ORIGINAL: Lützow
ORIGINAL: wosung
Can't you see it? It's like having Comical Ali write a History of the last days of Saddam Husseins regime.
As far as I know Ali got sentenced to death but who would be better qualified to write a biography about Saddam as somebody who had deep insight in all his plans and actions, somebody of his personal staff ?
Anyway, the whole topic touches a tender spot which probably can be only understood if you're German. You won't find many people in my country nowadays to agree with Hitler but the vast majority here is fed up to hear about Nazi crimes though. Modern German WW2 literature is impressed from political slant and thus I prefer post-war era books which focus on a pure militairy perspective. For this the Carell books are a good reference, as well as reminiscences of Manstein and Guderian. Even they may have put some personal mistakes on the death Hitler to look better in historical retrospection. Anyway, if German High Command had been really that incompetent, how comes they steamrolled most of Europe and it took 6 years to defeat them?
After all Barbarossa indeed has become a myth, kinda like civil war for Americans. When people still try to turn the outcome by reenactment and stuff, nobody judges southern generals for their personal stance about slavery, because it simply doesn't matter for wargaming.
Obviously you can’t see it. Because Comical Ali wasn’t only a spectator to Saddam. He was deeply involved in the regime. Thus he had good reasons, to tell his story in a certain way, with a certain spin. He wouldn’t write about his guilt and his incompetence, about the guilt & incompetence of his professional peers, would he?
Carell just collected memoirs of (mostly) officers, division histories and so on. Those sources had every reason to cover up their professional failures. Same with Dagrelle. There was reason to it, why after WW2 he lived in Francos Spain.
What’s a good factual history? How can the next generations decide this? They were not on the spot, when “it” happened. Contemporaries have their own agenda reaching in the past and present, plus: memory itself changes what was experienced, to make sense of it all. Therefore I trust the archive files more than the contemporaries.
About famous German military efficiency (including an earlier post about Dupuy’s formula).
Yes it took 6 years to beat the Wehrmacht.
But beaten they were.
Also in WW1.
So obviously German military efficiency had its limit.
This was perhaps the most interesting thought I got out of Richard Overys “Why the Allied won”.
Militaristic societies like das Deutsches Kaiserreich or Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan prepared thoroughly for “the next war”. Thus came their tactical and operational efficiency. This is confirmed by “Germany and the Second World War” as well.
But obviously this is not enough to win wars.
Above mentioned societies failed in the field of strategy, economy, (arguably) technology, (alliance) diplomacy.
A narrow martial racist world view and authoritarian structures help with tactics.
But they hinder all the rest what is important in modern inter-state conflicts: They result in megalomanic unrealistic strategies, social darwinistic fights for ressources in the regime, wastages of technical potential, and incompetence for coalition warfare and commission decision-finding (instead of “Führerentscheid”).
Thus those militaristic societies in a deeper sense were unfit for modern war.
”Modern German WW2 literature is impressed from political slant and thus I prefer post-war era books which focus on a pure militairy perspective.”
Hu?
Nice try!
Sure, the political slant is always a problem of “the other side”. Purely military perspectives have no slant at all.
Regards
