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Grimly Fiendish

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Everything posted by Grimly Fiendish

  1. Jason, you have totally lost me and I will not bother to respond to you again, although it does appear that you are trying hard to make a point. I respect that. But the fact is that I am not a historian, not a journalist, not a blogger, and not a scholar of WW2. I'm not sure you are either. I don't have time to write whole articles for you to spit on. I can't do anything but make fairly superficial remarks about an amazingly deep subject, pointing to whatever scraps of evidence I have at hand that seem relevant and interesting. I don't even care if my suggestions are proven false and you may have noticed that I have not actually tried to argue for them. I have merely presented and clarified them so that if they are knocked down, they are knocked down by someone who grasps them, not by someone who thinks arguments are won by shouting louder than anyone else. Apparently you can't handle that. I would hate to see you perform at a cocktail party---you would demand systematic evidence that the hors d'oeuvres are indeed delicious. You would bore everyone with your knowledge of hors d'oeuvre production until they all ran away. You don't seem to understand that you are posting in a wargamer's forum, not a scholarly forum. And you are acting like a troll.
  2. Krautman, could you please put up those Haffner links again? I don't see them up there. thanks in advance!
  3. Thanks, Michael. Yes, it is starting to hurt! Essentially, I agree with you: "insane" and 'stupid' are insufficient to end the discussion. At best (from the perspective of the stupid/insane argument), he was both but in a fascinating way. At worst, he was a gifted amateur with very interesting thought processes and ideological blinders to those processes. i admit that to go too far down the psychoanalytic road risks making too much of him. But i do think the same facts can be intelligently interpreted in different ways. For example, punishing his officers suggests a personal frustration with people who could not accomplish an impossible task he thought was easy, but it is not out of line with a disgust with the German people for being soft and needing only to be driven harder to achieve victory. If both interpretations are confirmed, we have a fuller picture than if we satisfied ourselves with one. So I don't think that the original question can be entirely answered by military history, as though it's just a matter of processing the mountains of hard evidence and analyzing his decisions from a rational perspective. That's just a beginning. (BTW, this thread is getting long, but Feldtrompeter was quoting Haffner a while back. That's where I got the Gotterdammerung from. Plus, if Hitler did consciously shift his priorities from battlefield victory to the Final Solution, then, rationally, that's a kind of acceptance of defeat whether he raged at his officers or not.) Also, SO, I apologize if I overreacted to your intial comments.
  4. Jason, you are tedious. But you are very good at intentionally misunderstanding other poster's remarks so you can always faithfully return to your own repetitous chant. Yes, Hitler was stupid, we know that. The funny thing you don't even realize is that all I'm doing is adding to your own argument, not trying to trump it. How could Barbarossa have succeeded when it was ordered by someone who could accept glorious defeat almost as easily as glorious success? It could not have succeeded, because the very things that made it possible doomed it. That means potential alternative military decisions may not be as central to the discussion as you insist. I have to wonder even about military intelligence. If the General Staff had told the Fuhrer flat out, There are 10 extra tank armies out there waiting for us, would he have listened? We can't know the answer, but we can have fun SPECULATING. When he dreamed up Barbarossa, he saw glorious victory. When defeat loomed, he saw glorious defeat. This is not the thought process of a winner. The timing of events is not critical to this "analysis." Similarly, Jason, my comparison of Barbarossa to Iraq was not what you think it was. It was meant to illuminate how easily even people who are not demonstrably insane can be tempted by ideology to do really stupid things with other peoples' lives. If we can do it, imagine how easy it was for Hitler to be "stupid." There is a context to his "stupidity." You are correct that my comment about Jim Crow was not speculation.
  5. heh! Jason, take a look at the name of this thread. Ignore the bad spelling and think hard on it. Then tell me how I'm not allowed to speculate freely here. I don't think logic is on your side this time. We all enjoy a bit of namecalling now and then, but really, are we to believe this forum is crawling with Hitler fans and SS fetishists? That kind of namecalling we don't need so much of. Let's stick with "idiot," "pantywaist," and "chronic masturbator" . . . those are good enough for my fiancee (bah-dump).
