Posts by Simon Grigg
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I have some difficulty erasing the image of you guys all gathered around your map with little toy soldiers and whatnot
Perhaps guilty as charged (and I did like an Airfix or two when I was much, much younger). But I do like to know, to state it in it's most reduced form, what happened, and quite clearly we do future generations, and just as much, past, a very grave disservice if we don't try to work that out, and in the most minute detail..broad sweeps simply don't wash.
The rise and implementation of the thing we seem to now define quite tidily (and thus debase the evil it implies), when put next to it's ugly complexity, as 'Nazi Germany, 1933-45' is something we need to fully understand, and not just in it's German form.
Simon's arguments that the seeds of fascism are present in every society and every individual, and must be guarded against.
This thread has made me re-read, as I mentioned earlier, Richard J. Evan's The Coming of The Third Reich, which should almost be required reading for any aspiring politician, political journalist, jurist, or tertiary student, if only to prevent the ordinary becoming the unthinkable.
Although I'm not sure the WaPo reviewer on the Amazon link read quite the same book as the one I'm looking at.
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Simon, have you read his Pegasus Bridge book?
No, but to be fair, it would've been very difficult to have covered this pivotal battle without giving the correct credit to the non-GIs who pulled it off. I've yet to read a D-Day history that doesn't mark Major Howard's attack & defence as crucial. After 3 Ambrose meanders through the almost single handed glory of the US Army in defeating Nazi Germany, and a how-we-tamed-the-savages book of the US West I gave up.
There's plenty of people who could be forgiven for not knowing that significantly more Turks, French and British soldiers than ANZACs were killed during the Dardanelles campaign.
And it wasn't so many years back that some quick, probably unscientific, survey in Australia determined that the overwhelming bulk of that nation believes that Gallipoli was a substantial ANZAC victory.
But, all nations love their martial myths, and sometimes have industries dedicated to maintaining or even creating them, and many, whilst somewhat loose with the facts, play a part in the maintaining the morale of a nation at war. I guess it's hard to go back after the fact and say, for example, the Battle of Britain wasn't quite the unequal fight the great leader, popular mythology and Hollywood said it was.
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Nobody tell him about IBM and Bayer, or he'll be left computerless and sick.
or Leica, Agfa, BASF and Nivea...
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Give the Russians some credit. It wasn't totalitarianism or Stalins evil ruthlessness.
Umm...nobody has taken any credit away from the Soviet Army, but the fact that you have to charge or be shot, or that every tenth member of your platoon is shot if you falter and so on, adds quite some impetus to the attack. I don't think that happened under Ike (although Patton may've been keen).
Beevor's narrative of the Battle of Berlin is quite staggering as it documents the brutality of the Soviet forces to their own men and women.
Not so for thrid party combatants such as us and the Americans.
....bombs fell on London and I think you underestimate the anger Pearl caused. Many of the Soviet troops were also from far flung Asiatic regions to whom Ukraine was as alien as Mars. Their lives were almost as much under threat from their own side as they were from the Germans. It was not all some rah-rah around the hammer and sickle....
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A little harsh on Stephen Ambrose.
Perhaps yes, but his D-Day book was an abomination and was only one step away from some Hollywood 'how we won the war' epic. I know he's harsh on the US military at times but he virtually ignores everyone else or is very token in his tribute.
I'm agreeing pretty much with the balance of what you wrote. This page has some pretty good detail on the Eastern war.
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He was very much part of the Whermacht, and not the Nazi party.
The High Command was largely tamed after the 1938 scandal & clean out. One of the major criticisms of the military under Hitler was that they were not only subservient to but pro-active in the worst excesses of the Nazis, hence the hanging of Jodl in 1946. The active co-operation of the military, who after all swore a direct oath to Hitler from the 1934 onwards, not only was crucial to the downfall of the Republic but the advance and security of Nazism thereafter.
If you look at these figures, production was never a problem and indeed, the end of WW2 left thousands of unused tanks, aircraft and guns stockpiled, albeit with no fuel and, in the case of the planes, nobody to use them.
The main issue was the quality of what was produced. The Germans produced some extraordinary hardware after 1943...way more advanced than most of the equivalent Allied designs. The Me-262 was the rough layout prototype for just about every successful jet fighter since, and the Fw-190 /Ta-152 was the best piston engined fighter ever produced, but they also continued to throw out large numbers of obsolete designs like the He-111 and Bf-109 and then there was Hitler's interference in the Me-262, insisting that it be used for a bomber rather than a fighter.
