Split Thread WWII & Appeasement

[ddt]

Hmmmm ...interesting. I guess to the Dutch/Calvinist Hammer everything looks like an RCC Nail ...

How did you get to that conclusion? First of all, I'm not a calvinist. More importantly, I didn't said anything disparagingly about Mr. Erzberger. My mentioning his party affiliation had no intention to be disparaging, nor can I see how it could be seen as such.

 

[Tolls]

Oh yes, oops.
Replace Iraq above, with Iran, in my posts.
Except where I talk about rebellion, which was in Iraq.

 

[Henri McPhee]

That may well be, and it's not in dispute. What is being denied is that the Germans were still capable of such an operation in early 1943.

That's official complacency and wishful thinking. There was no guarantee the Russians would come out on top at the battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943 and that the Germans could then be able to try again through the Caucasus. That was a serious matter for the British, and even for the Americans.

The Germans made inroads of about 20 miles at Kursk. It was only when Hitler heard that the Allies had landed in Sicily, and on to Italy, that Hitler abandoned his offensive at Kursk because that news put him in to a bit of a panic. Hitler then diverted troops and military equipment away from the Russian front to Italy, and even to Greece, in a dangerous dispersal for him.

There is a bit of information about the lamentably weak military situation in Persia and Iraq for the British in a book called The Turn of the Tide by Arthur Bryant published in 1957:

Two divisions were in Palestine and Syria to lend moral support to Turkey and prevent an Axis descent on the Levantine coast from the Italian Dodecanese, while four more, three of them Indian, were in Iraq and Persia to counter a possible German advance through southern Russia and the Caucasus against the oil-wells of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company on whose refineries, tankers and desert pipe-lines all the British forces operating in the region depended.

 

[Tolls]

I'm going to hazard a guess that you haven't actually studied Kursk.
There was no chance of any meaningful breakthrough.
They only achieved 20 miles in the south of the salient...the salient was over 100 miles wide. The north achieved less than 10 miles. Overall they covered less than a quarter of the distance they need to to cut it off, and even had that succeeded, there were insufficient forces to exploit it.

It was at this point that OKH start to count divisions with little regard to how strong they actually were. So the units deployed for Kursk were woefully understrength.

 

[Craig B]

The Germans made inroads of about 20 miles at Kursk. It was only when Hitler heard that the Allies had landed in Sicily, and on to Italy, that Hitler abandoned his offensive at Kursk because that news put him in to a bit of a panic. Hitler then diverted troops and military equipment away from the Russian front to Italy, and even to Greece, in a dangerous dispersal for him.

There is a bit of information about the lamentably weak military situation in Persia and Iraq for the British in a book called The Turn of the Tide by Arthur Bryant published in 1957:

So you take the view that the Germans were doing fine at Kursk, and abandoned the offensive solely to confront the Allied landings in Sicily. I've never been convinced by that. But let me have a look at the evidence. Up to now your various statements haven't been holding up well in the face of evidence.

ETA The Allies landed in Sicily on 9 July 1943. On that same day on the Kursk front

... a meeting between Kluge, Model, Joachim Lemelsen and Josef Harpe was held at the headquarters of the XLVII Panzer Corps. It had become clear to the German commanders that the 9th Army lacked the strength to obtain a breakthrough, and their Soviet counterparts had also realized this ...​

See Battle of Kursk^WP

 

[Henri McPhee]

I'm going to hazard a guess that you haven't actually studied Kursk.
There was no chance of any meaningful breakthrough.
They only achieved 20 miles in the south of the salient...the salient was over 100 miles wide. The north achieved less than 10 miles. Overall they covered less than a quarter of the distance they need to to cut it off, and even had that succeeded, there were insufficient forces to exploit it.

It was at this point that OKH start to count divisions with little regard to how strong they actually were. So the units deployed for Kursk were woefully understrength.

I have never made a profound study of Kursk. Much of my information in the past about it has come from TV documentaries, and books, and stuff on the internet. It's just it's patently obvious that landings were not an easy task as the Americans found out fighting to the death in their island hopping in the Pacific, and nearly another year's hard fighting after the landings in Normandy.

