1943: The Allied victory that never was.

[Carl Schwamberger]

\

Surprise is the Holy Grail, the golden vision for every military operation. Always have a plan flexible enough if it does not occur


I once explained the timing, the sequence of events in the NEPTUNE operation. When the individual receiving this realized the airborne ops that initiated around 12:30 & alerted the Germans some four hours before the fleet was sighted, he was aghast. He declared the airborne op the stupidest thing ever as it was guaranteed to blow tactical surprise. I'll leave that one for another day.

The thing is tactical surprise was never anticipated for NEPTUNE, but operational and strategic surprise was. The airborne assault also played into German fears of mass desants by the Allied Airborne Army, which they believed included no less than six airborne divisions.

Some how the forgoing of tactical surprise in Op Neptune has not made it to the History Channel, or the glossy magazines and their YouTube equivalent. The image of the German soldiers gaping round eyed at the Allied fleet as the haze lifts is the story. I've often wondered what the German story would have been had the Airborne drop been executed much closer to dawn. It took the defender between two and three hours to muster and get the defenses to 90-100 % manned. What happens if the Alarum is at 04:30 ? ...but, I digress.

[Richard Anderson]

Some how the forgoing of tactical surprise in Op Neptune has not made it to the History Channel, or the glossy magazines and their YouTube equivalent.

The image of the German soldiers gaping round eyed at the Allied fleet as the haze lifts is the story. I've often wondered what the German story would have been had the Airborne drop been executed much closer to dawn. It took the defender between two and three hours to muster and get the defenses to 90-100 % manned. What happens if the Alarum is at 04:30 ? ...but, I digress.

That may be the story, but its a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing...to quote the Bard.

NEPTUNE - I suspect after the mess that was JUBILEE - correctly focused on misdirection and deliberate confusion, rather than "surprise" per se. So there were multiple air missions - transport, heavy, and medium bombing - going on from about 2200 5 June, since, oddly enough, the Allied planners realized the Germans had this thing called radar, in a multiply redundant and sophisticated system they could not simply mask. So, instead, they manipulated it. The actual convoys at sea were mimicked by a second set of convoys directed at the Pas de Calais, which were created by 617 Squadron using WINDOW.

The air missions also exploited - partly deliberately and partly accidentally - the German fear of an airborne desant by the "massive" Allied airborne force. Neat fact, the famous war games at Rennes that drew away so many senior 7. Armee command staff on 6 June - it was the second series of war games (the first was in February IIRC) designed as a response to a massive Allied airborne assault rather than a seaborne assault.

I don't know where the idea comes that it "took two to three hours to muster and get the defenses to 90-100% manned"? Most of the troops in the WN were housed a few hundred yards away and when the alert went out in the early morning they were manned likely within a few minutes. The main delays were in moving up the deep reserves like Lehr, 21. Panzer, and 12. SS-Panzer...and expanding the alert from a local thing to a HG-B thing.

6 June:

0030 – Major von Luck at Vimont notified of paratroop drops
0035 – 21.Pz.Div. issues alert order
0130 – 12.SS-Pz.Div. CO wakes up his CoS with news that the invasion had begun
0200 – 2.Pz.Div. issues alert order
0230 – CO Pz.-Lehr Div. notified of paratroop drops by OKW
0300 – 12.SS-Pz.Div. issues alert order
0350 – Ob.West notifies HG-B that it considered the drops to be a limited operation
0415 – Pz.-Lehr Div. issues alert order
0500 – Ob.West unilaterally assumes control of 12.SS-Pz.Div. and assigns it to HG-B, ordering it to move to the sector of 711.Inf.Div
0535 – Kriegesmarinegruppe West reports engagement with Allied naval forces west of La Havre
0624 – Ob.West issues invasion alert and requests release of OKW Panzer Reserve

That last was about six minutes before the first waves began landing.

[Kurt_S]

Well it's been a minute but hey I've few spare moments...

However, wars are usually not won solely through tactics or just on the ground.

Who said anything contrary?

The notion that the Kriegsmarine could contest naval supremacy with submarines was absurd.

Please provide a single German primary source advocating "naval supremacy" via the submarine.

Prioritization by fiat of the supreme leader?

One really needs to do some comparative analysis of prioritization's success before reaching comparative conclusions. For the US's long running failures to make prioritization work, start with the reports of the War Production Board and Koistinen's Arsenal of World War Two.

