Comment: British Army veteran author Desmond Morris wrote The Desert Fox whose cinema adaptation starred James Mason in the title role. The book and film are utterly apologetic, flattering portraits of Rommel that are completely and deliberately ignorant of the actual Rommel. During and immediately after the war it served the British to portray Rommel as an exceptionally capable and decent foe, as this helped the British to magnify the efforts and achievements of the British Army in the Western Desert campaigns (the British called them the Western Desert campaigns because they were fought west of the British power center in Egypt/Suez); the British Army in the Western Desert performed sketchily, at best, and did not gain the upper hand until the Royal Navy had interdicted Rommel’s Mediterranean supply line and the UK and U.S. had bolstered the British Eighth Army with an increasing flow of war materiel. Rommel was actually a consummate brown-nose flatterer of Hitler, not least because Rommel was a Swabian, seen in the Wehrmacht as a social-climbing provincial upstart, who was jealous of the easier promotion and favors lavished on Prussian old boys’ club members of the Wehrmacht. In popular material one of the best assessments of Rommel’s character, up to the conclusion of the Nazi invasion of France, appears in Len Deighton’s book Blitzkrieg.
Rommel was a sound, temperamentally aggressive, somewhat above average field general, not an exceptionally brilliant one. Most people are unaware that his German Afrika Korps units were vastly outnumbered by the Italian Army troops under his command and most of which, considering their supply from the Italian mainland was indifferent at best, gave a good account of themselves under German theater leadership. The war in the Western Desert went back & forth for almost three years, chiefly because it was a series of campaigns dependent upon supply whose provision alternately and variously favored the Axis and the British forces. In this seesaw campaigning Rommel enjoyed the slight advantage imparted by his aggressiveness which prompted him to attack many a time at which he was nigh bereft of armor and logistic support; in this the sluggishness and ineptitude of the British Army also played a significant part (which helps to explain the postwar British accolades to Rommel’s acumen: the more formidable one’s foe, the more glorious one’s achievements against him). Ultimately, Rommel lost in North Africa because the Royal Navy succeeded in keeping the British Army’s supply lines open while, with the RAF, increasingly interdicting the Axis Mediterranean supply line.
Both fiction and non-fiction books and films about WWII range widely in their treatment of the various combatants, yet in these offerings there are trends which tend to follow the shifting, prevailing postwar zeitgeist.
The Homerian precursor of special operations forces is, of course, the Trojan Horse. Before Industrial Revolution technology made them possible and today ubiquitous, special operations did not flourish, chiefly because special operations depend, at first on rapid mobility and later also on portable instantaneous communications. In pre-Industrial Revolution eras mobility was limited to infantry marches and cavalry scouting, and communication depended on runners, mounted messengers, and line-of-sight signalling. Motor vehicles, self-propelled warships and small craft, submarines, aircraft, and wireless made special operations possible and practicable.
* One gets a very good sense of Rommel’s combat instincts in his early book, “Infanterie Greift An.” He won the coveted Pour le Merite in World War I due to his extreme personal daring on the attack.
Rommel tended to do very well on the attack (or counterattack) if the opponent had the least bit of nerves. He tended to do poorly when he ran into determined and capable opponent who would bait him. According to F.W. von Mellenthin (who was a staff officer under Rommel in Africa and subsequently wrote “Panzer Battles”) writes at length about Rommel’s casual refusal to acknowledge or take into account dire supply situations and running men and machines into the ground to maintain the momentum of attacks… which worked very well if the enemy panicked. But if they didn’t and carefully gave ground without breaking, Rommel would run into trouble just as his men and machines approached the collapse point (in one particular situation, as the momentum of his attacks petered out and the British refused to retreat, he had something like a dozen or so operational tanks left in the whole of Panzerarmee Afrika).
* Think about how Rommel might have performed had he been on the American side with massive air support and supplies. He was almost always handicapped by Germany’s inability to fully support his effort in North Africa.
* His task was to keep Africa from falling, and to tie down as many British divisions as possible, all with minimal casualties.
While no doubt he did tie down a number of well-equipped and trained British divisions, he suffered huge casualties and stretched out his positions so badly that when the American invasion of the Maghreb came, he couldn’t quickly help there.
As a commander of the whole Axis army in Africa, it was his job to take into account the supply situation (which he totally failed to do) as well as the overall strategic situation (the fact that his army might be needed in the Maghreb as well).
