It's time for our regular open thread. Talk about anything you want that isn't culture war.
For my readers in SoCal, two reminders. First, we have our meetup on Iowa coming up in slightly less than two weeks. Second, LA Fleet Week is this coming weekend, and that should be a lot of fun. I'd encourage you to go.
And for a bit of fun, I'd encourage you to check out Duffelblog, which is essentially the military equivalent of the Onion. It's mostly from a junior enlisted/veteran point of view, but there's some really good stuff.
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Non-naval museum mini review- Fort Eben-Emael
Type: Preserved underground fortress Location: Eben-Emael, Belgium Rating: 4/5, certainly deserves more visitors than it gets, loses a bit for difficulty of visiting
Price: EUR 8 (less for concessions)
Website: Fort Eben-Emael
This weekend I visited Fort Eben-Emael in Belgium. For those who don't know, this is a colossal fortress dug into a mountain along the Albert Canal near the Belgian-Dutch border. It was part of Belgium's defence against German invasion, but fell very quickly after a surprise glider landing on the roof of the fort by Fallschirmjager using shaped charges. The fort has about 4.5 kilometres of underground tunnels and galleries, and was armed with 30 artillery pieces ranging from 60mm to 120mm plus machine guns and AA guns.
While it was never used as a fortress again after the Germans took it, it remained in military use for various purposes until the 1980s. While it is still the property of the Belgian military, it is maintained by a group of volunteers who run guided tours (in French, Dutch, German and English) one weekend a month.
You enter the fort through what were the underground barracks, which are the lowest level and are level with the ground at the foot of the hill. While you wait for your tour, there is a small museum with various exhibits about the German invasion of the area and the battle for the fortress- mostly personal items including uniforms, personal weapons, etc and a lot of accounts of the fighting. Some of this is also included at the start of the guided tour.
Perhaps the star exhibit here is the world's only surviving DFS 230 glider as used in the assault (apparently there is one in Berlin but it's a replica).
The guided tour takes about two hours. It includes two of the four 75mm casemates (one largely intact with some damage as the guns were rendered useless from the outside, one totally destroyed), the radio rooms, the air filtration system and various other parts of the fortress. The volunteer guides are friendly and very knowledgable, talking about the day-to-day running of the fort, how its design was informed by the lessons of WW1, and the story of the assault. Of course, you need to be comfortable with quite a lot of walking and climbing stairs.
The guides did also have a point to make- the precise method by which the fort was captured was kept secret (the guide pointed out a German no entry sign on the door to a cupola that had been destroyed by shaped charges) and it was put out that it had been captured by frontal assault- the museum was showing the propaganda film about this, with a scrolling warning saying "Caution, this is a Nazi propaganda film!" Therefore, after the war the survivors of the garrison were treated badly because they were blamed for its failure to hold out. There were also (untrue) rumours of German spies either in the garrison or among the builders. In fact, according to our guide, the fortress was captured largely due to a combination of surprise, suicidal bravery by the Germans and plain luck.
Apparently there is a lot of the fort to see from the outside, but I didn't have time to do that on this visit. There are also special tours that take in areas of the fort that normal tours don't see, including the 75mm and 120mm cupolas.
Please feel free to reply with any more questions.
Two questions: can you recommend other military blogs that you feel have a good grasp on the subject (I understand the war nerd doesn’t meet this criteria).
Second: you use the concept of wehraboo sometimes. Could you expand on it with examples?
Thanks!
@AlphaGamma
Very cool. Thanks for sharing that. I’ll add a link to the new index I’m working on.
@Fxbdm
The one blog I’ll recommend unreservedly is Thin Pinstriped Line, by a former British MoD Civil Servant. Lots of insights into the buracratic and political machinery behind why a military turns out the way it does.
Absolutely not. He’s either completely clueless or he’s deliberately using terrible arguments.
The basic concept is a fanboy of the German military in WWII. There’s usually a lot of fawning over how cool their tech was, while ignoring the bits that actually make war work. Logistics? What’s that? Oh, yes, the Tiger broke down every three miles, but look how amazing and advanced it was! It’s much better than a Sherman. (Ignoring that the usual competition was Sherman vs Landser with a rifle, not Sherman vs Tiger.) Bismarck was the best battleship ever. Look at what happened to Hood! And the British never sunk Bismarck, she was scuttled! (Ignoring that the first was really bad luck and the use of cordite, and the second was totally irrelevant.)
Edit: Someone on reddit put together this guide, which is pretty much spot-on.
@Fxbdm
I'll toss my 2 cents in on these while we wait for Bean to answer.
Before the owner, Kevin, passed away unexpectedly, Weaponsman.com was a daily stop for me. The blog is still up, maintained by his brother (IIRC), and there is a huge wealth of information in the archived posts on topics like small-arms design, fieldcraft and land-navigation, and the author's own extensive and varied military experience as a US Special Forces weapons specialist.
While we're on the topic of land warfare, Nick Moran, a former US Armored Cavalryman, has a blog and a truly invaluable YouTube channel about armored vehicle history and design. He's the staff historian for Wargaming, the company that makes World of Tanks, but don't let that fool you; he's a serious, published researcher.
For anything you ever wanted to know about small arms technology, history, and development, Ian over at ForgottenWeapons.com (also an excellent YouTube channel) has you covered.
Another case of a life cut tragically short was that of Carroll LeFon, more widely known under the blogonym "Neptunus Lex." A selection of his posts are in the process of being archived at a site called "The Best of Neptunus Lex." Lex was a senior naval aviator, and there is no better window into life in a strike fighter squadron aboard a CVN than his posts. It doesn't hurt that his writing was often sublime.
