IWETHEY v. 0.3.0 | TODO
1,095 registered users | 0 active users | 0 LpH | Statistics
Login | Create New User
IWETHEY Banner

Welcome to IWETHEY!

New I've been thinking about that two-front problem...
...on and off for quite a while now. The German one, not the American -- for you, it turned out not to be much of a problem. Also, the Soviets handled theirs by pretty much ignoring the Japanese and leaving them to the USA. But the Germans... The funny thing is, we in the Western world usually think of WWII as primarily a Germany vs Britain/USA fight; even those of us who know that the war in Europe was really decided on Germany's Eastern Front somehow think of that only after the Western one. (N'est-ce pas?)

But, being such a thoroughly cultured man as I am, getting all my Bildung from the smaller screen... Having seen most of _Foyle's War_ twice or thrice over in the last few years, and then _Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter_ recently; I've come to think of that whole wasted year of the "Phony War". Much, much more wasted for Germany than for the Allies -- which, IIUC, by that point didn't yet include Unca Joe's Union of Workers' and Farmers' Councils -- because, as we all know, the real war was of course that on the Eastern Front.

So what would have happened if cooler minds had succeeded in persuading Adolf not to bother about the whole Western Front (after successfully having reclaimed Elsass ["the Alsace"] and Lothringen ["the Lorraine"] from France); i.e, never embarking on the invasions of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway in the first place -- not to mention the whole bloody farcical "Battle of Britain"? If he'd launched his *real* attack eastwards in, say, late March / early April 1940 in stead of late June 1941, just a while after Stalin helpfully brought much of the Soviet Union's army up close to get hold of (as the two divided Poland between them) but before he'd had those additional crucial fourteen months to build up his forces even more and prepare his bases beyond the Urals (and long before Mussolini would even have started getting his underwear chewed up for him by pretty much anybody he attacked, eliminating the waste of time in bailing him out from all his [mis]adventures)...

The world would look VERY different now, from what it actually does at the moment; and I'm actually not 100 % convinced it would on the whole be much worse off than it is(*).

One thing's for sure, though: A whole lot more of you guys would be talking German, *at least* as a second language.


---
(*): And yes, Alex, Barry, Bill, and whoever else, of course this includes the fervent wish that Some Events would somehow have never occurred in the first place, or by this fortuitous turn of events have been brought to a much earlier stop than they actually were. As long as we are in never-never-land anyway...
--
Christian R. Conrad
Same old username (as above), but now on iki.fi

(Yeah, yeah, it redirects to the same old GMail... But just in case I ever want to change.)
New What's with us?
Earlier this year this year, I read Churchill's "Gathering Storm", the first of 6 tomes on WW-2. I'll tackle the rest of the books over time.

Currently I'm reading Ken Follett's novel "Winter of the World". It's about that period of time as well.

Last July, my brother and I took a river cruise down the Dnieper from Kiev to Odessa with visits to Sevastopol and Yalta. It's the first time either of us were in Ukraine since we left the German occupied area in the fall of 1943 when we were 2 and 4 years old. The locals are yet to get over that war.
Alex
New That thing about how Little Big Adi, had he been left to...
...his own devices more than he actually was -- as I was quite vividly speculating about -- might have killed off even more of your kith and kin than he actually did, that's what's with you guys. :-( Damn, I HATE this German Guilt Komplex that, yes, affects even those of us whose parents weren't old enough to fight in that war. One DOES, it seems, if one was raised in a normal-by-European-1970's-norms household, desperately want to feel some pride in one's national heritage, even though that heritage can be tainted worse than the very soil at Ground Zero, Chernobyl.

But every German having attained or already occupied a state of consciousness after, at the very latest, May 8th, 1945, is denied that pleasure at least in its purest and most unadulterated form. What one can rejoice in is, on the one hand, "But all those peaceful achievements; Neuschwanstein, Beethoven, Bach...!" -- Yeah, but notice how that began with a "but"? Or, on the other hand the nutcase option: "Damn, they lost, too bad" -- the Neo-/Old Nazi route -- which, however coolest their uniforms admittedly were, I'm trying to avoid, thankyouverymuch. Which leaves, on the gripping hand, (the impossibility of) trying to reconcile relief that they didn't win with pride that they *almost* did: "Whew, good thing they got whipped in the end, but *dang*, how close they came to winning!". (And howevermuch you try to take pride in the fact that no such small people ever came as close to beating the whole rest of the world, the Romans and the Mongols, together with who knows how many peoples going back to at least the Hyksos, stand there laughing you in the face.)

Which all, I think, is what's behind the sales success of Alternate History ranging from P. K. Dick over, whossname, Philip Pullman?, to Harry Turtledove. But those authors all have trouble coming up with plausible explanations why not only Onkel Adolf but, much more importantly, our grandfathers and grandmothers and all our grand-uncles and grand-aunts and great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers and so fucking on and on would have stopped killing off you guys before there was nobody left to found Israel. :-(

Fuck, I shouldn't be posting these ramblings after finishing off the overwhelming majority of a € 1:75 liter bottle of Portuguese Rosé (and half of a bottle of red before that, with dinner), after Anki falls asleep from less than two glasses of it. But that'sh the way it ish.