  6. Jason, I trust you on CM advice. But you'll have to explain (a) how the work of professional historians is not grounded in historical reality (unless of course you agree with it) and ( how exploring the idea that Hitler had a death wish as well as being a drugged-up, lunatic, egomaniacal house painter in way over his head is an apology for him. Others may dribble or dabble, but for me you're rapidly becoming the least credible forum monkey on this thread, because you seem to think with your knee reflexes. You've read carelessly and missed my point, which is that, for Hitler, Barbarossa may have held no great risk even if it led to failure. That's not irrelevant to this thread. Any normal, sane person, as you have said, would have seen the risk and prepared for it. I've heard all the old histories. I'm interested in this thread because I want to hear new ideas. Not your silly negativism. There goes that whistle. It's quittin time at the Hitler Excuse factory!
  7. Yes, I do. And I've tried to be careful not to equate the run-of-the-mill institutional/personal notions of racial superiority that were/are everywhere in the West with what Hitler did. What he did was to take that mythology and twist it and elevate it to another plane entirely. No one else tried it. And yes, without a model he would have come up with his own laws. But Jim Crow showed him what he could do now, today (in the early 1930s), without any resistance or protest. Piece of cake. The Holocaust he had to hide. An interesting debate is bubbling up here, that is somewhat new to me, between (a) Hitler used racism to bootstrap himself to dominion of Europe and ( Hitler intended to dominate Europe just so he could carry out his racist programs. And © both. The effect of this on the stupid vs insane question is probably not of much interest to the military minds who began this thread with questions about production and oil. We know Hitler's priorities were suspect from the point of view of the General Staff. But what was Hitler's intent with Barbarossa? Did he really want a quick knockout? or did he want a long, slow, death-hump that would force the complacent German people to transform themselves into a warrior race that would perform superhuman feats against the lower orders and usher in the 1000-Year Reich, or else lead to their glorious immolation and ascent to Valhalla? Just speculating, but this Haffner guy seems to think that when Hitler saw he couldn't achieve one goal he was satisfied with the next. And yet he came closest to achieving the third, not the first or second. In terms of the logic involved, consider the war in Iraq, where there are VERY superficial parallels to the Barbarossa summer campaign: it was supposed to be quick and easy, a lightning strike like Barbarossa but on a smaller scale that would impress the enemy into surrender. Thus the US didn't send enough men, didn't send enough Humvee armor, etc. etc., not for the long haul. Was this because (a) the opponent and postwar situation were underestimated and optimism controlled the battle plan? or ( because the US wanted to show the world, meaning American citizens, Europe, the 3rd world, and Al Qaeda, that we could do it alone with both hands tied, that we could take casualties and still win, that the American people are not soft and squeamish and would happily accept more dead as the cost of victory? (These speculations can be found in a number of places in the media, and are based on the neocons' own writings.) The quesiton of stupidity vs ideology, in this case, pales beside that of error vs intent. I'm not suggesting Hitler never intended to win, but it's something to chew on.
  8. Andreas Just a comment, this time decidely off-topic though my original points were not: I assure you that the whole US is and was as racist as the American South. Just see recent books like Sundown Towns, and note the "race riots" as far North as Delaware and New York. No matter the atrocity, everyone always points to some other place where "things are worse." Apologists merely make a profession of it.
  9. More to the point, Lindbergh himself was something of a Nazi sympathizer. Yet his observations have been confirmed and are a matter of record. Everyone knows about the Japanese skulls and ears and shinbones, and the execution of prisoners and survivors. What Lindbergh does not comment on, because he couldn't know and didn't care, was who started it. I think the Japanese did, because by 1942 all their officers were peasants who knew nothing of "honor." The Pacific theater was a nasty place, and the GIs adapted to it quickly. In Europe, it's known that SS camp guards were shot upon liberation. I don't know about other times. Everything falls apart in a total war. Some atrocities result from chaos and desperation and the disregard for life that you learn when you repeatedly kill to save your own. Some are accepted or ignored. Some are planned at the highest levels. These are the crucial differences.
