I can't recall the title, but I believe that someone wrote a book about the drawbacks of the US military's excessive admiration for the Wehrmacht.
And honestly, reading about WWII it looks like the major achievement of the Wehrmacht's vaunted tactical superiority was to make the human cost of its repeated strategic blunders far higher than it might have been. In that sense, maybe the US has leaned from the Wehrmacht all too well.
That's a great summary Mossy, and makes me want to read the linked essays. I suspect you've drawn out quite a bit that I'd skim over if not forewarned.
2: Thanks. If only I could have learned to spell "learned"...
It looks good to me except for that last certainly. I don't think the Republicans can limit their corruption within the bounds necessary to keep an highly effective military.
All this suggests to me that capital-intensiveness and reliance on long-range fires aren't distinctively liberal democratic; in fact, that no manner of warfighting is distinctively political, but rather that each polity develops its own style based on the resources available to its military-industrial complex. Thus far, only liberal democracies have been able to sustain high-end complexes, but I think this largely accidental: this happened because those societies got richer earlier.
This is a really interesting point but I would say that you're going wrong by conflating "capital intensive war" with "reliance on long-range fires". Long-range fire doesn't have to be tremendously expensive - you rightly point out that the Soviets have been very keen on artillery since WW2, and they still are. But Soviet artillery parks have a shitload of towed artillery pieces and a shitload of multiple unguided rocket launchers like BM-21. They are the kings of the four-figure target reference (i.e. "oh, just level everything in that grid square".) What they don't have quite so much are the expensive precision long-range fires that allow you to do things like dropping just that one bridge, or destroying just that one division HQ. I suppose you could argue that this is for historical reasons, because they didn't develop the electronic sophistication that sort of fire needs; but that was a decision in itself.
And artillery itself is not a capital-only enterprise; you need a lot of labour as well (see Tooze's point about the Royal Artillery outnumbering the Royal Navy). Delivering X tons of explosive on to a target is an effect, and artillery is, at least nowadays, a far more labour-intensive way of achieving that effect than an air strike.
If only I could have learned to spell "learned"...
Larned is the aggressive form.
3: Thanks.
5: Fair point, but they have inherited such a complex, and it would certainly be possible for them to maintain it.
6: artillery is, at least nowadays, a far more labour-intensive way of achieving that effect than an air strike
Even including the ground crews?
Consistent with the WWII experience, the US Army was totally outclassed in the Korean War, the mediocre ground force eventually prevailing only through air, naval, and logistical superiority.
That's a contentious opinion. Really? The US Army was generally of worse quality than the KPA? Because the history of the Korean war is full of cases of US units fighting off KPA (and PVA) formations of several times their size and inflicting many times the casualties they took. Even in the first days of the war - the defeat of Task Force Smith and the retreat to Pusan - you won't find many cases of KPA units defeating US units unless they outnumbered them several times over. At Osan it took 5,000 KPA troops with armoured support to defeat 540 US soldiers with barely any anti-armour capability.
8.last is what I was wondering. Air time for a bomber is hugely expensive and I assume most of that cost is somehow labor somewhere.
8.last: yes, including the ground crews; and also the logistic burden that each option requires.
9: Also, against the Japanese in World War II, the U.S. was usually fighting against numerically superior forces.
Air time for a bomber is hugely expensive and I assume most of that cost is somehow labor somewhere.
Yeah but a lot of it is labour in the Boeing and Raytheon factories, or the Chevron refinery or whatever.
6: generally: I think the conflation of capital and fires is implicit in the Tooze.
What I (and IIRC Tooze) was reaching for was the proportion of capital versus labor; and AFAIK the WWII allies, and the Americans ever since have certainly been very capital-intensive in that way.
Delurking, Phillips Payson O'Brien's How The War Was Won was something I read at about the same time as Tooze's essays, and takes the analysis to the next level. (It's also worth reading in conjunction with Gregory Liedtke's Enduring the Whirlwhind, which is a rather dry analysis of the Wehrmacht's replenishment from 1940-1943).
What they do together, IMO, is rebalance (the necessary) shift towards the Soviet-centric view of the Russians as being the real winner of WW2 to looking at the economy as a whole; putting it brutally, human beings were just one raw material for the German war economy, and most of its output went to the Luftwaffe and the Navy. As these were both mainly directed against the Western Allies (let alone the Asian war going on at the same time that the US and British Empire were able to fight), in the context of WW2 as an economic struggle, not just as the clash of tanks etc. etc., emphasising the land war in the USSR as the prime cause of Germany's defeat misses out the big picture.
