JerseyJohn
-
Posts
6,549 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by JerseyJohn
-
-
I remember a news story in the 70s or 80s that a Jewish baby was born in Warsaw and it was either the first Jewish child born in that city since the war, or the first Jewish child born in all of Poland since the war, not sure which.
Stalin admired Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews and was planning to put his own Hollocaust in place when he died. -- The hand of God? Perhaps.
Hitler definitely came up through German politics because he had a lot of support from like minded lunatics, many of whom were army officers and professors! During the late 20s and early 30s the right wing Germans supported the Nazis, though the didn't agree with their agenda, because they used them to help fight the much more numerous communists. In the end the Weimar inepts made the fatal mistake of thinking they could control Hitler and his bunch.
As Chancellor Hitler stuffed key positions with people like Goering, Hess and Goebbels. When Hindenburg died Hitler, without any fanfare, just had the offices of President and Chancellor merged, making him dictator, and the Weimar Republic died quietly without even a whimper of protest.
-
:confused:
-- I'll drink to that one, or any other one as well. :cool: I made two or three posts at the World Affairs Board when we were first directed there. Don't really recall their replies but they've been sending me updates ever since. I feel bad about not going there but there just isn't enough time to fit in another place.
As you guys are saying, a big part of it is being familiar with the other people posting at the site and also knowing what the nature of the threads would be. The SC2 Forum has a really good balance now, the best I know of and over the years I've learned a lot of history here, which I'm grateful for.
-
I think that's mentioned in this book, SeaMonkey. A lot of what Hitler and the Nazi leaders did can only be described as hallucinations.
On the day during the Battle of Britain when the Luftwaffe suffered it's greatest losses, Goering cut back on fighter plane production!
One thing this author did a great job in bringing home is the way Germany fought the war with no real plan at all. No strategic concept in any of the branches.
The Luftwaffe had a flying jet prototype in the spring of 1939, for example (not mentioned in the book but I read about it somewhere else). Neither Udet or Goering liked it because they felt it was too fast and wouldn't be able to hit anything in a dog fight! So they did their best to bury it and by the time the plans were worked on again some of the designers were actually serving on the Russian front as infantrymen. What an absurdity, just incredible stupidity all the way around. Udet later committed suicide -- he was always the wrong man for the job, and his successor, Jeschenect did the same thing two years later, leaving a suicide note that laid all the blame on Goering. Of course Hitler's insistence that all jets should carry bombs, delaying production by over a year, didn't help much.
The navy spent the first three years of the war with Raeder building a conventional fleet and Doenetz working against him at every turn to try and get enough U-Boats to cripple the British convoys. Hitler would back one and then the other till Raeder finally left the scene. It must have a really bitter joke when he was later put on trial and sentenced to ten years I believe, for having violated the Versailles treaty as admiral of the Weimar navy, exceeding the tonnage rule on the three armored cruisers/pocket battleships.
The army generals had to put up with having SS and Luftwaffe ground units -- the Hermann Goering Panzer Division, what the hell was that about?!!
And the navy didn't have it's own pilots for the scout planes, they were provided by the Luftwaffe. If Germany had built an aircraft carrier the navy would have needed to request aviators from the air force.
True folly all the way through even when they sweeping everything before them.
-
It always drives me up a wall.
Most of the worst offenders were made during the sixties and, as in the Battle of the Bulge (filmed in Spain, without real snow
) they'd do something like use one kind of US tank for the Americans and a heavier model US tank for the Germans. Yeah, right, really convincing. In Patton the American and German tanks are the same models with different markings. In Kelly's Heroes they were probably only able to pull that off because they only needed a few of them, two tigers and one Sherman. I remember reading in 1970 that the movie Catch 22 was using all the B-25s that were still capable of flying.I guess it isn't much of an issue now with computer special effects and also there are specialty companies that make great replicas out of lighter materials, I guess plastic and aluminum.
