This is timely, as I'm reading The Longest Day right now. (And planning an upcoming visit to the D-Day Museum!) I tried to watch the movie, but it was frankly pretty terrible. Notable performances include Tony from West Side Story, acting just as deranged as he did in that movie. (Was it here that people were discussing the possibility that neurological damage from leaded gasoline was responsible for the behavior of the American teen as depicted in West Side Story, Rebel Without a Cause, etc.? I'm convinced.)
OP link 1 is 18 pages long, BTW.
2: Go before the Trump people change the exhibits to "both sides were brave."
2: That was me, I think, on scary teen culture.
Speaking of strategic bombing, I just noticed that my uncle's time as a B-17 pilot gets mentioned in at least one book about Jimmy Stewart's WWII service.
Looking at who wrote the book, it means there's a possibility that Leonard Maltin typed my uncle's name.
How many books about Jimmy Stewart's WWII service are there?
I have no idea, but I think both are very popular topics.
Ok, no war geeks in evidence. I'll write a summary anyway, I'm sure they'll come out of their foxholes to argue with me.
No modern discussion of D-Day is complete without a mention of how the invasion would have been covered by our modern press - Eisenhower's Folly from back in 1994 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1994/06/06/eisenhowers-folly/cb250c5d-ecdc-46a5-944d-7c2ca9caaf57/?utm_term=.53f6c5a131f6
The article referenced here is interesting historiography, discussing how historians have addressed different aspects of D-Day over the years. Historians have to earn a living, and that means coming up with new approaches to old stuff. It's like the fall of the Roman Empire denialists, a group of historians who deny that anything changed in Europe with the collapse of the Roman Empire. One of their critics refuted their claims nicely pointing out that even an eight year helping his dad out doing field work could tell that something had changed. No elementary school diploma needed.
As an overview, the paper was pretty good. War pushes technology and societal organization. The post-war technocratic corporation was shaped by the technocratic logistics of the war.
10 War geeks are here, just busy with other stuff.
Yes, sorry, I didn't realise you were waiting for expressions of interest. I'll try to put something together.
Well I'd never dare presume upon your time, sir! Civility is most important!
What's interesting about 11.1 is that the article it links to was originally published in 1984. Yes, as far back as that the New York Times was ridiculing all those ludicrous media "experts" who were sceptical about military action.
"Pissing into the Wind: The Case For."
10. I don't have the time to write a full essay, but I read the piece and have a few short comments.
One useful thing it did is call out (in Tooze's gentle way) the constant post-war valorization of the Wehrmacht over the Allied armies, especially the US Army, because the Allies "unfairly" exploited their huge material advantages to defeat Germany's "better fighters." You hear the same thing about the Union versus the Confederacy.
Another thing that struck me is that WW2 after D-Day featured a campaign that was remarkably like some WW1 offensives. The big difference was forward artillery observers with radio, both on the ground and in airplanes. Keegan, in his WW1 book, makes a big deal of how their offensives always failed because of the lack of radio (they had telephone wires sometimes but those got destroyed early in any battle). Tooze depicts WW1 with advanced technology, and the Allies had better advanced technology. There's a bit where US troops are shocked to discover huge numbers of dead horses (and mules?) as they advanced.
17 is good. Radio and also precision fires.
The typical WW1 offensive went like this: we shell the enemy position for a long time, and then we send infantry (maybe with tanks) to assault it. We lose touch with what's going on at the objective, so even though the assault probably succeeds initially, we don't send reinforcements fast enough. Meanwhile the enemy is moving up reinforcements on his side very fast, because he still has roads and railways, and we don't because we're having to move our troops across no-man's-land. Pretty soon the enemy has reinforced his depth positions to the point where our offensive just peters out, and then maybe he counter-attacks. So we've spent a lot of time and shells and lives maybe gaining half a mile of ground, or not gaining any ground.
The big differences in WW2 were first, as you say, that everyone had a radio, so we know when and where our attack succeeds, and second, that we have precision fires in the form of accurate artillery and airstrikes, so we can fight the deep battle at the same time as our assault goes in and stop the enemy from bringing up his reinforcements.