I'm not entirely convinced by the thesis, which does yadda yadda how exactly Germany was to be beaten except by literal tanks on the Reichstag lawn, but it's blunt pointing out that a tank that never makes it to the battlefield because its gearbox burnt out after 50 miles of the 200 mile trip to the front line from the rail head (because air superiority makes it too risky to detrain any earlier) or one wrecked in a bombing raid is just as lost as one destroyed by an anti-tank gun.
I'm not entirely convinced by the thesis, which does yadda yadda how exactly Germany was to be beaten except by literal tanks on the Reichstag lawn
Well, the first time around Germany was beaten without anyone's tanks getting anywhere near the Reichstag lawn.
9: This Battle of Osan? Because what you see there is a whole column of T-34s literally driving right through an American position because obsolete American projectiles just bounced off their armor.
My general impression is taken from the official Army history of the war, which consistently shows Americans to be under-equipped, ill-disciplined, and technically sloppy,* and the KPA and PLA the opposite. I specified US Army in the OP because I don't know the Marine history, and AFAIK the 1st Marine Division displayed far greater professionalism.
*Just for one example, in the static phase Americans chronically failed to fortify hilltops properly; it was a running joke that the communists obeyed the Army fortification manual better than the Army; IIRC Americans were frequently found to have fortified the topographic rather than the military crests of ridges.
Did the Berliners cover over all the shell marks in the walls of the old buildings? I haven't been there since 1992.
18: It's worth noting that the Americans were outnumbered 10:1.
Well, the first time around Germany was beaten without anyone's tanks getting anywhere near the Reichstag lawn.
Fair point - but it was the attritional grind (MVP France and the British Empire) of soldiers rather than indirect approaches via Greece etc that proved determinative.
18: This history, and some of the other volumes in its series.
And also hadn't deployed Alan Alda yet.
And also hadn't deployed Alan Alda yet.
Their initial Elliott Gould based strategy didn't prove sustainable.
consistently shows Americans to be under-equipped, ill-disciplined, and technically sloppy
No doubt they were. I'm sure the army in 1950 was much worse than it was in 1945 (and than it became in 1953). But, still, if they were so much worse than the KPA, you'd be able to point to lots of examples of the KPA defeating the US army despite being outnumbered by them. I suspect what that history says is more like "The US army in Korea was far worse than I, a US army officer, think it should have been, and the KPA was far better than a bunch of Asiatic Communists had any right to be". Not the same thing.
There was a Star Trek episode to that point.
I mean, you will always find examples of armies not doing things right, and you'll always find examples of soldiers saying (accurately) that the enemy is better than them at some things. But it's a mistake to generalise from that and conclude that the enemy must therefore be better at everything.
That point is too subtle for a Star Trek episode.
As one senior observer later commented, they built their fortifications much closer to the specifications set forth in the U.S. Army field manual than most Eighth Army soldiers did. [...] Many outfits in the Eighth Army were not so thorough and built their bunkers and shelters without adequate interior support or overhead cover. After a heavy Korean rain, cave-ins were all too common, especially before the winter of 1952-53.26 and 29 are good points, and on reskimming the sources now my impression was probably exaggerated. That said, I point out that the Americans didn't win many crushing victories after they had reinforced, despite advantages in the air and in supplies. What I'll stand on is an American military not unlike that in Normandy: often shoddy on the ground, and far better in the air and at sea.
It seems weird for academics to extrapolate anything confidently about ground strategy, tactics, keys to success, etc. from WWII to today. Isn't one of the lessons of major ground wars that things keep changing with tech and organization in ways you can try to predict and prepare for, but will inevitably fail at least somewhat, and have to scramble to figure out in real time? So most likely, a hypothetical major European (non-nuclear) war that started in 1965 would have been extremely different from WWII, and in unpredictable ways, and the same for one that started in 1985, and so forth.
I have nothing to add, but am enjoying the thread.
Actually, something that may be of interest to grognards: Steve Jackson Games is hoping to re-print Triplanetary.
31: I don't think Tooze, or AFAIK anyone he cites, does that.
Good to see Richard J delurking yet again. The Tooze brings all the schlachtbummlers to the blog.
So most likely, a hypothetical major European (non-nuclear) war that started in 1965 would have been extremely different from WWII, and in unpredictable ways, and the same for one that started in 1985, and so forth.
I'm pretty sure if it stayed non-nuclear it would have somehow involved Russian tanks in Berlin again.
Even if it didn't stay non-nuclear, the tanks would still have been there, however briefly.
