Both the Old South and Nazi Germany proved to be have overestimated their ability to win the war. What factors did they think would enable them to win? For what factual, philosophical or psychological reasons did they believe that?
If we draw a Venn Diagram of the factors they thought would give them victory, what kind of overlap or difference do we see between the Old South and Nazi Germany? If we look at the reasons why they believed that, how much overlap or difference?
Delusions of intrinsic superiority? That probably wasn’t the only reason, but I think it was a big part, for both of them.
I think the situations are completely different. Germ,any needed to win, the US South only needed not to lose. That is, they had to last long enough for the North to get tired of fighting them. I’m not sure that was an unreasonable bet.
If the South thought the way to victory was to not lose until the North got tired of fighting them, they should have waged a guerilla war. The Peninsular war which gave its name to guerilla was from 1807 to 1814, enough time for those Confederate generals to have had the opportunity to learn about it Peninsular War - Wikipedia
Did they think of themselves as fighting the same kind of war, strategically and PR-wise, as Washington?
Did the concept of asymmetrical warfare really even exist yet, though?
Germany had a significant advantage at the operational and tactical levels. There mission oriented doctrinal approach supplemented with effective implementation of modern weapons allowed them to produce quick strategic victories at the operational level. The defeated their early opponents more quickly than the balance of strength would have suggested. They then defeated France, the smaller countries of western Europe, and the British Expeditionary Force far despite being at a disadvantage in many strategic factors. Their offensive into Russia culminated a little short of Moscow. Seizing Moscow would have at least shifted the strategic balance of power. Russia’s ability to resist when important supply and communications lines that ran through Moscow would have been reduced. Russia’s only T-34 plant was still in the area during the Battle of Moscow.
Of course they did come up short of seizing Moscow. Then their ally started a war with the US which was protected from rapid ground conquest by oceans. At that point Germany’s strategic weaknesses came to the fore. They couldn’t reasonably expect to strategically cripple or knock any of their remaining opponents out of the war with a single ground campaign. At that point the brutal calculus of their strategic weaknesses took over. At the point where they were making decisions, though, they weren’t wrong about their operational and tactical prowess. When they could land a decisive first blow they could win wars before their weaknesses mattered.
They were constrained by protecting the plantation system and it’s slaves. Choosing a guerrilla strategy would have allowed the north to dismantle the very thing that prompted secession in the first place. The didn’t need to conquer the North to win. They couldn’t allow the North to operate relatively freely throughout the South until an asymmetric plan sapped Northern will.
War is waged in a world of imperfect knowledge. You may assume a potential adversary lacks will or motivation and be proven wrong. But you might also be right. The US lost the will to fight in Vietnam. What factors did the North Vietnamese have that led them to refuse to capitulate?
I think it was because the North Vietnamese were fighting on their turf. And we didn’t commit to the war, even from the beginning – it wasn’t a whole-country effort like WWII.
Same reasons The French and Americans insurgents refused to capitulate in the 1770s and 1780s. They, the North Vietnamese and many in the South Vietnamese population, were tired of foreign powers and/or inept kleptocrats oppressing them and saw the insurgency as a way to free themselves and improve their lives. Madame Nhu was as hated as Marie Antoinette for much the same reasons.
Does that mean that the Old South thought they would win because the North were softies who would run once you hit them a few times? At what point did they start to realize their mistake and what did they do about it?
A few problems with this. First, the ruling class had a lot of fixed assets. They could have gone into the swamps and forests but their plantations couldn’t. The Yankees could burn their homes and free their slaves, which would be defeating the point.
Since you must be quite familiar with this: Is it true that the Confederates has generally better generals?
Did the Nazis think they could be at peace with the UK or US? There was a lot of isolationism in the US at the time but did the Nazis expect they could do whatever they wanted in Europe and the US wouldn’t do anything but supply and bankroll the allies?
How much of an analogy can we draw between Gettysburg and the battles of Moscow/Stalingrad/Kursk?
So, they thought they could get the Union to let the South secede through conventional battles? That the North would be “isolationist”, for lack of a better term, to the point of not wanting to fight a war to prevent the union being broken up by slavery?
Right. What the Confederacy was created to protect required that there be a functioning state protecting it under law. If not fought conventionally they would have risked that by the time their independence was recognized, there would be nothing left of what they fought for.
And yes, there was (and is) a lot of cultural attitude that they were martially superior and more honor-bound than the Yankees. Martial spirit and “honor” ain’t much against superior industrial output, though.
Didn’t the Spartans have the same macho attitude of winning thru guts & balls rather than logistics & cleverness? It didn’t seem to work out for them at Leuctra or overall.
The Japanese certainly seem to have put a lot of emphasis on martial spirit and honor in WWII. How about Jihadis, what do they think are the reasons they think they’ll win, aside from divine will?
For Germany, part of the reason was the fact that the USSR couldn’t even defeat Finland in 1939 which made Germany underestimate the USSR.