Though AIMHMHB the Normandy campaign was like WW1 in the sense that the casualty rates were very high. From D-Day to Falaise, the Allied casualty rates per head were higher than they were on the Somme.
17: I left a comment on Tooze's blog that touches on the radio stuff.
18.last: Isn't that partially because the terrain of Normandy was such that it gave defenders the same kind of advantages a system of trenches did without the bother of needing to dig?
20: the short answer is the transition to the light machine gun as the main infantry weapon, but I'll let Ajay talk on that one.
20: well, defenders are pretty much always at a massive advantage at a tactical level. And both sides definitely dug in regularly in Normandy; if you didn't you wouldn't last long. Blackburn "The Guns of Normandy" is a memoir by a Canadian artillery officer; the main messages are digging in, the sheer volume of shells that had to be delivered and moved around the place, and (perhaps slightly self-serving) the massive technical and organisational superiority of Commonwealth artillery over everyone else's. The British and Canadians took artillery really seriously and had some of the best artillery in the war (the 25-pounder stayed in service until the 1990s), as well as a very good system of coordinating fires at up to army level, and the result was, as Tooze says, that German counter-attack after German counter-attack just got shredded, because a junior lieutenant could get on the radio and call in a Victor mission, which meant every gun in the army firing on the same target.
21: a bit; but that had been going on since 1918. If from 1918 onwards the British army's position was that an infantry section was a light machine-gun with some blokes attached to help carry ammunition, you could make a case that by 1943 a British infantry company was basically a forward observer with a radio and some blokes attached to stop him getting shot.
I didn't mean they didn't have to dig in at all, but I was thinking that they didn't have to dig huge elaborate trenches to get defense in depth because of the Normandy hedgerows. At least they certainly wouldn't have had time to get as fancy as they did in WWI.
The invasion of Normandy: a bustle in your hedgerow.
Tooze makes a very good point about artillery being neglected in histories of the war, and one with which I am (understandably) very sympathetic. Artillery isn't very productive in terms of dramatic clashes in the field that lead to hills being taken at bayonet point, and it isn't very appealling to tech-focussed types in the way that tanks and aircraft are. It's just a kind of rather unappealing mobile industrial process.
Keegan in "The Face of Battle", talking about the Somme, has a great riff about how the machine-gun is first and foremost a machine, like a drill press, which can be operated fairly easily for an entire shift by a semi-trained operator, as long as he keeps it supplied with raw materials. The same would be true in spades for the artillery. (Bigger than the Royal Navy by the end of the war! I did not know that.)
26: Huh, I tend to find artillery fascinating. I hypothesize that it'll become more prominent in histories once there's a generation of military scholars whose first exposure to tactics was playing RTSes.
24: well, they didn't dig huge long continuous trenches from sea to sea, true, but they definitely dug in a lot to get defence in depth. GOODWOOD went in against five successive lines of dug-in German defences.
The infamous hedgerows were really more use as cover from view and a restriction to movement, not so much cover from fire. For that you had to dig in.
That makes sense. I know the tanks had trouble moving.
Part of the reason that they didn't dig in with huge continuous lines is exactly that they had to provide defence in depth to a much greater degree than in WW1, because a shallow defence was much easier to overrun with proper tanks and so on - this became especially clear after GOODWOOD. And they simply didn't have enough troops to dig in to that depth all the way along the front.
I recall reading somewhere that many of the "Germans" in Normandy were Soviet citizens that the Germans grabbed.
31: New to me. There were huge numbers of Soviet POWs working as forced laborers, but AFAIK they were all in Germany. On the other side of the fence, I think all the Volga Germans had been deported to points east before the Wehrmacht got close to them.
Anyway, next Tuesday is clearly fine for everyone.
Lincoln Nebraska has a Germans from Russia museum, if you're ever in the area.
31 is correct; German 709th and 716th Infantry Divisions, for example, had a lot of Russian, Ukrainian and Georgian conscripts.
Non-Waffle House Georgia. Our local Georgia didn't have many Nazis until very recently.
37: Astonishing. I had no idea.
These were Wehrmacht units? I knew of the ethnic SS units, and the Cossacks in the east, but didn't know any were conscripted.
Well, if you learned about D-Day from The Longest Day, it wasn't mentioned.
