miral
Posts: 170
Joined: 12/20/2007 Status: offline
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Put this on a new thread because it has been so long since I replied to the original. Sorry, but don't have regular access to internet. Yes, the use of the word Idiots is partly to get the thread read. But only partly. Thre replies were interesting and written by people obviously knowlegeable about WWII and the German army. But what was most interesting about those that objected to my thesis and defended the German generals was that they are promoting an argument long discredited by German historians, particularly contemporary ones. The finest work is German and the Second World War, by a collection of scholars at the Potsdam Institute for the Study of Military History, with 10 vols out and one more to come. These include the finest of Germany's military historians. They completely demolish the myths that Hitler was mostly to blame for the strategic debacles of the War. This was a self-serving myth made up after the war by the German generals both to preserve their military reputations and to pretend that they had had nothing to do with the atrocities of the war. For instance, not one high German general objected to the invasion of Russia; they all assumed it would be a cake walk, just like Hitler. And almost every high general of the War was implicated in atrocies, even the great reverenced von Manstein (see his proclamation of his troops in, I believe 1942, in which he writes of the righteous war they are waging against the 'scum of Judaism'. Also, let us be clear about what Grand Strategy is. It is not battles, and it is not even whether to go for Moscow or divert to win a big operational victory in the Ukraine. It means integrating military, diplomatic, industrial and scientific resources more efficiently than your enemy. The Germans simply had no grand strategy. Germany and the Second World War goes into enormous detail in the German organization of these elements and presents a damning picture of incoherence and incompetence. And again, they blame not just Hitler, but a specifically German way of approaching war. In military strategy, that level below grand strategy, the Germans were also failures. As Citino and the Potsdam scholars point out, the prime German error was a constant failure to match resources to ends, and a constant underestimation amounting to arrogance, of their Russian opponents. And these were endemic among the operational geniuses of the Army, not just Hitler. And I am accused of being anti-German. Damned right I am anti-German, if you are speaking of the Germany of WWII. As copius scholarship has now shown the majority of the German people (see Hitler's Willing Executioners) and army (again see the huge amount of documentation in Germany and the Second World War), regular as well as SS, fully supported Hitler's mass murder, colluded in it, and regreted nothing except that they lost. Let's get this straight; the Germans weren't victims, too. They were murderous monsters who got far less than they deserved in retribution. A couple of notes on specific operations mentioned. Tuchman is not an authoritative source for the Schliefen Plan; she was not a military historian and her book is now pretty old. And Moscow, oh yes Moscow. If Hitler had only listened to his brilliant generals and gone for Moscow the Soviet Union would have collapsed. To the german generals Russian collapse was always just around the corner. Please read Supplying War by Martin van Creveld. In it he points that, at the start of the invasion of France in WWI, the German army was not capable of supplying itself as far as Paris. The Plan had no chance of ever succeeding. See his chapter on Russia in WWII as well as the vastly detailed examination of logistics in German and the Second World War. Before Barbarrosa was launched the Quartermasters Office of the German Army told the combat generals that they could supply the Army tolerably well to the line of the Dnepr, but not beyond. This is precisely what happened. After the Dnepr German supply constantly came near complete collapse. As Citino, in WWII the German officers did not even use the word logistics; they called it Supply, just like in Napoleon or Fredericks time. It is not as glamorous as great operational manuevers using many panzer divisions but the Germans might have spent more time figuring out how to get fuel up to the panzers instead of thinking that there was an operational answer to every problem. And there was the Germans problem, Guderian and Manstein and Kleist and all the other geniuses; they thought there were operational answers to every problem, even strategic. It is too easy and just not true to blame Hitler for all that went wrong and extol the generals as virtuosos who did little wrong. The German generals were masters of operational and tactical warfare but, like those of WWI, their view of war and the world was far too limited, and therein lay their downfall. As far as Franz Halder was concerned; he was a total bastard and a war criminal who should have been hung (see German and the Second World War for a devasting critique of Halder). Instead, shamefully, our government hired him to write lying histories glorifying himself and even gave him an award for his valuable contributions! Halder knew what evil was going on and had no qualms about it. Like al the other high generals, he knew. It was impossible to be a general in the Wehrmact and not know genocide was being comitted. Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome. This accurated defines the German Generals and their efforts in WWII.
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