Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "TIKhistory"
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As we've seen in our own time, crude oil producers swing prices way high and way low because once a retail consumer has committed to using gasoline, bunker fuel, avgas [ when they purchase cars, ships and planes ] subsequent demand for liquid energy is highly inelastic. This dynamic has nothing to do with Central Bankers. Look at fracking. Just by slightly over producing light, sweet crude prices crashed from well over $120/bbl to less than $40/bbl. The reason for this is that unlike coal, once the drill pipe has found oil, the human labor required to keep energy flowing is trivial -- coal has opposed traits. It's easy to find, but entails tremendous on-going outlays to keep the coal coming. Until slurry technology came along decades after WWII, coal was not even all that cheap to transport. (trains versus pipelines)
The ultra-low-ball crude oil price quoted early in your presentation was so low that the oil industry was going broke. The Texas Railroad Commission had to step in and stop oil drilling. This hiatus lasted for more than a year during the Great Depression. This commission regulated crude oil prices globally right up until the Arab Oil Crisis -- when it became obvious that AOPEC had the upper hand. Ironically, the founding members of OPEC did not participate in the cartel's embargo. (Venezuela and Iran founded OPEC -- not the Arab producers. They jumped on board rather immediately, however.)
Back to the Great Depression: oil prices keep rising once the Texas Railroad Commission turned the American industry -- within that state -- into a cartel. Texas was so dominant that it pulled all other American production towards its pricing.
BTW, General Thomas was entirely wrong. The Americans sent rotary oil rigs to the Soviets. These punched holes twenty-one times as fast as what the Soviets had been using. Typically, a hole started on Monday was ready to cap by Thursday. The field was simply not that deep, (1500 feet) the rock was pretty forgiving. The reason that the Nazis knew nothing of any of this because the field that the Soviets were punching had just been discovered. (!) The land was as flat as Texas. So rail lines could be laid lickety split.
Stalin told Churchill that the Red Army reached its absolute nadir with Manstein's winter offensive. Uranus and Mars had entirely burned through Stalin's reserves. He needed the thaw to train a fresh batch of cucumbers.
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STAVKA consisted of Stalin and the generals// marshals he plopped in front of himself on any given day.
His style was to keep them seated, pretty much at all times, while he walked around their backs, interrogating them about their concepts.
Other than Stalin, himself, it's amazing how many generals moved in and out of these STAVKA meetings.
STAVKA best mirrors America's National Security Council... another committee with a totally floating membership. The only one absolutely assured of a position there being the President, himself.
[The American NSC actually ran WWII, but it was never called that during the war, itself. Afterwards, Truman formalized what FDR had long established, and thus we ended up with the NSC and CIA, etc. Both were started out is improvisations.]
Most of my 'take' on the Russians comes not from Glantz -- who I've never read, though I've heard his lecture -- but from Russians and Russophiles. ( To put it politely. )
As for the insane losses at the land-bridge, they are confirmed from all sources... most notably the survivors.
You might take a gander at the post-Cold War diary accounts from the 'cucumbers' -- they are a fright. They just go on and on and on and on. They ALL tell of crazy high infantry losses to German machine guns.
Even Stalin, himself, was pissed at wasteful commanders, and made many a statement to that effect. Said 'waste' was due to the extremely short boot camps that every 'cucumber' reports in their diaries.
There are no exceptions floating around out there in the Russian literature. If there were, they'd get PLENTY of ink from Putin & Co.
No, the Red Army took a beating at the land-bridge. Four Red armies against a single panzer corps? Yiikes. With that much man-power, they should've blown through the Ostheer. On paper, that'd be five to one odds. Obviously, something does not add up.
The ten-armies quote, BTW, comes from a Russophile -- not a German. He was gloating about the Red victory, and the stupidity of the Nazis.
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The German army beat the German army;
The Red army beat the Red army;
-- right up until Stalin let his marshals run the show.
Then everything went the other way. This was also the same time that LendLease really kicked in... which was BEFORE Uranus.
Hell, there are German accounts of them capturing LendLease (American) jeeps and more still on flat cars as they rolled up to Stalingrad. The Germans were giggling and laughing because this stuff was still in American markings. How fresh can you get?
