[Kat] I’m surprised we haven’t linked this before, but I am finding the back and forth over Buchanan’s book extremely interesting. It starts with a predictable book by Buchanan: Churchill, Hitler and “The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Em…

Why stop with banning? Why not send him to a concentration camp?

Don’t worry MD4, in January Jazz will send us all to the camps. He told me so :)

Most of my reading about WWII has been military campaigns, not political (have read Churchill’s bio), so can’t claim to be an expert on the political issues. Germany did have a smaller army and air force than the Western powers, but it was a combat toughened group (Spain and Poland), with better officers, and generally superior equipment. France relied on the Maginot Line and a sizable, but ineffective army.

The point is if the allies, Britain and France in particular hadn’t been so all fired driven to screw the Germans after WW1 that WW2 would not have happened. Hitler would not have happened…

WW1 was a entirely preventable disaster…and not sure what sort of history Allah has been reading but blaming the Germans for ww1 shows he isn’t very well read on the subject.

PierreLegrand on June 16, 2008 at 12:07 AM

Screw the Germans.They were the ones most resposnible for World War I and they were the ones who showed magnanimity with the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, Treaty of Bucharest and Treaty of Frankfort.

This is not to give any remote justification, real or moral, to the German actions. Remember, France had invaded Germany many times from before to after Napoleon. Germany was Prussia with an agglomeration of hangers on. After Germany was consolidated in 1878, France started another war with Germany in-which Germany trounced them. In 1914 it happened again to somewhat of a stalemate. A cessation of hostilities (armistice) led to Germany disarming and France not. They them crammed the armistice up the German posterior. That led to the German actions leading to WW2.

Germany was land and border locked, except for the old Hanseatic strip along the Baltic with a small Bremem-Hamburg area in the West. They needed what they called Lebensarum.

Oft times wars are started for reasons frivilous to the survivors, but those reasons can change and become very serious as the war progresses.

Germany wins WWII, England stays out or sues for peace under Queen Wallis. I’m pretty sure I saw that movie.

Gosh, because certainly Czechoslovakia and Austria both remained free and independent states during the 40s, and none of their Jews were shipped off to any camps, right?

Just how do you propose that we could have done this?

The Germans could have been stopped in 1936 when they moved back into the Rhineland. The German force was very small, and had orders to pull back quickly if challenged. Hitler was not strong and it is likely he would have been deposed.

Hitler considerd the Slavs to be sub-human. Expansion to the East was always planned. Germans were to be transplanted and the Slavs either used as slave labor, deported (to where?) or eliminated. What’s a few more tens, or hundreds, of millions dead. War in the East would not have saved the Jews in that part of the world.

Who is to say that Germany would have broken its back in Russia. Without a West European theatre there would have been no need to have troops in the Middle-East and the Mediteranean. Germany would have had all its forces available to attack East and might well have attacked at a more suitable date.

Nothwithstanding Germany’s intentions in Russia, you have to ask yourself at what stage does the rule of law kick into the equation. Germany breached its agreements under the treaty and was not held accountable. When is it appropriate to hold a country accountable. The Brits and French eventually said this far and no more. The declaration of war was Germany’s doing.

We have many similar occurences to-day. Negotiation is everything and means nothing because agreements are broken with no consequences.

Buchanan has always been scum. As they say where I’m from, he needs a killin.

- The Cat

P.S. Carry on.

It wasn’t bad going in there, it was bad not going into North Vietnam. They thought if they did the Chinese would get involved.

And the Chinese may well have.

Indochina is devoid of decisive military objectives and the allocation of more than token US armed forces in Indochina would be a serious diversion of limited US capabilities.
- Joint Chiefs of Staff, 26 May 1954

The key to US defeat was a profound underestimation of enemy tenacity and fighting power, an underestimation born of a happy ignorance of Vietnamese history, a failure to appreciate the fundamental civil dimensions of the war, and a preoccupation with the measurable indices of military power and attendant disdain for the ultimately decisive intangibles. In 1965, Maxwell Taylor confessed that “the ability of the Viet Cong continuously to rebuild their units and make good their losses is one of the mysteries of this guerrilla war. We still find no plausible explanation of the continued strength of the Viet Cong”. Four years later, Vo Nguyen Giap commented that the “United States has a strategy based on arithmetic. They question the computers, add and subtract, extract square roots, and then go into action. But arithmetical strategy doesn’t work here. If it did, they’d have already exterminated us.”

The United States could not have prevented the forcible reunification of Vietnam under communist auspices at a morally, materially, and strategically acceptable price.
- US Army War College Quarterly, Winter 1996-97

What we really should have done, was follow Patton’s advice and drove through to Moscow in ‘45.

Tim Burton on June 16, 2008 at 4:05 AM

Maybe, or put less pressure on the Germans and supplied the Russians less so that they could have done it, but by the time Patton made his suggestion America was understandably far too war weary.

