ORIGINAL: neuromancer
Monty arrived at the end of the campaign, fought a defensive battle until he had superior numbers (at least that makes sense)
Monty did not fight the defensive battle. No major engagement was fought at the Alamein position after Auchinleck checked Rommel's advance.
had a bunch of new American equipment (the Sherman being better than the average German panzer of that time, although not the case at Normandy)
Of the 478 tanks in Eighth Army at the end of August 1942, 117 were Valentines, 139 were Honeys, 136 were Crusaders, and 15 were Matildas -- all obselete against the PIII and PIV. Of the remainder, some were Grants and some few were the early Shermans, which lacked wet ammo storage, rendering them extremely succeptible to brew ups, and which were on par with the PIVF2 in terms of relative penetration power and armor. In the words of one British gunner at Alamein "those things were absolute death traps."
, and then fought El Alamein. By that time the Africa Korps supply lines were stretched beyond recognition, and their supply at the best of times was very thin. Monty still managed to get a lot of his men killed, taking as heavy of losses as the Germans despite having a significant numerical superiority, better supply, and mostly better equipment.
He absolutely had better supply, I make that point above -- Rommel's insistence that Kesselring divert troops and aircraft to the desert rather than smash Malta doomed the Axis effort.
As for "significant numerical superiority", maybe you aren't aware of this...but that's how the Germans fought the war. They acheived stunning successes in the early years despite being outnumbered. They hardly cared about it; it was not until well after the reverses of 1943 that they lost their sense that they could beat anyone with superior tactics.
As for your claims re losses, they are wrong:
Axis losses: 55,000 men (25,000 casualties, 30,000 POWs)
Allied losses: 13,500 men (total of killed, wounded and missing)
Despite being on the attack, Monty incurred approximately half the number of casualties. Why you would invent a claim that he incurred as many losses as the Axis is beyond me.
He won, but at an unnecessary cost in the lives of his men.
Meaningless statement unless you're willing to state what you would have done differently with particular references to events in the battle -- Supercharge, Trig 29, etc. To be honest, that's my main frustration with your comments. You don't point out any concrete tactical errors; you just say that a general you don't like lost a lot of men.
Victory was practically a certainty,
Revisionist history. No one believed this in 1942.
but he took credit for it and claimed it was due to his 'brilliance'.
He was an arrogant, prickly, insufferable man by all accounts.
In Italy his ego kept on getting him - well his men actually - in trouble because of 'racing' up the coast with Patton (the two battling egos, but Patton was the better general).
Was not Mark Clark in command in Italy? Talk about someone no one says anything good about....
By the time Rommel was in Europe he had lost a lot of his heart in the war as well, the German army was already getting stretched pretty thin due to the disasterous campaign against the Soviets, and Hitler was running around second guessing his generals.
Oh, yes, Hitler second guessing generals, that only happened in 44-45.[8|]
And I don't think comparing Monty to the Soviet generals is a good thing. I don't think you'll ever find me claiming brilliance on the part of Soviet generals. Seeing as for a long time their favourite tactic was to drown the Germans in Soviet blood, I'm not very fond of them either.
That's Von Manstein and Guderian talking -- a repition of their self-serving, self-pitying accounts of the war in the east. It's sad, because Erickson, Glantz and others have gone to such great lengths to make the true story of what happened in the East available.
Other German generals have been somewhat more honest about the skill of their opponents. Heinrici, for example, notes the skill of his opponents at Kursk, where the Germans threw everything they had at the Soviets -- massive amounts of men, tanks that were technically so superior to Soviet tanks that they were nearly invulnerable, and the best of the best of German soldiers. Not surprisingly, Soviet losses were massive at Kursk, yet historians are quick to note the skill of Vasilevsky, Zhukov, and their generals:
"By 1943 Soviet doctrine, organization, and expectations were much closer to battlefield reality than were those of the senior German leadership....[at Kursk] the Soviet Union learned to integrate combined arms forces into a mix that proved lethal for the attacking Germans...Skillful Soviet deployment of strategic, operational, and tactical reserves, in particular, mobile armor and antitank reserves, compensated for high initial losses, countered every German tactical gain, immediately threw the German offensive timetable off schedule, forced the Germans to alter their plans constantly, and ultimately frustrated the Germans' realization of their operational objectives...the elaborate, deeply echeloned defenses around Kursk and artful Soviet deployment and commitment of mobile reserves had made the Soviets the
first force to halt a blitzkrieg offensive...it required remarkable self-confidence for Vatutin, Rokossovsky, and the other Soviet commanders to wait calmly while the German juggernaut prepared to do its worst."
