World War Two
Published 29 Apr 2023The fighting at Kohima is up close, personal, and vicious, as it is at Imphal. The Allies consolidate their gains at Hollandia, the Japanese are advancing in Central China, and it seems like the Chinese Nationalist Army has lost the support of the civilian population. This might not surprise you when we take a closer look.
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April 30, 2023
Germany’s Existential Crisis – WW2 – Week 244 – April 29, 1944
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March 29, 2023
Will Finland Leave the War? – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 28 Mar 2023The Finns have been fighting the Soviet Union since the Winter War. But now, Marshal Mannerheim and Prime Minister Risto Ryti look like they might pull out of the Eastern Front commitments they agreed upon with their Axis allies. German-Finnish relations seem to be at breaking point, and Red Army troops are threatening the borders. How long will Finland stay in this war?
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March 5, 2023
MacArthur and Nimitz Go Head-to-Head – Week 236 – March 4, 1944
World War Two
Published 4 Mar 2023The American attacks against the Admiralty Islands are successful, but this causes real tensions between commanders Douglas MacArthur and Chester Nimitz. Much of this week is taken up by planning and meetings on both sides — Adolf Hitler plans the occupation of Hungary, Josef Stalin plans new offensives in Ukraine, and the Allies plan to reconfigure their whole front in Italy. It’s all the prelude to an explosion of action.
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January 7, 2023
December 28, 2022
QotD: Collective guilt
As for the concept of collective guilt, I personally think that it is totally unjustified to hold one person responsible for the behaviour of another person or a collective of persons. Since the end of World War Two I have not become weary of publicly arguing against the collective guilt concept. Sometimes, however, it takes a lot of didactic tricks to detach people from their supersitions. An American woman once confronted me with the reporach, “How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler’s language?” In response, I asked her if she had knives in her kitchen, and when she answered that she did, I acted dismayed and shocked, exclaiming, “How can you still use knives after so many killers have used them to stab and murder their victims?” She stopped objecting to my writing books in German.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946.
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December 8, 2022
Is the Luftwaffe Defeated in 1943? – WW2 Documentary Special
World War Two
Published 7 Dec 2022Outnumbered and outproduced, the once mighty Luftwaffe is battling to hold its own across three fronts. Every month brings new pain for the force. But the Luftwaffe still has a few tricks up its sleeves and can make the Allies bleed heavily. If only Hitler and the Nazi leadership weren’t sabotaging its chances …
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November 24, 2022
Pavlov’s House, codenamed “Lighthouse” in Stalingrad
In The Critic, Jonathan Boff reviews The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Centre of WWII’s Greatest Battle by Iain MacGregor:
In the summer of 1942, with the German army deep inside the Soviet Union, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Blue, an attack from around Kharkiv in south-east Ukraine across hundreds of miles of steppe towards the oil fields of the Caucasus. Part of the plan required the German Sixth Army under General Paulus to secure the flank by seizing the industrial city of Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga.
By the middle of September Paulus’s troops were fighting their way, street by street, building by building, and sometimes room by room, through a city reduced to ruins by artillery shelling and the bombs of the Luftwaffe. The fighting was ferocious. Although by November most of Stalingrad was in German hands, several pockets of resistance still held out. Meanwhile, the Red Army was secretly massing for a counter-attack in the open terrain on either side of the city.
On 19 November 1942, General Zhukov unleashed a giant pincer attack which quickly overran the Romanian, Hungarian and Italian forces protecting Paulus’s flanks. Within days the German Sixth Army found itself trapped in a giant pocket, cut off from the rest of the German army. Here, in the depths of a Russian winter, nearly 300,000 surrounded men tried to hold out as their supplies of food, fuel, ammunition and medicine dwindled away.
By the end of January 1943, all hope of relief was gone. To Hitler’s disgust, Paulus ordered the remnants of his army to lay down their weapons. Of the 91,000 German soldiers sent into captivity in Siberia, only 5,000 would survive to ever see their homes again. Immense and terrible as the battle was — we will never know exactly how many troops took part, nor how many died, but it is probable that the total of dead, wounded and captured on both sides reached two million — Stalingrad was not the biggest battle of the war, nor even the bloodiest. Nonetheless, it remains, alongside Dunkirk and D-Day, among the touchstones of the Second World War, largely because it encapsulates three linked but distinct stories. Iain MacGregor does a fine job of covering each in his rich study.
First, Stalingrad was one of the most important battles of the war. It marked the high-water mark of the Nazi invasion of the USSR and an end to Hitler’s genocidal dreams of destroying the Soviet Union. Before Stalingrad, and the other crushing defeats the Axis suffered at around the same time in Tunisia and the Solomon Islands, the initiative had always lain with Germany and Japan. Afterwards, the Allies decided where, when and how the war would be fought.
