70TH ANNIVERSARY DISCUSSION (4) THE BATTLE OF THE RIVER PLATE 1939

@CWO:

@RJL518:

Considering what is going on in America today, and i am NOT looking for a discussion on today’s political situation mind you, do you guys agree with what America did 75 years ago with Japanese, German and Italian-Americans at that time?

Without getting into the highly charged question of “Considering what is going on in America today,” which is a subject that pertains to present-day politics rather than history, this should actually say “with what America did 75 years ago with Japanese-Americans at that time” because German-Americans and Italian-Americans were not interned – or to put it more bluntly thrown into concentration camps – during the war.  There’s a scene in the movie Midway in which the Charlton Heston character meets with the young Japanese girlfriend of his son, who like his dad is a naval aviator.  She and her parents have been interned, and at one point she turns to Heston and says angrily, “Damn it, I’m an American!  What makes us different from German-Americans or Italian-Americans”?  The Heston character, who has the decency to look embarrased, answers, “Pearl Harbor, I guess.”  Yes, that was part of the answer…put another part of the answer is that Japanese-Americans were much more visible as minorities in the U.S. than German-Americans and Italian-Americans, both of those latter groups being European rather than Asian.

It is false to assert that German-Americans and Italian-Americans were not interred. Those who’d immigrated to the U.S. from Italy or Germany were in many cases placed in concentration camps. (I saw a television documentary about this.) But it was apparently felt that assimilation was more possible for Germans and Italians than it was for Japanese. Someone of German or Italian blood who’d been born here would not be interred; whereas someone of Japanese blood who’d been born here might.

Conditions in the concentration camps were bad. The inmates were thin. Not so thin as to be in danger of death. But still clearly malnourished. Given that the U.S. as a whole was not experiencing any sort of food shortage during the war, this failure to adequately feed the concentration camp inmates is a black mark upon our record; quite apart from the justice or injustice of interning these people in the first place.

Leaving the Philippines wasn’t a “strategy” by MacArthur; he was ordered to leave by Roosevelt.  It should also be noted that MacArthur’s handling of the opening phases of the Philippines campaign was sloppy; as I recall, he was caught unprepared by the Japanese invasion, even though by the time it started he had already heard about the raid on Pearl Harbor.

The First Battle of Smolensk was a large scale battle during the opening stage of Operation Barbarossa in World War II, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It took place in the region around the city of Smolensk between 10 July and 10 September 1941, about 400 km west of Moscow. At that point the Wehrmacht had advanced 500 km into the USSR in the mere 18 days that had elapsed since the start of the invasion on 22 June 1941. During the battle the German army encountered unexpected resistance, leading to a severe delay in their advance on Moscow.

Ultimately, three Soviet armies (the 16th, 19th and the 20th army) were encircled and destroyed just to the south of Smolensk, though significant numbers from the 19th and 20th managed to escape the pocket. Some historians have asserted that the losses in terms of men and materiel incurred by the Wehrmacht during this drawn-out battle, together with the 2-month delay in the march towards Moscow, were decisive for the Wehrmacht’s defeat by the Red Army at the end of the Battle of Moscow three months later in December 1941.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Smolensk_(1941)

Historians say that this battle had a profound effect on Germany’s drive to Moscow in the early stages of Operation Barbarossa.  
What do you guys think?

Good post. However, I would like to make a correction. During WWII, Winston Churchill (later joined by FDR) imposed a food blockade on Germany. The Hunger Plan was the Nazi government’s effort to deal with the resulting food crisis. The Hunger Plan involved the starvation of captured Soviet cities; so that the food which would otherwise have fed those cities could instead be used to prevent starvation elsewhere in the Reich.

The plan had never been to starve Soviet POWs. Those POWs were conscripted to work in German weapons factories. Everyone, from Hitler on down, recognized those POWs were an essential component of Germany’s war machine. That is why Hitler ordered the POWs to be fed.

However, the Reich lacked the manpower necessary to cordon off captured Soviet cities from the Soviet countryside. Due to the lack of that manpower, the Nazis were unable to prevent food from flowing from the captured Soviet countryside to captured Soviet cities. The Hunger Plan mostly failed: the planned starvation in captured Soviet cities mostly did not occur. That failure didn’t result in fewer deaths. Just different deaths than those the Nazi government had envisioned with their Hunger Plan. Due to the failure of the Hunger Plan, the man tasked with feeding the Soviet POWs didn’t have the food he needed to carry out the order Hitler had given to him: the order to feed the Soviet POWs. Because it was physically impossible for that man to carry out his orders, millions of Soviet POWs starved to death while in German captivity.