If we are allowed to call YouTube channels "blogs," then Military History Illustrated would have to be included in this list. The author is an amateur historian, but really does his homework, often tracking down extensive primary-source documentation for his videos.
Agreed on avoiding the War Nerd. He often makes just enough sense to seem convincing until you actually stop and think through his reasoning (or consult an authoritative reference). That, is, he can seem convincing when he's not writing about something you know in detail; when he does it becomes easy to see the skeleton of his sophistry.
Not blogs, but I would also counsel avoiding military commentary aggregators like "War is Boring," etc. There are occasional good articles on such sites, but the senior editors generally lack the knowledge to tell the good from the bad so those gems are mixed in with mountains of dross.
Now on to the dreaded "wehraboo." This is a variant of the venerable term "weaboo," (pr. wee-ah-boo) referring to westerners who are utterly (but shallowly) obsessed with Japanese culture as seen through the soda-straw perspective of Japanese entertainment products.
Weaboos, or "weabs" as they are occasionally called, are convinced that everything Japanese is superior to anything non-Japanese, often being the sort of person who shows up on internet forums to declaim how katanas would be able to slice through European swords, and how one Samurai could no doubt beat up 10 stinky, stupid medieval knights rendered immobile by their heavy armor (just to be clear, the preceding is nonsense).
Well, his cousin the wehraboo (as in Wehrmacht, the WWII German armed forces), is equally convinced that every weapon and tactic of the Nazi regime was vastly superior to those of the Allied nations, that everything the German forces did on and off the battlefield was brilliantly conceived, and that Nazi Germany was only defeated by being crushed under the sheer weight of Allied economic production.
Some wehraboos are actually fans of the Nazi regime, but much more often they are partisans of the armed forces only, usually of the "the Germans would have won if not for Hitler being stupid" school of thought, which attributes every mistake or defeat of the German forces to Adolf's malign micromanagement.
This narrative originally arose shortly after WWII and was promulgated to gullible American and British historians by former senior officers of the Wehrmacht, who of course had good reason to distance themselves from the erstwhile regime. It was an easy sell; after all, who's going to speak up in defense of Hitler? Thus the German generals showed that they had at least as good a grasp of PR as battlefield tactics.
Now we know better, of course, but pop-history trails actual historical scholarship by at least a few decades, so it hasn't filtered down yet. And it would have to filter waaaay down to reach the sources most wehraboos draw their beliefs from: video games, movies, and TV documentaries, with the occasional equipment-focused coffee-table book thrown in.
Oh, Bean, that reddit link... perfection, simply perfection :D
@Directrix Gazer
Agree on Moran. What I've seen of him is great, although I'm not into tanks enough to have followed him exhaustively.
As for the others, I'll have to check them out. Thanks.
Why aren't coaxial-rotor helicopters more popular? I understand that this design doesn't generate additional lift as does a tandem-rotor design, but it does eliminate a major point of failure.
As far as drawbacks, weight seems possible but not likely -- helicopter rotors aren't heavy, they aren't even made of metal. That leaves complexity, of both the rotor shaft and the collective. I know this is probably the answer but after 70 years of development there must have been some improvements -- turbines are both much more complex and much more reliable than they used to be, for instance. And Kamov has been building coaxial helos for generations now -- are their designs known to be less reliable or more expensive than tail rotor aircraft?
There's no redundancy in that kind of helicopter. Losing one set of blades is, at best, like losing the tail rotor.
But it is a good question, and one I don't know the answer to. I have an aerospace engineering degree, but that just means that formally I have some idea of what a helicopter looks like. I think we saw two or three in class. My guess would be that the mechanical complexity is too much, particularly for the rather conservative world of aerospace.
Just realized that today is the 1-year anniversary of my last visit to Iowa. Less than two weeks until the next one, so it’s both sad and exciting.
Also, AlphaGamma, out of curiosity, what's the language situation at Eben-Emael? If I, who only speaks English, showed up, would I be able to take the tour and enjoy it?
There's no redundancy in any kind of helicopter, at least where the rotor system is concerned. Basically everything from the main gearbox out to the tips of the blades has to perform a complex dynamic function in a harsh environment, without fail, or the helicopter falls out of the sky. If you have two rotors, that's two different gearbox-to-blade systems that both have to work without fail or you fall out of the sky.
So, as few rotors as possible, and as simple as possible. Dual coaxial rotors fail both tests.
They do offer superior handling characteristics, due to the symmetry of advancing and retreating blades on each side as well as the lack of side force from the tail rotor. Intermeshed rotors offer about the same advantage. Most of the coaxial- or intermeshed-rotor helicopters actually built have been for naval use on small ships, and most of the ones that aren't naval were for air rescue or other applications requiring precision hover over land.
@bean on language: Yes, you would be fine. Tours start regularly, and each tour is in a specific language- so I went on an English tour and the guide spoke perfect English and explained everything in English. I'm fairly sure the non-guide staff (ticket office and cafeteria) also speak good English.
In the museum exhibits, a lot of the captions are only in French and Dutch but there are pamphlets available with English translations- it too me a while to find them, but then I speak passable French so wasn't looking too hard.
How good were the Waffen-SS actually? It's clear that they were carefully selected and trained, but when it actually came to fighting, how did they do on the eastern and western fronts? Presumably the Allies had some comparably formidable units.
This was a dndnrsn post, but the disappearing post glitch hit it. Sorry about that. He said that some SS divisions were OK, but a lot were only used for murdering partisans and civilians, and that they did at least slightly more war crimes. He then asked me about Robert McNamara. There was also his usual insightful commentary on Wheraboos.