Particularly wrong-headed is your implication that centralized prioritization ("fiat") was a problem. No, the experience of every country showed that greater centralization of prioritization improved that (flawed) process, from aggrandizement of the Speer/Todt Ministry to the WPB's implementation of the Controlled Materials Plan.

Also lacking any historical perspective is the extent to which Hitler was supposedly unique in acting "by fiat" to control production priorities. FDR did likewise:

The President concurred, particularly approving the emphasis given to three classes of equipment: aircraft and related items, shipping, and equipment for a decisive land and air offensive.

https://history.army.mil/books/wwii/ASF/chapter14.htm

Indeed it was FDR's personal decision to slash projected army size in Fall '42, preferring instead a larger air force. Hitler never made a decision of similar sweeping consequence re inter-service allocations.

Finally, you seem to apply a cartoon narrative of the Nazi state in which Hitler precisely dictated outcomes. As any remotely serious student of the Nazi state knows, it was a mishmash of competing bureaucracies that alternately "worked toward", interpreted in personal interest, or subverted central directives. Sic semper large organizations.

At least Marshall and Brooke usually managed to keep the more lunatic strategic notions of FDR and Churchill at bay, while Stalin eventually learned the same after the disasters of the first year of the war.

I saw that History Channel hour too!

Sure, three-quarters to two-thirds of the German Ground forces were engaged at any one time in the East.

Until mid-44 - or later - the German Ground forces had more soldiers buried in Russian soil than were engaged with the West. In addition to more (living) soldiers engaged with the USSR than with the West.

Their early campaigns in France and the Low Countries, Norway, the Balkans, and Greece were masterful combinations of ground and air power, as well as occasionally sea power. The early campaigns in the east were as well. Then the wheels started falling off the bus. Well, actually, they started to wobble prior to the attack on Poland.

So "masterful" but also "wobbly", with an inflection point unspecific? Luckily in military history one can get away with this kind of self-contradictory, amorphous high-level analysis. See below.

Germany also failed strategically

Military history is an analytically weak field. This must owe in part to its low prestige in academia, as a result of which we're not sending our best people into it. Online, however, one is lucky to encounter even the research assistants of military history's already weak thought leaders. Outsiders seeking to bring creditable intellectual/analytical practices to the field encounter the accumulated detritus of shallow dogma and interlocutors unable or unwilling to do more than parrot dogma. The insiders have the time, access, and low opportunity cost to have the data but, to adapt an analogous saw, military history is too important to leave it to the military historians.

To the extent that Germany's strategic failure is coextensive with it losing WW2, sure. And duh. But just as the poster's research assistance at TDI involved controlling for the effects of numerical/resource preponderance on tactical evaluation, so must strategic evaluation consider preponderance. Absent such consideration, strategic evaluation is merely the rote process of calling the victors strategically wise. This is an impoverished understanding of strategy, saying no more than a 6yo could say. On this childish intellectual frame, US victory over Grenada implies strategic brilliance; Finnish defeat by the USSR implies strategic ineptitude. It is shocking, though not surprising, that a career can be spent demonstrating that tactical outcomes do not resolve tactical quality, yet this same person can fail to apply the qualitative principal to strategic analysis. Again, it's a weak field analytically.

What I have tried to do in this thread is to remind you all that US/UK choices ran deeper than "a bridge too far" or "broad/narrow front." The US/UK could, for instance, have chosen the strategy commended - albeit a few months too late - by nearly all US Army professionals: concentration of strength against the enemy to defeat his main forces and take his land. Most postwar military history "analysis" of these choices - including by some of those involved in them - has done little more than fan service and hagiography. More fundamentally, and farther upstream of the Sledgehammer/Roundup/Torch dispute, the US/UK could have adopted a grand strategy that didn't rely on (or place disproportionate emphasis on) a bombing strategy untested in 1939 and largely refuted by the British experience of the Blitz (UK has the "excuse" of national chauvinism - only we can withstand such bombing - but not the US).

Whether in 1942 or 1943, it is beyond cavil that Wallied strategic concentration against the German Army would have ended WW2 much earlier. The desperate excuses proffered in this thread for 1942 failure don't apply to 1943's failure, to giving the Nazis yet another year to murder and destroy while the West focused mostly on killing women and children. That optimal Western strategy would have ended things blood-cheaper (for the West), in addition to earlier, is more difficult to argue but highly likely as well.