The date: September 1941.
Yeah, that tale surprised me, too.
Boston bombers arrived before Uranus, too. They were the primary reason that Army Group A was so frustrated. A-20s kept blowing up their supplies and attempts at bridging. Back at OKH, Adolf couldn't believe what he was hearing.
No, the history is clear, Stalin wasted lives at an astounding clip. Then it was Hitler's turn. German loses in the back half of the war had to be astounding. Entire divisions, corps, armies evaporated. That's as bad as anything that happened to the Russians in 41-42.
After the war, both sides wanted to fold their losses into their victories so that their extreme defeats didn't boggle the mind.
That's where you get TIK's statistical compilation.
BTW, German position maps don't carry a narrative. They just show deployments. They sure don't make the Ostheer look good, BTW.
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@wbertie2604 But, but, but -- the Colonel was convinced, too. The Krauts made THAT much noise. The 2nd Panzer and 26th VG were right in front of these guys.
When Ike hear the intel of the first day -- he leapt all over it, PDQ. He figured -- rightly -- that this is EXACTLY the kind of stunt that Adolf was prone for.
Not so, Bradley, who was STILL poo-pooing the reports sixteen-hours after the attack began. (!!!) He sent the 7th and 10th tank divisions off to XIII Corps -- almost under protest. This is in his own auto-bio. It's as close as he comes to admitting that he'd screwed up.
BTW, 2nd ID was to attack on the 16th -- a Bradley schemed attack, of course. Its commanding general disobeyed his corps commander... and stopped it. (Gerow, V Corps) Later Gerow apologized. The 2nd ID would've been mauled -- as the Krauts had preregistered fires awaiting them... plus king tiger tanks and the 12SS boys.
By going over to defense, the 2nd ID totally screwed up the 12SS. Adolf expected Big Things -- and yet nothing.
Middleton was NOT fooled. Fuller was not fooled. The Krauts could not tramp around with battalions of tanks, stugs, half-tracks and such in slippers. Their end-connector squeal is just too much to muffle.
The Armored Cavalry up north also was howling about end connector squeal. Piper was right in front of them.
It was Bradley who was dismissing these reports. Only in glancing, in his auto-bio, does Bradley admit that he was fulsomely dismissive of Kraut capabilities at this point. Though a bona fide genius, he utterly failed to imagine what a truly desperate dictator would do, what powers he could summon.
In military lingo: Bradley blew it. He was not getting just the one report. When Fuller sent the intel up the line -- he did so with his own written assurance that the dope was spot on.
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@solarfreak1107 The 19th Century folks called the distilled product coal-oil. You'll hear such references in many a Hollywood 'period' film. Petroleum based oil was the minor fraction of production until Rockefeller standardized refining in Ohio. Hence his brand: Standard (standardized) Oil.
[He made his breakthrough with kerosene that had no gasoline vapors in it.]
The destructive distillation of coal to produce coke for blast furnaces is a huge business even today. However, the coals used are chosen for their properties in iron reduction: low sulfur, low phosphorous.
For the Nazis, the play was to destructively distill 'steam coal' - the stuff that the Red Chinese and Indians have run short of. This process does not produce sweet coke -- but it does release far, far more volatiles -- which when condensed -- become very, very light 'crude oil' -- also termed 'gas oil' as it is a liquid recovered from hot gassified vapors by the process.
The kicker for the Nazis was that such an industrial process does not require exotic, high quality steels. It does not involve really high pressures.
It was not viable once cheap petroleum became widely available -- especially after Spindle top in Texas. (1903)
But, until then, coal distillation condensate dominated the fuel liquids market.
Before steam turbine driven alternators, the waste coke from said distillation was a drug on the market. But by 1935, the Krauts were in a position to partner up every distillation plant with a plain vanilla steam power plant -- of which the Nazis needed no end of.
THAT was their play -- and they blew it. The Nazis were destined to lose the war -- no matter what they did. But with coal oil, they would've had a route to far more liquid fuels at a practical cost. Thank the heavens that the Nazis were technical dolts.
