Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Military History not Visualized" channel.

Don't walk where it's easy to walk. Avoid natural paths. It's tougher slogging, but nobody's likely to stick a mine where the terrain is more difficult than the terrain adjacent.
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@MrBigCookieCrumble : Now THERE's a series they need to re-make, but this time with a budget for more than 5 British uniforms.
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@tommyscaletta : Mao never could've taken power without the Chinese people being pushed past the breaking point by Chiang-Kai Shek. Chinese will take more shit than most, but even they will overthrow their warlords if things get bad enough. And it's always the most ruthless, then, who prevails. Pol Pot, Mao, Lenin, Hitler ... When the only hope of filling your belly is going on a raid.
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I was gonna say "Percival," but it said U.S. and he was the Brit who lost Singapore.
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"Failures on 4 fronts?" Uh. I think they attacked 4 places to force the Ukrainians to defend objectives the Russians never had, and to weaken forces where the Russians wanted to make gains in Donbass. And I think it worked beautifully. The West is still celebrating the heroic defense of Kiev, which was never a serious objective, in my humble opinion.
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@Topfblende : I still think the Nazis were doomed. This or that different decision only affected the timetable, not the eventual outcome. I think the Germans vastly underestimated the extent of Soviet forces in the Far East, as well as the ingenuity and dogged determination of the Russian people, in general. They moved entire factories from one side of the Urals to the other, and kept right on manufacturing. Yes, MAYbe if they'd won the Battle of Britain, they'd've had enough resources to take out the Soviets, but the tide of battle had already turned long before the Normandy landings in 1944. Like Napoleon, I think they choked on the sheer expanse of territory gained, and like Napoleon, they created some of the fiercest partisans in history, from Poland to the gates of Moscow. Such ferocity hadn't been seen since Spanish guerrillas forced the French to side every baggage train with an entire army. Multiply that by a factor of 10 and you get some idea of what prosecuting that war was doomed from the first burned village.
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Fighting up through Italy was a very stupid idea. But they got some amphib experience and know-how from Patton's operations.
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@xxxlonewolf49 And the U.S. military-industrial complex doesn't WANT to go that route, because it cuts into their obscene profits producing very expensive "super weapons" that can't be deployed at scale We knew this in WW II, with the Germans emphasizing Tiger tanks, which had the best guns, but were very expensive, unreliable, hard to repair, and too big or too heavy to be worth a damn on maneuver. The Americans could build thousands of Sherman tanks for every 10 or 100 high-dollar Tigers. The Soviet T-34's were cheap to build, very simple, superior track/propulsion design (from an American engineer who was rejected by our government), and easy to repair. "Bells and whistles" is what the MIC wants. Auto manufacturing has gone the same direction. We've forgotten how to "Keep it simple, stupid."
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I dunno. The Americans may've wanted to go the direct route, but they didn't have the equipment or much (any) fighting experience. They learned a lot from the campaign in Africa. If Eisenhower weren't bending over backwards to get along with our allies, I think Africa would've been enough to get Monty fired. Excellent staff officer. Not a war-fighting general. Toxic mix of timidity, foolish courage, and ego. Put Patton out in front, and put Monty in charge of keeping the supply lines open and the soldiers fed and equipped. He was a very good sanitation engineer for the Allies in Africa.
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@xxxlonewolf49 "Using commercial drones is dumb! Much better to have a drone that costs 100 times more and comes with a rainbow flag and other important features!" If they started using cheap drones off the shelf, where's the profit for Lockheed-Martin and all the rest? Western leaders don't care about right or wrong. They just ask their donors what will make them the most money, and that becomes policy.
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@pax6833 Concentrating their artillery is good for blasting a hole in the front line. It's also a way to negate their precision-targeting advantage. Because of drones and satellite surveillance, the concentration of forces, alone, is enough to provoke concentration of "inferior" artillery on a target-rich environment. That's why you don't see much/any manned aircraft sorties or ground support behind enemy lines. The fact that Russia is flying more and more sorties over enemy territory is a reflection of the degradation of Ukrainian air defenses. In modern warfare, there really is no defense, once you're beyond the reach of your anti-aircraft and EW. Anybody can reach out and touch anybody. And even hardened targets with all the AA and EW in place are using very expensive SAMs to fight against relatively cheap missiles and drones. Basically, the defender runs out of ammo before the attacker does.
