For a long time now, military history has been progressively revised until it’s almost incoherent. This is particularly the case in World War 2, where much effort has gone into basically debunking everything and everyone. Someone wasn’t what history claimed them to be. Certain weapons were much better or worse than imagined.
Um… No.
All sides provided a lot of disinformation during the war. The Allies were no exception. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to focus on German revisionism, which is by far the worst and most egregious. Decades have gone into stating that effectively nobody in German uniform was what they were supposed to be in postwar histories. This has reached the point of absurdity.
At this stage, reading the histories you could be forgiven for thinking:
- France was apparently beaten by the pixies in 1940, not the Germans.
- The chronically dysfunctional, corrupt Third Reich was some sort of super-efficient altruistic dynamo fighting a war run by publicists for generals. Many of the reactionaries in the German military hierarchy, in fact, were highly obstructive and pre and postwar very hostile to certain generals. Guderian, Rommel, and Manstein were therefore solely media inventions.
- Guderian in particular never gave credit to anyone else and overstated his own role in everything.
- Manstein was somehow responsible for Stalingrad.
- Rommel was a chronic publicity seeker.
- The Russian campaign was overstated as a military problem. Everything could all have been fixed with a few band-aids. It was those generals who made it all go wrong. So there.
These are just some of the many tediously and obviously wrong points made by neophytes. (We’ll leave out the other debunking efforts, like the 88mm was harmless to tanks, when it was literally slaughtering British tanks in the desert, the Rhineland, etc. It’s a sorry saga.)
Point by point:
France 1940: The German military achievements simply cannot be disputed. Rommel and Guderian were undeniably at the very front of the drive to the sea from start to finish. No hype, no possibility of contradiction, plenty of witnesses. Manstein, the architect of the plan, was relegated to an infantry corps, similar to giving Napoleon a job mucking out stables at Austerlitz. It’s unclear what the debunking is supposed to prove, but whatever it may be, it doesn’t.
The Third Reich as a publicist: The Nazis didn’t invent Germany or the German military. They maintained a ramshackle network of private contractors to build or not build whatever the military needed. As Balck points out in his book Order in Chaos, they didn’t even have the industrial capacity for high-volume tank production, a crippling problem from 1939 onwards. The propaganda was just that – Propaganda. The generals had no option but to participate. The Nazi-made myths were never more than a drum-banging exercise, according to the Germans during the war, who soon learned to disregard them. Why don’t modern “historians” react the same way?
Guderian: Guderian was famous for more than his tanks. He was famous for a ferocious personality when annoyed, which was often enough. He was in well-documented constant conflict with a range of senior officers, and Hitler, from about 1930 onwards. Who else ever yelled at Hitler? It couldn’t be a very long list. He does give a lot of credit to his early supporters like his commander Lutz and many others, throughout Panzer Leader. That particular criticism is an outright lie. As for self-promotion, like Rommel and Manstein, he hardly needed it.
Guderian is also supposed to have “only” focused on the British tank writers when formulating his armoured warfare doctrine. He read De Gaulle as well, at the very least. The British and French were doing most if not all of the tank development in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Was he supposed to ignore this? Refer to people nobody had ever heard of when trying to promote the tanks as a working concept for Germany? How do you promote a military idea with no reference to other possibly hostile armies? Why would you present an incomprehensible, unverifiable argument based entirely on theory to support your own case, and based on what, precisely?
Manstein: After France, Manstein very successfully led panzers in the north of Russia. He was then transferred to the Crimea, to take the region and the very heavily fortified city of Sebastopol. Having been given this assignment, he was then deprived of any tanks and took ages to get any heavy artillery or anything else he needed. According to the execrable Guido Kopp, the months of brutal fighting were all his fault. Presumably he should have used pixie dust rather than tired, overstretched, undersupplied soldiers.
After an epic campaign, including fighting off a Russian invasion of the Crimea over the straits of Kerch, he was posted to take over the mess of Stalingrad. Some genius online is saying that Manstein was responsible for Stalingrad? How? He was nowhere near the place nor responsible for any of the units in the area when it was surrounded. This pitiful wanking exercise is supposed to be actual criticism?
Rommel: Rommel was one of the best-known officers in the German army in the 1920s, never mind the 1940s. A proven combat commander with years of successes as an infantry officer, sometimes entrusted with thousands of men although only a lieutenant, he had no need to prove his credentials to anyone. Proof of skill came when the former infantry commander, with no experience of tanks, led the “Ghost Division” in the attack on France. Most of the criticism at the time came from the German rear areas, and it’s exactly the same, nearly verbatim, as the so-called “modern” criticism; obviously wrong, and out of synch with actual military results. Like Guderian, he simply led from the front, as always in his entire career, and achieved what he did.