I’m not sure about the South. I once saw a cracked article saying the north had 4x the free population, far more industry and GDP, far more railroads, etc. Plus the south had 9 million people, of which 5 million were whites and 4 million blacks. The south had to know that if the north armed the 4 million blacks that they’d join the union to fight for their freedom. I have no idea what they were thinking. 20 million northerners and 4 million southern blacks would have an easy time destroying 5 million southern whites. I believe the union army was 2 million while the southern army was 1 million strong.
I agree about the South — they didn’t anticipate the huge War the Union would fight. For that matter, the Union would probably have let the South go if they anticipated what horrific costs the War would inflict.
But Germany also might have prevailed with a few changes. Imagine if the British Army had been taken prisoner at Dunkirk? Or if the bombing of London had demoralized the British nation? Or if Hitler had delayed his attack on Russia? Or if the German Naval Enigma codes were not decrypted and its U-Boat campaign more successful? Or if Franco had cooperated with his natural Fascist ally? The defeat of Nazi Germany may have been most likely, but it was hardly a sure thing.
I haven’t really studied the Civil War so I can’t speak to that ; but the reason German (and Japanese) leaders thought they’d get away with it is because they were fascists ; and fascists are implicitly, inherently incapable of correctly estimating the strength of their bugaboos.
It’s true of every fascist group, but probably even more marked in those two cases because so much of their ideologies were racist/based on pop-genetics on top of being fascist. And that’s absolutely dysfunctional and schyzo at its very core because on the one hand, you can’t be a fascist (or really an extremist of any persuasion) without an enemy to rail against. In the case of the Reich, it was communists and Jews (mostly) which were, in their opinion, such a dire and existential threat to Germany that they had to be destroyed ASAP. Every extremist policy, every “national purge”, every robbing of liberty, every new law, every oversight on violence by the Nazis was invented and presented as the only possible effective answer to the twin headed, all-powerful, all-controlling hydra of Judeo-bolshevism which the Nazis were the one and only rampart against.
That’s column A.
But in column B you have all the Aryan bullshit and the inherent superiority of the German race and culture over everything else ; especially the deviant less-evolved parasites that were Jews and Slavs. They weren’t even human ! Human-shaped rats, cockroaches, lice on the world ! So how could they have possibly resisted the strong pure might of a proud German soldier kicking the door in, newly purged of any of his past social-democrat flaws and infused with a glorification of strength and brutality ? *Unmöglisch *!
The implicit contradiction led them to the notion that there was a war that absolutely needed to be fought immediately else Germany would be destroyed ; by an enemy that was, somehow, both perpetually historically victorious but also implicitly and inherently weak, lame, inferior etc etc… And if you think that’s weird and dumb, hi, these are the Nazis, perhaps you’ve never met ? ;).
Turns out doublethink is not conducive to clear thought.
They didn’t even think the US would do that to begin with.
Hitler was extremely surprised (and much angered) that the US didn’t support him ; he’d got it in his silly head that the two countries were natural allies. And to be fair, eugenics and antisemitism were not exactly rare in the US back then. Naturally, when it turned out that Roosevelt wouldn’t play ball, he turned around and accused him (and America) of having been Jewish/Freemason puppets all along. Because that’s the only thing that could possibly explain such an illogical turn of events. Perfectly clear. Not a single doubt. The Nazi theory of history and the world was implicitly correct, therefore it’s reality itself that must have been perverted and Wrong.
Similarly, he was adamantly convinced that the British, being a) democrats ptooie and b) not quite untermenschen necessarily would rapidly cave to his aggression, understand why he did what he needed to do, appease him and let him concentrate on destroying Stalin because after all, it was in their interest too, ja ? They, too, were threatened by the hydra of Judeo-bolshevism, that much was perfectly obvious ! And Hitler didn’t even want to exterminate them ! So to keep fighting like they did was, * in his own words*, “contrary to all logic and necessity”.
So yes. He really believed he could do whatever he wanted and the UK & US would let him, help him even. He really was that blinkered.
At the start of the war, yes. Fortunately for the Union, Lincoln learned to fire bad generals and promote good ones, something Davis never did.
That may have gotten the word into English, but the concept is a lot older. Viriato was already using it against the Romans.
It was certainly true for both of them. The Confederates told themselves that the United States’ numerical superiority was meaningless because one southern soldier could whip five yankees.
The Confederates also deluded themselves over the power of cotton. Most of the world’s cotton was grown in the southern states and they felt it was a vital commodity for Europe. So they thought all they had to do was threaten to stop the sale of cotton and the European powers would take up their cause and force the United States to negotiate.
A more realistic appraisal was the asymmetrical goals of the Confederacy and the United States, as others have noted. The United States had to conquer the Confederacy to win. The Confederacy didn’t have to conquer the United States; they won by default if they weren’t conquered.
With Germany, their plans for success were pretty much entirely based on a delusion of their superiority. Hitler and the Nazis simply assumed that every opponent they challenged would quickly become demoralized and would submit to Germany. They never really developed a strategy for what they would do if this didn’t happen.
Franco wasn’t an ideological Fascist; he used both Fascists and Traditionalists because those were the tools available, but would have been equally happy to lean on the Sisters of the Silver Star and the Bugs Bunny Brothers if these seemed better. This is a detail which is easy to overlook, but which needs to be taken into account in order to understand his actions.