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Hellstorm - WW2 Crimes of the "Good Guys"
- Thread starter Mondial
- Start date
kookbreaker
Evil Fokker
- Joined
- Aug 23, 2001
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- 16,443
I hear a seagull, do you hear a seagull?
fagin
Philosopher
And Germans are still dying up until today. Scandalous...
Hans
Philosopher
- Joined
- May 10, 2007
- Messages
- 9,266
Nah
Oh our seagull has flown in and fled yet again for the happy lands of Nazi yearning.
As noted before Mondial your tactic doesn't work - how many years have you been trying this?
lol
Hans
Philosopher
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- 9,266
Yeah and lets see Hitler killed 5,500,000 of his own soldiers and started a war that resulted in the death of over a 1,000,000 ethnic German civilians - well done Hitler!
dudalb
Penultimate Amazing
Yeah and lets see Hitler killed 5,500,000 of his own soldiers and started a war that resulted in the death of over a 1,000,000 ethnic German civilians - well done Hitler!
Hitler stated right after Barabrossa began that this war would Decide the fate of Germany in the East for a thousand years. For once he was right..though not in the way he expected. You don't see East Prussia on maps anymore....
Worth posting this from HansMunstermann over on the "how competent were the Nazis" thread.
TLDR: Don't march on Russia if you are buying your oil from them and your own projections say you'll run out of supplies a fifth to a third of the way to the oil fields.
Well, I'll revive this mainly since I'm bored, and look at the myth of super-competent German generals and their success in Barbarossa. Warning: lots of text. No way around it, if we want to avoid the over-simplifications.
The thing about Barbarossa is, Hitler's explicit order was to go south and take the Ukrainian farmland and the oil fields of Caucasus first. Not only that would cover Germany's massive food and oil deficit (even the addition of Romanian oil barely halved that defficit, but it still was massive, and it was crippling both tanks and logistics) and allow it to wage war better, but it should have in theory crippled the Soviet ability to wage war too.
Basically Barbarossa was supposed to START with what would later become Fall Blau.
Which makes sense strategically.
THAT was why they gambled doing the attack anyway, even after quartermaster general Wagner already warned them that their logistics leash would only go as far as 500 to 800 km from the border. Because if they managed to pull THAT stunt, the win would be massive and give them a chance to win anyway.
Problem is, if you take a ruler to a map, Caucasus is a LOT farther away than that. They'd have to go between 3 times that (if Wagner's maximum estimate was correct), and 5 times that (if the lower one was correct.) And normally you go with the lower one, better to be safe than sorry.
Mother Russia is big, comrade
Halder doesn't tell Hitler that. He just makes his own plans that are a rehash of France. Just encircle their army, drive for the capital, and *bam* they surrender. (Never mind that they didn't when Napoleon does it.) The army group that was supposed to go after the oil fields is actually given the lowest priority for supplies and reinforcements, and are now only expected to advance a short way to an arbitrary line on the map and keep the Russians busy. And by arbitrary, I mean not even defined by any geographic features. It's literally just an arbitrary slanted line on the map.
Now while you could argue that that's the least unrealistic plan, given the logistical constraints, the fact is he never tells Hitler that the initial plan is impossible, which might have avoided the whole idiocy. He just makes a different plan that completely misses the strategic objectives, but Hitler doesn't know that. Hitler only learns what's ACTUALLY happening when he starts getting reports of the thrust to Moscow.
(And incidentally, stuff like this, where his generals lied to him and did something that missed the strategic point, may well be why Hitler starts to distrust and ignore generals later in the war. At the very least it IS why he has someone check Halder's plans for Fall Blau, and correct them. Because, surprise, Halder was AGAIN ignoring an order from Hitler.)
