Comments by "TheVilla Aston" (@thevillaaston7811) on "The Armchair Historian"
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@jpmtlhead39
'AT the time of El Alamein, Rommel wasnt even in África, to have a real command of his forces. He Just left some "directives" how to respond to the brittsh attack, that he knew It was abaut to come.'
The same question applies: Rommel was outnumbered two to one at Alamein. Does defeat there make him a bad general?
Its a simple question, a 14 year old could work it out.
And in Arnhem, the "brilliant" Montgomery, with the famous 4 Victoria crosses awarded (postum), tryed to gained a Moral Victory, on the total hummiliation of Market Garden. The Biggest Paratroopers operation of the war. His total lack of awareness and intelegence, made the perfect storm, for the poor paratroopers. A very real, bridge to far.
A "brilliant" plan, from a "brilliant" general
The MARKET plan was down to the head of the FAAA, US General Lewis Brereton.
Btw. Why is an hispanic like you taking an interest in real countries? Spain was not in the war, apart from helping the Nazis.
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@jpmtlhead39
1/10 for effort.
'got to do with everything.
You can only have a proper battle, if you have weapons and logistics to do so.' Your words.
OK. So Urquhart being out gunned, and oiutnumbered , losing at Arnhem made him a bad general?
And Britain dindt had the means, to engage the German army, only by Herself. Everybody knows that.' OK. So how does that make Montgomery 'The most overated general in Military history'?
'You have many examples, of brilliant german generals, Without the means to do what They intended to do.'
OK, so how many of them won when the odds were not in their favour? How many of them won without incurring hefty casualty figures?
Example: At Alam el Halfa, Rommel outnumbered Montgomery by 6 to 4. Yet Montgomery won. Does that make Rommel a bad General?
Example: At Alamein, Rommel was out numbered by 2 to 1, and lost. Does that make Rommel a bad General? Of course not .
For Alamein, allowed himself to be mauvered into a position whereby he had all but outrun his supply lines, and he found himself with the sea on his left, and the Qattara Depression on his right, and thus no room to outflank his opponent. The cardinal sins of warfare in the desert. Does that make Rommel a bad General?
Btw. Montgomery won at Almein with less than 7% casualties. Compare that to US casulty figures in their battles with the Germans...
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@jpmtlhead39
'from the lend lease program 80 % was food. Brittain was starving to death. No to mention,oil.
And tanks,airplanes,guns,everything you need to not starve and fighting a War.
If were not for the US Help,maybe the language in brittain,was another today.'
Your words.
Its a definite no.
The food import figures for 1941 are typical:
1941 total food imports: 14.654 million tons
1941 food imports from the USA: 1.073 million tons. (7.3% of the above total).
Oill came from the Middle East, Central America, as well from the USA.
Britons speak English, as Americans do, because Germany had no means of defeating Britain, regardless of anything supplied to Britain from the USA.
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@toekneekerching9543
From Big Woody (aka Para Dave):
'Thicko Monty just displayed his single thrust @ OMG.A concept so idiotic that pretty much everyone in Allied HQ blasted it. I mean it ended up like 1940 Norway,the Netherlands,Belgium,France,Dunkirk - complete routes.That's why the GIs had to get it sorted.....AGAIN.Hey tell the board Little Villa how mum took some Gerries prisoner.' His words.
The single thrust:
The Germans agreed that a concentrated allied thrust would have been the best policy...
'I am in full agreement with Montgomery. I believe General Eisenhower's insistence on spreading the Allied forces out for a broader advance was wrong. The acceptance of Montgomery's plan would have shortened the war considerably. Above all, tens of thousands of lives—on both sides—would have been saved'
Hasso von Manteuffel.
"The best course of the Allies would have been to concentrate a really strong striking force with which to break through past Aachen to the Ruhr area. Germany's strength is in the north. South Germany was a side issue. He who holds northern Germany holds Germany. Such a break-through, coupled with air domination, would have torn in pieces the weak German front and ended the war. Berlin and Prague would have been occupied ahead of the Russians. There were no German forces behind the Rhine, and at the end of August our front was wide open. There was the possibility of an operational break-through in the Aachen area, in September. This would have facilitated a rapid conquest of the Ruhr and a quicker advance on Berlin.
