Thanks for all the suggestions. I just ordered a couple of books.
[quote]GDollars37 wrote:
For the operational and tactical side of it, “Stormtroop Tactics” by Bruce Gudmundsson is very good, and Gordon Corrigan’s “Mud, Blood and Poppycock” is very readable, although I thought he was kind of making an argument that’s already becoming the consensus among academic military historians…[/quote]
I take it you would think “Storm of Steel” or anything by Ernst Junger would be too biased to then?..Same with any of those stories about young Rommel’s stormtroop activities?..
[quote]GDollars37 wrote:
I admire Churchill, and Headhunter’s stuff is unhinged, but Sir Winston was looking out for the British Empire first. Would that our politicians had the same attitude.[/quote]
And what became of Britain’s great empire after the world wars? Irony of ironies.
I suggest you give HeadHunter’s material a second go.
He is right.
Buchanan is also on target.
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
dhickey wrote:
Headhunter wrote:
dhickey wrote:
In Churchill’s autobiography, he talks about arranging things so American sailors would be deliberatly put at risk to hopefully bring America into WWI.
He talked about charging surfacing subs, to force German crews to always fire from underwater, so they’d hopefully make a mistake and hit an American vessel. He was a criminal.
.
Please post the citation for me from “Churchill’s autobiography.” Not from a screwy website. It should be in the public domain, say in Gutenberg.
Title and page number will do nicely.
Thank you.[/quote]
Churchill, The World Crisis, pp 274-75
“The first British countermove, made on my responsibility…was to deter the Germans from surface attack. The submerged U-boat had to rely increasingly on underwater attack and thus ran the greater risk of mistaking neutral for British ships and of drowning neutral crews and thus embroiling Germany with other Great Powers.”
as quoted in Griffin’s Monster from Jekyll Island, p249.
You’re welcome.
[quote]Headhunter wrote:
DrSkeptix wrote:
dhickey wrote:
Headhunter wrote:
dhickey wrote:
In Churchill’s autobiography, he talks about arranging things so American sailors would be deliberatly put at risk to hopefully bring America into WWI.
He talked about charging surfacing subs, to force German crews to always fire from underwater, so they’d hopefully make a mistake and hit an American vessel. He was a criminal.
.
Please post the citation for me from “Churchill’s autobiography.” Not from a screwy website. It should be in the public domain, say in Gutenberg.
Title and page number will do nicely.
Thank you.
Churchill, The World Crisis, pp 274-75
“The first British countermove, made on my responsibility…was to deter the Germans from surface attack. The submerged U-boat had to rely increasingly on underwater attack and thus ran the greater risk of mistaking neutral for British ships and of drowning neutral crews and thus embroiling Germany with other Great Powers.”
as quoted in Griffin’s Monster from Jekyll Island, p249.
You’re welcome.
[/quote]
At last!
Not “an autobiography.” Nope. I can’t fill out the rest of the paragraph; my copy of The World Crisis is long gone. (But then I suspect that you do not have a copy of the book, either, but have downloaded it from someplace, perhaps quoting it out of context.)
Now look at what he wrote. His goal is to “deter” the subs from the more accurate (I presume) and exposed surface attack. A German U-boat commander would have to be doubly cautious before engaging in an underwater attack for fear of hitting neutral shipping.
It is clearly not Churchill’s first intent to coerce Germans to fire on Americans; he knew what the consequences might be, but that is not his prime concern.
Further, well into 1917, the value of neutral shipping to Britain was far more that the value of having the US join as a fighting force. Once the US joined the Allies, its shipping, of course, would be open to German attack.
This must be difficult for you to swallow, HH, but Churchill and others argued and vacillated, but needed US food and credit and materiel more than soldiers and bullets.
None of this has to anything to do with WWII, of course, but at least HH has the merit to look up a fact in rebuttal.
[quote]Blacksnake wrote:
GDollars37 wrote:
For the operational and tactical side of it, “Stormtroop Tactics” by Bruce Gudmundsson is very good, and Gordon Corrigan’s “Mud, Blood and Poppycock” is very readable, although I thought he was kind of making an argument that’s already becoming the consensus among academic military historians…
I take it you would think “Storm of Steel” or anything by Ernst Junger would be too biased to then?..Same with any of those stories about young Rommel’s stormtroop activities?..
[/quote]
Huh? I’m not sure I get your point. Stormtroop tactics is very good on the operational and tactical side of it, but it does not really deal with the strategic level from what I remember. It’s not an issue of bias; the book is written by an American military historian.
