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Comment by crikli | Hacker News Reader

"Manoeuvre warfare is fantastically effective when the circumstances allow for it, but the available conditions, technology and personnel can sometimes make it ineffective. For instance, the German Blitzkrieg was extraordinarily effective against the static French defences in 1940, but the same forces and tactics came unstuck in 1941 when faced with a vicious winter and the Russian scorched earth style of defence."

Nah, the reason it came unstuck is because the Germans ran out of fuel and because overrunning Stalingrad became a point of pride with Hitler and the Wermacht...there were not tactical/strategic reasons to occupy the city when they could have encircled and passed.

Encirclement and passage was one of the lessons the American military learned (sort of) from Stalingard that they later executed in the island hopping campaigns of the Pacific. Rather than invading every island, they just bypassed those without strategic value, cut the shipping lanes, and let the occupying forces starve.

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Not just running out of fuel but general supply line issues.

Blitzkrieg (around which the German forces had been designed) was predicated on the assumption that you could quickly overrun a territory before the defenders could react to it. Which works fine in Poland and, to a degree, France (though that was partly due to some interesting internal politics in France at the time) but where's the first defensible border you could run to and hold in Russia? The Urals. Waaaaaaay too far to go. Even if you're starting from Konigsberg (as was then) and aiming at Moscow, that's still further than the whole width of France.

Germany was faced with supply lines that grew too long and a front that rapidly fanned out and thinned their forces. They ended up moving supplies by rail but had to lay their own rails as they went because the pre-existing Russian lines didn't match what they had and could feed from Germany. They needed supplies at such a rate that they couldn't afford the track time of sending cars back, so cars were abandoned at the front instead. The supply lines just became too long to service.

Then partisan campaigns started breaking out in captured territory requiring manpower to keep that land placid enough to support the front. Yet more supply issues.

Then.... winter came. German troops were faced with weather so cold that when they were fed soup it froze on their spoons before they could get it into their mouths. Yet Russian troops would hide in the snow all day and come out to attack by night. No doubt helped by convict armies which had regular army guns trained on them from behind and were under no illusions that returning in any condition to still fight would have them shot by their own side.

I don't believe there's been a single successful western land invasion of Russia since the Vikings. The country has demonstrated itself well able to simply absorb and tire out attackers by going back into the ample available space, safe in the knowledge that if they could somehow overcome the horrendous logistical challenges, they'd be so weak by the time winter came that it woudln't matter anyway. A brutal strategy, but apparently effective.

I have heard this kind of storytelling before, where the outcome of the WW2 is attributed to the failure of the German army on the eastern front and the discussion is focused on finding factors for that failure.

However such a storytelling tends to discard or fade the importance of Russian endevaours, ingeniuity and sacrifice. Another kind of storytelling would focus in finding factors which made Russia the ultimate victor. Such a discussion would prove far more interesting in my opinion. Then one could touch on questions such as how to withstand a strong inital attack, regroup, learn from your enemy and prevail.

I'm not at all saying the Russian army didn't do a very good job in the end; rather, being willing and able both to retreat nearly 1,000 miles from your starting position while more than doubling the width of your front line - and still retaining essentially undiminished capacity to fight and supply the campaign - gives you an enormous advantage.

> being willing and able both to retreat nearly 1,000 miles from your starting position

The Russian army did not do this in WWII -- the Russian army that faced the Germans at the border was entirely annihilated. Those who didn't die at the front mostly died in German POV camps. The Russians won the war because they had the manpower and industrial capacity to raise entire new armies to fight the Germans at a rate faster than the Germans could destroy them.

I don't see that anyone is discarding or fading the role of the Russian military, but without General Winter (a coin termed by the Russians) the outcome would have been different.

There's an excellent book I bought at a library sale a couple years back, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege (http://www.amazon.com/Stalingrad-Fateful-1942-1943-Antony-Be...) that really tells the story well.

Russia's success hinged on two things: their massive geographic advantages and the use of scorched earth tactics.

I don't want to minimize the fact that Russia bore a lot of casualties (more than any other country) in the process of defeating the Germans and pushing east, but frankly most wars are won and lost by the factors that existed before the first shot is fired, including population, logistics, and geography. If Stalin had done a better job, maybe Russia wouldn't have suffered so many casualties; if Hitler had done a better job, maybe they would have suffered even more. But there's no way Germany could have actually won, just as there's no way the South could have actually won the American Civil War.