I probably should have said "Russian tanks overrunning the German army" or something that wasn't the actual starting point in 1965.
Steve Jackson Games is hoping to re-print Triplanetary.
I find this exciting news, for obvious reasons.
I could find out what that means, but why ask a deep-learning algorithm when you can ask an imaginary friend?
It's a science fiction board game for huge nerds.
the Americans didn't win many crushing victories after they had reinforced, despite advantages in the air and in supplies.
Really? They did destroy pretty much the entire KPA in about two months, while driving from Pusan most of the way to the Yalu. That's quite crushing.
Too crushing, you would say if you were in charge of Red China.
41: among whom I am, vide my email address.
The email address, that is. There were hints about the nerdery.
The KPA retreated in disorder after the Incheon landing, not contesting most of the advance. A crushing victory, yes, but not achieved by the tactical qualities of ground forces.
48: Working here from this paper, which turns out to be a lot more relevant than I remembered.
The Inchon landing was a strategical masterpiece followed by a ground advance to Seoul so tentative that it largely negated the successful landing. The Inchon-Seoul episode typifies the U.S. style of war fighting in the twentieth century-successful maritime force projection followed by less effective ground campaigning. To illustrate the greater possibilities in the ground advance, the author contrasts the opening days of the Inchon-Seoul operations with those of an analogous German surprise offensive in the Baltic in 1941. The author concludes that the German battle fighting style in mobile war was superior, containing elements of boldness that could be applied to improve U.S. ground warfare today.
A crushing victory, yes, but not achieved by the tactical qualities of ground forces.
Indeed. I credit the strategic brilliance of the commander.
...who do you think carried out the Incheon landing???
The email address, that is. There were hints about the nerdery.
I hadn't noticed the e-mail address either, but it makes me very glad to share that news.
51: (1) Marines, not Army (see qualifications above); (2) attacking a virtually undefended port; and (3) barely moving for weeks on end as the majority of the KPA fled through Seoul unmolested, later to be reconstituted in Manchuria.
It's a science fiction board game for huge nerds.
I don't know if I'll end up buying it, because these days there's little or no chance that I'd actually get to play it. But looking at Steve Jackson's draft "Advance Combat System"* makes me feel happy nostalgia.
* The fact that it's called an "Advanced Combat System", that the link is "acs.html", and when you click through you see a bunch of ASCII charts for rolling d6 is perfect.
Ok, taking seven days to advance 40km against very light opposition.
That paper in 49 is pretty compelling, btw. The author, Stolfi, was also one of the first to properly analyze the balance of armor in France in 1940.
Thinking more about the capital-technology thing is kind of fascinating. Take this:
investments in nuclear weapons or missiles are cumulative. Knowledge, equipment, and infrastructure for nuclear and missile capabilities can accumulate over decades without becoming obsolete. Countries merely need to aggregate the technology to the point of surpassing a decades-old bar. North Korea, in essence, put its nickels in a jar every year for 40 years and eventually gained an extremely useful capability.What were in WWII the most expensive of all weapons, invested in on the off-chance of accelerating the defeat of profoundly inferior enemies, is today available to help tin-pot tyrants fend off profoundly superior enemies.
What were in WWII the most expensive of all weapons . . .
I remember reading that the cost of developing and building the B-29 was higher than the cost of the Manhattan project.
Which reinforces your point, because it isn't really practical to develop a large, technologically advanced airplane in small steps over 40 years.
And the aircraft would be obsolete when you finished it. Don't know about the B-29, but you're right, many R&D projects were in the same league as Manhattan.
Ajay commented some time ago that the next generation British submarines would be a project comparable to Manhattan. It makes me wonder where the next phase of capital-intense warfare goes. More of the same, at ever-increasing cost? Effective ballistic missile defense? For real android soldiers? Frickin' laser beams?
Delurking to add little value: My not very thorough understanding of US Army ground performance in the Korean War is that it's basically a story of the transformation of, and initially incompetent leadership of, the Eighth Army. The troops basically sucked (probably better in man-to-man comparison to the KSA, but still sucked) in the early stages of the war, since they were largely underequipped and undermanned due to budget cuts, and since only a surprisingly small portion of even the officer corps had any combat experience at all. And they were commanded by General Walker, who essentially sucked ass. This lasted through and past Inchon, and up to the point that the Chinese broke through. They were getting spanked both strategically and tactically (while being substantially outnumbered) by the Chinese. Then, fortunately, General Walker died and lost command of the Eighth Army, the US regrouped under Ridgway*, put in more experienced officers and had a better command structure, and then basically outfought the Chinese and the KSA remnants on the ground, even after Ridgway left, until it was decided for strategic reasons that continuing the war into the North made no sense. I'd be very surprised if there was a good case that in 1951-1952 the US Army was a less operationally effective man-for-man ground infantry than the Chinese or the KSA. Admittedly this is a general-focused (Walker v. Ridgway) story and I don't state it with any great level of confidence, but there you go.
