Posted on 11/13/2010 5:26:40 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
There was an Italian tank [don’t recall the make and model] used during the war in Libya/Egypt [Rommel] that needed to be sandbagged against small arms.
The article on the right is pretty interesting. 3 plants explode in three locations within an hour.
As far as I can find, there was never any proof of sabotage, but it still is awfully suspicion. Even then it was, since TIME magazine will run an article of these as several more incidents in this year asking if we perhaps have a growing 5th columnist movement here in the U.S.
An interesting note, of the 8 killed at the Woodbridge facility, 7 of them were women. Two of the women found dead were not identified as far as I can find and in one of those cases all they actually found of the victim was a torso some 1000 yards away from the blast site.
I've made this case before here, and promise you, I'm at least half serious. ;-)
How do you tell who won a war?
Yes, you can argue that Stalin was a bigger murderer, but remember: Stalin began his carnage in the 1920s, while Hitler didn't really get started until 1939.
During the war itself, Hitler's people killed more.
By contrast, the Germans really do control most of Europe today.
How is that possible, you may ask?
Easy, because when the whole world is going insane, those who are relatively sane gain control.
And the Germans, except for a, ahem, ahem, brief period have been amongst the most sane people on the planet.
For example, Germans have never forgotten the First Rule of Economic Survival: in the long run, you must make and sell more than you buy.
Nor did they forget the Second Rule: in the long run, good quality beats low price.
And that is how they enjoy the easy life of victory -- high prosperity, short working hours and long vacations at the best resorts.
Naturally, the Germans are not immune from various social forces which are turning Europeans into an endangered species, but I doubt if they will be quite as quick to succumb as some of those other weaker nations.
As for those small matters of 1945 territorial adjustments, East Germany, the Berlin Wall, etc... well, yes, victory always demands some price, and of course the Germans had to pay something.
But overall, they paid a lot less than many others -- the Jews, the Poles, Ukraines & others come to mind...
So I say, Germans are winners, and we're just a bunch of losers.
And please don't think I'm being less than half serious. ;-)
Well, again, the Germans paid a heavy price for WWII in many ways. They were de-facto occupied by the Allies for about 10 years (and by the Warsaw Pact for 45 years) and we still have bases in Germany to this day. They were divided as a nation for 45 years and lost territory (Prussia to Poland). The Germany of today is very different from the Germany of 1939 (or previous) because so many of the uber Alpha males died. Yes, they got help under the Marshall Plan, but so did most of Western Europe. In the end, the Marshall Plan was more about containing communism than anything else.
I think you will also agree that America was perhaps the first nation on Earth NOT to act like a typical conqueror. After WWII, we sought to Rehabilitate and Rebuild the nations we conquered in our own image (vs. plunder and subjugate). This is what made us different, but that too was in our best interest (e.g., the Marshall Plan).
WWI & WWII were the most profound events of the last century—perhaps even since the fall of Rome. You could even consider then as one war with an intermission since WWI directly caused WWII. As such, the consequences will continue to reverberate for a long time. Depending on your time horizon, you can make the case that different peoples won the war. If you picked 0-40 years after the war, then we and the Soviets clearly won. Today people (such as yourself) might look at circumstances and come to a different conclusion.
If you extent your time horizon out another 100 years, you may find that the real winners were someone completely different—and yes I’m talking about the Muslims. I think after WWII, Nationalism because such a dirty concept that Westerners stopped acting in their own national interest. I also think that the enormous loss of people had an negative impact on the Western psyche that made guilty about their culture (self-hatred). That created a void that Muslims are only happy to fill. The fact that Muslims have also co-opted the Global Power structure doesn’t help either. It is still an open question whether the old forces of Nationalism will resurrect sufficently to resist the Muslim colonization. It will be very interesting to see how it all shakes out.
Yes, that will be the CV-35, otherwise known as the L3/L5. Im sure of it.
Of course they did, and there is actually a serious side to my otherwise facetious arguments.
First of all, the way Americans define "victory" is nothing like anyone in the past, or indeed, like most peoples today.
And according to those old definitions, you could even say the Germans "won" the war.
Second is a counter to the oft-heard lament: oh, those poor little Germans got so so so abused and mistreated by the mean Allies, ain't it awful.
Well, they didn't come out of it all that badly, considering.
Check out the numbers on this site:
Both the Soviets and Chinese lost two & three times more people killed.
Poland, the Soviet Union, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bessarabia, Bukovina, Singapore, Greece and the Philippines all lost as large, or larger, percentage of their populations killed as Germany.
The Soviet Union, China, Germany, Poland, Dutch East Indies, Japan, India, Yugoslavia and French Indochina all lost a million or more killed.
