(What I’m basing this question on is the seeming superiority of guerilla-style insurgency over modern armies (the U.S. in Iraq is an example). I’m taking it as a given that an army that is hamstrung politically is in the same boat as an army that is hamstrung technologically.)
Could a small group (a few thousand) of Nazi holdouts have, acting as an insurgency, protracted the European theater of WWII so long that Nazi Germany could have survived for a very long time … perhaps even into the present day? If the Nazis attempt an Iraq-style insurgency, how could the Allied forces stood up to them and won the war in Europe?
The U.S. involvement in Iraq seems, to my untrained eye, to be demonstrating that an insurgency is essentially inpervious to a modern mechanized military unless near-genocide is expressly allowed and sactioned by a nation’s population. IOW, it seems that in modern war, the side with the greatest desperation and/or political will seems to win, almost regardless of numbers, training, technology, etc. – excepting hypothetical cases where truly indiscriminate mass slaughter is an option.
So … anyway … could the Nazis have pulled an insurgency off, and bought themselves a few decades?
In my opinion, no. First, the Soviets would not have felt at all bothered about draconian counter-insurgency measures. Second, in order for the guerilla tactics to work that effectively, the press has to create the image of victory. The US army had good control over what news was permitted and how it was reported.
The french were using guerilla tactics in the begining of the German occupation. This was ended both by the Germans making entire villages pay for individual incidents and by the advice of allied intelligence. The allies told the French that they were more valuable gathering information and that they needed to save their strength until the big invasion.
There were incidents of Nazi fanatics going sniper in the aftermath. But these decreased as the American occupation was increasingly perceived as benevolent. Especially compared to the Soviets.
As noted, insurgency only works against an occupying power that wants to keep the population alive but under control. The Soviets would have been just as happy to pave Germany as they were to occupy it.
Also, how are these fanatics going to survive? They’ve got no support, and no way to get supplies or food. You can’t fight a guerilla war without first figuring out the logistics of it.
They might have protracted the war, but what would have survived would not be Nazi Germany --i.e. an organized government and a society ruled by the Nazi party. What would have survived would be a few thousand people fighting as guerillas, while the rest of German society would either submit to the allies, or else just fall into total anarchy (like Iraq today).
So, maybe some American GI’s would have been blown up by fanatical German insurgents placing roadside IED’s or even committing suicide bombings.
But Nazi society led by an evil leader with a mustache would not have continued for long. Just as in Iraq today, the Sunni society led by an evil leader with a mustache no longer exists.
The history of guerrilla warfare is a mixed bag, to be honest. Guerrillas CAN be beaten, even if the screwup in Iraq suggests they can’t.
It’s also transperently absurd to suggest that the only workable approach to guerrillas is one of killing and slaughter. Take, for example, the Nazis themselves, who were appallingly, amorally vicious in their treatment of civilians; entire towns wiped out, civilians massacred by the hundreds in retaliation for a single incident. No matter how brutal they were, in some places the insurgency just got worse; Soviet partisans were a problem throughout the war, and in France and the Low Countries the insurgency was not only a physical problem, but insurgent agents infiltrated the occupation governments to an almost comical degree. Insurgents carried out attacks, passed on intelligence to the Allies, and infested the occupation governments with countless moles, spies, and saboteurs. So how did being brutal work out for the Nazis?
There is no possibility a Nazi resistance would have succeeded, for the simple reason that Nazism simply wasn’t an appealing ideology in 1946, and a Nazi resistance would consequently have had no popular support. Ultra-nationalism looked good to you if you were a German in 1932, your country mired in recession, communists calling for the destruction of nations, and the Western world seemingly out to get you. By 1945, it didn’t look very good at all.
Lots and lots of insurgencies have been defeated without resorting to near-genocide. The Hukbalhep war in the Phillippines, Malaya, countless Indian mini-wars, Edward I’s campaigns in Wales and Scotland, the Western rebellions in Canada, and I could go on.
Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan, too. But yeah, the current Iraqi insurgents look like cuts above the usual bad-asses. They almost seem to be having an easy time of it. I do realize, of course, on an open battlefield, they’d be mincemeat.
But that seems to be the beauty of guerilla-style insurgency – no need to run out into the open. Stay in the shadows, strike only as often as your cover and your materiel allow, and wait the opposing army out. Decades, if need be.
At the end of WWI I would guess a significant number of the German fighting power was either dead or POW. Was there any pool from which to generate a significant guerrilla force?
Contrast to Iraq where the invasion did not kill that many people (relatively speaking) and left a large group of people willing to fight.
That is not to say that carpet bombing Iraq during the invasion and killing every fighting age man would have been a better solution to the current situation.
The Nazis actually tried this, evil, amoral, never-say-die bastards that they were: Werwolf - Wikipedia
Apparently not much came of it, though, for the reasons stated earlier.
Although the OP specifically excluded it, this was a real concern of the Allies in the Pacific, and of course there were isolated Japanese holdouts on various islands for decades after the war. Fortunately, the Emperor’s widely-broadcast surrender averted a broader Japanese insurgency that would almost certainly have lasted years and cost many lives.