Storm of Steel is great, a fantastic memoir. Of course it is “biased”, Junger is one of the few frontline soldiers who seems to have loved every minute of it. Funny that the same nation produced Ernst Junger and Erich Maria Remarque.
[quote]GDollars37 wrote:
… Funny that the same nation produced Ernst Junger and Erich Maria Remarque.[/quote]
Look at their names and tell me who was warrior blood running through his veins.
Churchill, The World Crisis, pp 274-75
“The first British countermove, made on my responsibility…was to deter the Germans from surface attack. The submerged U-boat had to rely increasingly on underwater attack and thus ran the greater risk of mistaking neutral for British ships and of drowning neutral crews and thus embroiling Germany with other Great Powers.”
How strange it is that in 1941 he did the same thing again by having US-destroyers escorting british convoys halfway through the atlantic, where it had to happen that some would be accidentally sunk by the u-boats, and it did happen. So he was sacrificing american warships and lives for his goal of them joining the war.
That guy was one clever sob…
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
GDollars37 wrote:
… Funny that the same nation produced Ernst Junger and Erich Maria Remarque.
Look at their names and tell me who was warrior blood running through his veins.[/quote]
I doubt enjoying the slaughterhouse of a ww1 battlefield was a matter of “warrior blood”…
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
GDollars37 wrote:
… Funny that the same nation produced Ernst Junger and Erich Maria Remarque.
Look at their names and tell me who was warrior blood running through his veins.[/quote]
What a stupid thing to say. Keyboard warrior at its finest. I respect Junger, but blind nationalism (in contrast to patriotism) is nothing to be admired.
[quote]Ken Kaniff wrote:
Churchill, The World Crisis, pp 274-75
“The first British countermove, made on my responsibility…was to deter the Germans from surface attack. The submerged U-boat had to rely increasingly on underwater attack and thus ran the greater risk of mistaking neutral for British ships and of drowning neutral crews and thus embroiling Germany with other Great Powers.”
How strange it is that in 1941 he did the same thing again by having US-destroyers escorting british convoys halfway through the atlantic, where it had to happen that some would be accidentally sunk by the u-boats, and it did happen. So he was sacrificing american warships and lives for his goal of them joining the war.
That guy was one clever sob…[/quote]
You are completely wrong. Churchill was not the president of the United States, he was the prime minister of Great Britain, he had no authority over the American navy, only the Royal navy. Roosevelt was the president of the United States, he is the one who gave the American navy it’s orders.
Theres been enough written about the mental games Winston and Roosevelt played, how Churchill tried to influence and even manipulate him, and often did so successfully. Next time ill write 2 pages instead of simplifying something, preferably in my mother language.
[quote]GDollars37 wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
GDollars37 wrote:
… Funny that the same nation produced Ernst Junger and Erich Maria Remarque.
Look at their names and tell me who was warrior blood running through his veins.
What a stupid thing to say. Keyboard warrior at its finest. I respect Junger, but blind nationalism (in contrast to patriotism) is nothing to be admired.[/quote]
You really are an arrogant SOB. If you had the brains to back it up it wouldn’t be so bad but alas you do not.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
For those interested, Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens take on Pat Buchanan’s revisionist thesis:
http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=NWQyMWM3M2RmYTUwYmQ1ZTgzOTYxNWI2NWU0YWJlZWM=
P.S. - Gdollars, Blood Meridian is a great book, especially if you are fan of McCarthy.[/quote]
Watched the first two of those, though Hanson and Hitchens are probably my two least favorite “public intellectuals” out there. At least the moderator seemed pretty fair-minded, rare from NRO these days.
Yeah, I’m a big McCarthy fan, have only read The Road and No Country For Old Men so far, but I’d put him with John Irving and Tobias Wolff among my couple favorite writers.
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
This must be difficult for you to swallow, HH, but Churchill and others argued and vacillated, but needed US food and credit and materiel more than soldiers and bullets.
None of this has to anything to do with WWII, of course, but at least HH has the merit to look up a fact in rebuttal.
