Posted on 07/20/2014 10:25:50 AM PDT by WXRGina
(I was on vacation last week and it was re-read Stephen E. Ambrose week.)
My Father was in the combat engineers and their bridge across the Rhine was attacked by jets.
He said a nearby anti-aircraft battery claimed to have shot it down but all they knew was that it flew away looking healthy.
Of course it would hinge on when Hitler went down.
There were several brilliant Generals and Admirals who could have greatly turned events around.
Maybe not to win, but could have presented such a threat as to have kept much of Europe in German hands as part of a settlement, leaving a future threat to come...
Marx and Engels were both connected to the Rothchilders who wanted get rid of the Czar and his control of Russia. Both men and the Rothschilds were willing to join in doing such even though their ultimate ends were different.
HA..., I've read fighter pilots accounts like that, by the time you pulled the trigger it was gone.
They said instead they would linger around Nazi Air Fields and when they tried to land the P-51s would pounce.....
I agree with Kirk, in a sense.
The American Revolution was a continuation and extension of the Whig Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Whigs were a group of (mostly) nobles and gentry who were basically the heirs of the Roundheads. They believed nobles, gentry and other “free men” had the right to live their lives freely, as they saw fit. The GR to a considerable extent institutionalized these notions in the English system.
America was in an odd situation, because the English class system didn’t really make the trip across the water. The aristos had it pretty darn good in England, and had little motivation to cross. The leading citizens of America, particularly in the South, may have aspired to aristocracy, but by English standards they were at best gentry.
Thus by default the “aristocratic freedom” that was the base of Whig ideology wound up being a “white man’s freedom” in America. Everybody in America expected the freedom that in England was still largely considered as appropriate only for “gentlemen.”
But when America was established, the founding documents didn’t say anything about “white men freedom.” They spoke of “all men,” which be extension over time came to include black men, Indians, women, etc.
All political systems down through history and the revolutions that attempt to overthrow them have had one thing in common: Their purpose is to determine which individual or group gets to dominate and push around everybody else. Till the last century this domination was limited in practice by logistics, but in theory was generally absolute.
Only the American Revolution proposed that no group should be able to dominate the others, that the people should be left alone to live their lives as they saw fit. However imperfectly this principle was at first applied.
That is why I see the American Revolution as both profoundly revolutionary and profoundly conservative. It was revolutionary from the perspective of world history. It was conservative in that it attempted to conserve and in practice extended the revolutionary (whether they realized it or not) of the English Whigs.
Because we ate the apple and decided that we wanted to be like gods, choosing for ourselves what is right and what is wrong, and he honored that decision.
The title proposes the question but the article proceeds to explain that yes, in fact, there were a number of people that tried to kill him. They merely all failed.
It’s curious to imagine what the 20th century would’ve looked like if Hitler hadn’t used the German war machine to attempt such a broad conquest. Say, instead somebody else merely developed Germany into a strong economic power. It’s entirely likely then that the U.S. would not have grown into it’s postwar “superpower” status. The U.S. economy would have been strong and recovered fully from the depression but not explosively so as it did after the war. Germany, undoubtedly would have been the major player in Europe. What would have happened in the USSR? Hard to say... they’d have had many millions more people than they did post-war. It’s kind of imponderable what Stalin would have done differently, if anything.
True, it wasn’t a large bomber. I know it flew over London, but I don’t know whether that was out of a German airbase or not.
That's an amazing statistic and shows what the Germans themselves lost when Hitler survived that briefcase bomb. Also, I wonder if the Germans had surrendered in the summer of '44 would the Russian Army advance had been halted... or would Roosevelt have encouraged them to continue marching Berlin anyway. After all, FDR was madly in love with Stalin.
“It was radical. “
I suppose it depends on how you define it. Russell Kirk describes the American War of Independence as anything but revolutionary. It was waged to retain rights that the colonials believed that they already had and which George III was trampling upon.
The colonials had already been governing themselves and would have happily remained British subjects if George III had butted out.
“Americas War of Independence was a revolution not made, but prevented, Kirk explains. Britains American colonies had grown accustomed to and rather liked that the mother country had permitted them to govern themselves. Our Founders sought to conserve the societal order that had bestowed the blessings of liberty on the fledgling commonwealths. It was King George, the Founders felt, who was infringing on the chartered rights of Englishmen. When our Framers mustered in Philadelphia, they constructed little that was innovative but rather conserved the best of the constitutional bequest from our British heritage. An independent judiciary empowered with a check on the executive and legislative branches was certainly a new creation, but Americans were not caught up in the radical philosophies which were catching fire in and burning down France. Instead of desiring to create some new sentimental egalitarianism, Americans were concerned with preserving the existing order and restating long observed principles of law.”
My dad was in an anti-aircraft artillery battery in WWII, and the first time that they encountered a Luftwaffe jet they knew that they a had a problem.
The electric motors that kept their guns locked on target weren’t fast enough to keep up with the jet. If they were going to shoot one down they were going to have to explode shells ahead of it and hope the jet ran into something.
Fortunately the Germans didn’t have enough jets for them to take advantage of their speed.
There were a number of peace overtures made to the West by senior German military officers. From what I’ve read these all involved surrendering to the West but not to the Soviet Union. All were turned down by FDR who insisted on unconditional surrender. This did have the effect of lengthening the war in Europe.
Not enough jets. Not enough pilots to fly them. Not enough time to train new pilots. Not enough fuel to train the pilots or fly the jets they had.
Germany had the technology and the military know how to conquer and hold Europe if they hadn’t been ruled by a genocidal madman. His destruction of his armies on the Russian front gave the West a chance to defeat him. Of course a leader other than Hitler likely wouldn’t have embroiled the world in a huge war a mere twenty years after the previous one.
How about Margaret Sanger?
By comparison, our forebears went from monarchal subjects in a hierarchal society to republican citizens in a comparative blink of an eye.
Way radical.
I read somewhere that the Birsmarck’s anti aircraft guns had problems with the British Swordfish torpedo bombers because they were so slow.
True...but in the spirit of mass genocide- the Romans were hard to beat.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.