I don’t think *every *German higher-up was incapable of doubt, I think many had their reservations in private - but the system ensured that those who did voice doubt, any doubt, for any reason were quickly removed and replaced by yes-men and fanatics. Furthermore, the Nazi regime was super corrupt and running a lot on nepotism, so that there was a constant incentive for one-upmanship and taking things to further and further extremes in order to be granted more than the next guy - more promotions, more attention from the brass, more resources to do what you really wanted to do, or just being left alone to do your job without constant hassle (or bothersome micro-managing by the Führer who was convinced he knew everything better than everybody). And being (ostensibly) extra super certain of things was one way to rise up.
So people did that, and denounced anyone who wasn’t extra super certain to try and bring *them *down. And it extended all the way down to everyday, random people who’d rat out any perceived deviance of their neighbours and acquaintances before they would be denounced themselves. As a quote in a recent nazi-shooting videogame I’m playing goes (by somebody living in Nazi-occupied Poland), “Everyone is a Nazi now, or pretending to be a Nazi and I can’t tell the difference any more”.
Which make me wonder how much they took industrial capability into account. The Civil War was the first really big war since the Napoleonic Wars (not counting Crimea which was localized.) The railroad hadn’t even been invented then. Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, not the factories of Manchester after all.
I dont think the Union would have won if it wasnt for the railroads. Railroads were still a kind of new thing and few understood their potential for moving massive amounts of troops and supplies.
Thing is the south was BIG. It was very hard to move massive armies anywhere and keep them supplied. Railroads allowed this.
And then the blockade. At the beginning the union navy was pretty small and the south never thought they would have the ability to blockade the entire southern coast and that they would always be able to import things they needed.
And the “honor” of the South was shown to be a flimsy thing when the South lauded the cowardly attack by Preston Brooks on Senator Sumner
To review: Brooks was offended by Sumner’s comments on slavery, but rather than challenging Sumner to a duel or spontaneously attacking out of immediate rage, Brooks waited until
a) Sumner was alone and unsuspecting, sitting behind a desk that was nailed to the floor (thus impeding escape or defense)
b) Brooks was armed with a cane
c) Brooks had two allies with him hold off anyone who might intervene.
Sumner was beaten so badly that he could not return to the Senate for several years. Brooks declined a challenge to a duel from a Northerner who would actually be armed.
Rather than disgusted by Brooks, the South universally praised him as a hero, gave him gifts and returned him to office by special election and Southern senators wore pieces of the cane Brooks used for the beating as jewelry.
Well, not your whole post, most of it was good, but I have a nit about that part.
That is because I do remember that that fledgling government was lucky to seek independence after powerful nations were involved on what some historians call a World War. France was seeking revenge for what had taken place on the Seven Years’ War, and it did cost them.
There is that, and related to the Civil War, the Confederacy never had those levels of support from other world powers. Far from it, France did not recognize the Confederacy and remained neutral; Britain officially did the same, but in practice, the Union was the one that got most of the trade then.
While not quite inevitable, defeat was coming when resources do not appear. And like southern historian Shelby Foote said on the classic PBS documentary The Civil War:
Also many higher ups like Rommel wanted to sign a seperate peace agreement with the western allies and concentrate on Russia. They had sent a deal that if they would remove Hitler they would agree to many concessions such as pulling out of occupied nations. The allies wouldnt agree though so the planned coup failed.
My understanding of contemporary Civil War accounts is that Southern men were under the misimpression that they were especially tough fighters, that the North couldn’t raise the resources that they did, that they wouldn’t bring them South, and that other cotton-dependent countries would be on their knees begging to ally with the South. Basically what you’d expect from a bunch of hillbillies with delusions of grandeur.
My understanding of Nazi Germany is that if they had delayed invading the USSR, then they could have conquered Europe and “won the war” that way. They could have consolidated, regrouped, developed atom bombs, and possibly defeated the USSR as well. The Nazis had a very viable war machine, just bad leaders and rotten moral goals that kneecapped the military effort.
Do you think they would have been more likely than not to knock out the USSR if they’d started the operation some months earlier? Or in early spring of 1942? They went for Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad. I remember John Boyd talking about how strategic breakthroughs are best done in 1 thrust instead of pincer/tentacle movements. Which major strategic objective do you think they should have focused on at first, Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad or something else?
Since France has had its Trump/Brexit for a generation, who are those enemies to FN types?
Algerians (and Jews too, albeit to a lesser extent I think ? LePen father was callously dismissive of the Holocaust and never shied from antisemitic jokes, but he didn’t really go further than that AFAIR. LePen daughter has tried to steer away from that and the honest to god skinheads her father employed as security personnel). The FN was founded as a revanchist move over the Algerian war, and LePen father himself was a veteran of that war. Its modern incarnation has moved on to “Muslims in general” in the post 9/11 and Syrian refugees zeitgeist.
Blacks are also a bugaboo, naturally, but less so I think. There is/was something more virulent, more malicious, more visceral about French anti-Arab racism than its anti-Black racism in my experience (although that isn’t at all to say that Blacks have it easy around here…). I would have intuitively said it was because of the Algerian war, which was so horrible and cruel and plainly wrong that it is simply not talked about anymore ; but then again when I think about it some more VietNam/Indochina was pretty bloody as well and there isn’t much anti-Vietnamese racism. So I 'unno.
But TL;DR, the modern FN goes hogwild on the Great Replacement. Think of every horrible shit racist Americans have said about Mexicans/Latinos ; and assume the FN is more or less a copy/paste (with the exact same contradictions as well - like the omnipresent doublethink that them brownies are lazy and shiftless to a man but also they take all the jobs and work longer hours for less pay)
In the 1860s was the idea that wars were (or even could be ) won by the side with the most resources, not the side with the bravest, best drilled, troops and best generals, even be a thing?