Gunther Blumentritt
And also, it seems, one American who was there:
'if Eisenhower had not been so "wishy washy" and had backed either Montgomery or Bradley in the fall of 1944, the war would have been over by Christmas. '
Ralph Ingersoll.
The 'GIs' (In particular Eisenhower) gave us [the allies] AACHEN, the HURTGEN FOREST, METZ, an under resourced MARKET GARDEN, and the ARDENNES - the ARDENNES where Montgomery had to postpone VERITABLE and then come down and sort out the Bulge. And damn right Montgomery should have told the world how it was. I can only mavel and the restraint that Montgomery showed in that press conference.
Capturing Gerries...doubtless Americans have stories of US civilians dealing with Germans in the US homeland. It must have been scary, what with the Germans being a mere 3,000 miles away.
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@jpmtlhead39
And how was Germany going to defeat Britain without a Navy that was capable of taking on the Royal Navy. In the Summer of 1940, Germany had 1 heavy cruiser, 2 light cruisers, and 6 destroyers to face the Royal Navy’s 14 battleships and battle cruisers, 7 aircraft carriers, 58 cruisers, and 120 plus destroyers. By September 1940, the Germans had two prototype landing craft, each capable carrying 45 troops, that was it for the entire war. The rest of any invasion force would have to have been conveyed in barges. Germany had no heavy bomber fleet in 1940, and its air force as a whole was up against the then most powerful air defence system in the world. Britain was routinely reading German armed forces communications, and would go on to read German high command signals.
By the end of August 1940, Britain was able to send half of its tank fleet to the Middle East. By early 1941, Britain had two million fully armed men in Britain.
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@asmodeus0454
But what does Max Hastings bring to the subject?
All the key information has been in the public domain for decades. All the key people involved had had their say, and are long since dead, there must be virtually no one alive now who was at Arnhem. How many documents and facts are quoted that have not appeared before? How many one on one interviews did Hastings conduct?
As far as the troops at Arnhem are concerned, Martin Middlebrook built his 1994 work: 'Arnhem 1944 The Airborne Battle' around the testimony of those that were there. He interviewed 500 veterans. Even then, nearly thirty ago it was probably almost too late.
Beevor, Buckingham, Barr, Hastings, and so on, have all churned out stuff about MARKET GARDEN. Each in turn is hailed as difinitive, or the last word, or some such . The subject just gets raked over, again and again and again. There is always a dig at Montgomery, Brererton, Browning, Gavin, and so on, with none of them now able to answer back. In many cases these writers state opinion as if it is fact.
Antony bloody Beevor justified his effort by claiming to have unearthed evidence about the suffering of the Dutch people in the Winter of 1944-45. Yea...its only been known about since the newsreels and press coverage in May 1945 of OPERATION MANNA.
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Its a definite no.
Britain (and France), went to war on behalf of Poland, in spite of multiple offers of a peace deal by Hitler. The treaty with Poland only covered an attack on Poland by Germany, not an attack by any other country. The British Government went into this undertaking in 1939 despite being aware that the country could not be ready for a general war until 1941.
2,936 Fighter Command pilots took part in the Battle of Britain, 145 of them were Polish. The Polish squadrons only took part in the second half of the battle. The idea that Polish saved our ‘butts’ in the Battle of Britain is absurd.
The governments of Britain and the USA were no position to be able to condemn the massacre of Polish soldiers at Katyn by the Russians, when he news came out in 1943. Such a condemnation would have meant agreeing with the Nazis at a time when Russia was bearing the brunt of the war on land.
There is no evidence that Władysław Sikorski was murdered. Why would anyone risk trying to murder him in a plane crash? He was not important enough to warrant such treatment.
General Sosabowski was not blamed for the failure at Arnhem. Rightly or wrongly he was criticized from his performance, and the performance of his troops at Arnhem. But that is quite a different matter from blame for overall operation.
Churchill tried repeatedly to get help from Russia and the USA for assistance in airlifting supplies to the Polish Home Army during the Warsaw up-rising, without success until the very end.
Poland was not betrayed at the Yalta conference. By the time of the conference, Poland was almost wholly in Russian hands, and Britain and the USA had zero leverage on Russian actions.
The omission of a Polish squadron from the 1946 victory parade in London, while other Polish military units were invited to take part was a regrettable mis-judgement on the part of the government of the day, but this was more than made up for the 1947 Polish Resettlement Act.