[/quote]
JP Morgan made an absolute fortune from his war contracts, millions upon millions. But…the British were running out of money. No one would lend them more because Britain was losing (hard for you to swallow?). Then, Churchill got the brilliant idea of murdering innocents. Would our hero actually do something so nefarious? “The maneuver which brings an ally into the field is as serviceable as that which wins a great battle.” (page 300)
So, Churchill pulled the Juno from protecting the Lusitania and allowed said ship to sail into an area where a u-boat, U20, was known to be on patrol. The rest is history and soon after the USA gave Britain 1 billion dollars (War Loan Act).
What does this have to do with WWII? Well, if Churchill (an evil nut Druid) can drain the USA to win one war with satanic tricks, why not do it again? (See if you can find Winston in the photo.)
The only problem with your analysis HH is America came out of both world wars richer and more powerful. There are entire industries that benefitted especially aerospace and airlines.
Even Germany came out of world war two in better shape than most people realize. ie Half of German industry was laid in ruins at the end of the war. But due to expansions of their industrial base during the war the Germans had doubled their industrial capacity. So at the end of 1945 the Germans had as much industrial capacity as they had in 1938. This was the basis of the post war German economic miracle.
America did good to take on the Germans when they did. It should not be forgotten the Germans had a program called the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) that every year was producing a million trained soldiers.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
For those interested, Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens take on Pat Buchanan’s revisionist thesis:
http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=NWQyMWM3M2RmYTUwYmQ1ZTgzOTYxNWI2NWU0YWJlZWM=
P.S. - Gdollars, Blood Meridian is a great book, especially if you are fan of McCarthy.[/quote]
For what it’s worth I’m about halfway through Blood and really enjoying it … kind of Lonesome Dovish but more raw … and I’ve got another 4 or 5 of his lined up ready to go. I read No Country FOM and that got me going.
Also … I ran across the Hitchens/Hanson videos the other day and I’d concur … they’re pretty definitive.
Pat B. has to be my favorite guy that I disagree with almost every time he opens his mouth any more.
Hitchens and Hanson (one of them?) compared Pat to a lot of the Lindbergh “the Nazis aren’t that bad/trains run on time” crowd before the war in terms of his arguments and underlying opinions …
[quote]flyboy51v wrote:
…
Hitchens and Hanson (one of them?) compared Pat to a lot of the Lindbergh “the Nazis aren’t that bad/trains run on time” crowd before the war in terms of his arguments and underlying opinions …
[/quote]
The difference is that once the war started Lindbergh shut his mouth and got to work helping develop warplanes and allegedly even flew combat missions as a civilian.
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
flyboy51v wrote:
…
Hitchens and Hanson (one of them?) compared Pat to a lot of the Lindbergh “the Nazis aren’t that bad/trains run on time” crowd before the war in terms of his arguments and underlying opinions …
The difference is that once the war started Lindbergh shut his mouth and got to work helping develop warplanes and allegedly even flew combat missions as a civilian.[/quote]
There comes a tipping point where, no matter what, you have to defend your country.
My main interest is how these things get manipulated into happening and why. I don’t believe that history is like a rodeo bull and we’re (humanity) just barely hanging on to survive.
Why, for ex, was the North Pacific declared an ‘empty sea’ by the US Navy shortly before WWII? That means that we wouldn’t patrol there.
Why was headquarters for the Pacific fleet moved to Hawaii, where it was far more vulnerable, from San Diego?
How does a corporal who had no money, no connections, was a high school dropout, and wasn’t even a citizen of Germany, become Chancellor and almost conquered the world?
We are being manipulated.
[quote]Headhunter wrote:
DrSkeptix wrote:
dhickey wrote:
Headhunter wrote:
dhickey wrote:
In Churchill’s autobiography, he talks about arranging things so American sailors would be deliberatly put at risk to hopefully bring America into WWI.
He talked about charging surfacing subs, to force German crews to always fire from underwater, so they’d hopefully make a mistake and hit an American vessel. He was a criminal.
.
Please post the citation for me from “Churchill’s autobiography.” Not from a screwy website. It should be in the public domain, say in Gutenberg.
Title and page number will do nicely.
Thank you.
Churchill, The World Crisis, pp 274-75
“The first British countermove, made on my responsibility…was to deter the Germans from surface attack. The submerged U-boat had to rely increasingly on underwater attack and thus ran the greater risk of mistaking neutral for British ships and of drowning neutral crews and thus embroiling Germany with other Great Powers.”
as quoted in Griffin’s Monster from Jekyll Island, p249.
You’re welcome.[/quote]
The book is “Creature from Jekyll Island”. Glad you finally got around to reading it. I knew you’d enjoy it.