The Soviets certainly did inflict the majority of the German losses, of course they did it with American equipment*, while the Americans and British destroyed German industry and blockaded German ports.

At the end of the war, the Soviet Union was spent and starving. With the lack of western aid, the eastern war could go either way in the 43-44 timeframe.

It might be completely heterodox to do so, but one really can’t justify taking away credit for the victory over the Germans from any of their three main opponents.

*Wiki claims LL accounts for 10-12% of the USSR’s output during the war

18-1 on June 16, 2008 at 2:38 AM

Yes, the real issue was that we didn’t follow Patton’s (and to a lesser extent MacArthur’s) advice and push to Moscow.

By bombing raids we kept a HUGE number of Flak 88 canons off of the Eastern Front. They also would have sent a lot more fighters there to deal with the Soviet Air Force.

The Soviets were so spent and starving, through the 50′s, they didn’t even plan for a ground war in Europe. They fully planned on a nuclear exchange. They literally knew they didn’t have the manpower to face our forces. It is also why they kept so many outdated T-34/85s for so long. They were planning on putting 14 year old boys in them to try to over run us where nuclear weapons didn’t stop us.

It wasn’t until the mid-60′s that they started changing their war doctrine to try to steam roller us with conventional weapons.

Yes, we should never have gone into Vietnam and maybe if Kennedy and LBJ had not been elected we wouldn’t have.

MB4 on June 16, 2008 at 2:59 AM

It wasn’t bad going in there, it was bad not going into North Vietnam. They thought if they did the Chinese would get involved.

What we really should have done, was follow Patton’s advice and drove through to Moscow in ’45.

Yes, they got industralial capacity form Cz.

But yes, IT ABSOLUTELY WAS stronger. WWII proved the supremacy of air power, and in air power, Hitler was prophetic. The experience in the Spanish Civil War proved to be telling as it allowed the development that was realistically probably only thwarted by GB’s development of radar.

His advantage in the air was decisive and profound – which made every other little advantage magnified.

Spirit of 1776 on June 16, 2008 at 2:15 AM

Actually no. Equipment wise they were actually under-gunned by nearly every nation. What made the difference was that the Germans had better tactics and C3. Simple as that.

Look at their tanks and virtually every French design was better, the Brits were on Par and the Russians had better tanks.

All three lacked the tactics.

The French had piss poor fighters, but the Brits were on par. Yes, the Russians were worse off in the air, but that mostly had to do with the aircraft designer purges that occurred with the military purges.

Oh, and Vietnam, that country that we ’shouldn’t’ have gone into??

HarryStar on June 16, 2008 at 2:48 AM

Yes, we should never have gone into Vietnam and maybe if Kennedy and LBJ had not been elected we wouldn’t have.

Closet Nazi sympathizers and History revisionists belong to a type of camp which needs not guards.

Aristotle on June 16, 2008 at 2:43 AM

So you are saying that they should be shot?

BTW, who died and appointed you King?

I love the piece in the article about apeasement:

The Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin was just as evil, in his own way, as Hitler, and just as megalomaniacal. He was willing to murder millions and he preached the inevitability of the global triumph of communism

Gee, Hitler was THE WORST GUY EVER, and the only guy that we really should have stopped (i.e. NOT Vietnam) except for Stalin murdering millions of course.

It’s really amazing that he writes this just like it’s just another sentence like it’s no big deal.

Oh, and Vietnam, that country that we ‘shouldn’t’ have gone into?? ? How about the millions that were killed after we left?? I guess he didn’t want to mention that little fact.

Read this “tingling” for Obama from Newsweek.

MB4 on June 16, 2008 at 2:28 AM

Closet Nazi sympathizers and History revisionists belong to a type of camp which needs not guards.

No he wasn’t prophetic. He even balked for quite some time in giving priority to jets and what we call the V2, until he saw that he was losing and then it was too late.

Germany’s early successes where manly due to having much better Generals at the early part of the war and of course the French.

MB4 on June 16, 2008 at 2:25 AM

Don’t forget spineless, short sighted neighbors. The Allies could have stopped him easily in 36, and at a much smaller cost in 38 then in 39.

I think Hitchens is talking about mythology, not reality, flenser.

Yeah, America and Britain were the towel boy and water boy to the winning Soviet team during WWII (the Soviets killed over 90% of the Nazi troops who died during WWII), but that’s no good, is it?…we have to be heroes…always.

Hitchens is defending America and Britain’s heroic myth of how WWII played out.

alphie on June 16, 2008 at 2:16 AM

The Soviets certainly did inflict the majority of the German losses, of course they did it with American equipment*, while the Americans and British destroyed German industry and blockaded German ports.

At the end of the war, the Soviet Union was spent and starving. With the lack of western aid, the eastern war could go either way in the 43-44 timeframe.

It might be completely heterodox to do so, but one really can’t justify taking away credit for the victory over the Germans from any of their three main opponents.

*Wiki claims LL accounts for 10-12% of the USSR’s output during the war