Posted on 01/04/2012 4:29:06 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
The News of the Week in Review
Four Weeks of War in the Pacific (map) – 10
Twenty News Questions – 11
Grand Strategy of World War Covers Action on Two Vast Fronts (Baldwin) – 12-13
Where Japan Strikes for Empire (maps) – 14-16
Malayan Terrain Governs Battles (Wales) – 17-18
Answers to Twenty News Questions – 18
http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1942/jan42/f04jan42.htm
British forces make stand on Slim
Sunday, January 4, 1942 www.onwar.com
Indian battalion on the marchIn Malaya... The 11th Indian division prepares to stand at the River Slim but is suffering losses from heavy Japanese air attacks, as the new Japanese air bases in Thailand become operational.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andrew.etherington/month/thismonth/04.htm
January 4th, 1941
UNITED KINGDOM: de Gaulle demands the immediate release of Muselier.
Corvette HMS Larkspur commissioned. (DS)
ÉIRE: Dublin and some adjoining areas are bombed by the Luftwaffe.
GERMANY:
U-72 commissioned.
U-595, U-596 laid down.
U-203 launched. (DS)
ALBANIA: Greek forces launch a drive westwards, towards Valona.
NORTH AFRICA: Wavell orders British forces to advance into Cyrenaica, to exploit their victory against the Italians. 7th Armoured Division under General Creagh detours around Bardia and marches toward Tobruk.
CANADA: Destroyers HMCS Micmac and Nootka ordered from Halifax Shipyards Ltd. (DS)
U.S.A.: The German-born actress Marlene Dietrich becomes a naturalised US citizen.
On the news quiz, there are 20 questions. Some of these require multiple answers, so the total number of answers is 35. Of these, I missed eight and earned a C+. If just the 20 questions are counted, I missed four, earning a B-.
At what point did the troops on Bataan begin their sarcastic references to MacArthur as “Dugout Doug”?
"Soup kitchens run by local and international Jewish agencies proliferated in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Once Polish Jews were concentrated in ghettos, their food supplies were controlled by the Germans.
With food allocations limited to only a fraction of that required to maintain life, Polish Jews were dependent on supplemental nourishment provided by soup kitchens."
Why?
What were the reasons for this defeat which was of such crucial importance for the further course of the war? For whatever victories were yet to come, the divisions of Army Group Centre never recovered from the blows they suffered before Moscow. They were never again brought up to full strength; they never recovered their full effectiveness as a fighting force. At Moscow the strength of the German Army was broken: it froze to death, it bled to death, it spent itself.
At Moscow also Germany's faith in the invincibility of the Wehrmacht was shaken for the first time.
What were the causes of this defeat? Was it "General Winter," with his 30, 40, or 50 degrees below zero, that defeated the German Army in the east?
Was it the Siberian crack divisions with their splendid winter equipment and the cavalry from Turkestan? Undoubtedly the exceptionally cold weather played a disastrous part, with its record thermometer reading of minus 52 degrees Centigrade—a temperature for which no German soldier was prepared and no weapon fitted. And undoubtedly the vigorous Siberian divisions played a decisive part.
But cold weather and Siberian troops were only the more obvious reasons for the German defeat.
The "Miracle of Moscow," as the Soviets call the turn of the tide outside their capital, was due to a simple fact which was anything but a miracle—a fact that can be summed up in very few words. There were too few soldiers, too few weapons, too little foresight on the part of the German High Command, in particular an almost total lack of anti-freeze substances and the most basic winter clothing. The lack of anti-freeze lubricants for the weapons was particularly serious. Would the rifle fire or wouldn't it?
Would the machine-gun work or would it jam when the Russians attacked?
Those were questions which racked the troops' nerves to the limit. Improvised expedients were all very well while the troops were on the defensive, but to launch an attack or even an immediate counter-attack with weapons functioning so unreliably was out of the question.
Adolf Hitler and the key figures of his General Staff had underrated their opponent, in particular his resources of manpower and the performance and morale of his troops. They had believed that even their greatly debilitated armies would be strong enough to deal him his coup de grâce. That was the fundamental error.
