Hi Wout
Been out on a beautifull lake front building site laying out a home designed and taking topos with the engineers and surveyor most of the morning--electronics and survey equipement are amazing nowdays,-GPS related --also overseeing the construction phase along with the design of the home and really enjoying the process on this beautifull warm sunny breezy day.-the project looks good ,-the lakefront home project will employ 100s of people locally .
The lake ,evan for a work-day was full of boats of all types , nice to see .
I,m sorry the author's article upset you on a personal level ,and that your reaction is to attempt to insult me on a personal level ,-so in some ways I,m pleased that the author has invoked that responce that challenges you to think, evan though misguidedly .-{-by the way I don,t listen to am radio or talk shows ,-just the local radio station with a very D bias ABC news }.
It is amazing how people that accuse others of a human failing --as per your hate comment ,--is generally always better applied to themselves . I can agree with you wout on numerous subjects and be supportive of your efforts -
Formula 16 --ratings improvement ,--disliking ugly americans -{who remain nameless}
--but I can disagree with you on EU or socialistic notions and don,t have to accuse or attempt to personally insult as result -just disagree .
I think you missed the larger point and intent of VDH's article which is in part as you noted that in history all great civilizations had the common theme of free marketplace and healthy middle class that partisipated in it .--as per Amsterdam etc .
Don,t think he meant to imply that this is exclusive in history or will be in the future ,--just brief commentary on the numerous obvious problems the EU is currently inflicted with.
The author VDH is a history PROF .and author of several books ,-He is also a farmer in Calif ,-his Scandanavian heritage only a coupe generations removed immigrating to raise mainly grapes -raisins in Calif though mainly a prof. in Calif..
Recall numerous very offensive comments you have made over time about the US ,---i e --on our veterans day posting about the evils of US military personell and how you believe Stalin defeated Nazi Germany etc etc etc ,---
I have a long family history of military sevice dating back to the US revolutionary war ,---your EU bias ingrained teachings are insulting at times ,--though I understand the bias and EU perspective,--interestly I have family extentions to both sides of the US revolutionary war ,-my grandmothers side remaining loyalists in 1775 and moving to present day Canada where I still have relatives in Toronto.-The other side fighting redcoats of the time, in latter centuries fighting alongside to defeat Nazi-Germany and Imperial Japan .
An example /indicator of how wars -conflicts in history and seeming enemies become friends -good neighbors and evan extended family ,-and trusted allies in future history ---again the common theme is basic human freedom -self consentual govt .and free healthy marketplace in common along with free trade .
The most current examples are the former Soviet nations of Eastern EU Hanson lists in the article, as well as mideast nations noted.
Here is another Hanson article for you --just to set the record straight on that pesky Stalin issue ---enjoy
How the 'Cowboys' of the West Defeated the Nazis
By Victor Davis Hanson
This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on May 9, 2005.
President Bush is in Moscow's Red Square today, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945. Less than four years earlier, Hitler had declared war on the "cowboys" of the U.S. following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. When America in response entered the world conflagration, the Nazis had already been fighting Britain for 27 months and the Soviet Union for over five — and seemed days away from knocking the Russians out of the war. The ascendant Reich and its Axis protectorates stretched from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert and from the English Channel to near the suburbs of Moscow, gobbling up more territory in three years than had Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon in their entire bloody careers.
Just three-and-a-half years after America's abrupt entry into the war the Nazis were not merely checked or defeated — but rather annihilated in one of the most brutal and extraordinary military achievements in history. The American ordeal was not without heartbreak and hard choices. In the present age of national furor over WMD intelligence failures and inadequately armored Humvees, we forget that World War II was largely a test of whether an America ill-prepared for war would make fewer fatal mistakes than its battle-hardened Nazi adversaries.
Heroic unescorted daylight bombing over Europe in 1942-43 proved an American bloodbath. If the intelligence for the Normandy invasion was impressive, the fighting during the next six weeks in the bloody hedgerows was tragically a near-disaster due to inexplicable ignorance about the landscape of the bocage, just a few thousand yards from the beaches. Well-meaning but flawed ideas about the requisite amount of armor and firepower of tanks led to permanent battlefield superiority for the Panzers, costing thousands of American lives. Pleasant mediocrities like Mark Clark were sometimes promoted; scary authentic military geniuses such as George Patton were occasionally ostracized. Repeatedly, we failed to destroy retreating and trapped German armies in Sicily, Italy and Normandy in the summers of 1943 and 1944. We had not a clue about Hitler's buildup of 250,000 attackers on the eve of the Battle of the Bulge. Strategically, critics complained that the war had broken out to prevent Eastern Europe from being absorbed by a totalitarian power only to end up ensuring that it was.
