So, according to you, we need to take him at face value. Guess he doesn’t want nukes!

You know that those quotes are old, coming from the period when Tehran was still running the Europeans around the block a few times, and claiming the whole program was for civilian use… Then they got to the point where even the Euros declared the existing talks useless… so Tehran came clean and laughed at everyone and told us outright they were working towards a bomb, that they’ve ‘joined the club’, and have every right to the bomb…

It’s frankly insulting that you’d think people here would buy that approach.

“Russia would shoot their people in the back, if they ran towards the Soviet Lines. Which meant that Russia’s ruthlessness stopped the German advance, by piling bodies onto bodies.”

The Russians didn’t halt the Germans by “piling bodies onto bodies.” The Russians halted the German advance in two battles, Zhukov’s offensive at Moscow in the winter of 1941 and again at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942. Do you have any concept of these battles?

See, this is why I make fun of you for reading sci-fi and then using that to justify your beliefs. You have this fantasy in your head, about ruthlessness, about the bodies piling up, about changing the course of the battle through sheer strength of will, because those authors can create whatever world they want. They can create an imaginary world in which sheer strength of will can actually win a battle, and so you think that this applies to the real world. You don’t actually know anything about the war, or understand its key turning points, as in the two battles I mentioned above. Instead of actually knowing about the war, you have this vague feeling about the war, this one image (bodies piling up) that encapsulates your entire thinking about the war. In a book, an author can cover a war in a page; in real life, it’s a little more complex than that. But to you, that’s just it. These wars are like epics, space operas for you to think “wow, how cool! They blew up a planet! The Russians just piled up the bodies until they won! Superficial lack of understanding!”

Yammer, try reading an actual history book for a change.

Because this is what you said. I don’t know why you said it, when it could so easily be checked, but this is what you said. You immediately back-pedaled when called on it, claiming that you didn’t actually say it, and now you’re claiming that you said something completely different (“they didn’t use them until they had to use them”).

I’m not even sure what that means, “they didn’t use them until they had to use them.” The Allies certainly never had to do anything. War doesn’t work that way. The Allies were seeking a weapon that could break the stalemate of trench warfare; both sides tried lots of things (high explosives, flamethrowers, gas, etc.). But tanks were neither necessary nor decisive. They might have tipped a few battles, but the war was won and lost by the infantry and the artillery.

Jesus, Yammer. You know so little it’s amazing. You talk and you talk and you talk and you’ve obviously read a book or two, or seen a couple of shows on this History Channel, because you talk as if you know something, and you might fool a few people who don’t know any better. But some of the things you say are just so absurd, it’s like listening to a history lecture as translated from Enlgish to Chinese to Swahili and back to English again. Some of the words are in the right place, but they don’t really mean what you think they mean.

“This was actually due to Stalin’s ruthlessness, not Hitler’s.”

This I should have, but did not, expect from you. After all, you’re the little wannabe fascist. Oh, how you must long for those cool uniforms…

Hitler planned the war, from the very beginning, to be as ruthless as possible. In fact, he said:

“The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies.”

This comes from page 830 of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, in case you were wondering about the citation.

But even if Hitler had never said this, the idea that the 25 million Soviet citizens who died were solely, or even predominantly, the responsibility of Stalin, is revisionist history in defense of Hitler and the Nazis.

Here are a few terms to google:

Einsatzkommando
Babi Yar
Alfred Rosenberg

Official German policy in the East was to divert Russian agricultural output to Germany. This would have two effects: freeing Germany from the threat of a blockade and starving off the population of Russia. It was official German policy to starve to death millions of people. Read page 563 of Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich: A New History for transcripts from Nurenburg in which they discuss planning the murder of thirty million civilians.

I knew I was writing to an idiot, but I didn’t know that I was also writing to a Nazi-symp.

Let’s pick this one:

“The Germans had better tactics and better machineguns, they only quit cause they were scared of the Dough Boys. What’s a naval historian doing with landwar anyway? Hobby time?”

The Germans were certainly more flexible for most of the war, though the French (and the British, much more slowly and reluctantly) adapted their tactics not long into the war. The German’s chief advantages at the outset of the war were their extensive use of mortars, which were easier to use against trenches than the French flat-trajectory 75s, and the fact that they spent most of the war in the West on the defensive. German machine guns, being water-cooled, were actually harder to move than Allied air-cooled machine guns, and so offered a distinct disadvantage.

But the Germans didn’t lose the war because of America. They lost the war because the German economy was never suited to a war like that. The Germans, throughout the war, certainly killed Allied soldiers at a higher rate than they lost soldiers, but when they were facing the combined forces of Russia, Britian, France, and the rest with only weak allies on their side (Austria was essentially a non-factor after 1916). They just couldn’t afford it, in men or material.

No, the Germans lost because of this: they knew that an unrestricted submarine campaign would draw the US into the war, so they gambled that the campaign would starve Britian into submisison before Americans arrived. When that didn’t work, the Germans made one last gamble. They moved massive numbers of troops from East to West after the surrender of Russia and launched their Spring Offensives of 1918. They almost succeeded in splitting the British from the French, allowing them to knock the British out of the war, but Foch had carefully preserved a large reserve and plugged the gap. The Germans lots 300,000 men in a matter of a few days, all that was left of their manpower reserve, and they just couldn’t keep fighting anymore.

