More or less anything that the general public knows about the Texian Rebellion of 1835-1836 is bound to be wrong, as that field is loaded with various myths.
I think the biggest myth that Americans have to overcome that that we “saved the world from Hitler.” Whether we like it or not, Hitler’s Germany was defeated on the eastern front by the Soviet Union. The war in the east totally dwarfed the one in the west. I believe that the Russions * casualities* equalled the total US combat forces in the ETO and might have exceeded that number.
This myth has caused us lots of agony as it has enabled some foolish political leaders to sell the public on the idea that, having “saved the world from Hitler” we can solve problems, such as Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and terrorism by military force.
When this thread started earlier, I was going to post on the Western view of Hitler’s defeat compared to reality. Between Moscow in 41, Stalingrad, Kursk, Bagration and multiple other battles, the Soviets beat the living hell out of the German army. I say Western view because it seems to go beyond the United States when giving weight to D-day, North Africa and Italy.
Note: Without American logistical support, the Soviet army could not have fought effectively at all.
That’s just another myth. In the beginning our supply of trucks for transport was damned important. However there was absolutely no way that the single port of Murmansk would handle the amount of traffic required to provide the logistics of a war of the magnitude of that on the eastern front. Especially when it is at the end of a sea route that has a lot of ice trouble for a good part of the year.
According to a review of the war in the east in the US Army historical site (I haven’t been able to find the article again but I’ll keep looking) by about early 1944 Russion production of war materiel exceeded that of Germany in all aspects.
Check the WWII production figures in this Wikipedia article… In tanks and self-propelled guns Soviet production was 120% of that of the US and 225% that of Germany. In total artillery above 37 mm. their production was twice that of the US and 325% that of Germany. Their truck production wasn’t as great as ours and our trucks were of great value to them. In addition, they had a reasonably good rail system for transport and the Germans were apparently not able to attack it very well. All in all, they had sufficient logistic capability to do the job quite effectively.
One thing that seems to be true is that they fight very well in defense of Russia and not too well otherwise. In Finland in WWII they were nearly hopeless and they didn’t do too well in Afghanistan. During their takeover of eastern Europe after WWII they didn’t have to do any fighting.
I always remembered that during the cold war.
Who, by the way, goes on being mentionned all the time as the first man to have circumnavigated, despite dying on the way. Not exactly a myth, but I always found this puzzling.
Well, yeah. By early 1944 British and American long-range bombers had reduced much of the German production capability to rubble. You can’t really disconnect both fronts.
Still another myth. German war production increased during WWII.
Our bombers reduced cities to rubble, but factories still churned out the material as fast as ever. The strategic bombing campaign did not reduce production. Widipedia article. What finally was effective, late in the war, was a concentrated attack on the German transportation system and the interruption of their fuel supplies which mostly came the Balkans.
The Wiki article defends the strategic bombing of production facilities to some extent but throughout it it is clear that the really effective damage from bombing was the interruption of the transportation system.
The troops defending te Maginot line couldn’t be deployed in the Ardennes, as far as i understand it, for a lot of reasons :
-This border still had to be defended
-These troops were limited in number (that was the whole point. A small number of troops in the forts could stop a way larger attacking force).
-They weren’t equipped to fight out in the countryside. They were equipped to fight in fortified positions. They were not supposed to be mobile, their heavy weapons were the forts’ weapons, their ammunitions safely stockpiled, etc…
(Family anecdote by the way : some units were actually sent from there, though. One of my great-uncle’s regiment was stationned in eastern France, and was sent to the Ardennes, where he got killed)
And of course, much more importantly, the whole issue with the german Blitzkrieg was its speed. Troops that could have been sent more conveniently, quickly and efficiently than the ones manning the Maginot line proved to be unable to do so. The french army wasn’t very mobile. And it being very mobile wasn’t a major priority anyway, since a position war, WWI-style, was expected. An example of this is the fact that french forces weren’t equipped with radios, because communications could be intercepted, but instead with more secure field phones, that required land lines, with an obviously disastrous result as soon as German forces had bypassed the lines or even as soon as a french unit had itself moved. During most of the battle in the Ardennes, nobody, nor at the highest, nor at the lowest level, had any clue about what was happening, due to a complete collapse of the communications. Even tanks weren’t equipped with radios. Another example is that there were light fortifications in the Ardennes too. With guns that could fire only in one direction (like, say, the german bunkers defending the beaches during D-Day). Towards the expected fixed positions/trenches of the German army. In a movement war, a small german force just had to attack them from the other side, and voila!