Amateur strategists like Churchill and Eden thought these landings were easy. Blue collar workers in the UK were only interested in beer, cigarettes and football, and not far off countries like the Czechs, of which few people had ever heard. Chamberlain was right.

Kursk was a big battle and it was important to Britain and America that the Russians were not defeated there. There is information about this at this website:

www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-two/famous-battles-of-world-war-two/the-battle-of-kursk

For the attack on Kursk, Germany had grouped 900,000 soldiers in the region, 10,000 artillery guns, 2,700 tanks and 2,000 aircraft. About 1/3rd of all Germany’s military strength was concentrated in the area. Elite Luftwaffe units were ordered there.

Hitler ordered that “there must be no failure". Reconnaissance planes photographed all the defensive systems that the Russians had built.
“No offensive was ever prepared as carefully as this one." General Mellenthin.

However, Russia’s military leaders had not been sitting idly by. Their intelligence had alerted them to a massive German offensive; they knew where it would be, the numbers involved and near enough when it would start. They decided on a defensive strategy to allow the Germans to wear themselves out. The defence of Kursk was put into the hands of two generals – Rokossovsky and Vatutin. In preparation for a massive counter-offensive (and also to be used if the Germans were initially successful) a huge force of reserves was based in the rear led by Koniev. In charge of all these men was Marshall Zhukov.

The Russians had also placed vast numbers of men and equipment in the Kursk bulge. 1.3 million soldiers were based there, 20,000 artillery pieces, 3,600 tanks and 2,400 planes. The Russians had guessed where the Germans would try to use their tanks in depth – and placed a large number of their anti-tank artillery guns there. Trenches and other anti-tank traps were dug. The depth of defences included the laying of 400,000 mines, which equated to 2,400 anti-tank and 2,700 anti-personnel mines every mile – more than at the Battle of Moscow and the Battle of Stalingrad. By June 1943, 300,000 civilians were helping the Russians build defences around the Kursk salient. They repaired 1.800 miles of road and dug thousands of miles of trenches.

 

[Tolls]

What have landings got to do with Kursk??

That's a complete non-sequitur!

Are you sure you're not some AI?

And that link pretty much aligns with what I said...the Soviet defences were formidable, and backed by a massive reserve.
All it misses is the bit that the units those 900,000 German troops came from were almost 500,000 under strength.

 

[Craig B]

What have landings got to do with Kursk??

"Landings" are the least of the puzzles.

I have never made a profound study of Kursk ... Amateur strategists like Churchill and Eden thought these landings were easy. Blue collar workers in the UK were only interested in beer, cigarettes and football, and not far off countries like the Czechs, of which few people had ever heard. Chamberlain was right.

What had the Czechs and Chamberlain (by then dead for three years), or beer and football, to do with Kursk? The first sentence of Henri's post is very credible, however.

 

[Tolls]

Isn't Kursk where brave Tommy Atkins sent his men over the top with a kick of a football into No Man's Land?

Oh hang on, wrong war.

 

[erwinl]

Isn't Kursk where brave Tommy Atkins sent his men over the top with a kick of a football into No Man's Land?

Oh hang on, wrong war.

No. This was where a German u-boat sank its Soviet counterpart. This was known beforehand by Chamberlain, but he didn't warn the Soviets, because he didn't want to alienate the Germans after Dunkirk.

 

[Rincewind]

No. This was where a German u-boat sank its Soviet counterpart. This was known beforehand by Chamberlain, but he didn't warn the Soviets, because he didn't want to alienate the Germans after Dunkirk.

Sorry - but this is also wrong....

It was where the gallant RAF beat off the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor....

 

[Henri McPhee]

Churchill was not a strategic genius, as TV documentaries now portray him, and neither was Eden. After the war Churchill allowed German war criminals to advise the Egyptians, which was approved by the Nazi civil servants and lawyers who had carried on as normal after the war, so that they could compete with British manufacturing.

The Americans by then thought those war criminals were on our side, while the Germans proposed an amnesty for German war criminals, and Interpol did nothing about it, like they do nothing about internet fraud now.

It's like the appeasement of Saudi Arabia now for 9/11, and the lack of respect for international law by Saudi Arabia and Israel, and the support for Al Qaeda groups in Syria by Trump and Mrs. May and the CIA and FBI.

