[ASLML] Inside The Third Reich

[Ken Berry]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jim McLeod" <jmmcleod at mb.sympatico.ca>

> [conspiracy mode ON]
>
> There are the Allies, plugging away through 1941 to early 1943.  The
> desert war is a total sideshow in the big scheme of things.  The Allie's
> deep stratigic thinkers know that Hitler can't win the war versus the
> Soviets after Stalingrad.

Even on a single front?  I agree with the premise that strategists knew the
resources of North America would ultimately prevail long before the war's
conclusion.  But before Midway and the foothold in the Solomons?

I think Midway could have gone the other way because both sides had spotty
reconnaisance.  Had the USN lost its carriers instead of the IJN, would we
have devoted the same resources to Europe?  Canada might well have had some
strong opinions about the Northwest if Australia had been lost.

> The Allies now are looking at postwar Europe
> and their enemy is the USSR as the nazis are done.  The Allies need the
> Russians to grind down the Germans and they, the Allies, also need the
> Germans to grind down the Russians.  IMHO, that is why the Allies
> avoided the invasion of France until June '44.  Invading Italy was an
> appeasement to the Russians and the Allies would have been farther ahead
> to have not invaded Italy at all.

Of course, that is why it was an appeasement.  It is not as if the
demonstration of solidarity with Stalin was lost on the Russian and German
troops.  Maybe we kicked the wrong side of the door, but Germany would have
a new front with the strongest enemy yet.  Was the appeasement worth the
cost in lives and material of a campaign that may never have any chance of
being decisive?  I really don't know how to tell, but I think that was a
legitimate decision by the leadership.  We allow feints that cannot succeed,
but cost causalties, at lower levels of organization.

> IMO, Ol' Eisenhower had his sights on the US presidency by the time of
> WWII.  His hands off approach to the ground war in France after the
> D-Day landings may indicate that he:
>
> - knew without doubt that the Allies would win.

I'd want to know what evidence there is that he was thinking about the
Presidency.  I don't think he had any reason to believe it was his for the
asking in 1941-1943- or that he could be sure of victory much before 1944.
I think MacArthur had a better shot to be the conquering hero because he
promoted himself better than Ike did.  I think Mac had a better claim to
personally winning the war as well as presiding over a large organization.

> - knew that the families of dead American soldiers might not be so keen
> to vote for candidate Ike'.  His broad front strategy hints in that
> direction as do the antics of his "party all the time" HQ.  They knew
> they would win so why push the issue.  Keep US losses low to help Ike's
> image with voters but lets meet the Russians in mid-Germany for the next
> war so France doesn't get trashed again.

Deaths in defense of the nation would not have hurt him politically.  He
avoided casualties because we could.  I can't support that opinion because I
was not there, but I believe we minimize casualties because we are a free
society of equals.  Do you want your life spared if possible?  It is not a
matter of politics.

But if the campaign required it, people would have supported a more intense
conflict- there would be more grief at home, but little more anger at the
government.  It might even play the other way, because a more violent
struggle would be more dramatic, be over sooner, and that would then be the
justification of the increased intensity- "it would have drug on under the
alternative strategy" of lower intensity.

I think it is pretty much irrelevant to Ike.  I don't think the Allied
command structure would have allowed a higher casualty rate-  Ike would have
been replaced had he tried.  Maybe Speer could turn factories to building up
supplies unilaterally, but Ike needed help.

> The A-bomb's dropped in Japan
> were in a way, the final test of that weapon for the benefit of the
> Russians.

But then why didn't we follow up?  Why didn't we tell Stalin how the United
Nations was going to be and how the USSR was losing its sovereignty to it?
And if he did not like that, he could talk to our forces in Germany and go
see Hiroshima for himself.  If the Russians were so close to their own
fission bomb that we could not conquer them in time, then the demonstration
in Japan would have no point.

The explanation I've always heard, for why the Allies did not proceed to
eliminate all the threats to our national securities, but instead let the
Cold War start, is that the civilian populations would not allow the war to
be continued.  Don't know for myself, but the people who were there talked
about how unified the US was.  Even today there is a widespread tendency for
people who should know better to believe the fantasies painted by their
government.  Why couldn't Roosevelt or Truman decide what they want to do
and then find justification?  That was good enough for Johnson a few years
later when the US was not nearly as unified as in 1945.

The US Army was still fresh in comparison to the others in 1945, but Russia
is a big place.  Maybe it would not have been as easy as it sounds to move
east.  I think everyone wanted to stop dieing and go home.  That's why we
eliminated two Japanese cities and why we stood down in Europe.

Ken