And yet curiously not a single historian in the 24 years since he wrote it has chosen to either call him out on it or deride what he wrote as a blurb, only you. Rather odd considering his peers had no issue speaking critically of him when they disagreed with other things he wrote. If all you have to offer are lame attempts at character assassination of Keegan, absurdities that he should have footnoted that sentence with weather reports of May 1941 or it had no value and similar tripe, I have nothing further to say to you outside of the Pit. This is as absurd as your insistence that had the Japanese won at Midway that thousands of fighters would have had to be assigned to Hawaii to defend against hundreds of Japanese bombers that could be based there, ignoring both the facts that hundreds of bombers couldn’t fit on the Midway Atoll and that nowhere, ever, has a 10-1 ratio of defending fighters to attacking bombers been considered anything but massive overkill.
I’ll leave you two things to chew on: Operations in Greece concluded on April 30th. German forces were back in position for Barbarossa by mid to late May. How exactly was the Balkan operation continuing to delay them from launching Barbarossa from the end of May and most of June until June 22? And this, from wiki, Battle of Greece, Impact on Barbarossa:
Yeah, my somewhat off the cuff impression from reading various sources is that the whole debate is fueled by ex post attempts to justify the British adventure in supporting the Greeks; and of course it is equally handy for various German generals.
A better ex post justification is this: that, together with the Dieppe disaster, it somewhat inoculated the Western Allies against committing to the continent until they were in a position to do so (or, at least, the Brits, who then more or less bamboozled the Americans into avoiding a premature European invasion).
That’s my impression as well, there was an understandable desire to find some redeeming value to the otherwise disastrous British decision to commit to Greece. Not only were the British kicked off of the continent again leaving behind large numbers of prisoners, the forces sent to Greece were pulled from North Africa where the British had the Italians on the ropes. Had these troops not been sent to thier doom in Greece they might have successfully concluded driving the Italians out of Libya and ended the North African campaign in the spring of 1941. As it turned out of course the removal of these 60,000 or so troops coincided with the dispatch of the Africa Corps to Libya and the fight for North Africa would go on for another two painful years.
I can certainly understand the desire to go to the aid of the Greeks, and the British were I understand treaty-bound to do so when the Greeks were attacked by the Italians, but sound military strategy it was not.
I’m not sure I see your point. I was responding to this:
1989 isn’t very recent compared to two years ago; and as you can see the Historical Branch of the UK Cabinet Office came to the conclusion that the Balkans did nothing to delay Barbarossa in 1952.
As yet another post script, I wold say that Kursk also represented the end of “blitzkrieg” warfare…a style of fighting that had served the Germans well since 1939. Blitzkrieg was a good way for a smaller, under equipped army to break down a superior foe…sort of “shock and awe”…in it, concentrated air and ground attacks would overwhelm the enemy, and an armored breakthrough would sow fear and confusion. In the case of Kursk, the Soviets were too well prepared, and Zhukov and his commanders never lost confidence. The failure of the Kursk offensive must have sobered the German general staff-they realized that they were going to lose. Germany cold not afford protracted war-and this must have been a wake up call for the German generals.
Looking at the big picture in WW2, it strikes me that, in general, the more one of the major political leaders interfered with the direction of strategy, attempting to micro-manage battles, and impose his will on his subordinate military leaders concerning military minutae, the worse their cause did. This was true of Churchill, Hitler and Stalin; Greece, for example, was I understand Churchill’s baby.
The exception would be Japan, where the military leaders in effect set strategy without any non-military political oversight at all, having completely taken over the government … which in a sense amounted to the same thing.
This may have been an Allied strength, in that the Axis powers defined themselves at least in part by “heroic” military leadership by their political leaders. Führerprinzip was a major military liability.
Edit: though Kursk may be a counter-example - I read somewhere that the generals thought that one up with limited input from Hitler.
I do think that Hitler became a convenient excuse for assigning blame in post war memoirs, because well fuck Hitler (as extremely admirable sentiment). Many German generals just did not want to admit that they their asses handed to them time and time again by Messers Zhukov, Konev and Chuikov. Western scholarship in the cold war was loath to admit to Soviet skill.
By the way the specific idea of “hold your ground” was not bad either.Every withdrawal brought the Red Army closer to Germany itself. THAT was something that any pone was very right in wanting to avoid, in light of what actually happened.