Liddell Hart, an important military writer in the west, in The Soviet Army, attributes the salvation of the Soviet Union above all to the toughness of the Russian soldier, to his capacity to endure hardships and ceaseless fighting under conditions which would have finished off any Western army. Liddell Hart then adds that an even greater advantage for the Russians was the primitive nature of the Russian roads. Most of them were no more than sandy country lanes. Whenever it rained they turned into quagmires. This circumstance contributed more to the repulse of the German invasion than any sacrifice by the Red Army. If the Soviet Union had had a road system such as the Western countries, Russia would have been over-run as quickly as France.
All that Hitler had failed to consider; like most Western military men he had been ignorant of these facts. The final resistance at Moscow could have been overcome only by a fresh, well-equipped, adequately supplied force of about the strength of that which mounted the offensive on 22nd June. But what was that force like now? Five months of ceaseless fighting had reduced the regiments of the front-line divisions to a third of their nominal strength, and often less. The frost did the rest. Before Moscow casualties from frost-bitten limbs were higher on average than casualties through enemy action.
We still have the original schedule of the losses suffered by XL Panzer Corps. Between 9th October and 5th December the "Reich" Division and the 10th Panzer Division, including Corps troops, lost 7582 officers, NCOs, and men. That was about 40 per cent, of their nominal combat strength.
Total casualties on the Eastern Front as of 5th December 1941 were 750,000, or 23 per cent, of the average total strength of 3,500,000 troops.
Nearly one man in every four was killed, wounded, or missing.
The Russians had suffered significantly greater losses, but they also had the greater resources. Army Group Centre did not receive a single fresh division in December 1941. The Soviet High Command, on the other hand, switched to the Moscow front thirty fresh rifle divisions, thirty-three brigades, six armored divisions, and three cavalry divisions.
The question "Why did not the German forces reach Moscow?" will, of course, be answered differently by the strategist, the commander in the field, and the airman. The economist, no doubt, will have a different answer again.
General Blumentritt, for instance, the Chief of the General Staff of Fourth Army, and subsequently Quartermaster-in-Chief of the Army General Staff, sees the reason for the disaster in Hitler's strategic planning error in failing to tackle Moscow and Leningrad as the priority objectives in good time—i.e., immediately after Smolensk. That is the view of the strategist.
Anyone remembering the wartime enemy air raids on German towns will ask: What about the Luftwaffe?
He will note with surprise that the German Luftwaffe did not succeed in interfering with the passage of Soviet troops to the front through the Moscow transport network, nor in preventing the arrival of the Siberian divisions, nor generally in paralyzing Moscow itself as an area immediately behind the lines. Nothing of that kind happened. The last German air raid on Moscow was made during the night of 24th/25th October with eight machines.
After that only nuisance raids were made in December. Thus during the decisive phase of the operation the nerve centre of Russia's defense, the mainspring of Russian resistance, remained unharassed from the air.
Why?
Every German airman who was at Moscow knows the answer.
The Russians had established tremendously strong antiaircraft defenses around the city. The forests were thick with AA batteries. Moreover, the German Luftwaffe in the east had been decimated in ceaseless operations, just as much as the ground forces, and had to yield the air to the Soviet Air Force, which, before Moscow, was numerically twice as strong. Besides, the Soviet Air Force had numerous well-equipped airfields near the front, with heated hangars, enabling any unit to take off swiftly and repeatedly regardless of the weather. The German machines, by way of contrast, were based on primitive air strips, a long way behind the fighting line, which permitted operations only in favorable weather. Thus Moscow was virtually spared from the air.
Marshal Zhukov, it is true, does not regard the German weakness in the air as decisive. In a lecture to Soviet officers he said: "The Germans were defeated at Moscow because they had not ensured sufficient locomotives of suitable gauge to move supplies and reserves to the front line in large quantities, regardless of mud and snow, in what is the Soviet Union's best and most comprehensive railway network, that of the Moscow area."
Certainly there is some truth in that. But the decisive fact was that Stalin won the race for fit manpower—for both the fighting forces and the armaments industry.