To add even less value and change the subject, the more interesting issue TO ME isn't Tooze's D-Day piece (which is great) but in Tooze's heterodox view that the allied strategic bombing in WWII against Germany was actually effective. Of course the leading historian of strategic bombing in WWI (Richard Overy) strongly disagrees with him, as do (I think) most experts in strategic bombing. I'm certainly not competent to resolve the debate*, which is in any event slightly more nuanced (Overy concedes that strategic bombing had some non-zero strategic value, but mostly in limiting the Luftwaffe's ability to provide effective tactical defense, not in actually keeping the Germans from fighting more generally) but it seems to me that this is the biggest issue. If strategic bombing had little value, we basically mass-murdered Germans for nothing, and the massive Western allied advantage in strategic logistics and materials was probably not actually decisive in the war, although it surely would have been decisive if the Russians hadn't thoroughly beaten Hitler (using some of that material but still) first. If strategic bombing did actually cause the German war economy to collapse to basically unsustainable levels in 1943 and then again in late 1944-1945 (Tooze's thesis) the fundamental question of "what won the war" gets answered very differently.
(Also I should say that I am always suspicious of purely military history done by non-soldiers in the same way I am of purely legal history done by non-lawyers. This isn't to say that it can't be done very, very well -- just that there's some fundamental level of disconnect between analytical understanding and "getting it" about what operations actually mean that is always inherently distorting. That's not to criticize Tooze or to take any particular side in any particular debate.)
*(even one more addendum -- Ridgway is a good candidate for most-underrated (by the general US public) figure in US Army history, I guess second to Winfield Scott. Godadamn this comment is long)
No idea why I kept writing "KSA" for "KPA" but there you go. Value-adding.
61.1 is consistent with what I know. 30 last will be my last word on Korea.
61 rest: There's more detail against Overy in this review. AIUI Tooze holds that Overy's claims are essentially refuted by the relevant German archives, which have only become available since 1989. The earlier inefficacy claims were based largely on postwar studies like the USSBS, which relied on self-serving, inflated, production figures from people like Speer.
Ridgway is a good candidate for most-underrated (by the general US public) figure in US Army history
That's because he retired to Fox Chapel. Although he does have a the entryway to Soldiers and Sailors plus the local security studies program named after him.
61: Also, none of this is purely military history. In fact it's very largely economic history, in which Tooze does have technical training. Though I feel you, bro.
the fundamental question of "what won the war" gets answered very differently
I think increasingly the answer is, everything won the war. German defeat was massively overdetermined, and any number of roads could have led there. Eastern and Western Allies meeting on the Elbe sums that up kind of neatly.
Agree with both 66 and 67. To 67, the truth, as I understand it, is that the best way to understand WWII is to think of the Germans as having an incredible run of luck (some of it "create your own luck" but still), most spectacularly at the Ardennes in 1940. If that had failed, which it easily could have, it seems like things would probably have been over reasonably quickly.
Still, the strategic bombing question is super important.
68: Agreed on all points. It strikes me now that after that run of luck, things mostly outside German control, the war was shaped increasingly by things they did have under their control; not spectacular offensives that couldn't work against competent enemies, or pie-in-the-sky stuff like V2s, but stuff like the MG42. So Nazism wasn't characterized so perfectly by the dazzling offensives from 1939-41 as by the painful, bloody, utterly pointless defense thereafter. Less glamorous panzer officer, more muddy foxhole.
"Let's keep this thing we have going for a few more years so that we can enslave and brutally murder millions!" "Let's enslave and murder millions so that we can keep this thing going for a few more years!" "Gosh, maybe we're BOTH right." Ladies and gentlemen, the Nazis.
19: Not all of them, I am sure, but nearly so. Prenzlauer Berg is now the place where it's impossible to find a kindergarten slot. Friedrichshain will follow in a couple more years.
But yeah, all those crumbling facades you remember have been re-plastered and painted. It's all very spiffy.
On the other hand, 10,000 people were evacuated for part of Monday while a leftover bomb was defused. That sort of thing happens regularly, although it does not always involve quite as many people having to leave the area.