@dndnrsn
I mean the proper military units of the SS, the ones deployed to fight actual military units of the Allies. The 2nd SS Panzer Division "Das Reich" is one example.
@sfoil
I’m not even an aerospace engineer, but I recently got interested in answering the co-axial question too. My lay understanding points to two, not entirely satisfying, reasons for limited coaxial adoption:
The relatively small market size makes the R&D + certification costs sort of prohibitive at companies that don’t already have experience with them. The failed RAH-66 project cost $7B before it died, though it’s not clear that rotor design contributed much to that. Cost also seems to be the standard explanation for why designs don’t cross-pollinate quickly in the market even when patent unencumbered.
The tall rotor mast needed to separate the blades from each other adds a lot of drag. This makes it harder to meet required cruise speeds (KA-50 is plenty fast though).
The adoption of the V-22 seems to be changing the story a bit through the follow-on Future Vertical Lift competition. The requirements for this seem to be treated by industry as impossible to attain with conventional helicopter technology, so Sikorsky has been forced to enter with something more exotic than their standard designs (drawn from their long R&D history with NASA). Their entry (SB-1) is using advanced composites to shrink the coaxial mast height. Consequently, they’re able to use the space freed up by the rotor configuration to mount a pusher propeller (allowing for a big speed increase).
Basically, he screwed up everything he touched. He moved a lot of power away from the services and to the OSD, then abused it horribly. I think this came from some bizarre inherent distrust of the services, because that shows through in a lot of his decisions.
His general management system was sort of like the cargo cult version of rational analysis. He forced the services to make their cases to his analysts, who deliberately cultivated ignorance of the finer points of military life. If he couldn’t easily quantify it, he ignored it. At one point, someone calculated that it was cheaper to train a new pilot than to recover one in Vietnam. Apparently, an attempt to carry out this policy resulted in some of his people being placed on the first plane off of a carrier and told not to come back. And sometimes he just cooked the books to get his preferred option. For instance, when comparing nuclear and conventional carriers, the cost of the unrep groups wasn’t considered. Or the bit where he routinely would order a competition, then overrule the selection board and choose another design that he thought was better, usually because “it had more commonality”. TFX is probably the best example.
And then there’s the mismanagement of Vietnam. The Army was trying to come back from its New Look doldrums, and promoted the concepts that nuclear wars were likely to happen unless carefully controlled. This lead to lots and lots of effort spent trying to carefully control Vietnam and send signals that we didn’t want nuclear war. Of course, they read this to mean that we didn’t want to win, and kept fighting. Things like avoiding Hanoi, not hitting SAM sites under construction, and leaving Haiphong unmined.
Cancelling the B-70 and gutting US missile defense work were also bad decisions.
Seriously, you can trace almost any problem in the US military today back to him. If not for the knowledge of similar problems in other countries, I’d actually believe it.
This was the comment by dndnrsn:
Concerning Wehraboos:
Beyond what’s been said above, they’re a particular flavour of bad “vulgar” understanding of military history. They focus on the things that matter less, instead of the things that matter more. bean has mentioned that they don’t give a hoot about logistics, because logistics don’t have armour plating.
They also tend to ignore the strengths the Germans actually had (which are mostly boring things like quality of staff training and so on) in favour of fictions about German equipment being uniformly superior, German soldiers being individually better, etc.
They also, as Directrix Gazer notes, bought hook line and sinker the post-war apologetics of German generals, the “clean Wehrmacht” myth, etc.
@Johan Larson
OK, so, which Waffen-SS are we talking about? The Waffen-SS varied widely in quality. Six or eight or however many of their divisions performed as well as comparable Wehrmacht units. However, the majority of Waffen-SS divisions were either crappy units used for fighting partisans or murdering civilians (with a lot of overlap between these; the front-line units also were more prone to war crimes than the norm, and carried murder of civilians and POWs from the east to the west, whereas the Wehrmacht mostly left their murdering in the east), were divisions in name only, or both.
@bean
You don’t like McNamara. There are plenty of reasons not to like him, but what are yours?
(As I suspected, the “lost” comments aren’t actually lost, just hidden. I suspect I even know why this is happening, which offers hope for a quick fix. If it turns out to be a more involved fix, then I’ll set up an easy way for bean to recover the text of “lost” comments while I work on a permanent solution. Stay tuned.)
@Johan Larson
The actual front-line units raised relatively early on (before the war got really desperate, so, before 1942 or 43) were as good as their equivalents in the Wehrmacht - as the SS gained power and influence, they probably were better equipped, relatively speaking, too. Except maybe the 4th division, which by some accounts was crummy.
After that point, there were units that were intended for combat that didn't do so well, and were transferred to partisan fighting/civilian murdering duty. I think the units from the Balkans fall into this category. The majority of Waffen-SS divisions were either crummy, divisions in name only, or both.
With regard to war crimes, they were probably more likely to commit them in the east, and in the west, definitely.
@bean
Maybe the similar problems are due to a "surely business methods can be applied to any problem?" mindset, which as I understand it is why McNamara ended up where he was?
I think that was part of it. I'm beginning to see parallels between McNamara and the people who come out of silicon valley and start talking about how they're going to revolutionize drug discovery or rocketry or something else that isn't software. And then they discover that everyone in the industry wasn't as stupid as they looked. But they usually aren't put in charge of national defense, so they damage they can do is limited.
Bean, if you don't want this posted here, please remove it, but my company is looking for an Aerospace MRO Analyst in the DC area.
