JAPANESE CAPTURE BATAAN AND 36,000 TROOPS; SINK TWO BRITISH CRUISERS (4/10/42)

Microfilm-New York Times archives, Monterey Public Library | 4/10/42 | Charles Hurd, Raymond Daniell, Harrison Forman, Hanson W. Baldwin

[CougarGA7]

The Italians are just continuing the fine tradition they established in the First World War (Not to mention their first disastrous attempt to invade Abyssinia in 1895-6).

My favorite story on Italian prowess in warfare is when they attacked Greece and as the Greek forces began to push the Italians back a small French town near the border of Italy on the southern coast put up a tongue in cheek sign that said, “Greek Troops, Please Stop. You Are Now in France”.

[BroJoeK]

CougarGA7: "Not counting the over 3 million Soviet soldiers that have already been captured."

PzLdr: "The Germans have lost at least one. Moscow.
And if you throw in Rommel’s forced retreat from Operation CRUSADER, it’s two."

German records for the Battle of Moscow show about 175,000 casualties, including 10,000 missing in action, out of one million total forces in Operation Typhoon.

In the British North Africa Operation Crusader, Germans lost 38,000 casualties out of 119,000 total forces.

Neither of those involved mass surrender of whole armies.

What's interesting to me is that British loss of all 85,000 at Singapore and the US & Philippine loss of nearly all their 146,000 came near the war's beginning and helped to motivate both countries, certainly the US.

By contrast, Axis losses at Stalingrad and Tunisia will be seen, even at the time, as "the end of the beginning," if not yet, "the beginning of the end."

[CougarGA7]

If we are talking about individual battles I would start with the Battle of Kiev. Numbers on captured Soviet soldiers range from between 450,000 to 665,000 with around 500k being probably the closest to accurate. In the battle the 5th, 37th, and 26th Armies were either destroyed or surrendered as was most of the 21st Army.

[PzLdr]

You don’t need a mass surrender to lose a battle. You need to fail to either take your strategic objective, fail to meet the operational requirements of your battle plan, lose the initiatve, and/ or lose terrain and objectives the enemy wants. At both Moscow and Crusader, German offensive operations were halted, and the initiative lost to the opposaition. In the case of Moscow, the General Staff’s [not Hitler’s] primary objective for the entire BARBAROSSA campaign, was not taken.

in the CRUSADER operation, Rommel was driven back to El Agheila, losing all of Cyrenacia, including Benghazi. After the Soviet counterattack at Moscow, the Germans were driven back some two hundred miles along portions of Army Group Center’s front. To claim those aren’t defeats based on the numbers of dead, prisoners, etc., doesn’t wash