Why care about this? Well first there's the honest person's reflexive antipathy to nonsense, especially to nonsense in the service of power and jingoism. In addition, the erroneous belief that Allied WW2 strategy was good has ever since informed Western/US warmaking practice for the worse. Consider the US's postwar record: stalemated by impoverished China/N.Korea, defeated by North Vietnam, defeated by the Taliban, blemished outcomes in Iraq. God forbid they'd have fought a peer - it's no wonder all US leaders agreed that they (and the UK) couldn't defeat Germany had the USSR collapsed.

I don't bemoan these US defeats much, though the fans of American might are free to use my analysis for their own ends (they won't of course). What I do bemoan is the partially WW2-derived fantasies/delusions that US/Western strategy - bomb stuff, assume the dead kids don't matter - is militarily/strategically wise. Only this delusion enables American follies like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan - absent these delusions the US wouldn't commit to WW1-scale land warfare to kill Hitler (a bad refusal, IMO) nor to change regimes abroad (a good refusal, IMO).

Finally, we should also care about the rare but significant cases in which the US is a good actor whom one should want to be militarily effective. WW2 was one, there may be others today. A contemporary US prepared to provide more artillery shells, rather than more flashy things, would probably be a good thing IMJ. That US orientation has been precluded by its military delusions, which stem from never having fought a sustained, modern peer-peer land war except with the USSR doing most of the work. [depending on "modern", Civil War might be an exception]

-----------------------------------

Important clarification: I'm not claiming definitively Germany was strategically "better" than the West, though I lean towards believing they were. Germany needed to pull an inside straight to win and they nearly did so; nonetheless it was German strategic errors that largely lost the war in the East and therefore lost WW2. I am saying that the analytical standards for determining who was strategically better are either (1) childish if "strategically better" means "who won?" or (2) that any remotely analytical treatment of WW2 shows much/most of Allied resource expenditure to have been at best demonstrably inefficient, and to have afforded Germany's only chance of winning WW2 (fighting on one main front for far too long). I am annoyed by the lack of intelligent discourse on WW2 strategy, by its paucity of imagination and its obedience to the frames offered so far.

[Sheldrake]

Well it's been a minute but hey I've few spare moments...

However, wars are usually not won solely through tactics or just on the ground.

Who said anything contrary?

The notion that the Kriegsmarine could contest naval supremacy with submarines was absurd.

Please provide a single German primary source advocating "naval supremacy" via the submarine.

Prioritization by fiat of the supreme leader?

One really needs to do some comparative analysis of prioritization's success before reaching comparative conclusions. For the US's long running failures to make prioritization work, start with the reports of the War Production Board and Koistinen's Arsenal of World War Two.

Particularly wrong-headed is your implication that centralized prioritization ("fiat") was a problem. No, the experience of every country showed that greater centralization of prioritization improved that (flawed) process, from aggrandizement of the Speer/Todt Ministry to the WPB's implementation of the Controlled Materials Plan.

Also lacking any historical perspective is the extent to which Hitler was supposedly unique in acting "by fiat" to control production priorities. FDR did likewise:

The President concurred, particularly approving the emphasis given to three classes of equipment: aircraft and related items, shipping, and equipment for a decisive land and air offensive.

https://history.army.mil/books/wwii/ASF/chapter14.htm

Indeed it was FDR's personal decision to slash projected army size in Fall '42, preferring instead a larger air force. Hitler never made a decision of similar sweeping consequence re inter-service allocations.

Finally, you seem to apply a cartoon narrative of the Nazi state in which Hitler precisely dictated outcomes. As any remotely serious student of the Nazi state knows, it was a mishmash of competing bureaucracies that alternately "worked toward", interpreted in personal interest, or subverted central directives. Sic semper large organizations.

At least Marshall and Brooke usually managed to keep the more lunatic strategic notions of FDR and Churchill at bay, while Stalin eventually learned the same after the disasters of the first year of the war.

I saw that History Channel hour too!

Sure, three-quarters to two-thirds of the German Ground forces were engaged at any one time in the East.

Until mid-44 - or later - the German Ground forces had more soldiers buried in Russian soil than were engaged with the West. In addition to more (living) soldiers engaged with the USSR than with the West.

Their early campaigns in France and the Low Countries, Norway, the Balkans, and Greece were masterful combinations of ground and air power, as well as occasionally sea power. The early campaigns in the east were as well. Then the wheels started falling off the bus. Well, actually, they started to wobble prior to the attack on Poland.

So "masterful" but also "wobbly", with an inflection point unspecific? Luckily in military history one can get away with this kind of self-contradictory, amorphous high-level analysis. See below.

