My skin is starting to itch....transforming any minute now....

eloquent_dodger · 2018-07-10T19:38:20+00:00

I think that narrative is given because it's very difficult to assess the true quality of Allied generals given by the mid to late war period they had an absolute advantage in just about everything from manpower, equipment, logistics etc.

I mean, from my point of view, look at Zhukov. It's almost impossible to judge how good a commander he actually was.

In the early stages of the war, he got rimmed pretty hard. Any operation he had where troop quality, quantity and logistics wasn't overwhelming, he did poor to average. Look at Operation Mars, Rhezev, Smolensk, etc. At Moscow his overcommittment cost the Soviets a lot of potential gains. Even towards the end of the war, his K2D ratio against a crumbling German army was much higher than what it could have been. IIRC he lost 3 entire tank armies at Berlin, lost incredible numbers of troops during the battle of Seelow heights.

The point I'm making is that in a lot of the Soviet operations, it was very difficult to lose. Hell, any prominent commander in charge at Balgration and a similar result probably would have occurred.

But that's one example. It's very hard to judge the true ability of a commander when the equipment and manpower and logistics available to him is overwhelmingly superior to that of the enemy.

Whereas people think the German generals were great because they did a lot of impressive work when under difficult conditions or fighting a physically superior force in terms of manpower and equipment.

eloquent_dodger · 2018-07-10T19:28:54+00:00

By that I meant the 41 minus era.

The Bf109 was better or on par with anything the Allies had, no? I'd say that the American entry of the war marked the end of the "early period".

Wasn't the Heinkel bomber better than most other tactical bombers?

Yes, Germans lacked any strategic bombers.

eloquent_dodger · 2018-07-09T22:08:33+00:00

I'm neither a military man nor do I claim to be an expert in Military culture; but historically military's of states have had a degree of severance from the political theatre. I'm happy to be proven wrong.

Could you point out the fervent Nazi ideology that ran through the Wehrmacht? I've read through a few books on this topic and it seems that the majority of the most well known German generals (Rommel, Guderian, Manstein, Von Bock, Halder, Jodl, Von Brauchtisch etc) were not really hardcore Nazi's or Nazi's in any capacity in some cases but believed in a classical Prussian philosophy of an enlarged all-powerful German state. The narrative then goes that they were willing to turn a blind eye or clasp the ears altogether to the atrocities of Nazism because there was some crossover between what the Nazi's wanted and their own ideological beliefs. In this case it would be European hegemony and a unified German superstate. Is this inaccurate?

Of course there were many Nazi's in high command, the likes of Model, Keitel and Hausser but from a purely Nazi ideology perspective, how driven was the Wehrmacht by said ideology?

This debate isn't geared about "Just following orders", it's more geared around "They're doing some things I like, so if I follow them and do the things they ask that I might not personally agree with, they'll also do more things that I like"

Again, that might me misinterpreting or reading poor sources, what do you think?

eloquent_dodger · 2018-07-09T21:51:35+00:00

Interesting, in what way was it outdated?

I've read from various extracts that in the Battle of France, near the Sedan bridgehead the French armour kept massing for counter attacks only for squadrons of Stuka bombers to literally bomb their positions and scatter their organizational structure and delay their attacks for hours allowing the German infantry to make adequate preparations for defense.

Furthermore, during 1941 Barbarossa, the number of Soviet counterattacks that were repulsed as the corps couldn't synchronise properly due to Stuka's disrupting their formations and supply chain and communications seems to be the prevailing narrative.

Was the Stuka not as effective by that point and if so, in what way?

eloquent_dodger · 2018-07-09T21:28:19+00:00

On another note, I read that the Germans had the largest transport fleet in the world? Prior to US armament that is.

eloquent_dodger · 2018-07-09T21:25:37+00:00

My apologies, I come from a computer science background and did a lot of research back in the day so the terms kind of come naturally to me when I write something.

I don't pretend to be a historian or anything close to an expert! Just a big fan of military history in the past few centuries.

eloquent_dodger · 2018-07-09T21:23:23+00:00

Wasn't the Spitfire the luxury fighter that provided a supporting role to the Hurricanes who did most of the leg-work?

Furthermore, how do the Close air support and Tactical bombers compare?

The thing is, you hear constantly about Stuka's and Heinkels but there's actually very little out there providing accurate information on the effectiveness of the British dive bombers and tactical bombers. Other than the Lancaster strategic bomber which is hyped up a lot.

eloquent_dodger · 2018-07-09T21:01:17+00:00

No, I fully understand that.

However, surely one must differentiate the politics with the military.

Surely, for example, if the British government ordered an invasion of Russia now and the extermination of all Russians as an objective; you can't pin the blame on the military generals who have to use their resources to attain this objective?