There's a scene at the end of 'band of brothers' where the US troops are driving in their truck past endless columns of German prisoners, all on foot, and one of the Americans starts yelling 'how could you expect to win? You're walking! Look at us! Say hello to Studebaker! Say hello to General Motors!' etc.
The real importance of the American truck was on the Eastern front where lend-lease was, of course, massive. After all, the invasion of Western Europe was never really more than a sideshow to the real battle that took down Nazi Germany, the death-battle between the two totalitarian giants. Battles such as Kursk utterly dwarf anything that went on in France or Belgium. But it was the trucks, jeeps and much more supplied by the US, and the vehicles and aircraft (C-47) produced by the Soviets under license (plus the boots..millions of them from America) that made Georgy Zhukov's forces into the powerful Nazi smashing machine that it was.
There is a fairly strong argument to be made, and it often is, that the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union was what was needed to bring down a state like Nazi Germany. Whereas the American troops on the Western front relied on massive firepower but were stymied by an ongoing unwillingness to physically confront the enemy closer than that (Stephen Ambrose's jingo-istic re-writings aside), the Soviets were able to combine both, utterly ruthlessly, and relentlessly bludgeon an equally ruthless enemy until it was over.
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Nazi industrial misallocation, Allied industrial superiority, Allied planning superiority based on the habits and forms of democracy.
And myself, and others here, have already dealt with much of that.
it was luck' is pretty damn simplistic.
and taking 3 words out of about 3000 isn't?
About that s92.. :)
word.....
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I mean, suppose Britain folds in '40; so what? Britain didn't fold in '40. Britain kept fighting. That's what happened.
And there I was thinking that the study of our history was a little more complex, little more multi-layered, than "That's what happened" 'cos we were better. But there you go...
WWII sorted in 7 words....decades and whole forests of academic papers and books wasted.
[Sorry, to be so snarky, but I give up]
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To say Nazism was not a Regime defies all logic.
And yet I didn't say exactly that, if you read further, of course it was. But the idea that the "Nazi Regime" existed as just that...a boxed in parameter which existed from 1933-45 is utter nonsense. It was the culmination and bringing together of so many philosophical strands that existed and grew, almost as a political cancer, in Germany and Austria in the years after 1848. Richard Evan's three part history of the Third Reich, and especially volume 1, is good on this, and may be, at the moment, definitive.
I'm with Keir, I think the idea that if it weren't for Churchill the Nazis would have won the war is far too simplistic.
Once again, not all what I said, and I don't think that's what Keir said either. Keir's point seemed to me to be that the Allies won because of some sort of national & regime superiority over the clusterfuck that was the Nazi leadership and philosophy. That, I think, is only a part of it and misses the reality that it could have gone either way until at least the end of 1941 (after the US entered the result, with hindsight, was never in doubt, but even then, if things hadn't had an element of luck attached, such as the D-Day storms, the timelines may well have been different). He claimed Allied Industrial superiority (which, in the case of the British, is very much untrue, but in the case of the US, indisputable). There were so many variables in the mix and nothing was that clear cut. Don't forget that good regime, the British, finding themselves with a Churchill who played such a crucial role in 1940, also found themselves with a man who argued strenuously for strategic military moves a year to two later that would have caused grievous harm to the Allied cause, and who callously and knowingly allowed millions of Indians to die in the Bengal famines (the currently revised estimate is over ten million)..it goes both ways.
If Britain had folded in 1940, if those in the cabinet who were urging it, had had their way, then who knows. German control of the Suez and India. Likely no Pearl Harbor as the Japanese would have had a free hand to go in any direction they wanted apart from East.....really, who knows.
But I can't see Nazism winning a war and then turning into a peacetime regime
which I think is pretty much what I did say. What would have happened after a European Nazi victory in 1940/41 (for example if Roosevelt had not been re-elected) is another whole question.
Less theoretically, Churchill did not exist in a vacuum; there were other politicians who shared his views and there would have been support for them.
I've read at least a dozen histories of the 1939-41 period (and, yes Guilty Men, which largely underlined the divisions and anger in those divisions and was a book, which, incidentally, Churchill made some effort to have suppressed) and none seem to be able to find a viable alternative. There was, perhaps, Bevin, but he lacked the charisma and, being a working man, was unacceptable to the higher ranks of the military and much of the civil service. Eden and Attlee were very much not up to it. Beaverbrook was a loner and Canadian to boot, and many of the others in early 1940 either openly or otherwise, leaned towards capitulation. Maxton, from everything I've read, was a pacifist and gave a series of Anti war, anti-conscription and pro-appeasement speeches from the late 1930s onwards, right into the war years. I don't think so.
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Any chance of an answer to the question: who were the alternatives? After all it's you that's redetermined variables as absolutes.