He thought he had the chance to win the world war in North Africa (totally delusional), and this caused him to disregard both the orders given to him and ordinary common sense.
* A great commander adjusts his goals to his means and does not foolishly try to adjust his means to his goals. In Rommel’s case, he oftentimes just ignored the fact that most of fuel from Europe was consumed on the way to the battle front on that poorly maintained west-east highway from a port much too behind his lines… which did not matter if Rommel could induce panic on his brittle opponent by appearing quickly unexpectedly. When the British 8the Army finally had a commander with some backbone, the fate of Rommel’s men in North Africa was sealed.
The hackneyed saying that amateurs study strategy while professionals study logistics does have some truth.
Instead of dashing to the front for personal glory, if Rommel had actually worked politically to secure elimination of British air-naval bases in the Med and concentrated on restoring the capacity of ports he captured, he’d have been in a far better shape.
* Rommel attacked knowing he could not be supplied. He was reckless, gambling he could capture British supplies and he was considered so by the German General Staff. Once he met a opponent who did not panic under pressure, called his bluff, was willing to grind him down, he lost his army completely.
* Even strategically his pursuit of Cairo was foolish. The British didn’t depend on Suez (in fact, the Med was mostly closed to British shipping anyway), and even if he could have captured Cairo, he would have had to retreat to West Libya (and eventually to Tunis) after the November 1942 invasion of Algiers anyway. From a strategic point of view, he should have taken into consideration both the vulnerability of Algiers (even without an American invasion, the French forces there could have simply joined de Gaulle) and the total uselessness of capturing Egypt.
His campaign looked impressive, but eventually it proved a huge waste of manpower and resources. As I wrote, he was a great divisional (and below that level) commander, an above average corps commander, and way in over his head as the commander of the Axis army in Africa.
* In evaluating Erwin Rommel it would be well to remember that his adversaries were reading all of his communications in real time, yet he still surprised them and won substantial victories against considerable odds.
* To what extent was the problem you describe attributable to Erwin Rommel as commander of the Afrika Korps, and to what extent was it the fault of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht for even sending three German divisions to North Africa in the first place? As I see it, the Germans had two good choices: (1) concede the Mediterranean theater, leaving the Italians to cope as best they could, while the Germans concentrated on the USSR; or (2) make it, and not the USSR, the major theater, with the objective of cutting British communications entirely in the Mediterranean (e.g., capturing Malta) and forcing British ships to and from India to take the long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, while putting a maximum effort into U-boat interdiction efforts. They chose option 3: send just enough forces to keep the Italians from collapsing. That wasn’t Rommel’s fault. In a position of strategic inferiority, a commander can either elect a tenacious, grudging defense (e.g., Kesselring’s Italian strategy), or a calculated-risk offensive. Robert E. Lee chose the latter strategy in the American Civil War, as did Rommel in North Africa. It offered a chance (admittedly a very long chance, in either case) of decisive victory. The other strategy simply aims at a delayed defeat. Rommel’s reputation is on solid ground.
* There wasn’t a lot of interest in films about Thermopylae, but 300 was a massive hit. People want compelling movies. And there are certainly compelling stories of German forces fighting long odds during the war. If one were not afraid of the political and even legal repercussions, one could make some very compelling films about German forces in the war.
* Depicting Nazis as clowns distorts history and makes a mockery about what our troops faced. It took the combined might of the USSR, UK, USA and others over 4 years to defeat the Nazis. Incompetent clowns wouldn’t have been so hard to defeat.
* “We can now report — based on interviews with former Mossad officers and with Israelis who have access to the Mossad’s archived secrets from half a century ago — …”
Mossad officers & Israelis? Seriously?
I cannot think of a more unreliable source for just about anything.
Pure pulp fiction from top to bottom. If it smells, looks, & reads ridiculous then it is ridiculous.
“By way of deception, thou shalt do war.”
– Mossad
* Every morning, I walk by a picture of my wife’s grandfather in full Wehrmacht regalia hanging on the wall. No, I don’t give a salute.
Anyway – the documented truth is that the man who still silently stands watch over my crumbling old ranch in an old photograph, well cared for but faded, was a blue collar kid from a dinky ass Heimat who went and did his patriotic chore. The only people he killed were, actually, Russians. War. Well, War never changes, Cucky, and the men, especially young ones, will fight for their family, neighborhood, town, state, race, and nation. The flag, well, it doesn’t really matter. Men will follow a leader, because he is leader. This has been true since Horatio stood and the bridge and, like all verities, will be true long after the internet shuts down and the world that was is gone.
