You know the Italians and French keep saying we are lovers not fighters instead of just admitting they are not good fighters. Oh and they are not that much good of lovers anyhow, well at least the 2 Italian and French women I have been with weren't anyways
Funny how people think we don't even have the internet... And yes the French Army was defeated, crushed, humbled but they did fight.
And not to take this thread off course - they can fight a little better than the Arabs have shown versus Israel. Back to the French - the Maginot Line fortifications, while ultimately useless are wonderful. Went on holiday to Alsace a few years ago and had a tour of a few places along the line. Huge. Had it's own little train.
Hmm, sounds like like Continental Europe bashing was part of the globalisation kit bundle... Never had the occasion to go there. In the region where I live, the WWII legacy is rather contituted of a constellation of German bunkers, blockhaus and fortress part of the so-called Atlantic Wall with lots of underground galleries too. Close to Saint-Malo beaches, there is a tiny Island named Cézembre ; it was literally flattened by days of US bomb raids (as said in the article, it's the most bombed place of WWII). I've actually crossed the forbidden mine field area with a friend of mine who knew the safe path, those are the moments when you really rely on your guide ! Photo taken by me last week. Cézembre Blockhaus near my hometown. I - II
Yes, I've been there too as well as Normandy a bit further along. Was a few years ago now - I was 12 or 13 I think so I was nimble and lithe enough to be able to scramble around all the abandoned bunkers and whatnot. They do tend to stink of p!ss though - as parts of the Maginot line did. I liked the fact they were all still there and had not been taken away or turned into some crappy tourist attraction/coffee house as they surely would have been in this country. A fevered 12 year old imagination also led me to believe there may be a possiblity of finding a German soldier in there as with those Japanese soldiers they found in the mid-1970s on some island. There weren't any there I am pleased to report.
Didn't he play for Spurs ?. Anyway, I nominate the Italians, as they did lots of postering about how there is to be a new Roman Empire, and then were consistently crap. Mussolini talked the talk, but he and his country couldn't walk the walk.
according to your reasoning that Holland was such a heaven for Jew b/c they settled there... Poland must have been a paradise since it was the most heavily Jewish place in all of Europe did you know that there the name for Poland in Yiddish is Polin and in Hebrew it means "Here shalt thou lodge" or "Place of safe refuge" in the exile from the Land of Israel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polin and all those gettos that the jews were forced to live in according to you were those the places that were centers of jewish learning and culture? there was anti-semitism everywhere, in Poland, in EEurope, in SEurope, in Holland...
its kind of hard to be a competent force when your government falls midway through a war and you get a new government which severs ties with one side and changes to the other, but hey...thats just my opinoin
Oh it cant have helped. They however were never that competent, no excuse is quite large enough. Their colonial aspirations showed this to the maximum - taking mighty Abyssinia.
Yes there was anti-semitism everywhere but there's a huge difference between how the Jews were treated here in Holland and how they were treated in Eastern Europe. The Dutch jews were discriminated against, but were never physically harmed or even locked up for their religion. They additionally were fully-fledged members of the Dutch electorate. Meanwhile in Eastern Europe, pogroms took place even before Hitler had a look in, and even after he left, in 1946 in Poland to be exact. In that light it's ironic that the German Jews who fled for these pogroms in the middle ages largely ended up in Poland and Russia, by the way.
It wasn't really a military, but I'd say the biggest failure in that time was the German democratic system apart from social democrats, unioners and communists (who were the first group of victims, being in concentration camps long before the jews).
90% of jokes i have ever heard about ww2 directed at continental euros have been at the expense of the french, the other 10% maybe split among the italians, poles, czechs.i've never for example heard someone make a crack about holland. most people don't have a great sense of history anyway. they rememeber a few things, pearl harbor. d day. the a bomb. the holocaust and that the french surrendered. most people would not know what tarawa or the ardennes was or that romania fought along with the germans, for example. one more thing most people remember. that is how formidable the germans were. many people i know who are real history buffs have a strange sort of admiration combined with repulsion for the germans. from a purely miltary aspect, you can't help but admiretheir fighting ability. plus the waffeen ss had real cool uniforms.i remember that me and a bunch of my freinds were totally fascinated by the third reich as kids. i read "the rise and fall of the thrid reich" when i was 11 or so. i'm telling you, ther germans get a lot of respect here, even though they were the enemy.