I don’t agree that was all there is to it (though naturally, blaming Hitler for everything had its attractions!)
After all, after the war, Churchill was more or less top of the world in terms of reputation - not only as leader of one of the winners, and not only because his magnificent oratory sustained his country in its darkest hour, but also because, to a large extent, he wrote the history - won a Nobel Prize in literature for it in fact. How many other leaders have had the fortune to write their own story about their exploits - and were actually well regarded writers? Julius Caesar springs to mind.
Yet to a degree, after decades of hindsight, it can be seen that the much-lauded Churchill suffered as a leader from the exact same disease as the widely reviled (after he lost) Hitler - interfering in military strategy to bad effect.
So, for that matter, did Stalin - at least, going into the war. The difference is that he relaxed his draconian control over the military under the pressure of dire necessity. Hitler did not.
Churchill had Alan Brooke to control him. Hitler has Jodl and Kietel. Plus I actually think Hitler was a better strategist that Churchill, Winston had only bad ideas wrt to his interferences and Adolf actually got a few things right, France 1940 for instance. Yes, blasphemy.
A significant difference between Hitler and Stalin is that Hitler’s early successes, which were startling and achieved contrary to the weight of “professional” military advice, convinced him he was a matchless military genius who, ultimately, knew better than his staff; Stalin’s experiences early in the war convinced him of the opposite concerning himself.
Churchill was full of ideas bad and good (mostly bad).
As the war progressed, Hitler’s inflexibility and micromanagement proved an absolute disaster to his own side, while Churchill’s proved more of a periodic annoyance. The difference there is that, towards the end of the war, Hitler was waging a battle for survival and Churchill was not - the significance of his fight wained in comparison with his allies. Churchill could afford to be frivolously romantic in a way that Hitler could not.
Ultimately, Churchill’s primary value to the allies was his oratorial skills and his refusal to concede defeat; that weighs heavily against his liability as a strategist.
There strategy up until the end was to throw troops into battle with no concern for loss of life and simply overwhelm the Germans. Millions died unnecessarily. They intimidated their soldiers through NKVD units that trailed behind the Armies and killed as many as 1 million.
They were greatly aided in turning around the war by British and American intel..they had broken the German military code and the Alloes knew where the Germans were and what they were going to do. This, the Russians could concentrate much greater forces in the South than would have been possible without the intel.
The Soviets could have ended the war much sooner if they hadnt halted at the Vostula to allow the Germans to destroy the Polish Resistance; Stalin had no intention of allowing Poles any self-determination. And, if they hadnt rraped and looted across East Prussia and even Poland, perhaps the ordinary German soldier would have surrendered much sooner as what was happening on the West. German studies have shown that 1 in 3 of ALL..ALL..German females were raped.
In an obscene, Machiavellian, way, this is actually testimony to Soviet (i.e. Stalin’s) skill - ‘let’s have our enemies destroy our enemies, then we’ll take on what’s left’.
Including the fact that he was conveniently dead, which made it easier to blame everything that went wrong on him, even the things that weren’t his fault.
Very true, Churchill is probably best remembered in relation to Anzio by his comment that “I had hoped we were hurling a wildcat into the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale” than to the fact that he made the Anzio landing his pet project and it was carried out at his insistence in spite of its obvious problems, not the least of which was the lack of enough amphibious lift in theater to land a wildcat faster than the Germans could move troops to contain and counterattack the beachhead. Comparisons to Gallipoli, also Churchill’s brainchild, are hard to avoid.
With one exception I have to disagree with you; Hitler’s no retreat orders were almost always in defiance of any military sense and often of any reality of the situation. Most often all it did was allow the Soviets to encircle German forces that were not allowed to retreat, much as the Germans were able to encircle and destroy huge bags of Soviet forces in the opening months of the war. The Soviets learned from these mistakes made in 1941, when the Germans launched the 1942 summer offensive they found to their dismay that they weren’t able to encircle and destroy masses of Soviet troops as they had the previous year, rather than standing fast and being destroyed they would retreat and avoid encirclement.
