Posted on 05/09/2005 8:24:48 AM PDT by metesky
‘‘NO ENGLISH SOLDIER who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade.’’ Forty years ago the historian A.J.P. Taylor eloquently expressed what has become a universal belief. Other wars are looked back on with horror for their futile slaughter, but the conflict that ended in Europe in May 1945 is today seen as what Studs Terkel called his famous oral history of it: ‘‘The Good War.’’
In one way it will always remain so. A revisionist case, that defeating Hitler was a mistake, would be not only perverse and offensive, but simply absurd. And yet we have all been sustained since V-E Day, 60 years ago today, by what Giovanni Giolitti, the Italian prime minister of a century ago, once called ‘‘beautiful national legends.’’ By ‘‘we’’ I mean the countries that ended the war on the winning side (the Germans and Japanese have some national legends of their own).
Some of these legends are more obvious than others. The French suffered a catastrophic defeat in 1940, and the compromises many Frenchmen made with their conquerors thereafter ranged from the pitiful to the wicked. More Frenchmen collaborated than resisted, and during the course of the war more Frenchmen bore arms on the Axis than on the Allied side. Against those grim truths, Charles de Gaulle consciously and brilliantly constructed a nourishing myth of Free France and Resistance that helped heal wounds and rebuild the country.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
There is much truth to this notion. I think that the US Army's and Navy and Air Corp) defeat of the Wehrmacht was the greatest achievment in it's history, as the German Army was THE outstanding tactical fighting force of the war, even with the dead strategic hand of Adolph Hitler at it's controls. Never has any army (German) in history fought so well for so monstrous a cause.
In assesing our victory, we must acknowledge that we were tasked with confronting only 20% of that formidable German enemy in NW Europe. 8 of every 10 German soldiers who died in WWII were killed by the other hideous regime of the time, Stalin's Soviet Russia. Just think of our casualty lists had we had to face just another 25% of the German Army in the West. While we would not have been has inhumanly profligate as the Soviets were in expending human capital, it is safe to say that hundreds of thousands of baby boomers alive today would have perished with their fathers in the mud of European battlefields.
I am just trying to keep our victory in perspective and to make the case that even though I think that we would have ultimately prevailed, it would have been at the price of the greatest death toll in our history without the contributions of the Reds. I think our fight was nearly as much to prevent the westward advance of the Red Army as to defeat the Germans. It was a good thing for the world that we stopped them by meeting? them at the Elbe River. Would have been better had we gone a bit farther east though, despite the Yalta conference agreements.
WTF? The Soviets peddled propaganda BS (that the Nazis had committed the Katyn Massacre before the Soviets moved in) for decades. Fessing up to the truth after your lies have lost all credibility doesn't count (if it did, Clinton would be considered an honest man, a la Dan Rather).
The assertion that the Jews were locked up for the crime of producing industrial goods for the Allies is moonbattery on a level that makes DU look like a font of wisdom.
Well, then, now that you've admitted that the Nazis targeted civilian populations as a matter of policy, I suppose you'll be bowing out of this thread.
Puh-leeze. By your own admission, the Nazis threatened to destroy the city unless the Dutch surrendered. The "mistake" is that they destroyed it anyway after they got their surrender, which is hardly exculpatory.
Well, looting, especially small scale looting, was admittedly less strictly prohibited. There were a lot of cases when soldiers would go foodhunting or grabbing something small for souvenirs. Some larger items were exceedingly popular, like cars - grandfather said, that cars were looted in such numbers, that there was special car yards established for keeping the cars taken from soldiers. Again that was not too heavily enforced, mostly because the higher ranking officers too could seldom resist a nice Opel. Also true, that most got away with it. However, the rapes, murders and outright robbery were most strictly prohibited, and were met with capital punishment on the spot. There were no mercy given over such crimes, and they were few in between.
No, just pay attention to what I've said. True, Soviets denied it and blamed it on the Nazis, I've never stated differently. But it was Gorbachev that admitted it was Soviet doing, and he actually went to Katyn and made a public apology there. I do not know about his motives at the time, but in today's Russia (and I've said Russia) everybody knows the truth, and no one denies responsibility on this one, apart from some raving radicals.
They looted cars?
For some reason that strikes me as funny! How did they get them back to Russia? From what I read, the roads at that time were pretty much mud.
The roads - yes :-)
But not the railroads, which followed the Russian front, and not the streets in Moscow and other cities. If you could get your new toy past checkpoints and load it on the railroad, you were in.
At Kasserine, El Guettar, in Sicily, at Salerno, in Caretan, Lehr in front of St. Lo, Mortain, the early Lorraine fights culminating in Arracourt, the Bulge, and Alsace. In the largest of these, the Bulge, the US lost 2 divisions. In Kasserine it was 2 regiments. In most it was more like 2 battalions, and in all cases these initial losses were 2 echelon levels smaller than the German attacking force.
