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Tag Archives: warfare

The Nazis’ Astonishing Conquest of France

07 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, War

≈ Comments Off on The Nazis’ Astonishing Conquest of France

Tags

A Short History of World War II, Adolf Hitler, Ardennes, Charles de Gaulle, Erich von Manstein, European History, Fedor von Bock, Ferdinand Foch, French History, Gerd von Rundstedt, Heinz Guderian, James L. Stokesbury, Luftwaffe, Maginot Line, Maurice Gamelin, Military, military history, Monsieur Jerôme Barzetti, Napoleon Bonaparte, Nazis, Nazism, Schlieffen Plan, The Fall of France, The Weeping Frenchman, Third Reich, Vichy France, War, warfare, Winston Churchill, World War Two

Hitler in Paris

“[T]he French based their operational plan [for repelling a Nazi invasion] on four assumptions…

These assumptions were, first, that the Maginot Line was indeed impregnable; second, that the Ardennes Forest north of it was impassable; third, that the Germans were therefore left with no option but a wheel through the Low Countries [Belgium and Holland], a replay of the Schlieffen Plan of 1914; and fourth, that to meet and defeat this, the French would advance into Belgium and Holland and come to their aid as soon as the war started. The Anglo-French were sure, correctly, that the minute the first German stepped over the frontier, the Dutch and Belgians would hastily abandon their neutrality and start yelling for help.

Materially, though they were unaware of it, the Allies were more than ready for the Germans. Figures vary so widely — wildly even — that one can choose any set to make any argument desired. In 1940, the French high command was speaking of 7,000 German tanks, deliberately overestimating them to cover themselves in the event of a disaster. What this did for French morale can readily be imagined. Figures now available give a comparison something like this:

German Men: 2,000,000
Divisions: 136
Tanks: 2,439
Aircraft: 3,200

Allied Men: 4,000,000
Divisions: 135
Tanks: 2,689
Aircraft: 2,400

Nazi Germany Invasion of France

The original [Nazi] plan called for a drive north of Liège [Blue ‘X’ on the map above]; Hitler now changed it to straddle Liège, that is, he moved the axis of the attack farther south. Finally, he was convinced by von Rundstedt’s chief of staff, General Erich von Manstein, that the plan ought to be reversed. Instead of making the main effort in the north, the Germans would go through the Ardennes; instead of Schlieffen, there would be ‘Sichelschnitt,’ a ‘sickle cut’ that would slice through the French line at its weak point and envelop the northern armies as they rushed to the defense of the Belgians and Dutch. Manstein was an infantryman and was uncertain about the Ardennes; he approached General Heinz Guderian, the recognized German tank authority, who said it could be done. Hitler jumped at it immediately, and the plan was turned around. The assumptions on which the French had planned their campaign were now totally invalidated. […]

In the early dawn of May 10 the Germans struck.

There were the usual Luftwaffe attacks at Allied airfields and communications centers, and by full day the Germans were rolling forward all along the Dutch and Belgian frontiers. The whole plan depended upon making the Allies think it was 1914 all over again. Therefore, the initial weight of the attack was taken by General von Bock’s Army Group B advancing into Holland. Strong infantry and armor attacks were carried out, along with heavy aerial bombardment, and paratroop and airborne landings on key airfields at The Hague and Rotterdam, and bridges across the major rivers. The Dutch hastened to their advanced positions, some of which they managed to hold for two or three days, others of which they were levered off almost immediately.

The whole campaign of Holland took a mere four days.

Nazis in Paris

The mass of French armor was in Belgium and Holland and busy with its own battle. The French tried; they threw an armored division, newly organized under General de Gaulle, at the southern German flank. This attack later became one of the pillars of de Gaulle’s reputation — he at least had fought — yet it achieved nothing more than the destruction of his division. The few gains the French tanks made could not be held against the Germans sweeping by, and they hardly noticed that there was anything special about this attack.

As the Germans went on toward Cambrai, toward the sea, the new British Prime Minister, Churchill, came over to see what on earth was going on. He visited [French Commander-in-chief Maurice] Gamelin and looked at the maps. Surely, he said, if the head of the German column was far to the west, and the tail was far to the east, they must be thin somewhere. Why did the French not attack with their reserves? In his terrible French he asked Gamelin where the French reserves were. Gamelin replied with an infuriating Gallic shrug: there were no reserves. Churchill went home appalled.