The position involves both military and civil aircraft, but priority will go to people with a strong military background, uniformed or civilian. You'd be doing cost research for everything from engine maintenance interior modification work to airframe maintenance their costs and average intervals between services. Your work will be published in a prestigious trade magazine and you'll get to present your research at events all around the world. The ideal candidate has a strong background in aviation, is excellent with Microsoft Excel, and has a few years experience working in aircraft logistics or maintenance.
Salary is 70-80k per year, with more possible for exceptional candidates. No clearances are required. If you're interested, or know someone who might be, please email me cursedcassander@gmail.com
On the question of mcnamara, I think the issue was less thinking that “surely business methods can be applied to any problem!” but that he was just shitty at it. The description of what he was doing as cargo cult rationalism is apt. He simply seemed to lack serious understanding of the things he was attempting to optimize and had no inclination to learn about them.
@Said Achmiz
Thanks for looking into that. Hopefully the fix is easy.
@Cassander
I have no problem with you posting that. Do I get a finders fee if you hire someone who came through here? :-)
I'm not really quite sure what to make of McNamara. Assuming he wasn't actually a Soviet agent, I think "everything is business" is the best explanation I've ever heard for how badly he screwed up. But he'd done analysis for the XXI Bomber Command during WWII, so he can't have been a complete idiot, or the famously intolerant commander of said unit would have probably dropped him on Tokyo. That, or a belief in analysis so deep that he couldn't be bothered to learn its limitations. All of the books I have on the subject talk about using it to inform decision-makers, not to dictate results.
He definitely wasn't an idiot, I think it's more a question of the peter principle at work. I've heard mixed things about his tenure at ford, and don't know enough to comment, but the truth is that he wasn't there for long enough as president to know what he would have been like as an executive there, but by then was quite clear that his reputation was outrunning his actual accomplishments.
At DoD he displays the classic signs of someone promoted past their ability. The deception, the refusal to adapt, the conflation of disagreement with disloyalty, all made worse by his manifest awareness of the catastrophe he was overseeing in Vietnam. He clung to his models because that's what he knew.
As for a finders fee, that seems only fair! Let me run it by HR....
A great chat ongoing here.
Although I had not heard the term "Wehraboo" before I am well aware of their arguments--including those ranging from the feeble to the more rigorously robust. Sebastian Haffners work Anmerkungen an Hitler is a good foundtational text for the refution of the Wehraboo's premises. It is in some ways an economic overview and that sets the stage for logistics, manpower, etc. From Haffner one realizes just how early the arrows were pointing to the fact that Germany was not going to win or even be able to draw a decent stalemate. It is worth the read.
The other point that Directrix Gazer and Said Acmiz deftly bring to the fore is that of the captured Wehrmacht generals who had a GREAT influence on how the initial record was gathered. One can look first at Franz Halder who was until 1942 OKH. Good heavens...the gent ended up being a historical advisor to the U.S. Army Historical Division. Not hard to see where the ideas of a "clean" Wehrmacht sprung from and his former colleagues were quick on the uptake that this was the way to go narratively.
Only in comparatively recent years has serious scholarship been able to extricate a bit of the truth from the fiction. Even then there has been fiery pushback at times. Look at the steamroller Goldhagen ran into with his PhD Dissertation entitled Hitler's Willing Executioners. The idea that a limited group of bad guys were responsible for what was going down was still popular at that point in 1995/1996.
Haffner is a quick read. I remember being left with the impression, as I mentioned, of Ah-ha, that is when you can see that no matter how tough the fighting might yet be, that the Reich was going to fail in its bid.
@Neal Schier
Post-WWII the Americans (well, also the Brits and others, but mostly the Americans) wanted to know what it was like to fight the Soviets, and they could hardly ask the Soviets. Unfortunately, they did a piss-poor job of recognizing that the German generals they asked maybe weren't going to tell the truth 100% of the time. A lot of "conventional wisdom" concerning the Warsaw Pact came from anti-Soviet and anti-Slavic sentiment absorbed from German generals etc post-war.
With regard to the Holocaust specifically, I'm pretty sure that the "moderate functionalist" position as presented by Kershaw, etc has kinda become consensus. It seems to match reality more than the traditional German-apologist position and the Goldhagen position - neither of which fits the facts nearly as well as moderate functionalism does.
I enjoyed the "Why the Carriers Aren't Doomed" posts, but I thought they were mostly good for refuting an annoying internet fringe.
Today, this was on the front page of the New York Times.
@dndnrsn
Points well made--particularly regarding moderate functionalism.
I had also overlooked the thirst among the Western powers after the war to learn how the Soviets fought. Sadly, as you bring to light, those questioning the surviving German leaders were not rigorous enough in teasing apart embellishments from fact. Not saying I could have done better, but someone should have glommed onto the fact that maybe all that they were hearing always didn't ring true or at least had a hefty dose of face-saving to it.
@DifferentAnonymous I did see the article regarding China's Navy in the NYT. China's rocketing up the learning curve certainly merits attention. While we know that they are not sitting still, it is just how fast they are learning that is an eye-opener...or at least is for me.
One thing I have grown to appreciate from reading Bean's articles is just how tightly spaced the offensive versus defensive capabilities and technologies are at any given time. Sure there at any instant be a breakthrough that puts one side of the gridiron ahead, but the other side catches up with a technological jump of their own. It seems that we are seeing that proven again right now as the U.S. qualitative superiority in the Pacific is under what appears to be direct challenge. I defer however, to those of you in the know about these things as I am in the learning mode.
