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FreudianSlippers posted:Wasn't that exactly what Von Papen was trying to do? Von Papen had political designs of his own, and he (on more than one occasion) approached German military leaders about pre-emptively couping the government in order to preempt the takeover of parties that were unsavory to the German military establishment(both of which were turned down). Since he turned out to be way less clever than he thought he was, we don't really know much about what Von Papen would've done, but I think it's not entirely impossible that Von Papen could've ended up just being a nicer,softer Hitler.
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Aug 15, 2016 01:30
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icantfindaname posted:So what was Japan's endgame re:the war in China? I understand the Japanese military leadership was sort of a trainwreck and many of the escalations were done by rogue elements, but surely someone must have had a long term vision of some sort beyond pouring more troops into a Chinese meatgrinder hellscape forever? As far as I'm aware Japanese wartime ideology didn't really do the Lebensraum thing with China, did they somehow think they could make China a Manchukuo style puppet but with a billion people? The Japanese tried to establish a credible puppet government in the form of Wang Jingwei. Unfortunately, the things the Japanese did to the Chinese immediately destroyed any credibility that Jingwei's government had, and the brusque touch with which they played the political game of China made it so that anyone who worked with the collaborationists (important people that is) was tainted by their stench until their dying day. While they were happy to delegate less important areas to clients(and make no mistake, there wasn't anything that the Japanese saw as valuable in Inner Mongolia), they wanted strict control of resources and industrial zones. They might have meant to run China much like the European's ran African-style colonies. I think that the biggest mistake the Japanese had was not trying to fully invest their puppet regimes as legitimate figures. Some of the biggest pots of manpower that the Japanese could've drawn on where Chinese collaborationists, but because they were such vicious cunts in China, those manpower pools became utterly worthless as useful resources. The Japanese consistently tried to create a functional army for the Reorganized KMT government, mainly for police reasons, but they were so piss-poor in combat (and in policing) that they had to do those tasks themselves, sapping valuable manpower away from the front. A Festivus Miracle fucked around with this message at 10:33 on Aug 25, 2016 |
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Aug 25, 2016 10:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:Could you, uh, drown in mud? Like literally? I've read accounts of fully weighted soldiers sinking into the mud up to their chests(granted, the account I read was in central Belarus, which is a marshy region), so I don't think it's entirely implausible to drown in mud, provided there's enough rainfall.
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Aug 25, 2016 12:01
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 Here's a neat little image of a vehicle the Germans specifically designed to function in the mud. The awful mud is also part of the reason why Soviet tanks had huge horizontal profiles - it's much more difficult to sink into the mud if you distribute the weight of your vehicle across a lot of ground.  It didn't always work so good.
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Aug 25, 2016 12:06
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MikeCrotch posted:This sounds like the arguments for Germany winning the war in the East by not trying to exterminate everyone and enlisting the aid of anti-Soviet partisan in places like Ukraine, ignoring the fact that the only way this would have happened if the Nazis were not in power, in which case you probably don't have a war in the East at all. Comparing the war in China to the Great Patriotic War is comparing an apple to an orange. Their causes were fundamentally different, and their prosecution was fundamentally different. There are similarities, sure, but one of the main differences is that the Japanese didn't have 'exterminate millions of people' as part of the list of to-do tasks. Plus, the Germans did try to enlist the help of various anti-Soviet partisans, and even had some marked success in places like the Baltic states, helping to spawn partisan forces like the Forest Brothers and the Ukrainian Nationalist Army, which were tremendous PITAs for the Soviets up into the 1950s. The forces that the Japanese enlisted sucked so hard core in comparison to their own troops that they ended up being more of a drain on their resources than a bonus. And part of the reason for such appalling quality was the way the Japanese prosecuted the war. Policies like the Three Alls do not engender wide-spread civilian rapport, which was something the Japanese desperately needed to establish if they were going to conquer China. The Germans on the other hand, could rely on latent nationalist sentiment in some of the occupied territories to do the work of occupying those territories for them. The Japanese did not have that luxury.
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Aug 25, 2016 12:58
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You wanna talk about hellish, try living in a WW1 uboat. Hope you're ready to share a shitter with 50 other people.