For all the horror of Hitler's culture of death, to end it we were put in the morally ambiguous position of aiding Stalin, who had killed millions more of his own Russians than the Nazis ever did. An ironic dividend of the wreckage of war was that tens of millions who had once chafed under the paternalism of the aristocratic Victorian imperialists were now for the next half-century to be enslaved under the savage socialist emissaries of the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, on V-E Day, Hitler and Mussolini were gone, Europe was liberated, the Holocaust ended, and the Americans free to finish off the waning militarists of Japan. Credit for victory was not ours alone. Our British and Soviet allies had fought longer and killed far more Germans. Hitler's follies — the invasion of the Soviet Union, the belated mobilization of the German economy, the misapplication of his frightening new weaponry, and his sometimes lunatic intrusion into military decision-making — all helped.
Revisionists now tend to credit the lion's share of the Allied victory over Hitler to the Soviets who probably killed two out of every three soldiers of the Wehrmacht. Yet the Russians waged a one-front war in comparison to the Anglo-Americans. They did not invade Italy or North Africa, and opportunistically took on an already defeated Japan only in the very last days of the war. Global submarine campaigning, surface naval warfare, long-range strategic bombing, massive logistical aid — all vital to the allied success, were beyond the scope of monolithic Russian power.
The Americans and British went from the windswept and hard-to-supply beaches of Normandy to the heart of Germany — on some routes about the same distance as Moscow to Berlin — in about a fourth of the time it took the beleaguered Red Army to cross into Germany. How did our forefathers pull it off, and are there any wartime lessons that we can distill from their accomplishment?
What destroyed the Nazis was the combination of American matériel and the zeal of large democratic conscript armies that, despite little preparation or experience, within mere months proved as formidable as their more experienced German adversaries. By the time the Americans were through, they had built 100,000 armored vehicles, 300,000 planes, 27 aircraft carriers and mustered 12 million people into the military. Indeed, by May 9, 1945, nearly 20 million more Americans were working than in 1939.
What the highly individualistic GI may have lacked in discipline, he more than made up with improvisation and initiative. Rambunctious Americans were innately mechanical and at home racing through Europe on their machines of mobile war. A free press at home debated decisions, and a popular and re-elected president explained how the sacrifices of war were tied to the higher good of democracy and freedom — and hence ultimately to national security. Gone was the old notion that two oceans ensured parochial Americans a pass from the perennial mess overseas or that the advent of industrial wealth abroad brought with it reasoned foreign leaders free from primitive emotions.
Once the Axis declared war, the U.S. did not have much patience with arguments that Hitler had legitimate grievances arising out of World War I or that clumsy American diplomacy had incited the fascists in Tokyo. Naiveté and the appearance of weakness in the face of bullies — not an accident, an old wrong, or a misplaced word — were agreed to have prompted attack.
The generation that was forced to ignite enemy cities, send billions in aid to a mass-murdering Stalin, bomb French rail yards, and deploy soldiers who sometimes fought with obsolete equipment, felt that they did not have to be perfect to know that they were good — and far better than the enemy. For them, war was never an easy utopian alternative between the perfect and the bad, but instead so often a horrific conundrum of bad choices versus those far worse — victory going only to those who had greater preponderance of right, made the fewer mistakes, and outlasted the enemy.
©2005 Victor Davis Hanson
-AND HERE IS ANOTHER Hanson argues the other side of being overly zealous in crediting the US military .
-Victor Davis Hanson
“An Overextended Argument. A reply to John Mosier’s “War Myths””
John Mosier’s revisionist examination of the First World War has a great deal of merit. Most historians, especially in the United Kingdom, have both underplayed the critical role of the American army that began arriving in force in 1917 and underappreciated the record of qualitative superiority of the German army over its Allied counterparts. After all, when Russia was at last knocked out, German armies, undefeated on two fronts, combined in the West against exhausted and depleted enemies, only to lose the war in less than two years. Mosier is absolutely right to emphasize these facts and to argue that only the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) accounted for victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.
