe0YBfbtsnh5I_JtyQO_T-O4IOTgeHxQDTHp-luD1gcnk_0&_nc_ht=scontent.fdsm1-1.fna&oh=420a4bdb77622e193d194b6861a04ed7&oe=5D970761)
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Yep.
There's an excellent book of that fight: Last Stand of the Tin-Can Sailors, by Hornfischer, I believe.
Always wanted to read that read a review 10-15 years ago.Onto the Bucket List it goes
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I used to play Pacific War where you could replay each side of course. Playing the US side was far too easy. Playing the Japanese side was tough mostly because of oil, you had to train your air squadrons and you simply lacked gasoline to do it. It could be done, it's a game of course, it taught me a lot about the war in the Pacific and its geography. I can recall taking Midway and garrisoning the hell out of it and positioning my carriers near by and by 1943 the US show up with this massive force.
Oil. It's important.
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I have the tin can book around here somewhere. The wife told me if I had no plans to reread a book I had to get rid of it before we moved. That was tough.
Half Priced Books restocked their shelves off me. At least here there is a nice library 4 blocks away.
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We could have lost the war, or at least failed to win it. We could have botched it strategically. American combat leaders and fighting men could have failed--as they did at Savo Island and Kasserine Pass--over and over again. The American people could have given up, as they did with Vietnam.
The British had overwhelming industrial and military supremacy over their rebellious colonies in 1776. They botched it and lost.
Vietnam was much more like those rebellious colonies than WWII. Industrial supremacy only works if you have the will. The Vietnamese had the will, as did those colonists. Both suffered practically unending tactical and strategic losses, but never lost their will. Their adversaries tired of the losses and the strain those losses put on their home countries. Victory in the Pacific for the Japanese would have required the same, which--after Pearl Harbor and the Philippines--was a much taller order than it was in Vietnam.
The discussion of the European Theater following a failed landing in France calls to mind whether Russia might have lost its will for total victory--as the article CWS noted above discusses. The short answer is probably not, but it's not impossible to imagine a different outcome.
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Getting even further off topic, but all of these "what if's" involving WWII have me thinking that I need to read more about WWI.
I do find the second-guessing of WWII to be interesting but at the end of the day I just come back to the economic realities and generally conclude that no matter what changes you made to this or that battle the massive allied industrial advantage would eventually put the allies on top. Part of that is because there was never any chance whatsoever that the US would join on the Axis side and after the 1940 Presidential election the question wasn't really "if" the US would join the UK but rather "when" the US would join the UK.
For example, the US occupied Iceland while still technically a "neutral" country and began escorting convoys bound for Britain to Iceland (half way across the Atlantic) even before that. The US Navy was actively fighting (and sinking and being sunk by) the U-boats well before war was declared.
One more example: After the Bismark suck the Hood in 1940 the British temporarily lost contact with the German ship. It was an American patrol plane that found it and the information was promptly given to the British who proceeded to catch and sink the Bismark.
Given US industrial capacity and the fact that the absolute best the Nazi's could hope for was for the US to be technically neutral while still strongly supporting the UK/USSR, you really have to stretch credibility to come up with hypothetical Axis paths to victory.
This is why I find WWI so fascinating. At the time of WWI the productive capacity of Russia and the USA was substantially lower than it was 25 years later while Germany's Austro-Hungarian ally was a major industrial nation themselves. Furthermore, at the outset of WWI there was no guarantee that the US would get involved nor even on which side they would join if they did. At the time there were literally millions of people in the US not removed by more than a few generations from their German, Austro-Hungarian, and Irish roots. Many of these people had a natural ethnic sympathy for their European cousins and/or had an antipathy to the British. If the Germans had played their diplomatic cards right they probably could have AT LEAST kept the US out of the war.
Even without getting that deep into the war, at the very outset the Germans almost succeeded. The elder von Moltke is rumored to have died muttering "Keep the right wing strong". This refers to his plan to invade France via Belgium and Luxembourg and to "Let the last man on the right brush the channel with his sleeve" thus to keep the British from being able to interfere.
The German plan worked nearly to perfection but they were shocked by a Russian invasion of the ancient ancestral homelands of the Prussian elite. That the Russians could organize and launch an offensive so quickly was not expected. Consequently, an entire army was pulled out of the German right wing on the French front to help repel the "Russian hordes" in the East. When the French, to their credit, managed to form a cohesive line and launch a counter-attack their point of aim was exactly at the area of the German line that had been weakened in order to strengthen the Eastern Front.
The ironic thing is that all those German troops pulled out of the line in the West to shore up the line in the East ended up accomplishing nothing. While they were still being transported all the way across Germany, the Eastern commanders crushed the Russians and sent them fleeing back East. Then, the severely overtaxed German logistical section was tasked with turning all those troops pulled out of the Western Front back around again and shipping them back to the Western Front as it was apparent that they were not yet needed in the East.
It is reasonably likely that if the Germans had left their plan alone instead of panicking when the Russians launched what turned out to be a very ill-conceived and unprepared invasion that the German advance into France in the fall of 1914 would have been a total success on the order of the one they conducted 26 years later in 1940.
Had that happened it is almost certain that the Central Powers would have won WWI at least on the Continent.
The other thing that absolutely fascinates me about WWI is that I feel that the cultural and technological changes were even larger than they were in WWII.
If you think about it, the powers destroyed in WWII were mostly fairly new. Hitler's Nazi's only controlled Germany for a little over a decade and Mussolini's Fascists only controlled Italy for about two decades. The powers destroyed in WWI were much older. The Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs ruled all or part of what became Germany and Austria-Hungary respectively for centuries prior to WWI.
The technological changes were fantastic as well. When WWI started many of Europe's generals still hadn't learned the lessons of the American Civil War. Aerial warfare was in it's infancy. The planes of 1914 look like bedsheets lashed over sticks because that is basically what they were. There were no tanks or even armored cars and for nearly all soldiers if you had to go somewhere you were going to get there either by walking or on a horse.
At the end of WWI warfare looked pretty modern. There were metal-skinned mono-wing fighters and bombers flying over fields where tanks duked it out with one another, etc.
An early WWI battlefield would appear reasonably familiar to a Napoleonic or American Revolutionary soldier. Meanwhile, a late WWI battlefield would appear reasonably familiar to a modern soldier.
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Axis and Allies is a pretty good board game to get a sense for the Axis path to victory. There, speed is the key: knock Russia out, and reduce the U.K. to just the islands north of the European mainland, and maintain the strength of the Japanese navy. The longer Russia is involved, and the more the U.S. can build, the harder it is for the Axis to prevail. Of course it's a board game, but it's a good one (if you have the patience for it).
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Axis and Allies is a pretty good board game to get a sense for the Axis path to victory. There, speed is the key: knock Russia out, and reduce the U.K. to just the islands north of the European mainland, and maintain the strength of the Japanese navy. The longer Russia is involved, and the more the U.S. can build, the harder it is for the Axis to prevail. Of course it's a board game, but it's a good one (if you have the patience for it).
I played that game a lot in college and loved it.
One of my roommates at Ohio State was the son of a high ranking official for Proctor and Gamble. When he was in Junior High and High School his dad got transferred to Caracas Venezula to manage a P&G plant down there. While he was living in Caracas, my eventual roommate attended an International High School that was essentially a school for children of Embassy staff and corporate big-wigs living in Caracas. He played Axis and Allies with us a lot but said he enjoyed it more in High School in Caracas because at that time he would literally play where:
- He played the US
- A child of a UK embassy staffer played the UK
- A child of a German embassy staffer played Germany
- A child of a USSR embassy staffer played the USSR
- A child of a Japanese embassy staffer played Japan
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That's unique--and pretty cool.
My son wanted the game and he's the one I play it with (and his buddies and SFIrish, to some degree). He has the same problem with it that he has with chess--he understands the strategy well, but he isn't as focused as he should be on the end game (he also just turned 12, so he's got time to learn). He loves building towers of tanks and battleships. Two things the game reflects pretty well are that minor numerical advantage doesn't necessarily mean victory, and economically powerful actors can also afford poor strategy much better than the economically weak.