The Nazi leadership had deep-seated fears about Germany’s food situation. One of the reasons Hitler wanted lebensraum was so that Germany could physically feed itself, even if Britain imposed a food blockade. (As it did in WWI, and as Churchill again did in WWII.) The two most vital resources Hitler required from the western Soviet Union were food and petroleum. For Barbarossa to have been successful from the Nazi perspective, Germany needed to capture a considerable portion of Soviet oilfields, and a considerable portion of Soviet farmland.

To address your question of what Hitler should have done differently: he should have placed von Manstein in charge of Barbarossa in its entirety. Doing so would have resulted in a far greater level of success. Moscow and Leningrad almost certainly would have fallen in 1941, paving the way for additional German successes in 1942.

The “just sit and wait for the Phony War to end in April 1940” option is a bit perplexing as an answer to “You are the German High Command!  What is your next Combat Movement?” because it seems to imply that the Phony War was operating on a fixed timetable, and that this timetable was in someone else’s hands.  The lack of action on land on the Western Front is certainly due in part to inaction by France and Britain (whose strategy was basically to sit around for a couple of years to built up their strength for a showdown, while simultaneously hoping that the Nazi regime would be overthrown by a coup), but it was also very much a deliberate choice by Germany.  The Wehrmacht needed to analyze the Polish Campaign, fix the tactical and operational elements that hadn’t worked as well as expected, plan the upcoming campaign against France and the Low Countries, rest and replenish its forces, give them more training, provide them with additional equipment, and redeploy them to the west.  Doing this properly took time, but Germany could afford to take the time to do the job right because of the lack of Anglo-French pressure on the western front. ( In other words, by sitting on their collective hindquarters France and Britain surrendered the strategic initiative to Germany, which gave the Wehrmacht the luxury of attacking at the time and place of its own choosing.)  Moreover, the time period during which these activities took place were the fall of 1939 and the winter of 1939-1940, which was conveniently timed because this meant that the Wehrmacht wouldn’t have to fight in the fall (manageable, but rainy and muddy) or in the winter (far less harsh in the West than in Russia, but still potentially nasty as veterans of the Battle of the Bulge will recall).  The late spring / early summer period chosen for the offensive in the West was much more congenial for military operations.

There’s a scene in the movie Across the Pacific in which Sydney Greenstreet shows his pistol (I think it’s a 38-caliber gun) to Humphrey Bogart, who puts his Colt 45 pistol alongside Greenstreet’s and comments, “Mine’s bigger than yours.”

Sorry I didn’t see the other S  :-D. I suggest not using hexagons though. For all our Express games we are using tactical maps not terrain based ones. Its more like D-day then Miniatures.

This poll did not generate the interest that I assumed it would. I have locked the voting as it is time to move on to another subject. There were many different types of aircraft involved in this battle but I will confine my thoughts to the torpedo planes as that is what I voted for. The first single engine torpedo planes to attack the Japanese were six of the new TBFs from Midway. No hits were registered. One made it back to Midway. The first of the carrier torpedo planes to attack were Sixteen TBD Devastators from USS Hornet. (VT8) Because of confusion and inexperience they attacked without fighter cover. One man survived. Again no hits. The next group to attack were fourteen TBDs from USS Enterprise. (VT-6) Again no hits and eleven were lost. The last torpedo attack was made by thirteen TBDs from USS Yorktown. (VT-3) Once again no hits were scored and twelve planes were lost. But by this time ALL of the Japanese fighter cap was down to the deck to stop all of these torpedo planes. By chance this is when the dive bombers made their attack which lasted only about three minutes and left three Japanese carriers burning. Of course there were many others who gave their lives on Midway, on Enterprise and on the destoyer USS Hammann who never even got to see the enemy fleet. But those young men in the torpedo bombers gave their lives without even knowing the outcome of the battle. Can we even begin to imagine what their last thoughts were? They all contributed all that they could for this country. It is a shame that so many young people today have no clue what those men did for all of us.