Germany also failed strategically

Military history is an analytically weak field. This must owe in part to its low prestige in academia, as a result of which we're not sending our best people into it. Online, however, one is lucky to encounter even the research assistants of military history's already weak thought leaders. Outsiders seeking to bring creditable intellectual/analytical practices to the field encounter the accumulated detritus of shallow dogma and interlocutors unable or unwilling to do more than parrot dogma. The insiders have the time, access, and low opportunity cost to have the data but, to adapt an analogous saw, military history is too important to leave it to the military historians.

To the extent that Germany's strategic failure is coextensive with it losing WW2, sure. And duh. But just as the poster's research assistance at TDI involved controlling for the effects of numerical/resource preponderance on tactical evaluation, so must strategic evaluation consider preponderance. Absent such consideration, strategic evaluation is merely the rote process of calling the victors strategically wise. This is an impoverished understanding of strategy, saying no more than a 6yo could say. On this childish intellectual frame, US victory over Grenada implies strategic brilliance; Finnish defeat by the USSR implies strategic ineptitude. It is shocking, though not surprising, that a career can be spent demonstrating that tactical outcomes do not resolve tactical quality, yet this same person can fail to apply the qualitative principal to strategic analysis. Again, it's a weak field analytically.

What I have tried to do in this thread is to remind you all that US/UK choices ran deeper than "a bridge too far" or "broad/narrow front." The US/UK could, for instance, have chosen the strategy commended - albeit a few months too late - by nearly all US Army professionals: concentration of strength against the enemy to defeat his main forces and take his land. Most postwar military history "analysis" of these choices - including by some of those involved in them - has done little more than fan service and hagiography. More fundamentally, and farther upstream of the Sledgehammer/Roundup/Torch dispute, the US/UK could have adopted a grand strategy that didn't rely on (or place disproportionate emphasis on) a bombing strategy untested in 1939 and largely refuted by the British experience of the Blitz (UK has the "excuse" of national chauvinism - only we can withstand such bombing - but not the US).

Whether in 1942 or 1943, it is beyond cavil that Wallied strategic concentration against the German Army would have ended WW2 much earlier. The desperate excuses proffered in this thread for 1942 failure don't apply to 1943's failure, to giving the Nazis yet another year to murder and destroy while the West focused mostly on killing women and children. That optimal Western strategy would have ended things blood-cheaper (for the West), in addition to earlier, is more difficult to argue but highly likely as well.

Why care about this? Well first there's the honest person's reflexive antipathy to nonsense, especially to nonsense in the service of power and jingoism. In addition, the erroneous belief that Allied WW2 strategy was good has ever since informed Western/US warmaking practice for the worse. Consider the US's postwar record: stalemated by impoverished China/N.Korea, defeated by North Vietnam, defeated by the Taliban, blemished outcomes in Iraq. God forbid they'd have fought a peer - it's no wonder all US leaders agreed that they (and the UK) couldn't defeat Germany had the USSR collapsed.

I don't bemoan these US defeats much, though the fans of American might are free to use my analysis for their own ends (they won't of course). What I do bemoan is the partially WW2-derived fantasies/delusions that US/Western strategy - bomb stuff, assume the dead kids don't matter - is militarily/strategically wise. Only this delusion enables American follies like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan - absent these delusions the US wouldn't commit to WW1-scale land warfare to kill Hitler (a bad refusal, IMO) nor to change regimes abroad (a good refusal, IMO).

Finally, we should also care about the rare but significant cases in which the US is a good actor whom one should want to be militarily effective. WW2 was one, there may be others today. A contemporary US prepared to provide more artillery shells, rather than more flashy things, would probably be a good thing IMJ. That US orientation has been precluded by its military delusions, which stem from never having fought a sustained, modern peer-peer land war except with the USSR doing most of the work. [depending on "modern", Civil War might be an exception]

-----------------------------------

Important clarification: I'm not claiming definitively Germany was strategically "better" than the West, though I lean towards believing they were. Germany needed to pull an inside straight to win and they nearly did so; nonetheless it was German strategic errors that largely lost the war in the East and therefore lost WW2. I am saying that the analytical standards for determining who was strategically better are either (1) childish if "strategically better" means "who won?" or (2) that any remotely analytical treatment of WW2 shows much/most of Allied resource expenditure to have been at best demonstrably inefficient, and to have afforded Germany's only chance of winning WW2 (fighting on one main front for far too long). I am annoyed by the lack of intelligent discourse on WW2 strategy, by its paucity of imagination and its obedience to the frames offered so far.