(And yeah, the *Literature* Nobel for Churchill, how ridiculous is that? But OTOH, that was a more honest age: Back then, they apparently felt bound by the name of the Peace Prize not to give it as a War Prize, as it pretty foreseeably turned out to be in Obama's case.)
--
Christian R. Conrad
Same old username (as above), but now on iki.fi

(Yeah, yeah, it redirects to the same old GMail... But just in case I ever want to change.)
New Re: might have killed off even more of your kith and kin
That would have been easy in any case.

Who would want to fight for a Communist state? Eventually the Communists were talking about the Motherland instead. But, that fooled no one with a brain.

Before the Germans overran the area we were in (Southern Ukraine just North of Crimea), at the point of a gun, my father was "drafted" into the Red Army. No boots, no uniforms, marching around with a stick instead of a rifle, and throwing rocks instead of grenades for practice. The idea was to pick up a rifle at the front from a wounded or dead fellow "soldier". In back of the front line would be enforcers that would execute you on the spot if you turned back. Before any action, my father managed to escape, or technically become a deserter. One more reason to eventually retreat West ahead of the German retreat.
Alex
New Being nasty to members of other tribes--
I've pondered that dilemma; that is, attempted to put self as German-born, living out the runaway inflation of the Wiemar predicament … then espying a Strange Guy who--whatever else is true--could mesmerize a crowd/spin rhetoric which appealed not only to innate -even primitive- 'buttons-to-be pushed', and did so within a population (myself included) genuinely at poverty level [except the inevitable plutocrats, natch.]
But then also created a framework around which to hang all his fulminations, one logically connected and compelling but above all: perfectly tailored to build on the rampant discontent.
(This re the initial seductions, since studied well beyond TMI.)

Then, flash-forward.. to yours (and millions') predicament: I see two aspects to this; one is the plight of those innocent (by time of birth and other qualifiers) of the seduction, the huge adventure (!!) and then horrible outcome of surrendering absolute-Power to the Strange Guy. That situation can be analyzed-to-death by all the academic methods, Psych, Philosophy and so on.
But second is the attitude of onlookers (those within the Adventure but never giving allegiance to the perpetrators) and all the rest of external peoples.
I think.. that a frequent ingredient of the withholding of empathy? compassion? by the Auslanders(?) is connected with the reputation of the German tribe:
that of The Arts/Bach et al, meticulous creation of state-of-art machines and other, related cerebral qualities; lastly and maybe especially: the high education level of the population.

aka How Could They ______! or ______!

But, once having reviewed the trajectory of this 'Exceptional' tribe, my own: I deem this sub-rosa permanent criticism of the German tribe: bogus.
If one totted up the reported Murican atrocities past/present, local/abroad just commented on in these foribuses
(and then for me anyway: also ponder Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here--from 1935!) and throw in our oxymoronic 'business ethics' and the already slipping-away democratic Ideal (said to animate Americans.. once upon a time)
… where's the significant Difference? Am I a torturing-bastard because an infrahuman named Soo explained-away 'water-boarding' to a credulous (also bogus) selected-President? I think not.
(I also throw into the mental-mix the anecdote, told in these pages, of a brief exchange with someone in the village of Dachau--now a bloody half-century ago!)

Anyway, and for me, it's no longer a puzzlement. But obviously I am outnumbered in many psyches. That's their problem.
How long do people keep these Nasty-memes? Well, 150 years after end of our civil *war, some millions of Muricans still call the Pres. of the US a nigger.
* The first one, that is: call me in 5 or n years re the one that's brewing?

(Hey I only had one medium Screwdriver avec fresh-squeezed orange juice/a dash of bitters.)
New s/coolest/gay/g just sayin
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 58 years. meep
New couldn't happen in spring 1940
germany was woefully unready. While for 10 years the german's had successfully trained the soviets in the art of winter warfare, the german army was woefully unready. The western front was to remove materiel for war that could be used behind them and to secure their western front. The jump off to the east was after a mad scramble to get ready and they were still unprepared for winter. The only thing they had going for them was unca joe shooting all the german trained generals. Battle of britain was a sideshow as germany would have preferred britain as an ally. Especially against russia who killed the king's favorite cousin.
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 58 years. meep
New Nope, not as I understood it.
Germany may have been woefully unready, but the thing is that the Soviets were even more so, and that Germany wasted some -- far, far, too much -- of what little readiness it had on the Western front, allowing Stalin to catch up in relative terms. The Great Purge was already done; there was no more use for the Germans to extract from that between April 1940 and June/July 1941. Had they skipped the whole invasion of Western Europe, my hypothesis goes, the "Phony War" on the Western front -- with Britain having *declared* war on Germany after the invsion of Poland, but not actually *doing* anything warlike against it -- might have continued indefinitely.