Point is that while German suffering was high, it was not especially exceptional -- many others suffered as much or more.
And you could say, they received many benefits from "losing" the war -- benefits which could easily add up to "victory" in some definitions.
rbg81: "They were de-facto occupied by the Allies for about 10 years (and by the Warsaw Pact for 45 years) and we still have bases in Germany to this day."
US and British occupations were a total benefit to the Germans, for which there were no down-sides.
And that's the reason some of our troops are still there -- we get along well, and the Germans like having us.
We'd be gone in a day if they didn't.
rbg81: "You could even consider then as one war with an intermission since WWI directly caused WWII."
I argue this just slightly differently: WWI did not directly cause WWII -- rather both wars were caused by the same thing: German Imperialism.
The reason we had a second war was because WWI did not defeat the root cause.
rbg81: "If you extent your time horizon out another 100 years, you may find that the real winners were someone completely different—and yes I’m talking about the Muslims."
Muslims are simply filling in the huge void left by the near-death of Europe's instinct for self preservation.
My guess is Europeans will all snap out of it, probably just around the same time they figure out they can no longer depend on Uncle Sam to protect their little fannies against every conceivable threat.
But have to wonder if that will be such a good day for US?
A few points:
1. German shame about losing WWI and anger at being “humiliated” by the Allies enabled Hitler’s rise and caused WWII.
2. I think the Germans were only happy to have us there ‘cause they were afraid of the Soviets. I don’t think any self-respecting German liked being occupied.
3. I wish I shared your optimism about “snapping out of it”. Again, I think something has fundamentally gone wrong with the Western psyche. The latest Conservative victories aside, its getting progressively worse and don’t see it turning around in my lifetime.
No. War is a political action and is about achieving a political objective. Killing people and breaking things is the application of a military force to achieve these ends. You are applying a tactical aspect of warfare to a strategic question. At the end of the war, the Germans held none of their military or political objectives.
After a war is over, does the victor not collect reparations from the losers -- to rebuild its economy and restore its infrastructure? Well, how many billions of Marshall Plan reconstruction reparations did Germany collect after the war?
After the results of reparations from the last global war, I would have thought the Allies would have wanted to try something different, but in reality there war reparations after World War II. Though they were smart enough to realize that the 320,000,000,000 amount that they estimated would be the cost was not realistic for Germany to pay. They did come up with a sum of 20,000,000,000 by the Allied Commission on Reparations though of which the Soviets would receive half. Most of this was to be paid in machinery. Some factories were entirely disassembled and reconstructed in France and the UK for example. So in short, the Allies did receive reparation. Just not to the degree that had been attempted in the past.
Doesn't a victorious army usually absorb as tribute, some of the better units of its defeated adversary, to help with the next big battles? Well, how many millions of Allied troops stood guard in Germany against the Russians -- some still there to this very day?
Not always. And the more technical militarizes become, the harder it is to really do that. Germany was militarily decimated at the end of the war leaving not much in the way of units that would be worth absorbing. That coupled with the need to denazify and of course France's pressure to completely demilitarize the country that had attacked them twice already in the 20th century, didn't leave much room for absorbing any "better" units. Yet it was not long into the Cold War that it was realized that Germany had to have a functional military (much to the distress of the French).
Doesn't a victorious nation usually enjoy the fruits of it's wars -- prosperity, an easy life, others to do its bidding, easy access to the world's best vacation resorts, and long vacations to enjoy them? And don't the losers have to bear the burdens of high taxes, long work hours, short vacations and constant military defense against repeated attacks on every front?
This would depend on the political objectives of the war in the first place. The objective of the Second World War was not to defeat the Germans as a people, but the Nazis as a political force. For the sake of stability in Europe which had been lacking since the end of the First World War it did not make sense to leave central Europe completely desolate. That’s not to say that it was not thought about though. The Morgenthau Plan called for the deindustrialization of Germany and putting the entire nation on a poorer, farming economy. The plan was dropped though after it was realized that the coming Cold War would need a Germany that was stronger economically.
Finally, don't the winners usually end up in control of the territories they conquered? Well, how much of Europe does the US or Britain, or the USSR control today?
It is 65 years later so using today as a measuring point is not very strong. We did control the conquered areas after the war and we did what we felt was best with the conquered lands. In fact what "we" thought was best was different enough that one of the zones of control ended up breaking away from the others to become East Germany. The western Allies help establish a democracy in their zones which still survives today.
So, no. I don't see Germany as having won the war in any fashion. I do see that they had the good fortune to have been conquered (for the most part) by nations that were not looking for anything but creating a stable government in central Europe that would help prevent a repeat of another militaristic Germany picking on its neighbors.