I have held off contributing to this thread for a while, but some of the comments in your lengthy post/diatribe raised my hackles.

You wrote

Whether in 1942 or 1943, it is beyond cavil that Wallied strategic concentration against the German Army would have ended WW2 much earlier.

In had to look up Beyond Cavill to be sure I understood. It means beyond any doubt. Had you written "could" instead of "would" I would have agreed. But you didn't. You are convinced that the US/UK strategy was wrong and extended this to a diatribe about the discipline of military history, the poor quality of analysis exhibited by military historians and some kind of political statement about US post war military operations.

Lets start with some simple history. What happened happened. Whatever did not happen didn't. No one is ever likely to know what would have happened if someone had made a different decision in the past. It didn't happen. Had the allies launched a cross channel assault in 1942 or 1943 it is possible the war would have ended earlier. Possibly the Allies could have defeated the German army; it is also possible that the Germans could have thrown the Allies into the sea and the war ended in 1944 as a German victory.

Here are some links to scholarly arguments about the benefits and limitations of counter factual history

• Turning Points, Bottlenecks, and the Fallacies of Counterfactual History Randall Collins, Sociological Forum, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Sep., 2007), pp. 247-269 (23 pages) https://www.jstor.org/stable/20110212
  WHITHER “WHAT IF” HISTORY? Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, History and Theory First published: 02 October 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10724
  Counterfactual history: why what didn’t happen matters https://www.timeshighereducation.com/ne ... pen-matter

s

But as you have pointed out you are a creditable outsider bringing your intellectual/analytical practices to bear and despise the accumulated detritus of shallow dogma , you might not have access to academic sources This Guardian article "What if' is a waste of time, Counterfactual history is misguided and outdated, as the first world war debate shows", summarises some of the weaknesses of counterfactuals
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/ ... te-of-time

I don't think that counterfactuals are a waste of time. They offer hours of intellectual entertainment and an opportunity to explore historic decision making, but they can't prove anything.

You are also appear to be a victim of one of the problems outlined in the Guardian article, "The problem with counterfactuals is that they almost always treat individual human actors – generals or politicians, in the main – as completely unfettered by these larger forces, able to make decisions without regard to them in any way." Much of the material on this thread has been posted by people bringing knowledge of the other factors, which explain why they collective view of the Combined Joint Chiefs was to postpone the idea and liberate North Africa instead. .

Furthermore, there is a tendency to treat decisions made by a collective as if they were a single rational being, instead of a set of compromised by individuals constrained by their organisational norms and differences of individual opinion. For example, FDR's military advisers were far from being a single ratiuonal voice. The Head of the US Navy was far keener on action in the Pacific than Europe. Marshall's enthusiasm for an early Cross Channel assault cannot be entirely disentangled from a service consideration to avoid priority shifting to the Pacific , where the Us Navy would lead. There was a substantial US Army lobby for investment in strategic bombers. No one knew at the time how decisive strategic bombing might be. Despite your dismissal of the effectiveness of strategic bombing, the publication of the strategic bombing survey did not lead to the disbandment of the USAF's bomber force.

I would urge you to re-examine your post and thinking.

[Kurt_S]

Brief response for now, more later...

You are also appear to be a victim of one of the problems outlined in the Guardian article, "The problem with counterfactuals is that they almost always treat individual human actors – generals or politicians, in the main – as completely unfettered by these larger forces, able to make decisions without regard to them in any way."

Even were this objection true (even were I ignoring the multiplicity of intra-country viewpoints), it's irrelevant to objective evaluation of strategic choices. The fact is there were strategic choices made among actual alternatives (Sledgehammer/Roundup vs. Torch, big bomber forces versus big armies). One can evaluate the military merit of those choices objectively without regard to the processes that engendered them. If it turns out that Choice A traced to Causes 2-20 instead of a superficial Cause 1, that's embarrassing for the historian of the decision but essentially irrelevant to the question "was Choice A militarily wise?"

For example: I could write a book claiming (1) that the adoption of the machine gun was militarily wise and (2) that the machine gun was adopted due to the material dialectics of the capitalist base dictating the form of the ideological superstructure. That (2) is nonsense has no bearing on the validity of (1).