40: yep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/709th_Static_Infantry_Division_(Wehrmacht)
Some conscripts, some volunteers from POW camps, some volunteers from the occupied USSR.
That is easily the unhappiest-looking Korean dude I've ever seen.
At the risk of stereotyping, Koreans aren't a smiley people in my experience.
43: Ah. I remember now about the POW recruitment in the east. I didn't know they were in the west as well, but of course.
45: Which makes this dude all the more unhappy. And who could blame him? He died in Illinois, FFS.
Illinois has some good food. I bet none of those people along the way before he was captured by the Allies fed him very well.
Just don't eat pizza in Chicago. They're horrible at it.
43. A static infantry division sounds as if it might be of limited utility, especially in a war of movement.
50: It wasn't, at that stage, a war of movement.
I think the point was you could make troops to old, injured, poorly trained, ill-equipped, or potentially disloyal serve in a static capacity even if you couldn't use them the regular way.
Yeah, by the time the Normandy campaign turned into a war of movement, the 709th and 716th had been pretty much neutralised.
As one does, I have been distracted by reading WWII entries in Wikipedia. My favorite fact of the day: "Liberté chérie was one of the very few Masonic lodges founded within a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War."
Anyway in the second half of the western war the Germans were essentially defending statically the whole time. Remember this in Band of Brothers? "Krauts in the open," immediate call for fire mission.
No spoilers. I haven't seen it yet.
I'm waiting until enough time as passed that I can see David Schwimmer without thinking of Ross.
He basically is Ross, AFAICR.
That's why it's taken me 13 years and counting.
He vanishes after the first episode, except for a brief humiliation later on.
55: Freemasonry has a totally different reputation in France (heroic and républicain) to the UK (a slightly sordid club for hypocritical old white guys).
55, 63 Germany too, I believe. My first ex's grandfather was a German Freemason and anti-Nazi who came to the US after they took power. He was a photographer for Look and Life magazines and was very old when I knew him in the late 80s. He'd been to Mongolia and other out of the way places in the 20s and the photographs he took there were amazing. Still had all of his equipment (ancient Leicas and Rolleiflex's and stuff.
I tried to watch the movie, but it was frankly pretty terrible.
As adaptations of Cornelius Ryan books go, A Bridge Too Far is better imo. Among other things, it has the advantage of starring just about every British actor alive at the time. If there's a more quintessential "Hey, it's that guy!" movie, I don't know what it is.
Loved A Bridge Too Far when I was a kid. It often played on NYC region TV.
The local Masonic lodge is buying bikes for all the kids who have perfect attendance at the older girls' school this year. I assume that will mean lots of illnesses get passed around, but we're not eligible anyway what with my posting this from a hospital waiting room and blah blah standard blah, though we also already have bikes and I'd have felt tacky taking more so this works out beautifully. (Mara is being a champ about her CT scans and digestion study. Lee showed up briefly and was her annoying self. etc.)
One year in elementary school a final year kid got a special prize in assembly for not missing a single day, in seven years. Saddest thing ever. (Though I think I had one perfect year myself.)
The saddest thing they do here is parade the kids across the stage at the end of the year and announce their Accumulated Reading Points, whether or not they have perfect attendance, and whether or not they're in Gifted & Talented. I hate it. In the early grades, it's possible to not have begun the reading points program, and so you're just a lone name.
I guess in prior years perfect attendance for the year got you a free summer pool pass. There are awards by grade level, nothing too exciting. Definitely never any public acknowledgement I've seen of what kids are in gifted and talented, though mine aren't and maybe I just wouldn't know. They do announce graduation from English Language Learner status, but that's the only thing of that sort I've seen.
70: Like, it's not classist at all if you have three *different* indicators of class instead of just one.
70: That's awful and stupid. Our kids' K-5 has Night of the Stars, with certificates for attendance, grades, citizenship; you basically have to be a real shitheel not to be eligible for any of them, but it's not like those kids have to march across the stage.
*probably unfair, but based on the number of kids that I only knew from dinner table complaints who nonetheless got awards, you don't need to be a genius nor an angel to get them
Also, if I'd known you all were talking about the essay before the discussion date, I'd have joined in yesterday. Today I don't have time, but I'll be back Tuesday.