Britain fed, clothed, and housed many thousands of Polish people during the war. It is surely not unreasonable that those Poles that were able should have joined in with the fighting where they could.
WINSTON S CHURCHILL.
THE SECOND WORLD WAR.
CASSELL & CO LTD
VOLUME VI TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY
1954.
P563
The burden lay on British shoulders. When their homeland had been overrun and they had been driven from France many Poles had sheltered upon our shores. There was no worth-while property belonging to the Polish Government in London. I said I believed there was about .£20,000,000 in gold in London and Canada. This had been frozen by us, since it was an asset of the Central Bank of Poland. Unfreezing and moving it to a Central Polish Bank must follow the normal channels for such transfers. It was not the property of the Polish Government in London and they had no power to draw upon it. There was of course the Polish Embassy in London, which was open and available for a Polish Ambassador as soon as the new Polish Government cared to send one—and the sooner the better.
In view of this one might well ask how the Polish Government had been financed during its five and a half years in the United Kingdom. The answer was that it had been supported by the British Government; we had paid the Poles about .£120,000,000 to finance their Army and diplomatic service, and to enable them to look after Poles who had sought refuge on our shores from the
German scourge. When we had disavowed the Polish Government in London and recognised the new Provisional Polish Government it was arranged that three months' salary should be paid to all employees and that they should then be dismissed. It would have been improper to have dismissed them without this payment, and the expense had fallen upon Great Britain.
All clear now?..
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Dod o
Big Woody is a liar, and this is why:
Big Woody’s forgery can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2obwt4n1G0&lc=UgyXsiASB8pi_JS_WfV4AaABAg.9Afuv3FHaYc9BMmj0JXY2u&feature=emcomments
Lead comment:
John Cornell
3 weeks ago (as of 31 07 2020)
Patton should have kept his mouth shut and concentrated on achieving his task of taking Metz, which had been his objective two weeks before Market Garden and yet still hadn't done it 8 weeks after Market Garden.
The 25th reply is the lie:
Big Woody
1 week ago (as of 31 07 2020)
Das Deutsches Afrika-korps: Siege und Niederlage. By Hanns-Gert von Esebeck, page 188 Returning from North Africa with an inflated ego after the comparatively easy defeat of the German Africa Corps, he considered himself to be the greatest commander ever. Later information has revealed that he inflated the number of German casualties to improve his image. At El Alamein he claimed that there were more German casualties than there were German troops all together on the actual front!
This is were Big Woody unwisely took it from:
http://ww2f.com/threads/what-went-wrong-with-operation-market-garden.28468/page-5#post-389603
What went wrong with Operation Market Garden?
Discussion in 'Western Europe 1943 - 1945' started by tovarisch, Feb 2, 2010.
Page 5 of 14 < Prev1←34567→14Next >
RAM
Member
Joined:Dec 11, 2007
Messages:507
Likes Received:9
...
'Returning from North Africa with an inflated ego after the comparatively easy defeat of the German Africa Corps, he considered himself to be the greatest commander ever. Later information has revealed that he inflated the number of German casualties to improve his image.
At El Alamein he claimed that there were more German casualties than there were German troops all together on the actual front!' ...
RAM, July 28 2010
...From another opnion in a hack forum, not from 'Das Deutsches Afrika-korps: Siege und Niederlage. By Hanns-Gert von Esebeck' as Big Woody claimed.
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CHESTER WILMOT
THE STRUGGLE FOR EUROPE
WM. COLLINS, SONS AND CO LTD.
1954
P509
‘On the day after the fall of Paris, [25th August 1944] the SHAEF Intelligence Summary, reviewing the situation in the West, declared: " Two and a half months of bitter fighting, culminating for the Germans in a blood-bath big enough even for their extravagant tastes, have brought the end of the war in Europe within sight, almost within reach. The strength of the German Armies in the West has been shattered, Paris belongs to France again, and the Allied Armies are streaming towards the frontiers of the Reich.”
THE GUNS AT LAST LIGHT
THE WAR IN WESTERN EUROPE, 1944-1945
Rick Atkinson
LITTLE BROWN 2013.
This paperback edition published in 2013.
P260
‘A SHAEF intelligence summary issued September 16 reported that “the enemy has now suffered , in the West alone, losses in men and equipment that can never be repaired in this war….No force can, then, be built up in the West sufficient for a counteroffensive or even a successful defensive.” German strength facing the 100,000-man XXX Corps directly across the Dutch border was estimated at six infantry battalions backed by twenty armored vehicles and a dozen field guns; scant enemy activity had been detected in the last two days.’