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Good question. And thanks for bringing smart people to the conversation. Much can be learned from video AND comments.
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If I'm not mistaken, infantry (musket) in square don't need pikes to stand against cavalry. Bayonets and a solid formation are enough to stop a horse charge, according to my lack of scholarship.
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@freaki0734 : There's always mixing, but yeah. There are inhibitions against intermixing, especially between ruling class and natives. But some invaders take women from the local populations, more or less by propinquity and necessity. That's why so many 2nd- and 3rd-generation Norsemen were Christian. The hand the rocks the cradle. Luckily for humans, while the stranger is a danger, the exotic is also highly attractive, and we'll usually find a way. From a Darwinistic viewpoint, the women who are raped by invaders actually are winning the long game. Their men lose out, but the women's genes are passed on as well by a swarthy man as a freckled man. And the women's customs seep into the invaders' culture.
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@mpriymak : I think the people were always quite fertile. But people were living so close to the bone that infant and child mortality were quite high.
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The Romans had the best artillery in the world. It availed them not.
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I think NATO forces had a monopoly in the skies. In Ukraine, both sides have full aerial intelligence, albeit 2nd hand, in Ukraine's case. Both sides have satellite, 1st or 2nd hand. I hadn't heard NATO declaring a no-fly zone. I just think the Russians have the Ukrainians massively outgunned. Russia's been planning for this. NATO's been worrying about which bathroom to use.
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I wonder what would've happened if the Germans had just stuck with the Panzer IV's and poured all their energy into that and the 88 mm flak guns that turned out to be one of the best artillery pieces of the war. If you have a true, well-coordinated, combined-arms battle strategy, I don't think you need the absolute best armor or the best guns. But you DO need to win (or at least tie) in the air. But I'm no scholar. Not a soldier. It just seems like there's a love affair with the tank that has evolved into massive mission creep, instead of keeping tanks "in their lane," and limiting their role to what they do best, and preparing the battlefield properly for their best use.
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@redaerf2b414 Yes. The Saar voted to be German, and the wishes of the people were ignored (January, 1935). At that point in time, Hitler had some sympathy around the world.
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@redaerf2b414 CIA's been operating in Ukraine for a long time. USA was instrumental in the coup in 2014. Not a word about that in corporate media in the West. You don't have to think Putin's a good guy to doubt that NATO are good guys.
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@Jermster_91 Schoolboys designing tanks to be the best at everything, just like the designers of the Tiger.
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I'm no historian, but I've run simulations of Operation Barbarossa in a game called "Russian Campaign." And with the benefit of hindsight, you can see quite clearly that the war is strategically over in the Winter of 1941. When Moscow doesn't fall, it's all over for the Nazis. And even if they do take Moscow, and let's assume with light losses, there are vast reserves of men and materièl to the East. With Moscow in hand, the Nazis can then take Leningrad followed by Stalingrad or vice-versa, and then the 3rd city must fall. But how long that would last is anyone's guess. In the game, it is possible to achieve "victory conditions" by seizing Moscow and killing Stalin. But you have to attack by or before the last week of May or first week of June, and your opponent needs to blunder, badly. But even with Moscow in hand, Germany's still more or less in Napoleon's shoes, with very long supply lines and hostile Soviet partisans threatening every inch of those supply lines, much like Napoleon in Spain. I think the Germans very much underestimated the Soviets, based on their intelligence on what the Soviets had on their Western frontier at the outbreak of war. Stalin didn't trust Hitler, but he thought he could at least temporarily focus on the Japanese threat in the Far East (and maybe pick up some territory?), which it turned out were not a very serious or long-lasting threat in that region, despite successes farther South in China and SouthEast Asia. All that being said (maybe half of it true), Rzhev was were more real fighting took place than in the more famous battle for Stalingrad. I think another piece of this is because Army Group South was the only part of the attack that was making any progress after the Nazis were turned back at the gates of Moscow. To all but the men involved, things just appeared static, everywhere but down South.
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