George has been dead 65 years now. I wonder if 'WAIKI' copyright has been maintained? In the edited form, it's a great war primer, btw. Somewhat bloodless, but the geometry of mainforce combined arms land warfare is there.

The more I learn about WWII, the more I appreciate Ike. I think Patton probably should have been relieved on Sicily, but I understand why he wasn't. Ike knew why he needed Patton and protected the nut throughout the war. Anyone else would have been fired several times over.
Best,
Tom

If your are not aware of it, of possible interest might be Eisenhower's general starvation order issued upon Germany's surrender and directed at the allied POW camps (and to some degree Germany as well). This came after Ike reclassified German POWs as disarmed enemy forces, thereby taking away any rights they had under the Geneva Convention. This also allowed him to use German POWs as basic slave labor.

Obviously Ike had a vindictive streak in him and believed in total war - forget Grant, think Sherman.

Aren't you going to tell us that Ike intentionally killed one million German POWs?

Now why would you assume that? Ike's general order was controversial, and is generally little know about. But I misspoke comparing Ike to Sherman. I should have compared him to Phil Sheridan, but that's another story - consider it anecdotal backdrop and nothing more old sport.

Post-war prisoner labor may have saved lives, if it got the road net cleared for peacekeeping and relief ops, and the Reich's defeated enemy slaves and torture/starvation victims on the road home.

But yeah, a big lot of Germans, their 'guests', allies and former conquered peoples starved in the Winter of 45-46. It was a starving time in Japan and China too.

I've heard that Gen. Pershing wanted to delay armistice, go on expending US forces to destroy the Kaiser's army in detail at the end of WW1. He wanted to chase them past the border, kill them until the HQ surrendered, to make the point that 'yes, you really did lose this war in a big way'. I refer you to the old saw about 'moral defeat of the enemy'.

Is decimation by artillery better than the death by disease and hypothermia that accompanies short rations in Winter?

There must have been some men who liked both Patton and Eisenhower. The prewar Army was a pretty small world; everyone knew everyone else. Almost all senior American generals in the war had served together many years at much lower ranks before it.

It was known that very few people within the Army disliked Eisenhower. Patton was more controversial, which may not have had exclusively to do with his personality.

My Military History prof was an Ike freak, and I liked to get his goat. But Ike wasn't ever a real combat leader of note. He accomplished his mission as a coalition-maker. He was political as hell - which was appropriate for what he had to do - and proven out by his later Presidency.

Meanwhile Patton was batshit crazy sometimes but he was probably the best tactician the U.S. has ever had. He made plenty of political mistakes (but few tactical ones), but he was a real warfighter - of the "in case of war break glass" variety.

In the end it's just my opinion.

As you may know Hunter, princes and kings would go into battle wearing their finest, including jewelry (to be used latter to ransom them if captured). They did this to inspire their men and ensure they stood out to the rank and file.

George Patton mentioned something similar describing this to his nephew (his wife's sister's son, whose mother Patton may have been sleeping with).

He felt he had created a news and photo journalist's image; acknowledged it was partially his fault; but to continue to do anything less, no matter if he was sick, etc, and to not swagger around in a custom uniform, sometimes wearing two S&W .357mag revolvers (new caliber back then), or occasionally a Colt Peacemaker, would eventually lead the men his command to assume he was finished. And thinking that, they too would soon think they were finished.

Mentally ill? Probably not, though oddly, Patton was dyslexic, and certainly controversial.

However, this is supposed to be about Ike, described to me once to be America's first political general who seemed to grasp how the political nature of an alliance drove what surely should be strictly military decisions concerning strategy - something Patton could not or would not accept.

Even after the Armistice was signed in the last few hours American generals with Pershing's blessing were launching costly and bloody attacks against fortified German positions which had they waited until 11:00 AM they could have walked into without a shot being fired. The British and French were appalled with this callous stupidity since they did the fighting and suffered 96% of the deaths in the war. Gen. Pershing in testifying before Congress on this senseless slaughter showed no remorse and stood behind his remarks that he was trying to impress upon the Germans that they were defeated. The Germans certainly were not impressed since almost all the attacks were easily repulsed and seems to have been a glory hunt on the part of American divisional commanders irritated that the war might end too quickly thus cheating them of recognition.

in the annals of US military folly. thanks for mentioning this - it was a big issue at home in 1919, but quickly supressed and forgotten

Several officers refused to send their guys over the top on 11/11. 11 11 11 by Joseph Persico gives a good account.

