Comments by "Steve Watson" (@stevewatson6839) on ""We won’t come back here, so we can’t leave Stalingrad!"" video.

@henriklarssen1331 Paulus surrendered on the 31st of January. A week earlier on the 24th Roosevelt, at the close of the Casablanca conference, had declared the Allies policy of Unconditional Surrender. Not the brightest idea to have when you are reading your enemies mail and know they know the game is up. No, you offer your enemy a "Golden Bridge of escape" as the maxim from Sun Tzu has it. There is much point made of the inaccuracy of the "Madman Hitler" narrative by Lewis; in contrast this isn't the first bit of Roosevelt bonkers: despite also being able to read the Japanese mail; he had left them misunderstanding American terms for lifting the embargoes that led to the Japanese thinking Pearl Harbor; Strike South; and war with the US, however unlikely to succeed, was their only option. It wasn't only the Axis leaders that bore guilt; in the upper echelons I see no "heros" in WWII on either side.
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@petriew2018 Evil? even that is too simplistic. I'm getting the impression from some of the directly quoting Hitler literature that I've bought from Lewis' bibliography that it was dawning on him that a large number; and maybe most; of his assumptions and guiding principles were deeply flawed. What Lewis' work has brought out too is Hitler never actually had de facto control; there were a large number of competing authorities in the Reich, none of which could be said to be pulling in anything but the vaguest general same direction, and were more often than not in complete disagreement and pursuing their own agendas. A large part of this was Hitlers fault; and by commision as much as omission. It didn't help that the Allies, the UK in particular wouldn't stick to the script! 🙂 Shame about that. NOT.
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@samsonsoturian6013 On the Gripping hand, I think there is enough work here (The site overall) to award an actual PhD if it were to be put in the required format. I certainly have on my shelves a fair few academic works that are just a waste of good trees in fact - as well as relative, and in comparison, to Lewis' endeavours.
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@ruberxwibebadhi Steady on, mate! Let the lad catch his breath. 🙂
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@eze8970 Unfortunately the evidence from the horses mouth, in Heiber and Glantz in particular (I think we can say these transcripts haven't been got at.) would seem to be against you. Plus the W.Allies made unconditional surrender their policy the week before Paulus surrendered; a daft declaration that was both confounded & compounded by how Hitler saw the world, his weltschaunung. This was a rational actor working within a common, if wrong, thought schema; not some swivel-eyed loon who couldn't actually think. His "Fingerspitzengefühl"; both politically and militarily was very often right even after the Bomb Plot and his loony doctors. "Unconditional Surrender" was all Roosevelt; it is not daft to think even late in the day for Hitler to think he could wring terms if not escape from Wallace or Truman who, though from different directions, wouldn't have run with so self-defeating a policy. "Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein" could have worked; Fall Gelb's "Sichelschnittplan" had been even more unlikely to succeed after all; and it was only luck someone said "Nuts!" and the Herr missed out on the massive WAllied supply dump at Stavelot. Yes, Hitler was a gambler, but not irrationally so: he could actually have confidence that he had made the right call time and time again before the fact based on his own record. After the fact even more of his calls have been revealed correct; despite the later obfuscations of his generals and the twistings of the Big Three.
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@DannyBoy777777 I can't help it if some wankers aren't paying attention. Fuck off, mate.
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@mikereger1186 Fortunately, the wait in George's case has led to some of us realising his opus is actually a bit crap and we are the better for that realisation.
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