Finally, the Ardennes area was poorly defended because it was thought that no signifant force could cross them quickly, hence that no important offensive could happen there. So, this area was poorly defended, and ony with reserve troops and there were no existing reserves for this part of the front (still on the assumption that in the odd case of an attack in this area, there would be ample time to bring forces from elsewhere since the german would have such a hard time crossing the Ardennes). So there was no reinforcements to send there quickly.
And of course Germany used a decoy. Since french and british forces were massed at the frontier waiting for an offensive in Belgium, the germans offered them exactly that. The allied forces rushed into Belgium, as planned, got stuck there while the real offensive began in the Ardennes, and were completely unable to retreat in time when it became obvious they were going to be trapped.
Also, I would note that even after the breakthrough in the Ardennes, the french high command still had no clue about the ennemy’s intentions. Either it could turn west and rush to the sea (what they did), or they could intend to attack Paris and turn south, or they could turn east and attack the Maginot line from the rear (in which case it would have been a really bad idea to remove the troops defending it). They still didn’t know that what was happening there, rather than the offensive in Belgium, was the main assault, either.
By the way, I would note that if you look at some site with pictures depicting of the Maginot line’s forts, in particular the inside, you might note that they were really impressive and surprisingly modern for this era (or at least I was surprised and impressed when I checked this out).
[semijack]It’s amazing how mistakes by the military repeat themselves. In the winter of 1944, Ike and his planners were convinced that the Germans were beaten in the west and it was now merely a matter of time before the whole thing could be wound up. Our line holding the area west of the Ardennes area along the border with Belgium and Luxemberg was about 40 miles long (as I recall) and was defended by only 2 well spread out divisions, the 106th and another that I can’t think of right now that was there to recover and refit after recent heavy action. And the 106th was fresh from from the US having been in the ETO in a couple of weeks. The area was so lightly defended because it was thought that the Ardennes Forest provided cover because an armored attack through it was too difficult.
That’s where the Germany army struck in the Battle of The Bulge as they had in the spring of 1940.[/semijack]
I just wanted to add to this that, although the RAF and the USAF reduced Berlin almost completely to rubble, the postal service kept working right up until the Red Army took the Kremlin, there was electricity and running water where the lines and pipes had not been damaged, and they were still manufacturing guns, tanks, and planes until the suicides in Der Fuhrerbunker, at which point it was everyone for themselves.
Indeed, there were still movies showing at the cinema (Kolberg was one of the first Full Colour Epic Movies, made with 100,000 Wermacht troops as Napoleonic Soldiers when they really should have been fighting the Russians).
The He-162 Salamander was also produced at the very end of the war- it went from blueprint to combat flying in something insane like 10 weeks- and in the end, it was the lack of fuel which did the Germans in completely in the West. Whole legions of Panzers and Squadrons of planes sat in depots and on runways because there was no fuel to run them with… a situation which has parallels in the modern world, too- but that’s for a different thread.
Sorry, that should read “The Red Army took the Reichstag”. :smack:
Rues lack of Edit Function, and not for the first time, either…
Those huge numbers of 88s shooting at Allied bombers could have easily been shooting holes in Russian tanks if not defending German cities. At least one of the results from the bombing campaign
Indeed, it does. When I was studying WWII in high school, american and british operations were overemphatized and the eastern front was lousely covered, apart from Stalingrad. I got out of school with the distinct belief that the main contributor to the eventual victory was by a large margin the USA. And that the Russians were mostly being killed in droves trying to resist to the Germans until the Americans would come to save the day. It took me a long time to realize that this depiction was pretty innacurate. And obviously, IME, most frenchmen still widely underestimate the importance of Russia in WWII and overestimate the importance of the USA.