An experience shared by South-East Asia. Warfighting!
I think I agree with everyone, but on strategic bombing, from the objective-ish metric of "can you defeat a power with equivalent economic strength to the USSR with a surprisingly low amount of dead voters" it worked pretty well if you're not too concerned about the effects on civilians at the receiving end.
73: additionally, it's not like the alternative approach of "rolling into Germany with a load of tanks and guns" would have been great for civilians either. And, in fact, as the eastern half of Germany found out in 1945, it wasn't.
And the western half. Far less bad than the east, but still plenty bad.
Thinking more about this:
each polity develops its own style based on the resources available to its military-industrial complex
I've started in on this, on British interwar army development, and nearly finished this on Soviet planning, and it seems everyone in Europe was thinking on much the same lines. Everyone wants full mechanization, massive armor, firepower and airpower. The British and Americans could afford all of it and eventually built it. The French could afford most of it,* minus strategic air, but were knocked out early. The Germans and Soviets could barely afford any of it, but built as much as they could, essentially by starving people to pay for machinery. The Soviets had a big head start, and eventually outside help, so they ended up with a lot more of everything than the Germans, again excluding strategic air. To Tooze's MG42 piece, maybe it's notable that the Soviets also produced some excellent ground weapons, scorning the Allied weapons that reached them.
*Or had it in 1940, anyway. IDK to what extent they could really afford it.
The Soviets had a big head start, and eventually outside help, so they ended up with a lot more of everything than the Germans, again excluding strategic air.
Two interesting insights from O'Brien's book were that:
a) the German air industry and US air industry both had c. 2 million employees - being able to optimise factory space for production rather than dispersal helps.
b) The USSR's allocation of the bulk of its industrial war fare to land weapons is unusual - everyone else focussed at least 50% on airplanes alone, and once you add a varying proportion of naval construction on top of it, land production remained a minority in every country but the USSR.
(As I've said, I disagree with the special pleading at times in the book, but thinking about the absolute size of economic output versus how much damage even the most crushing defeat an army can inflict is a useful exercise. German tank losses at Kursk, e.g., barely shift the dial)
78.last
Isn't "shifting the dial" only one dimension of the problem? If the Germans lose a lot of tanks they have to be replaced, and that takes resources (duh!) but also time. While the new tanks are being built and transported to the front the Russians are advancing another 100 or 200 km, aren't they? Losses of soldiers are even worse, of course, and Germany's smaller population couldn't replace them as easily without taking workers from the very factories that were producing all those tanks (or fighters, or artillery).
Hence the Nazi focus on slave labor, which had its own problems. I forget the timelines, but how much did the Russians use "gulag" factory labor during the war?
79 last: A fuckton. I think mostly in mining, not factories. Don't have figures to hand, but around that time ISTR figures like NKVD being responsible for 70% of nickel production.
(Was reading the memoirs of a Russian infantryman the other day where he casually revealed his immediate post-war mining career involved being a supervisor for a bunch of zeks; some of whom charmingly and casually wanted to murder him.)
The parts that don't rust in winter.
Nickel is just one example of the top of my head. There were a whole bunch of metals like molybdenum and copper, and other stuff. I'll try to find the reference.
Everyone wants full mechanization, massive armor, firepower and airpower. The British and Americans could afford all of it and eventually built it. The French could afford most of it,* minus strategic air, but were knocked out early. The Germans and Soviets could barely afford any of it
...but the Germans and the Soviets nevertheless still chose to go to war in 1939. And I think this is where the idea of a liberal-democratic way of war comes from - it comes from how you run your wars of choice. If your wealth and industrial base means you can't have a mechanised fires-based army, but you can only have a lot of marching infantry a lot of whom are going to get killed, then maybe you tend to avoid wars of choice. Or, if you're the kind of state that doesn't value the lives of its citizens very much, maybe you don't.
Bruce de Mesquita makes the point that democracies can be warlike, just like dictatorships, but democracies are much more likely to choose to fight wars against much weaker opponents whom they reckon they can probably beat, and dictatorships will choose to fight wars against equal or stronger opponents.
That's fine. I wasn't really disputing the importance of gulag production to the Soviet war effort.
85: But the Soviets at least did only choose to go to war against much weaker opponents.
They still lost to one of the weaker opponents.
85: All makes sense; but what you're describing as a liberal-democratic mode of war is characterized at the political or grand-strategic level; what Tooze describes is at lower levels.