On time is early, on time is late.
I keep reading the title as "A New Kind of Reading Group" and not remembering what was new about it.
citizenship
Gold star for natural, silver for naturalized, bronze for "other". See ICE on the way out.
You just need to get in touch with your masculine side.
I think ICE shoots you if you're masculine while brown.
56 etc.: I finally saw Band of Brothers a few months ago, and loved it so much that I promptly watched it again three times, and read the book (not nearly as good as the series) and a bunch of ancillary memoirs (the Guarnere/Heffron book was pretty good). I thought David Schwimmer was great, but I've never really seen Friends. There are a bunch of recognizable faces among the actors, but the only really distracting moment was Jimmy Kimmel as a transport worker. They should rerelease the series with his face roto'd out.
It is superb. I've no idea who Jimmy Kimmel is, so I'm fine on that score.
Kimmel was actually reasonably significant in the defeat of the defeat of Obamacare.
Wait I didn't mean Jimmy Kimmel. Jimmy Fallon. He's only in it for like a minute.
Not the Obamacare Jimmy. The dumb one who ruffled Trump's hair.
I don't know what Fallon has done since SNL.
83: Jimmy Kimmel is John McCain?
No, but I think they both dated Sarah Silverman.
No wonder your century is over.
Electing Trump is the "grab two beers and inflate the evacuation slide" of global respect and responsibility.
Don't you dare insult grab two beers and inflate the evacuation slide by comparing it to Trump.
90 reminds me of how much I'm struck by the similarities between very recent events and the things discussed in Deluge. It really hasn't come into very frequent discussion yet (in the U.S.) because of all the domestic upheaval and shittiness, but I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that the U.S.'s sudden withdrawal from its prior international activities and role is likely to have the same sorts of negative consequences as the U.S.'s sudden withdrawal after World War I.
92: I guess that's why we ban analogies.
89: If dating Sarah Silverman is wrong, I don't want to be right.
On the bright side, Halford, our glorious Governor is reportedly interested in the idea of banning new gasoline cars after 2040 or so.
17 I don't know why it's eluding me right now, but I'm pretty sure the internet has my mom's grandfather's article on the use of radio in the Philippines, both in the war with Spain and the fighting afterwards. It would have been published in 1901, I think, in connection with his MA. (He was in the Signal Corps from 1898 until the early 30s, going from buck private to Chief Signal Officer.) He was also a major player in battlefield communications in WWI, but I don't think he published anything about that.
My uncle recently gained possession of a silver bowl he and Billy Mitchell won in a military horse jumping contest in 1916. (Looking at the internet, I see that my uncle just donated it the the outfit that puts on the competition.) So, there were still horses and horsemanship. My grandfather was on the polo team at USMA, and in the cavalry briefly after graduation ('33), before switching to Signal Corps.
[great-grandfather won the silver bowl; uncle donated it]
Halford, our glorious Governor
I always knew he'd go far.
The point about blitzkrieg is that by 1942 at the latest it had become clear that it was not working any more. And it's even arguable that, whatever it was, the Germans never actually did it, because they didn't have the industrial base and so their army was still generally foot-borne and horse-drawn, and even .
You want a real blitzkrieg victory? Look up the ludicrously one-sided Operation COMPASS, in December 1940. A small but highly mobile and very well-equipped Commonwealth force attacked an Italian army five times its size and destroyed it entirely with minimal losses - less than 2,000 killed, wounded and missing against 150,000 Italian killed, wounded and captured. They did it with superior mobility and superior armour.
Ironically, you could make a very good case that COMPASS taught the British exactly the wrong lessons. They had tremendous success against the Italians with "Hussar tactics" - charging around the place in columns of motorised infantry and medium tanks and light artillery, and just generally shooting stuff up and spreading alarm and despondency.
But when they tried it against the Germans they ran into opponents who were much better at defending against armour by using combined-arms defensive tactics (infantry, AT weapons, artillery and tanks all working together) and they had a few nasty defeats where their tank arm would just go charging off ahead and run into a screen of dug-in 88s and get shredded, before readjusting to the much more deliberate, artillery-heavy approach that Montgomery perfected (and later of course got mocked for by people like Hemingway and Patton).