Yes. The last chance for the Germans to win was in the first world war. And that would have been only by keeping Britain and America out of the war, and minimizing involvement with France.

The south most certainly could have won the civil war. Why not?

Men, money, and manufacturing: The North had all of them, the South had none.

The South had enough of an industrial base to sustain a 1:1 kill ratio for years. Their mistake was to provoke a hot war instead of a cold war, causing most of their capacity to be diverted to fighting, instead of to industrial build-up and R&D. The time was ripe to replace slavery with automation, and instead they blew it all on a swinging dick attack on Fort Sumter.

The time was ripe to replace slavery with automation

Remember the Jevons paradox--any technological advance that increases the efficiency a given good can be utilized (including labor) results in an increase in the demand for that good. This is why slavery was even around back then--it was on its last legs until the cotton gin made it profitable again.

> Their mistake was to provoke a hot war instead of a cold war

True, except I'd replace 'cold war' with 'continued legislative compromise'; the North was damnably willing to compromise with the South, allowing them to get much of what they wanted with rather little sacrifice. There was, in fact, a compromise in the works when the South attacked Fort Sumter and, from a larger perspective, a lot of 19th Century American politics prior to the Civil War was an increasingly desperate dance done by the North to placate the South to prevent the inevitable war.

> The time was ripe to replace slavery with automation

Read the Cornerstone Speech, given by the Vice President of the CSA. It lays out the reasons they wanted to secede and slavery was foremost among them. Slavery, by that point, wasn't just an economic engine, it was a cultural imperative. Preserving slavery was so ingrained in the Southern mindset that I feel fairly certain the plantation owners would have gone through a certain amount of economic dislocation if that meant keeping the slaves and the social system built on slaves.

Besides, even if you're right, the CSA still would never have allowed former slaves equal rights. Not without a race war that successfully toppled the post-slavery CSA establishment by force of arms. In the real world, it took the direct threat of Federal force of arms to ensure the reality of Civil Rights in the South nearly a century after the Civil War. (Admittedly, this is at least partially because Reconstruction didn't go on long enough or go nearly far enough.)

> Besides, even if you're right, the CSA still would never have allowed former slaves equal rights.

Was the civil war a better outcome? After the war former slaves were still agricultural workers, working long days in the fields. Only now they faced random violence and Jim Crow laws. Lynchings occurred well into the 20th century. Oh and the cost of the civil war was 600,000 lives, unbelievable destruction and a complete abandonment of all of the principles this nation was founded on(self-determination).

> Not without a race war that successfully toppled the post-slavery CSA

Why not? It almost happened before the invention of the cotton gin. Slavery was in serious decline.

> After the war former slaves were still agricultural workers, working long days in the fields. Only now they faced random violence and Jim Crow laws.

This happened because Reconstruction was stopped too early. There was a period, from 1865 to 1876, where blacks were in state-level political office across the South, there were no Jim Crow laws, and the Klan was killed off by focused Federal action.

Secondly, slavery was horrible. Slavery involved much of what went on in the Jim Crow era, plus it meant a slave's life to try to escape the South. The Jim Crow South never managed to track down and forcibly return all the blacks who escaped to Detroit or Harlen.

> complete abandonment of all of the principles this nation was founded on(self-determination).

No. No. No. No. We fought this war and as it turns out, self-determination has to include everyone, not just the people lucky enough to be born rich and white. Read the Cornerstone Speech if you still doubt the primary cause of the Civil War was the CSA's insane determination to hold on to slavery.

> It almost happened before the invention of the cotton gin. Slavery was in serious decline.

If it's the CSA doing the inventing, there would have been another invention that saved slavery. And another. And so on. (After all, can't slaves work in assembly lines?)

> No. No. No. No.

Just so you know, I imagined you yelling this and slamming your shoe on the table.

> We fought this war and as it turns out, self-determination has to include everyone

What about the first civil war? The one between Great Britain and its american colonies? At the time the colonies had slavery and GB eliminated the slave trade in 1807 and all slavery in 1833. Why were the slave-holding american colonies justified in rebelling in 1775 but a different group of slave-holding americans not justified in rebelling in 1861? Was that self-determination for all?