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Getting even further off topic, but all of these "what if's" involving WWII have me thinking that I need to read more about WWI.
I do find the second-guessing of WWII to be interesting but at the end of the day I just come back to the economic realities and generally conclude that no matter what changes you made to this or that battle the massive allied industrial advantage would eventually put the allies on top. Part of that is because there was never any chance whatsoever that the US would join on the Axis side and after the 1940 Presidential election the question wasn't really "if" the US would join the UK but rather "when" the US would join the UK.
For example, the US occupied Iceland while still technically a "neutral" country and began escorting convoys bound for Britain to Iceland (half way across the Atlantic) even before that. The US Navy was actively fighting (and sinking and being sunk by) the U-boats well before war was declared.
One more example: After the Bismark suck the Hood in 1940 the British temporarily lost contact with the German ship. It was an American patrol plane that found it and the information was promptly given to the British who proceeded to catch and sink the Bismark.
Given US industrial capacity and the fact that the absolute best the Nazi's could hope for was for the US to be technically neutral while still strongly supporting the UK/USSR, you really have to stretch credibility to come up with hypothetical Axis paths to victory.
Good stuff, Medina.
The airplane that found the Bismarck after the fight in the Denmark Straight was an American-built PBY Catalina, but it had been sent via Lend-Lease to the UK. However, it was (unofficially) under command of a U.S. Navy pilot at the time.
I would amplify on your point about us escorting convoys. We started out running "Neutrality Patrols," in which we looked for German subs and reported any sightings to the Brits. Later, on the premise that we needed to make sure that Lend-Lease materiel got to its destination safely, we started directly escorting convoys, and handing them off to the Royal Navy halfway across the Atlantic. This led to the shooting incidents involving USS Greer (dropped depth charges, 4 Sep 41), USS Kearney (torpedoed, survived with loss of 11 lives, 17 Oct 41) and USS Reuben James (torpedoed, sank with the loss of 100 lives, 31 Oct 41). Reuben James was actually based in Iceland. Had Hitler wanted war with the United States, he could have had it right there.
Interestingly, after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the U.S. even though he was not obligated to do so. He said happily that victory was now guaranteed, as Germany had an ally who had never lost a war in 3,000 years.
This is why I find WWI so fascinating. At the time of WWI the productive capacity of Russia and the USA was substantially lower than it was 25 years later while Germany's Austro-Hungarian ally was a major industrial nation themselves. Furthermore, at the outset of WWI there was no guarantee that the US would get involved nor even on which side they would join if they did. At the time there were literally millions of people in the US not removed by more than a few generations from their German, Austro-Hungarian, and Irish roots. Many of these people had a natural ethnic sympathy for their European cousins and/or had an antipathy to the British. If the Germans had played their diplomatic cards right they probably could have AT LEAST kept the US out of the war.
Even without getting that deep into the war, at the very outset the Germans almost succeeded. The elder von Moltke is rumored to have died muttering "Keep the right wing strong". This refers to his plan to invade France via Belgium and Luxembourg and to "Let the last man on the right brush the channel with his sleeve" thus to keep the British from being able to interfere.
The German plan worked nearly to perfection but they were shocked by a Russian invasion of the ancient ancestral homelands of the Prussian elite. That the Russians could organize and launch an offensive so quickly was not expected. Consequently, an entire army was pulled out of the German right wing on the French front to help repel the "Russian hordes" in the East. When the French, to their credit, managed to form a cohesive line and launch a counter-attack their point of aim was exactly at the area of the German line that had been weakened in order to strengthen the Eastern Front.
The ironic thing is that all those German troops pulled out of the line in the West to shore up the line in the East ended up accomplishing nothing. While they were still being transported all the way across Germany, the Eastern commanders crushed the Russians and sent them fleeing back East. Then, the severely overtaxed German logistical section was tasked with turning all those troops pulled out of the Western Front back around again and shipping them back to the Western Front as it was apparent that they were not yet needed in the East.
It is reasonably likely that if the Germans had left their plan alone instead of panicking when the Russians launched what turned out to be a very ill-conceived and unprepared invasion that the German advance into France in the fall of 1914 would have been a total success on the order of the one they conducted 26 years later in 1940.
Had that happened it is almost certain that the Central Powers would have won WWI at least on the Continent.
The other thing that absolutely fascinates me about WWI is that I feel that the cultural and technological changes were even larger than they were in WWII.
If you think about it, the powers destroyed in WWII were mostly fairly new. Hitler's Nazi's only controlled Germany for a little over a decade and Mussolini's Fascists only controlled Italy for about two decades. The powers destroyed in WWI were much older. The Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs ruled all or part of what became Germany and Austria-Hungary respectively for centuries prior to WWI.
The technological changes were fantastic as well. When WWI started many of Europe's generals still hadn't learned the lessons of the American Civil War. Aerial warfare was in it's infancy. The planes of 1914 look like bedsheets lashed over sticks because that is basically what they were. There were no tanks or even armored cars and for nearly all soldiers if you had to go somewhere you were going to get there either by walking or on a horse.
At the end of WWI warfare looked pretty modern. There were metal-skinned mono-wing fighters and bombers flying over fields where tanks duked it out with one another, etc.
An early WWI battlefield would appear reasonably familiar to a Napoleonic or American Revolutionary soldier. Meanwhile, a late WWI battlefield would appear reasonably familiar to a modern soldier.
Moltke the Younger did as much as any individual to make sure that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand turned into a general European War, and then he effed it up. Then, seeing his failure, he had a nervous breakdown and quit. What a man.
German diplomany in WWI was, as usual, maladroit to say the least. The Germans, late to unify as a nation-state, convinced of their own righteousness, feeling victimized by the other Great Powers, have never had a talent for seeing themselves as others see them. Their propaganda in WWI reflects that weakness--it only convinces the already convinced.
Here's an example:
(https://i.pinimg.com/236x/0d/7b/be/0d7bbe48e5ad3c901e99aea1d3b1e86a--mini-skirts-wwi.jpg)
The caption, translated, reads: "The aware man has a broad chest--forewarned is forearmed."
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WW I was an extension of centuries of haggling and hostilities of kindoms,states and principalities.The Brits didn't win their empire with courtly manners and fair play, more in line with Earth-shaking violence.And at one time the Sun never set on it or it's cricky aristocracy.A time of different morals and expectations
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WW I was an extension of centuries of haggling and hostilities of kindoms,states and principalities.The Brits didn't win their empire with courtly manners and fair play, more in line with Earth-shaking violence.And at one time the Sun never set on it or it's cricky aristocracy.A time of different morals and expectations
Yeah.
But the Brits--with longer experience and maybe due to their own political system--ruled their empire with a better understanding of what the natives wanted, needed, expected, could tolerate, better than any of the Great Powers. And back to the WWI propaganda point, with all that experience, they understood exactly what points they needed to emphasize to get the rest of the world on their side. No "Aware Man Has Broad Chest" in their propaganda.
Also, they cut the telegraph line from the European mainland to North America on the first day of the war. That meant that all telegraphy between Europe and the Americas had to come through Britain, as they of course left their own cable intact.
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" the Guns of August".
Thumbs up,
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Really?British conquered countries then call them colonies.The Bengal Famine,the Potato Famine - didn't hear any problems about a British Famine.Read up on the Crown's crap in this country.Just because we share the same tongue our ideals were quite different.Germany/Ausria didn't start WWI Britain blockaded and starved many Germans/Northern Europeans,the Gerries have an ugly language but the Crown greased the skids for the 2nd WW unfortunately.BTW CW great point on the Brits cutting the cable so guess who's POV had been told to the USA
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(https://scontent.fdsm1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/61990108_10161935289415626_1523734575623176192_n.jpg?_nc_cat=108&_nc_oc=AQlmI1hN92yf7q_aNr2kCe0YBfbtsnh5I_JtyQO_T-O4IOTgeHxQDTHp-luD1gcnk_0&_nc_ht=scontent.fdsm1-1.fna&oh=420a4bdb77622e193d194b6861a04ed7&oe=5D970761)
Whew! Good thing God was on our side!