Hitler was determined to rub it in. The armistice talks were held at Rethondes, in the railway carriage where the Germans had surrendered to [former Head Allied] Marshal [Ferdinand] Foch in 1918. The Germans occupied northern France and a strip along the Atlantic coast down to the Spanish frontier. They retained the French prisoners of war, more than a million of them, and used them in effect as hostages for the good behavior of the new French government, set up at the small health resort of Vichy. They wanted the French fleet demobilized in French ports, but under German control. The French agreed to essentially everything; there was little else they could do but accept the humiliation of defeat. After their delegation signed the surrender terms, Hitler danced his little victory jig outside the railway carriage and ordered that it be hauled off to Germany. He left the statue of Foch, but the plaque commemorating Germany’s surrender twenty-two years ago was blown up.

Parisian during Nazi invasion

On the morning of the 25th, the sun rose over a silent France. The cease-fire had come into effect during the hours of darkness. The refugees could now go home or continue their flight unharassed by the dive-bombers. Long silent columns of prisoners shuffled east. The French generals and politicians began composing their excuses, the Germans paraded through Paris, visited the tourist sites, and began counting their booty. It had indeed been one of the great campaigns of all time, better than 1870, probably unequaled since Napoleon’s veterans had swarmed over Prussia in 1806; Jena and Auerstadt were at last avenged, and there would be no more victories over Germany while the thousand-year Reich endured.

The casualties reflected the inequality of the campaign. The Germans had suffered about 27,000 killed, 18,000 missing, and just over 100,000 wounded. The Dutch and Belgian armies were utterly destroyed; the British lost about 68,000 men and all their heavy equipment: tanks, trucks, guns — everything. The French lost track of their figures in the collapse at the end, but the best estimates gave them about 125,000 killed and missing, about 200,000 wounded. The Germans claimed that they had taken one and a half million prisoners, which they probably had. Except for defenseless England, the war appeared all but over.”

__________

Selections from the eighth chapter (“The Fall of France”) in James L. Stokesbury’s A Short History of World War II. Though I’m not if it’s considered AAA historiography by experts in the field, Stokesbury’s book is a highly informative, tight read, divided into episodes that make for good twenty minute immersions in specific topics. I recommend it.

The above photo, often called “The Weeping Frenchman,” was taken several months after the invasion and published in the March 3rd, 1941 edition of Life Magazine. It depicts Monsieur Jerôme Barzetti, a resident of Marseilles who wept as the flags of his country’s last regiments were exiled to Africa. You can read more about it here.

Below: soldiers from the Wehrmacht march down a Parisian boulevard.

Stay on topic:

  • Why the French still seem to deny their role in the war, but the Germans now own theirs
  • The charming Hungarian immigrant who stormed Omaha Beach with a camera
  • Hitler’s ridiculous laziness
  • Churchill’s superhuman energy
  • “Your leaders are crazy”: the leaflet we dropped on Nazi Germany

Nazis in Paris 2

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Who Wants It More?

18 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, War

≈ Comments Off on Who Wants It More?

Tags

Alon Peled, Bravery, combat, David Ben-Gurion, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Patton, IDF, Israel, Israeli Army, Israeli History, Meir Amit, Mossad, Napoelon Bonaparte, Vietnam War, War, warfare, World War Two

Soldier at Wailing Wall

“The willingness to fight and die, to sacrifice for a cause, has often been vital in changing history. Napoleon Bonaparte remarked that in war the mental is to the physical as 3:1. George Patton demurred that the mental to the physical is closer to 5:1. In many revolutions (English, American, Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Iranian), the side weaker in weapons and numbers but superior in will to fight triumphed. This will to power, as Friedrich Nietzsche asserted, was critical to success. Alon Peled observed that, in modern armies, the most important factors for success are internal cohesion and the dedication of soldiers. Mossad chief Meir Amit asserted that, ‘the human factor is the biggest and most crucial for our society and our security services.’