How did the Second Civil war ensure self-determination for everyone? The fact is that it did not. Many blacks in the south were denied the right to vote for decades through a variety of tactics including literacy/law tests and threats of outright violence.

> After all, can't slaves work in assembly lines?

It's way cheaper to employ people for industrial work than it is to enslave them. Slaves are expensive and are a major capital investment, with significant risk of loss if they become injured or killed on the job. With employees you just replace them when they cannot work and you do not have to invest capital in buying them.

If you believe that the US invaded the south to free the slaves, the only reasonable conclusion is that they failed, at an enormous cost of lives, liberty, and property.

"Preserving slavery was so ingrained in the Southern mindset that I feel fairly certain the plantation owners would have gone through a certain amount of economic dislocation if that meant keeping the slaves and the social system built on slaves."

Yes, and that's OK. Free men with tractors were about to tear out the foundations of slavery. We know that slavery was economically infeasible by 1920, and that's with a decade or two of lost progress due to War losses. With a balls-out effort for industrial independence, that could probably have been accelerated to 1890.

That didn't happen because the abolitionists decided that it was better to kill one man today than to free two men tomorrow, and because the CSA let the abolitionists choose the terms of the conflict.

"Besides, even if you're right, the CSA still would never have allowed former slaves equal rights."

And that's OK too. In a Christian nation, the master is responsible for his estate's dependents, even if there is no use for them. After farm automation, most plantation owners would have freed them in desperation to escape the room and board costs. (In short order there would have been nothing left but lifestyle slaveholders and the obscenely rich, and the Southern abolitionists would have taken care of them.)

"Admittedly, this is at least partially because Reconstruction didn't go on long enough or go nearly far enough."

It has been argued that Reconstruction had to wait for the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, which diverted vast amounts of resources into Southern industrialization.

> Free men with tractors were about to tear out the foundations of slavery.

Slaves can build tractors.

> We know that slavery was economically infeasible by 1920

This was a generation after it was abolished and the South had had to do something else. It's my contention that had the South been able to hang on to slavery, it would have found ways to work it into niches it never filled in the real world. Assembly line labor, for example, or mining, or fishing.

> the CSA let the abolitionists choose the terms of the conflict.

The abolitionists, by and large, thought they could win enough seats in Congress to outlaw slavery if they could prevent slavery from expanding into the new Western territories. That's why such expansion was the main topic of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and why Bloody Kansas was so bloody, and so on. There were certainly militant abolitionists, but they were the minority; the CSA chose its own war.

> In a Christian nation, the master is responsible for his estate's dependents, even if there is no use for them.

In a Christian nation, slavery either doesn't exist or is infinitely gentler than what actually occurred.

> After farm automation, most plantation owners would have freed them in desperation to escape the room and board costs.

Farm automation means machinery, and slaves can make machinery. Maybe that would involve plantations being turned into factories, but it isn't a slam-dunk that it would involve freeing slaves.

> It has been argued that Reconstruction had to wait for the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, which diverted vast amounts of resources into Southern industrialization.

This is an interesting idea. Who argues that?

> Slaves can build tractors.

I doubt they can do it well. Machinery is hard enough for enthusiastic people who are being showered in money.

> It's my contention that had the South been able to hang on to slavery, it would have found ways to work it into niches it never filled in the real world.

Perhaps. My experience is that skilled industrial jobs are hard. Even in the time of Henry Ford, high wages had to be paid to attract good enough people. If slaves could get the job done, then auto workers at minimum wage could do it, which seems absurd to me.

> In a Christian nation, slavery either doesn't exist or is infinitely gentler than what actually occurred.

Southern slaves were not treated nicely (slavery, duh), but they were treated well in comparison to many other examples of slavery. Elderly, worn-out slaves were a reasonably common sight, despite the fact that their economic output was near zero. Slaves were given the very important job of child care (creating the Southern accent in the process), which is not a job given to a sullen, mistreated drudge. Compare this to the Arabs, who use slaves completely up and plow the bodies under as fertilizer. (See Dubai for a modern example.)

> This is an interesting idea. Who argues that?