There was a Kurt Vonnegutt TV interview when Slaughterhouse Five first came out and he said he loved it because everything was authentic. It was filmed in Romania, I believe, and they'd just kept all the hardware, weapons and uniforms that the Germans left behind, more than enough to fill a screen with the real tanks and artillery pieces depicted in the movie. -- Now there's a flick nobody ever mentions; then again, it doesn't seem like a legitimate war movie.
In documentaries I can understand slight inacurracies in things like tanks and aircraft, but gross mistakes are a real turnoff. The most common type is showing Tiger I's and Panthers as they're talking about the early days of Barbarossa and Stalingrad. I've even read a few novels that were very good otherwise but place panthers and tigers in action long before they entered service.
-- Also, there was one novel where I actually wrote to the author. It wasn't a bad story but he kept talking about the Graf Spee's 16" main guns.
:eek: Sorry, they were only 11", like the Scharnhorst and Gneisnau, and even the Bismarck and Tirpitz only had 15" main guns. He wrote back, a very pleasant thank you note saying his wife had let him down in the proof reading. -
It's good to see the SC2 Forum running so much like the old SC Forum of four or five years ago, when there were a variety of topics being discussed by history buffs and game buffs and everyone who fit in between the two extremes.
The addition of a seperate MOD forum is also a good idea by Hubert and the Battlefront mods. In the old SC forum everything mixed together and it was much harder to keep track of what different people were working on.
-
Also, he was always surrounded by an SS bodyguard. Regular army officers were disarmed before they were allowed to come near him.
The last halfway decent chance for an assassination was muffed by von Stauffenberg when he put the bomb under an extremely heavy table. Probably anywhere else in the room, away from the being under the table, would have killed everyone in the room.
Also, FDR's announcement that the United States would only accept unconditional surrender (I don't think he consulted either Churchill or Stalin) worked against a coups; not much point in ousting your country's leader only to immediately surrender unconditionally.
-
I think the names are Todd and Michael Lanahan of Philadelphia, turns out they must be the same two mentioned in the opening post.
Not sure I got the proper link, but here goes,
-
It was the AOL opening screen, Bromley. I'll try to post a path to it.
-
There's a photograph of a pair of brothers from Ohio, celebrating because one of them just recovered from testicular cancer so they went to run with the bulls. In the photo they're jumping in opposite directions with the same bull goring both of them, one on each horn, seemingly up the butt. Both were hospitalized and photographed laughing about it. I'm sure a blownup version of the photograph will end up in both their homes. A Great conversation piece.
It's amazing that no one died in that mess and, over the decades, not many people have suffered fatal injuries in this screwy ritual.
-
That's all assuming Germany is at war with the USSR and the USA.
As we both know that didn't have to be the case. In mid-June of 1941 it was the UK vs Germany and Italy. Hitler chose to expand the war to include the USSR for unsound reasons. Even then it wasn't lost but less than six months later he further expanded it with a declaration of war on the USA, which was totally senseless and virtually insured Germany's defeat.
So we can say Germany lost WWII because it was led by a madman, but that would be too simple.
Anyway, there isn't as neat and simple an explanation as production figures and, if Germany hadn't invaded Russia or DOW'd the United States it certainly would have had the overwhelming manpower and not the other way around.
Some of the most important non-military reasons were Hitler's refusal to go onto a wartime economy until 1943. His mania for enslavement of conquered people, leading to sabotage in industry and partisans behind the lines. The tragic and ruinous policy of rounding up and killing Europeans Jewish population at the rate of two and three million a year -- at the exact time the Axis was critically short of manpower!
Military reasons include Germany never having had any real overall strategy! It started off with the assumption that there wouldn't be a war over Poland. When that proved false the assumption was UK and France would make peace over the winter. When that didn't happen the new idea was to grab Denmark and Norway for the navy before thrusting into the Low Countries where the idea was to defeat the British and French and force a peace settlement. Having succeeded beyond their expectations and knocking France out of the war, the next plan was to -- ? No next plan at all!
