Comments by "Nicholas Conder" (@nicholasconder4703) on "The Armchair Historian" channel.

Perhaps the greatest issue the Wehrmacht had throughout the war was poor logistics. They lacked the trucks and fuel to move supplies to the frontline troops, and it was this inability to resupply and reinforce their units that eventually doomed them.
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I notice that few kudos were given to Wellington, who had a conglomerate army, consisting of many novice units and commanders (many of his Spanish veterans were sent to North America to fight in the War of 1812) and several units of dubious loyalty. In addition to this, it was a coalition force formed from units from 5 different nationalities speaking at least 3 different languages. For Wellington to hold such an army together and fight as well against a unilingual veteran army lead by commanders with multiple victories under their belts was no mean feat. Most people talk about Napoleon's mistakes, but often don't comment on Wellington's masterful handling of his own army. Your comment that Napoleon should have won, and that many replays in the battle result in a French victory all point to one thing, the battle was won because of Wellington's generalship.
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The irony is that the forgotten front, the Macedonian Front, is where WW1 was actually won. The Allies on the Western Front started and was making some progress, while Allenby launched his attack in Palestine and demolished two Turkish armies. However, when the Allies in Macedonia launched their attack, the Bulgarian Army collapsed. Bulgaria sued for peace. This blew a huge gap in the Central Powers' lines in the Balkans, and exposed a now completely defenseless Istanbul to the British Army. With the nearest army of any size sitting in Baku, Azerbaijan, Turkey sued for peace. The French and Serbian armies pressed north, and as the Austrian army collapsed in northern Italy, Austria suddenly discovered they had no forces to prevent the French and Serbs from marching into Budapest and Vienna. Austria sued for peace. The Germans now found that they had a single army in southern Austria/northern Serbia, and only a single worn out army to face more than three Allied armies. The only troops they could possibly call on were out in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, over 2 weeks away. Germany was basically defenseless in the south. The Allies had an almost clear path all the way to Bavaria and beyond. This, coupled with the continued offensives on the Western Front, caused Germany to sue for an armistice. It is really sad that the majority of historians neglect this very important offensive that started in September 1918. Perhaps a telegram sent by Kaiser Wilhelm sums up the Central Powers' views on this the best, “Disgraceful! 62,000 Serbs decided the war!"
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I might add that recent studies suggest that the German soldiers may have been taking a mild form of methamphetamines, which would explain why they fought so well and succeeded in launching attacks that seemed impossible. It might also explain why after reaching the coast at Abbeville that the panzers halted - they may have been finally suffering from excessive fatigue from being "high" for a week. I will add, however, there is little evidence to support this hypothesis, but it does make sense if the troops were given "no doze" pills for an extended period of time.
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11:37 The unit at Clerveaux actually held up the German advance for a day, so their stand was not altogether fruitless.
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One possible reason for Ney's optimism, often missed by historians, is that Ney was the only one of Napoleon's generals who had beaten Wellington on not one, but two previous occasions in Spain. This may have affected his judgement at Waterloo.
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13:18. It was around this time that Bradley ended up being an Army Group Commander without any armies, more or less. Eisenhower decided that the best way to handle things was to have Patton attack northwards with one corps, while Montgomery took command of the northern flank of the bulge. This left Bradley more or less out of the loop.
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Rather than the standard use of fortified farmhouses or villages, Wellington appears to have used these positions more as outerworks for a fortification. These strongpoints served to blunt attacks, steer attacks into identified kill zones where they could be hit from three sides at once, and limited Napoleon's ability to launch attacks at weak points of the line. Hougoumont in particular was important in this regard because it prevented Napoleon from easily moving his troops laterally around the Anglo-Dutch right flank. It also explains why both sides committed as many troops as they did to the battle around Hougoumont (Wellington to deny Napoleon space to maneuver, Napoleon to gain that mobility). So, the French attack was not a feint, but as Wellington later obliquely acknowledged, an attack on a vital part of his defense line.
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If you want a really good in-depth look at Operation Crusader, TIK has done a 9-hour long presentation on the battle. It is very good.
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I found this video had a somewhat anti-British slant to it, strongly hinting that England was the root of all evil in Africa. Yes, he does state facts, but also deliberately overlooks some rather important codifiers to those facts. For example, the reason why you had starvation in the concentration camps during the Boer War was due not to deliberate neglect, but poor logistics, improper management and some indifference on the part of some commanders. It is one of the reasons that General Kitchener earned the nickname "Kitchener of Chaos". This is not to say that what was done was right (and in most cases it most certainly was not), but the history needs to be examined in full and taken in context before passing judgement.
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@jerankorak7997 I'm not saying they used Pervitin all the time, or in massive quantities. However, I can see Wehrmacht officers giving it to their men when they felt they needed more out of them than could normally be achieved. Like adding nitro or methanol to an engine - you give it a temporary boost in performance. Likewise, giving the troops Pervitin would have given them higher performance and able to function at peak capacity longer. I suspect the officers figured they were giving their soldiers an early form of Red Bull or an energy drink, rather than an addictive substance. However, over time, they would have started realizing the long-term consequences of using it, and likely stopped giving it to their troops around 1942-1943.
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Part of the reason why the second siege of Tobruk didn't last long was because most of the minefield and barbed wire had been moved to the Gazala line, and the anti-tank ditches and other defenses were not maintained. So the South Africans were stuck manning defense lines that lacked proper protection. Also, Rommel had had a plan for taking Tobruk in November 1941, and was able to use this plan to take Tobruk this time round.