Pal, you're taking my tongue-in-cheek arguments more seriously than I intended. :-)
I was simply trying to point out that the Germans didn't come out of the war so badly, compared to many others.
In fact, if you turn your head and squint your eyes a bit, you can even see the outlines of "victory" in that picture.
Let me put it this way: while Germany obviously lost the war, they've done pretty well since, winning the peace.
CougarGA7: "You are applying a tactical aspect of warfare to a strategic question."
Actually, I was seriously trying to point out that the Germans suffered a good deal less than many other groups.
By the way, in my listing of deaths by nationality, I inadvertently neglected to mention such groups as Jews, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, Soviet POWs, "special needs" children, etc.
CougarGA7: "They did come up with a sum of 20,000,000,000 by the Allied Commission on Reparations though of which the Soviets would receive half.
Most of this was to be paid in machinery.
Some factories were entirely disassembled and reconstructed in France and the UK for example.
So in short, the Allies did receive reparation."
In short: Germans sent all their old worn-out machine tools to the Russians, French & Brits, then immediately set to work building new stuff for themselves.
By the way, do you have any idea how much Germans love machinery?
We're talking Brer Rabbit in the Brier Patch kind of love here.
You can't ask a good German to do something more enjoyable than designing, building, maintaining and operating really nice machinery.
I'm not even certain if they prefer sex -- after all, Germans' birth rate is not much different from the rest of Europe... ;-)
So I wouldn't even refer to those transfers as "reparations."
I'd call it an economic stimulus program. ;-)
CougarGA7: "Yet it was not long into the Cold War that it was realized that Germany had to have a functional military..."
You misunderstand.
I was referring to the fact that since 1945 the Western Allied militaries have been servants of the Germans -- standing guard at the Fulda Gap and Rhine River to protect Germans against Eastern barbarians.
And it is a fact that the Germans like us there, or we would have been gone -- as in France -- many years ago.
Cougar7: "The objective of the Second World War was not to defeat the Germans as a people, but the Nazis as a political force."
Not true.
The objective was to thoroughly defeat the Germans as a people -- to so thoroughly defeat them that they would never again attempt world domination through military conquest.
And if this sounds a little "politically incorrect" to you, then ask yourself: truthfully, just how "politically correct" were such leaders as Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and even Winston Churchill?
Answer: not at all "politically correct."
They hated the Germans as a people, and wanted them thoroughly defeated.
The only issue was, how "thorough" was "thorough enough"?
Pure German propaganda.
Of course, Germans suffered "shame" and "humiliation" at their defeat in the First World War.
But their shame was: they did not believe they had been defeated militarily, and therefore they deserved no humiliations from the Versailles Peace Treaty.
Further more, it would not have mattered in the least what terms Versailles imposed on Germany.
German imperial ambitions -- humiliation for France, Lebensraum in the East -- were in no way affected by their defeat in 1918.
Many Western leaders -- notably, US Commanding General John Pershing -- fully understood in 1918 that Germany was only asking for an armistice and time to retreat, regroup, rebuild, rearm and restart the war -- in 20 years!
So, there were not two world wars, only one: it was Germany's bid to become the world's most dominant power.
They tried twice and failed twice, the second time with disastrous consequences.
But I say, all things considered, they've done well since.
rbg81: "2. I think the Germans were only happy to have us there ‘cause they were afraid of the Soviets. I don’t think any self-respecting German liked being occupied."
I believe that Germans today are pretty "self respecting," and that's a good thing -- but they are no longer as insufferably arrogant as they were for many decades before 1945, also a good thing.
Germans have always -- since 1945 -- liked and appreciated the Western Allied forces on their soil.
That's why some of ours are still there.
When the Germans finally decide that we are more of a pain than a benefit, then we'll withdraw.
But that day still has not arrived.
rbg81: "3. I wish I shared your optimism about “snapping out of it”.
Again, I think something has fundamentally gone wrong with the Western psyche.
The latest Conservative victories aside, its getting progressively worse and don’t see it turning around in my lifetime."
I am by nature optimistic.
Yes, in the sturm und drang, in the fog of political warfare it's often most difficult to tell which side is gaining or losing, and where.
Europe today has enjoyed many years of what native Australians might call "dream time," and I would call healing time -- meaning somewhat disconnected from reality, focused inward, learning to get along with themselves and each other, and time to forget the unimaginable horrors of the past.
In due time they may well be called on again to shoulder the burdens of the World.
But such a calling will most likely be related to America's further decline, and that is not something I'd wish for any time soon.
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