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Leadership and Success
At some point I would like to do an article on the political situatiions and decisions made during WWII, although it has to be said, don't look for it soon, entire shelves in libraries are dedicated to that single subject, so planning, typing and checking will take quite sometime. Still, I think it will be worth it. I have noticed that subjects like the Blitz (not necessarily here, but in general), give the facts but rarely a context. A simple example of that is the SHAEF decision to start bombing German towns once German forces had started to be forced back. Yes, the bombing did help reduce the German War Machine by hitting munitions factories and such like, but the fact is that there was no planned targeting, obviously no pin-point targeting because such a thing didn't exist, and very much a feeling of justified revenge for the Blitz from the British. What happened. 500,000 German civilians were killed in the bombing. That's a large figure. Now think of it as being one hundred and sixty seven government sanctioned 911's. Suddenly its a '''very''' big number, and that's what I mean by context. In fact, the bombing of German towns and the Blitz had a huge part to play in the Geneva Conventions ban on deliberatly targeting civilians. Yet you go into a pub and ask a young 20-something what they know of the Dresden bombings and see just how little they know.[[User:Ieuan|Ieuan]] 00:58 7/Nov/08 GMT
At some point I would like to do an article on the political situatiions and decisions made during WWII, although it has to be said, don't look for it soon, entire shelves in libraries are dedicated to that single subject, so planning, typing and checking will take quite sometime. Still, I think it will be worth it. I have noticed that subjects like the Blitz (not necessarily here, but in general), give the facts but rarely a context. A simple example of that is the SHAEF decision to start bombing German towns once German forces had started to be forced back. Yes, the bombing did help reduce the German War Machine by hitting munitions factories and such like, but the fact is that there was no planned targeting, obviously no pin-point targeting because such a thing didn't exist, and very much a feeling of justified revenge for the Blitz from the British. What happened. 500,000 German civilians were killed in the bombing. That's a large figure. Now think of it as being one hundred and sixty seven government sanctioned 911's. Suddenly its a '''very''' big number, and that's what I mean by context. In fact, the bombing of German towns and the Blitz had a huge part to play in the Geneva Conventions ban on deliberatly targeting civilians. Yet you go into a pub and ask a young 20-something what they know of the Dresden bombings and see just how little they know.[[User:Ieuan|Ieuan]] 00:58 7/Nov/08 GMT
::well the Brits themselves had little to do with the war before spring 1940 as well (it was called a phoney war). And the Soviets were on the Nazi side! Starting summer 1940 the US economy was mobilized into the war effort and the US drafted millions of men. As for leadership, the defeat of the Nazis did not happen in 1939, 40 or 41--in fact they were winning until the US entered the war and turned it around. Sorry about the Germans in the cities--they should have moved to the villages, as they were ordered to do by the USAAF and the RAF. They stayed in cities because they were building tanks and guns there. [[User:RJJensen|RJJensen]] 20:31, 6 November 2008 (EST)
::well the Brits themselves had little to do with the war before spring 1940 as well (it was called a phoney war). And the Soviets were on the Nazi side! Starting summer 1940 the US economy was mobilized into the war effort and the US drafted millions of men. As for leadership, the defeat of the Nazis did not happen in 1939, 40 or 41--in fact they were winning until the US entered the war and turned it around. Sorry about the Germans in the cities--they should have moved to the villages, as they were ordered to do by the USAAF and the RAF. They stayed in cities because they were building tanks and guns there. [[User:RJJensen|RJJensen]] 20:31, 6 November 2008 (EST)
Oh yes, the USSR was on the Nazi's side, but what is truly alarming is that they didn't need to be. A fortnight before WWII started Stalin made an offer to Britain and France to send close to a million troops to the German border to stop Hitler. Unfortunately Britain and France, not trusting Stalin, decided not to agree to an alliance and effectively left USSR out in the cold. In response the Soviets signed a non-aggression pact with Germany.
As for leadership, one of those tricky things again. Leaders exist in both failure and success, one of the points to having leaders is that the political classes have somebody to point to and say "Oh, you". Did the US lead the western allies in success. Yes and no. The US joined the war, the tide turned, but part of that was the disaster at Stalingrad, a success that was wholly the Soviet Union's and sapped a massive number of German troops away from the Western fronts. So in that sense the leadership is jointly US and USSR (althouth you will understand that isn't a point that was solidly taught on either side of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War). Yet the Supreme Commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force was a US General, Eisenhower. In that sense the leadership was US. However, his deputy was British and immediately under them were 2 US Force Commanders and 3 British Force Commanders, so in that sense the leadership was a joint-command. It is prehaps best, from a factual view, to seperate success from leadership. Therefore it can clearly be said that Allies success in WWII had a great deal to do with the US committing forces to the Western front in Europe and the USSR forcing the surrender of German Troops at Stalingrad. In terms of leadership, well as I said, complicated, not something that is determined by success, and in all cases has a habit of shifting significantly with the passage of time.
"Sorry about the Germans in the cities--they should have moved to the villages, as they were ordered to do by the USAAF and the RAF". Sorry, I read that and I laughed so hard I cried. I can just see it now. ''"Excuse me Mr. Nazi Security Officer who is, has and is part of group that systematically removes families and people from homes, sends them to death camps, kills people in the street, shoots people for the most trivial of offences, including not being patriotic enough, and when not involved in killing also happens to be involved in some of the most brutal, despicable and unacceptable torture and medical experiments the world has ever seen which has not just been practiced on adults but also children as young as babies, our enemies have told us that they are going to bomb us so you don't mind if I don't come into work for say, oh the next three or four years."''. There are few people who are truly defiant and willing to ignore the orders of the man who has a gun pointed to their head. There are even fewer who are willing to be that defiant when the man with the gun has it pointed at the head of their children. And that assumes that any significant part of the civilian population even heard the warnings. I doubt the Nazi Government passed the message on and anybody caught listening to the radio frequencies used by the British or other allies was automatically assumed to be a spy, taken away and questioned with a red-hot poker until they either a) broke and admitted they were a spy to stop the torture regardless of whether they were a spy or not or b) broke and admitted they were a spy to stop the torture regardless of whether they were a spy or not. A few years of that kind of government policy is going to make sure very few people on Germany would be that keen to listen to anything that the Allies said.[[User:Ieuan|Ieuan]] 02:25 7/Nov/08 GMT