A weak will to fight has repeatedly led to disaster. In 1940, the French, despite equal numbers of tanks and manpower to the Germans, lacked a will to fight and were defeated in a six-week campaign. In 1975 the South Vietnamese army, despite massive qualitative and quantitative advantage, was rapidly routed by an inferior North Vietnamese army which lacked airplanes, tanks, or sophisticated equipment — but had a greater will to fight…

After millennia of persecution, the Holocaust and Arab terrorism, the Jews had a very strong will to fight. They were well aware that they had nowhere to go. They saw the struggle as a life-and-death one determining the fate of the Jewish people. David Ben Gurion told his commanders that ‘We will not win by military might alone. Even if we could field a larger army, we could not stand. The most important thing is moral and intellectual strength.’ Yigael Yadin, Israel’s first chief of staff, assessed the will to victory as the most important factor in the victory in 1948, for:

If we are to condense all the various factors, and there are many, which brought about victory, I would not hesitate to credit the extraordinary qualities of Israel’s youth, during the War of Independence with that victory. It appears as if that youth has absorbed into itself the full measure of Israel’s yearning, during thousands of years of exile, to return to its soil and to live in liberty and independence, and like a giant spring which had been compressed and held down for a long time to the utmost measure of its compressibility, when suddenly released — it liberated.

During the 1945-48 period they fought against the British Mandatory government and then the Arabs. The British had almost 100,000 soldiers and police, first-class equipment, international legitimacy, Arab support and the halo of their great successes in World War II. The far fewer Jews, unable to mobilize openly, with little military experience, without uniforms or heavy equipment, fought off first the British and then the numericaly superior Arabs to achieve independence in May 1948.”

__________

Pulled from the twelfth chapter of Jonathan Edelman’s The Rise of Israel: A History of a Revolutionary State. The picture: an IDF soldier after recapturing the Wailing Wall in 1967, 18 years after Israel’s independence.

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What Would Lawrence of Arabia Do about the Middle East?

09 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Comments Off on What Would Lawrence of Arabia Do about the Middle East?

Tags

Arabia, army, conflict, Fighting, foreign policy, Interventionism, Lawrence of Arabia, middle east, peace, T. E. Lawrence, Twenty Seven Rules, War, warfare

T. E. Lawrence

“Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.”

__________

Rule #15 in T. E. Lawrence’s “Twenty Seven Rules” which summarized for the British army his approach to Arab warfare. It was published in 1917.

Credit to TheDish.

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How to Survive a Roadside Bomb: Sebastian Junger Escapes Death in Afghanistan

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in War

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, Battle Company, combat, Fiction, foreign policy, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, Restrepo, Sebastian Junger, Taliban, violence, War, warfare

Sebastian Junger

Later this week I’m going to type up a short review of Sebastian Junger’s remarkable book WAR. Before then, however, I want to introduce those of you unfamiliar with the text to a disturbing (and particularly telling) section of it.

In this scene, which happened midway into Junger’s 15-month stint in Afghanistan, the men of Battle Company have crammed into four Humvees and set off on a routine patrol of the sparsely inhabited surrounding countryside. The Taliban have recently added a new weapon to their arsenal, makeshift roadside bombs (usually consisting of pressure cookers filled with fertilizer and diesel), “because they were losing too many men in firefights” against the vastly superior American force. Through this twisted new tactic, “the enemy now had a weapon that unnerved the Americans more than small-arms fire ever could: random luck.”

And luck isn’t on the American’s side this day. As the Humvees cruise through a neighboring village, a bomb detonates under Junger’s vehicle. The explosion is triggered about a second too early, missing the main cabin by about ten feet and blasting up through the engine block. Junger is one of the only contemporary Western journalists to witness first-hand such a scene, which has now played out countless time over the course of the Allied occupation. Here is a slice of the ensuing half minute:

The explosion looks like a sheet of flame and then a sudden darkening. The darkening is from dirt that lands on the windshield and blocks the sun… “GET ON THAT GUN!” Thyng starts yelling at the gunner. “GET ON THAT GUN AND START FIRING INTO THAT FUCKIN’ DRAW!”… Big, hot .50 cal shells clatter into the interior of the Humvee…

There’s a lot of shooting out there and I’m not looking forward to running through it, but the cabin is filling with toxic gray smoke and I know we’re going to have to bail out eventually. I keep waiting for something like fear to take hold of me but it never does, I have a kind of flatlined functionality that barely raises my heart rate. I could do math problems in my head. It occurs to me that maybe I’ve been injured — often you don’t know right away — and I pat my way down both legs until I reach my feet, but everything is there. I get my gear in order and find the door lever with my hand and wait. There is a small black skeleton hanging from the rearview mirror and I notice that it’s still rocking from the force of the blast. I just sit there watching it. Finally Thyng gives the order and we all throw ourselves into the fresh cool morning air and start to run.