  10. Oops, wrong button. Ignore this. [ February 08, 2006, 08:32 AM: Message edited by: Dave Stockhoff ]
  11. Andreas, just a clarification before I get lumped with the Nazi apologists. I don't mean to suggest that the US government was as racist as that of Hitler or the Nazis. I meant the US vs Germany as a whole. Hitler's first antisemitic laws were apparently inspired by/based on the Jim Crow laws of the southern US. I'm afraid I don't have a reference for this except for a placard at the Holocaust Museum. But if it's true it says a lot. [ February 08, 2006, 08:34 AM: Message edited by: Dave Stockhoff ]
  12. Anytime you're trying to state with certainty what went on in someone's head, you're going out on a limb. That's all I'm saying. More to the point, in the case of Hitler there is always someone who will stand up and say, He wasn't one of OURS. But of course there are very few modern Western figures who are not in some sense Christians---who didn't get most of their ideas from it, good or bad. It's wishful to think otherwise. But I'm not agreeing with Corvidae that he was "devout." Corvidae's point about racial mythology is relevant. The racist attitudes of the Germans toward the Slavs date back at least to the Teutonic Knights, who considered them savages to be converted or slaughtered in crusades, much as in Asia and in Africa etc. etc. Thus the available and easily-tapped belief that the Russians were subhumans, bolstered by demonstrated military incompetence. It's funny that Churchill called the Germans Huns, but the Germans often seem to have confused Russians with the Mongol Horde. Hitler may not have totally mobilized production but he made use of every bit of existing mythology he could get his hands on to exert Germans to war. Whether or not it made him underestimate Russia, it made him paranoid and made Germany historically insecure. The threat was always there in the German mind, even in the absence of actual plans for invasion.
  13. I'm not saying you dreamed anything up. I'm well aware of the nature of the debate and of the evidence, from which I think one can make any argument one likes. I've read about Hitler's Catholic upbringing and I don't doubt he stopped going to church. Why should he? He was his own god. But it has nothing to do with what he thought he was, and I don't know how you define a christian anyway. Usually someone who rejects his own belief is termed an agnostic. Last I checked, agnostics who didn't slaughter millions were still allowed in. The point is utterly moot, for the purposes of this forum at least. Better to focus on the meat of his writings and speeches than to try to pigeonhole him. No one can say he was "certainly" or "certainly not" anything in this context, at least not to my satisfaction. Nothing in this link is new, although it's a nice summary. Brief, but balanced.
  14. I knew that response would come up! SO, I don't want to start it up with you, but you must admit that you have no basis for such a claim except wishful thinking. Unless you've found a little tunnel into Hitler's skull a la the movie Being John Malkovich . . . Although calling him a Satanist would be even more absurd.
  15. Seems to me this thread has largely been about whether Hitler was primarily stupid or insane, or whether the proportion of the 2 changed over time. I'm not sure this is worth a lot of effort, but it does parallel a larger debate as to whether he was evil or just criminal. Another topic you run into in forums less educated (and less civil) than this one is whether he was a Christian or not. Corvidae actually raises some interesting points, like was Hitler really as interested in global empire as much as the US government liked to paint him as being? Was he ever really a physical threat to the US? Was not the US just as racist until after the war? (I won't try to start a debate about "concentration camps.") There were lies on all sides, because a lot of institutions and power centers have to be neutralized in a democracy to sustain a dictatorship. For this reason, it is unsafe to make any assumptions about truth, and also, it is worthwhile to examine whatever rationale were used or might have been used by whatever faction of the General Staff. For example, whatever Hitler's analysis was in his own mind, after all their battlefield successes despite their moping, it must have been difficult for the General Staff to argue that Hitler was wrong about German invincibility: not because they were insane or stupid, but because logic failed them. Try explaining discipline to a dictator. Another angle that has, thankfully, been left out so far, is the pop psychology one. My only point here is that it has been theorized, more or less, that Hitler craved "love" and 'attention" and that this drove him to seek it in politics. In this light, it is not hard to make another guess as to an IRRATIONAL, but LOGICAL, reason why Hitler might have been reluctant to go total on Stalin at the cost of Germany's comfort: He was needy, egomaniacal, and sentimental, and no doubt he went into his final depressive tailspin only when it was clear the people had stopped cheering. Anyway, my own opinion is that all these arguments point to one thing: the very factors that led to Hitler's/the Reich's success were his/its downfall. It/he was essentially a bubble, though I do not exactly mean to say it/he was an aberration. So Jason is basically right when he says Barbarossa was doomed from the beginning, because a nutjob made that call in the first place, and the arguments he made to convince people were irrational. But he is certainly wrong to say that the situation was simple, and I think that has been amply demonstrated by the variety of arguments and topics presented here. They represent a tiny fraction of the whole debate. Back to my cave . . .