BTW, a single ton of steam coal figures to emit about 1.3 barrels of coal oil condensate... IF you're using lighter, wetter thermal coal. At worst, you're looking at 1 barrel per ton. Nazi Germany was mining millions of tons per year -- over 300,000 tons per day...(adding in the occupied nations.) Scaling up to 100,000 bbl per day might have been possible. Then the Nazi fuel crisis would be over.
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@Peorhum
Nope. Not a chance.
The ONLY shot that the Germans had in North Africa was by way of a drilling campaign.
Astoundingly, it never occurred to either the Italians or the Germans to drill for water in Libya. It's not as if it had been tried and the holes came up dry.
Virtually the ENTIRE nation sits atop a massive aquifer, with the biggest deposits in the deep southern desert. Still, it had water virtually right up to the coast.
This water actually comes from the Nile river... by way of Sudan. You see the Earth is splitting apart there, so the ground gives way to an immense, bottomless swamp. And I do mean bottomless. Attempts have been made to find the bottom, and the drill string just kept going and going until the crew ran out of pipe. (!)
Then, with the passage of millions of years, the swamp water wicked its way north to create an immense aquifer from western Egypt all the way to the west. IIRC, it's the biggest ever discovered.
Underneath that lens of water lies the best crude oil ever discovered. It's practically gasoline. ( okay it's only 40-50% gasoline ) A single well could've supplied the DAK and the Italian fleet.
The Nazis and Fascist Italians could've pumped 2,000,000 bbl per day out of Libya -- if given enough time to build it out. ( Think fifteen years. )
What a gaff. They never looked, not even once. After the discoveries under Kuwait and Saudi Arabia -- why didn't they get curious?
This option was available BEFORE Barbarossa. With a modern rig, water would be hit after about three-days, BTW... oil would take another week, week and a half.
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@Peorhum
andrew is largely correct.
The assets used for Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete came from Army Group North almost exclusively.
This had a DRASTIC impact during Barbarossa.
1) The British SUNK 2nd Panzer Division -- not the men -- just the panzers. The Germans were shipping all of its equipment from Greece to Italy -- thence to be rail roaded back to Army Group North. They all ended up under the Adriatic.
This one panzer division counts as TWO, as it was still based on the TO&E of 1940. It hadn't been divided in half for Barbarossa. ~400 panzers were sunk -- in two ships. So, until the Battle of Moscow, the most elite, powerful German panzer division, Guderian's favorite, was cooling its heels back in Germany, being totally rebuilt.
2) Crete was the end of German airborne operations. This proved to be HUGE, HUGE, HUGE. The German parachute arm was the instrument of victory time and time again. It was originally intended to assist in the conquest of Leningrad. ( one scheme out of many ) The idea was to parachute it on top of the rail line leading off to the east and Archangel. This would entirely eliminate support to the defenders of that city. The plan would be to rip up the rail road and retreat back to German lines while the panzers surged forward to meet the paras. It could've worked.
3) The rail net of Yugoslavia and Greece was a travesty. So rail road repairs sucked down all of the SUPPLIES and tooling and troops intended for Army Group North. This was to have knock-on effects during Barbarossa. The Germans simply couldn't repair the rails as fast as originally planned. This was a MAJOR screw up that directly fed back into burning too much gasoline -- to replace the missing steam locomotives.
4) Greece also kept the 1st SS Brigade in the south, and much else. This was the wrong place for such an elite unit. The Romanian front did not move until Army Group South peeled the Soviets backward. This process took more than a month. Until then, 11th Army just sat on its azz... with two Romanian armies to keep it company.
5) Greece and Crete continued to be a drag on German resources -- especially oil. For you had to keep supplying the Crete garrison with motor transport ( no grass for horses ) and air cover and shipping to and fro. None of this was in the 'original military budget' for 1941. It was a total bleeder.
What proved to be a fiasco for the British Empire proved ultimately to be the utter downfall of Nazi Germany. But no-one saw that at the time. Indeed, most don't comprehend it to this day.
But Greece and Crete is where Nazi Germany really went off the rails. Germany couldn't afford to even enter this campaign. It was that much of a bleeder. Greece is probably the ONLY time in Churchill's life that he made a correct military decision of a strategic nature.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
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@TIK
1) Von Manstein was correct. The moment of decision was BEFORE von Manstein was even brought into the picture... BEFORE the 6th Army was even encircled.
