Why The Germans Lose At War (Book) + JJR @Armageddon & JJ Goes, Returns, and Leaves.

[JerseyJohn]

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 ]

[flintlock]

Originally posted by JerseyJohn:

I enjoyed it all the way through, highly recommended.

I've glanced this book over in the past, though ultimately passed it by as the majority of reviews on Macksey's work has been poor to mediocre at best. Your post is the first time I've read anyone praise this book.

Years ago I read Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - A History of Nazi Germany, which I throughly enjoyed! It appears somewhat similar to what Macksey attempts to cover. If you've read Shirer's book, would you still recommend reading William's book?

[JerseyJohn]

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!

[jon_j_rambo]

Germany really won World War II. Their country is now #2 in economies. They don't have to spend any money on defense. They are #1 in the EU. The jews have left Europe or were killed...all prophesied they would be back in Israel.

[JerseyJohn]

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.

[Blashy]

I would say you loose when your opponent has overwhelmingly huge manpower and resources over yours AND is not a total idiot.

Many times the side with less resources and manpower has won just because the other side was stupid or had poor leadership.

[JerseyJohn]

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.

[Bromley]

Originally posted by jon_j_rambo:

Germany really won World War II. Their country is now #2 in economies. They don't have to spend any money on defense. They are #1 in the EU. The jews have left Europe or were killed...all prophesied they would be back in Israel.

Japan didn't do too badly either . I've always believed that WW1 & WW2 are what allowed the US to leap ahead to superpower, but I couldn't find historic GDP data online to back that up. Although without those wars there likely wouldn't be a EU, so over time it may even out.

Messianic stuff aside (and the >1m Jews still in Europe might be surprised to hear that they're not here - likewise the slightly-more-than-the-Jewish-population-of-Israel number that's in the US), it's only just hit home how many Jews were killed. Six million, purely as a number, is increasingly small in the modern world, but it was just under a third of the world population of Jews at the start of the war and just under half of the current population.

[ July 14, 2007, 04:41 PM: Message edited by: Bromley ]

[Blashy]

As I said, a stupid leader can kill you.

But my personal BIGGEST mystery that will never truly be known is WHY did those military generals let that idiotic fool live and not simply kill him on the spot and take over.

There are thousands of reason speculated but no one really knows why.

[Blashy]

And my first comment is correct... it's not my fault they bit off more than they could chew both times (WW1/2).

[Iron Ranger]

Honor, that and most of them had been raised and trained to follow thier leader due to his blood not his ability (Kieser). The thought of removing the leader (granted there were alot of attempts) was totally alien to the high up/old prussian generals.

[JerseyJohn]

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.

[SeaMonkey]

I don't know if this is common knowledge or not, but leading up to "Typhoon" Hitler actually had cut back on military expenditures, expecting the USSR to not make it into 1942 as a belligerent.

Now think about that. Perhaps if there had been enough forsight, possibly some good intel, and it had been acknowledged, Germany may well have taken Moscow in 41 inclusive with the Kiev diversion.

Just a committment would have sufficed. Now how can we, as the Axis player, duplicate this possibility, with the features of SC2?

Maybe an earlier IT and PT investment, instead of the usual military components?

[JerseyJohn]

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.

[jon_j_rambo]

There's more to Adolf Hitler, than Adolf Hitler. Nobody climbs the ladder w/o in the words of the Beatles,"A little help from my friends". Madman, not really...I prefer the word Murderer...just like the Devil in the beginning, a liar & murderer.

Fas as the Jews being "gone" after WW-2. Depends where you look. Warsaw & keep going East, I was told (whether true or not), that there wasn't any Synagoges rebuilt. Would you stay?

[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.

[arado234]

Another reason is the fact that hitler didnt really trust anyone.So how can you expect germany to win when the head man doesnt trust the armed forces commanders.Its a loosing situation.He also loved to play one person against the other.No cooperation.When the army,the navy and the airforce are all pitted against one another even though they are supposed to be on the same side,YOUR DONE.It also didnt help that almost all of the abwher.were committed to see hitler fail.Its amazing the germans were able to come as close as they did to winning.

[Guest Mike]

One of my histyory prof's described hitler's style of Govt as competitive.

IE he'd say he wanted something, then the various henchmen would all race off and trhy to make it happen in competition with each other in order to secure the Furher's favour.