Also IIRC there's some research showing that dictatorships can keep the peace among themselves, given they're all primarily concerned with internal stability. Obviously Nazis don't fit that scheme, the Soviets often did.
It's just possible that the Nazis were fucked in the head.
A running thread in the Soviet-planning book is that all the Soviet leaders considered war with the west inevitable. Stalin at least seems to have sincerely believed the Marxist-Leninist-whateverist theory on that, and apparently no-one questioned the assumption. If that's your starting premise, hooking up with Germany in 1939 isn't unreasonable: it gave the USSR freedom to wipe out a number of possible opponents, capture some useful buffer territories, and help set up the capitalist powers to gut each other, meanwhile freeing up some forces to keep watch on Japan.
Stalin sincerely believed Hitler wouldn't invade the USSR until 1942, which more than negated any advantages the Soviets got from hooking up Germany.
Maybe "sincerely" should be "desperately."
93: As Molotov remarked to (I think) a British diplomat during the Battle of Britain: "You put your losses in one column and the German losses in another column and subtract one from the other. But we put British and German losses in the same column and add them up."
Have we had a violation of the "<scottish>true</scottish> democracies don't fight each other" theory yet?
Stalin possibly didn't appreciate how fucked in the head the Nazis were. Also, he thought the warnings from the British were lies to get him to do their fighting for them. Which of course they did want, but they weren't lying.
I'm utterly failing to find the gulag nickel reference, so maybe y'all should forget about that.
97: knowing my people as I do, I am willing to speculate that if there were two truly Scottish democracies in the world, they would be fighting each other virtually constantly.
It look like it was just under half the nickel. Still pretty vital.
Thanks Moby! I continue blissfully upon my way.
Read that entry further down, look to see who is mentioned by name in the last sentence of the first section "Conditions" part. Don't say the name here. I wonder who decided he had to have his name mentioned in the main text?
Two guys are mentioned by name there. I don't see any exceptionable about either being mentioned. It sin't strictly necessary, but it's typical of wikihistory semi-plagiarism. And I've no idea why Voldemort rules apply.
Voldemort Confunded my keyboard.
You can say Voldemort. He doesn't have a google alert for his own name.
You also can't say the country in Africa that rhymes with Rihanna.
It's bee a few years. Maybe it's safe now.
Oh, that sentence. Never heard of the guy.
Also, that doesn't rhyme with Rihanna.
Soviet FP again: in the 1920s and into the 1930s the main enemy the Soviets planned and wargamed for was a Polish-Romanian alliance, presumed to be backed by France and maybe allied also with the Baltic States and Finland; and given the Civil War history, and the French Cordon Sanitaire project, they weren't being wholly unreasonable. They were also rattled quite badly by the German-Polish rapprochement in 1934. Against that background, Molotov-Ribbentrop makes a lot more sense.
Molotov-Ribbentrop makes a great deal of sense for the Soviets (and for the Germans who could have avoided a two-front war).
But the German grand-strategic objective in 1939 was - as it had been since before the First World War - to dominate eastern Europe, including Ukraine, in order to use it as a massive colony whose exploitation would allow them to compete against Britain and the USA on equal terms. They never made much of a secret of this, not at any point in that period. Given that, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the USSR to team up with Germany.
It doesn't make sense to trust the Germans as much as Stalin did, but I don't see how it was unreasonable (leaving aside the morality of the thing). It was buying time to re-arm.
2nd 118. Given inevitable war (not just with Germany, but with all the western powers) temporary accommodations made sense. Especially since the territories ceded to the USSR under the pact would thereby be denied to all the western powers, and available to the Soviets. Again, the Soviets saw all those countries, not unreasonably, as potential partners in capitalist coalitions.
Back then, what they thought was late capitalism was actually middle-aged capitalism.
But, in addition to the territory they got, the USSR did agree to ship lots and lots of materials to the Nazis. That part didn't make sense. At least not carrying on with the shipping of the goods even after the massing of German troops was obvious.
It was buying time to re-arm.
That was true for both sides, though. Germany had 1700 tanks in 1939, many of which were light tanks of minimal effectiveness; by 1941 it had twice as many, and they were of far better quality.
Given inevitable war (not just with Germany, but with all the western powers) temporary accommodations made sense.
"If you agree that it made sense to believe this stupid thing, then it makes sense to do this other stupid thing."
122: It's certainly true that the only reasonable Soviet assumption was that the Germans would also be using the time to rearm, but it seems a reasonable risk for the Soviet side given the much lower starting point of the Red Army.
