One thing I will give Churchill was that he was far more realistic, and far less trusting, when it came to dealing with Stalin than Roosevelt was and Churchill accurately predicted the Cold War. But yes, I believe Brooke had to tell Churchill how it was on many occasions in order to prevent his more silly ideas and appointments from coming to fruition. As it was, Churchill’s Mediterranean first strategy was pure lunacy…
Rick Atkinson goes into the US generals chomping at the bit to get into France in early 1942 in An Army at Dawn. He also goes into detail of the early antagonism between the British who saw Americans as amateurish upstarts and the Anglophobic US officers who in turn saw the British as stodgy defeatists frustrating any serious offensive planning while the Soviets were dying in droves --even though a cross channel invasion was completely unrealistic for many reasons. Not least of which was that the US Army was still in training & expanding rapidly, lacked heavy weapons as of yet, and had little or no combat experience below the senior ranks.
Even if they had gotten a foothold during “Operation Sledgehammer,” the Wehrmacht could easily have contained the area for years on end without seriously disrupting the German armies in the USSR. Atkinson concludes that in the initial arguments, the British were right. Neither of the Allies was ready to mount major offensive combat operation in Fortress Europe against a powerful foe rich in both armor and airpower. But he then criticizes the British for continuing to argue against the liberation of France until almost the last moments and pursuing a futile invasion corridor towards southern Germany (Austria) through the mountain passes of Italy.
I do not think Churchill staged Dieppe just to prove a point however. There was something of trying to force the Germans to defend the coast(s) with as many troops as possible and the operation was supposed to be essentially a much larger scale version of the “commando raids” the British had been mounting all along…
Yes i agree , but something that bother me is that Goering had the same defect of promising miracles as well Hitler and others did . The greatest one was Stalingrad when he personally promised Hitler that Luftwaffe with ease would supply the whole army from air a promise that assured Hitler to leave the army in the trap . Does Goering didn’t know that he can’t supply it ?
I don’t know anything about that aspect of Stalingrad and Goering’s involvement so I can’t comment on it, but it’s at least consistent with his overconfident attitude to the Luftwaffe’s contribution to the possible invasion of Britain in the Battle of Britain air war period.
Maybe both instances were cases of hubris and or unwillingness by Goering to be seen by Hitler as unable to deliver the power which might have been expected from a Luftwaffe which had benefited hugely from Nazi arms growth, albeit very weakly in the bomber area compared with what the Allies would soon produce and use against Germany.
Building upon my earlier comments about the lack of higher staff training and experience of Hitler, Goering falls into the same category of someone who lacks all relevant training and experience to command a national air force, regardless of his personal achievements as a WWI pilot.
There are no commanders on the Allied side comparable with Hitler and Goering as military commanders because all the Allied senior commanders achieved their positions after long training and experience rather than through the political thuggery and chicanery which brought Hitler and Goering to positions well beyond their military and strategic experience and ability.
Maybe the question better asked would be, what if Albert Goering came to power-Now thats another story about another Brother of Herman Goering…
Albert Goering - saviour of victims of the tyranny his brother helped create - was imprisoned for several years after the war for his name alone. During the post-war-years he had many difficulties, the name Goering had become an almost impossible handicap. Grateful survivors, rescued by Albert Goering, helped him survive bitter years of joblessness. He married several times and died in 1966, after working as a designer in a construction firm in Munich.
Its such a shame that they imprisoned the poor guy just for having a surname same as Herman Goering…
That’s a good post Herman, I didn’t know about “The Good Brother.” It seems he was largely pardoned after Nuremberg, and a brief internment. But the Czechs rearrested him as he did work at the Skoda Works, but evidently committed acts of sabotage and saved Jews all the while…
I’m impressed.
You know, a very very good movie about Oskar Schindler was made (Schindler’s List), and another movie, Defiance, about the Bielski brothers.
Well maybe it’s time for a movie about Albert Goering. If he did what they said he did, he deserves to have the real facts come out.
This link ought to wake some people up:
http://www.auschwitz.dk/albert.htm
and another:
http://socyberty.com/history/heroes-of-the-holocaust-and-their-stories-of-courage-two/
I hope one day they declare him one of the “Righteous among the Nations”.
And let us pray, if we ever have to drink from that awful cup, we have the strength of such as Albert Goering and Schindler.
Deaf
Hitler NEVER believed to its general, Nick.
The any military professional general confirm this point in its memours, from Manstaint to Guderian.
Hitler never trusted to generals, and suspected them all in potential treason.
He bit believed, or made the pose he believed to Goering, due to its personal relations- Goering was his friend and a member of NS from most beginning. He was near Hitler in Beer Hall Putsch.
He was actualy much smarter then is usially considered. Even in Nurenberg tribunal he often put the American general prosecutor in stupid position by his ability to think:)
Goering endeed had deserved the popularity as chief of Luftwaffe for the first time.
He didn’t won the Battle for Britain , coz it was unpossible to win the war by pure aviation. But he definitelly terrorised the British island pretty effective. And brits can’t answer proper at least till 1943.
The Luftwaffe was a brightest side of Wermacht , i mean it was probably the most effective part of GErman military mashine.They has done all the possible and unpossible to stop the Allies strategic offensive.
And Goering endeed made a lot of work for it.