All Chaing was interested in was stockpiling American arms against the day that he could use them to fight Mao. But it's just as well, because the Chaing's army was so badly led, the officers so corrupt, arrogant and incompetent and the soldiers so badly trained and treated, that they didn't really stand much of a chance against the motivated professionals that made up the Japaanese army. They were not much shy of being an army of beaten-down coolies. Interestingly, when US General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell (one of the truly great soldiers of the war, though little known: even Marshall knew he was a better military mind than MacArthur, and in the 1940 army war games, which covered most of three Western US states, Stillwell, with the smaller force which was supposed to lose, kicked Pattons ass all to hell and back) got the opportunity to train and lead Chinese troops, they proved to be the equals of anything Japan could send against him, but he never got the authority he needed. A horrible waste of military talent who was left to rot. Interestingly, Stilwell knew very well that Mao was more than willing, even eager, to fight the Japanese, and he had disciplined, well led troops who were happy to follow him, and Mao apparently offered him overall strategic command in return for guns and ammunition. He tried repeatedly to get the War Department to let him send them the arms and equipment they needed, but the US government turned him down cold. No way they were going to give guns to a Communist. And Chiang openly threatened to stand down his army if Stilwell sent guns to Mao.
The Egyptians were quite frankly, and more or less openly, rooting for the Germans. All the British really wanted was for them to stay out, which was OK because the Egyptians felt that it was a European fight and they didn't want anything to do with it.
The French just did everything wrong. They relied on fixed defenses in an era which had passed stuff like the Maginot line behind. They disbursed their tanks and artillery amongst the infantry units, rather than have them fight as armored units. They considered the Ardennes to be impenetrable by armored or mechanized forces and barely bothered to defend it right up until Rommel came barrelling through at the head of an entire Panzer division. The real crime was that the French had more, and better, tanks than the Germans did at that point. Better fighter aircraft, but almost no bombers.. Better anti-aircraft artillery. Lots of good stuff. But the French government insisted on spending vast sums of money building the Maginot line instead of buying combat weapons. The military buget was enormous, back-breaking, but it all went for cement and steel that Germany simply drove around to the north, through Belgium.
In answer to your question, you'd have to say the Italians. They were so inept that Hitler would have been better off if they'd remained neutral. The worst of it was when they invaded Greece, got compeltely in over their heads and Hitler had to bail them out, That effort cost them several months off the start of the Russian invasion, which had been planned for late Spring and instead didn't start until IIRC, September. They had the Russians on the run, but ran smack into the Russian winter. If they'd had another couple months of decent weather they would have taken Moscow and pushed Stalin back across the Urals, from which it would have been much tougher to fight their way back.
The Maginot Line held pretty well against attacks. If a 1939 German Army had to fight against only it, I don't think would have went through easily if at all. The Ardennes was well known to be full of roads. Of course tanks could pass through it - it would only be slow for them because the single lane roads. During the invasion it turned into one big traffic jam, and if the western air force doctrines included the idea of close air support, it would have been a terrible failure for Germany. The reason they did not defend the area was simply because they had the misfortune of capturing the original batteplan of invasion, and Germany (or more specifically Manstein) made a new one that took advantage of that. The French and British put their troops where they thought the Germans would be. Only if you look at the most basic of numbers. The French tanks were fatally flawed because of their one-man turrets. They were simply incapable of performing in a mobile battlefield. It is rather telling that the Germans, who were not affraid to use other captured equipment, didn't put French tanks in front line units even thought they were always short of tanks. And for all that, France could have still forced a WWI style stalemate which they would have eventually won if they simply did the right thing at a number of points. This was simply a war won by brilliance on the German side combined with heaping dose of luck.