Junger then yanks his reader from combat to the classroom, where he digresses on a vital but overlooked lesson any student of war should assimilate – namely, that combat is one of the most thrilling activities a human being can experience:

War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know. Soldiers discuss that fact with each other and eventually with their chaplains and their shrinks and maybe even their spouses, but the public will never hear about it. It’s just not something that many people want acknowledged.

Junger elaborates:

War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else. Combat isn’t where you might die — though that does happen — it’s where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don’t underestimate the power of that revelation. Don’t underestimate the things young men will wager in order to play that game one more time.

This thought is shaped by a closing sentence which could also function as the book’s thesis:

The core psychological experiences of war are so primal and unadulterated, however, that they eclipse subtler feelings, like sorrow or remorse, that can gut you quietly for years…

Junger is still helplessly strapped into this high-low psychosomatic roller coaster as the men tow their wrecked Humvee back to outpost Restrepo that afternoon. In the still of the Afghan sundown, Junger eventually finds a quiet moment to reflect on the day’s events, and in the process offers a glimpse into how this singular experience of combat-at-full-throttle can disfigure a soldier’s understanding of war.

I’ve been on some kind of high-amplitude ride all day since the bomb went off, peaks where I can’t sit still and valleys that make me want to catch the next resupply out of here. Not because I’m scared but because I’m used to war being exciting and suddenly it’s not. Suddenly it seems weak and sad, a collective moral failure that has tricked me — tricked us all — into falling for the sheer drama of it. Young men in their terrible new roles with their terrible new machinery arrayed against equally strong young men on the other side of the valley, all dedicated to a kind of canceling out of each other until replacements arrive. Then it starts all over again. There’s so much human energy involved — so much courage, so much honor, so much blood — you could easily go a year here without questioning whether any of this needs to be happening in the first place. Nothing could convince this many people to work this hard at something that wasn’t necessary — right? — you’d catch yourself thinking.

Junger then returns to the immediate psychological experience of combat, only now it is his subconscious mind, not his front brain, that is processing the day’s traumas.

That night I rewind the videotape of the explosion and try to watch it. My pulse gets so weird in the moments before we get hit that I almost have to look away. I can’t stop thinking about the ten feet or so that put that bomb beneath the engine block rather than beneath us. That night I have a dream. I’m watching a titanic battle between my older brother and the monsters of the underworld, and my brother is killing one after another with a huge shotgun. The monsters are cartoonlike and murderous and it doesn’t matter how many he kills because there’s an endless supply of them.

Eventually he’ll just run out of ammo, I realize. Eventually the monsters will win.

Whether consciously or not, Junger tinges this paragraph with the unfortunate residuals of warfare, including survivor’s guilt, isolation from family, and dreams charred with post-traumatic terror. That final coda is perhaps the most lacerating moment of the text: a simultaneous recognition of evil and a resignation to its eventual triumph. Junger is too restrained a writer to paint this conclusion in too bold of strokes, but nevertheless it is latent in the text for some if not most readers. This subtlety is the true achievement of the text, as Junger manages to forge a clear-eyed and wholly human narrative out of a conflict that has been so politicized and depersonalized over the past decade.

Restrepo

__________

As I said, be on the lookout for a short review of WAR in the coming week.

Both of the above photos were taken at outpost Restrepo by one of the my heroes, the late photographer Tim Hetherington.

Read on:

  • Vietnam veteran, Catholic, and scholar Andrew Bacevich reflects on war and original sin
  • Sebastian Junger describes how combat changed him for the better
  • I relate how the professional structure of our military is partially to blame for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

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