Comments by "John Burns" (@johnburns4017) on "TIK Q&A | WW2, Atomic Bomb, Rommel, Sturmgeschütz and Treaty of Versailles" video.

  1. grahamt33 Patton was a US media creation: Patton was an average US general, like Simpson, Patch, Hodges, etc. No more. Patton at Metz advanced 10 miles in three months. The poorly devised Panzer Brigade concept was deployed there with green German troops. The Panzer Brigades were a rushed concept attempting to plug the gaps while the proper panzer divisions were re-fitting and rebuilt after the summer 1944 battles. The Panzer Brigades had green crews with little time to train, did not know their tanks properly, had no recon elements and didn't even meet their unit commander until his arrival at the front. These were not elite forces. 17th SS were not amongst the premier Waffen SS panzer divisions. It was not even a panzer division but a panzer grenadier division, equipped only with assault guns not tanks, with only a quarter of the number of AFVs as a panzer division. The 17th SS was badly mauled in Normandy and not up to strength at Arracourt in The Lorraine. Patton's Third Army was almost always where the best German divisions in the west were NOT. ♦ Who did the 3rd Army engage? ♦ Who did the 3rd Army defeat? ♦ Patton never once faced a full strength Waffen SS panzer division nor a Tiger battalion. In The Lorraine, the 3rd Army faced a rabble. Even the German commander of Army Group G in The Lorraine, Hermann Balck, who took command in September 1944 said: "I have never been in command of such irregularly assembled and ill-equipped troops. The fact that we have been able to straighten out the situation again…can only be attributed to the bad and hesitating command of the Americans." Patton was mostly facing a second rate rabble in The Lorraine. Patton was neither on the advance nor being heavily engaged at the time he turned north to Bastogne when the Germans pounded through US lines in the Ardennes. The road from Luxembourg to Bastogne saw few German forces, with Bastogne being on the very southern German flank, their focus was west. Only when Patton neared Bastogne did he engage some German armour but not a great deal at all. Patton's ride to Bastogne was mainly through US held territory. The Fuhrer Grenadier Brigade was not one of the best German armoured units with about 80 tanks, while 26th Volks-Grenadier only had about 12 Hetzers, and the small element of Panzer Lehr (Kampfgruppe 901) left behind only had a small number of tanks operational. Patton did not have to smash through full panzer divisions or Tiger battalions on his way to Bastogne. Patton's armoured forces outnumbered the Germans by at least 6 to 1. Patton faced very little German armour when he broke through to Bastogne because the vast majority of the German 5th Panzer Army had already left Bastogne in their rear moving westwards to the River Meuse. They were engaging forces under Montgomery's 21st Army Group. Leading elements were engaging the Americans and British under Montgomery's command near Dinant by the Meuse. Monty's armies halted the German advance and pushed them back. In Normandy in 1944, the panzer divisions had been largely worn down, primarily by the British and Canadians around Caen. The First US Army around St Lo then Mortain helped a little. Over 90% of German armour was destroyed by the British. Once again, Patton faced very little opposition in his break out in Operation Cobra performing mainly an infantry role. Nor did Patton advance any quicker across eastern France mainly devoid of German troops, than the British and Canadians did, who were in Brussels by early September seizing the vital port of Antwerp intact. This eastern dash devoid of German forces was the ride the US media claimed Patton was some sort master of fast moving armour. Patton repeatedly denigrated his subordinates. ♦ In Sicily he castigated Omar Bradley for the tactics Bradley's II Corps were employing ♦ He accused the commander of 3rd Infantry Division, Truscott of being "afraid to fight". ♦ In the Ardennes he castigated Middleton of the US VIII Corps and Millikin of the US III Corps. ♦ When his advance from Bastogne to Houffalize stalled he criticised the 11th Armoured Division for being "very green and taking unnecessary casualties to no effect". ♦ He called the 17th Airborne Division "hysterical" in reporting their losses. After the German attack in the Ardennes, US air force units were put under Coningham of the RAF. Coningham, gave Patton massive ground attack plane support and he still stalled. Patton's failure to concentrate his forces on a narrow front and his decision to commit two green divisions to battle without adequate reconnaissance resulted in his stall. Patton rarely took any responsibility for his own failures. It was always somebody else at fault, including his subordinates. A poor general who thought he was reincarnated. Oh, and wore cowboy guns. Patton detested Hodges, did not like Bradley disobeying his orders, and Eisenhowers orders. He also hated Montgomery. About the only person he ever liked was himself. Read Monty and Patton: Two Paths to Victory by Michael Reynolds
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  2. Dale Halling Another brainwashed right-wing nutball.