And those were inflicted precisely by having better odds (especially in armor) at the initial point of attack. As soon as US reserves arrived and redressed that, the Germans started losing. Read in particular the story of US third army in Lorraine in September, in Hugh Cole's "Lorraine Campaign" (one of the US army "greenbooks", the official history).
The Germans did have pro officers, excellent infantry that fought very hard, and superior tanks. But they had very stupid high command, an overly aggressive doctrine that threw away their armor on fruitless counterattacks, and not much in the way of mobility as an entire force. (80% of the army was rail and horse dependent). On the east front their "play" in pure military "chess" terms was quite poor from the autumn of 1942 on, with only passages of brilliance. Anyone who can read a map can see the Russians made better moves at the top level.
Also, the Russians beat them in the home front stuff on their own. From the same industrial base prewar and under far worse conditions (the Germans took 40% of the country's population and industry), they outproduced the Germans 2:1 in tanks. The reason is the Germans were so arrogant after their early cheap victories over lesser opponents, they didn't bother to mobilize their economy when they attacked Russia. This is one of the great world historical blunders. And that one was entirely an "own goal", pride as a weakness.
There is no way of knowing whether or not the field commander (a Wehrmacht officer, and thus probably not a Nazi per se) who gave the order actually intended to make a bombardment, whether he even had authority to make such a bombardment, or whether this was bluffing. However, the order certainly did not come from on High.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out the policy memo making this a matter of policy in what I quoted, like the famous memos between Churchill and Bomber Harris.
No? Well, I didn't think you could.
Wasn't there a quote from Patton to the effect that "the worse the infantry, the more artillery that was needed, and the US infantry needed a lot of artillery"?
On the east front their "play" in pure military "chess" terms was quite poor from the autumn of 1942 on, with only passages of brilliance. Anyone who can read a map can see the Russians made better moves at the top level.
The war was over in winter of 1941 when the Germans failed to take Moscow or the Russian heartland behind it to Novgorod and Sartov and Volgograd. That plus the Urals and the near west of Siberia equalled enough human and natural resources to eventually defeat Germany.
(the Germans took 40% of the country's population and industry)
Much of Russian industry had been relocated from the Ukraine to the Urals as a precautionary measure by Stalin. Much else was uprooted on the spot during the invasion and sent east along with around 15 million people. The Germans didn't find all that much to work with, and spent an enormous amount of resources rebuilding Ukrainian industry in the 1942-1943 period, only to immediately lose it.
The reason is the Germans were so arrogant after their early cheap victories over lesser opponents, they didn't bother to mobilize their economy when they attacked Russia.
They didn't need to. German war theory was based on the quick victory of the Blitzkreig. Had Hitler struck Msocow in August/September of 1941 after the taking of Smolensk, rather than making his Ukranian diversion, the war likely would have been over by the winter before the US entry, since the Russian nerve center would have been taken. Its quite obvious Germany could not win a war of attrition against Russia or the US. The German war plan against Russia called for a lightning strike and the occupation of Moscow within 12 weeks, with a solidification of a front line against remnant Communist forces on the axis of Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan along the Dvina and Volga rivers by early winter. A number of military historians, such as Gen. R.H.S. Stolfi ("Hitler's Panzers East") have pointed out how this campaign would have succeeded had it not been diverted by Hitler right at the moment of impending victory.
Again, Germany could not hope to win a long war of attrition against the US or Russia because of superior resources in the hands of those two countries.
Apparently you are unable to read and understand, which is why you come away with ridiculous tripe like the above.
The Germans locked the Jews up to use them for forced labor for the German war effort.
The Eastern Front became a locus of total war because (1) Russia was not about to honor the Geneva convention, (2) Russia practiced a scorched earth policy in retreat under the initial attack, especially in the occupied countries of the Baltic States and Ukraine, and (3) the conflict was a death struggle of two opposed ideologies - Naziism and Bolshevism - with concomittant expectations that ideological partisans (Commissars and Waffen SS men) on both sides would be shot on the spot at capture as criminals against humanity.
It obviously does not make sense for Germany to purposefully destroy a country it is attempting to occupy and exploit economically, nor was this the German practice in the attack.
If Hitler really believed in total war, he would have put the German economy on a war footing long before 1944, which was the only year it actually ran as such.
ignores much of the actions the SS and others took in German occupied Europe.
Arresting and detaining or killing ideological dissidents against Naziism hardly seems like a practice of total war. This is much more closely related to Police State population control theories. Total war is the total mobilization of the population and resources of the country in a fight in which every person, animal, and building in the opponents territory becomes a fair target.
LOL -- somebody who doesn't understand a reference to the "B-24" (and doesn't know how to look it up and correct his ignorance) accusing somebody else of being "unable to read and understand". That's rich!
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