Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "Manstein's "MIRACLE" at the Third Battle of Kharkov [Heavy Sarcasm within] TIK Q&A 19" video.

@seinine The BBC re-enacted Agincourt -- forensically. They were SHOCKED. The English really didn't defeat the French. The French defeated the French! Henry V was a VERY clever commander -- because he chose the best ground for a defensive battle on the coast. The actual battle site still shows evidence of the battle -- and even after centuries -- the terrain lies amazingly undisturbed by modern development. Due to seriously thick fog and muddy ground, it's now plain that most French fatalities were due to the French falling upon the French -- actually unseen by the English -- at all! Their own horses were rebelling, colliding, slipping, falling. The following waves of knights were galloping into fog so thick that they could not pull off before disaster struck. The BBC proved that it has been a MYTH that the Long Bow was at all decisive. The fog was so extreme, for most of the battle no-one let loose a volley of arrows. French armor -- of the period -- hauled out from museums -- proved to be entirely too thick for the arrows of the period. The Long Bow story was an invented fiction to puff up the English troops. The vast majority of Frenchmen died of HEAT EXHAUSTION. Once anyone in armor falls to the clay-mud ground they can't get up. This is STILL TRUE, as the BBC demonstrated. They need about five unarmored guys to pull up one fallen knight... with clear skies and no threats. The mud of Agincourt actually sucks any knight down like it's superglue. They died attempting to merely get back up on their feet. It was very much like the famous La Brea Tar Pits of Southern California. Layer after layer of fallen knight was suffocating those lower in the pile. When the fog lifted, the battle was promptly over. Then both sides invented what had happened in a fog so thick that few could see the action. Naturally, the tales ran towards heroic myth.
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That Wiki page is a hoot. It doesn't even make it up to wrong. The SS Pioneer Corps ( Its name at that moment ) run up towards 70,000 men as each SS division was virtually at its max TO&E, having not been committed to combat for months. Indeed, the 3rd SS was actually a surprise arrival. It'd been in France to be totally rebuilt. They were NOT panzer divisions at this time. Rather they were designated mechanized divisions. They each had three mechanized/motorized infantry regiments -- with tank battalions recently laid on top. So these were super-sized divisions. The 6th Panzer had also come from France -- and was at shock strength when it attempted to relieve 6th Army. All four divisions were equipped with the latest tanks -- low mileage on every one. The 11th Panzer was a "ghost division" and its exploits during Uranus were written up by von Mellenthin in "Panzer Battles." Its commander,Balck was promoted up to command XLVIII corps -- taking von Mellenthin with him as his chief of staff. { In 1978 Balck and von Mellenthin ran a US Army wargame as to stopping the USSR. That wargame was run by Col. Norman Schwarzkopf. } The 17th Panzer was a run-of-the mill panzer division at this point in time. So the Krauts had well over 100,000 soldiers for Manstein's Miracle... at the point of attack. Due to winter inactivity, (Hitler had lost 6th Army AND a air army) the Krauts even had decent fuel supplies. The key to the battle -- as ever -- was intelligence. The Soviets had spoofed the Krauts with their own Enigma -- with four-rotors. It became obvious that Enigma was compromised. So Manstein brought in KM Enigma machines -- with FIVE rotors. Then he sent spurious signals for the Soviets to swallow with his four-rotor Enigmas -- while the truth was sent via five-rotor Enigmas. This was how he suckered Stalin into plowing ahead into the Nazi bag. After this counter-offensive, Stalin deemed it to be the LOWEST POINT in the war for the Red Army. He told Churchill this. Winnie dang near swallowed his cigar. At the end of Manstein's Miracle, Stalin had totally run out of cucumbers. New bullet stoppers could not be trained until the snow melted. By June, Stalin's peril had passed. By June the Anglo-Allies had wiped out another air army and panzer corps in Tunisia. Operation Husky was in the wings. This move caused Hitler to move a panzer army and infantry army out of the Eastern Front to block the Anglo-Allies. This deployment included the 1SS and 2SS and 24th Panzer Corps.
