Profile of Frencho

so you are looking for good war series?

doesn't matter. i recommend The Wire

Recommend it too, it's the same show-runner of Generation Kill, David Simon is the man!

I've got another question for the historians and WW2 buffs out there.

So March 8th (Women's Day) a friend of mine sent me this link of women's photos throughout history, there's a lot of pictures from WW2. She was surprised of seeing fighting women in the Red Army, Soviet Partisans and French Résistance, also that most of the workforce in USA and UK was female. Yet there are no pictures of German ladies. Personally I can't think of any besides the teenage volkstrum girls pics manning AA emplacements or posing with rifles from 1945 that I googled a while ago. Seeing that the role of women during wartime was pretty well documented for the Allies nations. What was the role of women in the third Reich, they seem to have no role, either in the factories, rear lines nor front lines?!

So last week, Paul Allen's expedition found the wreckage of the Japanese Yamato Class Battleship Musashi near the Philippines. The ship lies at a depth of around 1,000 metres!

This is the sister ship of the notorious Yamato Battleship, which are to this day the largest and heaviest armed battleships ever built. the Musashi was commissioned in mid-1942, modified to serve as the flagship of the Combined Fleet Neither Ship survived WW2.

She was present during the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June, but did not come in contact with American surface forces. Musashi was sunk by an estimated 19 torpedo and 17 bomb hits from American carrier-based aircraft on 24 October 1944 during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Over half of her crew was rescued.

Pictures of the wreck:

News video of the Wreckage of the Musashi.

Another news video.

The anchor.



If you look closely you can see Japanese markings on this crank used to adjusting the elevation of the guns.

Pictures of the Musashi while it was still terrorizing the Pacific:



Emperor Hirohito of Japan (front row, center), with officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy, on board the Japanese battleship Musashi off Yokosuka Naval Base, 24 June 1943.
Admiral Osami Nagano is sixth from left in the front row.




Yamato & Musashi on leaving a harbour:

Musashi under fire by warplanes before beink sunk.

A few things:
The German leadership did not aim to "exterminate the Soviet people" - the fate of genocide was reserved for the Jews, and the decision to actually physically exterminate the Jews en masse was not formulated until Barbarossa was well under way. As far as we know, the Germans intended to reduce the Soviet populace to a "Helotic" state - their lot was to serve as a nigh endless source of uneducated, literally disposable labour. Even in long-midterm planning, the amount of "Aryans" settling inside what was to be the former territory of the Soviet Union never exceeded a single-digit million figure.

Reducing the soviet population to disposable slave labour it not long stretch from genocide, and there were plenty of villages massacred during the German advance. Pretty sure the Soviets were not keen on such a fate, death or slavery, either way this emboldened the fighting spirit the Soviets, they had no alternative but fighting, and winning. Diplomacy was not an option. I also believe that the Nazi leadership aimed to force a regime change in the Soviet Union, and oust communism. There was an ideological and racial element present on the eastern front that was not present on the western front.

For example, that was not the case against France. Yes there were horrible massacres by the SS Totenkopf in the 1940s in Beauvry, Paradis Lestrem, Chasellay (Black Senegalese Troops) etc... But the whole French population was not to be reduced to a subhuman workforce. Would the French III Republic have yielded if were they to suffer the same fate as the Soviets? I'm certain they would not have surrendered under such bleak outcome.

Instead the German wanted to humiliate the French, so an armistice was signed, it ended with a political and diplomatic agreement because the German left the French a sour, yet acceptable alternative.

Hitler (and most of his coterie) was literally obsessed with public opinion. He genuinely believed the narrative that a moral failure of the "home front" rather than strategic attrition per se had doomed the German war effort in WW1. WW1 had been hugely traumatic to the German civilian population with widespread starvation (Steckrübenwinter etc.), a good deal more so in fact than it had been ie. to the French or British populace, with the Germans suffering in excess of 700 000 civilian deaths to the effects of the blockade. Therefore, Hitler sought to mitigate any and all unnecessary stresses on civilian morale, ie. implementing just a limited industrial/demographical mobilisation until 1943 etc. "Hitlers table talks" are very informative in this regard.

Very informative, I did not know about this. It all makes more sense now! Still prioritizing public opinion over a multiplied strategic production output was a huge mistake.