TVA, Oak Ridge, Huntsville, and so forth. Huge amounts of resources were poured into creating technology projects from scratch. By the time of Apollo, Southern senators were good at bringing home the money and economic development.

The South certainly couldn't have won the Civil War in the sense of invading and subduing the North. I think odds are good they could have "won" a political victory, in the sense of dragging the conflict out with superior generalship (which they had) until people in the North got tired enough of it and the North simply gave up and recognized the Confederacy, which was all they really wanted in the first place.

It's one thing to concede defeat and peacefully coexist with a tiny country in southeast Asia. That's not a hard sell, politically. A country that represents half of your former territory, borders your capital and has a very long border with you, and has a history of warfare against you is not so easy.

"Russians won wars by throwing themselves in front of tanks, which was not the right mindset for a master criminal."

> I don't believe there's been a single successful western land invasion of Russia since the Vikings.

Not considering the first World War as a successful invasion seems rather unfair. After all, Russia did get knocked out of the war and ceded huge tracts of land.

> Encirclement and passage was one of the lessons the American military learned (sort of) from Stalingard that they later executed in the island hopping campaigns of the Pacific.

I was just reading Machiavelli's "Discourses on Livy" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourses_on_Livy) last night, more exactly a chapter called "Fortresses are generally more injurious than useful":

> But when the prince has not a good army, then fortresses whether within his territory or upon the frontiers are either injurious or useless to him; injurious, because they are easily lost, and when lost are turned against him; and even if they are so strong that the enemy cannot take them, he will march by with his army and leave them in the rear; and thus they are of no benefit, for good armies, unless opposed by equally powerful ones, march into the enemy’s country regardless of cities or fortresses, which they leave in their rear. We have many instances of this in ancient history; and Francesco Maria did the same thing quite recently, when, marching to attack Urbino, he left ten hostile cities behind him without paying the least attention to them.

You can very well replace "fortress" with "battleship" and the idea is the same.

Anyway, I highly recommend the book, and you're mentioning somth about the US Army learning from the Germans' mistakes. Well, I can tell you that they certainly did not learn anything from reading Machiavelli, otherwise they wouldn't have trusted Karzai in Afghanistan (there's a chapter called "How dangerous it is to trust to the representations of exiles"), not to mention trying to conquer peace by bribing everyone involved in ruling present Afghanistan (there's also a chapter for it: "Republics and princes that are really powerful do not purchase alliances by money, but by their valor and the reputation of their armies") or not doing anything about Abu Ghraib ("How dangerous it is for a republic or a prince not to avenge a public or a private injury").

Here's the English translation of this great book: http://oll.libertyfund.org/simple.php?id=775

Thanks for the link...I'll be checking that out.

> You can very well replace "fortress" with "battleship" and the idea is the same.

No, you can't, because the battleship can move and attack your supply lines.

Battleships won the first world war. Not because of any engagement they participated in, but because the Royal Navy stopped German merchant shipping entirely, while the Kriegsmarine only managed to harass British shipping. You cannot go around a battleship when one of the primary points in it's design is to be fast enough to interdict anyone.

A strong defensive emplacement (such as a fortress) provides some advantages, even to a mobile army. If your opponent chooses not to attack it, he has granted you the initiative -- you can move your forces out to attack his at the time of your choosing.

Of course, a battleship, being mobile, does not suffer from the disadvantage of being easy for your opponent to bypass. And a battleship, carrying a stupidly large armament, has the advantage of being able to blow up lots of your opponent's stuff. Its primary disadvantage is its expense, which is why you don't see fleets consisting of only battleships.

That's a fair point, the pointless focus on Stalingrad was folly and a big contributor to the defeat. But the lack of preparedness for the Russian winter (and the impact it would have on the speed of movement) and the inability to capture supplies as they captured terrain both played big roles as well.

Ok come on, there was no need for them to go to war with Russia AT ALL, if Hitler had focused on Britain and waited until the West was completely defeated (a few years at the most), he would not have lost. Russia divided the Germans in a way that was unnecessary.

Britain had the naval and air power to hold off Germany. Russia had sprawling territory and the winter; Britain had the English Channel. Germany would have been better served to win the North Africa campaign; that might have actually left Germany with a defensible position.