:c029:
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In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, but one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.
― Abraham Lincoln
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It has been common in history to "beseech the blessings of God" in war, obviously by both sides often as not.
That sort of language probably has gone out of fashion today in the US and Europe.
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gotta find your motivation
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No atheists in the foxholes....or on the putting green
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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.
Speaking of generals, Mark Clark often does not come off well in histories, I don't know if that is fair or not.
John S. Wood and Creighton Abrams come out well among those who have heard of them.
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Really?British conquered countries then call them colonies.The Bengal Famine,the Potato Famine - didn't hear any problems about a British Famine.Read up on the Crown's crap in this country.Just because we share the same tongue our ideals were quite different.Germany/Ausria didn't start WWI Britain blockaded and starved many Germans/Northern Europeans,the Gerries have an ugly language but the Crown greased the skids for the 2nd WW unfortunately.BTW CW great point on the Brits cutting the cable so guess who's POV had been told to the USA
I disagree with this, MrNubbz:
In the history of European colonialism/imperialism, who ruled their colonies better than the Brits?
Whether we want to admit it or not, we owe our own self-government to the fact that we had been largely self-governing in our colonies until after the French and Indian War, and it was our desire to continue to be/return to being self governing that caused us to rebel. The revolution began over our assertion of our rights as British subjects.
And this is largely the case throughout the former British Empire. The former colonies that are most successful today are predominantly former British colonies.
I don't get your point that the Brits greased the skids for World War II. I think the Germans have a lot more responsibility for that one.
All of which doesn't really have much to do with my point that I think you were responding to, which is that the British were much better at propaganda than the Germans in World War I.
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It has been common in history to "beseech the blessings of God" in war, obviously by both sides often as not.
That sort of language probably has gone out of fashion today in the US and Europe.
Text of President Roosevelt's Radio Address - Prayer on D-Day, June 6, 1944:
"My fellow Americans: Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.
And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:
Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.
Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.
They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.
They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest-until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.
For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.
Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.
And for us at home -- fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas -- whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them--help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.
Many people have urged that I call the Nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.
Give us strength, too -- strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.
And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.
And, O Lord, give us Faith. Give us Faith in Thee; Faith in our sons; Faith in each other; Faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.
With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.
Thy will be done, Almighty God.
Amen."
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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.
Speaking of generals, Mark Clark often does not come off well in histories, I don't know if that is fair or not.
John S. Wood and Creighton Abrams come out well among those who have heard of them.
Albert Kesselring was pretty remarkable. A Luftwaffe officer who commanded combined forces at theater level.
Mark Clark's mediocre reputation was well-earned, IMO.
I don't know much about Wood, beyond the fact that he was widely respected by his peers and his subordinates, but had trouble getting along with his superiors.
Can't say enough good about Creighton Abrams, who was to some degree Wood's protege, I think. Too bad he didn't replace William Westmoreland about 2 years before he did. We might not have lost in Vietnam. And too bad he died early. The army that fought so brilliantly in Desert Storm was the end result of reforms begun when Abrams was U.S. Army CoS in the '70s.
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CW spot on regarding your views of commanders.Markus Aurelious Clarkus they called him around Rome.Kesselring whom I haven't researched too much gets high marks from most however there were also alot of executions under his watch/command
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And this is largely the case throughout the former British Empire. The former colonies that are most successful today are predominantly former British colonies.
Sorry but most take an un british like stance.The Crown was as full of themselves as the Reich was.Most learned from their mistakes and the founding fathers were keen to notice and adjust the constitution,bill of rights and laws accordingly.Screw their Feudal class system.Their barons,bishops,princes,Kings and cockroaches.They were a fine example of a bad example.They weren't the nose in the air mutts you see on PBS.Again the sun never set on their empire because of Christian Charity.The Brits were @*!&%^$ plain and simple.Everything they had they took by force.Thank God for the influx of many nationalities
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CW spot on regarding your views of commanders.Markus Aurelious Clarkus they called him around Rome.Kesselring whom I haven't researched too much gets high marks from most however there were also alot of executions under his watch/command
I'm not sure that there were any high commanders in the Wehrmacht who had clean hands, much as they tried to downplay their treatment of civilians after the war. I don't excuse Kesselring.
Just like I don't excuse R.E. Lee, whose troops in the Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns captured free blacks and took them back south as slaves.
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Sorry but most take an un british like stance.The Crown was as full of themselves as the Reich was.Most learned from their mistakes and the founding fathers were keen to notice and adjust the constitution,bill of rights and laws accordingly.Screw their Feudal class system.Their barons,bishops,princes,Kings and cockroaches.They were a fine example of a bad example.They weren't the nose in the air mutts you see on PBS.Again the sun never set on their empire because of Christian Charity.The Brits were @*!&%^$ plain and simple.Everything they had they took by force.Thank God for the influx of many nationalities
Heh! "The best of a bad example" means that they were still better than any other European powers of the time.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.
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I read Guderian's autobioigraphy and found it very self serving and full of excuses, "We could have won the war if Hitler had listened to me.".
B. Lidell Hart connived with Guderian to get both of them luster.
I think one has to read multiple "versions" about something like this to start to get a truer picture.
We Americans and Brits have heard of Rommel of course, but no Balck and Manstein and Guderian and Kesselring nearly to the same extent. Manstein may have been the best general in the 20th century both in tactical and strategic terms. Rommel was built up by Hollywood and the Brits because Monty "beat him".
Rommel was a fine general I think, very daring, had he been given more support in North Africa, the Germans might have taken the mideast oil fields and Suez.
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A dry Martini, with a 15:1 ratio of gin to vermouth, is called a Montgomery, because those were the odds he required before he would attack.
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Ha! I've read about the Monty Mixer quite a few times.CD's right,Manstein,Guderian,K'Ring & Balck all excellant.Would have like to see the Brits Leave the Auck,Dorman-Smith and specially O'Connor alone.Any of them would have out distanced 15:1
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Here's a good article (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/invention-won-world-war-ii-180972327/?utm_source=smithsoniantopic&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20190609-Weekender&spMailingID=39911220&spUserID=Mzg3ODQwNjczMDQzS0&spJobID=1540726541&spReportId=MTU0MDcyNjU0MQS2) on the Higgins Boat (LCVP), what Ike later called "the invention that won the war."
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Text of President Roosevelt's Radio Address - Prayer on D-Day, June 6, 1944:
"My fellow Americans: Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.
And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:
Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.
Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.
They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.
They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest-until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.
For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.
Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.
And for us at home -- fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas -- whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them--help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.
Many people have urged that I call the Nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.
Give us strength, too -- strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.
And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.
And, O Lord, give us Faith. Give us Faith in Thee; Faith in our sons; Faith in each other; Faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.
With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.
Thy will be done, Almighty God.
Amen."
I wonder what's more useful, a great prayer or a great general?
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A dry Martini, with a 15:1 ratio of gin to vermouth, is called a Montgomery, because those were the odds he required before he would attack.
that's the ratio I like my martini
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I wonder what's more useful, a great prayer or a great general?
During the Revolutionary War they had a saying "Pray to GOD,boys but keep your powder dry"
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All of which doesn't really have much to do with my point that I think you were responding to, which is that the British were much better at propaganda than the Germans in World War I.
It is incredible how incompetent the Germans were at it. During WWI the Germans were roundly criticized in the US for their "unrestricted submarine warfare" (same in WWII) and that was contrary to international law at the time. What is interesting is that the British blockade of neutral ships/ports was equally contrary to international law and appears to have just been accepted as a matter of course. If the Germans in WWI had done a better job of illustrating Britain's flagrant contempt for the very same international law that the Germans were violating it might have kept the US out of the war and the German's late offensives could have been successful without US support for the collapsing French Army.
On the subject of unrestricted submarine warfare, after WWII there were some attempts to prosecute the Nazi Naval leaders for it and they largely failed because US admirals from the Pacific were called to testify and had to admit that the US did exactly the same thing to Japan. The primary difference being that the US Navy was completely successful where the German Navy failed.