Britain doesn't make peace so instead of adding to the U-Boat fleet and concentrating on the Battle of the Atlantic Hitler chooses instead to invade the USSR on the premise that it would fall quickly and, somehow, that would force Britain to come to terms. Odd, exactly the same premise Napoleon had in 1812 and, eventually leading to the same outcome.
With the invasion of the USSR about to be launched, Hitler was asked by his army group commanders whether the priority was to be on destroying the enemy's armies, occupying his cities or taking his strategic resources. Hitler's reply, all three were of equal importance! -- Plan? There wasn't one, and never was.
So eventually the key field marshals worked on the premise of holding as much ground as possible and making ground given up very costly to the enemy. But Hitler worked against that as well by ordering inane and doomed offensives on the principle (from his idol, Frederick the Great) that when one is in a hopeless position the only option is an all out attack.
All of those things were fatal flaws in Germany's war effort.
Even the Enigma was a fatal flaw because, despite good reason to suspect the system had been compromised, Germany never considered that possibility and continued using it, with only minor changes, throughout the entire war.
I think it's too easy to oversimplify the outcome of the war. The allies never took it for granted and we shouldn't assume now that it was an automatic outcome. It wasn't.
-
-
He went through three or four different stages.
Volunteered to fight in WWI, wound up as an ambulance driver in Italy and was wounded from an artillery blast.
In the 1920s he lived in Paris and was a reporter for the Toronto Star and a Kansas City newspaper while he got his start writing fiction. Most people think he wrote his best work during that time.
1930s he became very famous, went to Spain to cover the Civil War, was oppenly communist and vehemently anti-fascist.
1940s his writing began going downhill. He married a newspaper writer and wound up in France covering the Allied advance but also seems to have been with a French fighting unit. He lived in Key West during most of those years.
1950s Had his last hurrah with the short novel, The Old Man and The Sea, and won the Nobel Prize for literature a short time afterwards. He spent most of the decade going to the places in Africa and Europe that he'd travelled through as a young man. Along the way he was in two airplane crashes in two days and came away with serious head injuries. Afterwards his drinking went out of control and he was steadily sinking into manic depression. He lived in Cuba and at first thought Fidel Castro was a hero, but changed his mind soon afterwards and returned to the United States.
Living in Idaho, he kept claiming the F. B. I. (which had a real file on him) was tracking him with assassins, including the local sheriff. He was given electro-shock therapy against his will and soon afterwards committed suicide.
Hemingway was one of those larger than life people, always enjoying everything and very physical. By the mid-40s he couldn't keep his private life seperate from his public life and that's when he started going downhill.
I think he couldn't deal with the idea of growing old. He was 62 when he killed himself.
-
Ironically, after Munich, both Britain and France were bending over backwards to offer special deals to Germany to stop Hitler's rants and threats and sword rattling. In one of them an offer was made to return the African colonies taken from Imperial Germany -- these were very large holdings, several times the size of Germany itself! Hitler refused all of that. He said the Reich had no interest in Afica, or anything else outside of Europe.
There was a book in the 80s called, The Fourth And Richest Reich. that said pretty much what you did in that post. Tried to find it online but only came up with a couple of books with similar titles that look lunatic fringe.
-
Yeah, there's a lot of use of his name, he still has a lot of commercial appeal. I think one of his sons (he had three, from three different wives) is behind most of that.
That family seems prone to suicide. His father, who was a doctor, committed suicide in the 1920s when Hemingway was living in Paris. His mother sent him the pistol!
-
Brother Rambo, I think it's a portable sun dial.
-
-- Outstanding JJR Hemingway was also a fresh water fisherman. One of his Nick Adams stories from the 1920s, Big Two Hearted River is about a trout fishing. :cool:
-
True.Originally posted by Desert Dave:</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr /> ...the german panzers were stop by hitler himselfe
Hitler was NOT so very risk-taking
At the start (... of yet another!