What Halder doesn't get, though, is that Russia isn't France. The distances are much higher, and there is no sea to pin the enemy against. Instead of adapting it to do the smaller pincers of Fall Blau (never mind that those didn't work either), the idea is to encircle a whole front or two by making one big push to... WHAT EXACTLY? But the infantry can't keep up, so essentially instead of one big encirclement, they had just created a giant bulge that the Soviets could just walk out of if they wanted. That's why they have to stop the drive to Moscow and turn south to actually complete the encirclement.
The plan is so incompetent, it's slapstick comedy. Well, it would be if it didn't involve hundreds of thousand dead.
But wait, some will say, it worked great, didn't it? They took a lot of ground, they took UNBELIEVABLE numbers of prisoners, etc. Surely it was a good plan, if it worked so well? Well... thing is, Stalin was worse at military stuff than Halder and Hitler put together, that's why it worked.
1. Stalin correctly guesses that the only sane thing to do if you were going to attack the USSR is to go south. So that sector of the front is the most heavily manned, and the northern sector is given the lowest priority for material and reinforcements.
Remember when I said before that a lot of nominally tank or motorized divisions were actually lacking parts, ammo and trucks? How that made them less mobile than non-motorized divisions, because the latter at least had horses to pull their artillery? Yeah, the effort to fix that is concentrated in the south. The northern ones remain hamstrung.
Even with evidence suggesting otherwise, as reports of German forces massing on the border start coming in and painting a different picture, Stalin actually is convinced that that's just a diversion and the main attack will go south. (Strangely foreshadowing what the Germans will believe about Normandy and Calais a couple of years later.)
Stalin actually moves MORE of the northern divisions south, to counter that supposed main thrust. When Barbarossa starts, some divisions are caught disorganized because they're in the middle of moving south.
So when the main thrust goes center instead of south, they meet by far not enough resistance there. Germany is outnumbering the USSR by more than 2 to 1 on the whole front anyway, but that situation is far worse for the USSR in the centre and northern sectors. Those guys get completely overwhelmed by the German thrust.
2. Stalin does do something smart, and that is take the time to dismantle the factories in the west and move them into the Urals. Pretty much an order of magnitude beyond what the German logistics could possibly allow reaching.
But that is going to take time. Most of those won't be producing tanks or some even trucks until 1942. He deliberately trades more land and human lives in the short term, for a better fighting chance in 1942 and beyond.
Now this isn't bad strategy, but it makes the German wins look bigger, when it's really only a loan of territory, and it will come to bite them in the ass later. Hard.
3. Stalin has to do one more dumb thing, and this one tops it all. It's so idiotic, that even just a little more idiocy would cause it to collapse into a singularity of human stupidity, and the shockwave would leave the whole galaxy running around with pencils up the nose and underpants on the head
By his orders, and enforced by the NKVD commissars, there is only one allowed course of action: keep frontally counter-attacking to drive the Germans out. There is no strategic retreat, no regrouping, no reinforcing flanks or lines of supply. You can only order a frontal attack towards the west, or the commissars will override you. And shoot you.
Remember how I said that Germany didn't create as much encirclements for a while, as bulges that you could leisurely walk out of, if you wanted? Remember how they took ridiculous numbers of prisoners anyway?
Yeah, the Russians counter-attacked themselves into encirclements
Halder's plan was crap, but by Jove, Stalin worked hard to make it work anyway
Hercules56
Banned
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The Nazis and Soviets committed horrible war crimes.
The West? Not so much.
The West? Not so much.
I really do not care what the non-Jewish Germans suffered during the war, they could have risen up and stopped it but were too cowardly or evil or both to do so and we still have nazi slimes around. And that might not have happened anyway had they not violated the agreed to Rules of Warfare in so many ways. Not to mention that since the Nazi's were vile enough to have war plants, war offices, war transportation etc. in the cities where they knew (ROW) they were imminently attackable legallythey might have had a claim that precision targeting be used, but by putting those things in the cities they removed that concern from the air attacks completely. For those who think otherwise, please actually read the Rules of War for that period.
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Again, the RoW contained language stating that any form of military function or production for the military, transportation of or for the military or military bases/communications in a city or other area made that location a legitimate target for the other side.