Amazon recommended me a documentary titled World War II: The War in the Atlantic. The title image? This. It's either a very odd alt-hist, or the work of someone so terminally confused that they can't tell the 40s from the 80s.
Re the NYT article, I'll give them credit for at least being less prone to exaggeration than War Nerd was. While I do think they overstate the threat, China is getting good at this game, and we shouldn't underestimate them. But I did enjoy the whole "three submarines in 1995" thing. I'm pretty sure they're comparing SSNs in 1995 with all submarines today, because the Chinese are still fairly short on those.
@Neal Schier
The American, etc, guys in charge should have done a better job of asking "how much of this is excuses and sour grapes" but, yeah, it wasn't as obvious then as it is now with better historical information.
What creeps me out is the way that stuff gets uncritically presented now - eg, memoirs by German generals published without any commentary or introduction or anything by military history publishers. Not just Wehrmacht generals either - Waffen-SS, even.
I can think of a couple drivers of this. First, there's the relegation of military history out of the mainstream of historical studies. Students aren't having to read these books, and that means no demand for academic editions. Second, the fragmentation of the military market. You have popular books (Hornfischer and Massie on the naval side), serious books (Norman Friedman) and illustrated books (Osprey and the like). I find these irritating, because while they have pretty pictures, the text is usually inferior to what I write here. I think that says a lot about who buys them. And the same people buy WWII German memoirs. There's only a few publishers who produce serious books (Naval Institute Press is the best!) and I can only imagine that it's worse on the Wehrmacht front.
One thing that contributes to fixation on the Wehrmacht at the upper end of the respectability spectrum is that is that "how could the Germans have managed to win/salvage themselves" is more interesting than "why the Germans screwed up and lost" because the latter is so easily answered; basically any approach (logistical, correlation of forces, industrial capacity, strategic, etc.) to the invasion of Russia generates "this is stupid" as an answer really quickly and then you start digging into how things could have even gone as well as they did, and now you're spending most of your time talking about things the Wehrmacht did right.
"How Germany could have won WWII" is a self defeating question. Because for them to have won, things would have had to change early. Really early. And before you know it you are asking "How Germany could have won WWI" which is a much more realistic scenario (especially if the USA stayed out).
Is War Nerd still around? Because I remember following him when I was much, much younger. So much younger that I stopped reading him when the USA invaded Iraq. Because WN was giving blow by blow commentary and confident predictions... that would be completely contradicted by events the next day. He ended up with this big essay about how the US forces had ground to a halt, and how it was now a bloody stalemate that would drag on for months or years... about 12 hours before US tanks entered Bagdad and Iraq surrendered. I concluded he might be able to write entertaining history, but clearly wasn't worth following for analysis.
@bean
My experience of Osprey books - hey, we were all teens once - is that the quality of the WWI-focused stuff is markedly better than the WWII-focused stuff. Not sure why, but a lack of Wehraboos likely has something to do with it.
You're definitely right that a part of the problem is that academic history doesn't take military history that seriously. This leads to an elevation in what sells of "great man" history, dates-and-battles type stuff, etc over stuff that applies a more developed historical toolkit.
@sfoil
This is a great example of a lacking historical toolkit. Looking at the war through only a "practical" military lens starting in 1939 or 1941 or whenever ignores that the military had lost control to the Nazis due to the Blomberg and Fritsch affairs, and that major decisions in Germany were made based on ideological grounds. Invading the USSR was a decision made based on Nazi doctrine - while the generals post-war got pretty absurd in the degree of "uh, actually, all the dumb decisions and war crimes were by guys who killed themselves/got hanged" they were spouting, it's probably true that absent Nazi racial-national doctrines, their belief that agriculture wouldn't get significantly more efficient in food produced per unit of land, their belief that autarky was necessary, etc, the generals would not have thought "invading the USSR? Good idea, doable!"
It's not necessarily that all Osprey stuff is awful, and you read what's available. I've occasionally found useful tidbits in them. But their level of history is definitely a lot closer to what I can produce than the stuff I consume to get better.
He is. Apparently, he's a poet/writer, which probably explains his gross inabililty to actually do technical analysis. I checked, and there's no posts from 2003 to 2007 on his current site. I may have to play with internet archive to go find the one you're talking about.
I thought of another reason why the WWII stuff might be worse than the WWI stuff. Basically, it's a combination of demand and available options. Anything about German tanks is going to sell well. It doesn't have to be good. So why bother putting a lot of work in at the Osprey Military Book Mill? But improvements in quality on WWI stuff might actually cause extra sales. Also, if you're a good WWII historian, you can probably do better than write for Osprey, but a good WWI historian has fewer options. Or even just that you tend to get fewer mediocre enthusiasts for less popular wars.
@sfoil
I'd like to push back on this a bit. I think the decision to invade Russia is somewhat more defensible than is often thought, for a few reasons.
First, look at the German situation after the fall of France. The Germans have the best army in the world, and no where to really send it. They know that it walked all over their two most powerful enemies in a couple weeks. "Victory disease" is a phrase normally associated with the Japanese, but it should apply even more to the germans, who had been winning against the odds for years at the time of the invasion of russia.
Second, the idea that the USSR was economically superior to the Germans is not particularly accurate. Paul Kennedy puts Germany and the USSR on roughly equal footing in 1939, and if anything that's somewhat generous to the USSR. wartime soviet production was the product of an enormous amount of material support from the US and substantial (but clearly not measurable) quantities of propaganda. Moreover, the US was clearly sidling up to the brits, giving them very large quantities of war material which made the long term German position very uncertain, especially knowing the long term effects that blockade would probably have.