Evans article and book (more to say on that later) regards broader counterfactual histories that address more than the narrow issues of military judgment, in which accounting of social causation is core to the questions being interrogated. His objections have merit regarding those broader uses of counterfactual history but much less merit (I would argue none) regarding narrow questions of military/strategic judgment.

there is a tendency to treat decisions made by a collective as if they were a single rational being, instead of a set of compromised by individuals constrained by their organisational norms and differences of individual opinion.

Look if you'd rather argue with an idiot, and cast me in that role, I can't really stop you. It just doesn't seem worth anyone's time. Throughout this thread I have repeatedly stated that the multiplicity of Allied decisionmakers was one factor that made their strategy objectively bad:

A huge part of Allied strategic listlessness is that it's often a >8-party coalition: USSR, USN, USAGF, USAAF, Douglas MacArthur, RN, RAF, British Army, etc.

Reminding me of what I already know would be helpful if I didn't know it and would be relevant if my point weren't about objective strategy, regardless of reasons/excuses.

[Sheldrake]

I think you are missing the point at which we differ.

You appear to be arguing that you KNOW for certain what might have happened if the Western Allies had chosen a different course to the historical time line. Your arguments treat speculation as if it were fact and then accuse historians of poor quality analysis and shallow thinking!

[Kurt_S]

I think you are missing the point at which we differ.

You appear to be arguing that you KNOW for certain what might have happened if the Western Allies had chosen a different course to the historical time line. Your arguments treat speculation as if it were fact and then accuse historians of poor quality analysis and shallow thinking!

I responded only to a few of your points, refuting for instance your misimpression that I am unaware of hydra-headed Allied decisionmaking processes. As a matter of courtesy and good faith, would you mind acknowleding that you've revised your impression of my arguments? Or let me know that you still believe I have a simplistic impression of Allied decisionmaking, which courtesy will allow us to refrain from wasting each other's time.

Re certainty: Sure, I'll concede that my "would have ended WW2 much earlier" propounds too much certainty. I would revise it to "would likely have ended WW2 much earlier."

Certainty and proof (whatever you mean by that bedeviling epistemic concept) aren't the standard here. All strategic decisions are made absent certainty because they regard future events and expectations. The Allies didn't launch Torch because they were certain about its outcomes; they judged it to be most likely to further their goals.

Nobody can say for certain what would have happened had the Allies invaded France in 1943 with a force bigger than OTL Overlord/Neptune, as was eminently possible. Likewise, nobody can say for certain what would have happened had Hitler done the "Small Solution" in December 1944 rather than OTL's BoBulge. Maybe a significant defeat causes the anti-Hitler coalition to fall apart after all.

Of course we all find it unreasonable (I hope) to believe that Germany had any chance whatsoever in Dec'44 but it's on grounds of reasonableness rather than on epistemic certainty that we are able to say so.

Likewise it's on grounds of reasonableness rather than epistemic certainty that any reasonable person should eventually see that the German Army of 1943 was not capable of fighting a true two-front war and would have collapsed when confronting this challenged as it did in 1944-45.

Because the reasonable conclusion is that a strategy to force 2-front war on Germany would likely have succeeded, the reasonable conclusion is also that this was the correct strategy and any alternative the wrong strategy.

[Aida1]

Why care about this? Well first there's the honest person's reflexive antipathy to nonsense, especially to nonsense in the service of power and jingoism. In addition, the erroneous belief that Allied WW2 strategy was good has ever since informed Western/US warmaking practice for the worse. Consider the US's postwar record: stalemated by impoverished China/N.Korea, defeated by North Vietnam, defeated by the Taliban, blemished outcomes in Iraq. God forbid they'd have fought a peer - it's no wonder all US leaders agreed that they (and the UK) couldn't defeat Germany had the USSR collapsed.

I don't bemoan these US defeats much, though the fans of American might are free to use my analysis for their own ends (they won't of course). What I do bemoan is the partially WW2-derived fantasies/delusions that US/Western strategy - bomb stuff, assume the dead kids don't matter - is militarily/strategically wise. Only this delusion enables American follies like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan - absent these delusions the US wouldn't commit to WW1-scale land warfare to kill Hitler (a bad refusal, IMO) nor to change regimes abroad (a good refusal, IMO).

The US was not militarily defeated by the northvietnamese and the Taliban. South vietnam and Afghanistan were defeated by the northvietnamese respectively the Taliban after the US left. One can only reproach the US political leadership of having(willingly) left Southvietnam and Afghanistan to fend for themselves being well aware of the consequences. That US military advantages against North Vietnam were not properly used in the Vietnam war is also a result of mistakes by the political leadership.
Western political leadership generally lacks the will to use its military advantages to the full.

