[Kaslin]

Ping

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Bush’s Fault? ;)

[ricmc2175]

Brilliant planning? You are kidding, right? The political general who ran this campaign lost more men at D-Day than MacArthur lost retaking the entire south Pacific.

[rbg81]

Easy. The Allied insistence on on conditional surrender. This terrified the Germans and helped keep Hitler in power. Of course, any “surrender” that kept the Nazis in power should have been rejected.

[ThomasMore]

Montgomery was an idiot with failed military policies. He was more of a diplomat than a military leader and strategist.

[abb]

More specifically, the lost opportunity to capture the approaches to Antwerp before the Germans had a chance to dig in. The port had been captured intact, but the estuary was neglected, even though there was the opportunity.

Instead, Monty’s ass was afire because Patton was getting all the ink. That was the reason he planned Market Garden, and insisted on the supplies to carry it out.

Instead, we got The Bulge, and East Germany postwar.

[2banana]

Why WWII Didn't End Sooner

Because the Germans didn't invade England and invaded the USSR????

[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

Hanson is one of our nation’s finest essayists. He is a first rate classical scholar and military historian. He had a major impact in classical scholarship in his discussion of Greek development.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

No doubt some mistakes were made. Not taking Caan before it was reinforced was a biggie similar to Anzio. Market Garden was a gamble that failed, and why didn’t we detect the Ardennes buildup just to mention a few. Not to mention the crazy Nazi’s expert defense.

WWII was so vast and complex you could argue about that forever.

[gusty]

My guess would be the German decision to leave troops behind in French and Belgian coastal cities. After the breakout from Normandy, the German strategy was to pull back to the Rhine, but leave significant garrisons in the coastal ports. This threw a serious monkey wrench in Allied logistics. The port facilities in Normandy were not big enough to handle the logistics for a quick win.

[Texas Eagle]

Because Selma hadn’t happened yet?

[bert]

it is what it is...... no amount of Wednesday morning quarterbacking will change the facts

[Servant of the Cross]

In an unwise move, Eisenhower in early September had diverted gasoline and ammunition from the American sector to Montgomery's theater. Montgomery, in a risky gambit, planned to leapfrog across the Rhine from Holland into the German Ruhr Valley, hoping to paralyze Germany's industrial heartland and end the war outright.

The result, however, was the disastrous Operation Market Garden, or "A Bridge Too Far," catastrophe.

If only, my military acumen been used wisely, instead of being wasted by
mediocre men of lesser ability - men harboring political aspirations - the
war would have ended much sooner than it did ... with a great savings in
lives and materials.

In August 1944 Lt. Gen. Omar N. Bradley, commanding the 12th U.S. Army Group, abruptly halted the advance of the XV Corps of Lt. Gen. George S. Patton's Third Army.

The Mysterious Death of Gen. George S. Patton

[JRios1968]

Why WWII Didn't End Sooner

Because the Germans went ahead and bombed Pearl Harbor!!

[virgil283]

Thanks Kaslin good article

"U.S. Gen. George S. Patton -- in the doghouse for the slapping of ill GIs a year earlier"

They should have punished Patton by making him stay at the front.....

[Trentamj]

Spinning hypotheticals regarding alternative WWII event-sequences has long been a favorite activity of both myself, as well as many of my oldest friends. General Montgomery has long been regarded as insufferably vain, as well as limited in military acumen. Eisenhower's position as Supreme Commander is better understood in terms of him being the in loco parentis, or the European proxy for the President of the United States. As such, many of Ike's decisions turned on political, rather than merely military factors.

Ever since Abraham Lincoln starting changing his top generals as often as he changed his socks during the US Civil War, every United States President expects a commensurate prerogative to micro-manage ongoing military operations. FDR was not about to let a mere 4,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean keep him from having a major say in how Germany was to be defeated. Eisenhower was NOT selected for either his strategic or tactical genius (geniuses being a dime a dozen); instead, Eisenhower was selected because he could be TRUSTED to enact the political will of Washington DC without letting his ego get in the way. Say what you will about Ike, when it came to being a personality, he was essentially EGO-LESS in comparison to Patton, Montgomery, and even Omar Bradley.

[wordsofearnest]

Tonnage.

[Oatka]

I posted this elsewhere, but think it is appropriate here. While there is a request for a donation, you can watch this fascinating graphic 18-minute display for free.

The graphics for Russian losses were horrific, and the disparity of American casualties between the Pacific and European campaigns were a surprise - to me anyway.

Check out http://www.fallen.io/ww2/

[Billthedrill]

I love a bit of arm-chair generalship myself. With the advantage of perfect intelligence, no pressure for a decision, and a cold beer in front of me I am easily the equal of Patton, Napoleon, or Al the Great. (The Custer thing was not my fault - I offered Crazy Horse a tie but the guy was banking points for a level-up.)

There are a few uncomfortable truths about Patton's wild run through France that we armchair generals tend to miss with the disadvantage of perfect hindsight. First, that even with a Channel port safely in hand and no other demands, that would have stretched the logistics train to the very limit. Patton used air assets to cover his flank for a reason: everyone else was running pedal-to-the-metal forward and even finding, much less keeping up with, the point of that spear was beyond anything but the most meticulous planning, which, since nobody (Patton included) expected that sort of astonishing success, we didn't and couldn't do. We had similar problems in Iraq in the second Gulf War, where we did have the luxury of planning but the troops simply exceeded even that. Second, and perhaps more important, Hitler simply was still in firm control and quite unwilling to even consider an armistice, much less a surrender, in the autumn of '44. Here was a fellow fully willing to allow entire armies to be cut off, surrounded, and die on the vine, rather than cede a single foot of ground, a policy he continued until the very end to the shock and dismay of such defensive experts as Manstein and Heinrici, who were quite capable of doing more with less but not everything with nothing.

In the end, Germany had to be crushed, not simply outmaneuvered, a prediction that Pershing had made in 1919. Hitler had to be killed, not defeated. The Nazis had to be hung, not offered an easy out. And sadly, people had to die to do that.

[PA Engineer]

I don't agree with Victor Davis Hanson on this one. The Hürtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge could have arguably been avoided had Eisenhower's relationship with General Devers been more professional. Eisenhower had an extremely difficult job and could be forgiven for many mistakes, however his insecure motivations at stopping Devers cannot be forgiven.

How World War II Wasn’t Won

One Allied army, however, was still on the move. The Sixth Army Group reached the Rhine at Strasbourg, France, on Nov. 24, and its commander, Lt. Gen. Jacob L. Devers, looked across its muddy waters into Germany. His force, made up of the United States Seventh and French First Armies, 350,000 men, had landed Aug. 15 near Marseille — an invasion largely overlooked by history but regarded at the time as “the second D-Day” — and advanced through southern France to Strasbourg. No other Allied army had yet reached the Rhine, not even hard-charging George Patton’s.

Devers dispatched scouts over the river. “There’s nobody in those pillboxes over there,” a soldier reported. Defenses on the German side of the upper Rhine were unmanned and the enemy was unprepared for a cross-river attack, which could unhinge the Germans’ southern front and possibly lead to the collapse of the entire line from Holland to Switzerland.