The exception is Hitler’s no retreat order during the Soviet winter counteroffensive of 1941/42. In this case it was probably the wisest choice of actions, the Germans had been caught overextended, there was a very real fear that a retreat would turn into a rout with the specter of the fate of Napoleon’s Grande Armée looming in everyone’s head, and finally there was nowhere to retreat to that was any better than where German troops already were. There were no prepared defenses or fall back lines to withdrawal to, and as bad as casualties to the cold weather were, retreating would mean abandoning whatever little protection from exposure to the elements was available and marching in the freezing cold. Large amounts of heavy equipment would also have to be abandoned. Unfortunately for the Germans, the lesson Hitler seemed to draw from this was that ordering no retreat was a panacea for any situation.
This is simply not true. The Soviets demonstrated a great deal of skill and strategy during the war, getting better and better as the war dragged on. The sheer number of successful encirclement operations they conducted against the Germans speaks lie to the claim that the only strategy they used was to overwhelm the Germans. Just for a couple of the best known examples, Operation Uranus which resulted in the destruction of 6th Army at Stalingrad and Operation Bagration which threw the Germans out of the last remaining occupied parts of the USSR and halfway across Poland, encircling and destroying most of Army Group Centre in the process. From the link:
The Soviets halted at the Vistula because they had outrun their supply lines. Stalin’s refusal to offer any aid to the Polish Home Army was despicable and Machiavellian, but they weren’t in a position to simply march into Warsaw. The brutality of the Eastern Front was also of Germany’s doing, not the Soviets. Unavoidable considering the German’s plan was to murder off much of the Soviet population and to reduce what remained to slavery to make room for German colonists. Lebensraum was the entire reason for the war with the USSR. By the by, more than 1 in 2 of all Soviet POWs taken by the Germans died in captivity in a deliberate program of working and underfeeding them to death. From here:
Its easy to encircle troops that arent allowed to retreat.
The brutality in the Ukraine started long before 1941. The Soviets murdered 8 million Ukrainians during the 1930’s and countless numbers of others. Their lack of inesse and any sort of military skill can perhaps be seen in the Battle of Berlin. They had the war won. They didnt need to massively assault the city…but thats what they did…I have read that they took one million casualties. Its an obscenity.
The survival rate if German POWs likely wasnt any higher. They were forced into slave labor; German POW’s cleared and rebuilt Stalingrad for example. Many didnt retirn home until the mid 1950’s. How bitterly ironic that while German leaders were on trail in Nuremberg for war crimes and crimes against humanity; being udged by our Soviet ‘allies’; the Soviets were still committing the same crimes.
Indeed, for many Eastern Europeans, WWII didnt end until 1989.
The Germans could have easily won that war had they adopted the warplans from WWI. Granting sovereignty to Ukraine and the Baltic States and promisin g to overthrow the Bolshis and actually following through on it would have made things very hard on Uncle Joe.
But the Germans and the Soviets were both murderous and evil. They deserved one another. It was the Soviets who allowed the Germans to start WWII in the first place; remember the Molitov agreement of late August 1939. And also remember hat the Soviets helped the Germans break the arms limitation provisions of the Treaty of Versailles by allowing the Germans to develop armor tech in their territory.
Your comments are true to a certain extent..for example, the Russians took over 160,000 dead at Kursk-vs about 55,000 for the Germans. The final assault on Berlin was ordered by Stalin-both Zhukov and Koniev were ordered to assalut the Germans-at no heed for casualties.
Indeed, Stalin and Hitler were only slightly different-neither cared anything for human life. They were both dedicated ideologues-with no concern for anything except their own egos.
That wouldn’t have been necessary. Zhukov and Konev wouldn’t have needed to be told to ignore casualties.
The big decision Stalin made was a non-decision. Zhukov and Konev were rivals and both had been jockeying to be the one who got to capture Berlin. Stalin, of course, encouraged the rivalry. So he drew a line up to Berlin and told them, “Your forces advance on this side of the line and your forces advance on that side of the line.” And then he stopped the line before it hit Berlin and told them that the city was both of their objectives and it belonged to whoever got there first.
The Japanese government was outlined in the Meiji Constitution, which was based on the German model of government. The Ministry of War (Army) and Ministry of Navy were members of the cabinet, but did not report to the Prime Minister, but rather directly to the emperor, who was not actively overseeing the day-to-day matters, nor attempting to set or veto strategies.
In addition, the chiefs-of-staff of the service branches also nominally reported directly to the emperor and were not under their respective ministers.
Although the prime ministers were military leaders, they were outside of the chain of authority within the ranks. The foreign ministers and (I believe) most other cabinet members were civilians.
You are correct that there was no political oversight of the military.
