#stahelposting

[regina-bithyniae]

Listening to book on Eastern Front and saying "wow does anyone have a stupider and sloppier approach to strategy than Germany?" and then listening to Shattered Sword and seeing, "yeah."

[regina-bithyniae]

Meta: did you sit through the WW2TV video? I find his content unwatchable, he brings on an expert guest and just rambles over them half the length. Impressive work if you can take that!

I don't have a ton to offer - my only in-depth Eastern Front knowledge is 1. that book and 2. TIK History's Stalingrad campaign series.

But, there do seem to be some rhetorical tricks going on in Stahel's work. What's not talked about is clearly one - Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (OBGDE ?) barely goes into what Blitzkrieg looked like for the massive Soviet encirclements. I was surprised just now to see Smolensk had something like a 9:1 casualty ratio when I checked Wikipedia, I don't think he gave much indication just how lopsided it was. (You mention his non-mastery of the Soviet archives, seems relevant here)

Another odd point is popular mobilization against the Nazis. He indicates German policy radicalized the population into partisan warfare, but also that the public began partisan warfare almost immediately, which seems too fast for a widespread understanding the Germans were planning to starve everyone to death.

A suspicion of mine is that we're in a phase of perhaps over-correction against the Wehrmacht. Not on "clean wehrmacht" grounds, but on the organization's actual effectiveness. I believe you can make any organization look clownish with an archival deep dive into the interpersonal politics and struggles between members. While the plan to blitz through the Ardennes, say, might have been a last-ditch attempt to come up with a plan to beat France, they still did have the ability to carry it out!

The thing about Stahel's Barbarossa "agenda" is that he has great points in-the-weeds, but his "big thesis" is boxing shadows. He says, repeatedly in both his books and lectures, that he wants to "push back against those who say Operation Barbarossa was a success", and show them it was a failure. To prove this point he goes into what the goals of Operation Barbarossa were: to destroy the Soviet capacity to resist at all. I have him right here saying that:

He throws this up on the screen while asking the audience, "did Operation Barbarossa achieve this?" - which of course it did not, he is right about that.

But I must ask, who are you fighting against? Where are these mythical people who think Operation Barbarossa was a strategic success?! No one thinks that, Nazi Germany lost the war! It was a strategic disaster of literally unparalleled proportions, we all know that, everyone agrees. When people say "Operation Barbarossa was a big success", what they mean - and they say this explicitly, no one actually says the sentence I just typed - they mean it achieved previously unheard-of operational successes, despite being a strategic failure. That some of it clearly went right. Which I think seems at least partially to be objectively true.

Now Stahel has some good points to counter this - generally the idea being that each Nazi victory degraded their offensive capabilities, which given their goal of vast conquest was a price they couldn't pay. But that is a more limited claim, he doesn't frame it that way, he has to shoot for the moon like he is bucking consensus.

He does this "strategy trick" in another weird way again in the video I just linked - he essentially argues that the retreat from Moscow was a "better" operation, because the goals of the operation were aligned with the means.

They abandoned offensives, and played defense to hold key areas. And they did do that, they succeed at these goals even if the price paid is quite high. And so he compares it to Barbarossa, which was intensely optimistic in its goals.

But again I must ask, who cares exactly? There is of course this fundamental strategic dilemma, where a lack of easy victory locked Nazi Germany into a two front war against an enemy with deep resources. Like yes, Operation Barbarossa was bad - we all agree on that though. But June to November still offered way more opportunities to get out of than dilemma than December did! Its not really that important if your wildly overpromise if you still keep winning, right? What would you prefer, a plan that promised a 100 wins but only gave you 50? Or a plan that promised you 5 losses and gave you 5 losses? Being right on the prediction really isn't that important is it? Its not like the December pivot fixed the strategic dilemma after all.

