The Germans did not fear retaliation by the dutch airforce though. Hitler and Goering purposefully did not bomb London because they knew the British could bomb Berlin in response. Once the British decided to purposefully bomb Berlin Hitler had no reason to not bomb London. And as the Rotterdam Blitz showed, he had no moral quandaries with bombing civilians

Zyklon B was not used for military purposes. The most compelling reason for why chemical warfare was not used is that it is ineffective against military targets. As shown in WWI chemical agents can be defeated with relatively easy countermeasures. It also is often too unpredictable. Less than 3% of casualties in WWI were due to chemical warfare and it lead to no dramatic victories.

The first bolded is the "uh, no." Hitler never had any qualms about hitting civilian targets. None.

The second bolded is a new "uh, no."

The Battle of Britain strategy was sound at first in that the Germans solely went for military targets. They were on the cusp of wiping out the British radar system (without really knowing or understanding the critical importance of it), but then during a night raid the Luftwaffe accidentally bombed civilian targets. This was not part of their plan even though that decision was still a close one. Of course, the story continues that Churchill ordered a raid on Berlin the next day and that so incensed Hitler that he lost his composure and hence focused on civilian targets to the detriment of his cause.

At the time, many militarized nations were toying with the concept of bombing enemies into submission which means whole cities would be carpet bombed until they surrendered.

The English developed this theory, yet never really adopted it. The Germans were intrigued by it and would have likely used that as "Phase B" of their operation after eliminating the proper military targets. However, because the radar system was not wiped out first, the Luftwaffe suffered huge losses and Hilter withdrew.

In sum, Hilter and Goring were not refraining from bombing civilian targets in the U.K. out of fear of reprisal, they refrained because current conditions did not allow for it - the Fighter Command had to be conquered first.

Those numbers are totally meaningless as it is not a proper "apples" to "apples" comparison.

It's nice to throw numbers around, but not when it is at the expense of proper context.

I'm curious what context you mean. The argument you make in the post before seems inherently wrong as the Germans could easily have attacked military targets by day and civilian by night in the early stages of the Battle of Britain had they no qualms.

I guess you glossed over the "argument" since you didn't understand it too well. The German plan for Operation Sea Lion was to 1) establish air supremacy; so that 2) they could keep the British Navy at bay. Their plan did not include the bombing of any civilian targets as that was not conducent to their immediate goals; it had nothing to do with their moral beliefs regarding taking out civilian targets or fear of reprisal from such.

The Germans were still there to fight a war and win that war. However, as evidenced by the bombing of Rotterdam, they had no qualms with hitting civilian targets if such was part of their war strategy. For the Battle of Britain, it was not. So, it would make entirely no sense to continually bomb civilian targets "by night" if that was not part of the strategy to begin with.

My comment about "proper context" concerns your outrageous comparison between the wonton tactics of the belligerant country against that of the defending country attempting to end the war. Even beyond that, the Bombing of Dresden at best (to your position) was still an act against military targets, especially since the Germans started spreading their assets in and among civilian areas. Finally, in the context of the times when it took squadrons of bombers to effectively eliminate just one target (its not like today with modern weapons) and the fact their operation was not in violation of the Geneva Convention, your "comparison" is just a hackeneyed attempt to recharacterize something to suit your modern views which are completely impractical and unfair given the big picture.

* I see you were going on about this earlier in the thread. You were not so convincing there, either.

Read all this, I should bring my 95 yr old ex RAF photographer grandad here, jeez he has some stories.

Btw I have read a lot of books on the angel of death but wow that clip was sick.

Also ATM am watching a Nat geo doc on the big boy bomb. Makes me sad that nuclear fusion or fission can't remember, was ever discovered.

So what does this prove? I think it's pretty clear that the Nazi military strategy was based on winning battles in rapid fashion and expressly not wanting to be in battles of attrition. Of course the Nazi's were lunatics too so that doesn't mean the strategy was viable. Personally I don't think too hard about the machinations of crazy people.

Maybe, maybe not


Exactly

Anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor today. It was 70 years ago and my how the world has changed since.

Bump. There was some good discussion in this thread.

Anyone got any theories as to why Italy was so awful at warfare?

At the beginning of WW2 afaik they had a navy bigger than the french & British combined & a pretty good air force, good tanks and a pretty sizable army. Yet they were consistently defeated by much much smaller & weaker armies and were more of a hindrance to Hitler than an actual ally.

I have pondered this from time to time. I honestly believe that Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Pompey, Gaius Marius and Gaius Julius Caesar would be appalled by the ineptness of italy in the last few centuries. What would they say to Italians today?

This is the cradle of some of the most skilled military minds and powers in world history. And now? Like Churchill was to have allegedly said, at the start of WWII finding out Italy was going the Germans (i am paraphrasing) you would be happier fighting against them rather then be stuck with the burden of having them on your side.

Powers rise and decline. Heck Greece produced the Spartan's and look at them today. This is clearly something that says a lot about the great military nations in the east. They have ebbs and flows but not the lol fall off like from one of the greatest military crucibles in all of history.

It's strange too because they were involved in WWI, so they should of had a ton of experienced generals/leaders.

Pretty sure they had a huge advantage in every battle in terms of numbers of men, tanks, planes, and naval fighters. Yet were easily thwarted by the french, the Greek, & the British in North Africa.

I guess it just shows how important military leadership is. Even with awful leadership it blows my mind they got beat back by a tiny British force in North Africa until Rummel showed up.

But yea good point about the Romans. What a fall off.

The Italian Navy was not larger than the British, not by a longshot. They had zero aircraft carriers, and 6 Battleships total. On a theater basis it was much closer as the British were obviously stretched very thin especially after Japan entered the war.

The Italian Air Force certainly suffered due to the fact that the Italian planes were of inferior quality compared to the British.

Quality of equipment certainly must have extended to the army as well, though I am not as well versed in why the Italian Army performed so poorly. Obviously it's inability to defeat Greece in 1941 goes to show how poor the Italian Army organization was.


I remember reading back in WWI that the Italian army performed so poorly due to a variety of issues. Some due to recent unification, some due to poor leadership, poor peacetime training, poor mobilization plans etc.. So when Italy entered the war it entered without any real proper preparations compared to any of the other major powers. Also Italian officers shot an extraordinary amount of their own men due to draconian orders to prevent retreat. It might be hard to train future leaders for your army when your busy shooting any smart enough to order a tactical retreat. ( Or when your busy losing every battle you are in due to inept leadership )

Not sure if you guys caught up on this, but an audio recording recently surfaced of Hitlers conversation with Mannerheim.
http://archive.org/details/OnlyKnown...-PublicVersion
Pretty amazing and somewhat surprising info. Hitler admits underestimating the strength of soviet army and sounds amazed at the number of tanks soviets produced. Also states that he was sure that Soviets were planning to attack first in 41 or 42 so he decided to do that first. Also a lot of info about 39 Molotov pact.