[Onslow]

It's sad that Kurt still fails to follow the forum guidelines and still refuses to actually discuss factual issues and instead relies on illogical implications of his personal superiority over others and untrue claims about those who have more respect for those who were there at the time and know far more than Kurt ever will about the realities they faced.

These are the tactics of the conspiracy theorist. When simple facts are brought up, one ignores them and retreats to the dishonest implication that one is an ubermensch. Meanwhile Kurt still refuses to explain, for example, how an LCT design that by the simple laws of physics must set machines over its ramp into water that will drown them can be the basis of a successful invasion. He also repeatedly makes the completely untrue and dishonest claim that all or most of those who disagree with him do so because they feel that Allied strategy was inherently excellent. The lack of evidence for such claims means that it is little but a lie; many people who believe that Allied strategy was often flawed (like me) also believe that a 1943 cross-Channel invasion was likely to be a disaster.

When one cannot make an honest argument based on facts but instead falls to insulting others as Kurt does, it's apparent that one does not have a reasonable argument. Shorn of empty rhetoric, his line of argument is simply a cry of personal superiority, sneers at those who knew far more than he ever will about the reality they faced, and a refusal to deal with simple, undeniable physical facts.

A person who refuses to acknowledge simple physical facts and proclaims their enormous personal superiority is not a person who can conduct a reasoned discussion on alternative strategies. No one who runs away from discussing realities like LCT production with the childish claim that the British were not really "trying" to build enough, at a time when they were suffering far more serious privations, peril and workload than anything Kurt is likely to encounter, can actually honestly claim to be capable of reasoned discourse.

[Terry Duncan]

As this seems to have once again descended into discussions of members and not the topic, this topic is now locked as warned previously.

Please stick to discussing the topic itself and not other members as this is against the rules and only ever leads to bad situations.

Terry

[paulrward]

Hello All :

I have been following this thread for some time, as it gradually wound
on, and have noticed one major fact:

No one here on AHF has cited, or possibly even read , the one, single
source that is the best source for the reasoning behind the Allied
Strategy of North Africa / Italy first, and a delay in Overlord until
1944.

My suggestion to ALL OF YOU is to go back and read, (or re-read),
Dwight D. Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe. It will answer
every point brought up here, and will especially highlight two major facts:

1. The British, i.e. Churchill, were scared shitless about attacking into
France, fearing another landing failure like Gallipoli, or a trench stalemate
war of attrition as they had suffered in WWI. And the St. Nazaire raid
didn't help Churchill's morale one little bit.

2. The U.S. Army was simply not numerous enough, well equipped enough,
or competent enough, to attack into France prior to the summer of 1944.
Very simply, up until the beginning of 1944, the U.S. Army was essentially
The Not Ready For Prime Time Players.


What changed was A) Anzio convinced Churchill that another Gallipoli could
happen anywhere, and B) The U.S. Army got Bigger, Better Equipped, and
weeded out a few of the stupider officers.

Go back and read Ike, and see if you find the answers you have been looking
for.

Respectfully

Paul R. Ward

[Carl Schwamberger]

No one here on AHF has cited, or possibly even read , the one, single
source that is the best source for the reasoning behind the Allied
Strategy of North Africa / Italy first, and a delay in Overlord until
1944.

My suggestion to ALL OF YOU is to go back and read, (or re-read),
Dwight D. Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe. It will answer
every point brought up here, and will especially highlight two major facts:

.....

Go back and read Ike, and see if you find the answers you have been looking
for.

...

Actually I have read it, and it has informed some of my thoughts on this subject. Read a great deal else as well that touches on the issues.

[Richard Anderson]

No one here on AHF has cited, or possibly even read , the one, single
source that is the best source for the reasoning behind the Allied
Strategy of North Africa / Italy first, and a delay in Overlord until
1944.

My suggestion to ALL OF YOU is to go back and read, (or re-read),
Dwight D. Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe. It will answer
every point brought up here, and will especially highlight two major facts:

.....

Go back and read Ike, and see if you find the answers you have been looking
for.

...

Actually I have read it, and it has informed some of my thoughts on this subject. Read a great deal else as well that touches on the issues.