We’ve have century or two of industrial warfare to the get used to the idea. But IMO I think may anachronistic to assume people in that era thought that way.
Yeah, I’d say that’s got a certain amount of truth to it. From this angle, with our greater understanding of economics, we can evaluate the south’s effort as insane. At the time, though, they were following a pretty basic plan in attempting to break the north’s spirit. Lincoln and his team determined to break the south economically and degrade the CSAs very ability to fight.
In terms of railroads, as UrbanRedneck laid out above, I’d say it’s not railroads per se, it was the entire manufacturing base that allowed greater materiel to be produced that the rails were a sign. Hell, the south going to war with just one major iron works - Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond - would now be seen as insane. TIW produced - just 90 miles from Maryland - half the confederate artillery and most of the rail stock. When such were destroyed in the war they had a hell of a time replacing them.
Look, it’s easy - and wrong - to treat economics as deterministic in anything because there are too many human factors at play. But production and economics do put a pretty significant thumb on the scale of most human endeavors.
This is the correct answer. Basically the Germans didn’t set out in 1939 saying “Yep, we’re going to take on the Poles, the Russians, the French, the British, AND the Americans, because X, Y and Z.”
It was very much more a “We’ll whip Poland in a month”, and then once the British and French were in the war, the thinking was “We’ll whip France quickly as well, and move on to Britain”. And then a year later, “So far, our ground forces haven’t failed to defeat our opponents in record time, so we’ll whip the Soviets by Xmas”
Then starting around December 1941, things got ugly for them- the Russians were NOT beaten by Xmas, and for some bizarre reason, pre-emptively declared war on the US after Pearl Harbor. At this point, they’d achieved domination of continental Europe, but still had the Free French and British warring against them, and managed to invade a huge and populous nation (Soviet Union), and antagonize the world’s pre-eminent industrial power (the US), who happened to be unusually close as nations go, with the British. They had the tiger by the tail at that point- there wasn’t any sueing for peace; the Soviets were going to grind them down, regardless of what the US/British did.
In the case of the Confederates, I think it was even more shambolic in terms of planning/strategy. Once the states had seceded and the Federal government had declared the secessions invalid, and that they were in a state of rebellion, war was pretty much the only choice. But it’s not like they got together in Richmond and said “IF we secede, how are we going to prosecute the inevitable war?” I think it was more of a thing that moved faster than anyone was really prepared for, considering the speed/state of communications in those days. I mean, Lincoln was elected in November 1860, and by the end of February, the Confederacy was born. The war started in April, and by the end of July, the first battle had been fought.
Combine that with military thinking that was very outdated- most senior officers still clung to the idea that the war was effectively going to be fought Napoleonic-style, and that big decisive battles were what was going to force the issue, not the long, grinding war of attrition that actually happened. We see this in the South especially- between their general unpreparedness to fight a modern war, and the sort of thinking that led to Pickett’s Charge.
My personal belief is that even had Lee won at Gettysburg, that would have only delayed things, but that’s not how they were thinking at the time- the thought that the Union could replace the soldiers and formations lost and keep on fighting and win through sheer mass was a concept that was really being developed at the time. Prior to that, armies were organizations that were formed up, and used fairly quickly, because they tend to disintegrate when in the field- disease, accidents, etc… all take their toll. So as a result, wars tended to be fought with what they had, and not in the context of ongoing production, recruiting, etc…
But in the Civil War, that changed. The US put a huge army in the field AND supported it for years far from home through the use of railways. That’s fundamentally different than what had been done until that time.
How close to a total war was the Civil War? Large scale, sustained conscription was rather new, taking the example from the wars that followed the French revolution. Instead of geographic depth, it gave the North a “demographic depth” to keep going after losses because the North could recruit equip and train soldiers father than the South could take them out.
Since it came down to grinding down the opponent, what shortages most hampered the Old South or the Nazis?
I’m not aware that Hess was the representative of any larger group of Germans. He claimed he was acting on Hitler’s behalf, not as part of a coup aimed at overthrowing Hitler. The likeliest reality is that Hess was representing nobody other than himself.
This is true. I think it was Dan Carlin I heard talking about how even the armies of WWI were laughably out of date from the perspective of WWII armies just 20 years later, but it’s very likely a Roman Legion could take out a medieval army from a thousand years after its time, and Alexander’s army could probably have beaten Rome from hundreds of years later.
So, before the Civil War, it was possible to be “decades behind” an opponent, and still win. Not long after that, though, it was clear to everyone that you had to be up to date with the extreme bleeding edge of military technology and logistics to even stand a fighting chance.
I think there’s a distinction between understanding the importance of weapons technology, which the opposing sides in the US civil war did (going back to the early days of artillery that was understood to some degree), and understanding that what ultimately won wars was having an industrialized country that could produce more troops, muskets, cannons, boots, rations, etc. than the opposition, which wasn’t AFAIK.
What do you think? That Rommel called up a few thousand friends and said “Hey, guys, let’s invade North Africa this weekend!”
Rommel was an officer in the German army. He was given assignments and orders by his superiors in the German command structure. So it wasn’t Rommel who invaded North Africa; it was the German army (which was carrying out the directives of the German government) and Rommel just happened to be commanding the troops. Rommel was acting as a representative of Germany in that role.
Hess, on the other hand, did not represent anyone in a similar manner when he flew to England. Nobody had told him to go there.
