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.

thanks for posting that. very interesting.

+1!
But is there a translation?

Here's a good transcript with some additional info at the beginning: http://www.feldgrau.net/forum/viewto...4104ef#p119636
here's a youtube version with the translation as background video to the recording: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8raDPASvq0

It's truly fascinating. He's very well spoken as you'd expect (the transcript doesnt quite do it justice, especially considering he's freely monologizing for a good few minutes) and his voice and overall style is completely different compared to his speeches (f.e. this one). No rolling Rs, very different intonation and a very slight austrian accent that's absent from his public adresses as far as i know.

Says it all imo

I have just finished reading Double Cross - The True Story of the D-Day Spies and would recommend it to anyone interested in 2nd World War history. It reads much more like a spy novel than a historical book, but opens a fascinating incite into just how thoroughly the German spy network was controlled by the British.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...8-double-cross

sounds awesome, thanks for the recommendation!

Oh lawd.

nice pic. 70% true.

An interesting selection of WW2 photos from imgur:





















Full album here here.

Apologies if its already been posted, but one of the best (IMO) documentaries of ww2 is available on youtube (pretty sure its all legit as its been there for several months).

Its the French produced Aplocalypse. Its approx 6 hours of original WW2 footage, almost 100% in color and gives a very rounded perspective of WW2 (something which a lot of other documentaries do not do).

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocaly...cond_World_War
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1508238/
First episode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjzYR0-vau0
YouTube user profile with the rest of the episodes: http://www.youtube.com/user/alnka1974/videos

Apocalypse is good but it's not my favorite one. I think it is too short and lacks details and explanations. For instance: I don't like that they talk about the Anschluss already on 8th minute.

I would recommend World War 2: The Complete History. I think it's better because they go deeper in pre-war politics and explain correlation between WW1 and WW2 among other things.

First episode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mFG0Du_DKU

I always loved The World at War as a documentary series. I think I must've watched it about 5 times over the years and having Olivier doing the narrative is just incredible.

Is it the one from 1973?

LOL nice, a documentary from the neo-Nazi perspective.

"It's not clear who burned the Reichstag"

"Churchill's speeches in the thirties were the ravings of a lunatic"

Etc, etc.

The Germans used tons of artillery pieces and trucks captured at Dunkirk against the Soviets.

Italy was doing exactly what it did in WWI, sitting on the sidelines waiting to join the winning side. After the battle of France it looked for all the world that the Germans were gonna win so they invaded France hoping to pick up some concessions.