Hence you get competing land forces (Wheremacht vs SS vs Luftwaffe), competing tank programmes, competing aircraft programmes, etc.

nothign wrong with a bit of competition of course, but in this case they all ended up in production - the normal use of competition is to figure out what's best so you can concnetrate on it.

Very simplified of course, but I think this gives a flavour to what happens when you have Govt by suck-holing!

[Minty]

Does anyone tend to look at WW2 as starting around 1870 and finishing in 1957? (signing of the treaty of Rome). you can;t look at WW2 without WW1 which was born out of victory over France in the 1870s. Aren't we simply looking at the birth and growing pains of a new nation and therefore threat to the existing order in Europe. Germany, that upon creation threatens the existing powerhouse , France.Then over 3 increasingly desperate wars and 3 generations that suck more and more countries in until the power in europe moves east to the USSR?

[Guest Mike]

The ol' chapter 1 & chapter 2 story.

I don't think 1870 is the right starting date tho.

WW1 & WW2 were about whether Germany would dominate Europe, or Europe would dominate Germany.

the answer to this was definitively given in 1945 (with due appreciate for the help given by the USA and USSR to the rest of Europe for making it unquestionalble!).

1957 was "just" the post-match rules review!

1870 (and by extension 1866) were about whether Germany would exist or not, and although superficially attractive are in a different frame IMO.

[Blashy]

Yes Minty if you really want to look back the birth of Germany is a good starting point.

Prussia was already a great power and with the expansion of Germany it really made them rivals of UK, France and Russia and of course they being greedy wanted to keep it that way, causing allot of frustration to the German people.

But Otto Von Bismark did have it all "settled" prior to WW1, he made it a duty to always be at peace with one of these major powers, he said it that being at war or simply having all 3 against Germany would simply be its downfall and as soon as he died they went against that... and lost.

[xwormwood]

Originally posted by Blashy:

But my personal BIGGEST mystery that will never truly be known is WHY did those military generals let that idiotic fool live and not simply kill him on the spot and take over.

The answer lies within the even more idiotic leaders of France & UK!

"Peace for our time" saved Hitler, because "those military generals" couldn't sack a leader with such success.

As far as i know important parts of the generals were ready to eleminate Hitler in 1936 (Rheinland), but couldn't do it because France did nothing to stop Hitler.

Same goes for Austria (Anschluss) and Munich 1938.

Even in 1939 it would have been possible, if there would have been a REAL reaction instead of the phoney war / drolle de guerre.

And if we look back to 1918, well, the Entente wasted their vicory there, plowing the field for things like the 3rd Reich as well.

They should have been much milder toward Germany, or even much harder. But this unhealthy middle thing weakend Germany only just enough to make it strong and angry enough for a revenge war 20 years later.

I see no real wisdom between 1918 and 1945. Nowhere.

Sorry.

edit: well, ok, maybe Gandhi, of course

[edward_n_kelly]

Originally posted by Blashy:

As I said, a stupid leader can kill you.

But my personal BIGGEST mystery that will never truly be known is WHY did those military generals let that idiotic fool live and not simply kill him on the spot and take over.

There are thousands of reason speculated but no one really knows why.

My reasoning is a combination of a code of honour (within their own frame of reference very different to modern or indeed "western" concepts), a "yearning" for an "ordered" life and return to preeminence of the armed forces after the chaos of the democratic Wiemar Republic and a lack of moral courage to do the "best" for the "nation" (is the "nation" its people to the generals or something different?).

Desperation in the later stages gave rise to Stauffenberg and his "plot" but even those participants generally still saw a war against the "communist horde" or "barbarians from the east" but allied with "western allies".

They just had a totally different (and to us unreal)frame of reference which seems so alien to us (and to many of the leaders of the allies at the time). Churchill correctly identified the problem but still only had one solution war (he was predisposed to assassination but could not convince enough people or even himself to get it authorised). Stalin probably also saw it - but was fascinated by it for so long (and somewhat distracted by his own paranoia) that it was not until some weeks after JUN41 that he wanted to prosecute the war fully....

Edward

[Guest Mike]

They didn't try to kill him because until Stalingrad Hitler was obviously good for Germany - did you not notice that they'd conquered France and half of Russia in that time? Why would you want to kill him until then??

[arado234]

BECAUSE HE WAS A RAVING LUNATIC.I guess thats not a good enough reason judging by the way the world has gone since then.