123: Well, yes. I don't see that it's so horrendously stupid though, given the energies the capitalist countries had put into suppressing communists domestic and Russian in c.1917-23. Even setting the ideology aside, you have the whole history of modern international relations in Europe.
124: I doubt they were much lower, since they had a substantial head start. Your point holds though, since they weren't just arming to survive, they were arming to win. They wanted superiority, not parity.
What is the current understanding of how seriously the USSR was in trying to achieve a defensive alliance against Germany with the western powers before WW2? I recall (possibly incorrectly) that AJP Taylor thought the answer was "very" and beat this point into the ground in his "Origins of the Second World War." (The western powers certainly weren't interested, but the question is, was Stalin really interested?)
Wasn't the fundamental assumption of Stalin in entering into Molotov-Ribbentrop that France had a good army that was overwhelmingly likely to tie up the Germans for years or beat them, or at least that France and Germany and Britain would horrifically beat each other up on the ground for years while the Soviets could do their thing of purge, murder, rebuild? That was a perfectly reasonable belief in 1939 - except for some extreme German good luck in 1940 it would have been right. Also France was ally#1 of the various anti-communist Eastern European countries. A lot of what seems inexplicable about the interwar period or 1939-1940 makes sense if you remember that people were relying on the (accurate) belief that France and Germany had roughly evenly matched armies, which is a hard thing to remember given what we know actually happened, but was correct.
I mean that still doesn't explain why Stalin didn't ramp up after France fell in late 1940-early 1941, but I think everyone recognizes that as pure stupidity.
I recently learned that the "Soviet man laugh at your pitiful western tank!" thing is mostly horseshit. The Red Army very much did use and appreciate the M4 Sherman, in fact, they assigned them to Guards tank brigades and used them in what they would later call the operational-manoeuvre group role, as a very good way to move the front line a long way towards Berlin quickly.
(In the big spaces out east, range, speed, and reliability were obviously very useful.)
Also, the Red Army operated more Valentines than the British Army. Weirdly, although the UK designed it as a heavily armoured, relatively slow support tank for the infantry, the Soviets used it for reconnaissance. (They had a different idea of how to reconnoitre than we did - emphasising fighting for information, like the Germans.)
There's an interview with a Hero of the Soviet Union about it here: http://www.theshermantank.com/lee-and-grant-tanks/soviet-shermans-the-soviet-union-used-and-liked-the-sherman/
RE strategic bombing upthread: I'm looking forward to the Tooze article on Overy. It seems to me that discussions of strategic bombing have always focused too much on a strawman that is, unfortunately, vigorously put forth by proponents of bombing, which is that you can bomb another country into submission without any messy ground action. It's a stupid claim that was always absurd, but it's so appealing to warmakers that it became central to the entire notion/theory of strategic bombing, and has therefore also been the target of opponents. But "B-17s didn't win the war on their own" is very, very far from "B-17s were almost entirely useless", which Overy and his successors have sort of treated as the null hypothesis. That is, once they disproved the strawman put forth by Mitchell and all the rest, they must also have disproved the more modest thesis that "bombing your opponents' factories and railways hurts their war effort usefully."
I don't recall Farley's (of LGM) exact position on strategic bombing, but I'm almost certain that one of his arguments for getting rid of the USAF (as an institution, not as a fighting force) is that it's inextricably wedded to the strawman vision of strategic bombing, and that you can't fight effectively if you're wedded to a fantasy. IOW, air forces under the Army would be likely to have a more practical/realistic view of the uses/benefits of strategic bombing, because the true believers wouldn't be in charge.
I haven't read the piece, or even the last 40 comments, but I did watch some McHale's Navy reruns last last night. Can't imagine anything like this now. |>
Is there any basis behind Solzhenitsyn's portrayal of Stalin (in the The First Circle) -- that Hitler was only person he ever trusted.
132.1: It's just a short book review. I think Tooze's actual argument is in Wages of Destruction, but I read that a while ago.
(They had a different idea of how to reconnoitre than we did - emphasising fighting for information, like the Germans.)
Again I suppose we're back to working within the limits of your technology base - Soviet radios were in such short supply (only late in the war making it below divisional level in practice, iirc) that rapid information flow was impossible - moving forward in echelon until you hit an enemy and then overwhelming them at that point (like everyone, the Red Army was chronically short of infantry) was the constrained response.
Just one more case on the resource/style thing. The Japanese army in WWII had very little modern equipment of any kind and very little ammunition. They had basically WWI infantry weapons and not much else. The dealt with this, consciously, by substituting training for materiel; infiltration tactics, night fighting, hand-to-hand fighting, extreme discipline and physical endurance.