You do know that most of us cannot be taken in by propaganda made by slime and ******** I hope. The bit I am familiar with of Italian women being raped and more was Ethiopian soldiers. As to the Free French and moreso certain French military, they did real bad in Algeria and I would have loved seeing them dancing in air on lengths of wire. If you do not know why. look it up. We have this thing called the internet nowadays.
Nazis do propaganda.......still!!!!!
Henri McPhee
Illuminator
My elder sister went on a school pupil exchange with a German family in the 1950s to Hanover, or Hannover. The German girl was a very nice gel and we all went on several visits together. I still have some cine film of her visit. I remember her being upset when she received a letter from her German boyfriend calling off the relationship. My sister was a bit miffed at the time at how Hanover was prospering and how her German family seemed to be quite wealthy with all the West German debts cancelled by America. The German father blamed Churchill for Germany's past troubles. He was obviously a proper old Nazi
Her brother visited us about a year later with a German male friend. They were a couple of toughs. They were about to go to a dance hall. One of them had a revolver which surprised me at the time.
The German girl visited us several years later with her husband and a son but we have lost touch since then.
It's just that a leopard cannot change its spots. The Germans are either at your feet or at your throat.
Her brother visited us about a year later with a German male friend. They were a couple of toughs. They were about to go to a dance hall. One of them had a revolver which surprised me at the time.
The German girl visited us several years later with her husband and a son but we have lost touch since then.
It's just that a leopard cannot change its spots. The Germans are either at your feet or at your throat.
fagin
Philosopher
There are no words.....
Nessie
Penultimate Amazing
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I do see the Western Allies as the good guys. They were developing social democracies, which are preferential to a racist dictatorship. The eastern Ally was supported due to a common enemy. The Soviets under Stalin was as bad as the Nazis.
The behaviour of all sides during the war was pretty atrocious at times. The Nazis set the tone of the war, with undeclared invasions, bombing of civilians and they went on to commit genocide. That the Western Allies fought hard and dirty at times was the only way to win. A ruthless enemy cannot be defeated any other way.
That terrible things happened after the war, in particular to the Germans, is hardly a shocker. You reap what you sow. That there was revenge is to be expected.
Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
That sounds like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. “Give me five bees for a quarter,” you'd say. Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.
Abe
SpuriusMaximus
Penultimate Amazing
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Mate, frankly, where the hell do you think the allied industry was located? Do you think that, unlike those vile Nazis, anyone was carefully building their factories 2 miles from the city limit, or WTH?
Have you checked out for example where the Chrysler arsenal in Michigan that made M3 and M4 tanks was located, for example? Hint, it's better known as the "Detroit Arsenal (Warren, Michigan)", because it's smack dab in Warren, the biggest suburb of Detroit. And that's a factory expressly built for making tanks. The ones that were converted mid-war, nobody moved outside the city they were in.
So, please. I'm not defending the Nazis, but it's silly to pretend it's some Nazi grand plot to hide behind civilians. EVERYONE placed their factories close to where they expected their workers to live. Chiefly because you couldn't expect everyone to have a car in the 30's like you have now, public transportation sucked, etc. The whole of western Europe didn't have NEARLY enough fuel for any the of that. And a lot of factories had even been built long before the 30's.
And in fact when the Nazis did built a factory from the ground up -- as in, actually built from a government initiative, as opposed to wherever the hell Krupp or Opel happened to have built their private factories -- look up Volkswagen. It was actually built a couple of miles from the nearby town of Fallersleben. Mostly because the town didn't want to pay a part of the costs, mind you. But still, one way or another, is was actually built by the NAZIS away from populated areas. The later town of Wolfsburg grew around the factory, rather than the factory being built in the middle of a town as some evil Nazi plot.
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I've been dealing with Germans daily for close to 10 years in a professional capacity. In my experience this statement is utter tosh.....
Likewise for me, only it's closer to twenty years.