It's true that the Germans did launch some attacks on it, but they were only feints. The French had hundreds of thousands of troops manning it, and the Germans wanted to hold them there. It was never part of their plan to break through it, and it was not part of their main effort, which relied, as I'm certain you know, on speed and mobility, not slogging it out fighting fixed fortifications. Quite true, but they because of the narrow roads, the rugged very steep terrain, the extensive bogs and the River on the other side, French military doctrine held that it was vastly unsuited for mechanized warfare and seem never to have seriously considered that it was a particularly threatening sector. It was particularly, I think, because artillery couldn't operate very effectively there, and the French were always in love with artillery. The Germans overcame that problem by using dive bombers (the otherwise useless Stuka) as forward artillery. The French seemed not to have noticed what went on in Poland. Also true, but France didn't make much of an effort with them anyway, and the way they deployed - as infantry support vehicles rather than as fully mechanized autonolous units - simply wasted them. And the Germans did end up driving a lot of Renault tanks around Normandy. They certainly didn't export them to Russia where they would have been chewed up by T-32's or to North Africa where their lack of visibility would have made them suicide boxes against the tankers of the British Eighth Army. But the Americans saw sizeable numbers of them if Im not mistaken. I would also add into that the surprising (to the Germans most of all) the shocking command inertia, indecision and incompetence of the French command. They seemed at every turn to be stunned at what was happening, and did not react well - or quickly - to much of anything. The French were seemingly bogged down by their own doctrines, and their officers were unable to adapt in any meaningful way when the fight unfolded differently than the way they expected it. (Which in itself is a fascinating topic: Russian and French doctrines held that all decisions had to be made at the top. At the unit level you couldn't wipe your ass without permission. The Russians employed better communications than the French, who had a dreadful and inexplicable shortage of radios, so it worked better for them anyway. Plus, with France's top command in a state of confusion and panic, their orders either didn't come or made no sense The Germans relied on extensive training in every conceivable situation. In theory, every commander down to the company level would react exactly the same way to any given scenario. Explicit instructions weren't necessary every step of the way because everyone was going by the book. The Americans expected their junior officers to figure it the hell out and get moving. Improvise, adapt and overcome, and if all else failed call in the P-47's to blast the crap out of it) There were some individual exceptions, like that otherwise contemptible swine DeGaulle, whose unit performed quite well in Alsace, to the point of actually halting the German advance for a time. But he was an insubordinate egoist who apparently ignored most of his orders.
The invasion was launched on June 22nd, the winter of 40-41 was very severe and the ground was too soft to launch an attack much earlier.
You're probably basically correct, but without looking it up (I detest that, as you know) I'm positive that Hitler wanted the Eye-ties to occupy Greece and thus cover his Southern flank for the invasion of Russia (Barbarossa). And I'm also reasonably sure that he had to divert and entire armored corps - which he didn't want to do - to Greece in April or May to do the job Mussolini couldn't get done. And I can't believe the Russian roads don't firm up before mid June. The Eastern front isn't really my thing though, so I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.
In the 40s,most Soviet roads weren't much more than cart paths from collctive farm to collective farm.Also Army Group Centre had to attack around the Pripet Marshlands.
Italy was stuck between the devil and a hard place. Mussolini loved Italy and truely wanted to rebuild it back from the poverty into which it had plunged IMO, but then you have this mongrel, this "pederast" from across the Alps as Duce described him, born in the land of Italy's traditional enemy, but who happened to follow a form of fascist ideology. In truth Italy was pushed into a war in which it didn't want to enter and why should it have when it was busy focusing on rebuilding itself? Italy been painted as some how cowards in the war is gross propoganda, who freed Naples from the nazis? The Neapolitans. Who finished off Mussolini after he turned his back on Italy and shook hands with the Austrian POS? Italians. As for the amusing "cowardice" jokes, tell that to the Romans, who if you're of civilised European origin, owned your ancestors hard. If your family is Christian and of European origin, you are in one way or another, Romeowned.
The problem is that Italy struck out on its own in Ethiopia and in North Africa, and hardly distinguished themselves. You can't blame everything on Hitler.
As a proud Scotch-Irishman, Hadrian's Wall never overtook either. Basing traditional warfare to the present is incredibly misguided. If in 100 years, the American army are forced to retreat and surrender to the might of Guatemala's army, no one is going to care about their performance in World War II.