Yet there is a fallacy of overextending that argument, as for example, when he emphasizes that the British only occupied 15% of the battle line on the Western Front — as if the allocation of terrain is a better gauge of military efficacy than, say, the relative numbers of Germans killed by the British or the contribution of British technology in critical areas like tank or aircraft innovation. This larger question of the proper credit for the Allied victory in the First World War can never be properly adjudicated, since it hinges on fundamental and often intangible questions of emotion and human nature. Is credit for victory (in any context) to be given to those who hold off the enemy, while suffering horrendous casualties, only to be saved by late arrivals? Or do the laurels deservedly belong to their eleventh-hour rescuers, without whose timely appearance in force the previous sacrifice would have proven in vain? “They” say we came late, suffered little, and stole the show; “we” retort that we arrived in the nick of time to save them from defeat in their own war. Both claims have merit and I don’t see how Mosier or any others will quite settle the relative arguments, although he is to be congratulated for emphasizing the other side of the often forgotten equation.
Mosier again reveals a penchant for revisionist insight when it comes to Blitzkrieg — and yet again simplifies elements of his often zealous argument to the point of caricature. He seems to think that Blitzkrieg was a static method, that its success or failure hinged on the basis of some theory chiseled in stone, independent of time and space. But was that really true outside of the handbooks of a few strategists who were still shaken by the trench holocausts of the First World War?
In fact, in certain instances, Blitzkrieg was a far superior tactic to mass infantry charges, entrenchment, or static and incremental patrolling — but only if particular prerequisite conditions were first met. Good weather, fairly level and unobstructed terrain, and ample gas and supplies were all essential for sustained mobility and advancement. Only tactical air support made the fast moving use of armor on a narrow front safe from flank attack — as Patton and Pete Quesada proved in August 1944.
In contrast, factor in rain, clouds, or snow — whether in the case of the 1941 final German late autumn approach to Moscow, Patton at Metz, Market-Garden, or the December 1944 German advance into the Ardennes — and motorized columns could stall and become vulnerable to counterattack by even small pockets of well-led infantry. Add in the problem of supply lines that were either stretched or for a time nonexistent, and then persistence in Blitzkrieg was a prescription for a disastrous combination of impassable roads, out-of-gas tanks, fog and clouds hampering fighter support, and armor offering easy targets in mountain roads and forests.
If Mosier’s argument is that the efficacy of Blitzkrieg has been exaggerated as a cure-all wonder strategy, thus distorting our own appreciation of the real pulse of the war, then he is, of course, mostly correct. In fact, armored breakout was just an alternate method of rapid advancement ushered in by the internal combustion engine, whose efficacy depended on an astute general who knew when and when not to employ it. Blitzkrieg does wonders when you want to outflank the Iraqi army in the deserts outside Kuwait or reach Baghdad in a rapid anabasis along the Tigris-Euphrates Valley in just three weeks. But it proves of little value in taking the streets of Fallujah or ejecting killers from a mosque in Najaf.
So if the weight of Mosier’s argument is that Blitzkrieg brought no real novel advantages to warfare and instead was counterproductive, then it is once again a thesis taken too far. Dismissing Blitzkrieg’s efficacy takes no account of the radical change on the battlefield that tanks, motorized transport, and tactical air support could achieve in mere days — not merely encircling and surrounding less mobile enemy forces, but also in achieving a psychological toll that might exceed the actual severity of the attack.
Mosier fails to distinguish between what we should call “good” and “bad” Blitzkrieg. His apparent assumption is that unthinking swashbucklers always thought as if they were doctrine theorists such as Fuller or Liddell Hart. Yet read Patton’s frantic comments in August 1944 when he was already worried that stretched supply lines, reduced enemy interior lines, shorter days, bad weather, and rough muddy terrain on the horizon would soon grind his advance to a halt before crossing into Germany. Even advocates like Rommel, Guderian, and Patton accepted, whether by instinct or bitter experience, that there were times when the unleashing of supposedly rapid moving tank columns proved neither rapid nor even successful. Patton, for all his bluster, privately knew that his lateral rescue sprint to Bastogne in snow over icy narrow mountain roads in sub-zero weather was not going to be anything like the past race around Paris.
By the same token, many on the German general staff anticipated that the so-called von Runstedt offensive of December 1944 would be doomed in a way the similar 1940 strike was not — given the changed strategic calculus, the nature of the respective enemies, changed weather conditions, and the absence of even minimal reserves of petrol. In fact, the initial German breakthrough of late December showed the full irony of Hitler’s idiocy: adherence to a sound concept in absolutely the wrong conditions; rapid advance with only a few days of logistical reserves; little air support when the weather cleared; and thrusting a long column into an enormous foe when there were no more reserves to protect the base.
Similarly, inclement weather and fighting on the defense in mountainous terrain favored the Finns — for a time. That the Russians may have thought massed armor assaults under such impossible conditions were viable is hardly a referendum on the efficacy per se of Blitzkrieg. Mosier at times seems to forget that to astute practitioners Blitzkrieg, like all military strategies, was simply one of many alternatives suitable for a given time and place.
