During the last days of the siege of Berlin, Hitler confessed to associates in his bunker that he was plagued by nightmares of the maps showing the positions of the Sixth Army when it surrendered at Stalingrad.
Sailboat
Oh come on!
Any German general worth his salt would have been fully aware that Russia was a fucking big place and that the Russians were more than capable of retreating 1000 miles and still putting up a fight
My favorite example of ths was when I was working the info desk at a Museum in Philadelphia. Someone with a British accent came upand asked me for directions to a restaraunt they had made reservations for that evening. I did not recognize the name, and check the books we had that listed the restaraunts. Nothing. I wondered if it was a new place in the 'burbs. So I asked “Is this out of the city?”
"yes’
This usually means a suburb, or at most New Jersey
“Do you know what town its in?”
“Niagra.”
:smack:
I then had to explain to them the concept of the size of even this small part of the US.
Well, let’s keep in mind that the Germans had beaten the Russians in World War I, when they were far more occupied in the West than they were in 1941, and were facing a Russian dictator who hadn’t purged his officer corps and starved a big part of his population. Obviously invading Russia is never a great idea, but it wasn’t quite as crazy as it can seem in retrospect.
Well no, actually the Russians decided to fight among themselves so all the soldiers decided to bugger off back home to join in the festivities
Nope. I already mentionned it several times and I’ll do it again. France wasn’t in any position to put up a protracted defense. The lat attempt to do so by organizing a defense line along the Loire river had miserably failed. The german army not only was already ocupying most of the country, but it was advancing at a speedy rate essentially unopposed because France hadn’t any more any army left. Basically, half of it had been capured or evacuated without weapons in Belgium/Northern France/Dunkirk, and the oter half was surrounded in north-eastern France. It was a matter of days before the country would entirely be under german militay control.
The only proposal made at the time regarding “protracted resitance” was the “reduit breton” concept : trying to defend the Britanny peninsula until… until I don’t know what (and they probably didn’t, either). A plan which was of course dismissed as ludicrous and unfeasable by the french high command.
The choice faced at the time wasn’t between a protracted resistance in France and surrendering, but between :
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A military capitulation without peace and a government in exile (Churchill, who wanted to keep on his side french North Africa and more importantly the french fleet even went as far as proposing a common Franco-British government)
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An armistice according to whatever terms the germans would dictate. Which was the path followed.
And by the way, the more I try to view this situation wihout hindsight (not knowing that the UK would keep on fighting instead of accepting a reasonnable peace two weeks later, not knowing that war would break out between Germany and the Soviet Union, not knowing that the USA would eventually join a war still going on years later, not knowing that Hitler would turn out to be way worse than the others dictators who ruled most of Europe, and so on), the more I think that the few politicians who historically supported the option 1) were complete fools.
It was a somewhat reasonable possibility to think this would happen again. Besides, it wasn’t like the Russians decided to fight among themselves to celebrate how well they were doing against the Germans.
My point is, there’s a tendency to think of the French as prone to surrender and the Russians as tough, to the last man fighters, but that perception is largely based on what happened in World War II. Before, you’d look at the lousy Russian performance in World War I and the Russo-Japanese War and the disasters of the Civil War, the purges and collectivization, and the heroic French fighting at Verdun, etc, and have a whole different view of things.
Point taken…I think.
However I still maintain that the Germans had not beaten the Russians prior to the outbreak of the Russian civil war.
What basically happened was that the Russians called for an armistice, returned home and began killing each other instead of Germans.
Incidentally, you forgot the duffing up the Finns gave the Russians
Well, yeah, that too. I think, though, that we’re in basic agreement that while invading Russia was a blunder, it’s wrong to look at it ahistorically as if the Germans were a bunch of nuts who couldn’t read a map and had absolutely no idea who they were fighting.
Ehhhhh…
I’m not so sure of that. The French COULD have resisted, quite effectively. But it would have taken a vastly higher tolerance for casualties than they had; it would have involved mass death on the scale of what had happened in Russia. You don’t need an organized army or any kind of real territorial holdings - but you do need a ruthless will to fight on at any cost. The French were beaten in morale, not material. The Russians were almsot beaten in material, but never morale.
Granted, their morale was bolstered by a psychotic tyrant who threatened such dire retribution upon anyone who surrendered or refused to fight that most would risk the German’s wrath rather than Stalin’s. This option wasn’t even available to the French, because the conditions were not “correct.” (given that I thik those conditions are fundamentally wrong, I put in scarequotes). But the French had ample ability to fight if they’d had stronger, feistier leadership. I view the tragedy of France in WWII as a failure of its political class.
For the French to have continued resistance, they would be fighting in the most populated region of France. Millions of civilians would have been killed, and cities devastated. Russia was different -it was a vast, unpopulated land with hundreds of miles of rural areas between the cities. The Russian territories were much more defensible, because there were no all-weather roads connecting the cities. Could the French have continued? yes, but only at a huge cost…which the government wasn’t prepared to make.