The criticism of Rommel is outstandingly incorrect. Another critic says he was at Sedan crossing the Meuse in 1940 when he was at Dinant, quite some distance away, and just incidentally, in another country, too. This seems typical of his many detractors – Always wrong; it’s just a question of how wrong.
You’d think a “publicity seeker” would have put in a lot more work than he did on that side of things. Most footage is at the front or in areas under his command, rarely elsewhere. There’s an interview of Rommel in front of a camera in1942-3. He looks extremely uncomfortable, a bit fidgety, and very conscious of the fact he should be with his command, not keeping a camera company. If anyone bothers to track his movements, (see The Rommel Papers) he didn’t have a lot of time for seeking publicity, either.
The Russian campaign: Everyon’es an expert on the Russian campaign, which just happens to be where most of the debunking of people happens, too. I’m not going to write a book on this:
- Severe casualties were becoming apparent from mid -August 1941, according to Guderian in Panzer Leader. This is after about 6 weeks of the actual campaign.
- The OKW couldn’t pretend not to know about the casualties and rapidly escalating equipment shortages, because they had constant reports. The generals were fighting a massive, if clumsy, enemy in battles with steadily fewer forces, tanks wearing out, etc. This makes them bad or at least naughty generals, according to some cretins somewhere. The rule of thumb here is that after June 22 1941 the Germans are losing people at an incredible rate. The German military archives are open. Modern historians also have access to that information. Why isn’t it being checked? Oh, and by the way – Who was responsible for managing unit strengths, replacements, and equipment? The front or the rear? Why is this not mentioned? Do you even know whom you’re debunking?
- The supply situation was impossible at best, worse than impossible at worst. It was an absurdity. During the Stalingrad relief operation, there was a rickety rail line connecting Army Group South to Germany. The best information the Stalingrad relief force had was that the rail line might not be occupied by the Russians. It was. That’s how efficient the support for an entire Army Group, Manstein’s, actually was. (See Rauss, Panzers on the Eastern Front) Later during the war, bizarre stats like a single artillery piece to cover a 40km front appear regularly. Ammunition levels, non-existent is yet another popular refrain. Yet the fault is always with the debunking targets, not the Nazis?
- The German army was expected to achieve a vast undertaking, then basically denied the means – or often even the basics – to achieve it or even survive it. Nobody listened to the soldiers. There’s a not-famous-enough story of von Ribbentrop in 1945 showing up at the front, then about 100km away from Berlin, and asking a local commander, (von Luck), if it was possible the Russians could actually get to Berlin. Well? Why doesn’t this putrid example of Nazi intellect get a mention in the debunking process? Whose side are the debunkers on? From the look of this sea of disingenuous drivel, not even their own.
- Where should the responsibility lie for these situations which are being debunked with such naïve zeal? The people fighting, freezing, and dying? The commanders with nothing to work with in godforsaken places with their commands rotting away before their eyes while dealing with idiots? …Or the people enabling the disasters from thousands of kilometres away? You’re not debunking that at all, are you?
I’m not sure if the debunking is just belated anti-Nazism or more likely, the exact opposite; deflecting blame away from the Nazis by loading it on to the generals. There’s something very unlikely about so many obvious, easily disprovable errors, especially when ignoring so many hard facts and military achievements. The observed fact is that the debunking always goes against all the military realities on a truly monotonous basis.
You’ll have noticed I’m quoting many old firsthand German sources here. There’s a reason for that. Soldiers know their personal wars far better than anyone else. They may or may not have known what was happening a few feet away at some times, but they’re experts on their own ground and what they were doing themselves. Few people writing their memoirs claim to be omniscient. They can’t be, and they know they can’t. These guys rather conspicuously don’t claim omniscience – particularly when referring to the people supposedly on their side back in the cuckoo nest in Berlin. Yet the debunkers are infallible? I’d say not.
They also don’t say black is white or say that up is down. What were the military achievements? Who achieved them? Does anyone on the other side deny those achievements? If not, why not? Did millions of people die just so a few tedious, arguably deranged, denialists can get some publicity for themselves?
A lot of information has come out after the war. It’s not a great look for any side. The Allied catastrophes are invariably glossed over by some, but never by the soldiers who were there. The Germans were more than clear enough about their feelings at their massive casualties, if very understated in many cases. The staggering Russian death toll is usually mentioned, then pig-ignorantly forgotten as any sort of real issue by so many “historians”. That war practically annihilated an entire generation of Russians; hardly gets a mention by debunking.
How many collections of double standards and selective agendas can you call “military history”? To hell with history being written by the victors; it’s supposed to be written by people who know what they’re talking about and can at least pretend to have facts to back them up.
This is what really bothers me – Everyone’s overlooking the agendas of the writers. Any fool can write a book to order proving someone’s a hero or a saint. It’s called fiction. History is supposed to be fact, and it needs to be fact.
To deny history is to deny humanity. It’s that simple, and that dangerous.