MacGregor establishes this context neatly. He explains with just the right amount of detail why Operation Blue was launched and what it hoped to achieve. He offers a clear discussion of the decisions taken, and mistakes made, on both sides; and he hints at the logistical weaknesses that probably damned the Germans to disappointment from the start.
The strongest point of this book, however, is its description of the street-fighting in the heart of the city around a building known as “Pavlov’s House” (codename Lighthouse: hence the title of the book). Here the German 71st and Soviet 13th Guards rifle divisions fought for months. By focusing on this small area and these two formations, MacGregor is able to dig deep enough into the tactical detail to give us a clear sense of the difficulty, violence and terror of urban warfare, without swamping us with repetitive detail. His descriptions of fighting have a cinematic quality, swooping smoothly from panoramic tracking shots of the initial German charge down towards the waters of the Volga into close-ups of bullet-riddled mannequins fought over in the ruins of a department store.
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November 16, 2022
The Real Reason for Hitler’s War – WW2 Specials
World War Two
Published 15 Nov 2022The murder of the Jews of Europe is not simply conducted alongside the military and political war aims of the Third Reich. For Hitler and the Nazis, the murder of the Jews of Europe is the military-political aim of the war. It confounds all logic, but in the twisted worldview of Nazi ideology, it makes perfect sense. This is a war on the Jewry.
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November 14, 2022
The Auschwitz Business Model – War Against Humanity 086
World War Two
Published 10 Nov 2022Hitler commemorates the twentieth anniversary of the failed Beer Hall Putsch, in Auschwitz 50 men are shot in celebration, and Arthur Liebehenschel replaces Rudolf Höss as commandant.
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November 12, 2022
QotD: The short careers of secret police chiefs
(The Romanian Securitate had public intimidation down to an art form. They’d follow random guys around using big, obvious details, the better to prove to the proletariat that everyone was suspect. It is to them, not Mafia dons or aspiring rappers, that we owe the now-standard Eurotrash track suit look).
Secret police goons suffer from two serious structural problems, though, that not even the guys in Stove’s book [The Unsleeping Eye] really ever solved. The first is the obvious one, that guys who know where the bodies are buried are always at risk of using that knowledge. Napoleon’s guy Joseph Fourche, and FDR’s main man J. Edgar, lived out their natural lives (as did Elizabeth’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham), but of them, only Fourche lived in anything approaching what we would call an ideologized society, and that was small beer.
The rest of those guys died in harness, because of course they did. Adolf Hitler was an especially stupid dictator, and Heinrich Himmler an especially servile little freak, but I have no doubt that if the Reich had gone on much longer [Himmler] would’ve shanked [Hitler]. If Heydrich hadn’t gotten perforated in Prague, he no doubt would’ve gone after [Himmler] even sooner. Lenin and especially Stalin burned through secret police chiefs on the regular, because they pretty much had to.
I don’t know about the goons in the Chinese etc. secret police, but I’d be shocked to find anyone with more than a few years’ tenure, because purges are simply a way of life in totally ideologized societies. For every Khrushchev who manages to hang on – n.b. he was a Red Army commissar during the war, i.e. a not-so-secret police goon — there are fifty guys who live fast and die hard, because that’s just how totalitarians rule.
The stoyaknik, of course, is well served to consider the current scene as if he were watching the Politburo of an exceptionally deluded Commie regime, one made up almost entirely of ruthless yet clueless retards … who still believe, for the most part, in Communism.
That was always the problem for Kremlinologists in evaluating the USSR — whatever the Boss of the moment decided would, of course, immediately be retconned into the Scriptures by the Academicians, but what did the Big Guy himself think about it? That constrained his choices. Stalin and Khrushchev were true Communists, there’s no question about that, but they came up in the school of the hardest possible knocks — if they needed to do something directly contrary to Leninism in order to hang on to power, then Comrade Ilych can suck it.
For anything short of mortal, though, they’d more often than not behave as stereotypical Commies, so the first thing any Kremlinologist had to do was determine the seriousness of the situation from the Politburo’s perspective. Not an easy task, as you might imagine, and what made it worse was: as the USSR gained stability and Communism matured, the old school hardasses all died off and were replaced by True Believers. Mikhail Gorbachev, for instance, didn’t start making his mark until after Stalin’s death, and he wasn’t a real up-and-comer until after Khrushchev — that is, he started rising through the ranks only after the hard boys were gone.
Thus, while Khrushchev was a true Commie, he still had some hard reality to constrain him. Gorby didn’t. He really believed all that Marxist-Leninist horseshit about democracy and etc.; he was far more doctrinaire than the earlier generation could possibly be. Thus Kremlinologists were forever baffled when he did stupid things that made no sense from the Realpolitik perspective, but were perfectly in keeping with the Scriptures. They thought Perestroika was some big 4D chess feint, for instance, instead of just a soft boy doing something noodle-headed.
