73 Years Ago in the Ardennes

[DC Tom]

On 1/2/2018 at 3:38 PM, Jauronimo said:

So what you're saying is, that on a scale of 1 to Rorke's drift, the Bulge is about a 9 and Stalingrad is a 14.5?

 

Stalingrad was a pit.  Imagine: 

 

Take a city of 400,000 people. 

Bomb it to rubble, so all the infrastructure is destroyed.  

For five months, put about 1.6 million soldiers into it, plus an indeterminate number of horses and cattle.  The soldiers have:

     - No shelter.  Every building is bombed out.

     - No sanitation.  Utilities are bombed out, including sewers.  (You know what the smell of a battlefield is?  It's not dead bodies, or gunpowder.  It's ****.  A battlefield smells like tons of human ****.)

Now that you're living in an open cesspool, kill a million of those people, civilians and soldiers.  Tear two-thirds of the dead apart, starve the rest.  Leave the bodies laying out in the open.  For five months.  

 

The only other battles I know of that approach that awfulness is Okinawa in World War 2, and Ypres and Verdun in World War 1.  Guadalcanal, Buna, and Bataan don't even come close to that level of horror.  And before 1900, armies did not tend to be as large or sit in one place for any length of time, so you didn't see a half-million men spending months wading through a miasma of dead corpses and their own ****.

[Billsfansinceday1]

6 hours ago, DC Tom said:

 

No Jews died in the gas chamber at Dachau, either.  It wasn't an extermination camp.  Executions were by firing squad or hanging.  There's actually no evidence that the gas chamber at Dachau was ever used to kill anyone.  The few prisoners at Dachau who were gassed were transported to the Aktion T4 facility in Linz.

 

And most Russians didn't end up in concentration camps, either.  They were either sent to special "Russenlager" (which, unbelievably, were worse than the concentration camps), or just killed in situ.  Except for forced labor, Nazi Germany generally didn't transport prisoners west from Russia, to avoid "polluting German soil."

My first father in law was a Polish POW and was in Auschwitz and later Dachau.  He still had the POW # tattooed on his forearm and hardly mentioned his experiences to his family.  He opened up to me, being in the Army, and his story was heart wrenching.  He made boots for the SS from the leather of the shoes from the Jews (and others).  

 

I have visited Dachau twice and it is sobering and sickening.  Never again.

[flomoe]

Dachau is a very sobering place. The “museum” inside the main building is probably the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to imagine that human beings could do some of the experiments to other humans.

 

In the early 90’s, I happened to tag along with a few Canadian backpackers who had a young German 20ish guy tagging along with them on the bus ride to the camp. The poor guy was absolutely devastated by the camp and the cruelty that occurred there. He broke down several times and eventually waited outside the walls for the rest of us. He was from northwest Germany and was never taught about the holocaust and only heard rumors about Germany during the Nazi regime. He said that at that time, there was a large gap in the history of Germany during the 30’s and 40’s that younger Germans have no clue about.

Im sure that’s changed now but it was eye opening to me that a country could keep over a decade of time  secret from its citizens.

[Mark Vader]

On 12/31/2017 at 3:11 PM, row_33 said:

 

Patton and MacArthur and Stonewall Jackson’s hype don’t survive an honest and objective review of the mythology

 

 

 

On 12/31/2017 at 5:19 PM, DC Tom said:

 

Jackson's does - his Shenandoah campaign was indisputably brilliant, and he had the best understanding of mass and maneuver as any American general in history, period. 

Patton was overrated.  MacArthur was...complicated.  He had his share of brilliance...but in a 40+ year career, you'd expect him to get something right, and it's hard not to look askance at a general whose tactics in divisional command in World War 1 were considered "bloodthirsty" by the French - the same people whose army mutinied over casualties.

 

Heinrici?  You're an idiot. 

 

I have found this thread to be interesting. For as much as I enjoy reading about history, I do not know about this much military detail. While I do know the names of these generals, I do not know much about their skills as tacticians.

 

I wanted to ask you both, and everyone else here, what is it about Patton that makes him overrated?

 

Also, which generals throughout history do you hold in high regard? 

Edited January 18, 2018 by Mark Vader

[Dante]

On 1/4/2018 at 9:06 PM, DC Tom said:

 

Stalingrad was a pit.  Imagine: 

 

Take a city of 400,000 people. 

Bomb it to rubble, so all the infrastructure is destroyed.  

For five months, put about 1.6 million soldiers into it, plus an indeterminate number of horses and cattle.  The soldiers have:

     - No shelter.  Every building is bombed out.

     - No sanitation.  Utilities are bombed out, including sewers.  (You know what the smell of a battlefield is?  It's not dead bodies, or gunpowder.  It's ****.  A battlefield smells like tons of human ****.)

Now that you're living in an open cesspool, kill a million of those people, civilians and soldiers.  Tear two-thirds of the dead apart, starve the rest.  Leave the bodies laying out in the open.  For five months.  

 

The only other battles I know of that approach that awfulness is Okinawa in World War 2, and Ypres and Verdun in World War 1.  Guadalcanal, Buna, and Bataan don't even come close to that level of horror.  And before 1900, armies did not tend to be as large or sit in one place for any length of time, so you didn't see a half-million men spending months wading through a miasma of dead corpses and their own ****.

Paint a vivid picture of the totality, underpublicized consequences of this type of thing. Way, way to cavalier like enthusiasm to send people to fight, destroy and kill since then. I have changed so much on my attitude in this over the years. Now when I see movie previews glorifying military action abroad it kind of repulses me. Sorry I'm not knowledgeable enough about specific details on generals and alike to wade in on the argument 

Edited January 18, 2018 by Dante

[DC Tom]

3 hours ago, Mark Vader said:

 

I have found this thread to be interesting. For as much as I enjoy reading about history, I do not know about this much military detail. While I do know the names of these generals, I do not know much about their skills as tacticians.

 

I wanted to ask you both, and everyone else here, what is it about Patton that makes him overrated?

 

Keep in mind that "overrated" is not the same as "bad" - he was no Fredendall, who he replaced in North Africa, and who was a true incompetent.

 

Having said that...he was primarily a one-trick pony.  He was excellent in a pursuit role (e.g. in Sicily and France), possibly the best in the war and the equal of Rommel.  But unimaginative in a set-piece battle - he would never bypass or take a fortress like Rommel did Tobruk (when he did, such as at Metz, he resorted to nothing more than a series of costly frontal assaults), and I can't imagine him leading a swirling mobile defense such as Herman Balck on the Chir River in Russia in December of '42.  And his staff work generally left something to be desired.

 

On the other hand, he does deserve credit for his pursuits on Sicily to Palermo and Messina, and through France after Normandy.  And at the Battle of the Bulge, he turned an entire corps 90 degrees off its axis of advance in about three days and attacked through about 80 miles of snow to relieve Bastogne, which is a decidedly non-trivial command accomplishment.

 

4 hours ago, Mark Vader said:

Also, which generals throughout history do you hold in high regard? 

 

Subodai, Alexander, Seydlitz (accomplished something at the Battle of Rossbach that very few other cavalry commanders in history have done: reorganized his cavalry force after a charge, and charged again.  Also told Frederick the Great, in response to his persistent meddling at the battle of Zorndorf, "After the battle, the King may do with my head what he wishes, but in the meantime will he please permit me to use it?"  He won the battle.)  K.K. Rokkosovsky.  Herman Balck, Stonewall Jackson.  

[sherpa]

Twenty six years and one day ago, a new strategy of warfare was introduced, and we are never going back.