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Aug 25, 2016 15:07
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MikeCrotch posted:
1942 was a shitshow for Romania. When the Soviets launched Little Saturn and Uranus, they effectively destroyed the Romanian army, largely because the initial blows fell exactly on Romanian positions. Not only was the Romanian industrial complex woefully underprepared for war with Russia, the military was rather behind in terms of doctrines and technology. The Romanians managed to rebuild their formations in time to desperately and ineffectively fight the Russians during the invasion of Romania, but by then it was kind of a moot point. Thankfully, Michael I saw the writing on the wall and overthrew the fascists, however much good that did him in the long run.
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Sep 2, 2016 11:59
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That's getting up to Paraguayan War levels of casualties.
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Silver2195 posted:This is probably true, although to play devil's advocate, France was still imposing harsher terms on Germany than had been imposed on France at the Congress of Vienna (a full century before, so not really a strong argument, but still). The territory the French formally lost in Vienna in 1815 wasn't properly French territory. Much of it was land that had been gained in the prior 20 years, land that wasn't seen as being properly French, which is why it never inspired a sense of French revanchism. Taking Alsace-Lorraine away from France (oh, and humiliating it for the second time in a century) inspired some serious Teuton-a-phobia in France. If France had won the war by itself (in some kind of weird alternate universe), the French would've plainly dismantled Germany altogether - many,many French, including those at that top, wanted far more severe peace terms than they got. Foch, that guy who said "This is not a peace treaty, this is an armistice for twenty years", didn't say that because he thought the treaty was too harsh, he said that because he thought it was far too lenient.
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Sep 7, 2016 14:47
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Orange Devil posted:Austerity policies were so terrible at dealing with the Great Depression that countries that were fully committed true believers such as the Netherlands did not recover from the Great Depression until *after* World War 2. It's a little bit more nuanced than that - the war was rough for the Netherlands, especially in late '45. The Germans fiercely contested the low countries into 1945, and it showed in the destruction that was wrought on the Netherlands. Probably the biggest thing that lifted the Dutch economy out of the hole was generous aid and tremendous borrowing. Don't forget that as a final gently caress you to the Allies, the Japanese had most of their puppet states declare themselves independent of their colonial overlords, which, in the Dutch case, turned out to be a canker sore on the Dutch economy for years.
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Sep 7, 2016 14:59
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Ron Jeremy posted:The only thing to speculate here if the Germany repels the D-Day landings is whether the Soviets choose to stop at the Pyrenees or continue to push their boots up Franco's rear end. I dunno about this. Let's say D-Day was a brutal disaster - the US still had hundreds of thousands of troops in the Channel ports, a second front in Italy that was slowly crumbling by 1944, and an entire second D-Day lined up to liberate Southern France. Basically, no matter how you shake it, by 1944 the war is wrapped up in the West, with only the minor details about who gets to have a nice German/Austria puppet state not yet settled. It would've taken incompetence of cosmological scale for the Allies to fail to conquer Western Europe in 1944-45. Even Market Garden and the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest only really served to delay the Allied war machine by a couple of months. BattleMoose posted:Also, what happens to Switzerland? The Swiss set up their country to be intentionally as dickish as possible to conquer. The Soviets doctrine would've proven hilariously ineffectual in the cramped mountain passes leading up to the National Redoubt. My guess is that, in some weird alternate history timeline where the Germans somehow repelled the Allies in the West but failed in the East, the Soviets would've left the Swiss well enough alone.
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Sep 21, 2016 09:15
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You can tell McNamara felt serious regret over what happened, but he still felt justified for doing it. On a level, I kind of agree with him. The entirety strategy of the Japanese government at the end of the war was to make the conquest of Japan so bloody that the Allies would balk at the losses. Instead, the Allies showed that they'd murder millions for victory, and that they had the weaponry to do just that, without the absurd losses that the Japanese were hoping for.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:14
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icantfindaname posted:Like I said, Mussolini ideology was a weird exception, people take fascism to mean Nazis not Mussolini I think part of the reason for that is because Italian Fascism was such an abysmal failure. Italy was the canker sore on the rear end of the Axis for the entire war, contributing mass of manpower and strategic military bases, but little else. Latter day fascists want to emphasize that it worked in the past - which is why they're not going to use the least successful example of fascism as a template. It's kind of like how latter day Tankies and true Stalinists have morphed into Maoists over time - you can't point to a failed state who espoused your ideology as something to aspire to.