Third, given the terrible performance of the soviets in the winter war, they looked very defeatable.
In sum, the idea of knocking over Russia to get the resources needed to stand up to the anglo coalition is not an entirely insane idea, even before you get into nazi racial ideology and factor in a german military that never thought about logistics as much as it should. That's not to say it was a good idea, it's thinking of international politics as a video game, but from the German perspective in 1940, it had a logic to it. And let's not forget, the German estimation of their own ability wasn't all that far off. Their invasion did make it to the gates of Moscow, destroying whole armies and capturing millions of men on the way. Where they erred was in underestimating the ability of the Russian political system to endure the sort of catastrophic loses that it was entirely reasonable to assume that they couldn't endure. Also the amount of support that the west could provide to them but frankly, I don't think anyone in 1939 really understood the extent of US industrial & technical superiority over everyone else.
@bean
I remember the WWI trench warfare Osprey books, 2 of them, as actually really good; "learn stuff from these" more than just "pictures!"
@cassander
If Germany and the USSR were on an equal footing going in, why did the USSR have such larger numbers of tanks? Admittedly, the bulk of their tanks in 1941 were obsolete models - but the Germans were still bulking out panzer divisions with Pz IIs. The German planners going in knew it had to be a knockout blow.
German intelligence estimates concerning the Red Army were generally lowballing Soviet capabilities, and they certainly overestimated their own capabilities. Did any of the Army Groups reach their objectives in 1941? They made enormous advances and inflicted enormous casualties on the Soviets - but they didn't reach their objectives.
The exact extent of the industrial capability might not have been understood, but it was understood that the US had serious economic and industrial superiority.
The decision to invade the USSR was decided based on elements of Nazi doctrine and on Hitler's worldview. The German generals' post-war depiction of themselves as basically always correct practically and morally except when overruled by Hitler is lies - they made plenty of practical mistakes, and those who weren't outright Nazis still sold their souls - but decisions that were the downfall of Germany (invading the USSR, racial doctrines which undermined the war effort in many ways, failing to mobilize effectively until it was too late) were made on political/ideological grounds. The Wehrmacht was thrown into a situation where had everything gone as well as possible (every decision perfectly made, every roll of the dice boxcars) that still might not have been enough.
(Of course, one can point to pretty much any military disaster and say "huh, looks like some bad decisions got made for political reasons" - it was ever thus)
@dndrsn
Tanks aren't the best indicator of industrial capacity. Compare a tank to a ww2 aircraft. The aircraft had an engine with twice the horse power, engineered to use higher test gas. it was made out of aluminium, which was more expensive than steel at the time. I don't have good cost figures, and any figure quoted in marks would be largely meaningless because the raw material allocations were far more important, but fighter aircraft cost at least as much as tanks, and probably more, especially counting scarce resources. And when you talk about multi-engine aircraft, the gap gets wider.
Also, Soviet tank production, even if we assume it wasn't overstated for propaganda reasons, benefited greatly from the fact that they could focus their limited engineering talent on a few areas and outsource the rest to the west. the soviets, for example, could and did have all their railroad and truck engineers/workers make tanks, because they could import rolling stock and trucks. Comparative advantage applies, as ever. On top of that, it didn't suffer from the disruption of allied bombing and was super charged by western raw material inputs, neither of which could have been anticipated by the west.
They understood that the US was a large and rich country, like a bigger version of England, because that's pretty much what the US was in 1918. But by 1945, the US was a lot more than a bigger version of England, it was the first and only first world country. In 1939, the US has something like 3 times the UK's population, but has 5-6x GDP by the end of the war, and that's probably things. US production was more than every other participant put together by a considerable margin, making goods that were almost universally more advanced and of better quality.
I didn't say they did. I said they came pretty close.
unquestionably. But that worldview had substantial roots in an economic understanding of the world that, while flawed, was far from crazy.
Completely accurate.
The failure to mobilize is largely a myth invented by Speer. There was a conscious decision made to try to keep up the home front quality of life during the war, and I'm not at all sure that it was the wrong one. the stab in the back was a myth, but what isn't a myth is that the german mobilization of ww1, the deprivation of the home front, led to an eventual collapse of german society when the war situation got bad enough. The war situation in 1944 or 45 was much, much worse than 1918, but that didn't happen in ww2. I think the nazi insistence on maintaining the quality of life home front (often at immense human cost in the periphery of their empire) is a substantial reason why.
Once the US is involved, a clock starts ticking that runs out on August 6, 1945. If the Germans don't win the war by then, the rest of the war is very predictable. Little Boy falls on Berlin. The Germans resort to suicide tactics to stop the bombers, which buys a little time, but eventually more bombs fall, more cities are destroyed. Eventually the generals, probably with the help of senior Nazis, realize that they have absolutely no hope against atomic firepower, kill Hitler, and sue for peace.
For the Germans to win, they have to either prevent the US from entering the war or somehow wrap things up by mid 1945, and I don't think there's a way to do that by military means.
I'm not sure that the nuclear end would play out quite that way. If Germany wasn't teetering on the brink of collapse, as Japan was in August of 45, then I suspect that the weapons will be saved until Germany can be destroyed at one blow. Otherwise, you end up with them dispersing, recovering, and otherwise adapting to the attacks. But yes, there's no way Germany wins once the US comes in.
Great point made about the Germans having made impressive gains but still having ended up short of the objectives.
