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Depends on the photographer. With the right angle and lighting you can make him look like Bugs Bunny.
Posted on 08/23/2005 1:48:53 PM PDT by jb6
Yes, but his Generals also never ultimately gave him anything to fear at all, until the very end. German honor, and the German nation, would have been saved by a short and nasty civil war, at the end of which the Wehrmacht would have bested the SS, Hitler would have been gone, and the Final Solution never would have been implemented.
The question is: were the Generals fools who plunged into Russia unprepared winter? Or were they cowards who foresaw a winter disaster coming but were too afraid of Hitler to do anything about it?
I seriously doubt Patton ever would have ended up in Italy, even if he hadn't been relieved. Little known is that after Fredenhall was relieved of II Corps, George Marshall offered the command to Clark, who refused, saying it amounted to a demotion. Patton grabbed it, even though he was already slated to get an army. Marshall never forgot.
Clark got 5th Army in Italy, and despite Eisenhower's numerous attempts to get him into the ETO to lead the American troops in Normandy, Marshall shot him down. Bradley got the head job, and Patton has movies made about him while Mark Clark is all but forgotten.
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Depends on the photographer. With the right angle and lighting you can make him look like Bugs Bunny.
What propped up Hitler, and thwarted those officers who wanted to get rid of him, was of all things, the weak-willed appeasement of Britain and France over both incidents. Neville Chamberlain and Eduard Deladier could have stopped the Nazis in their tracks, but instead bought themselves the worst war in history.
Russkies did not win the WW 2 Western Allies did.
Also you can note that Hitler delayed Barbarossa in order to deal with the uprising in Yugoslavia. Had Hitler not done this he may have taken Moscow in July or early August.
It should not be forgotten that Stalin joined with Hitler and divided up eastern Europe. Together they invaded Poland in September of 1939. Hitler took the western half of Poland and Stalin took the eastern half.
The Hitler/Stalin agreement allowed Stalin the Baltic States, Finland some territory to the south toward Iraq.
The great benefit to Hitler was that his back was protected so that he could fight Britain and France.
Stalin reluctantly agreed to fight Germany only after Hitler turned on his erstwhile partner and attacked Russia.
Without American Lend Lease, and the military aid it received from Britain, the Germans would have easily defeated the Russians.
The Russian people are the least likely to know anything about what Joe Stalin did during the war. This was a closed police state. The people were given the option of dying for Stalin or just dying.
Later in 1939 Stalin came within an inch of signing the Nazi's "Pact of Steel" which would have made him the fourth partner with Japan, Italy and Germany.
Stalin also signed a peace treaty with Japan and protected Japan's back during the entire war. Stalin declared war on Japan two days after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima so that he could get in on the spoils.
The whole of Russian history is a tale of deception, tyranny, blood-thirsty revolution, hate and finally failure on a scale never before seen in human history.
Had von Paulus defied orders from the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia it merely would have been another field marshall who would have surrendered to General Voronov.
If Paulus had defied orders at the very beginning of Uranus, or even at the moment of the Soviet linkup at the end of Uranus, and managed to break a hole and link himself up with German lines, the defied orders would have been forgotten and buried, and der Fuhrer would have taken credit for the idea.
That's a lot of ifs, but I only mean to say that a successful defiance by Paulus would have been overlooked and forgotten. If it had come early enough, it could have worked.
I'd bet he'd still have been given Third Army when it was activated because he would have run the Germans out of Italy long before Clark finally took Rome on June 5th.
Thanks, but, as I said above, I waded through it page and map one by one.
Hitler initially wanted to invade Russia in the fall of 1940 after France had fallen but had to be talked out of it.
I've read some good debates on how much the invasion of Yugoslavia cost the Germans in the winter of 1941. It can, and has, been argued that Hitler's diversion of forces from Moscow during the fall of 1941 did as much as anything else to ensure the failure of the Moscow campaign when winter proper began.
Amazing, ain't it? What were they thinking?
THe Eyeties already had Albania. It was their invasion of Greece that had stalled out. What really slowed the Nazis down was taking Yugoslavia, then Greece, and then a Hitler directive to go south before they hit Moscow. All three moves rather unecessary because a stalemate in Greece would have just been an unsuccessful Italian sideshow that dragged on forever, same with Yugoslavia, and if they had Moscow, they would have had the Ukraine and the oilfields anyway.
Before the invasion, the USSR had been NAZI Germany's major source of oil. So in some ways, Hitler was the best general the Allies had. BTW, the Soviets faced 5 times the Nazis the UK and the US did, and paid 100 times the price.
Either way, you still need warm clothing in Russia, not to mention a way to cope with the mud before the big freeze. Still not a walk in the park to this day. BTW, the NAZIs were initially greeted as liberating saviors in the Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Somehow they failed to notice and treated folks who had originally been kindly disposed to them as "liberators" like fiends, instead of friends.
It is ironic that, despite the huge differences between the US, Britain and Russia, they were to able to coordinate their strategies to a much greater extent than the Germans and Japanese. The Germans and Japanese essentially fought two independent wars, which is why they lost.
Japan suffered two defeats from Zukov in 1938 and in 1939, costing them an entire army. They weren't about to attack again.
Sure, Stalin should have gone into war unprepared.
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