--David M. Glantz & Jonathan House, "The Battle of Kursk". Glantz and House go on to discuss the Soviet offensive following Kursk:
"the pattern of Soviet success in 1944 and 1945 was already evident in [the Kursk counter-offsensives]...prior to an attack, reconnaissance forces carefully scouted the enemy and then eliminated key strong points. Concealment of actual troop formations and elaborate deception measures misled the Germans at to the locations of the coming attack. Specially configured teams of infantry, sappers, and infantry support tanks made the main assault after a massive, carefully targeted artillary barrage. As quickly as possible, tanks corps and armies pased through the attacking infantry to complete the penetration and then exploit
hundreds of kilometers into the German rear area."
As for combat losses at Kursk -- the only thing you use to justify your assertions as to who was a good general and who was not -- Glantz notes that the losses are not due to a tendency to simply throw a horde of men at the enemy and pray, but rather to (a) the process of learning to conduct deep operations, which they were then just beginning (as Vasilevsky said "we had not only won a great battle, we had matured in it"), and (b) the sheer intensity of the fighting. German losses were equally staggering, and no one is going to accuse Manstein, Model, and Kempf of being tactically inept.
Nor do you have to wait til 1943 to find examples of Soviet operational brilliance; even in the dark years -- 41 and 42, when failure after failure could be laid at the feet of odious, incompetent men like Mehklis and his ilk, the generals who later lead the RKKA to victory were already making their presence felt: the planning and conduct of Operation Uranus establishes Vasilevsky and Zhukov among the upper echelon of WWII generals, as does Zhukov's masterful conduct of the defense of Moscow in 1941, when the western allies had given up all hope for Moscow to be saved.
In sum, the myth of the Soviet general merely throwing men at random against the lines until the Germans died is just that: a myth. Whatever the failures of the horrible, horrible RKKA generals that Stalin had in place in 41 and 42, men like Zhukov and Vasilevsky emerged from the wreck to hold the USSR together during those years, transformed it in 1943, and by 44-45, the RKKA was better trained, better prepared, and better led than its German opponent.
And as for the Americans in Europe, they really weren't very good at the start. People don't seem to like to talk about that, but really, until the Americans got some battle experience, their troops and commanders did extremely poorly, mostly winning by sheer force of numbers (although at least not taking the same kind of casualties as the Russians).
Neither the US nor the UK forces (I include Canadians, Aussies, etc. under the auspices of UK here for ease of reference) face German forces of the same size and quality of those faced by Soviet forces. No battle in the West involved 2 million men and thousands of tanks, such as clashed in the Kursk offensives. No US or UK force faced the flower of German military at their height -- units like Gross Deutschland, Das Reich, Leibstandarte, Totenkopf -- by 1944, the veterans of these divisions were moldering in graves under Russian soil.
I leave you with more words from Vasilevsky: "In reading works by several bourgeois writers on World War II, I have frequently noticed their inclination to play down the Red Army victory in the summer of 1943. They try to instill in their readers the idea that the Kursk Battle was just an ordinary, insignificant episode in the war...as the saying has it, deeds speak louder than words. I would mention just one elementary fact: at the height of the Kursk Battle our Allies landed in Sicily and, on 17 August, crossed over into Italy. Could they have possibly done so with even half the forces against them that we had to contend with in the summer of 1943? I think not."