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Sorry but most take an un british like stance.The Crown was as full of themselves as the Reich was.Most learned from their mistakes and the founding fathers were keen to notice and adjust the constitution,bill of rights and laws accordingly.Screw their Feudal class system.Their barons,bishops,princes,Kings and cockroaches.They were a fine example of a bad example.They weren't the nose in the air mutts you see on PBS.Again the sun never set on their empire because of Christian Charity.The Brits were @*!&%^$ plain and simple.Everything they had they took by force.Thank God for the influx of many nationalities
It isn't just the Europeans. Everybody who could had colonies. If you had to choose who would colonize you, you would be smart to pick the British over any of the others, especially the Japanese.
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The German attempt to get Mexico to attack the US was a mess for them, and perhaps led to our declaration of war as much as the sub thing.
Had neither happened and Germany prevailed in the war, history would be vastly different.
The AEF was fairly small in numbers relatively speaking, but provided some critical "backbone" when the French army was seeming to give up.
The French already had issues with mutinies in earlier years. The Germans were limited in their 1918 advance by logistics, and their hungry troops often would sit down in a town and just eat for a period of time.
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A dry Martini, with a 15:1 ratio of gin to vermouth, is called a Montgomery, because those were the odds he required before he would attack.
Sometimes being a great general, like being a great coach, is a matter of being in the right place at the right time for your natural temperament. Monty's hesitance to attack, I think, was helpful early on in N. Africa. He allowed the Germans to extend their lines to the breaking point and only then did he attack. It worked well. The problem was that the British made a hero out of him for that win and he could never be replaced after that even when that temperament became a liability rather than the asset it had been earlier in the War.
The same is true of Halsey in the Pacific in reverse. His aggressive temperament was a great asset at times but at other times (see Bull's Run / Battle off Samar) it was a MAJOR liability. Halsey's charging off North to sink the Japanese carriers left the invasion fleet totally unprotected and resulted in a lopsided battle that was a near-catastrophe for the US.
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The German attempt to get Mexico to attack the US was a mess for them, and perhaps led to our declaration of war as much as the sub thing.
Had neither happened and Germany prevailed in the war, history would be vastly different.
The AEF was fairly small in numbers relatively speaking, but provided some critical "backbone" when the French army was seeming to give up.
The French already had issues with mutinies in earlier years. The Germans were limited in their 1918 advance by logistics, and their hungry troops often would sit down in a town and just eat for a period of time.
By 1918 the powers that had been fighting for four years were all facing mutiny issues. Germany ultimately collapsed when their Navy refused to follow orders to go attack the British. The French issues are more well known. Russia wasn't "defeated" so much as their people simply refused to fight any more, etc.
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Everyone was worn out, for obvious reasons. Civilians were starving. Casualties were appalling. I think the average person wanted it to be over no matter what.
The Americans were chipper and naive, well fed and supported, and plunged into battle at times as if it were a game.
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The arrival of Americans in France in large numbers in the summer of 1918 was the war-winning event. The American Doughboys were enthusiastic, optimistic, and BIG! It was a huge boost to the Allies and a morale-killer to the Germans.
The Germans couldn't believe how big the Americans were when they started capturing some as POWs. Here's a photo of some American POWs and their German captors.
(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6e/d2/cf/6ed2cf74e88a8aecc6f594ae2471560a.jpg)
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they look big, but not enthusiastic, optimistic
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It took a while to train the Americans to this new style of warfare. The French badly wanted to feed them into French divisions to give them experience, Pershing insisted they fight as American divisions. Tactically, it can be said the Americans made mistakes especially early in their efforts in 1918.
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The arrival of Americans in France in large numbers in the summer of 1918 was the war-winning event. The American Doughboys were enthusiastic, optimistic, and BIG! It was a huge boost to the Allies and a morale-killer to the Germans.
The Germans couldn't believe how big the Americans were when they started capturing some as POWs. Here's a photo of some American POWs and their German captors.
(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6e/d2/cf/6ed2cf74e88a8aecc6f594ae2471560a.jpg)
When I was at Ohio State I took an Economic History class taught by a professor whose special area of expertise was researching the relative wealth of historic societies based on the height of their people. Basically, height is determined by nature (genes) and nurture (food). More well fed people are generally taller than less well fed people. Nearly all of his research was based on male height because armys typically kept good records about their recruits including height.
Based just on that and the picture above I would surmise that the Americans of 1900-1918 ate a whole lot better than the Germans of the same period. The nature part (genes) should be about the same and unless that picture is an anomaly, something caused the difference.
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they look big, but not enthusiastic, optimistic
One would not expect captives to be terribly enthusiastic or optimistic. I think he meant that they were enthusiastic and optimistic when they arrived, not after they became POW's.
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It is possible the US soldiers were for some reason preselected for height and are not representative.
But during that period, Americans generally ate a lot better than most Europeans, especially as children. I notice even today when I'm in France I'm nearly always the tallest person in any crowd of people, it's rare to see someone as tall or taller, while here in the US it's fairly common. I'm around the 95th percentile for height.
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supposedly, MacArthur, when planning for the Japanese surrender selected all men to be present as well over 6 feet tall, don't remember if it was 6'2" or 6'4" or what.
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For the Formal surrender,Nimitz sent a yacht to pick up Dugout Doug - he wanted a battleship or sumsuch,read a lot of crap about him like that.Evidently he had a great many PR people
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Sometimes being a great general, like being a great coach, is a matter of being in the right place at the right time for your natural temperament. Monty's hesitance to attack, I think, was helpful early on in N. Africa. He allowed the Germans to extend their lines to the breaking point and only then did he attack. It worked well. The problem was that the British made a hero out of him for that win and he could never be replaced after that even when that temperament became a liability rather than the asset it had been earlier in the War.
Exactly MB I've got in some very heated debates on Youtube comment sections regarding the rancid runt Monty.Literally he was a henious liar,many,most of the British Officers hated his guts.Churchill fired good general before sticking the allies with this ebola chimp.He'd take credit that was never his and deflected blame with his fingerprints all over it.A case study in F-UP,Move UP.I like the Tommies but their offspring are revisionist rubes - save some of their historians.Read Ike and Monty: Generals at War and EISENHOWER & MONTGOMERY At the Falaise Gap.Honestly I'm surprised no one shot him.Talked to Eisenhower like he was in charge of Latrine duty.However twice Monty had to issue formal apologies to IKE.Toward the end IKE started to really give it to him
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A lot of the basis for keeping a general around was PR, as was the basis for letting some go.
PR in wartime is important, and the generals who are bad can at times be managed to be less bad.
Firing Monty would not have gone over well with the British people, and Ike was sensitive to that, as was Monty.
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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.
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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.
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“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
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We adopted Battle Hymm of the Republic as our own.
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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
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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.”
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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.
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Sherman was the 1st President of what would later become LSU
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Going back to the OP and addressing the underlying question, I think @CWSooner (https://www.cfb51.com/index.php?action=profile;u=1544) will agree with me that everything that happened after roughly May of 1943 had no real impact on the final outcome of the war. Events after January of 1943 still obviously impacted WHEN it ended but not how.
To REALLY oversimplify, you can break WWII into three segments of roughly:
- Up to approximately May, 1942 was a nearly unbroken string of Axis victories with only a few temporary set-backs, "ties" or inconclusive (at the time) fights.
- Approximately June, 1942 through May, 1943 was somewhat more fluid with Axis victories here and Allied victories there
- June, 1943 through the end of the war was a nearly unbroken string of Allied victories with only a few "ties" or temporary set-backs for the allied side.
The three biggest events (in order of importance) that either caused or marked the changing tide were:
- Stalingrad: The Germans lost 300k-400k German soldiers in the Stalingrad campaign along with about that number of other Axis troops (114k Italians, ~125k Romanians, ~125k Hungarians).
- The end of Axis operations in North Africa: The Germans lost 130k captured along with ~20k killed or wounded in North Africa and it was worse for the Italians, a LOT worse.
- Midway: The Japanese lost four carriers.
The two German defeats are inherently more important than the Japanese defeat for the same reason that FDR and Churchill agreed upon a "Europe First" general strategy: Because the Japanese did not have enough Industrial capacity to be a serious long-term threat.