Naturally once into Russia we can cooly dissect the decision making and even,if begrudgingly, concede why certain actions were taken, but... Having fallen short of the objectives we see what ended up as nothing short of a musical chairs of priority juggling. The lack of securing the oil from the Caucasus alone was an epic error--as well as the push toward Stalingrad to protect the northern side of that effort to the south. Why did they try to take the city instead of just block the river? Could they have even refined as much oil as they needed had they achieved the fields? One question only leads to another.
I know I state the obvious here, but do so only as I am finding broad agreement here among those who have obviouly read serious standard works on the conflict that the handwriting was on the wall early for the Germans. Not sure why those who toy (no pun intended) around like the Wehrabos (sp?) never wish to look at the broader strokes of what was going on. The wider context to me is just as interesting as the details.
I think it's because to look at that broader context is to stop being a Wehraboo. To be able to maintain the view that Nazi Germany was great and not actually a collection of fools lead by a madman requires you to ignore Wages of Destruction and the like. It also requires you to ignore the allied technical achievements that were in every way the equal of anything the Germans did, such as the proximity fuse and penicillin. But those are low-flash and very effective, so of course they don't attract the adoration of that crowd.
Well said Bean. Your site is enjoyable because you bring a rigorous technical approach to the details but always fit them into a broader context. This in turn lends meaning. A tough needle to thread at times I am sure, but your efforts are appreciated by the readership.
@cassander
For Barbarossa, the Germans had more aircraft than they had tanks, and the Soviets had almost as many aircraft as tanks. The Soviets had more aircraft than the Germans - but a lot of them got destroyed on the ground.
Once the war had started and as the stuff they got increased, yeah - delivery of American trucks for example certainly let them allocate their resources differently. But what they went to war with in 1941, and what was available to them for some time - what % of that was produced outside the USSR?
It was a surprise the degree to which the US could produce so much stuff, but an industrial expert wasn't needed to see that a war against the US couldn't won in the long term.
Did they come pretty close? They took neither Leningrad nor Moscow, and if they'd taken them holding them might not have been easy; in the south I think they ended up very far from their actual objectives.
I'm not going by Speer, because rule one is never trust the generals, rule 2 is never trust Speer. I'm going from, uh, Hitler's Beneficiaries, Aly. His thesis is, yeah, that the German leadership consciously used slave labour and plunder to offset making fewer material demands on their civilians. They wanted to avoid a WWI
So, I'm not how what you're saying contradicts what I'm saying. The Germans didn't fully mobilize in the sense of they didn't put the squeeze on their own civilian population. German civilians described not feeling real material privations (they still got butter from France!) until well into 1944.
However, slave labour and plunder could only provide stuff for German civilians and the war economy after the enslaving and plundering happened; they started plundering earlier on but the slave labour only started after taking men from factories into the military started to bite.
Compare to the Brits. They rationed more and earlier - their morale didn't collapse even after a couple of years of defeats; the German public morale could probably have handled a couple years of victories even if they'd had less butter and so on. The German leadership was ultimately worried that they might fall victim to a sudden shift in public opinion; they really underestimated the extent to which most Germans either supported them or had just decided to say nothing.
Additionally - forget about Speer covering his ass/talking himself up after the fact. If the Germans were fully mobilized in any real sense of the word, the whole episode where Goebbels tries to get "total war" going and then some Gauleiters complain or infighting with the other second-ranking guys interferes, sort of happens for no reason.
Further, most Americans in 1941 had wanted to go after Japan far more than Germany. Had 1941 gone differently - had the Germans really dealt that knockout blow - or even maybe 1942 (had Blue not gone off the rails at the end, who knows) I think it's plausible that engaging in combat with the Germans in 1942-1943 starts looking like a worse proposition to everyone concerned, and especially to the voting public. It's not like this would be the only time in history that the weak point of a US military effort would be political support and morale at home. Canada likewise would not have been super into it; we had political crises over conscription in both wars, in both cases late in the war, and in WWII when the war was clearly being won. The UK likely wouldn't stay in it at that point.
The French Army had more tanks than the Wehrmacht in May of 1940, including heavier tanks with thicker armor and bigger guns. So the German general staff, and Hitler, might be forgiven for thinking their other advantages might well let them deliver a knockout blow in the first year of war against Russia as well.
And, unless they believed they could have defeated the Western allies without Russia ever turning against them, 1941 was pretty clearly the year for Germany to try and deliver that knockout blow. However stacked the odds were against them, they weren't going to get any better if they waited.
@dndnrsn
in 1941 the soviets were just putting into service aircraft comparable to things that the germans had built 4-5 years earlier and which they'd already built in large quantities by 1941. they were pretty far behind.
speed matters in this case. the US industrial mobilization in ww1 went fairly badly. The US's greatest contributions to allied victory were food, money, and men. Almost all the heavy equipment was built in france and the UK. Everyone knew that in the long run the US could mobilize in a huge way, but no one expected that they could have fully equipped armies built from its own resources deploying in europe while fighting the japanese and building most of the stuff that the other allies would fight with all within a year.
They might not have taken moscow and leningrad, but they almost did. they advanced 1000 miles in 5 months, a distance it would take the russians 3 years to push them back.
It's easy to say that now, after the fact knowing that german morale didn't break. Much harder to say that in 1941. And the UK was a much richer society in 1939 than germany was, their belt had more room to tighten, so to speak.
this sort of infighting happens all the time, in every war, and every political system. Do I need to bring up the US sidelining its best general because he slapped someone? Churchill spending weeks getting into a fight with his top brass about the badges on uniforms? it's very hard to evaluate these systems independently of the results we know that they led to. the whereaboos are unquestionably silly, but arguing that every german above O-6 a goose stepping moron isn't much better.
