Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "German News 1944" video.

@jmarlow2153 I contend that the real turning point was the cypher-war. Signals intelligence decided the strategic game. It was at Tel el Issa that the Brits FINALLY discovered how Rommel had been wrong-footing them... Same as how the Krauts had been wrong-footing the Soviets straight through to Uranus -- for the most part. The Cambridge crew alerted Moscow PDQ as to what the Brits discovered WRT signals analysis, the B'diesnt teams, and Nazi code breaking. Tel el Issa turned to be quite significant for the Battle of the Atlantic. This is a connection that virtually all histories skip past. And with reason, the UK government has kept a tight wrap on the embarrassing details for decades after the war. It was hard enough to reveal Enigma and Ultra. It is even worse to let the public in on the errors in British naval codes during the early years in the Battle of the Atlantic. Both the British and the Germans had one fundamental problem, the grid co-ordinates when sailing across the Atlantic soon become too repetitive. They become a key into the cyphering scheme. In North Africa, both sides were getting so many, many naval signals such that their encoding schemes began to break down. Until Tel el Issa the British were wholly unaware of just how totally the Krauts were doping their movements out. The PAA never recovered from Tel el Issa. Suddenly, the 8th Army had signals security. The exact same thing happened for the Soviets with Uranus. It was NOT a co-incidence. During the first hours of Uranus, KNVD commandos snagged the Enigma detachment that had been located up with the Hungarian Army -- during a white out!!! The Soviets/Russians are still staying mum about this astonishing feat. The weather report is common knowledge -- yet buried in the military archives. How the Soviets pulled this gambit off remains a mystery. Uranus worked because this machine -- and its papers -- and its crew -- permitted Stavka to spoof Adolf's supreme command over-rides. They spoofed the 29th MD into stopping its counter-attack against the southern wing at the most critical hour. Until this order from "Adolf Hitler" came through, the 29th was just chewing up the light, leading infantry of the Reds. There is the wrongful assumption that a division fighting in North Africa was approximately equal to a division fighting in the USSR. Such is not so. The desert destroys men and machines at SEVEN TIMES the tempo seen in Europe This burn-out in the desert is still true. Translated: to support a single panzer division in the Sahara took seven-division equivalents of Eastern Front military gear. Yes, the reason Halder hated Rommel's campaign was that it was sucking down enough men and gear to sustain two-panzer armies if deployed to the Eastern Front. Yup. It was that bad. This horrific wearing rate was why Kaddaffy had such a huge tank force. He knew that if ever deployed, it would wear down at a fantastic rate. You might note that most of the dictator's tanks have been scrapped. The Sahara destroyed them even without any of them fighting. Stop thinking about North Africa in terms of divisions and men -- and start calculating how many gallons of gasoline, ships and panzers are evaporating there. Adolf was actually supporting SIX panzer armies but only getting four armies + one corps. That's how it looked from OKH's desk.Losses to the RN and to the desert were EPIC. Two extra panzer armies -- ALL panzer divisions -- none merely motorized -- would've changed everything in the East during 1942. Rommel's fruitless enterprise cost Adolf any chance at victory. Even today the resource gobbling significance of North Africa is lost even upon British fan boys.
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@oldman1734 No. The breach was back at 8th Army in the Western Desert. Monty stopped the leaks. These leaks cost the Great Auk his job. You need to read up on Captain Seebaum (sp?) and the First Battle of tel el Issa. During this event, the Aussies captured Captain Seebaum and his entire B'dienst crew. The Aussies also grabbed the gear and the paperwork. Within those papers it was revealed that the B'dienst team was reading not only 8th Army's signals -- but the Royal Navy's Atlantic convoy signals. (!!!!) The latter was never suspected until it was discovered. The RN changed its signals security -- rather totally. This fiasco has NEVER been popularly acknowledged in British histories -- to this very day. After Monty took command, everything was corrected. Rommel was never the 'fox' again. Seebaum was dead... his whole unit was captured by the Aussies. The entire flow of the war had changed. You can now see why Monty became so celebrated. Reading 8th Army signals proved unnecessary. The B'dienst team had doped out what was up merely by figuring out whose radio was commanding -- then building up a network analysis. (In the Cold War this technique became standard NATO practice.) That alone was sufficient for Seebaum and Rommel to dope out what 8th Army was up to. The USN used network analysis to destroy the IJN, too. But that's another story.
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@oldman1734 Horrocks was a corps commander and in absolutely no position to know about the crypto war. ULTRA and all the rest were restricted to Monty and his superiors. I can easily believe that Monty, et. al spun tales to Horrocks to dump onto the Americans the gaffs made within 8th Army -- all which were largely ouside Horrock's personal knowledge. Indeed, straight through to the end of the war (and beyond) army commanders were expected to keep corps commanders in the dark. This was true for Britain, America and Canada. America did have its diplomatic codes stolen by a black-bag operation in Cairo. And some leaks did source from that fiasco. But it took prompt field intelligence for 8th Army to be undone in the desert by Rommel. ONLY the B'dienst crew could pull that off. The Americans weren't even remotely in the picture. BTW, there are many accounts of Rommel and Seebaum chatting it up to all hours in Rommel's 'off-time.' They were buddies. Seebaum's rank had nothing to do with his real importance in Rommel's eyes. And, of course, the First Battle of tel el Issa was the turning point of WWII. The British stopped losing -- and began winning -- straight through to May 8th, 1945. The Krauts had been winning more on the strength of their signals security and signals analysis than any other factors. That Horrocks actually believed that British defeats were caused by non-existent American involvements -- 'tis to laugh. But then, the entire British Army establishment could NOT figure out what was going wrong in the desert. BTW, Rommel got into Tobruk via B'dienst spoofing. By using Dutch accents the Krauts conned the defenders into thinking that they were listening to Boer chatterers. The Krauts successfully shifted South African defenders out of their positions on the very logical basis that they were needed to enhance an Aussie counter-attack victory. Then the Krauts drove straight through the chink in the Tobruk defense to occupy critical positions. This is the stunt that convinced the Great Auk that he had to crush the B'dienst team. The deception fiasco was suppressed in all British histories of the debacle. It has simply been skipped past.
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@Chiller01 I've yet to see a name historian go into the totally out-sized inputs required to keep Rommel in business. Todays Russians insanely under-rate the British contribution to victory -- via 8th Army. The British were actually fighting 2 panzer army equivalents. A LOT of that gear was being sunk by the Royal Navy. And to do that, Britain paid a fearful cost. (Malta, anyone?) Approximately 35% of all German gear sent to Rommel went under the waves. This percentage swung all over the lot, as everything turned on how effective the Malta force was at any given time. By the end, sending stuff to Tunisia was self-slaughter for the Axis. Indeed, one of the key reasons that the Luftwaffe failed at Stalingrad was because Adolf had already prioritized Tunisia. That's why his transport fleet was so slow to show up for 6th Army. This reality is also never brought up in any standard history.
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