The Germans and their Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian allies simply could NOT absorb losses on the scale of those suffered at Stalingrad and in North Africa. Stalingrad ended with Paulus' surrender on January 31, 1943 and the North Africa Campaign ended with the surrender of Axis forces in Tunisa on May 13, 1943. Midway ended with Yamamoto ordering the remaining Japanese Naval forces in the area to head home on June 5/6, 1942.
Once those three campaigns had ended the Axis powers stood no plausible chance of winning. They simply couldn't absorb losses in those quantities and continue to face the Allies on anything like equal terms.
Thus, by the time D-Day happened on June 6, 1944 there was almost no chance of a complete and catastrophic failure. As was noted upthread, the US had a terrible time at Omaha but the other four landings went more-or-less according to plan. Catastrophic failure at all five could only possibly have been caused by what insurance adjusters (but not @OrangeAfroMan (https://www.cfb51.com/index.php?action=profile;u=58) ) would refer to as an act of god. It simply wasn't within the capability of the Axis troops to actually toss the invaders back into the Channel.
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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.
Like @OrangeAfroMan (https://www.cfb51.com/index.php?action=profile;u=58) I just have a hard time understanding it. What could drive ANYONE to such a hatred of a different religion, or a different race, or etc, in order to desire to actually exterminate them from the planet?
But the sad thing is that I think a lot of us look at history and say "I can't believe *they* did that", while not realizing that it all still exists. There's something truly dark within humanity, the idea to divide ourselves based upon arbitrary tribes and treat anyone outside of our own tribe as evil, dehumanize them, and consider them as expendable to the human race.
I don't think OAM was saying that he thought it wasn't a sincere hatred. More that this level of hatred is utterly incomprehensible and irrational, yet it existed and continues to exist.
We're just not wired to get along, IMHO, and that realization is one of the most deeply existentially depressing pieces of knowledge that I've ever carried.
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Many Germans accepted the "stab in the back" idea at the end of WW One. Germany was not being invaded when that ended. Germans felt like somehow the army just quit one day, and they had to blame someone. Germans viewed their military as indomitable. These feelings were inflamed by the economic crises that came to past. Hitler obviously pushed "the Jews did it to us" and many Germans figured he must know something. And he was a capable orator, able to repeat simple concepts with a lot of passion. Humans are prone to tribalism and rejection of other.
Had the Germans prevailed in WW One, they probably would have retained Alsace and Lorraine and their African colonies and made the French pay reparations, perhaps raw materials, and expanded into what is Poland today. The world would have been very very different.
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Like @OrangeAfroMan (https://www.cfb51.com/index.php?action=profile;u=58) I just have a hard time understanding it. What could drive ANYONE to such a hatred of a different religion, or a different race, or etc, in order to desire to actually exterminate them from the planet?
But the sad thing is that I think a lot of us look at history and say "I can't believe *they* did that", while not realizing that it all still exists. There's something truly dark within humanity, the idea to divide ourselves based upon arbitrary tribes and treat anyone outside of our own tribe as evil, dehumanize them, and consider them as expendable to the human race.
I don't think OAM was saying that he thought it wasn't a sincere hatred. More that this level of hatred is utterly incomprehensible and irrational, yet it existed and continues to exist.
We're just not wired to get along, IMHO, and that realization is one of the most deeply existentially depressing pieces of knowledge that I've ever carried.
FWIW: I didn't mean to single out OAM, I was just responding to his comment. It has been a serious debate among historical scholars as to whether hating the Jews was a political convenience or a deeply held belief among the NAZI hierarchy. As my post above indicates I fall firmly in the "it was a deeply held belief" camp because it is impossible to me to explain the massive diversion of resources into killing Jews in 1944 if it was only a Political convenience.
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I think there was a theoretical chance of a German armistice with Stalin circa 1943. Stalin didn't think the Allies were pulling their load very well. Had Hitler been willing to take "half a loaf", he might have snagged a good bit of Ukraine and Byelorussia in return for a cease fire. Maybe.
That might have been his last chance. Manstein wanted to develop a mobile defense, but he was fired. Kursk might not have happened and the Germans could possibly have caused so many casualties that even Stalin would call a halt.
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Many Germans accepted the "stab in the back" idea at the end of WW One. Germany was not being invaded when that ended. Germans felt like somehow the army just quit one day, and they had to blame someone. Germans viewed their military as indomitable. These feelings were inflamed by the economic crises that came to past. Hitler obviously pushed "the Jews did it to us" and many Germans figured he must know something. And he was a capable orator, able to repeat simple concepts with a lot of passion. Humans are prone to tribalism and rejection of other.
Had the Germans prevailed in WW One, they probably would have retained Alsace and Lorraine and their African colonies and made the French pay reparations, perhaps raw materials, and expanded into what is Poland today. The world would have been very very different.
As I mentioned somewhere upthread, WWI what-ifs are far more interesting to me because I find them much more plausible / realistic.
I really think that the Central Powers could have prevailed in WWI in a number of different ways, for example:
- If they hadn't pulled an entire army out of Northern France to defend East Prussia from a threat that turned out to be wildly exaggerated.
- If the Germans had chosen not to invade neutral Belgium and Luxembourg it is entirely possible that the British would have stayed out of the war. As it was, the British got involved because they were a guarantor of Belgian neutrality. Perhaps if the Germans had respected that they could have kept it as simply a Continental War in which they would have been much more likely to prevail.
- If the Central Powers generally had learned from the ending stages of the American Civil War (fought about 50 years earlier) and based on the inventions in the interim that there was a massive advantage to the defender. Ie, machine guns, landmines, and barbed wire had substantially increased the number of troops needed to attack. Viewed in reverse, these technological advances had substantially decreased the number of troops necessary to defend. Had any power fully realized this, they could have defended vast portions of front line with a limited number of well-equipped dug in troops and used all of their other manpower to build up a MASSIVE numerical advantage at the point-of-attack of their choosing. Ie, as it turned out the Germans had at least twice as many troops as they needed to defend facing the French. The other half (or more) of those troops should have been allocated to the northern attack wing. The French could have done the same thing in reverse.
- If the Germans had been even modestly successful at diplomacy they could have at least delayed the entry of the US into the war by another six months or a year and that might have been long enough for the French Army to collapse.
- When the Germans introduced gas warfare they did it on a small scale at first and by the time it was used on a large scale both sides were doing it and both sides had developed and deployed countermeasures. If they had introduced gas warfare in a massive attack it might have ruptured the Allied line and allowed for a major advance. Interestingly the British made the same mistake when they introduced tanks. Their first tank advances didn't have enough tanks to make a major breech in the German line. Had they introduced them in mass quantities they might have ended the war sooner.
I'm sure there are others, but IMHO, these are all more plausible than any potential Axis strategy to win WWII.
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I think there was a theoretical chance of a German armistice with Stalin circa 1943. Stalin didn't think the Allies were pulling their load very well. Had Hitler been willing to take "half a loaf", he might have snagged a good bit of Ukraine and Byelorussia in return for a cease fire. Maybe.
That might have been his last chance. Manstein wanted to develop a mobile defense, but he was fired. Kursk might not have happened and the Germans could possibly have caused so many casualties that even Stalin would call a halt.
In 1943, I don't think so. You are right that Stalin didn't think the Western Allies were pulling their load, but some of that was simply projecting. I've read that Stalin's pre-Barbarossa plan was to wait until the Nazis and the Western Powers had been sufficiently weakened and then jump in as a powerful peacemaker. Post-Barbarossa he always seemed to think that FDR/Churchill were doing the same thing in reverse.
That said, I believe that the chance for a separate Nazi/USSR peace died at Stalingrad. After that the Russians could have won without much help and they weren't realistically going to quit before they won.
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Many Germans accepted the "stab in the back" idea at the end of WW One. Germany was not being invaded when that ended. Germans felt like somehow the army just quit one day, and they had to blame someone.
This is an underrated issue among human beings, and it rears its head in a multitude of ways.