Dunno why it wasn't used.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/photosnormandie/3727145210/in/set-72157611749224223/

Cheers,
Tom

Lucky Strike?

Camels - 60 a day.

He's of course welcome to his opinion - and I know he was in the War. But of course he's an opinionated blowhard, which you can learn from any episode of 60 Minutes. But I had the intense displeasure of sitting behind Rooney on a flight many years. He distinguished himself by acting arrogant and being a first class asshole to everyone around him, including the flight crew. He accuses Patton of improprieties to gain personal fame, but after Rooney's performance on the airplane anything he has to say is suspect to me.

No value judgment about Rooney at all on my part - but he was attached to 3rd Army through France and till the end of the war (I think) and saw Patton close-up and had some pretty strong opinions on the guy. Doesn't necessarily negate any of the points you made - including the bat-shit crazy part!

I guess what I'm interested in is less tangible. Did Patton's tactical concept save lives and shorten the war? Did his style do the same, whatgevder that may have been?

As you pointed out, Ike wasn't a battlefield commander, but given the mediocrity of allied generalship as the army and army group level as mentioned here by JPWREL, did Ike's political skills mitigate that, was it irrelevant, or whatever?

Willie and Joe had little patience with Patton's 'mask of the general.'

Is one of my hometown papers. Mauldin was the house cartoonist for decades and alwqays threw in either new or legacy Willie & Joe cartoons at appropriate times and places.

I would have been better off referencing him instead of Rooney - thinks for bringing Mauldin into this thread.

Lots of good stuff here, but this one seems pertinent.

http://www.stripes.com/02/nov02/mauldin/

And some of them almost bring tears too.

Did you mean the one with the totally decrepit jeep and the "You are Now Entering The 3rd Army" sign with a list of fines for bad apperence (no buttons, no shave, etc., signed by "Old Blood & Guts") with the caption:

"Radio th' ol' man we'll be late on account of a thousand-mile detour."

I can see Old Blood & Guts going ballistic over that - certainly a guy who believed his own BS.

Thanks for posting!

I should have proofed the link, but you found your way thru stellar material to find the one. I liked the one where Joe is being held for inspection outside the O-club, explaining that his missing buttons were shot off when he took the town. Or maybe he cut them off to be more 'high speed and streamlined' when eating dirt?

Willie's ever-dented helmet tickles my passion, traumatic brain injury from command mines and vehicle crashes. It makes the news when it our football heroes take TBI to congress, but...

And your point really brings home the tragedy of the kids who have suffered head trauma in Iraq who would have been dead from the same wounds in any other war, including Vietnam. They are such serious and debilitating injuries, almost to the pont that they deserve to be in a category of their own, not just "wounded."

During a Summer vacation Europe with my Parents when I was 12 in 1966 we went to Spain and on every street corner (or so it seemed) there was an amputee selling lottery tickets. It took me a couple of days to realize who they were - civil war vets.

I know this isn't the case with the combat vets on this list, but many people don't consider the wounded; there is a belief that most of them will recover fully and that it isn't all that bad.

I agree.

Patton got lucky with the 3rd Army and damn near didn't get a command at all thanks to his out-of-control behavior on Sicily. Because Monty was also a complete narcissist and nut Coppola's screenplay (Patton) was able to play off the two goofy personalities to create a classic Hollywood good-guy/bad-guy story line. Not an accurate recording of the real story - bad history.

In retrospect he was a cautious and thoughtful president. It could be argued that his administration was full of bellicose cold warriors such as the Dulles brothers. But it could also be posited that given the mood of the country in those years, it would have been difficult to have a less aggressive administration and that he actually kept people like the John and Alan Dulles and Curt LeMay of SAC in check.

His famous military industrial complex speech certainly was not made by a gung-ho "nuke 'em into the stone age" type - and there were plenty of those around back then. It's possible that he saved us all from WW III.