And the fact that Hollywood, run by Eskimos with their 8 bazjillion words for f*cking host cultures over, now seems fit to to produce Frankfurt school propaganda that misrepresents facts as the actual guys who fought the war on the Allied side actually remembered them should give you some god damn pause to think that maybe, just maybe, it’s not, like the photo on the wall, black and white.
* I predict that Nazis will come to be regarded as heroic by much of our population when the US becomes well over half non-European, because they will be seen as resistance fighters standing up against Anglo/Zionist hegemony, and their ideology will be seen as something worth emulating.
Call it a crazy theory, but non-whites are a lot less bothered by Hitler than Europeans and Jews. Chinese, for example, are not really bothered by Nazis. What really gets them going is the Opium War and the like, and that wasn’t started by Germans…
What a lot of American elites and PC types don’t understand is that much of the rest of the world sees US as we see the Nazis, so anyone who fought us earns some respect and even sympathy in an “enemy of an enemy” sort of way.
* Additionally once the Morgenthau Plan was leaked I could easily see patriotic Germans fighting to ensure Germany did not have to endure its provisions. Even if you weren’t a Nazi, you still wouldn’t want Germany to be subjected to the Morgenthau Plan.
First, it was obvious to anybody that a German victory would be good for Germany. I know there’s a lot of hand-wringing about how dark and terrible it would’ve been for Germans to be under the swastika banner, but truly, the Gestapo would’ve been not much worse than the present PC regime (they rarely executed or even arrested Germans who avoided explicit anti-regime activity, and even less so during times of peace), so it was obvious for German patriots in 1939 or 1940 that they should help the regime if they wish good for Germany.
After 1941 it didn’t change, but after that Hitler turned truly genocidal, and one can argue that from a moral point of view self-interest (or ethnic self-interest) should’ve been overridden by moral considerations. However, in 1941 Hitler’s war against Stalin also started, so anyone working on the defeat of Hitler was also explicitly working to help Stalin. (Arguably that was the case even in 1940, because Stalin would’ve used the opportunity to grab for himself what he could.) Now even our friend the commentator Jack D acknowledged that Stalin might have been as evil as Hitler or even more so. Especially with the limited information people had at the time, and the human propensity to believe worse things about an outgroup (like the Soviets) then an ingroup (the Germans themselves). So after 1941 for a German patriot it would have been arguably a duty to help Hitler against Stalin. And certainly many non-Nazi patriots did think so.
I truly find it bizarre how German patriots of the time are now retrospectively expected to work for the ruin of their own nation based on the (even in retrospect highly questionable) notion that Hitler’s victory would have led to more mass murder than Stalin’s victory.
(Stalin’s victory led to Mao’s victory and hence later even Pol Pot’s victory – Mao wouldn’t have killed 60 million Chinese, nor Pol Pot, nor the Vietnamese commies etc. would have killed their millions. Would Hitler have killed more than 60 million after his victory, in addition to the ones he killed anyway? Maybe, but it’s pure speculation.)
* The Morgenthau’s idea of not allowing the Germans to have any sharp metal objects was impractical (in part because of the Cold War) so instead the US kept Germany under military occupation for 50 years and allowed it to start chipping away at our auto industry. If nothing else, blowing up all the steel mills would have been a lot cheaper for us.
What the Russian had in mind for the Germans (and what they actually did) was a hell of a lot worse than the Morgenthau Plan but this did not stop them from winning in the east so I’m not sure the stuff about 30 divisions was really true. Morale will only get you so far without material.
* Franco knew that he owed his position to MI6 (see my comment earlier in this thread). The British persuaded him to keep out of the war. Franco was a monarchist at heart and intended (as he ultimately did) to restore the monarchy. Alfonso XIII was married to Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, the youngest granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and first cousin to George V.
Franco admired his queen and on one occasion when she reviewed his troops after a battle in Spanish Morocco, he presented her with a large basket of roses adorned with the severed heads of three Moorish rebels, recalling a legendary episode of the Reconquista. What the queen thought of this romantic gesture is not recorded.
Between the debt he owed British intelligence, and the connection between the Spanish and British royal families, Franco had reasons to cultivate the good will of the British.
Characterizing Franco as a “fascist” is not quite accurate. He less resembled Mussolini, an atheist whose fascism was derived from socialism and syndicalism, than the Austrian Engelbert Dollfuss, who was a traditionalist Catholic authoritarian.