Internecine Euro-Mayhem), anyhow.
Well, he was indeed concerned
That - Guderian, Dietrich & Kleist, et al,
WERE
Out ahead of the curve,
So to speak.
Worried that they would be cut-off
Before the following infantry
Could secure key objectives.
As for chemical warfare,
BOTH sides knew very well
That was a foul & horrendous
Witch's brew,
And neither side wanted to be the FIRST
To introduce them,
Partly,
Due to - not fully knowing
Just what the other guy was capable of.
Hitler's own WW-I experience?
Like Hemingway,
He had a severe and lasting jolt,
And ever - even sub-consciously,
Feared receiving a similar sort
Of body & mind disarrangement.
UNLIKE Hemingway,
He wasn't able to realize,
Internalize, and re-direct
That kind of deranging experience
And make "Art" out of it.
Too bad that he couldn't.
I am supposing - based on partial
Readings, so... an imperfect guess,
But,
Hitler could have gone
The other way, IE,
Become a somewhat "normal" citizen
Had he sold some paintings
Or, O/W "succeeded" in Society.
His eventual "madness" was real, though.
What caused it?
Not the chemicals on the ground, IMO,
But,
The volatile mixture of neuro-chemicals
In his head.
Since birth.
Many "normal" humans DO resort
To "craziness" at a later stage of life,
It happens every day,
At any age,
In every Nation on earth.
As we have recently witnessed,
Ad nauseum, all over the place. </font>
-
To JJRambo c/o Battlefront,
Regarding your various posts about me -- Ah, screw it, I'm not writing to this guy till I see what kind of marlin he hauls in.
-
I'm not defending bullfighting, cockfighting, dogfighting, or even boxing, which I'm not a fan of -- I don't personally like any of those things. What I'm saying is it's something that's been going on for centuries and, as neither of us live in the country being discussed, it's their business, not ours.
I'm sure every culture does something that would seem repulsive to other cultures. What about Boxing Day when you Canadians go around punching each other?! :eek:
-- All right, bad example.
-
And it's always good seeing that old stock footage.
:cool: I get a kick out of documentaries that do things like showing the famous footage of King Tigers being reviewed by Peiper prior to the Ardennes Offensive 1944, but the narration is about the invasion of Poland, 1939! :confused:
-
Sure. I've read that one twice, once when it first came out (I was 12 at the time) and again twenty-five years later. Needless to say I understood it a lot better the second time. :cool:
The only problem with the older books, like Shirer's, is they were written before many important classified files were released to the public. For example, the ENIGMA System was kept secret till the late 1970s and that definitely puts a different slant on a lot of WWII events. The pity of it is, but done by design of course, that both Churchill and Eisenhower, the two biggest spy and counter-inteligence buffs of the war, were long dead by that time and neither were able to mention their own part in the information war when they wrote their own books.
Shirer's Berlin Diary and The Decline And Fall Of The Third Republic are also worth reading.
I don't pay much attention to reviewers. I several who really dug into Shirer, for example, and the crux of it was that he was only a journalist and not a professional historian. Wonderful reasoning, the fact that he witnessed many of the events firsthand doesn't count. Meanwhile those great minds of academia probably wrote nothing at all on the subject. I've read similar remarks about Barbara Tuchman's books, I remember her name, and Shirer's, but have long forgotten the names of their critics.
In Macksey's case I guess the critisizm is he doesn't write the way a great scholar would. I'd agree, in the meantime, after reading books on the subject for over forty years, I found his work to have a lot of merit and also to be an interesting read. If it's because I'm too dumb to know better, well, so be it!
-
A lot of WWII films that could have been filmed in color were filmed in B&W to incorporate newsreel footage without having the viewer being jolted back and forth.