Had Grant sought to outflank Lee and march to his rear without first defeating him in Northern Virginia, he probably would have failed with disastrous consequences for Lincoln in a vulnerable Washington. But such a foolish move would not necessarily have been a referendum on the logic of the so-called “indirect approach,” much less a harbinger that a firebrand like Sherman would fail in Georgia and the Carolinas when he tried avoiding battle and advancing deep into enemy country without communications, flank protection, or logistical support (but in more favorable terrain, in a wider theater of operations, with an entirely different army, and against commanders unlike Robert E. Lee). In fact, the Grant-Sherman partnership is a good antidote to Mosier’s various theses, reminding us that it is hard to give credit to victory to a particular army in a multifaceted struggle replete with differing types of sacrifice, and that certain theories of advance are not only predicated on particular favorable conditions, but also only work in concert with their radically opposite counterparts.
The same pattern of overgeneralization is again true of Mosier’s critique of strategic air power. It likewise was not a static concept. Sending lumbering bombers over targets at high altitudes, without fighter support, when wedded to the illusion of pinpoint accuracy with a small load of high explosives was naïve and surely not worth the sacrifice of devastating losses in crews and planes. By 1942-43 the Army Air Corps nearly wrecked itself over Europe, proving that the grand claims of air advocates of the 1930s were lunatic.
Or were they? In the rapidly changing contexts of World War II what was true in 1942 (Mosier’s “right from the start of the war”) was not necessarily so in 1944-45, either in Europe or over Japan. Fast fighter escorts with drop tanks, improved versions of the B-17s, the entrance of the latest model Lancasters, and the appearance of the B-29 in the Pacific, coupled with the frequent use of incendiaries in loads of well over 10 tons per plane, soon spelled the loss of entire cities and a resulting disruption in enemy industrial production, communications, and transportation that in a cost/benefit analysis (if we dare use such terminology when speaking of mass death) could more than justify the (vastly reduced) losses in strategic aircraft. Moreover, much of the successes over Europe in 1944-5 were borne on the experience bought so dearly in 1942.
That Germany did not have successful four-engine bombers with long-range fighter escorts eventually proved deleterious for its cause for a variety of reasons. Neither Russia nor England (much less the United States) redeployed critical artillery for anti-aircraft use around its major cities to the same degree as the Germans. Therefore they were free to use far more of their available heavy guns on the ground in their offensives against panzers. And this question of degree is important. Both Americans and Germans diverted fighters from ground support to dogfights over the German cities. But the Americans had far more planes to spare and were inflicting bombing damage in the process; the Germans sought to defend the homeland and diverted their precious fighters from attacking rapid Allied armor advances.
The belated use of V-1s and V-2s was a disastrous strategic blunder, precisely because it allotted scarce capital and labor to weaponry that in comparison to a Lancaster or B-17 was a terribly inefficient means of dropping a ton of explosive per Mark spent. And as Williamson Murray has variously shown, it is not accurate to imply that historians are correct in concluding that “the strategic bombing campaign in Europe was hardly a howling success” — even if we look only at the larger picture of the vast diversion of resources to prevent air attacks, the inefficient restructuring of the German economy to adapt to daily bombing, and the real effect that the destruction of urban cores had on transportation and communications. The Americans, unlike either the Germans or Russians, waged a multifaceted war involving surface ships, merchant marine convoys, and a variety of land, sea, and air forces over two vast theaters, an effort in which Blitzkrieg and strategic bombing played key, but not necessarily always the key, roles.
Examine the failed German blitz of 1940, and Douhet looks like a crackpot prophet. But look again at March to August 1945 when Curtis LeMay’s Superfortresses, loaded with napalm and mines, virtually shut down the Japanese economy in six months without destroying his bomber fleet, and we are not so sure quite how to assess his mad predications. By March 11 over Japan, “the bombers always get through” was as true as it was over Germany by early 1945 — and as false as it had been in 1942.
In short, Mosier offers historians valuable reminders not to become wedded to myths that a particular theory of attack ipso facto marks watershed breakthroughs in military art and practice. But to press his claims, he sometimes must employ the same sort of inflexibility in thinking that he rightly exposes in his critics, failing to appreciate the natural evolution of a theory as both technology and practical experience prove hardly static.
Strategists eventually did fathom the advantages of new ways of making war, and by trial and error worked hard to find the proper conditions and landscapes to use strategic bombing and Blitzkrieg to their full potentials. That the Allies did so far better than the Germans explains in part why they won the war.
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