Once the army was encircled, it was too late.
ANY attempt to break out past the first FEW DAYS was doomed to failure.
1) The army was already fatally weakened by hunger and lack of transport. In the conditions then prevailing, 6th Army would've been chopped up, Napoleon style, just by exposure marching westward through the cold.
2) Paulus WASTED 6th Army's reserve fuel supplies in the magic hours after Uranus was launched and before the army was encircled. This episode is ALWAYS omitted in the telling and re-telling of Uranus. To do so makes the Ostheer look like IDIOTS. Yes.
The panzer regiments, the QRF for 6th Army that had been kept in reserve just for this possibility were run into the ground -- and then brought back into the kessel. To do so, they had to travel the LONG way back. The short route would've put them west of the Don bridgehead... a location that Paulus didn't bother to reinforce whatsoever in the early days of Uranus. (!!!)
3) The 29th Motorized// Mechanized division was held in reserve expressly to counter-attack any Soviet advance that might proceed across the lower Volga in an attempt to sweep 6th Army from the south. In the campaign it DID launch its pre-planned counter-attack into the Reds. This attack went off PERFECTLY. The 29th was just mowing down the advance elements of the Red army. The leading troops had absolutely no heavy weapons at all. They were still trapped east of the Volga, as no truck, no tank could cross the Volga -- the ice ridges were THAT BAD. ( They occur every year, so you can always re-examine the matter next winter.) It took DAYS for the Soviets to fix paths for their tanks and trucks. The primary reason that the southern pincer had cavalry was because horses could navigate the ice single file. Once to the west bank, the cavalry faced essentially no opposition of any kind, so it was a simple matter to trot westwards. When the cavalry ran into Germans, everyone dismounted and fought like Dragoons.
( Shades of the Australians of WWI fame in the Middle East.)
3a) The Soviets SPOOFED Paulus & Company into stopping the 29th's attack, by claiming the authority of Adolf Hitler. We now know for a fact that Hitler was in absolutely no position to issue the magic directive. He was on his train at the time.
3b) This event was mentioned in EVERY German account of the period. They just couldn't understand 'Hitler's interference.' Heh. Later von Manstein put it all together. He fed the Soviets garbage during his Winter Offensive and then bagged multiple Red armies. ( Spoofed them with 4-rotor Enigmas, sent true commands with 5-rotor Enigmas -- and shortly thereafter, the Ostheer went over to 5-rotor Enigmas across the whole front.
This transition was one of the reasons for the lull before Kursk. OKH could not bear to have side by side transmissions of 4-rotor and 5-rotor signals. Any such folly would allow the Soviets to back into the 5-rotor system.
(The IJN made this mistake with the USN. It resulted in the Midway fiasco.)
By the time von Manstein showed up, the die was cast. 6th Army had become immobilized. Paulus is the man most responsible for that status. He was the man on the scene allowing the Reds to WALK across the snow to encircle him. Yes, the great advance proceeded at a tempo that Napoleon could identify with.
The break-down rate of the T-34s in this campaign was astounding. The crews were so GREEN than even the slightest malfunction had them totally stumped. This is why 11 Panzer found themselves squared off against pathetically small T-34 formations. They had started life as tank regiments back at the Don. By the time they were confronted, they'd lost 65% of their strength do to motor-march grief.
( Later the Soviets would correct this epic gaff. They even put together a propaganda piece about cross-training the new T-34 crews back at the factory. That newsreel footage is up on YouTube to this very day, BTW.
This ^^^ is what separated the USA from the Red Army. GIs didn't need ANY training WRT mechanical trivia. And the USA gave its tankers about 18 months of training on their Shermans before being committed to combat. The USA originally ( on paper ) was scaled to invade France in May 1943. That's why the tankers had so much time to kill.
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Strategy & Tactics Magazine ( Dunnigan ) cranked out cardboard war games forty-five years ago. One featured Uranus. They had to impose a Hitler-rule so as to achieve some semblance of history: the German contestant was prohibited from moving his panzers out of the pocket, of moving them to the Chir or Don rivers. For, during game testing, EVERY player was immediately sending his panzer corps to the west, while squatting in place with his infantry armies. ( 6th Army was really and army group in its own right. It had its own panzer army, and two Romanian armies and a Hungarian army and an Italian army -- all of whom were routing their command orders through Paulus. (!!!)