Nazi Germany had no hope whatsoever of "winning" a decisive global conflagration given the geopolitical constellations of its day. Even allied with Italy, Japan and minor powers such as Romania/Hungary etc., it lacked the demographic base, industrial strength, and access to natural ressources to ever compete with the Western powers by themselves, let alone in conjunction with the Soviet Union.

Agreed, they knew that, yet, they still ended up doing exactly what they weren't supposed to do... Also Hitler declared war on the USA, not the other way around, baffling. Why bring the USA, which was in a state of active neutrality (Just sending armament and supplies) to a fully fledged belligerent when you are wrestling with the Soviet Bear?!

The German leadership started it, so one should expect them to know what they are getting into. Hitler had made so many gains through diplomacy, fairly artful diplomacy, and bluff and the threat of force that I think what doomed the Germans was focusing on the racial and ideological misconceptions the Nazi were harping about, and that started on the eastern front. Had they sticked to a limited war against the Soviets, the outcome might have been an armistice and some territorial gains.

As the two previous post by CoH 2 player and Death Head point out, the Germans could only shine in short, spirited wars. Which are also called "limited Wars" and consists in taking concise strategic, territorial or political objectives in which the belligerents participating in the war do not expend all of each of the participants' available resources at their disposal. it's typical of the European wars between monarchs and aristocrats before the rise of Nationalism.

I would say that was the case against the the Czechs for the Sudetenland, against Poland for Dantzig and against France for revenge and punitive reasons. So the German armed forces shined in said limited wars.

What baffles me, is that the German leadership, as the aggressor has the greatest chance to dictate which kind of war they are going to fight. When the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, they intended to exterminate the soviet people as they were considered "Untermensch".Then take their territory and repopulate it with Aryans. That was the objective, and that's TOTAL WAR, a war Germans could never win.

Edit: Found this quote by Professor Christopher Browning: "This is certainly going to be a military campaign, but it is a territorial war for Lebensraum, it is an ideological war against Bolshevism, and it is a racial war against the Jews and Slavs. So this is going to be the war out of which his historical meaning, his manifest destiny, is realised".

What was the German high command and the Nazi leadership thinking?!

They expected to win a total war without mobilizing the whole German workforce and industry into the war effort from the start. Hoping for the soviets to cross their arms and let themselves be exterminated?

On the contrary I think that when news of the war crimes in Poland and then during the early stages of Barbarossa spread out to STAVKA, they were certain this was not a limited war like the ones against France, Poland or the UK. So the Soviets fought harder and mobilized the whole nation into the war effort early on. They would never surrender even if they would have lost Moscow. Ironically, the Red Army was also founded by Leon Trotsky, a Jew.

I'm not that into WW2 history even less into operational history, but I strongly believe that 1941 Operation Barbarossa progressed into soviet territory with such celerity because they caught the Red Army during a transitional phase, thus it was truly vulnerable. The Red Army was changing it's doctrine from a defensive one to an offensive one. Stalin was also worried about a possible Japanese invasion in the Far East, so the armed forces were split on two fronts.

the biggest mistake the German High commands did was never acknowledging this critical point. the Red Army they fought in 1941 was not the same they fought in 1943, they had changed everything from the tactical level, the operational level and all the way to the Strategic level (STAVKA).The soviets thought and operated in radically different manner, the Germans did not.

And so I believe that at first the allied armies, which were caught off guard, had to gain a sense of themselves. I don’t want to personify them too much and say they were like individual personalities, but I do think there’s something to it.

They had to get a sense of themselves, a sense of the possibilities that they were able to explore. And I think to do that first of all they had to survive, and that’s why those anchoring moments are perfect. For the Anglo-American alliance it was North Africa, specifically the Battle of Kasserine Pass/El Alamein And, of course, for the Soviet Union it was the great counter-offensives North and South of Stalingrad. The Soviets were still there, still alive, the Germans, they’re flesh and blood like the soviets, they are not supermen despite Nazi propaganda proclaiming them to be übermen. So suddenly those armies has anchored themselves. And from that point, once the Germans had lost operational superiority, only at that point I think could we say that the superior resources of the allies could begin to make a difference.

On the contrary, the Wehrmacht still operated quite similarly in 1943-1944 like they used to operate and thank back in 1939-41, , they never managed to anchor themselves after their setbacks, nor accepted the grim circumstances, they needed to reform they whole military thought. But as CoH2 player said, German General Staff was myopic.