Now what I am not saying here is that like in December it would have been smarter to keep attacking or anything; they stopped for a reason, the defensive pivot was smart. My point is that Stahel keeps wanting to make something more of this sort of "means/ends" disconnect that isn't there. To the extent that Operation Barbarossa wildly overpromised in a way that strategically fucked Nazi Germany, everyone agrees already. To the extent that such overpromises invalidate victories on the ground, its a weak argument that doesn't hold. December 1941 was not better for the Wehrmacht than October 1941 because they were more realistic about how badly they were going to get hammered, which Stahel implicitly suggests.

I will again emphasize that when you get into the details of his histories he is extremely talented. But he has a strong desire to narrativize that imo gets in his own way.

[regina-bithyniae]

The disastrous development of the Me210, cancelled before going into production, cost Germany as much as building 5000 combat aircraft, or as much as they spent on armored fighting vehicles of all types in any year of World War 2.

If "How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War 2" is accurate in the statistics it reports on production figures, this completely flips strategic understanding of WW2 on its head. Even accepting that Operation Barbarossa as-fought could not have knocked the USSR out of the war regardless of the strategic decisions made during it, Germany's air+naval production swamping its land vehicular production would suggest much room to build up the logistical system and armored forces.

Need to get a PDF/solid copy of the book, this is crazy.

[regina-bithyniae]

Seemingly alone among Wehrmacht generals, General Hermann Hoth's wikipedia profile image is his Nuremburg trial defendent picture:

Furthermore, he stated that Soviet prisoners of war had always been treated well, arguing that the usage of the nickname "Ivan" for the POWs showcased the "family-like relationship that our soldiers had to the Russian prisoners of war".

lol

[regina-bithyniae]

So basically what saved the USSR from collapsing summer 1941 was like 10% the Red Army, 90% having the absolute shittiest roads in Europe

[regina-bithyniae]

Some cognitive dissonance: Stahel drives home that German Eastern Front blunders and bad decisions were spread out throughout the commanders and various ones of them were right and wrong at different times, while also committing to "the loss of nearly a million men in the Southwestern Front was 100% purely because of Stalin being an idiot and not anyone else."

Starting Glantz, he also seems to push the Red Army as forward-thinkers about armored warfare and belongs to the "Soviet generals beat the Germans" camp.

Correcting from the previous "Dashing NOT NAZI German tank generals effortlessly beat up the Soviets and could've won if Hitler wasn't an idiot" historiography is obviously needed.

But feels like we're in an overcorrection focusing only on the Wehrmacht's failures and talking about how hard the fighting was, distracting from the repeated encirclement and destruction of Soviet armies.

[regina-bithyniae]

Man Stahel really really has an axe to grind

Started Kiev 1941, it stands out even more than OBAGDE

[regina-bithyniae]

running list of funniest wehrmacht general deaths

1. strafed to death by random kiwi pilot in the last days of the war while driving in car

2. had stroke while going for recreational run in winter 1942 then medical evacuation flight back to germany crashed

[regina-bithyniae]

Let's look at another Glorious Soviet Victory:

OK, sounds good.

oof

Going by total combatants the Soviets outnumbered the Germans 2.5:1, with 4:1 tank/assault gun ratio, 7:1 artillery and 8:1 aircraft ratio. So it's not even an "infantry horde versus armored forces" fight, the Soviets outmass the Germans even more in terms of metal than manpower!

Taking the Glantz and House numbers because they're the only ones by a single set of authors, they still land at a 1.5:1 casualty rate.

I agree that battle casualties and killing more of the enemy than they kill of you does not directly equal victory, but these tell you a pretty stark message about the relative fighting ability of both sides.

In "When Titans Clashed" at the start of the Third Phase of War section, Glantz says that you could consider Soviet officers and troops to be about roughly as competent as their wehrmacht counterparts, which is a howler. He says the higher Soviet casualties are because they're fighting on the offense, but then the Germans managed favorable casualty ratios on the offense even as late as Kursk, attacking straight into the teeth of a massive Soviet defensive formation without surprise.

Glorious Soviet Victory

[regina-bithyniae]

Take a shot every time Stahel writes "great distances" drinking game -> 100% lethality!

So basically what saved the USSR from collapsing summer 1941 was like 10% the Red Army, 90% having the absolute shittiest roads in Europe