FYI. SHAEF was Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force.
For British, Canadian and US forces.
And the purely Britisg arrogance is where?..
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@bessarion1771
'Literally in the letter you posted he said " this brigade performed very badly here and the men showed no keenness to fight if it meant risking their own lives (.) " Which was a bold faced lie and Montgomery KNEW it was a lie. What a filthy gutless way to assault the allies.' Your words.
Literally, what Montgomery stated may have been a lie, it may have been the
truth. Wh can know? I don't. It was definately an opinion. He was entitled to his opinion, especially in a private letter to a colleague.
Montgomery's opinion would seem to be in line with one Geoffrey Powell, who, in his memoir of Arnhem stated of Polish troops put under his command in the Oosterbeek perimeter:
MEN AT ARNHEM
GEOFFREY POWELL
Pen and Sword Books 2004
P164
'At irregular intervals from the late evening onwards, clusters of mortar bombs had fallen among and around us, harming no one but preventing sleep, at least for me. Others, between spells of sentry duty, had collapsed exhausted into oblivion. Four times enemy patrols had roused them from their stupor as the night exploded into noise and light, with red tracer whipping the trees and white flares blossoming overhead. No one had been hit, but losses there had been. On stand-to rounds I had found the Polish trenches empty except for Peter, their corporal, crouched grimly behind his Bren. The rest of the party had vanished in the early hours, sensing perhaps that they had attached themselves to an unlucky unit. Peter explained nothing, but his embarrassment was clear; it was both unfair and pointless to press him for details when either pride or sense of duty had kept him there to fight on among strangers.
The thought of what would have happened if the enemy had attacked from this direction against a position held by the one solitary man was chilling. It was a mistake to trust strangers. I had learned yet another lesson: rely only on those you knew.'
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@bessarion1771
Your post:
"Like Browning, Montgomery, despite his postwar admissions, outrageously made the Poles the scapegoat. In a scathing letter to the chief of the imperial general staff, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, he characterized them as gutless. “I do not want this brigade here again,” he said, and suggested they be sent to join their comrades in Italy. To this day, the unfortunate stain upon the honor of these brave men has yet to be officially erased."
How is this Montgomery's words?
This is quote I have seen from Montgomery:
`Polish Para Brigade fought very badly and the men showed no keenness to fight if it meant risking their own lives. I do not want this brigade here and possibly you may like to send them to join other Poles in Italy.’
as far I can see those words might also have been written by Montgomery if Arnhem had succeeded, but Montgomery considered that this or that unit had perfomed badly.
For Montgomery to have scapegoated the Poles for Arnhem, I would need to see quote of proven provenace, to read something like:
'Arnhem failed because of the performance of the Poles'
Do you have such a quote?
As it happens, it is on record that Montgomery blamed the weather, a lack of backing from Eisenhower, and Montgomery's own mistakes, for Arnhem not being taken.
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Gel Syk
Montgomery [Bernard] scared...
MONTY
The Field-Marshal
1944-1976
NIGEL HAMILTON
HAMISH HAMILTON
LONDON
1986
P259 - 260
'Monty's own fearlessness was legendary. Standing on the beaches of Dunkirk he had berated his ADC for not wearing a helmet after a shell had landed almost beside them. 'But sir, nor are you,' the helpless young officer had complained. Landing in Sicily, Monty had toured the bridge-head in a DUKW with Lord Louis Mountbatten, C-in-C Combined Operations. When a German aircraft screamed very low over their heads Mountbatten had wisely thrown himself to the floor of the vehicle. 'Get up, get up,' Monty had chided him impatiently. Though he was conscious and careful of his health, with a near-
fetish for pullovers worn one on top of the other, he seemed to feel no fear of enemy sniper, artillery or aircraft fire. Indeed so oblivious did he seem to the danger of snipers in Normandy that the War Office had sent a special cable pleading with him to wear less conspicuous 'uniform', lest like Nelson he fall needless victim to an enemy sharp-shooter—a cable that amused Monty since it so patently ignored the dictates of great leadership in battle, that a commander must be seen by his men and recognized.'
P.S. Big Woody also goes by the name of Para Dave on YouTube comments.
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