  16. Civdiv, crew quality is a big factor. Elites uaually button up on their own just in time, while greens need their hands held. One thing you can do is watch your TCs, and when one ducks, consider telling everyone at that range (especially from infantry) to duck. It's even worse for halftracks . . .
  17. I was just back in the PBEM game in which the above event occurred, and I found that my estimate of the distance involved was pretty bad. It was actually 120 meters!
  18. I guess that qualifies as a minor fluke!
  19. I may be risking a spanking myself, but I am really curious about the LOS question I posed above. I'll rephrase it: Was it a fluke when a schreck targeted, hit, and killed my Sherman at about 60 meters through a small stone house that should have been hiding right behind the house? I've been playing CM since CMBO came out and I have never seen this. If so, which was the fluke, the targeting or the kiling?
  20. The problems I had with tank riding in CMBO probably were caused by small maps and therefore close ranges---the PC I had back when I played CMBO was slow and kept the map size down. The forces used were small and rarely involved a whole company of anything, regardless of force type. Thanks, everybody, for all your answers!
  21. Good point for infantry, junk2drive. But what about a tank?
  22. Don't know if you mean me, but I always use Extreme.
  23. I have a situation related to civdiv's 1st question---actually, the opposite question. I just lost a Sherman to a schreck firing about 50 meters or more from woods through a small heavy building that my Sherman was right behind. I can't give you a screenshot, but on the lowest scale setting, the house definitely covered the tank completely---although the tank was initially able to fire at the schreck before it hid and popped him. So I guess the tank was firing through the house too, but just around the corner and A LOT CLOSER! I know you can target and sometimes fire a tank shell or hail of bullets through a building. But a schreck? How is this possible? And of what use are game mechanics if this is allowed to happen? (Pointless whining: Why don't tanks use area fire to protect themselves from AT teams they can't see? I know they can do it to other tanks.) [ February 03, 2006, 09:55 AM: Message edited by: Dave Stockhoff ]
  24. OK, that's good. Thanks! I knew armor needs to be massed to be effective---you learn that lesson is any good simulation---but I hadn't considered HOW massed. Perhaps you need about 3000 points of "armored division" to do an armor battle properly—anything less than that, you may as well pick an ID with support or just use as little armor as possible. I understand now. I've been mostly involved in 2000-point QBs, and things don't always work out the way it seems they should. Tanks turn out to be really vulnerable. It's been my experience that at "heavy" tree coverage and above (on a random map), tanks need lots of infantry protection; at "moderate" or below, infantry need lots of tank protection---otherwise, the infy might not be able to cross open areas to their objective. Is that a realistic assessment, CM-wise? (Let's say I'm picking forces for a QB.) Given JasonC's description of how armies had standard TOEs and ratios and then attached other units or violated those ratios in practice, is it not realistic to take some rough standard for a division type and add platoons and companies and batteries to it (in addition to subtracting random casualties etc.) to get a plausible "task force"? I know I can "do whatever I want," but that's not really satisfying or instructive. Also, you tend to get a system creep, whereby over a series of QBs you and your opponent reach for lager and larger guns. I'd like to find a way to stay grounded . . . About tank riders not suffering from small arms fire: I did a CMBO scenario for the Christmas Day '44 assault I mentioned, in which about a company of Panzers took a company of PzGs on the road to hell. (They tried to overrun at dawn the 1st Airborne backed by a few tank destroyers and a few Shermans.) I don't know what the difference between CM and RL was exactly, but the Allies always blew the PzGs off the Panzers with their mortars, yet accounts don't mention mortars at all. I had to delete them to stop it. I also found that tank-riding didn't work out well in CMBO and haven't tried it since. JasonC, am I missing something about the situation? Or does CMBO exaggerate this effect?
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