Which would have left Germany free to concentrate all its resources on the Eastern Front, and to start the attack early in the spring -- almost before the roads would bear their traffic -- in stead of far into summer, delaying the later stages of the attack far too late into autumn and, eventually, winter, because they'd opened up a lot of ultimately useless and power-draining fronts in the Mediterranean and North Africa to cover up for Mussolinis fuck-ups in Egypt and Greece.

Had they skipped the whole Holland-Belgium-France and Denmark-Norway bit, they'd have been *more than a year* ahead of what they actually were; Benito wouldn't even have *started* his clusterfuck, so he couldn't have been in need of being bailed out, and the Krasnaja Armija, far from being building supply routes and bases behind the Urals, would actually have just been moved up *westwards for the slaughter*, invading the Eastern half of Poland. Germany wouldn't have had anthing bound up elsewhere, as it eventually did when the actual Operation Barbarossa started (far, far too late.) See whjat I mean?
--
Christian R. Conrad
Same old username (as above), but now on iki.fi

(Yeah, yeah, it redirects to the same old GMail... But just in case I ever want to change.)
New One more thing.
In the Ukraine the Germans were initially welcomed. After all, they were liberating the locals from Communism. The Germans were too arrogant to figure that out and abused the population. Victors do that. So, the locals turned their back on them.

Then, there was the "Jewish problem". For the moment ignoring the moral issues, that wasted a great deal of German resources to prosecute.
Alex
New belated response here
I believe it was Peter* Fleming's Operation Sea Lion, which I first read almost fifty years ago, where I read—hell, I've still got the book (and now I see from the inscribed date that I read it more like 44 years ago)—that the Third Reich would have done way better to have left the west alone if the conquest of the USSR was the ultimate objective:
It [leaving off any further offensive operations vis-a-vis the UK] would have been a lucklustre situation. America, so generous with her moral and material aid to an island closely beleaguered and quite possibly doomed, would have offered less comfort to a nation which, after being decisively defeated, was wordily pretending that nothing of the sort had happened. The loyalty of the Dominions would have been qualified with a certain caution, the embittered reproaches of France would not have been tempered with admiration. Churchill's tenacity of purpose would have kept defiance alive—but for how long, when there was nothing tangible to defy? It is worth remembering, too, that some 40,000 British prisoners of war had fallen into German hands. If Hitler had made a contemptuous offer to send them home, how could any British Government have refused it? And for how much longer, after it had been accepted, would the nation have continued to face the prospects—which on a short view were all this Phony War would have to offer—of boredom, bankruptcy and blockade?
Hitler, we now know, was a lousy strategic thinker. The Sovs always insisted that his spiritual heirs lived west of the Iron Curtain, and I fear that history has borne out the commissars' claim in more particulars than that. I take some comfort in knowing that the Masters of the Universe, or their children, will end their careers dangling from lamp posts.

collectively,

*sibling of Ian Fleming of "James Bond" fame.
Expand Edited by rcareaga Sept. 16, 2013, 05:58:49 PM EDT
New Even more belated response..
Seems to me that a shared-idiosyncrasy? (make that: fatal-mindset, then) was Adolf's and Unca Joe's Red Queen's fondness for, Off With Their Heads!..
Both unWorthies shot-feet all the way off via repeated purges of this n'that military (and Other) hierarchy.
Nothing like having barely-'experienced' commanders trying to deal with the routine Emergencies--something which One's Own life can resolve quickly.
Not to mention those always unique situations, for which you must Imagine-well, synthesizing from the old stuff too.

(Well, that they were also psychopaths ... explains most things, but this is a specifically-shared guaranteed-loser, I wot.)

Is there a 'moral'?
Starters: The ONLY person who should be delegated great-Power: should accept same only after
successive/(sincere--goes without saying) declining of the post.
Yeah: GW comes to mind, but then.. if he's the Only one? and none-other lives today: I see ... Doom.
Because we never/ever grok-to-fullness (all the wise things.)
But we knew that.



Ed: oTyp
Expand Edited by Ashton Sept. 21, 2013, 08:57:58 PM EDT
     Book re 'The day FDR became a wartime president' - (Ashton) - (11)
         I've been thinking about that two-front problem... - (CRConrad) - (10)
             What's with us? - (a6l6e6x) - (4)
                 That thing about how Little Big Adi, had he been left to... - (CRConrad) - (3)
                     Re: might have killed off even more of your kith and kin - (a6l6e6x)
                     Being nasty to members of other tribes-- - (Ashton)
                     s/coolest/gay/g just sayin -NT - (boxley)
             couldn't happen in spring 1940 - (boxley) - (2)
                 Nope, not as I understood it. - (CRConrad) - (1)
                     One more thing. - (a6l6e6x)
             belated response here - (rcareaga) - (1)
                 Even more belated response.. - (Ashton)

I'd interracially copulate with an alien at this point, and take it to breakfast even.
119 ms