The struggle for manpower had become the most serious problem of the war. The irreparable losses of the German side, and the resulting shortage of combatant troops, decided the battle of Moscow. The subject has hitherto not received the attention it deserves, but some interesting facts are revealed in the more recently published papers and letters of Field-Marshal Keitel, the former Chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht.
Keitel wrote:
I had to force upon Speer, the new Minister for Armaments and Ammunition, a programme enabling me to call up again for active service 250,000 servicemen exempted for armament production. The struggle for manpower began at that moment and has never ceased since.
The German Wehrmacht—i.e., Keitel—lost that struggle. The number of men who remained exempted from active service without good reason has been estimated at half a million. Keitel writes:
What would these men have meant to the armies in the East? The calculation is simple. With 150 divisions of 3000 men each, they would have meant a reinforcement of their combat strength by half their nominal establishment. But instead the shrunken units were replenished with grooms and farriers and suchlike, and these in turn replaced by willing Russian prisoners of war.
Keitel quotes two figures which illustrate the problem:
The monthly losses of the land forces alone, in normal conditions and excluding major battles, averaged 150,000 to 160,000 men. Of these only 90,000 to 100,000 could be replaced. Thus the army in the field was reduced in numbers by 60,000 to 70,000 men each month. It was a piece of simple arithmetic to work out when the German front would be exhausted.
In the forest of Takhirovo, a wooded area In the Nara bridgehead before Moscow, heavily reinforced with concrete strongpoints, the 2nd Battalion, 508th Infantry Regiment, took an interesting prisoner early in December—the commander of the Soviet 222nd Infantry Division. A party of sappers had brought him out, wounded, from his dug-out, the only survivor.
Captain Rotter, the OC 2nd Battalion, interrogated the colonel. At first the Russian was dejected and apathetic, but gradually he thawed out. This was the fifth war he had been mobilized for, he explained. Did he think Russia could still win the war, Rotter asked him. "No," was the answer. All his calls for reinforcements had produced the same reply: We have nothing left; you've got to hold out to the last man. Behind his division, the Soviet colonel explained, there were only a few Siberian units left this side of Moscow, apart from workers' battalions. But surely, Captain Rotter objected, very stubborn resistance was being offered everywhere? The colonel nodded. During the past few weeks, he said, many new officers had joined the troops—middle-aged men for the greater part, and all of them from Siberian penal camps. They were men who had been arrested during the great Tukhachevskiy purge, but who had survived in prisons and camps. "Active service at the front is their chance of rehabilitation. And if a man has a penal camp behind him death holds no terror for him," the colonel said. And softly, as though still fearing the ears of Stalin's OGPU, even in captivity, he added: "Besides, they want to prove that they were no traitors, but patriots worthy of Tukhachevskiy."
When the records of this interrogation reached Army headquarters someone on Kluge's staff remarked, "The late Tukhachevskiy is in command before Moscow"
A bon mot, but profoundly true.
Hitler Moves East-Paul Carell
If my family lore has it right my father was known to use that term in reference to his commanding general. But he didn't arrive in the theatre until '43, so he probably didn't originate the term. Perhaps MacArthur's withdrawal to Australia, ordered by the President, had something to do with it.
In his book My Commando Operation, Otto Skorzeny wrote that Hitler said if he had known the Russians had as many tanks as they did, he would not have invaded.
If Skorzeny was accurate, this points to bad intelligence.
Just by reading Homer's posts, one can gather that Operation Barbarossa was in trouble by middle August 1941 as analysts publicly compared where the Germans were versus what they needed to accomplish before snow began falling in the northern sector of the front in late September and winter preparations would have to begin.
A really good book on the early phases of operation BARBAROSSA was written by David Stahel called “Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East”. In his book Stahel makes a strong case that the invasion of the Soviet Union was already in trouble by the middle of July, only a month after it had started and that by August it had completely run out of steam.