@John Schilling said...
As you have many times before, you've said exactly what I was trying to say, but better. This is exactly it.
@cassander
But they still produced them; was the issue with the physical production facilities or was it with bad decisions on a planning level, etc?
Granted, I may be underestimating the degree of the surprise.
By nature it's retrospective; in 1939 or 1941 or whenever they couldn't foresee the degree to which people would keep fighting. Nor could they foresee the degree to which their Soviet enemies would.
My point is that Goebbels clearly perceived a lack of military mobilization; his diary and the fact that he came back to this over and over again instead of finding a new lever for power indicates this was more than just a level of power for Goebbels. So even if Goebbels was wrong and the mobilization was as good as could be expected, or whatever, he still perceived it at the time as a problem. Thus, it can't be a thing Speer fabricated to make himself look good; he already had enough of those anyway.
Further: the German system was worse than the Allied systems for infighting, significantly so. Hitler was a leader with huge power who was kinda lazy and disinterested in many things important to running a state, war or no war. He also had an openly stated preference for letting underlings go at each other on the basis that the winner was bound to be the better man. One way or another the Allied powers all had better management at the top; this meant less in-fighting, since the infighting in the Nazi leadership was due to incompetent management by the guy at the top.
@John Schilling
Of course we have the advantage of hindsight and superior knowledge. However, I think that the people discussing this stuff today tend also to have better models of reality and thus ability to judge decisions than the Nazi leadership, because apocalyptic theories of international conspiracy and race war are less popular than in 1920s-30s Germany.
Before we decide anything else about the new Space Force, we need to decide what color their uniforms should be. Let's start with the service uniform, the attire that is rather like a business suit, and worn in office settings.
Right now, the service uniforms of the army, navy, air force, and marines are dark blue, dark blue, somewhat lighter blue, and green (respectively.) It seems the new Space Force should choose dark blue uniforms if they are conformists, or something completely different if they are edgy freethinkers.
How about medium gray with black highlighting, and rank insignia in silver on black?
It was both. Soviet designers were behind (partly because they all got sent to the gulag in the 30s), their designs were for industrial processes that had lower standards of quality control, worse materials, all the way through the system, and in general they weren't as productive, all the result of the soviet system. You can crudely weld 40 tanks together and they'll still work pretty well, but that shoddiness will extract a much greater performance penalty in an airplane.
One can make the exact same criticism of FDR. He too had a policy of appointing people who disagreed to be the head/deputy of departments so that they would disagree and he'd have to work out the differences, meaning that he would retain all the power, of putting off hard decisions for as long as possible for the same reason. And it bit the US in the ass very hard when he started falling apart mentally and physically, then died, leaving his completely uninformed VP in charge.
I think that assessment is almost entirely the result of post-hoc assessment, at least when talking about the axis prior to 1944 or so. The Nazis had Goering, the Brits had Beaverbrook. I'll grant you that the US did exceptionally well with Marshal, but most of the difference wasn't much better allied leadership in a day to day sense. It was in the fact that when allied leadership announced wild goals for propaganda purposes, like building 100k planes in a year or deciding to fight two wars in the pacific instead of one, the US could afford to make it happen without it imperiling the war effort. Germany did not have that luxury. Allied leadership looks better than it really was because, especially in the US, they were running downhill.
@cassander
FDR pulled shit like that; stuff like that is not very uncommon. But Nazi Germany had that dialled up to eleven, plus the state-party-SS split.
The Germans would likely have lost even if the management of the war effort, etc, had been the smoothest possible. It's just impossible to overcome stuff like the Americans being able to make more of one particular variety of thing than you plus your allies can make of varieties of that thing. I think the only way they win is by knocking the Soviets out of the war by 1942 at the latest, and that probably wasn't happening.
Still, the nature of their government - the feuding and turf wars that went on even when things were falling apart and those involved would soon be dead or on trial and knew it - that's a special level of dysfunction.
What does this (the "two wars in the Pacific" part) refer to?
@dndrsn
I think you have this backwards, the turf wars get worse when you're losing not better. If you really dislike general X and he gets put in charge and wins, well you can grumble all you like but he's winning and unlikely to get sacked. If he loses, though, then it's a lot easier to argue that general Y should be in charge, so the knives come out. And that's not just from a self interested perspective, maybe you really believe in general X or y being the right man.
@quaelegit
Originally the US plan was to contribute about 15% of its war to a production to a pacific campaign. there were two ways to do this, either drive across the central pacific through the marshals and mariannas or the south pacific, trough new guinea and the philippines. The navy wanted to do the former, MacArthur wanted to do the latter. The compromised by doing both, which meant sending a lot more men and material into the pacific campaign than was originally planned. The US could afford to do stuff like that, the germans couldn't.
@cassander
Not talking about the generals here, but rather the Nazi party inner circle. It's impossible to explain the influence of someone like Bormann in a remotely functional system; it goes beyond ordinary turf wars and politics determining policy. Likewise, none of the Allies - not even the dictatorial USSR - had a weird "alternate track" outfit like the SS - it ran the police, it ran the concentration and death camps, it ran the death squads, it had its own military units, by the end of the war it had taken over military intelligence, it even had its own industrial and commercial interests (not just related to having control of the inmates whose slave labour was used in the war machine - by the end of the war, it controlled a majority of mineral water production).
Just finishing up my first day back on the Iowa. It's been a great day, and a long time coming. Got to see the new Lost at Sea exhibit, but can't share the pictures until it officially opens.