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Sep 23, 2016 04:27
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504 posted:So.. it had been invented then? It had been proven in concept models(ie 'it works in the lab'), but no one had run a plane solely with jet engines yet. The Germans were the first ones to actually produce a working prototype jet plane, and the first ones to introduce a jet plane fighter, but the Me 262 was by no means a unique fighter concept. The British had jet fighters flying home defense in 1944. If anything, the Germans were about three months ahead of the Allies in introducing a jet fighter. The Me 262 went into widespread service in May 1944, the Gloster Meteor went into widespread service in late July, 1944. In terms of development, the Allies and the Axis each had working jet fighter prototypes by 1942. The real problem with jet's in WW2 was making a jet engine that wouldn't flame out if the pilot went into a dive/flame out and explode if a mechanic looked at it cross-eyed. The Germans and the British independently solved their metallurgical and practical problems with their jet engines about the same time.
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Sep 28, 2016 18:59
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There's definitely some merit to the idea that 'Hitler hosed it up'. Don't get me wrong, Hitler made many serious strategic errors. But the reason why you see 'It's all Hitler's fault' so commonly in the historiography of WW2 is because the last 50 years of our research into WW2 has been purely from the German side. The biggest decision makers who survived the war often blamed Hitler for losing it, and that's been the predominant narrative. German generals were amazing, German soldiers were amazing, German equipment was amazing, but no, if it weren't for Hitler, we surely would've won the war with the Soviets! 
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Oct 1, 2016 00:52
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Dialing back the slow-Anschluss idea and discarding the "useless" overseas colonies (and I realized we're gettIng way into Turtledove territory here), how about this: Yeah, the Finns and the Scandinavians, the most warlike people  .This reads like a fantasy-novel that would exist only in the minds of certain White supremacist writers. Long and short, once Germany rolled into the Sudetenland, clearly repudiating the Versailles Treaties, the gears of rearmament began to turn. War would've happened one way or another, even if Germany took two or three decades to get it done. As other posters have said, the Nazis would've been booted from power eventually, as their cosmic mismanagement of the economy would've run them into the ground in the long run. If you've ever read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the writer points out a time where Herman Goering basically stole millions of dollars from the German insurance industry under the threat of throwing the head executives into concentration camps. You can't run an economy like that forever and expect things to work out in the long term - see Venezuela, Zimbabwe etc.
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Oct 1, 2016 06:17
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The Finns were some of the biggest losers of WW2. The deal the Soviets originally offered them was garbage ("I want huge amounts of land that also happens to contain certain industries, resources, and a fair chunk of your population, and I'm willing to give you a completely undeveloped wilderness in exchange"), but it was a far better deal than the one they finally ended up with. It was only the British and American respect for their plucky little nation fending off the Soviets for a few months that they didn't end up becoming a Soviet puppet state. But the idea that the Finns would've fought the Soviets before the Winter War for some of that sweet,sweet desolate nowhere is comical in its own right.
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Oct 1, 2016 07:48
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To understand Hitler(better, not entirely), you have to see the direction of his life. He was literally a semi-homeless vagrant in Vienna prior to WW1, who spent his time reading political literature, making okayish vignettes of people to survive. When the war was announced from the balcony in Vienna, you can actually see HItler in the photo and he looks loving thrilled. From there, you can see how his ego grew to enormous proportions. In just 19 years, he went from being a homeless bum in Vienna to the Leader of Germany. Of course he thought he was the poo poo, because he had no reason to think otherwise. Through luck, circumstance, and the willing participation of others, he managed to best an a strongly entrenched political establishment. Compound that with a quack doctor who treated his various intestinal problems with all kinds of drugs, add in the incredible stress of running a country at war, and finally add in lickspittles like Halder and Keitel, who kissed Hitler's rear end as hard as they could mush their faces into it, and you can see why he became crazier and crazier and more convinced of just how amazing he was.
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Oct 13, 2016 01:52
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Stickarts posted:I'm currently scanning the thread for already offered suggestions, but does anyone have any recommendations for books chronicling Hitler's life pre-WWII? Rise and Fall of the Third Reich offers a decent perspective on Hitler's life before WWII. Hitler's rise to power is almost as absurd as his leadership of WWII.
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Nov 11, 2016 17:44
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