We need someone to blame for this bad thing happening, let's pick a group we're already not fond of and/or a group no one else is especially fond of.
This issue is why we attacked Iraq after 9/11. If you're honest with yourself, you know this to be true.
This issue is why self-driving cars aren't a thing yet. We'd rather have 10,000 deaths and someone to blame than 100 deaths with no one to really blame.
This issue is why many believe in a creator - those who share the phrase "well what else could it be?"
This issue is why the tree limb scratching at the window or the spooky shadows or the other things from our imaginations, with no practical previous evidence for it, are always out to get us.
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Had Manstein been left in charge in the East, he MIGHT have been able to "hold the line" and make Russian losses so severe the army would have collapse. He worked some miracles after Stalingrad and apparently Hitler was so shocked he let Manstein do his thing, which involved of course strategic retreats and mobile defense.
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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.
As it turned out, the better Union generals were out west too.
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In 1943, I don't think so. You are right that Stalin didn't think the Western Allies were pulling their load, but some of that was simply projecting. I've read that Stalin's pre-Barbarossa plan was to wait until the Nazis and the Western Powers had been sufficiently weakened and then jump in as a powerful peacemaker. Post-Barbarossa he always seemed to think that FDR/Churchill were doing the same thing in reverse.
That said, I believe that the chance for a separate Nazi/USSR peace died at Stalingrad. After that the Russians could have won without much help and they weren't realistically going to quit before they won.
Our faithful ally Stalin was also feeding info on us and the Brits to Japan prior to his declaration of war on Japan after Hiroshima.
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Something we tend to do is forget about contingency. I think my posts upthread probably shorted that factor. Even when things are highly likely, other possibilities are still, well, possible.
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As it turned out, the better Union generals were out west too.
Coupled with inferior Confed generals aside from Forrest. I know Lee made a lot of mistakes but he was a very motivational leader, which counts some. Jackson was asleep I guess during the Seven Days but otherwise he was unpredictable but often paired up with political generals on the other side.
The Nazis were a bit like the South, neither could afford any major mistakes. And mistakes are inevitable in warfare.
Peleliu strikes me as a mistake in the Pacific, I still don't understand why that was not called off. That took 1st MarDiv off the map for Iwo Kima.
It wasn't a crucial mistake of course and didn't matter except to the casualty lists. The number of ships the US turned out, and crews, in the Pacific by 1944 defies belief really. Training all those men had to have been extremely challenging. I guess they got basic training and then were trained on board later for their jobs.
Was an Armistice ever possible mid-1943 with Stalin and Hitler? Obviously not for Hitler, but MAYBE for Stalin. He was always paranoid about his generals becoming famous.
My premise is Manstein left in charge and no Kursk, not offensives, but tactical defensive reposts to Soviet offenses.
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Coupled with inferior Confed generals aside from Forrest. I know Lee made a lot of mistakes but he was a very motivational leader, which counts some. Jackson was asleep I guess during the Seven Days but otherwise he was unpredictable but often paired up with political generals on the other side.
The Nazis were a bit like the South, neither could afford any major mistakes. And mistakes are inevitable in warfare.
The overall strategy of the Southern States in the Civil War has never made sense to me. It was mentioned upthread that when the war began William Tecumseh Sherman was serving as the first superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy which would eventually become LSU. This was his statement to a Professor who was a close friend and an enthusiastic secessionist:
"You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it... Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail."
The Confederacy's situation in 1861 was somewhat similar to Japan's eighty years later in 1941. They had substantial military establishments at least comparable to the United States but a smaller population and productive capacity only a small fraction of the adversary they were facing.
At least Japan had the right idea. They knew that they had to act quickly and take as much territory from the US as possible before the US' massive advantage in productive capacity could be brought to bear. On a macro-strategic level the Southern States should have done the same thing. Their best chance was in 1861 and it was predetermined from the beginning that their chances would get worse in 1862, then get worse again in 1863, then get even worse in 1864, then continue to get worse in 1865 and beyond.
Gettysburg is, I think, a good example of this. Over the years many people have criticized Lee's decision to send Pickett, Pettigrew, and Trimble charging against the Union Line. Most of Lee's subordinates opposed the attack. Post war, General Longstreet claimed to have told General Lee that "I have been a soldier all my life. I have been with soldiers engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions, and armies, and should know, as well as any one, what soldiers can do. It is my opinion that not fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position."
What became known to history as Pickett's Charge was tactically moronic. As an aside, Pickett himself hated that name because he was against the idea as well and, of course, it was a catastrophe. However, if you give Lee the benefit of the doubt, it may have been a sound strategic decision.
On a macro-strategic level, by 1863 the Union's massive advantage in productive capacity was having a major effect. I think Lee knew that July 3, 1863 was simply as good as it was going to get for his side. If Pickett's Charge had been successful and the Union Army had been thoroughly routed at Gettysburg there might have been a chance for the Southern States to secure a negotiated settlement particularly if they had followed up that victory by sacking Harrisburg (just 40 mi away and PA's capitol) or threatening Washington (~70 mi away) or Baltimore (~50 mi away).
Obviously Lee knew that his forces were weaker than the Union Army but I think he also knew that the disparity would be worse for him in 1864 and he simply decided that July 3, 1863 was likely to be a better day to try to win the war than any subsequent day would be.
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I think the Confederate "strategy" was to hold on and hope the North would quit. I concur with what you wrote above. (Had Jackson been at Gettysburg perhaps Lee would have been more adventurous.) Vicksburg of course fell at the same time.
But, imagine even in late summer 1864 had Sherman botched his campaign. Maybe Joe Johnston turns Atlanta into Petersburg and the election comes and McClellan is elected. Maybe. Perhaps Atlanta was the decisive point.
We have a painting around these parts that once showed it as a Confederate victory.
https://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/explore/exhibitions/cyclorama-the-big-picture (https://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/explore/exhibitions/cyclorama-the-big-picture)
So many DYs moved down heah that now it doesn't.
Southern history can be a bit peculiar.
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I wonder why the Confederate artillery didn't load up some solid shot and knock down those fences. I doubt it would make much difference.
The Age of the Rifle made frontal charges pretty much idiotic. Malvern Hill should have been a lesson.
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I'm late to this party, but great thread!
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Welcome, and please join.
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If the June 6th invasion had failed the allies would have re-grouped and done over. Also, Germany would have been the target of the first A-bombs starting in July 1945. However many needed.
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How do you say "Fat Boy" in German?
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fetter Junge
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There weren't too many targets left in Germany by 1945.
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I think the Confederate "strategy" was to hold on and hope the North would quit. I concur with what you wrote above. (Had Jackson been at Gettysburg perhaps Lee would have been more adventurous.) Vicksburg of course fell at the same time.
But, imagine even in late summer 1864 had Sherman botched his campaign. Maybe Joe Johnston turns Atlanta into Petersburg and the election comes and McClellan is elected. Maybe. Perhaps Atlanta was the decisive point.
We have a painting around these parts that once showed it as a Confederate victory.
https://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/explore/exhibitions/cyclorama-the-big-picture (https://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/explore/exhibitions/cyclorama-the-big-picture)
So many DYs moved down heah that now it doesn't.
Southern history can be a bit peculiar.
I think you are right and really the weaker power only has two basic strategies available:
- Make the war costly enough for your stronger adversary that they eventually quit, or
- Win fast, before your adversary's productive capacity advantage can be fully put to use.
My thinking is that strategy #2 is only available for a limited time so the weaker power should employ it from the get-go then switch to #1 if they have to. That is pretty much what the Japanese did in WWII. The Confederates basically started out with strategy #1 then tried to switch to strategy #2 but it was too late by the time they switched. In hindsight they probably should have spent 1861 and 1862 on all-out offensives to demoralize their stronger adversary while they still had a good chance to achieve victories on Northern soil.
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If the June 6th invasion had failed the allies would have re-grouped and done over. Also, Germany would have been the target of the first A-bombs starting in July 1945. However many needed.
That is pretty much exactly my thinking on the matter.
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Lee did invade Maryland in 1862 of course. It didn't really work, but it caused problems for the Union army as well, though it finally got rid of McClellan, who by all accounts could have ended things in September.