Yeah, I think we've all read it and have read much more besides. As a start, David Eisenhower's The Bitter Woods puts a slightly different spin on things, but in terms of documentary analysis, it is hard to beat Forrest Pogue's The Supreme Command along with Maurice Matloff and Edwin M. Snell's two volume Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare. If you want the British perspective, there is Gibbs et alia six-volume Grand Strategy and of course Ellis's two-volume Victory in the West. Or, if you want the original documentary sources and opinions, you can always go to CGSC and suss out the records of the various conferences, like SEXTANT. Also, don't forget the leadership and planners of the various air forces and navies also had their own notions of what the "answers" were.

Or you can read a single source, decide it is the be all and end all because it matches your preconceived notions, accept the confirmation bias, and tell the poor benighted ignoramuses at AHF what a sorry bunch they are for not citing it...

[Lethl215]

No one here on AHF has cited, or possibly even read , the one, single
source that is the best source for the reasoning behind the Allied
Strategy of North Africa / Italy first, and a delay in Overlord until
1944.

My suggestion to ALL OF YOU is to go back and read, (or re-read),
Dwight D. Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe. It will answer
every point brought up here, and will especially highlight two major facts:

.....

Go back and read Ike, and see if you find the answers you have been looking
for.

...

Actually I have read it, and it has informed some of my thoughts on this subject. Read a great deal else as well that touches on the issues.

Yeah, I think we've all read it and have read much more besides. As a start, David Eisenhower's The Bitter Woods puts a slightly different spin on things, but in terms of documentary analysis, it is hard to beat Forrest Pogue's The Supreme Command along with Maurice Matloff and Edwin M. Snell's two volume Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare. If you want the British perspective, there is Gibbs et alia six-volume Grand Strategy and of course Ellis's two-volume Victory in the West. Or, if you want the original documentary sources and opinions, you can always go to CGSC and suss out the records of the various conferences, like SEXTANT. Also, don't forget the leadership and planners of the various air forces and navies also had their own notions of what the "answers" were.

Or you can read a single source, decide it is the be all and end all because it matches your preconceived notions, accept the confirmation bias, and tell the poor benighted ignoramuses at AHF what a sorry bunch they are for not citing it...

Pretty much this. Can't say it any better than Rich.

[paulrward]

Hello All

Mr. Anderson posted :

Or you can read a single source, decide it is the be all and
end all because it matches your preconceived notions, accept the
confirmation bias, and tell the poor benighted ignoramuses at AHF
what a sorry bunch they are for not citing it...

Or, you can, like most Historians, ( a profession which, in my opinion, is right
up there with Theologian and Gender Studies Professor, ranks as the most
useless in our society ) rely on works by other historians for your data.

John Eisenhower was a fresh little butterbar right out of West Point when
the vital decisions were being made by his father. Pogue, Matloff, Snell,
Gibbs and Ellis are writing from the position of outsiders, well after the events.
They may know WHAT decisions were made, but they have no idea WHY they were made by the decision makers.

General Eisenhower, on the other hand, WAS THERE ! He reviewed ALL of
the data available to him at the time, and based on that information, good
or bad, HE made the decisions. And, less than three years after the end of
the war, he sat down and dictated his account, using his daily logs, his diary
and summaries, and huge amounts of documentary data he had available
to him in the post war era. And then he had experts check and double check
his writings for errors and omissions. His work is clear and concise, and it
has the advantages that, at no time does he have to guess as to why the
military decisions were made as they were - he was there for the debates, he
had all the competing views presented to him, and he made the decisions !

The first half of Crusade In Europe gives, on almost every page, reason after
reason why an invasion of France in 1942 and 1943 never took place. The
lack of competence of the U.S. Army, the low levels of equipment, the fact
that the USAAF did not have air superiority over France, the effects of the
U-Boat campaign on supply issues, and just plain lack of experience fighting
a modern war by the officers of the United States Military stand out, again
and again.

Remember, if the Allies had invaded France in 1943, Fredendall might have been
in command on the ground instead of Bradley. How do you think that would have
worked out ?

If you want to add two more works from the U.S. point of view, add A Soldier's
Story, by Omar Bradley, and War as I Knew It, by George Patton.

And, for the British view, The Memoirs of Field Marshall Montgomery, by Monty
himself, and Sir Francis de Guingand's Operation Victory, both provide
excellent information as to the thought process and decision making by the
Officers involved.

Or, if you want the original documentary sources and opinions,
you can always go to CGSC and suss out the records of the various
conferences, like SEXTANT.

Or, you could just read the memoirs of the Commanding Generals WHO WERE
AT THE CONFERENCES ! But, that might be too difficult for a Historian to
grasp.

Respectfully

Paul R. Ward