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@desmondanderson665 Stalin tanks had a 122mm gun that fired two-piece ammo -- and the gun had to be swung down to feed it. A good crew could bang out two-rounds per minute. It was really perfect for bunkers and infantry support. It was a rotten anti-tank threat. The number one nightmare for the Krauts was the 100mm SU machine. It ran on the T-34 chassis -- but not having a turret -- its glacis was very thick. Further, its 100mm gun had better statistics than any other anti-tank gun the Soviets produced. It was totally dedicated towards killing Panthers and Tigers. The number two nightmare was the same machine, armed with an 85mm rifle. These existed in even greater numbers. Head-on both were virtually impossible to knock out. They were both committed in packs. They would be wheeled in to gang-rape panzers. They were so effective that the Soviets praised them to Heaven -- and the USSR was atheistic!
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@seinine On first go, it's not up-loaded to YouTube. But some of their tests on armor have been up-loaded: ARROWS vs ARMOUR - Medieval Myth... Search-Engine for it. What the boys 'discovered' was long out there from the BBC's work, namely that French armor of the period was generally proof against English arrows. This makes sense. Who would buy or tolerate armor that didn't work against such a common, and commoner's, weapon? What was most impressive was how much force is required to pull medieval armor up out of sticky mud. For the BBC -- it was mind-blowing to guys who thought that they had everything scoped. As for documents, forensic science, right before your eyes shows you that much of the written record is pure fiction. For another tale of pure fiction, in 1980 it was finally revealed that EVERY English sourced account of Waterloo in the last 150-years is a MYTH. The foundational myth was crafted on the basis of crowd-funding -- with the crowd being retired British officers who wanted to look good in history! Only by going back to contemporary accounts -- which took years -- ( This correction became a PhD thesis project -- and he got it.) It was revealed that those then living wrote PLENTY. And all concerned recorded that the PRUSSIANS were the critical victors at Waterloo -- not the British. By the time Napoleon sent in his Imperial Guard -- the battle was actually already lost! He had Prussian pouring into his right flank -- with no-one to stop them. Ney had already frittered away too much blood. Ney should've been left back at home. Lastly, it IS true that syphilis did in Napoleon. He froze on 6-17-15 because his organ was on fire. This had been long a rumor. His physician's diary makes it plain that the rumor was fact. The good doctor told his kin to keep the diary buried for at least a century.
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@desmondanderson665 And that dude was one of Germany's supreme tank aces. Obviously he knew what a dog the Stalin tank was. It was not at all designed to destroy other tanks -- just bunkers -- for which it did a bang-up job. However, even with its limitations, on first blush, JS-2s were commonly expected to destroy German heavies. The rate of fire for any Tiger crew (they were ALWAYS elite, hand-picked crews) was many times that of a Stalin tank. BTW, i rather doubt it took Otto Caris that long. IIRC, he blew up parked Stalin tanks as he rolled past. His loader got quite a work out! When combined with his buddies, the Red Army lost a battalion -- ish of Stalin tanks. ( TO&E for them was usually 30 machines.) This tank action opened the door for 16th and 18th Armies to race to the West -- the Courland Pocket being their fate. While in the pocket, unit after unit was pulled out by sea to rejoin the front. The only limitation being shipping -- a very risky business due to the Soviet navy -- finally able to contribute to the war by sinking anyone fleeing to the West.
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@desmondanderson665 You are seriously confused. King Alexander -- he was not that great -- passed through the desert that stretches from Pakistan to Iran. In his day, the track was inside Persia. This was the opposite side of the Persian Gulf. Next, King Alexander was DELIBERATELY punishing his army by this transit. It had refused to go further East into India. Alex was absolutely clueless as to the staggering size of India. BTW, like Christopher Columbus, he had a wildly distorted estimation WRT the size of our planet. The reason he wanted to go east was because he thought that he'd pull a Magellan and circumnavigate the Earth -- on land. That is, he'd would've then conquered the world. Alex KNEW that the route he was taking was one of the world's driest deserts. (It still is.) His army drank every water hole dry during his transit. Since he was in the front, Alex had first shot at whatever water was found. The boys at the back simply died.
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@desmondanderson665 Boy, it must have really hurt.
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