The Rhodesian army in their bush war in the 1970s also had essentially no modern materiel, and compensated with improvisations and high-risk tactics; things like paratroopers jumping from civilian light aircraft and fighting largely with WWII weapons.
Very different armies in very different societies, both offsetting materiel shortages with heroic infantry improvisations. Consistent with Ajay's 85, the Japanese in this situation elected to start at least one suicidal war, whereas the Rhodesians fought until they realized they were losing then negotiated a reasonable peace.
No two democracies with at least 5 McDonald's, 3 KFCs, 2 Arby's, a Chipotle, a Hardy's, and a Cinnabon have ever gone to war together.
137 - to a point. The Japanese industrial base ~ the same as the USSR's. They made the not-unreasonable in context of an island nation whose (self-identified[1]) enemy was several thousand miles away to focus on the navy and air power, and their tanks were actually on a par with early-30s norms. In the late 30s rearmament they took the risk of skipping a generation, which backfired quite a bit.
[1] And there's a fascinating chain of thought here about whether the need for a post-Russo-Japanese war hypothetical enemy to design your navy against led to Pearl Harbour...
137 - to a point. The Japanese industrial base ~ the same as the USSR's. They made the not-unreasonable in context of an island nation whose (self-identified[1]) enemy was several thousand miles away to focus on the navy and air power, and their tanks were actually on a par with early-30s norms. In the late 30s rearmament they took the risk of skipping a generation, which backfired quite a bit.
[1] And there's a fascinating chain of thought here about whether the need for a post-Russo-Japanese war hypothetical enemy to design your navy against led to Pearl Harbour...
140: No argument; but they couldn't afford to compete with the American navy and the Soviet army at the same time; having given the navy priority, the army was forced to desperate measures.
In contrast, the danger of a democracy without a Cinnabon invading a country with a Cinnabon is very high, as the people demand the chewy goodness for themselves.
I remember reading that the cost of developing and building the B-29 was higher than the cost of the Manhattan project.
Yes - Manhattan Project was $2 billion, B-29 was $3 billion. And the Manhattan Project was far more expensive than absolutely necessary because they made speed a priority and had a "try everything" approach.
When I said that Astute was a bigger project than the Manhattan Project I meant in terms of complexity, but it's possible that it would be true in terms of cost too; I'd have to check.
re: 144
Manhattan Project was $27billion in 2016 dollars.
Astute looks to be about $1.7 billion US, per boat. First three boats, about 5 billion, so, in terms of R&D cost, not really Manhattan sized. US
Also, the B29 was edgier than you think technologically. The Wright R-3350 engine was a crazy-arse idea - the backwards, snaggletoothed Brits had moved onto jets... - pushing the very edge of piston engine technology. The worst difficulty was trying to get rid of the heat involved, which drove them to basically use the lubricating system as the main cooling system. When that broke down - which happened a lot - it caught fire, which was very bad news because the block was made of an alloy of MAGNESIUM.
The fire would reach 3000 degrees C or more and burn right through the main wing spar within 15-20 minutes.
Our nearest equivalent was the Bristol Centaurus, which at least had the decency to burst into flames when you started it up.
"Why does your high-performance piston engine burst into flames as soon as you start it up?"
"To save time!"
whether the need for a post-Russo-Japanese war hypothetical enemy to design your navy against led to Pearl Harbour...
Robert Massie reckons this is similar to what the Germans (specifically Tirpitz and the Kaiser) did in 1897.
"To justify building battleships, a new enemy - England, at the time friendly to Germany - had been designated. To fight France and Russia, a powerful German battle fleet was unnecessary; the German Army would win or lose that war whatever happened at sea. To fight England, however, Tirpitz had established that battleships were necessary. Having established that premise, Tirpitz then brilliantly reversed the argument; in order to justify building battleships, the enemy must be England..."
Japan did at least need a navy, whatever its diplomacy; and they started their first buildup while allied with Britain.
Yes, but they chose to model their hypothetical opponent not as the RN, but explicitly against the USN even before WWI - the unusual mix of slow but massive submarines, inadequate destroyers, fast heavy torpedo armed cruisers, and the core battleship/carrier fleet was meant to whittle down the US Pacific fleet sailing to the rescue until the final climactic super-Jutland...
https://www.amazon.com/Kaigun-Strategy-Technology-Imperial-1887-1941/dp/159114244X (Kaigun is surprisingly interesting on this.)