Re: The same old shit!!!

----- Original Message -----
From: "Derek Fulton" <derekfulton@bigpond.com>
To: <gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 31, 2002 10:37 PM
Subject: Re: The same old shit!!!

> > >From: "Derek Fulton" <derekfulton@bigpond.com>
> > > Unfortunately (for American ego's that's not entirely correct) As
I
> > > previously mentioned the arrival of fresh American troops had
brought
> > > forward the end of the war, but the war was lost to the Germans.

> >I'm sorry.  This claim simply is not transacting in reality.  Yes,
American
> >military presence and its effect on both World Wars and their
eventual
> >outcome is debateable.  The effect of the American supply base and
> >industrial might on the Allied war effort as a whole is not.

> Germany a continental European power was never going to win a drawn
out
war
> against a coalition that included Great Britain, a global empire. When
the
> American troops arrived, the war in Europe was shifting from trench
warfare
> to a mobile phase, which ended in the breaking of the Hindenberg line.

Given that pretty much the entire western front of World War I was
fought
inside France, at times within artillery range of Paris, I simply do not
take this argument seriously.  The European Allies were fighting on
their
heels pretty much the entire war.  Belgium had been overrun and France
was
being slowly whittled down.  The only thing that really stopped the
Germans
was the stalemate of trench warfare, for which neither side had a real
way
of breaking other than by throwing lots of warm bodies into no-man's
land
and pray that the other side didn't have enough machine guns to shred
them
all.  Even at the time of the armistice, very little of pre-war Germany
was
actually in Allied hands -- a small part of Alsace-Lorraine and nothing
more.  The Russians were already out of the war by 1918, and the Germans
had
been doing just fine in keeping the Allies on their heels even when
they'd
had to fight on two fronts.  Once the eastern front was nailed down,
things
did not look good for the Allies on the western front at all until the
Americans got involved as 1918 stretched on.

Suffice it to say, all of that wonderful colonial power in Britain's
hands
looks to me like a lot of drivel.  It hadn't worked in three years of
fighting.  What changed in the fourth?	You got it.  The Americans
showed
up.

> >Remove Adolf Hitler from his disastrous meddling in military and
diplomatic
> >decision making from about 1940 onward, and the chances of Allied
victory
in
> >the European theatre of World War II would have been basically zero.
That
> >stipulates three different crucial changes:

> Remove Hitler and friends and there may not have even being a war :)
> Although there probably would still have seen a war between the US and
Japan.

I disagree.  Something like what happened in World War II in Europe was
very
probably made inevitable by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great
Depression that followed.  Germany was gratuitously forced to accept a
great
deal more humiliation at the end of that war than was really necessary,
and
they were hit very hard by the Depression afterwards.  Hitler, in this
respect, was practically inevitable.  If it hadn't been Hitler himself,
it
very likely would have been someone like him.  A hostile Communist
regime,
perhaps.  Some other nationalist band of nutcases.  Something.	But the
way
Germany was treated after World War I was pretty much begging for there
to
be a World War II and a regime in Germany willing to fight one.

It can be potentially argued that the rest of Europe was probably
fortunate
that the regime that ultimately wound up bringing Germany back to war
was so
corrupt, willing to shoot itself in the foot, and ultimately incapable
of
letting the country's excellent military traditions actually carry out
the
war as they were able without their political leaders (read:  Hitler)
finding as many ways as possible to make their jobs impossible to carry
out.
I don't expect the Jewish population to agree, of course, and that's a
tragedy that _wasn't_ inevitable and could have been prevented if we'd
seen
it coming.  But the ultimate reality of there being a World War II to
fight
was pretty much asked for by the way the European Allies handled
themselves
at the end of World War I.  The smartest thing we did at the end of the
second war was to not repeat Versailles.

That said... I should probably add that the Soviet Union was at least as
crucial to the European war effort as the Americans were.  The Soviets
did
the vast majority of the ground fighting against the Germans that
ultimately
resulted in Allied victory, and the Germans only collapsed like a house
of
cards once the West finally got around to invading at Normandy because
the
Soviets had spent three years exhausting them in advance.

The British can sort of be included as a crucial third Allied power that
we
couldn't have won the war without, but that had little to do with any
particular material advantage they offered and much to do with their
being
able to offer a staging ground for American involvement, and as such
eliminating them from the equation essentially would have effectively
also
eliminated the United States as a factor.

You might have noticed that I said in my previous comments that removing
Hitler, in general, from the micromanagement of German efforts in World
War
II would have probably had the effect of turning the war the other way
in
Europe, and that the three Hitler blunders I cited in supporting that
argument involved failure to remove or outright invitation of each of
these
three powers into the war.  The Battle of Britain was the least crucial
of
the three errors -- if Hitler hadn't single-handedly invited the U.S.
into
the war or brought about German defeat against the U.S.S.R. with his
meddling, Britain could have been dealt with just as easily later as
they
would have been previously if Hitler hadn't also meddled with Goering's
strategy over Britain in 1940.

So I should probably say that without the United States, OR without the
Soviet Union, Germany would have probably won the war in Europe.  This
is in
some contrast to Atkinson's remarks, and maybe that'll make me seem a
little
more reasonable in context.  OTOH, I can't logically disagree with his
assessment of the ineptitude of the post-Napoleon French in just about
every
military action they've participated in since, from the Franco-Prussian
War
to both World Wars to Indochina.

E