It didn’t help that the German soldiers, who hadn’t eaten real meat in years, overran Allied stores and found that, unlike them, the Allies were well-fed. It didn’t take long before the mutinies broke out. The Germans were already in retreat when the Americans arrived with more the a platoon or two.

Anyway, Yammer, this is the sort of thing that other people know that you clearly do not. I recommend that, instead of reading fiction (which you should still do for fun), you should try reading non-fiction, and quoting that as evidence for your arguments. It does wonders.

And Yammer, a professional historian with a doctorate in history working for the Navy is not a naval historian. A naval historian is an historian who specializes in naval history. The service branches employ a number of historians who work on a variety of topics. The one to whom I referred specialized in German history and military strategy through history. Nice try, though, to denigrate an expert’s opinion because it doesn’t match up to yours. I shouldn’t really say that it surprised me, though.

Seriously: if you’re interested in this sort of thing, I can put together a reading list for you.

I thought you knew that Spank, did you have to look it up?

Yammer, I don’t even know where to begin with you.

Start at the beginning, go to the middle, and end at the end.

You make up historical “facts” out of whole cloth (“the Allies never used tanks in the First World War”)

It’s a fact the Allies never used tanks in WWI before they were forced to. Which was the point, I believe, but you wouldn’t know that would you.

and then, when confronted with reality, claim you never really said it.

Why would I say that they didn’t use tanks in WWI? That would be like saying the Eastern Roman Empire didn’t use cataphracts because they were forced to. I think you need remedial logic.

In each othe cases I listed, the use of “ruthlessness” did not produce victory; on the contrary, the more violent the actor was, the greater the resistance it provoked on the other side.

You learned this from a military book, eh? A book general, I see.

Saddam, for example, never defeated the Kurds, despite using mass-casualty weapons like poison gas.

What does that have to do with anything, really? With no fly zones, what’s the problem, you can’t bomb the kurds anymore.

They forget that France won World War One.

The Germans had better tactics and better machineguns, they only quit cause they were scared of the Dough Boys. What’s a naval historian doing with landwar anyway? Hobby time?

What traitors? German traitors?

Let me not do a Justin here, and outline the logic. The logic is that ruthlessness wins war simply because war is a contest of will, as much as it is a contest of logistics and strategem. Whoever quits first, loses. Russia would shoot their people in the back, if they ran towards the Soviet Lines. Which meant that Russia’s ruthlessness stopped the German advance, by piling bodies onto bodies.

Russia wouldn’t give up, which allowed them to hit back. Will isn’t everything, but it is 3/4ths the battle.

Yammer, the Soviets lost 20-25 million people in the course of the war. In his infamous “Commissar Order,” Hitler made explicit that the war was to be waged as ruthlessly as possible.

This was actually due to Stalin’s ruthlessness, not Hitler’s. It’s kinda hard not to rock up lots of kills when they keep trying to rush your MG nests.

Here’s the real low down on war people. Will and determination makes up 3/4ths of the war effort. Strategy and tactics about 1/10th maybe, and logistics the rest.

It is important to be ruthless, but it is also important to be right. Spank’s arguments to the contrary, doesn’t do what he thinks it does. It doesn’t argue against ruthlessness, it just argues that being smart about it is a lot more useful than just throwing bodies at the problem like the Soviets did.

Being right is about placing logistics correctly and choosing the correct strategy and tactics. Realistically, it was not a good idea to throw Soviet bodies at the Germans. It was a lot smarter to do guerrila warfare and try to slow the Germans down and then cut the German logistics. It took a few million for Russia to get this of course, but that’s how it is with the Russians. Not very smart, but very determined.

America is both very smart and very determined. That’s why Normandy worked, Hitler was fooled into thinking it was somewhere else by smart British spies and double agents. Still hard, which meant willpower was required, but not impossible. Not when there is a will, there is a way.

Thank you

Ya, shoot the traitors if they run back towards the Soviet lines, a good example of ruthlessness.”

Out of all your gibberish, I think I am most puzzled by this. Of all the atrocities commited by the Germans on the Eastern Front, you decided to mention the shooting of traitors if they run back towards the Soviet lines? I’m not even sure to whom you are referring. What traitors? German traitors?

Yammer, the Soviets lost 20-25 million people in the course of the war. In his infamous “Commissar Order,” Hitler made explicit that the war was to be waged as ruthlessly as possible.

And you don’t know this? Are you unaware, as your comment makes it seem? Do you really know so little? Or did you just make up another historical “fact”?

Why, “British brutality in Mau Mau conflict”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,836653,00.html

In each othe cases I listed, the use of “ruthlessness” did not produce victory; on the contrary, the more violent the actor was, the greater the resistance it provoked on the other side.

Saddam, for example, never defeated the Kurds, despite using mass-casualty weapons like poison gas. The Germans, despite fighting the most ruthless war in history on the Eastern Front, were defeated by the Soviets. The Germans dropped bombs on London in the Blitz, believing that the ruthless slaughter of civilians would cause them to drop out of the war. The Allied air campaign against Germany was meant to blast them into submission, but German war industrial output reached its peak during the bombing.

And so on.

A couple of points:

It’s not spelled “Ghandie,” it’s spelled “Gandhi.” Gandhi lived in India, not Kenya.

As for the French, I highly recommend you read Robert Doughty’s “Pyrrhic Victory : French Strategy and Operations in the Great War.” An historian with the Navy once said to me: Everyone makes fun of France. They forget that France won World War One.

But on this subject, Robert Farley wrote much better than I can. Read:

http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2006/05/question-of-will.html