-
Ernest Hemingway has always been one of my favorite authors. He wrote two books on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon during the mid-1930s and The Most Dangerous Summer which was edited and released after his death in 1961. Additionally many of his excellent short stories and a novel, The Sun Also Rises involve bullfighting. Despite reading all those works about a sport he was obviously a big fan of, I've never understood the appeal.
On the other hand, I don't think it's right for people of other countries to make sweeping judgements about it. The sport, or I think it's more accurately described as a fatalistic ceremony, has some sort of deep significance to the Spanish and also to several Latin American cultures, as well as Mexico.
According to Hemingway, writing in the 1930s, the whole thing was much more evenly matched in the 19th century, when bulls were bred to be larger and more aggressive than later on. One odd thing he describes is how old horses, especially those who had been used to pull fruit and vegetable wagons in the United States, were bought hundreds at a time and shipped to Spain. They were fattened up on a diet that included large quantities of sawdust and sent into the arena for the bulls to gore, tiring themselves out while the crowd watched the efforts of the doomed horses to stay clear of the horns. Hemingway seems to have admired this part of the ritual too. I have no idea why.
I've forgotten the names for the various bull fighters -- I think matador was the archaic term -- toreadors, picadors sticking the beasts with barbed sticks turned me off, but seems to be a crowd pleaser and something that can't be done away with in order to prepare the bull for its demise.
One thing I have to say, though, is it has to take a huge amount of courage to stand alone in an arena against an eraged bull, aremed only with a cape and hidden sword, or no cape and a pair of barbed sticks, or even sitting on a horse with a lance.
Naturally there's no real point to any of it except for those who have been raised with this as part of its culture.
-- Hemingway used to also run through the streets with the bulls. Now that's something I really can't understand. On the other hand, growing up in Brooklyn, we never had anything like that in my childhood so I'd be very hesitant to pass judgement on people who grew up with all of this in their culture.
-- -- Bullfighting music is pretty good. :cool:
-
Full title is:
Why The Germans Lose At War: The Myth of German Military Superiority
By Kenneth Macksey
1996, Published by Barnes & Noble Press
I passed on this book a few times but finally bought it at $7.98. Glad I did. Before reading it the title turned me off, but afterwards the premise makes a lot of sense.
Macksey goes back to Frederick the Great, proceeds through the Prussian Army's ups and downs in the Napoleonic era and the 1866 - 71 wars against Austria, Denmark and France to create a unified Germany, then takes it through WWI and WWII showing how both times, and for very similar reasons, battlefield victories were transformed into devastating defeats. At the end of the book he draws some interesting contrasts between the policies of the Reich and that of the United States in the 1990s -- this book was written before Bush Jr's adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Which is unfortunate because I'd very much like to know what Macksey thinks about those actions from the multiple viewpoints he examines the subject through.
He covers the well trodden areas we're all familiar with, such as Hitler's catastrophic meddling, but brings a fresh perspectives to all of it, along with an excellent re-evaluation of many of the key figures.
German war efforts are examined from the economic, scientific, industrial and social aspects as well as analyzing the peculiar role that country's leadership played in both world wars.
Some points I found particularly interesting are the German Army, throughout its history, giving low priorities to communications, supply and engineer units.
He packs a lot of information in a scant 229 hardcover pages! I enjoyed it all the way through, highly recommended. :cool:
-- Title changed 7/18 and 7/19 to conform with later posts.
[ July 20, 2007, 02:08 PM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ]
-- I'll drink to that one, or any other one as well. :cool: 
) they'd do something like use one kind of US tank for the Americans and a heavier model US tank for the Germans. Yeah, right, really convincing. In Patton the American and German tanks are the same models with different markings. In Kelly's Heroes they were probably only able to pull that off because they only needed a few of them, two tigers and one Sherman. I remember reading in 1970 that the movie Catch 22 was using all the B-25s that were still capable of flying.
Victory, Defeat, Armistice, Taxes, Depression
in Strategic Command 2 Blitzkrieg and Weapons and Warfare
Posted