And i don’t really think the Goering lie to Hitler was a true resault of final devastation of Luftwaffe in last days of war.Finaly , it was initially Hitler who obsessed by Total war, which absorbed too much resourses for Germany.The Goering Luftwaffe was still functional even after caputilation of GErmany.
I’t not i try to admire by Goering, he was a hard Nazis and he deserved the death.
But i have not the tend to underestimate him.
I have to admit, I have a reluctant admiration for Hermann Göering—but he deserved death—just like the guy who sits out in the car waiting for the bank to be held up. The teller is killed—everyone is guilty, whether they pulled the trigger or not. Probably a lame analogy, however.
If so, why wasn’t the same ‘justice’ and penalty applied to others equally guilty of the same crimes?
One of the charges against Goering related to use of slave labour, yet Werner von Braun was just as complicit in it in his rocket program. But he was taken to America and became an American citizen a bare ten years after the war and a bare ten years after his complicity in the same crimes that Goering committed.
If Goering had special knowledge of some air force or other matter which America thought would have given it superiority over the Soviets, he wouldn’t have been prosecuted.
Goering undoubtedly deserved to be tried as a war criminal according to the Allied standards created for the war crimes trials, but then so did an awful lot more who weren’t but who the Allies could and should have tried.
In a sense Goering was a victim of unfair victor’s justice, in that he was not treated equally before the law the Allies had created to deal with what the Allies determined to be Nazi war criminals.
We needed Werner von Braun and his team’s expertise—thank God the Russians didn’t get to them before we did. It was obvious that Stalin was going to gobble up as much of an exhausted Europe as he could, and Churchill was well aware of that fact. As it was, the Soviets got their hands on quite a few of Hitler’s scientists. Throughout the remainder of the 1940s and into the 1950s, it was probably, 'Our German scientists can beat your German scientists!’
How many ex-Nazis served the Allied occupying authorities and later the Federal Republic? Unless we were going to completely decimate Germany, it was political, and necessary, some overlooking. Obviously, the high-profile Nazi war criminals had to be tried and go to the block.
FDR’s Secretary Morgenthal wanted to make a cow pasture out of Germany—at best, something like an impoverished agricultural country. Later on, de Gaulle and Der Alte, Konrad Adenauer, had the wisdom and foresight to come together and say, Enough is enough!
Wasn’t that a century old French desire?
How far in history do you want to go back? If Bismark hadn’t demanded Alsace-Lorraine in additional to war reparations from France in 1870, perhaps the French would have paid the money and wouldn’t have had to get this territory back. Then, following Imperial Germany’s defeat in 1918, the French not only took Alsace-Lorraine back, but the victors squeezed Germany dry. The inequities of Versailles and Germany’s crippling debt gave Hitler and his Nazis a very persuasive argument.
That’s a pragmatic American or Western / anti-Soviet view. It’s the same reason that some of the bastards at Harbin were never tried and that some went on to great and profitable post-war careers in Japan, because the Americans thought those sadistic bastards had gained useful chemical and bacteriological warfare information from their vile ‘research’ on, among others, American POWs. They hadn’t, just like their Nazi counterparts hadn’t with equally pointless and cruel ‘experiments’.
The principles of justice ought to ensure that everybody accused of such terrible crimes stood trial.
Political reality is that nobody gives a shit about justice if the political advantage outweighs it.
That’s the way it is, but it doesn’t mean it’s just or moral, or that I have to accept it, not least because the war was fought supposedly to allow good and justice to triumph over evil and injustice.
Why?
If the underlings who did the dirty work weren’t brought to account for their crimes, why try only the bosses who ordered it?
Applying similar principles to, say, organised crime nowadays we’d ignore the crooks who kill people and try only the bosses, on the rare occasions they’re brought to trial.
If one of my loved ones was murdered by a low level crook or a Nazi underling, I’d want that bastard tried a lot more than his boss.
Saw a documentary on Goering tonight which said he failed to see the potential of jet aircraft.
If only he’d been smart enough to see it and to be seen by the Allies as having unique knowledge in that area he’d probably have avoided trial.
With a bit of luck he might have ended up in charge of NASA.
Yes and he had to see it in the early war years, in 1944 it was already late for development , but the problem how to produce many jet fighters i think was still on the table as well as the problem with the tank production , simply the germans didn’t have enough industrial capacity compared to US for example . So i think they had to choose between aircraft or tanks or other equipment because they didn’t had the capacity to produce all at once like the USSR or US .
Albert Speer, in Inside the Third Reich, wanted jet fighter planes. Hitler, on the other hand, and he had the final word, wanted to put German resources into long-range bombers–targeted at New York City.
The older I get, the more I realize that, short of the Second Coming, this world’s not going to be equitable. That’s the way it is.
I have wondered, would we use any ‘beneficial’ knowledge gained by those horrific Nazi concentration-camp experiments, a la Dr. Mengele? The argument being, well the ‘patients’ are long dead, so why not?
Those in the know have examined those experiments and have never found anything useful in them.
The problem with this mentality is obvious. Stalin had 2.5 million Poles deported to Siberia in 1939-1941 and only 1/4 million survived. Infact at least 1 million were dead by 1941. That puts him ahead of Hitler in sheer barbarity at that time :rolleyes: :evil: :shock:Who in the west was going to proscute Stalin and his minions during the Nurmberg trials for crimes against Humanity [or the Poles to be more specific]? 
:evil:
Face it all of war is extension of Politics
Clausewitz? 
It’s true of course.