...because they didn't have the industrial base and so their army was still generally foot-borne and horse-drawn, and even .
You try to move at blitz-speed when you're carrying a German's lunch.
If you don't move at blitz-speed you will soon become a German's lunch.
The Russians might feed me if they catch me first.
Of course we will. Come a little closer.
And then the bastards feed you green hay and blame you when their offensive doesn't reach Paris in time.
It would have worked if they'd given the horses methamphetamine as well.
When I was a kid, we had a pony that would throw the rider if he wasn't given an Oreo cookie (or Hydrox, as he didn't know the difference) first. His name was Tarzan.
100: Not disagreeing on most points, but what you describe the British doing to the Italians is pretty much what the Germans did to the French and Soviets in 1940-41, and IIRC did to the British in North Africa shortly after the operation you mention. The difference being that the British had mechanized the entire army, and the Germans just a few units at the front.
Inasmuch as there was a "blitzkrieg" doctrine it involved deep attacks into the flanks and rear of the enemy, ideally resulting in a triple envelopment and destruction of the entire enemy force, the Platonic ideal of which was Cannae. On those criteria peak blitzkrieg was certainly the massive envelopments on the Eastern Front in 1941 and 1942; and more consequentially, though much less perfect, the Ardennes breakthrough in 1940.
Of course it didn't work if the enemy had the cohesion to keep fighting even when outflanked or surrounded. As you say, that became the norm from about 1942 onward.
what you describe the British doing to the Italians is pretty much what the Germans did to the French and Soviets in 1940-41, and IIRC did to the British in North Africa shortly after the operation you mention.
Except for the massively disparate numbers and casualty count. The German army was roughly equal in numbers to the Allies in 1940, and only slightly smaller than the Soviets in 1941, and both times took pretty high casualties itself in the process of winning.
The Italians outnumbered the Commonwealth forces five to one and still got completely destroyed; the first time in the war that an entire Axis army had been defeated and destroyed, and it wouldn't happen again until Stalingrad (and then at a far higher cost to the victors).
(And I don't think you can have a triple envelopment because a double envelopment means surrounding the enemy with a flanking movement on both sides. A pincer movement. Triple envelopment would mean burrowing underneath them as well...)
Weren't the Italians the ones that needed German help to beat the Greeks and that barely beat Ethiopia? I'm not saying it wasn't an impressive victory given the ratio of forces involved. I'm just saying it wasn't exactly playing against varsity.
I understood triple envelopment to mean two flanks and the rear: the pincers joining to form a complete encirclement. No argument on the numbers; but I didn't put casualty ratios in those criteria, and AFAICR the Germans didn't either. Again, inasmuch as there was a coherent doctrine.
And in terms of absolute outcomes: 1940, France destroyed as a great power in 6 weeks; 1941, 2 million casualties inflicted in 6 months.
111 And yet I recall reading somewhere that the Gurkhas rated the Italians the highest among their opponents in that theater.
They had poor equipment and terrible generals. (Unlike the French, who merely had terrible generals, and the Germans, who merely had poor equipment.)
Apparently I'm wrong on 112.1.
100: re COMPASS:
The wide-open spaces of the desert placed a premium on mobility, and the British were much better equipped, both materially and conceptually, to take advantage of those conditions. O'Connor's force was entirely motorized and he possessed more and better tanks than the Italians. The Italians, by contrast, lacked much of the modern equipment necessary to fight effectively in the desert. Their army was composed almost entirely of unmotorized infantry and they had fewer than 4,000 lorries in Cyrenaica. Their tanks were mostly light and mechanically unreliable and their field artillery was out-ranged by the British. With only about half the artillery of a British division, and with only two infantry regiments, Italian divisions lacked fire-power, manoeuvrability, or the capability to defend in depth. Graziani's troops were poorly trained and suffered from low morale.These criticisms of the Italians are nearly identical to the same author's criticisms of the British in France; the British outclassed the Italians in much the same way the Germans had outclassed them. Condensing your 100 and my 109: blitzkrieg as popularly remembered is essentially the interaction of rapid attacks into the rear with a relatively inept and incohesive enemy.
Re-upping. Stupid timezones.