My own research on the subject also came to the same conclusion at least when we look at the 2nd Panzer Army. Mine was solely a logistical comparison between Patton’s 3rd Army and Guderian’s 2nd Panzer so it lacks the depth of Stahel’s work, but I did gather a lot of information from the 2nd Panzer’s Quartermasters reports that illustrate how immediate the supply problem was for Guderian’s forces.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andrew.etherington/month/thismonth/04.htm
January 4th, 1942
MALAYA: Indian forces on the River Slim are bombarded by Japanese aircraft.
U.S.A.: Destroyer escort USS ENGSTROM is laid down. (Dave Shirlaw)
This is an interesting question. How could such a derogatory term be applied to a man who at each rank possibly exhibited more personal bravery under fire than any surviving commander?
On one hand there is the famous poem attributed to the Bataan defenders titled Battling Bastards of Bataan which went more or less:
We are the battling bastards of BataanThe battling bastards poem clearly lays blame on the United States government for abandoning the Philippines.
No mamma, no pappa, no Uncle Sam
No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces
No rifles, no planes, or artillery pieces,
and nobody gives a damn
In his book American Caesar, a book that was "critically acclaimed", described as the "Most thoroughly researched work to date" and from which television documentaries were produced, author William Manchester on p237 claimed the term "Dugout Doug" was from words sung to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Rupublic
Dougout Doug MacArthur lies ashakin' on the RockMy challenge to anyone familiar with the song Battle Hymn of the Republic is to make the above lyrics fit the music.
Safe from all the bombers and from any sudden shock
Dugout Doug is eating of the best food on Bataan
And his troops go starving on...
Here’s the full version, from the 1949 book “Bataan: Uncensored”, by Col. E. B. Miller, the former CO of D Company, 194th Tank Btn:
The Battle Cry of the USAFFE
Dugout Doug MacArthur lies a-shakin on the Rock
Safe from all the bombing and from any sudden shock
Dugout Doug is eating of the best food on Bataan
And his troops go starving on
CHORUS:
Dugout Doug, come out of hiding
Dugout Doug, come out of hiding
Send to Franklin the glad tidings
That his troops go starving on
Dugout Doug’s not timid
He’s just cautious not afraid
He’s protecting carefully the stars that Franklin made
Four-star generals are as rare as good food on Bataan
And his troops go starving on
(CHORUS)
Dugout Doug is boarding his Chris Craft for the flee
Over bounding billows and the wildly raging sea
For the Japanese are banging on the gates of Old Bataan
And his troops go starving on
(CHORUS)
We’ve fought the war the hard way since they said the fight was on
All the way from Lingayen to the hills of Old Bataan
And we’ll keep on fighting even after Dugout Doug is gone
And still go starving on
(CHORUS)
Thanks. In "American Caesar", William Manchester printed just the first stanza and chorus. I do need to say that in my original post, I was sloppy and should have included the chorus especially since the words to the chorus are about all that closely fits the melody. So, I apologize for that.
As references, Manchester cited both "Bataan Uncensored" and a 1970 book "The Years of MacArthur" Vol II as being his "Dugout Doug" sources.
My original point still stands in that The Battle Hymn of the Republic is a song almost all Americans are familiar with. In reading the first stanza of "Dougout Doug", it is immediately obvious that the opening line simply doesnt fit the melody of traditional or uptempo renditions. Why doesn't this stimulate anyones curiosity?
In "Bataan Uncensored", Col. Miller is clearly mad at the world and for good reason. I do find it curious that Col. Miller didn't mention the Battling Bastards of Bataan poem.
The book "Bataan Uncensored" which I presume you have read is what you might call a composite record in that Col. Miller intermixes his first hand experience along with those of others he interviewed. For the most part, Co.. Miller never makes a clear distinction between his personal experience and that of others as told to him. Understanding the circumstances, I won't fault him but just want to point it out.
But you can pretty much tell by the way the book reads when Col. Miller is describing what he personally experienced versus the account of someone else.
Since I neither have a grade on the line nor do I get paid for this, I can only go so far but do believe a historian (hint, hint Cougarga7) could do an interesting study as to the likely origins of this Dugout Doug song.
Items I would investigate are:
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