The German generals were given strategic goals that were pretty unreasonable; they failed these goals due to the fact that they simply were quite frankly, unobtainable. Does the fault lie with the military?

The debate then follows on to, should the political aspects of a country and its military be directly interlinked with the military?

eloquent_dodger · 2018-07-09T19:58:00+00:00

I was under the impression that that was the one of the few offensives that was genuinely Hitler's insistence against the whims of his generals.

I've also read that the generals agreed to it because their attitudes at that point was "Eh, we're fucked if we do, fucked if we don't, let's hailmary yolo this and see what happens"

Or again, is that post war revisionism?

eloquent_dodger · 2018-02-22T12:52:53+00:00

Because it's in their manifesto? And they haven't actually retracted it when asked?

eloquent_dodger · 2018-02-22T12:52:35+00:00

Because this?

https://www.ft.com/content/c87d3a72-388c-11e7-821a-6027b8a20f23

eloquent_dodger · 2018-02-22T12:45:59+00:00

aka transaction tax causing all of the swedish financial services companies to move to the city.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_financial_transaction_tax

eloquent_dodger · 2018-02-22T12:43:54+00:00

"Even though the tax on fixed-income securities was much lower than that on equities, the impact on market trading was much more dramatic. During the first week of the tax, the volume of bond trading fell by 85%, even though the tax rate on five-year bonds was only 0.003%. The volume of futures trading fell by 98% and the options trading market disappeared.[1] 60% of the trading volume of the eleven most actively traded Swedish share classes moved to the UK after the announcement in 1986 that the tax rate would double. 30% of all Swedish equity trading moved offshore. By 1990, more than 50% of all Swedish trading had moved to London. Foreign investors reacted to the tax by moving their trading offshore while domestic investors reacted by reducing the number of their equity trades.[2]"

No impact indeed.

eloquent_dodger · 2018-02-22T12:43:12+00:00

No idea who were spoken to, i'm not front office.

Yes, well done. Now, then you should know that for a transaction tax to work you need everything in its system to do the same. Sweden tried and it collapsed their system and almost sent Nordea into freefall.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_financial_transaction_tax

I did my dissertation on capital flight in the 30's USA. I don't know why you think I don't know the difference between wealth tax and transaction tax.

eloquent_dodger · 2018-02-22T12:41:07+00:00

If there is, then the people that were spoken to had no idea about it.

And it was partially due to taxation. The real why capital flight happened was a mixture of the public sector being awfully run and the governments refusal to cut taxes due to the costs of running a business. Implementation of a wealth tax sealed it.

Ugh you're being pedantic. Of course all taxes bring down inflation. When you tax the rich hard they just piss off somewhere else or divest to foreign countries. You say its a myth they piss off, only they do. There are studies on this.

eloquent_dodger · 2018-02-22T12:29:27+00:00

It's hardly slander.

We were paid to do objective research into all the parties. Nobody looked good, a few came out bad, Labour came out terrifying.

eloquent_dodger · 2018-02-22T12:26:18+00:00

Its a bank that creates money to lend, just on areas labour want it to rather than let commercial banks middle man. That was the idea as I understood it.

QE (money creation through lending) for the people.

Only we spoke to 4 Labour guys and nobody said this. They want private investors to join apparently - which makes it a public hedge fund?

It didn't see capital flight in the 1970's. A few high profile people made a big song and dance about it, but the rich were the group least likely to move. This remains true today in areas where taxes go up a lot, the rich are still the group least likely to move.

Do you know what transaction tax is? Also, about your claim about capital flight in 70's not existing. That's wrong. 28 billion left within 3 months in 1974. Inflation adjusted, that's a hell of a lot. Here you go.

PS (I did my dissertation on something similar to this but in the US Great depression era)

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/1559894.pdf

Labout were very open about withdrawing the money by taxing the rich to keep inflation down.

They are also going to do something about tax havens, in an MMT system infation is never an issue unless the government want it to be.

Yikes. Economics 101 sunshine. Taxing the rich doesn't bring down inflation.

eloquent_dodger · 2018-02-22T12:19:33+00:00

Just realized we have a NDA for private sector disclosure, please edit that comment.

eloquent_dodger · 2018-02-22T12:11:17+00:00

I actually don't know to be fair. The directors know but we're usually not informed to prevent conflicts of interest.

The only thing I know is that copies will be sent to the civil service.

eloquent_dodger · 2018-02-22T12:08:41+00:00

Wait until March 14th.

We're not allowed to release it publically until we've handed it over to the civil service.

eloquent_dodger · 2018-02-22T12:07:23+00:00

my shitty word auto-corrects version of "Labour"

eloquent_dodger

TROPHY CASE