Which is quite weird in a country which is not particularily US-friendly. I tend to attribute this to the memories of the WWII generations, passed down to the next ones.
Strategic Bombing: it is true that Germany was able to retain a lot of war production despite the bombing. However, the germans had two big problesms:
-fuel was running low-the Luftwaffe had insufficient fuel for night fighters and training
-transport was difficult, because the USAAF and RAF targeted railroad stations and terminals.
After the loss of the Rumanian oilfields, Germany got by on synthetic fuel, but there was not enough production of that.
Strategic bombing would have worked better if the Allies had concentrated on destroying the railroads and syntheitic fuel plants. I also think that had the Ruhr been targeted, most of thesynthetic fuel production (based on coal) would have been wiped out.
As for the Battle of the Bulge-Eisenhower screwed up-he had numerous reports of a German offensive-yet ignored them. :smack:
Sure. :rolleyes:
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Allied area and strategic bombing forced Nazi Germany to commit enormous quantities of anti-aircraft guns and ammunition to homeland defense. A large number of 88mm cannons (some put the figure at 10,000) that otherwise would have been used as anti-tank guns on both the Eastern and Western Fronts, had to guard against Allied bombers. If Germany had been assured that her cities were off limits to Allied bombers, perhaps as many as 7,000 of the 10,000 88mm cannons committed to anti-aircraft defense would have been deployed by the Wehrmacht as anti-tank weapons, a sobering thought when one realizes the toll such firepower could have inflicted on American, British and Russian tank-crews. Germany’s defense of her airspace and cities required 900,000 personnel to man the anti-aircraft “flak guns” (Fliegerabwehrkanonen) which numbered 14,250 heavy guns ranging from the superb 88mm to 12.8 cm, 34,750 light to medium guns ranging from 20mm to 3.7 cm, 1,500 barrage balloons, and 6,750 searchlights.
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This led to complaints that, due to the apparent ineffectiveness of anti-aircraft defences as a whole, that the guns should be stripped from the air defense units and handed over to the army for anti-tank duties. However this politically unpopular move was never made.
Or along your lines of debate: whatever :rolleyes:
Yes, but thats not the same as saying (the earlier poster did) that it was the bombing itself that won the war, or helped to do so.
I made the point earlier that war in the east was a very close run thing, during the German Offensives of '41 and '42 Germany came very close to defeating the Red Army (during the attack on Stalingrad, the difference between victory and defeat came down to a couple of city blocks and a handful of occupied buildings). It was the western allies attacks during this period (both on land and by air) that probably had the biggest effect on the final outcome of the war, exactly for this reason, despite the fact that are generally less remembered than the later campaigns in the west. The german troops that were involved, though small compared to the huge numbers deployed in the east, could have made the diffence on the eastern front.
Any effort whatever on the part of the western forces prior to the Normandy landings has some effect. As Lincoln said about Grant’s “action on all fronts” conduct of the Civil War, “Those not skinning can hold a leg.” However the air war in the west during the time when we had no land forces on the Continent was conducted at enormous cost to us and wasn’t all that effective.
The original discussion was about US logistical support being the main reason that the Soviets were able to fight so effectively. However I pointed out that Soviet production increased continually during the war, exceeded that of Germany and in many categories of war material, such as tanks and artillery, exceeded that of the US. That was countered by the claim that US bombing hampered German production. That is irrelevant to the point that US logistics which was of great importance largely in the matter of trucks sent to the Soviets wasn’t the main reason the Soviets fought so effectively. I think their production of other materiels show that they had capacity to produce plenty of trucks had they needed them. I regret ever having been sidetracked into the question of the effectiveness of the US strategic, daylight bombing campaign. I’ll try to avoid that in the future.