On the other hand, the entire purpose of the Nazi regime was to conquer eastern Europe, enslave or exterminate its population, and resettle Germans there. Victory required a successful invasion of Russia.

Yes, if they had taken North Africa, then swept up through the Middle East they would have endless oil, and then it could have been a short hop into Russia from the South.

Well... The opera singing surrender monkeys were supposed to take care of that.

Point of order: In retrospect we can clearly see that the RAF was losing the Battle of Britain. It was within weeks of being completely eliminated by the Luftwaffe, when Hitler, quite unexpectedly for the British, switched to a strategic bombing campaign of major population and industrial centres. If the Luftwaffe had air supremacy, then naval supremacy and invasion would have followed. Invasion would have left very few credible options for any D-Day like operations.

The United states was already giving overt aid to Britain at that point. Had RAF lost and the German invasion of Britain seemed realistic, the USAF would have joined in to prevent that. While it would have taken only weeks to end the RAF, Germany didn't have the shipping capacity to maintain an invasion, and it would have taken months to build.

Also, few considered air power to be actually capable of fighting battleships until the Battle of Taranto, where the effectiveness of air raids surprised almost everyone. The German planners almost certainly didn't believe in the capability of Luftwaffe to destroy the Royal Navy.

"Had RAF lost and the German invasion of Britain seemed realistic, the USAF would have joined in to prevent that."

I've never heard that before - do you have any references? The Nazis declared war on America, not the other way round.

The US Navy was actively fighting the Kriegsmarine on the North Atlantic as early as late 1940, and even before that, US had started providing armaments to bolster the British war effort, and took over the defense of various British holdings to free up forces. They also provided entire cohesive units of equipped volunteers to fight against the Germans on the British Isles, and the Japanese in China. None of these actions were neutral under international law -- the United States was in a state of undeclared war against the axis powers for nearly two years before Pearl Harbor. This all can be found in any reasonably comprehensive history of the second world war, including the wikipedia articles on the Atlantic War and the Sino-Japanese war.

The reason USA didn't join outright was that there was serious domestic opposition to the war, and Roosevelt understood well that he needed his Lusitania to be able to bring America fully into the war. The Germans took all pains to avoid this, and USA only managed to declare war after the Pearl Harbor.

In reality, history rarely contains black-and-white narratives where the one side is the clear aggressor. Had the USA not been actively engaging in combat operations against the Germans and the Japanese, they never would have been stupid enough to pick a fight with the Americans.

But what could the USAAF realistically have been able to do in 1940 to help the British?

Exactly. From where could the USAF operated? I agree that the Americans would liked to have helped resist an invasion but at that time I don't think they would have had the required platform.

> Britain had the naval and air power to hold off Germany. Russia had sprawling territory and the winter; Britain had the English Channel. Germany would have been better served to win the North Africa campaign; that might have actually left Germany with a defensible position.

I firmly believe that the only possible route to German victory would have been capture of Gibraltar soon after the French campaign. German industries sorely needed raw materials, and it's war machine sorely needed oil. The Mediterranean could have provided both, and all the Germans needed to completely secure it would have been the Rock and Suez.

Was the capture of Gibraltar in any way realistic? With Franco joining on the German side, perhaps. The Germans had siege cannons that should have been able to reduce the foundations that Gibraltar stands on into rubble. But Franco had already won his war -- he had little to gain from joining, and a lot to lose.

Without an axis Spain, taking the Rock would essentially have required first attacking Spain. And they had a large, experienced and well-trained army, which would have had good defensive positions on the Pyrenees. I don't know.

The entire Rock of Gibraltar was turned into a fortress during the war. The civilian population was evacuated, and additional tunnels and artillery placed in the rock. I am not sure that the German siege weapons could have reduced a block of granite into rubble.

With sufficient heavy artillery, while you might not be able to breach into the fortifications, you can certainly mess it up enough to stop it from shooting back.

It would not have been necessary to actually take Gibraltar -- only to silence it's guns, and place enough artillery west of it to block the strait.

Encirclement was by no means discovered at Stalingrad! The Germans themselves created plenty of kessels in '39-'43. And the classical example is, of course, Hannibal's strategy at Cannae.

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