[lit-ideas] The German Way of War
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:01:31 -0800
Peace Mystics be warned. The following note deals with an actual war; so
kindly delete this note and skip ahead to some less-alarming note.
For those interested in World War Two (and flying body parts), the following
is a very interesting review of three recent books on the Eastern Front:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/713otfat.a
sp I was especially interested in the third book, Absolute War, Soviet
Russian in the Second World War by Chris Bellamy. The best historian on the
Eastern front according to the reviewer was John Erickson who wrote Road to
Stalingrad: Stalin's War with Germany (1975), and The Road to Berlin (1983).
Bellamy was a student of Erickson and built off of his earlier works.
Archival materials continue to come to light and Bellamy justifies his book
by writing, "We knew, pretty well, how the war was won. But now we know
infinitely more [than Erickson] about how it was run."
Here are some quotes I found interesting:
"The German state never existed as anything other than a militaristic
enterprise, which is why its skill led to repeated defeat and, ultimately,
to its own devastation in 1945. That this final devastation originated out
of victory is only one of the many ironies of German history."
"The General Staff's rule of thumb was that a nation could produce two
divisions (30,000 soldiers) for each million of its population. The Soviet
Union prewar population was 190 million, and so should have produced an army
of six million soldiers in 384 divisions. By September, Soviet dead and
prisoners exceeded four million. In the first six months of fighting, the
German army achieved 12 - repeat, 12 - great encirclements on a par with the
victories at Sedan in 1871 and the Ardennes in 1940.
"If Barbarossa had been a war game, all would have been over. Yet the
Russians didn't play by quite the same rules. On August 11, Halder would
write: 'Overall, it is clearer and clearer that we have underestimated the
Russian colossus, which had prepared itself for war with an utter lack of
restraint which is characteristic of the totalitarian state. This is as
true in the area of organization as it is of the economy, the area of
transport and communications, but above all to pure military power. At the
start of the war, we reckoned on some 200 enemy divisions. Now we have
already counted 360. These divisions are definitely not armed and equipped
in our sense, and tactically they are in many ways badly led. But they are
there.'
"The Germans lost in 1918 because, after Erich Ludendorff's spring
offensives failed and killed a huge number of German soldiers, the
appearance of four million fresh American troops, fighting with an
enthusiasm not seen on the Western Front since 1915, broke the morale of the
German army. Governments lose the will to fight when they lose the way to
fight, the contrast between France and Britain in 1940: the vast French army
quit and the tiny British one did not."
"In terms of the Second World War as a whole, it could be argued that
Stalingrad was not the turning point because once the United States became
involved, Germany had no chance of winning, anyway. From the point of view
of 7 December 1941, whether in eastern front terms, with the Moscow
counteroffensive, or in global terms, with Pearl Harbor, was the turning
point. However, from December 1941, while it had gained a breathing space,
Russia could still lose - or just collapse, as by all normal rules it should
have done in 1942."
"What comes through on every page of Absolute War is the utter inhumanity of
the German-Soviet war. The Germans began in barbarism and the Russians
replied in kind. The numbers are difficult to digest. The German army left
4 million men on the battlefields of eastern Europe, but they killed 27
million. The Red Army lost 11.5 million soldiers, and 15.5 million
civilians died in the territories occupied by the German army. Nearly 10
Russians died each minute that war lasted, 14,000 each day. . . . In four
years of terrible slaughter, the Red Army did not just defeat Hitler and
National Socialism, but also put an end to Prussian militarism. It was a
Soviet victory over something that had menaced Europe for two centuries.
Stalin was a barbarous man, and in the end, that is what it took to finally
draw the curtain on the German Way of War."
Comment: It is important to note that the Germans could not have won the
war once the Americans got into it, but that doesn't take anything away from
those who fought the Germans. Had the Soviets collapsed as they might well
have, it would have taken several more years to defeat the Germans if they
fought the Americans as hard as they fought the Soviets. On the other hand,
with a bit more time they might have managed to assassinate Hitler and
surrender to the West, as they did in the First World War. But then, as we
can assume the final sentence in the article to imply, the final curtain
would not have been drawn on the German Way of War. We might be arguing
today over whether it is more appropriate to worry about the Islamists or
the Germans. Everyone spins if they can, but when a nation like Germany has
been defeated utterly, it is difficult to find anything to spin.
I recently questioned, by means of an illustration, whether Britain would
have fought the Battle of Britain as she did if she wasn't aware that the
Americans were coming to their aid. I asked this question in the context of
disarmament. Britain disarmed its army and then had to fight against the
best equipped army in the world. I was intending that little aside to be
a lesson to America. If we disarm, we will have no America coming to our
rescue. I wasn't intending to denigrate the British fighting spirit, only
the British leadership which disarmed its army. I feel the same way about
Americans who hope to disarm our army.
Another thing going for the British that I didn't mention because it wasn't
relevant to my illustration was that Hitler's heart wasn't in defeating the
British. He definitely wanted to defeat the French, but he hoped the
British would eventually join him against the Soviets. Many British
probably won't want to examine this counterfactual, but there was a sizeable
pro-Fascist element in Britain in the late 1930s. The pro-American Iranians
remind me a bit of it. It was enough to keep the Germans from engaging in
an all-out concentrated attack, but it was never substantial enough to cause
the British Parliament to seriously consider siding with the Germans.
I was also interested in Halder's comment which implied that he didn't think
Germany at the time as a totalitarian state.
Lawrence Helm
San Jacinto
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