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Bad ideas in war

The Japanese suicide thing

It guarantees that your whole system/institution overall can't "learn" from things that have already gone wrong, and your decision-making ranks are as full as possible of people with as little experience as possible, while incentivizing them to avoid risks.
 
HansMustermann said:
OK, different topic.

I have before criticized German generals like Halder or even the famous Rommel for not understanding strategic goals. Like, Halder overriding Hitler's orders and going for a random line through Russia (that included going after Moscow instead of the Caucasus oil fields) or Rommel started a push towards the Suez Canal even though the Brits had closed it on their own (to not risk the raids of the Italian Navy) and his only actual strategic goal was only to keep Italy from dropping out of the war.

Some months ago I was listening to an actual historian (dumbly I can't remember who), who said something along the lines that Germany didn't have a strategic thinking school in WW2, they only had operational-level thinking. Like, at best their planning is at the level of

1. Win this OPERATION.
2. ???
3. Miracle happens here.
4. WIN!!!

Not in those exact word, but no planning actually got above the level of operational.

And everything clicked in for me. They had moved from WW1 tactical thinking (which already explains WW1), to interwar operational thinking. Literally nobody (in the military) than Hitler actually planned around strategic objectives, nor around achieving them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Hitler was good. He was a psychopath and one of the most evil people ever. I'm just saying that his military was even worse at understanding what is the POINT of thrusting in a particular direction, they only ever learned HOW to do it.
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IIRC Hitler's stupidity/madness was ultimately one of the Allies' greatest weapons. I think his generals and strategists probably were capable, but he was not, and he was so all-powerful nobody dared disagree more than a little, if that.
 
bigred said:
IIRC Hitler's stupidity/madness was ultimately one of the Allies' greatest weapons. I think his generals and strategists probably were capable, but he was not, and he was so all-powerful nobody dared disagree more than a little, if that.
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I'm sorry, but blaming Hitler for all of Germany's failures is a post-war idiocy where we allowed the surviving German generals to exonerate themselves. Hitler was hardly infallible as far as military decisions went, but he was also not the bad ideas machine he is made out to be. Some of his decisions were based on strategic need (oil fields), some were just obstinance being the right move (i.e. ordering no retreat in the first Winter because it would have turned into a rout). As the war went on, his decisions did become worse and worse but by that point no decision would change the overall tide.
 
Hitler was neither stupid or mad.

Self serving post war memoirs written by German generals seeking to absolve themselves of blame are responsible for most of the claims, along with Harder's war diaries which are mostly fiction.

Saying he was mad absolves him of responsibility for his crimes.
 
bigred said:
IIRC Hitler's stupidity/madness was ultimately one of the Allies' greatest weapons. I think his generals and strategists probably were capable, but he was not, and he was so all-powerful nobody dared disagree more than a little, if that.
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Despite the post war propoganda there really was nobody in the Heer that came out of WW2 well. Most generals were either lickspittles or too focused on their narrow areas of competency to grasp the wider strategic needs of the armed forces, never mind the bigger moral implications of Germany waging war on the world.
 
Andy_Ross said:
Hitler was neither stupid or mad.

Self serving post war memoirs written by German generals seeking to absolve themselves of blame are responsible for most of the claims, along with Harder's war diaries which are mostly fiction.

Saying he was mad absolves him of responsibility for his crimes.
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THIS. Of course Halder's memoirs after the war weren't going to say that he was stupid enough to not even understand what a strategic goal is. They're gonna say that he coulda taken Moscow if only that meddling Hitler didn't override it and make him go in '42 after the actual strategic goals he was told in early '41. (Never mind actual Russian correspondence during the war saying that, yeah, losing Moscow doesn't change anything for them.)

Nor is he gonna say that his army actually committed war crimes (after being saved by the British from Nürnberg) or that like the other top generals he was receiving regular bribes under the table, so to speak, to stay on Adolf's side.

You have to understand that it was a USEFUL fiction for the allies too, which is why they let him do it and in fact, edit the other memoirs. The idea that, oh yeah, we got the guys who know how to defeat the Russians, was what everyone needed to hear as the Cold War was setting in.
 
HansMustermann said:
THIS. Of course Halder's memoirs after the war weren't going to say that he was stupid enough to not even understand what a strategic goal is. They're gonna say that he coulda taken Moscow if only that meddling Hitler didn't override it and make him go in '42 after the actual strategic goals he was told in early '41. (Never mind actual Russian correspondence during the war saying that, yeah, losing Moscow doesn't change anything for them.)

Nor is he gonna say that his army actually committed war crimes (after being saved by the British from Nürnberg) or that like the other top generals he was receiving regular bribes under the table, so to speak, to stay on Adolf's side.

You have to understand that it was a USEFUL fiction for the allies too, which is why they let him do it and in fact, edit the other memoirs. The idea that, oh yeah, we got the guys who know how to defeat the Russians, was what everyone needed to hear as the Cold War was setting in.
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Halder didn't edit his diaries, he was writing fiction even at the time. His sequence of events and exchanges at command meetings and planning groups from 41 onwards are at odds with other published contemporary sources.

There's a reason he got fired.
 
No, I mean he was the editor of the other generals' memoirs. Who, granted, were also writing self-aggrandizing fiction.
 
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Speaking of...

"Amateurs talk about tactics, professional talk about logistics."

And if you thought I was talking about Germany and ending up skipping on winter uniforms, because they have transport capacity for either that OR ammo... err... yes, that qualifies too. But then there's stuff like Japan, which didn't even see a need for its soldiers to EAT. For Germany, the soldiers eating their horses in Stalingrad to not starve, was a desperate measure. For Japan, that was the PLAN from the start.
 
HansMustermann said:
Speaking of...

"Amateurs talk about tactics, professional talk about logistics."

And if you thought I was talking about Germany and ending up skipping on winter uniforms, because they have transport capacity for either that OR ammo... err... yes, that qualifies too. But then there's stuff like Japan, which didn't even see a need for its soldiers to EAT. For Germany, the soldiers eating their horses in Stalingrad to not starve, was a desperate measure. For Japan, that was the PLAN from the start.
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It was the key to their rapid advance through jungle and mountain terrain.

Move fast, outflank and capture rear areas before stores can be pulled back.

That's why the advance in to India collapsed so spectacularly at the Battle of the Admin Box.
They didn't capture the supplies and after being fought to a standstill and failing to defeat the besieged British and Indian forces they had no food and had to withdraw.
From that point it was defeats all the way and almost the entire army ended up literally starving to death by the time they withdrew all together.
 
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The Great Zaganza said:
no use in war.
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Proximity fuse is what made heavy AA actually effective.

Plans and early prototypes of the Proximity Fuse were part of the technology package the UK sent to America when they joined the war, along with the Cavity Magnetron which resulted in the development on millimetric radar, another 'wonder weapon'.

I would include as wonder weapons, High Frequency Direction Finding (HuffDuff) and VHF multiplexing for direct talk between ships (Radio Telephone). These last two were the key to coordinating multi ship, escort group attacks on U-boats and in their own way were 'wonder weapons' that played a large part in winning the Battle of the Atlantic.
 
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Nukes are no use.

I'm fine with proximity fuses.

And no, nukes were not necessary to make Japan surrender.
Their point was to intimidate the Soviets
 
Nukes weren't strictly necessary to make Japan surrender, but they were probably the optimal solution to that problem. And they also had the advantage of intimidating the Soviets. So actually a great idea in war.

Project Pluto, on the other hand, was a terrible idea in war, which is why it never got off the ground. Looks like it might be a great idea for peacetime, though.
 
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