Posted on 09/08/2006 2:30:59 PM PDT by NutCrackerBoy
From a military guy:
Dear Jonah,
The favorite indoor outdoor sport of public intellectuals these days is of course the historical analogy. Iran is the new Germany and this is 1938. Bin Ladin is the new Saladin and this the 12th Century or whatever. A new one dawned on me yesterday. I am currently reading a book called Through German Eyes: The English on the Somme. The author has gone back and read German unit histories and intelligence reports and tried to write a history of the battle as the German’s saw it. What emerges is the whole myth of an incompetent British leadership sending lambs to slaughter is not true at all. Looked at from the German perspective, the British Army was actually very good on the Somme. They nearly broke the German Army.
The reason why this reminded me of today is that people continually refuse to understand that some fights are just hard. The British Army in 1916 was facing an industrialized well trained German Army that was occupying the better part of France and was simply not going to quit. All of the arm chair post facto strategizing in the world is not going to change the brutal reality that the English could either give up and loose the war or fight and win the war and suffer incredible casualties. There was no easy way out.
Today, we face in many ways the same situation. We face a fanatical and cunning enemy who is unafraid to blend into our society indiscriminately kill civilians, is numerous, well funded and like the Germans will not give up. There is no good way out of this. The United States is going to spend the next generation or more under the threat of terrorism. It will have to change its society and its notions of civil liberties and privacy and will probably have to invade and occupy the odd country every few years for the foreseeable future. All of the arm chair strategizing about more troops in Iraq and Special Forces and diplomacy and working with our allies is not going to change that. People just refuse to face a bad reality. A bad situation is always someone’s fault for not pursuing the easy solution. People refuse to accept that sometimes there are no easy solutions. In the same way people refused even after the war to see that the slaughter on the Somme and Ypres was unavoidable once the war started, people today refuse to see that a long protracted bloody struggle against radical Islam is inevitable. Thus we get “Bush’s incompetence” and “why do they hate us” and so fourth. It is just the same monkeys in different trees.
Hehe, when I saw the title, I thought it was going to be about the Easter Rising! ;)
Germany lost WWII in 1933 when Hitler started persecuting the Jews. What if he hadn't been an anti-Semite and instead, appealed to their sense of German unity? Every advanced weapon system developed by the US & its allies would have been deployed in the early stages of the war to ensure an Axis victory.
Sheep, sheepdogs and wolves.
Sheep who don't like sheepdogs around; sheep who deny wolves exist.
>>>Germany lost WWII in 1933 when Hitler started persecuting the Jews.<<<.........
True, but the nasty reality is that he nearly won because he was ruthless and fanatical and was able to brainwash millions into thinking the same way. It is the Islamofascist mindset that we have to deal with (and the naive but terribly dangerous liberal assumption that Islamofascists are just like us.)
Clarify, please. It seems like there is a missing negative somewhere there. Do you mean Germany's ability to innovate was attenuated, swallowed up into managing complex (and evil) logistics of death camps? Thus slowing development of military technology such as defense systems?
It's my understanding that prior to "hostilities" all sides agreed not to target civilian areas? Bombers would get lost and drop their bombs far from their intended target.
Well said.
The design of Colossus, the first all-electronic, digital, programmable computer by Max Newman. Although Colossus was not a general purpose computer and had only limited programmability, it represented an important milestone. Newman, a Cambridge University professor of mathematics, headed the "Newmanry," a special code-breaking unit at Bletchley Park in England during World War II. Colossus was designed and built to break the German Lorenz cipher, which was used by the Nazi high command to encrypt its highest priority communications. The Colossus machines (which were physically constructed by a team working under the electrical engineer Tommy Flowers+ ) played a critical role in securing Allied victory in Europe and were influential in the post-war development of computers in England.3 (Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, Alan Turing+, who was Newman's protégé, had relatively little direct involvement with Colossus, although his ideas were extremely influential. Newman later declined to become "Sir Max Newman" in protest against the treatment accorded Turing+ by the postwar British government.)
2. Hitler didn't have any Jews top counteract this:
When Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, Einstein was a guest professor at Princeton University, a position which he took in December 1932, after an invitation from the American educator, Abraham Flexner. In 1933, the Nazis passed "The Law of the Restoration of the Civil Service" which forced all Jewish university professors out of their jobs, and throughout the 1930s a campaign to label Einstein's work as "Jewish physics"—in contrast with "German" or "Aryan physics"—was led by Nobel laureates Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark. With the assistance of the SS, the Deutsche Physik supporters worked to publish pamphlets and textbooks denigrating Einstein's theories and attempted to politically blacklist German physicists who taught them, notably Werner Heisenberg. Einstein renounced his Prussian citizenship and stayed in the United States, where he was given permanent residency. He accepted a position at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he concentrated on developing a unified field theory (see below). Einstein became an American citizen in 1940, though he still retained Swiss citizenship.
Edward Teller (original Hungarian name Teller Ede) (January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-born American nuclear physicist, known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb."
Of Jewish descent, Teller emigrated to the United States in the 1930s, and was an early member of the Manhattan Project charged with developing the first atomic bombs. During this time he made a serious push to develop the first fusion-based weapons as well, but these were deferred until after World War II. After his controversial testimony in the security clearance hearing of his former Los Alamos colleague Robert Oppenheimer, Teller became ostracized by much of the scientific community. He continued to find support from the U.S. government and military research establishment. He was a co-founder of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and was both its director and associate director for many years.
Nazi Germany might have been able to survive one, but not both.
Instead, Gemany lost twice: their Jews went to work for the Allies, and Germany had no Jews in which to develop counteracting intelligence/weapon systems.
"People just refuse to face a bad reality."
Sadly, the reality is that we are going to be forced to kill millions of them, while they gladly try to kill millions of us.
Not the pretty picture I had envisioned for my retirement,
but it's been a swell R&R.
Clarify...Hitler threw all the Jews out of German universities. All the great Jewish physicists from Germany either left the country or were thrown into the war machine. Those from Hungary and Denmark also left Europe. The U.S. Manhatten Project benefitted greatly from their loss. Germany's program to build an atomic bomb suffered from the loss of so much intellectual firepower.
I don't know if the same was true regarding radar.
Sorry, but while the point--that bad realities sometime have no easy way out of them or through them--is absolutely valid, using the carnage of the Western Front in WW I as the historical analogy is flat wrong.
The carnage *was* largely due to incompetence: the failure of the British General Staff to adapt their tactics to modern weaponry. Massive barrages, the end of which signaled to the hunkered down enemy that it was time to come out and man the machine guns was flat idiotic, and thousands of young men were sacrificed on the altar of tactical inflexibility. The Germans finally correctly adapted their tactics, to use artillery supression of enemy fire concurrent with an advance, and break through into the enemy rear, rather than merely capturing the next trench, but too late, so that their potato famine and the revolt of their fleet doomed their war effort.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.