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St. Vith had been held by the heroic defense of the last regiment of the 106th Division (the other two being surrounded in the Schnee Eifel and forced to surrender). Unfortunately, reinforcements couldn't arrive quickly enough, and with the regiment being threatened with encirclement, Montgomery ordered them to fall back to new defensive positions. He also complimented them on a job well done, as they had held up the Germans at St. Vith almost 5 days.
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@omarbradley6807 The real issue was the state of the Russian tanks. Of those 10,000 tanks, I have seen estimates that two-thirds were down for repairs, and many crews didn't know how to use them properly. Also, many of the tanks had two-man turrets (including the early T-34s, which reduced their combat effectiveness.
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@leto.o5759 I agree with your comment. The German logistical problems escalated as they advanced deeper into Russia, while the Russian logistics improved somewhat as they were pushed closer to their industrial bases around Moscow and Leningrad. However, the biggest problem the Germans had was a lack of universality in their transport. The Wehrmacht requisitioned trucks from all over Europe to support the invasion, rather than having a few makes of vehicle (Overy covers this in "Why the Allies Won"). This meant that one of Murphy's Laws kicked in, "interchangeable parts won't". Plus, the Wehrmacht never produced enough spares to repair those vehicles that broke down.
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@danktime216 The British didn't want to kill the Boers, just stop the guerilla activity and the war. This does not excuse what happened. The only positive thing you could say about it is that it was not a deliberate genocide like the one perpetrated by the Nazis, or deliberate mistreatment like that perpetrated by the Japanese on Allied POWs. Still, it was neglect, and this is not excusable. There was no real justification for the war either, by the way. The Boer war was started by the political machinations of Cecil Rhodes and his political buddies because they wanted the resources in Natal, Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Again, I was not condoning what happened, but trying to say that things needed to be put more into context than I thought they were in the video.
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@danktime216 No, context does not lose its meaning because we differentiate between manslaughter and 1st degree murder in our legal system. They do the same in the International Court. It's very easy to sit back 120 years later and pass judgement. It's quite a different matter when you are actually on the spot, trying to end a war with what you hope will be the least amount of bloodshed. Eisenhower has been condemned for letting thousands of German POWs die while in Allied hands during 1945. Do we condemn him for this? Some people do, although again one wonders if they take into account that the Allies were feeding all the liberated populations in their section of Europe at the time, and the Allies had to figure out who had priorities for food and shelter, civilians or enemy soldiers. The how and why of the question is often as important as the what. That said, I will again say I am not condoning what happened. The Boer War was an unjust war of colonial expansion. There is no whitewashing this fact. It lead to a lot of civilians deaths. It is our job as citizens of the world to remember the acts and work to prevent them from happening again, regardless of circumstances.
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Minor correction - although Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander, Field Marshall Montgomery ran the land campaign until September 1. So, Montgomery can be lauded for the success in Normandy, but must also take the blame for some of the failures. Regarding Epsom and the other British operations, it should be remembered the British faced most of the Panzer divisions (including all the SS units). It is also important to remember that the Overlord plan, from its very inception, was for the British forces, good on defense but not as aggressive on offense, would try to hold the Wehrmacht's mobile forces in the Caen area while the American forces cleared Normandy and then broke out into France proper. Writ large, it worked out that way. However, I will also submit that most of the British offensives were only partially successful, and suspect that Montgomery saying that they were ONLY trying to hold the Germans near Caen is "window dressing". I suspect he probably did want the British forces to break out, but had to be satisfied with keeping the German's eyes fixed on Caen.
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@davedennison7386 And it may also, in part, explain why some of the Wehrmacht soldiers were so willing to commit atrocities.
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15:30 I noticed you made an error in where the retreat of Army Group North ended. You place the pocket up in Estonia (due north of Vilnius), whereas the units that had been located there actually retreated out of that trap and down the coast. However, they were then bottled up in the Courland Peninsula, between Riga and Memel, northwest of Vilnius. TIK did a very good series on the Courland Pocket https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJsjxSfB7Ls
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If nothing else, this presentation demonstrates that an experienced and well lead American squad could handle itself against its German counterpart. Two things this simulation overlooks which played an important part in the Wehrmacht's defensive successes in 1944 - fanaticism (or at least extreme feelings of superiority) and experience. The Germans tended to have a lot of both of these until late 1944, at which time they finally ran out of their pool of highly motivated youths to throw into the ranks. The Germans attitude, as pointed out in one book I read, was to feel like a Germanic or Norse warrior striding across the battlefield, while the American just wanted to defeat the Nazis, end the war and go home. With regards to experience, most American units were still relatively green compared to their German counterparts, and their lack of experience often showed. This is one reason why American tank losses tended to be higher than German losses - not because the Sherman was a bad tank (it wasn't), but because the Germans tended to use superior tactics. It also didn't help, either for the squads or tankers, that they were advancing and hence more exposed to ambushes or fighting on ground that did not favor the attacker.
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@DereineLord Rommel had to stop at French gas stations to refuel his panzers. Yes, bad logistics. Check out what TIK says on his youtube channel about the Germans running out of fuel and ammo at Stalingrad BEFORE November. Or how the panzers could only go about 200km before they outstripped their supply lines. Yes, lousy logistics.
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@starstudiosRPG Rommel did that in France in 1940, as did Patton during the training exercises in 1941.
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Well, if you consider psychopathy and megalomania forms of insanity, then yes, Hitler was insane. Unfortunately, they are forms of insanity that is difficult to diagnose. And they do not prevent someone from being a genius.
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