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  3. German labour mobilisation: The fact that more women were not mobilized for war work is sometimes taken as one more symptom of the inability of the Nazi regime to demand sacrifices from the German population. In this respect it has often been contrasted to Britain, where an increase in female participation in the workforce was the key to sustaining the war effort. Such comparisons, however, are completely misleading, since they ignore the fact that the labour market participation of German women in 1939 was higher than that reached by Britain and the United States even at the end of the war. In 1939, a third of all married women in Germany were economically active and more than half of all women between the ages of 15 and 60 were in work. As a result, women made up more than a third of the German workforce before the war started, compared to a female share of only a quarter in Britain. A year later, the share of German women in the native workforce stood at 41 per cent, compared to less than 30 per cent in Britain. Not surprisingly, over the following years Britain caught up. But even in 1944 the participation rate for British women between the ages of 15 to 65 was only 41 per cent, as against a minimum of 51 per cent in Germany already in 1939. - Adam Tooze, Wages of Destruction - The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
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  4. Dale Halling Another brainwashed right-wing nutball. TIK, do not engage with them.
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  5. The British A-Bomb project started in 1939. The British MAUD Committee figured out how to make the bomb using uranium 235. This input was used in the Manhattan project. When the bomb was perfected and proven to work, the USA naively cut off all information exchange with the British, thinking they had something no one else could make, even though they never invented the bomb. The British did make their own A-bomb and very quickly and were ahead of the USA in all aspects of the bomb, right through to the H-bombs in the late 1950s. The Americans became very arrogant - naively so.
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  6. Market Garden was a success: ♦ It created a 60 mile buffer between Antwerp and German forces. Antwerp was the only port taken intact. This buffer proved itself in the German Bulge attack right through US lines. ♦ It created a staging point to move into Germany at Nijmegen, which happened. ♦ It eliminated V rocket launching sites aimed at London. ♦ It isolate the German 15th army in Holland. ♦ They reached the Rhine. ♦ The salient was fleshed out. ♦ The Germans never retook one mm of ground taken. All this while Patton was stalled at Metz moving 10 miles in three months against a 2nd rate German army. And US forces were stopped before Aachen and eventually defeated at Hurtgen Forest - you know that engagement the US historians and History channels ignore.
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  7. grahamt33 Do some reading. Look at Patton's record. Very ordinary. A US media creation. They needed a hero and he fitted. He even wore cowboy guns.
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  8. grahamt33 Patton was fired for cowardly hitting a sick soldier in a hospital bed. An utter coward. A nutball who believed he was re-incarnated many times. 1985 US Army report on the Lorraine Campaign. Patton does not come out well. http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a211668.pdf Combat Studies Institute. The Lorraine Campaign: An Overview, September-December 1944. by Dr. Christopher R. Gabel February, 1985 From the document is in italics: "Soldiers and generals alike assumed that Lorraine would fall quickly, and unless the war ended first, Patton's tanks would take the war into Germany by summer's end. But Lorraine was not to be overrun in a lightning campaign. Instead, the battle for Lorraine would drag on for more than 3 months." "Despite its proximity to Germany, Lorraine was not the Allies' preferred invasion route in 1944_._ Except for its two principal cities, Metz and Nancy, the province_ contained few significant military objectives." "Moreover, once Third Army penetrated the province and entered Germany, there would still be no first-rate military objectives within its grasp. The Saar industrial region, while significant, was of secondary importance when compared to the great Ruhr industrial complex farther north." Another Patton chase into un-needed territory, like he did when running his troops into Brittany. "With so little going for it, why did Patton bother with Lorraine at all? The reason was that Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, made up his mind to destroy as many German forces as possible west of the Rhine." In other words a waste of time. "Communications Zone organized the famous Red Ball Express, a non-stop conveyor belt of trucks connecting the Normandy depots with