* On March 15, 1940 Himmler stated: “All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complex. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. It is imperative that the great German nation considers the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task.”
(a) we know that Hitler had no compunction about committing genocide, (b)the Slavs were designated as untermenschen and (c) Lebensraum wouldn’t be Lebensraum if someone else was living there.
* In case anyone gets overly sentimental about Nazi Germany, a few figures:
Soviet POWs who died at the hands of the Nazis: Approx 3 million plus, with around 2 million of the deaths occurring in the Winter of ’41-’42 alone.
Jews: 5 million plus
European civilians killed in Nazi “reprisal” operations: Approx 700,000 (with Belarus alone accounting for around 300,000)
Soviet citizens starved to death during the siege of Leningrad: 670,000 plus
And, if the Nazis had actually managed to win in the East, the death toll would have been higher still:
The Hunger Plan: The planned diversion of “surplus” Ukrainian food supplies to the Reich. It was estimated that that would have entailed the mass starvation of around 30 million people.
Generalplan Ost: The mass ethnic cleansing of the Slavic East. If fully implemented, this would have meant a death toll in the neighborhood of 50 million.
* Best movie to be made for that would probably be the Kriegsmarine’s Baltic evacuation operation, which as a ‘miracle’ easily blows Dunkirk out of the water. Several times as many people evacuated over a longer distance against a much stronger opposition with far fewer naval resources than the British had.
Plenty of heroism along with terrible tragedy. Just about all of the most lethal ship sinkings in history occurred when overloaded liners got torpedoed in the icy Baltic by Soviet submarines.
* Mass murdering regimes have the habit of slowing down the mass murder part after the death of the founding dictator. Not always, but usually. The USSR didn’t do that after the death of Lenin, but after the death of Stalin they stopped the mass murder almost completely. In China the same thing happened after the death of Mao. Vietnam got less murderous after 1986. Pol Pot’s regime got destroyed.
* I read years ago that to much of the world (Middle East, Asia, Latin America) Hitler is only seen as the man who lost WW II, rather than the most evil man who ever lived.
The writer’s point was Americans don’t know this.
* I’ve read that German net assessors before the war hoped that Italy stayed neutral. They believed, quite reasonably as it turned out, that Italy’s Mediteranean ambitons would be a distraction to the major German war effort, which was in the east. There was no German encouragement for Italy to declare war on France and Italy did so only after France had been defeated by German forces. At the end of the war both sides claimed victory in the Italian campaign and for precisely the same reason: We tied down lots of your troops you could have better used elsewhere.
Where would those British forces “tied down” in the Mediterranean have been used between 1941 and 1943? A cross-channel invasion, even one involving the 8th Army, would have been very difficult before 1944. The entire Mediterranean effort was a total distraction from the German point of view. I suppose one could fault Rommel for giving the German OKW the idea that the Mediterranean was important by his early victories there.
* I don’t believe the Nazis ever discovered America’s greatest strategic secret: that Saudi Arabia was brimming over with oil. An all out drive for the Persian Gulf might have allowed Germany to hang on, but I don’t think it ever occurred to them.
* You could make a fantastic movie about German pilot Hans Ulrich Rudel. He flew a Stuka dive-bomber equipped with a 37mm cannon, with which he took out Soviet tanks. He also took out a Soviet destroyer. After his plane was shot down, he made a spectacular escape from behind Soviet lines. He continued to fly in combat after he lost his lower leg to a 12.7-mm bullet. Hitler awarded him the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds. Problem for Hollywood is that he was an unrepentant Nazi.
From Wikipedia:
Hans-Ulrich Rudel (2 July 1916 – 18 December 1982) was a German Luftwaffe military aviator during World War II, a ground-attack pilot credited with the destruction of 519 tanks, 1 battleship, 1 cruiser, 1 destroyer and 70 landing craft. He also claimed 9 aerial victories, and the destruction of more than 800 vehicles of all types, over 150 artillery, anti-tank and anti-aircraft positions, 4 armored trains, and numerous bridges and supply lines.[Note 1] He flew 2,530 ground-attack missions all over the Eastern Front, usually flying the Junkers Ju 87 “Stuka” dive bomber, and 430 missions flying the Focke-Wulf Fw 190.
* You could make a great movie based on the memoir Samurai, written by the Japanese ace Saburo Sakai. It’s a great read. Sakai became a very popular guest at reunions of US pilots who had fought in the Pacific.