I bet if you asked most Americans who the Union general in charge at Gettysburg was a few would say Grant and the rest would have no clue what anything meant.
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The Confederacy in 1861 was stronger relative to the Union than the 13 Colonies in 1775 or the 13 Free and Independent States in 1776 were relative to Great Britain.
But George Washington, who initially sought a decisive battle, soon realized that he didn't have either the muscle or the tactical skill to win such a battle. So he kept the Continental Army intact, struck where he could, as at Trenton and Princeton at the turn of 1776-77, and awaited foreign assistance, which the Continental Congress was working on with France and Spain. And eventually he wore the British down, and they quit.
I think too many Southerners (for their own good, that is) assumed that, because they were stronger relative to their enemy than the Patriots had been, they could win independence by decisive victories on the battlefield. They won victories in 1861-62, in the East, but warfare had changed since the Revolutionary War. The introduction of the rifle-musket changed things the most. It made battles more expensive, and made it harder for the attacker to win, because he couldn't get through the 200-300-foot-deep killing zone as nearly as quickly as RevWar soldiers could get through the 50-foot-deep killing zone of their war. Also, better antipersonnel ammo was developed for the artillery, and it could employ it for that entire killing zone as well. So the attacker, even when victorious, generally took much heavier casualties than the defender. Lee in particular won victories, but they were victories that the South could not afford. Antietam (Sep 1862) was the clearest example. It was a tactical victory, of sorts, but a decisive strategic defeat.
The Confederacy's official strategy, to the extent that it had one, was to defend its perimeter. A defense in depth would have been wise, because the Confederacy was huge and could theoretically trade a lot of space for time--time in which the northern public might tire of the war. But no state was willing to have its space traded for time, especially not the border states, who would be the first to suffer. So the Confederacy tried to defend its perimeter and succeeded more or less in the East at doing so. But the West was where the Confederacy would lose the war. Under the overall leadership of Albert Sidney Johnston, it invaded "neutral" Kentucky, inviting a response by the Union in superior force. Kentucky was lost, so Johnston next tried to hold Tennessee. His defeat at Shiloh killed both him and his chances, although it would be a long time before Union forces would control most of Tennessee. By the end of 1862, Grant was beginning what would become his brilliant Vicksburg campaign, which would culminate on 4 July 1863 with the fall of the "Gibraltar of the Mississippi," cutting the Confederacy in two.
Jefferson Davis wanted to detach major elements of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia to assist in the defense of the Vicksburg region, but Lee convinced him that it would be better for him to launch a second invasion of the North and win a big battle on northern soil, fatten his horses on Yankee fodder, and bring home weapons, equipment, food, and escaped slaves. Instead he was defeated at Gettysburg. After that, all the Confederacy could hope for was that a Democrat would win the presidency in 1864.
Gettysburg has been called "the price the Confederacy paid for Robert E. Lee."
The northern public was very war-weary in 1864, and Grant's expensive (in blood) Overland Campaign was heavily (and wrongly, IMO) criticized. Lincoln thought he might not even be renominated, much less re-elected, and told his key subordinates that they would have to win the war by March of 1865, because the incoming Democrat would have been elected on a platform of ending the war at any price.
But Sherman captured Atlanta, northern morale surged, Lincoln won re-election decisively, and the rest is history.
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The North was more persistent than one might have expected, probably because of the man at the top. As you note, the power had shifted to the defensive side, something not appreciated for a long time, even perhaps into 1915. Rifling really changed the calculus.
Wellington is one of my favorite generals to study in India as well as in Portugal and Spain because of his acute understanding of tactics and strategy and his opponent's strengths and weaknesses. He also was "left alone" by higher command for obvious reasons. He did a lot with very little.
I have visited a lot of villages and small towns in France and in every one is a memorial listing all who died in WW One (mostly). The length of the lists is astonishing. A village of 300 people or so can have 75 men listed as killed, not wounded, killed (many died of illness of course). The French had two ideas come 1940:
1. Fight this war in Belgium, not France, and
2. Let the Germans attack and we'll mow them down.
With the Maginot Line being basically impenetrable, it was almost an excellent strategy.
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There's just nothing like an army that is almost good enough to win or a strategy that is almost good enough to work.
Back to the Civil War, I forgot to mention that the Confederacy had maladroit diplomacy. It tried to use cotton as a weapon rather than as a lure. Right off the bat, Jefferson Davis proclaimed an embargo on cotton to Europe to try to force Britain and France to recognize Confederate independence under the threat of not getting any more cotton if they did not comply. Confederate diplomats in Britain and France un-diplomatically drove this point home.
I'm much less tuned into French national character, but as for the Brits, they don't like to be bullied. It didn't work for the Confederacy in 1861-62, and it didn't work for the Germans in 1939-40.
Fortunately for the future of American civilization, the Brits had bought a bumper crop of cotton in 1860, so there was a bit of a surplus in 1861. Also, Britain had the capability of expanding cotton production in India to make up the difference. By 1863, the Brits could do without Southern cotton, and they did.
British aristocrats liked the Confederacy's feudal social order, but the ordinary British people hated slavery, and they were starting to gain increasing political power. The elites could not safely support recognition and support of the Confederacy. The French would have recognized the Confederacy had the Brits done so, but not by themselves.
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The Brits developed a cotton supply from Egypt more than India as I recall. The French were disposed to intervening but not without British concurrence.
The South couldn't afford many mistakes, and they made them, much as Hitler had a nice run but couldn't afford many mistakes and made them.
Imagine a scenario wherein Hitler reinforces Afrika Corps seriously and holds off on Barbarossa a year but manages to take Egypt and then the middle east and its oil. He wanted that for Benito of course. That would have netted him more than going after Russia.
As we've discussed before, Lee without Jackson arguably was a pedestrian general in many respects. He could read his opponent perhaps. He knew them well mostly. But Jackson gave him the hammer while Longstreet gave him the anvil. Jackson at Gettysburg might have changed things.
It's interesting that GB found Churchill and the Union found Lincoln when few others could have managed what they did.
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You're right, CD. The Brits did get cotton from India, but their big increase in cotton production was in Egypt.
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"History Buffs"' review of the movie Gettysburg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ1f9vliwiA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ1f9vliwiA)
The movie is based on the novel The Killer Angels, and it copies some of the book's historical liberties, as well as having some of its own making. But it's still pretty good.
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A movie like that gets some interested. It wasn't as bad historically as Battle of the Bulge with Henry Fonda.
I never understood why they changed so much in that movie, it's not even very similar to history.
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I was surprised when I visited how gentle the grade is up Cemetery Ridge. It's not much of a ridge, A few rounds of round shot could have take down the fences.
I don't know how much the tree cover has changed on LRT and Culps' Hills.
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There's just nothing like an army that is almost good enough to win or a strategy that is almost good enough to work.
Back to the Civil War, I forgot to mention that the Confederacy had maladroit diplomacy. It tried to use cotton as a weapon rather than as a lure. Right off the bat, Jefferson Davis proclaimed an embargo on cotton to Europe to try to force Britain and France to recognize Confederate independence under the threat of not getting any more cotton if they did not comply. Confederate diplomats in Britain and France un-diplomatically drove this point home.
I'm much less tuned into French national character, but as for the Brits, they don't like to be bullied. It didn't work for the Confederacy in 1861-62, and it didn't work for the Germans in 1939-40.
Fortunately for the future of American civilization, the Brits had bought a bumper crop of cotton in 1860, so there was a bit of a surplus in 1861. Also, Britain had the capability of expanding cotton production in India to make up the difference. By 1863, the Brits could do without Southern cotton, and they did.
British aristocrats liked the Confederacy's feudal social order, but the ordinary British people hated slavery, and they were starting to gain increasing political power. The elites could not safely support recognition and support of the Confederacy. The French would have recognized the Confederacy had the Brits done so, but not by themselves.
The South's cotton embargo has to rank as one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in history. The rest of that dubious top-10 probably belongs to Germany.