the field armies." They were getting fuel via 6,000 trucks. "The simple truth was that although fuel was plentiful in Normandy, there was no way to transport it in sufficient quantities to the leading elements. On 31 August , Third Army received no fuel at all." In short, Patton overran his supply lines. What was important was to secure the Port of Antwerp's approaches. Montgomery approached the US leaders of the First Airborne Army and they would not drop into the Scheldt. "Few of the Germans defending Lorraine could be considered First-rate troops. Third Army encountered whole battalions made up of deaf men, others of cooks, and others consisting entirety of soldiers with stomach ulcers." Some army the Americans were going to fight "Was the Lorraine campaign an American victory' From September through November, Third Army claimed to have inflicted over 180,000 casualties on the enemy. But to capture the province of Lorraine, a problem which involved an advance of only 40 to 60 air miles, Third Army required over 3 months and suffered 50,000 casualties, approximately one-third of the total number of casualties it sustained in the entire European war." Huge losses for taking unimportant territory, against a poor German army. "Ironically, Third Army never used Lorraine as a springboard for an advance into Germany after all. Patton turned most of the sector over to Seventh Army during the Ardennes crisis, and when the eastward advance resumed after the Battle of the Bulge, Third Army based its operations on Luxembourg, not Lorraine. The Lorraine campaign will always remain a controversial episode in American military history." It's getting worse. One third of all European casualties in Lorraine and never used the territory to move into Germany. "Finally the Lorraine Campaign demonstrated that Logistics often drive operations, no matter how forceful and aggressive the commanding general may be." "Patton violated tactical principles" "His discovered that violating logistical principles is an unforgiving and cumulative matter." Not flattering at all. And Americans state Patton was the best general they had. Bradley stated later: “Patton was developing as an unpopular guy. He steamed about with great convoys of cars and great squads of cameramen … To George, tactics was simply a process of bulling ahead. Never seemed to think out a campaign. Seldom made a careful estimate of the situation. I thought him a shallow commander … I disliked the way he worked, upset tactical plans, interfered in my orders. His stubbornness on amphibious operations, parade plans into Messina sickened me and soured me on Patton. We learned how not to behave from Patton’s Seventh Army.”
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  9. TIK talks about Patton and Montgomery as they were equals. They were not, Patton was an average US general, while Monty was in charge of Army Groups. You are falling into US propaganda, especially from Hollywood - Patton v Monty, etc, etc. In his diaries Monty hardly mentioned Patton, as he rarely dealt with him. While egotistical Patton's was full of bile towards Monty.
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  10. Caused?
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  11. The Sturmgeschütz had a lot of hits because it was mainly in a defence role, as was the Tiger tank. It was a self propelled gun, and was no war winning tank.
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  12. rikske66 Market Garden was not a strategic failure at all. Market Garden was a success: ♦ It created a 60 mile buffer between Antwerp and German forces. Antwerp was the only port taken intact. This buffer proved itself in the German Bulge attack right through US lines to the salient's south-east. ♦ It created a staging point to move into Germany at Nijmegen, which happened. ♦ It eliminated V rocket launching sites aimed at London. ♦ It isolate the German 15th army in Holland. ♦ They reached the Rhine. ♦ The salient was fleshed out. ♦ The Germans never retook one mm of ground taken. All this while Patton was stalled at Metz moving 10 miles in three months against a 2nd rate German army. And US forces were stopped before Aachen and eventually defeated at Hurtgen Forest - you know that engagement the US historians and History channels ignore.
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  13. rikske66 Market Garden had many objectives, I gave them in bullet form above. It just never got over the Rhine, but to the banks. Look how long it took US forces to reach the Rhine. The thrust north was the right thing to do. Montgomery after said it was under resourced, which it was. Bradley and Patton were syphoning off supplies to Patton from the US First army, disobeying Eisenhower orders, meaning the US First army could not join in (Neillands said it was deliberate to starve Montgomery of supplies). Monty wanted divisions from the US First on the right flank and multiple Rhine crossings.
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