Your critique of top-level generalship is interesting. The Brits were lousy too. Montgomery was a but loony and peaked in 1942 in the desert. Brooke was a stiff and spent more time in bureaucratic warfare against the Americans than the Germans, and Alexander wasn't particularly swift either. Both Ike and Montgomery had superior COS officers in Beetle Smith and Freddie de Guingand. De Guingand probably saved Monty's job in the Fall of 1944 when he was blatantly insubordinate to Ike. It reminds me of that great Fawlty Towers episode (Don't Mention The War) where the Germans remark "how did they ever win?"

Alan Brooke’s great service to the allied cause was to restrain Churchill’s most wild-eyed schemes and to bring realism to allied strategy up to about the autumn of 1943. In fact FDR pretty much bought into Alan Brook’s correct assessment that the western allies could not enter NW Europe until they had established air superiority over the battle space. The American high command responded to this correct assessment by FDR with a great deal of anger and chagrin. FDR, being astute intuitively understood that for the allies to suffer a bloody massacre of a failed and premature invasion would seriously damage his political position here at home and with the Soviet Union. Sadly, many American generals didn’t mind this risk since the majority of divisions would have been British.

The Americans in 1942 were arrogant (which comes from ignorance and a lack of experience) and unrealistic about the capacities of their own freshly formed and raw armies. Brooke understood this and also had to deal with a foolish Anglophobic bigotry of much of the American officer corps.

Brooke understood that neither the British Army (which by and large had a bad war) nor the American Army was in the same class as the veteran Wehrmacht and that they would need overwhelming air superiority along with numerical superiority in men and equipment on the ground to make up for their performance deficit.

Where Brooke missed the boat was insisting on peripheral strategies in the autumn of 1943 when a cross channel landing in the late spring of 1944 became an absolute political necessity. Like many generals Brooke was politically tone deaf and while he might have had a grasp on the larger military issues facing the allies he often couldn’t grasp the political dimension of the struggle.

I think you are being kind to Brooke, After all, even though he had been advocating "the soft underbelly of Europe" since 1914, wasn't Churchill's pushing of the Balkan invasion instead of Roundup/Overlord one of Churchill's wacky ideas?

You certainly are correct when you point out that Americans were arrogant and in too big a hurry and were therefore angry when the Brits managed to get Roundup canceled for 1942 and 43 - for reasons that proved prescient when the Yanks encountered problems due to inexperience in North Africa. But he also insisted on slogging up the Italian boot for no great strategic reason, and opposed Anvil in Provance, which proved to be extremely successful and strategically sound.

That said, I was mainly referring to Brooke's pretty nasty British upper middle-class stiffness and prejudice. His political "tone-deafness" was the opposite of Ike's keen political nose, and I think we would both agree that both these guys had essentially political roles. Of course Brooke wasn't contending with Ike, his Yank counterpart was Marshall with a bit of help from that Anglophobe Ernest King.

No question that Brooke's strategic savvy helped avoid a possibly catastrophic premature invasion of Western Europe, but his support of Churchill's Med policy cost a lot of lives and ate up resources that could have been used in Roundup/Overlord or made Anvil even more effective than it was. And the fight over the aborted idea of a Yugoslavian invasion was just silly. Maybe I'm just thinking about his overall truculence; he used vinegar when Ike used honey.

if the allies had capitalized on the destruction of the Wermacht by the USAAF at the faliase gap (sp) in late summer 44. Instead, says Hastings, there was Montgomery's loony Anhem self-aggrandizement adventure, and a long pause that allowed the Wermacht time to scrape together ersatz combat units.

This is important in its own right - but also remember the holocaust was accellerating in the same period. Easily 1,000,000 could have been saved.

I'm not a military expert, but Patton seems to have always argued for a more audacious blitzkrieg like strategy, with armored thrusts to disrupt German supply lines, etc.

Seems kind of sensible to me.

As much as I enjoy Max Hastings’s armchair generaling the stark unalterable fact facing the allies was one of logistics. They were not in a position to launch major offensives (rather than mere following the retreating Germans eastwards which is essentially what Patton did) until major port facilities were opened up.