It was just a catastrophic failure. For one thing, the South needed foreign currency and supplies. For another, without their embargo the European powers would have been more inclined to side with the "free trade / neutral shipping" south.
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They thought their cotton was King. Remember they had very limited access to what was happening in the cotton market in Europe.
I understand cotton was grown around these parts back then. The soil (clay) is incredibly infertile. It's good for pine trees and kudzu and fortunately dogwoods and azaleas.
The Piedmont here is used for grazing and growing chickens and not much else today. I have sat in a chair with a beer and watched kudzu grow around my foot, starting to, a tendril had grabbed me and the vine was growing. I managed an escape at the last second.
I always thought quicksand would be more of a hazard in adult life.
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Our faithful ally Stalin was also feeding info on us and the Brits to Japan prior to his declaration of war on Japan after Hiroshima.
Didn't know this,what did the creep do?
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I think the Confederate "strategy" was to hold on and hope the North would quit. I concur with what you wrote above. (Had Jackson been at Gettysburg perhaps Lee would have been more adventurous.)
While Jackson was certainly bold/brave to the core,home field was thing during the late unpleasantness.During the battle of Fredericksburg Meade rolled up the left flank and Jackson didn't appear to do much.Burnside however being completely way in over his head didn't notice an opportunity when presented and failed to follow this up.Ordering assaults ad nauseam on Mary's Heights to right taking horrific casualties.Evidently at Gettysburg the Union had a whole other Corp not engaged - according to Shelby Foote.So it's uncertain what difference,if any Jackson in the end would make there
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Oh, it's certainly one of the more historically accurate historical movies. It presents a reasonable interpretation of the big picture, and has some interesting vignettes.
Longstreet's remonstrance to Lee about how no 15,000 men he's ever seen could take Cemetery Ridge is based on Longstreet's memoirs, which he wrote after Lee's death, and after he himself had become a pariah amongst his former colleagues for becoming a pro-Reconstruction Republican, while they were all promoting the "Lost Cause" mythology and damning him as a traitor and--very much ex post facto--the reason for the defeat at Gettysburg. He had reason to make himself look good, maybe a little better than the facts warranted.
I don't think it presents Buford's fight early on Day 1 very clearly. But, then, neither does Michael Shaara's book.
Still, it's far better than most.
Battle of the Bulge is one big steaming pile of crap.
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A thing I learned when reading Guderian's book was how personal history's usually are designed to make the author look good. He even was in cahoots with Lidell Hart in all of this.
The Battle of the Bulge deserves a good movie. I visited the southern part of that battlefield. It's not at all like I thought it would be, not many trees, but obviously the land has been cleared substantially for ag. I'd like to go back, but I was already pushing it with the patient wife. That trip we visited Belleau Wood, the Maginot Line, several museums near Bastogne, Waterloo, Normandy, and the Musee des Blindes in Saumur.
We only had about 3 hours in Saumur, it was awesome. I dragged her back for most of a day later. Saumur is a nice city.
Now want to visit Bovington.
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A thing I learned when reading Guderian's book was how personal history's usually are designed to make the author look good. He even was in cahoots with Lidell Hart in all of this.
The Battle of the Bulge deserves a good movie. I visited the southern part of that battlefield. It's not at all like I thought it would be, not many trees, but obviously the land has been cleared substantially for ag. I'd like to go back, but I was already pushing it with the patient wife. That trip we visited Belleau Wood, the Maginot Line, several museums near Bastogne, Waterloo, Normandy, and the Musee des Blindes in Saumur.
We only had about 3 hours in Saumur, it was awesome. I dragged her back for most of a day later. Saumur is a nice city.
Now want to visit Bovington.
Yep. Even a mea culpa tends to be self-interested. "See how willing I am to criticize myself?"
I saw a recent video on Belleau Wood and it seemed like the woods were still pretty dense.
IIRC, Waterloo's terrain was significantly altered to create the memorial there.
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Belleau Wood is impressive. The woods are very dense, but much of the area now of course is a cemetery, with two very tall flag poles flying a larrge flags other than the Tricolour, though it has three colors. It is out of the way, not easy to find. There is an impressive memorial building on a hill overlooking Chateau Thierry but it is for WW One and French-American cooperation. The Germans let it stand in 1940-1944. It is separated by 3 miles or so from the cemetery.
We climbed the pyramid at Waterloo which has the advantage of seeing the battlefield, but did change the terrain significantly. The wooded parts seemed well preserved, it was about like what I expected. I can see how the rains the previous night would have rendered the lower areas muddy.
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I was surprised when I visited how gentle the grade is up Cemetery Ridge. It's not much of a ridge, A few rounds of round shot could have take down the fences.
I don't know how much the tree cover has changed on LRT and Culps' Hills.
It's been 21 years since the last time I was at Gettysburg, but at that time LRT was much more heavily wooded than it was in 1863 when it had been logged pretty extensively. Culp's Hill was heavily wooded in 1998 also. I can't remember whether it was supposed to have been that way in 1863 or not.
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Would the A-bomb have been useful in 1945 if Germany had hung into August?
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I don't know how useful it would have been, but I'm sure that it would have been used.
It would have completed the destruction of Berlin had it been used there.
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The B-29 project cost more than the Manhattan Project, and the A-bomb would not have been deliverable without the B-29 (Lancaster could have carried it with some mods to bomb bay).
Imagine B-29s going after Germany in mid-1945 like they did Tokyo. Germany probably still had more of an AA threat.
"We" tend to think of wars as ending like WW 2 ended, almost total destruction, but in history that is less frequent I think. The US Civil War ended with just about complete demolition of the South's ability to make war at all. It's fortunate the south didn't engage in guerrilla tactics.
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Not sure they would have,knowing it would affect surrounding countries greatly.Where Japan was in isolated surroundings
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There wasn't much known at the time about radiation impact. We endured years of nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere before it was stopped.
I think the most deadly single bombing raid was the one that hit Tokyo with incendiaries and HE.
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Yup took more lives than Little Boy and Fat Man together.Unfortunately the Germans & Japanese left little recourse dealing with Hitler & Hirohito.They worshipped these creeps and their crimes against humanity
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Your average Japanese person was being lied to about the war and had no reason to doubt it until the B-29s and B-24s started hitting the home land in force. Japan had never been invaded, or attacked, aside from Doolittle (which was a shock for that reason). I think we launched some B-29s from China to hit Japan early in 1944 but the logistics of that was ridiculous, so it wasn't until Saipan and Tinian and Guam fell (mid-1944) that the bombing started, which was November 1944.
I guess by then they knew things were going badly, but not how badly. The Japanese armies were still deep into China in large numbers. I'm sure by early 1945 the average Japanese person was beginning to feel the pinch on food. The islands could have been starved into submission by 1946 entailing mass starvation into the millions.
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I'm sure by early 1945 the average Japanese person was beginning to feel the pinch on food. The islands could have been starved into submission by 1946 entailing mass starvation into the millions.
Good Point,just glad GI's weren't sent en masse.Make it painful for THEM.Wouldn't have taken long to figure out their emperor wasn't Divine
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Germany probably still had more of an AA threat.
Not probably, definitely. The Japanese AA threat was minimal to nonexistent by 1945. The bombing raids over Japan typically suffered more losses to mechanical issues than to enemy action. They didn't have many planes, they didn't have any fuel even for the planes that they did have, they didn't have any experienced pilots, and their planes were not up to anything close to German standards.
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I think we launched some B-29s from China to hit Japan early in 1944 but the logistics of that was ridiculous,
The logistics of bombing Japan from China were beyond ridiculous. It took something like 10 B29 flights back-and-forth between India (supply bases) and the Chinese airfields to launch one B29 flight against Japan.
Note that those flights between India and China had to fly over the Himalayas. They called it "flying the Hump". I know about this because when I was a kid I mowed a yard for an old lady in town who was a widow. She had been a widow for about 45 years since her husband died in 1943 or 1944. He was "flying the Hump" and crashed into the Himalayas. She was probably about 70 years old when I was taking care of her yard and she would point to a picture of a dashing young Army Air Corp Officer in his dress uniform and say that her husband would always be young.