I have read before that this is a reason that Truman opted to drop atomic bombs – he and his advisers considered a conventional invasion of Japan a far bloodier proposition.
OK … so the lingering question is: the Nazis couldn’t put up a successful insurgency, but various factions of Iraqi society can? Some reasons why have been broached – the Nazis didn’t seem to have popular support after V-E day, whereas the various present-day Iraqi insurgent groups seem to be heroes to at least one of the Sunnis/Shiites. The Russian presence in the European theater is also an obvious difference.
Winston Churchill set up a guerilla force (Auxiliary Units) to harrass a Nazi occupation should Britain have been invaded. These fighters had caches of explosives, firearms etc all hidden in bunkers thoughout the English countryside. The people recruited tended to be landowners, farmers, gamekeepers, poachers and other people with firearms skills and knowledge of the local area.
They were given formal training in intelligence gathering, communications, demolitions, survival and hand-to-hand combat.
Their role was to disrupt enemy operations, supply lines, assassinate ranking officers and to punish collaborators (basically, killing anyone who fraternised with the occupying forces).
Their predicted survival time was 14 days.
The chances of a small guerilla force without outside assistance surviving for more than a few weeks (maybe a couple of months at a push) is not particularly believeable.
Fill me in, then, on the current Iraqi insurgency – are they all direct agents of foreign governments? Not the Iraqi equivalents of the Sons of Liberty?
I know what’s going over there is complicated … but the way it’s being served up in the available media, the Iraqi insurgency is some kind of an invincible juggernaut. All we hear is “they can’t be beaten … they can’t be beaten” – which to me, implies strongly that they are a superior fighting force to the U.S. military. Obviously, that’s doesn’t make intuitive sense per se … so what the heck is going on? And why didn’t/couldn’t nations with more relative means in the recent past (e.g. Nazi Germany, or hypothetically WWII Britain) get away with protracted insurgency? See also Vietnam, early '70s.
I think they might have been a severe irritation but no more.
And I am somewhat amused when the finger is pointed at the Soviets for being harsh. When our infantry took fire from a house they usually called up a tank and blew the house apart.
We bombed from the air as accurately as we could but that wasn’t very accurate. In fact late in the war a more effective method of flattening cities from the air was worked out. The first groups dropped demolition bombs to make a lot of wreckage for fuel. Then groups came in and dropped incendiaries to set the wreckage on fire. Then groups came in and dropped fragmentation bombs to supress firefighting.
Had guerillas become too much of a problem I don’t see us holding back on repressing it by any means we thought would work.
Just look around you today and consider the methods our officials defend for combatting terrorists.
What were the living conditions like in Germany at the end of WW2? What communications were available? (phone, mail, transport) Weren’t the population at the brink of starvation? I think that if you’re just struggling to survive, carrying on fighting or supporting fighters would be low on your priorities.
What happened to the troops and Nazi Party members? Were they interred for a while?
There is also the cultural differences between subdued by a like culture and an alien culture that feeds insurgents too.
That doesn’t seem particularly harsh to me. If you were taking fire from a fortified position wouldn’t you call in a tank if you could? War sucks. If you doubt the Soviets were harsher than the Americans or British you might want to check the aftermath of the Battle of Berlin and the tens of thousands of rapes that occured or the vast numbers of German POWs who never made it back even years after the war was over.
Direct agents? I don’t think so. I’m not convinced that there’s large numbers of foreign fighters present. But they’re being supported by the Saudis, in the case of the Sunnis and the Iranians in the case of the Shia (and now the US is arming the militias too). There’s also masses of materiel left over from the Iraqi army, and ordinary Iraqis under Saddam were well armed. There’s also a lot of people with military training hanging about, the Iraqi army was pretty large and after the invasion they were disbanded (rather foolishly I think).
I think that a major difference between the two situtations is that the German homeland was invaded in 1944-45 after the German military and population had been exhausted after over five years of fighting with substantial casualties to its armed forces, into which the bulk of its able-bodied military-age men had been drafted.
In Iraq, on the other hand, the U.S. led invasion was extremely quick, and the Iraqi military to a great extent abandoned their posts rather than defend against the invaders (whether at the instructions of Saddam or otherwise). The occupation government then decided to abandon the army, rather than reconstitute it. This left a huge number of military age men (including both ex-soldiers and those who had not served) available to become insurgents. In addition, the Saddamist military and quasi-military forces had numerous weapons cashes around the country, which were emptied in and after the invasion.
True, plus enormous damage to civilian institutions, limited capacity to feed the (non-combatant) population and the presence of overwhelming Allied military force - so a grab-bag insurgency would have found itself in desperate straits almost immediately.
Interestingly, even the threat of a diehard movement influenced Allied plans in the final campaign of the war in Germany. Eisenhower and his generals thought they needed to have forces on hand to assault the “National Redoubt” (mentioned in the “Werewolf” link, and referred to in Nazi propaganda), and these troops, as I recall, were not immediately available for real threats.