In my view, Montgomery’s biggest failure was not his abortive Arnhem operation, which merely demonstrated why he was unsuitable to command a major northern attack into Germany but that he ignored the opening of the Port of Antwerp which was in his sector of responsibility. Ike bears some of the blame here for not ordering a full court press to get the Scheldt cleared and into Antwerp. As it was, the delay gave the Germans enough time to demolish the port facilities to such an extent that it really wasn’t until late winter that the port was at full operation. Had the assets that were wasted at Arnhem been used to get the Scheldt navigable and the port into operation at the earliest possible moment then a secure logistic base would have opened up some options, which were impossible until the supply situation resolved itself.

JSINAIKO, I don’t think we disagree about Brooke. He did bring some needed value to the Anglo-American strategic relationship up till late 43’. BTW, he at first was not keen on Torch (invasion of N. Africa) but came around to that if it was necessary to avoid a bloodbath on the beaches of NW Europe. The Med strategy was really Churchill’s but FDR agreed that after N. Africa they just could not sit around doing nothing while the Russians bled in the east. The Anglo-American armies had to be used and the Med was the obvious place to do it since that’s where they were and there was not enough shipping to move them to another theater.

The Italian campaign tied down more allied troops than German and I don’t know of many military historians, which would consider that campaign well managed particularly by Clark or adding much to the eventual defeat of Germany. They probably should have stopped at Rome and moved the bulk of the forces to southern France as you say. Interestingly, had we not capture the port of Marseilles when we did then we would really have been in trouble because a huge amount of supply had to come thought that location because of Montgomery’s incompetence in taking Antwerp expeditiously.

Well put, as usual.

I'm basing my view of Brooke on Churchill's selective inclusion of many of Brooke's memos and minutes in The Second World War. Maybe it has something to do with me having lived in the UK and knowing the attitudes and personality types that are represented by Brooke and really not liking them much. So perhaps it's more of a personal thing with me.

Given that Market-Garden has been referenced (not by you), my sense is that Ike could have vetoed it, and so could Brooke or Marshall, but in the end the combined staff would not really have been in a position to cancel Market-Garden because that was a tactical move of the sort that was generally left to the theater and/or army group commander.

Your criticism of Mark Clark is also well taken. After his failure of nerve in the first day or two of the Anzio operation made Italy more or less irrelevant he fought tooth and nail against Anvil and did his best to truncate that essential operation.

Your comments about Torch are also correct - FDR knew it was essential to get American boots on the ground in front of the Wehrmacht. As it turned out, it the "blooding" of the US army in N. Africa was an essential component of the creation of a competent fighting force.

Well put, as usual.

I'm basing my view of Brooke on Churchill's selective inclusion of many of Brooke's memos and minutes in The Second World War. Maybe it has something to do with me having lived in the UK and knowing the attitudes and personality types that are represented by Brooke and really not liking them much. So perhaps it's more of a personal thing with me.

Given that Market-Garden has been referenced (not by you), my sense is that Ike could have vetoed it, and so could Brooke or Marshall, but in the end the combined staff would not really have been in a position to cancel Market-Garden because that was a tactical move of the sort that was generally left to the theater and/or army group commander.

Your criticism of Mark Clark is also well taken. After his failure of nerve in the first day or two of the Anzio operation made Italy more or less irrelevant he fought tooth and nail against Anvil and did his best to truncate that essential operation.

Your comments about Torch are also correct - FDR knew it was essential to get American boots on the ground in front of the Wehrmacht. As it turned out, it the "blooding" of the US army in N. Africa was an essential component of the creation of a competent fighting force.

RD, in my view the RAF and USAAF tactical support operations were absolutely essential for the progress of the performance challenged British and American ground forces. No question about it. However, the Strategic air offensive by Bomber Command and the USAAF really was fought as a separate war and did not produce significant results on the ground until the ground war had been decided by the Soviets. In fact German reached their highest war productions in 1944 despite massive allied bombing.