 

[Henri McPhee]

I don't think Eisenhower was a strategic genius either. His theory of a small bridgehead on the north-west coast of France would have been a ghastly failure on the beaches, a bit like the Dieppe raid.

From Eisenhower's book Crusade in Europe:

I personally favoured, at that time, the third course of action; that is, the attempt to seize a small bridgehead on the north-west coast of France. However, I told General Marshall that the project was a hazardous one and that my only real reason for favouring it was the fear of becoming so deeply involved elsewhere that the major cross-Channel attack would be indefinitely postponed, possibly even cancelled. Almost certainly any 1942 operation in the Mediterranean would eliminate the possibility of a major cross-Channel venture in 1943. Later developments have convinced me that those who held the "Sledgehammer" operation to be unwise at the moment were correct in their evaluation of the problem. Our limited-range fighter craft of 1942 could not have provided sufficiently effective air cover over the Cotentin or Brittany peninsula against the German air strength as it then existed.

 

[jimbob]

Isn't Kursk where brave Tommy Atkins sent his men over the top with a kick of a football into No Man's Land?

Oh hang on, wrong war.

I see that you have never made a serious study of the battle of Kursk either.

 

[jimbob]

Is anyone arguing that Churchill was a strategic genius?

 

[Henri McPhee]

Is anyone arguing that Churchill was a strategic genius?

It's just that we are not being told the pure unadulterated historical truth. It's like bugging is never reported by the mainstream media.

As I have said before there was a recent TV documentary with an American commentary saying that Churchill won the war on his own, and that Churchill would have intervened when Hitler took over the Rhineland in 1936, and Austria in March 1938. With what? The United States recognized the German occupation of Austria.

Recently, also, there was an American goon on TV who quoted Churchill as saying Chamberlain had a choice between war and dishonour and Chamberlain chose dishonour. That was a silly remark.

 

[Craig B]

It's just that we are not being told the pure unadulterated historical truth. It's like bugging is never reported by the mainstream media ... there was a recent TV documentary with an American commentary ... Recently, also, there was an American goon on TV ...

Do you consider such TV documentaries and "goons" to be dependable sources of information?

 

[theprestige]

Is anyone arguing that Churchill was a strategic genius?

I think Henri is watching telly and live-blogging his critique.

 

[Garrison]

It's just that we are not being told the pure unadulterated historical truth. It's like bugging is never reported by the mainstream media.

As I have said before there was a recent TV documentary with an American commentary saying that Churchill won the war on his own, and that Churchill would have intervened when Hitler took over the Rhineland in 1936, and Austria in March 1938. With what? The United States recognized the German occupation of Austria.

Recently, also, there was an American goon on TV who quoted Churchill as saying Chamberlain had a choice between war and dishonour and Chamberlain chose dishonour. That was a silly remark.

Henri, maybe you should stop watching what passes for documentaries on the History channel and read some modern scholarship on WWII. You keep referring to books written when huge amounts of info about the war were still classified or unavailable.

 

[Henri McPhee]

It's not just me who thinks this about Churchill. This is Peter Hitchens writing in the Mail on Sunday today about the matter:

Will we EVER be honest about the Second World War?

HOW we love to wallow in the Second World War. Though it ended more than 70 years ago, it is the bit of our past we refer to most, in politics and fiction.

The film Their Finest is no exception to the usual rule: lots of smoking, lots of sirens, lots of joy snatched in the midst of grief and danger. Though it mocks ever so slightly some of the pretences of propaganda, it still treads delicately around what has become our national religion.

And it is accompanied by trailers for yet more of the same. Here comes another film about Winston Churchill, and a movie about Dunkirk. Will either tell the truth, that Dunkirk was a dreadful, needless defeat caused by political posturing, which almost cost us the war; and that after 1940 and the 'Finest Hour', Churchill's leadership was often gravely mistaken?

I doubt it. Because we lost so much wealth and power in the Second World War, we still have to keep telling ourselves that we won it. Or did we - as my father ( who served in a pretty rough bit of it) used to ask from time to time, as he contemplated the state of the country he had helped to save.