Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "German Thoughts on the Churchill Tank" video.
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@shermanfirefly5410 All of this has been addressed by me before. Browning called the shots. The heights were the ONLY terrain that could support panzers. They were directly on the German border, and so the Allies had no idea of what might be lurking under the forest there. As a 3-star, Browning simply was too valuable to be lost. He knew all about ULTRA... because he was an army commander. HE was the source of the 1,000 tanks story -- which came via ULTRA. What Bletchley Park had picked up was Hitler's commitment to a Western Counter-Offensive. It was to be launched in mid-November. This date slipped until December 16th. So, Bletchley was not wrong.
The battle of Nijimegan should NEVER have been fought. The British were to have ALREADY grabbed the Arnhem bridge -- making it impossible for Germans to drive across the island and into Nijmegan. The story you've read has been 'adjusted' to make The Plan look better.
The Allies (Browning) did not realize that the Krauts had a mobile FLAK battalion dedicated to protecting their V-2 launch island. It was rolling out every nightfall to shoot at the RAF while the V-2 crews did their business. Its commander had just gotten his Iron Cross that very morning.(!)
Virtually ALL contemporaneous accounts are LYING. They are suppressing the fact that the entire reason for M-G is to suppress// eliminate the V-2 launches against London -- which are coming from this island.
THIS is the reason why Ike gave Monty total priority without even consulting Tedder. ( He tried to stop M-G the second he heard about it. )
The actual guy behind M-G was never Monty -- it was Winston. Parliament is blowing a fuse about the Nazi bombardment.
Quite obviously then, the ideal drop zone is the island, itself. It merited a full American division: 101st Airborne.
Gavin must have been stupefied to discover Germany's most elite FLAK formation holding most of Nijmegan. Its very existence was a total surprise.
BTW, it's THIS FLACK unit that caused the British to shun landing even closer to Arnhem. No reccee flights could figure out what the heck was going on. The FLAK kept shifting all over the island. The RAF had never seen that before. FLAK stayed put -- usually. They actually thought that the FLAK was coming from Arnhem, itself. Nope. That's how lost they were.
Naturally, when British Airborne fought in and around Arnhem they kept running into 20mm FLAK... and lots of it. This you'll note is missing from virtually all battle accounts. It has been edited out by censors. Again, to hide the V-2 connection. For WHY was all of this FLAK in a Dutch minor town? Yeah, it would raise too many questions.
Virtually every thing TIK has held true does not hold up to inspection.
BTW, Browning was fired by Monty for his screw-ups. Fired so fast that the Press could not talk to him.
The V-2 connection has also been buried. When C. Ryan drafted his book no-one ever mentioned the V-2 launches to him. (!!!!)
Lastly, Frost DID capture V-2 launch crews that just happened to be waltzing on by. That aspect was buried for decades, too.
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@samrodian919 Tried -- but not fully successful.
Because the weather often shut down USAAF operations for days at a time, the crews were given long enough leaves to get just about anywhere in England -- much to the disgust of the locals.
Overpaid, over-sexed and over here!
At one point, B-29s were to be committed to England -- as in bases up in Scotland. (!)
As it was, only a single, solitary, B-29 was ever stationed in England -- as a publicity stunt -- and to screw with Adolf's head. Britain actually started constructing such bases. This terminated before things got much beyond surveys and paperwork. So, don't go looking for them.
The bases to the east grew out of a lack of space in the west.
Events forced London's hand. You're looking at Plan C or D. The original purpose of East Anglia strips was for the recovery of cripples. That didn't last.
Winston admitted -- after the war -- in Missouri -- that the growth of the American military machine went way beyond British expectation... particularly in heavy bombers. The USAAF not only packed it in -- in England -- it expanded like topsy in the Med, the Pacific and all points in between.
Results overwhelmed (British) intentions. Naturally, all such matters were censored back then -- and are usually never brought up by mainstream military historians even now.
So much American stuff landed in England that the joke was that the island would sink. The way things were set up, most everything landed in the Irish Sea (Liverpool, mostly) and then was warehoused -- some place in England -- before heading off to France. The Krauts had done such a bang-up job ruining French harbors that direct shipping to France was never a serious factor. In this, everything was different than WWI. [Yes, very late in the campaign, America could finally ship direct. But Winter had arrived by then.]
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@thomasellysonting3554 Dang, got the year wrong. Otherwise, the film is technically spot-on. It's so correct that the film is boring -- a downer. I cite from imdb:
As the movie shows, a jeep actually reached the outskirts of Rome with no resistance – and reported back. But Lucas still chose to dig in and wait. So, this paranoid, fearful general gave up the element of surprise that the landing had been, and instead entrenched and allowed the Germans to move in and surround the area with heavy artillery and armored power. The result was a five month battle that was among the bloodiest of WWII, with 30,000 casualties. Equally bad, it gave German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring time to later pull his troops from the southern barrier and regroup all his forces north of Rome to continue to hold the Allies at bay with costly encounters.
The written records entirely back this statement up. Clark and Lucas have gone down in lore as the worst US generals of WWII. Lucas was actually canned. I blame Clark because Lucas was burnt out even before the landing -- and that was obvious to all around him.
As for the campaign, as cited, it was OBVIOUS that the hills were priority #1. It was obvious that the Tiber could not be crossed by the enemy. Too few bridges, the Tiber is quite rapid, too. As for the right flank, it was a swamp -- famously drained by el Duce -- but still wholly unsuitable for military movement. The ONLY area that was a threat was dead ahead -- the Alban hills.
And there were no German units within quick reaction range. It took DAYS for the Krauts to assemble even a thin line. All during that time, Lucas sat on his tush, being hectored by all around him for his sloth.
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