Severian, “Book Review: The Unsleeping Eye by R.J. Stove”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-09.
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November 6, 2022
Allies Launch New Phase in Pacific War – WW2 – 219 – November 5, 1943
World War Two
Published 5 Nov 2022The Allies hit the beaches of Bougainville, largest and last of the Solomon Islands. They create and expand a beachhead there and also win battles there at sea and in the skies. In the USSSR, the Soviets are closing in on Kiev and in the south have isolated the Crimea, but in spite of that, Adolf Hitler issues a new directive that Germany’s focus for the future should be in the west and the threat of an Allied invasion there.
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September 11, 2022
The Allies’ Latest Victory – WW2 – 211 – September 10, 1943
World War Two
Published 10 Sep 2022Dwight Eisenhower publicly announces the secret armistice signed last week, and Italy is now officially out of the war. The Italian fleet sails for Malta and Allied captivity. The Allies have landed in force in Southern Italy and they do face some heavy opposition from German forces — who have no intention of giving up Italy. In the USSR, though, the Soviets continue liberating territory all over Ukraine as they force the Germans back to the Dnieper River.
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September 10, 2022
QotD: “Working toward the Führer“
This had several big advantages. First, it’s in line with Nazi philosophy. The Nazis were Social Darwinists. Social Darwinists hold that “survival of the fittest” applies not only to humans as a whole, but to human social groups as well. Any given organization, then, must exist to do something, to advance some cause, to reach some goal. Ruthless competition between groups, and inside each group, is how the goal works itself out (you should be hearing echoes of Hegel here). The struggle refines and clarifies what the group’s goal is, even as the individual group members compete to reach it. The end result gets forced back up the system to the Führer, such that, dialectically (again, Hegel), “National Socialism means X” now encompasses the result of the previous struggle.
[…]
As with philosophy, “working towards the Führer” fit well with German military culture. Auftragstaktik is a fun word that means “mission-type tactics.” In practice, it delegates authority to the lowest possible level. Each subordinate commander is given an objective, a force, and a due date. High command doesn’t care how the objective gets taken; it only cares that the objective gets taken. Done right, it’s a wonderfully efficient system. It’s the reason the Wehrmacht could keep fighting for so long, and so well, despite being overpowered in every conceivable way by the Allies. The Allies, too, were constantly flabbergasted by their opponents’ low rank — corporals and sergeants in the Wehrmacht were doing the work of an entire Allied company command staff (and often doing it better).
Consider the career of Adolf Eichmann. In the deepest, darkest part of the war, this man pretty much ran the Reich’s rail network. Say what you will about the Nazi’s plate-of-spaghetti org chart, that’s some serious power. He was a lieutenant colonel.
The final great advantage of “working towards the Führer” is “plausible deniability”. Let’s stipulate Atrocity X. Let’s further stipulate that we’re in the professional historian’s fantasy world, where every conceivable document exists, and they’re all clear and unambiguous. It’s a piece of cake to pin Atrocity X on someone … and that someone would, in all probability, be a corporal or a sergeant. Maybe a lieutenant. What you wouldn’t be able to do is trace it up the chain any higher. Everyone from the captain to Hitler himself could / would give you the “Who, me?” routine. “I didn’t tell Sergeant Schultz to execute those prisoners. All I said was to go secure that objective / defeat that army / that National Socialism means fighting with an iron will.”
*I’m deliberately conflating them here — to make it clearer how confusing this could be — but in talking about this stuff the terminology is crucial. Adolf Hitler, the man, played the role of The Führer. What Hitler the man wanted was often in line with what the Führer role required, of course, but not always. This is one of the footholds Holocaust deniers have. Did Hitler-the-man actually put his name to a liquidation order? No. Did Hitler-the-man actually want it to happen? Unquestionably yes, but like all men, Hitler-the-man vacillated, had second thoughts, doubted himself, etc., and you can find documented instances of that. But The Führer very obviously wanted it to happen, and it was The Führer that motivated the rank-and-file. The man created the role, but very soon the role started playing the man …
Severian, “Working Towards the Deep State”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-06.
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September 4, 2022
The War is Four Years Old this week – WW2 – 210 – September 2, 1943
World War Two
Published 3 Sep 2022Four years of war and no real end in sight, but as the week ends the Allies land their first troops on Italy, actively committing themselves to a front in Western Europe. In the USSR the Soviets are taking heavy casualties but still pushing back the enemy with big partisan help and in Pacific plans are made for offensive against yet more Japanese held islands.
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July 6, 2022
Decapitating the French Resistance – WAH 066 – June 26, 1943
World War Two
Published 5 Jul 2022The Gestapo deals a devastating blow to French Resistance, and in Bengal, British India the famine is only getting worse.
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