And Paulus was in DIRECT subordination to Adolf Hitler. I don't know where you, TIK, ever came up with Paulus reporting to von Manstein. It's on the record from many sources that Hitler had jumped the queue and was calling the shots for Paulus VERY shortly after 6th Army was encircled. It was at this moment that Adolf had finally come up to speed -- and was in his Prussian lair.
Keep in mind that Mars had OKH's attention, too.
Mars caused Hitler to reneg on his commitment to Paulus -- which was to seen a panzer corps to his aid should anything go sideways at Stalingrad. IIRC the panzers involved were the exact divisions that Hitler had taken away from 4th Army a few months back: 17th panzer, 18th panzer and GD motorised... The panzers were actually sitting on flat cars south of AGC when Hitler committed them to Mars -- BEFORE he even scoped what was up with Uranus -- BEFORE things truly went sideways.
He was reacting to the screams of 2nd and 3rd Panzer Armies. Stupid.
The correct play was to let the 2nd and 3rd bob and weave. They had PLENTY of power, short lines back to the rail heads.
Whereas 6th Army was in a heap load of trouble -- so obvious that Zeitzler// OKH had been screaming about it for WEEKS. He'd been told that he should calm down because a spare panzer corps was on call if anything erupted.
The Soviets knew all about this reserve panzer corps, and so actually turned over MANY secrets to the Germans so that it would not be sent south to bail out Paulus.
Further research figures to show that the RUSSIANS used spoofing to get the panzers to return back into the kessel. Hoth, Rommel, Guderian, Hoepner, not one of them would've bought such missives -- purportedly from Hitler -- same as the BS used to freeze the 29th Motorized division.
The infantry of 6th Army simply couldn't be shifted... not even before the encirclement.
The ONLY troops that should've broken out were the panzers and motorized troops -- and they needed to break-out before they were even encircled.
All later breakout attempts that were contemplated were TOO LATE. Paulus had already destroyed his panzer's gasoline reserve chasing ghosts.
This ^^^^ brutal FACT is something that ALL Ostheer histories try to obscure. Don't let them.
The chain of command jumped straight to Adolf Hitler. Von Manstein had to BEG Adolf to sign off on any orders he wanted to give to Paulus. Hitler duly threw in his two-bits.
I've quoted from just a piece of Hitler's insistences, already.
TIK, your thesis -- it doesn't fit the facts.
BTW, it was Franz Halder who established in the mind of Adolf Hitler that Paulus was a "does as he is told" kind of guy. His own peers were SHOCKED when he was promoted to army command... by Franz Halder -- his patron. Later, Hitler decided that now that he had Paulus -- why hang on to the Catholic? And out Halder went.
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@Edax_Royeaux You left out that the US adopted a uniform gauge AFTER the end of the Civil War. It's an amazing story all by itself. What happened was that over a three-day week-end (a national holiday in the Spring, IIRC ) all of the non-standard track was re-gauged. (!!!) How so? Ordinary joes were used to re-gauge all straight track. Veteran rail crews solely concentrated on switches/points. To re-gauge, only one rail was normally moved. With a gauging jig, even idiots could nail down the rails to spec. As for the rolling stock, that took a bit longer, but there was enough 'northern' rolling stock such that the South had enough time for the crews to re-gauge the locos and cars. ( Some before, some after. )
The American's contrast with Australia is astounding. The Aussies were unable to re-gauge their rails to a uniform standard -- even though decades were to pass. But, that's another story.
The issue with Soviet rails has been addressed repeatedly by me: the gauge was not the killer. The destruction of the ties/sleepers and the destruction of the water towers was the back-breaker. In the US Civil War the combatants developed 'sleeper ploughs' / tie-plows that a locomotive could drag to utterly ruin thousands of ties per day -- while doing a number on the rails, too. After that destruction, the only thing left was "The Way." That is, the graded path. Of course, all bridges were blown. The USSR had virtually no tunnels, so the Nazis lucked out on that score.
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