The Strategic bombing campaign greatest contribution was the winter of 1944’s unanticipated destruction of the tactical Luftwaffe in the west allowing the British and Americans to gain crucial air superiority over the battle space, particularly Normandy. However, from a political point of view the bombing campaign was essential in that there really was no other front of significance (including the Med.) to demonstrate to the Russians that we were carrying a major share of the burden. Both Churchill and FDR were concerned that unless we did something substantial until were ready to open our main front in NW Europe that the Russians if pressed hard enough might make a separate peace. This is not as far fetched as it sounds since Stalin did make some overtures to the Germans in the summer of 1942 as the southern front collapsed in the Caucuses.

that pointed out to Navy that, at the rate we were losing ships along the Atlantic seaboard in 1942, we weren't going to be able to get the necessary men and material to England for an invasion? That's the way I heard it, I think from more than one source. I grant you that the D. of Army had time on its hands that year, relative to the Navy, but it shouldn't have taken captured U-boat pics to realize that leaving the lights on at the Jersey shore was a bad idea.

When the war began, Adm. King refused to form convoys along the Atlantic coast and Gulf of Mexico and allowed independent ship sailings until the bloodbath became so sever that it forced his hand as a result of public outrage and actual strategic impairment. His excuse was that he did not have enough escorts to protect those convoys. The British who knew this business far better than King (preoccupied with the Pacific) told him that convoy’s lower ship losses even if they are poorly protected versus no convoys. King like so many American officers at this time was a hard a fast Anglophobe and likely because this advice came from the Admiralty was determined not to follow it. King eventually sobered up and starting with tanker convoys and found their sinking’s dropped sharply.

Yep. When Jimmy Dolittle took over from Ira Eaker he understood that the real use for the 15th and 8th USAAFs was as objects to draw in the Luftwaffe. Of course this could not be an effective tactic until the P-51 - an aircraft with the performance to match the best the Germans had to offer (until the jets) and with the range to do it over Berlin and other cities in the heart of Germany - came online in the first quarter of 1944.

There was massive resistance by the USAAF to:

A. Putting the Merlin engine into the P-51, thus making it the best high altitude escort fighter of its era. After all, it was a Brit idea so it couldn't have much value! And it meant admitting that the darlings of the USAAF - the P-38 especially - would get knocked down a peg in the ETO. The heaters in the P-38 were bad and guys literally lost fingers to frostbite while flying them at 30,000' in the ETO. Very effective in the South Pacific where the altitudes were lower, the weather warmer, and the 2 engines meant survivability over the vast stretches of water there. Also their Allison engines - the same as priginally in the P-51 - weren't as well suited to the high operational altitudes in the ETO.

B. Superseding the P-38 and P-47 for massive P-51 production once it had been re-engined. It reminds me of the refusal of the army to send Pershing tanks (not so great but they had a big 90mm gun) to the ETO to counter the Panthers and Tigers because most of the bridging wasn't adequate to hold their weight, so thousands of kids continued to get fried to a crisp in their Shermans (AKA The Ronson).

Countless lives were lost over Germany because the USAAF procurement operation refused to consider the Mustang - it could have been in place almost a year earlier.

IMO the strategic bombing advocates were damn near criminal in their resistance to close support and their insistence that they could win the war by targeting ball bearings or whatever. They gained a bit of traction during the post D-Day oil campaign, but that was accomplished after the virtual destruction of the Luftwaffe by 8th Fighter Command P-51s over Berlin using the bombers as decoys (more or less). Bombing the means of production whether the ball bearing works at Schweinfurt (a huge defeat for the 8th) or the actual Messerschmidt and Focke Wulf production lines was ineffective. The oil campaign had some impact.

Ike had to fight tooth and nail to get the 8th to soften up Normandy in April, May, and early June 1944 - the strategic bombing mafia thought that futile raids over replaceable factories in Germany were more important than D-Day. This was about ideology not letting the facts get in the way. Those facts were brutally brought home by George Kennan and J. K. Gilbreath in their post-war Strategic Bombing Survey. Of course it didn't stop us from building the B-36 and other white elephants.

In February 1951 the Marine Air Wing in Korea was put under the command of Pat Partridge of the Far East Air Force (FEAF). the 1st Marine Division had a cow and loudly complained to Matt Ridgeway; the Marines had (and continue to have) an intimate relationship with their attached close support air wings. Ridgeway regretted that he could do nothing and when the Marines went to Partridge he lectured them about how interdiction is more effective than close support. Again, damn near criminal. Marine air had a great rep in Korea, the FEAF musch less so.

So inattention to close support by the USAAF and the USAF is a tradition that seems to continue to this day. Didn't they try to get rid of the A-10 Warthog before the first Gulf War proved its value?