I dunno what it is, what with Hitler launching an impossible war in Russia, Mussolini's adventures in Greece, or Japan dragging the US straight into the war when they didn't really need to. I swear they must have been brought together by their love of Leeroy Jenkins tactics.
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -Thomas EdisonDidn't Hitler have actually competent people below him, just not in a position to stop these dumb blunders?
I think I remember reading that the reason none of the Allies put any serious dedication into assassinating Hitler is that his underlings were more competent and it would do more harm then good.
edited 15th Sep '15 12:16:16 AM by Imca
Well, there was "The Blond Beast" Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Holocaust, who was assassinated by Czech freedom fighters. Unfortunately, the Nazis ended up killing everyone in a village in reprisal, and this also served to stop any more assassinations of high-ranking Nazis.
Ancient campfires show early population numbers
: "Radio carbon data from prehistoric occupation sites are providing insights into Australia's fluctuating human population levels tens of thousands of years ago.
ANU archaeologist Alan Williams used radio carbon dating technology to examine charcoal dates from more than 1000 prehistoric campfires and based on this he says populations appear to have increased steadily until 25,000 years ago."
Hugging a Vanillite will give you frostbite."Power resides where men believes it resides."
On knights, well, this was in how to manual when it came to love for them:
"If love of women perchance should attract you, remember to carry them away with abundant praise, and if you find a suitable spot, do not hesitate to take what you sought and seize it in violent embrace. For with difficulty will you be able to soften their rigor, unless a fitting cure of their modesty by means of at least moderate compulsion comes first. We say these things so that if you should be stirred to love them with little foresight, you might learn with brief instruction what procedure you should follow."
I just saw that there was a Napoleon versus Washington episode in Deadliest Warrior and Washington won.
Le lol. Napoleon would curbstomp Washington so hard his wooden dentures would pop out the top of his head.
edited 15th Sep '15 12:57:59 AM by MadSkillz
One other reason Hitler never really had any attempts against him was because at Germany's height there was an informal recognition that a power vacuum could well have developed after, and that is a situation nobody wanted to have happen.
The classic example of this is actually Saddam Hussein - he had a structure built around himself, and look what happened when he left.
It would have been like that, only much worse.
"Did you expect somebody else?"Actually that isn't entirely true. Not only did his own side try to assassinate Hitler the allies had several plans in place to achieve it and one plan that involved commando snipers that reasonably had a high chance of success. They chose to leave him in place because at the time he was doing nothing to stop the infighting of his commanders and contributing to mess. The power vacuum had a risk of someone more competent filling the void. What interference he did cause was only one factor the rest was poor leadership throughout the German military and government in general.
The meme "Hitler fucked us up" is mostly bunk. His commanders had variable levels of competency but were constantly in competition with and undermining each other. They frequently Leroy Jenkins all their own without input from der fuhrer. It has been pretty thoroughly debunked alongside the myth the Sherman M-4 was a death trap.
A glaring example was Rommel. Supposedly a brilliant commander but in reality he was overly aggressive and sloppy about protecting his rear. He repeatedly outran his supply lines to a severe extent and often failed to adequately protect them against allied raiding.
Who watches the watchmen?Guderian was the closest they had to a competent-at-everything replacement for Hitler, AND Hitler likes him despite not really being a Nazi. He can do military, economy, and politics, albeit there's a caveat with the last one. He can only do politics with non-Nazis (the "Prussians" in the military). When he tried doing politics with Nazis, he's rebuffed, so instead he eventually dismiss them entirely. Which then eventually undermined his position as inspector general. While he can appease the "Prussians" with his position through discussion on military doctrine as well as with potential production advantages, he cannot do the same with the Nazis because he isn't one of them. And Guderian was really the only person that told Hitler face-to-face that he f**ked up. Several times. On a lot of things. Over the course of the war. That's not to say that he himself was perfect though.
As I understand it, for whatever is made of the whole "Barbarosa failed because Hitler had to bail out the Italians in Greece" thing, all that invading earlier would have accomplished would be getting the whole German army stuck in the Rasputista.
Rommel was, in many ways very much overrated. He was clearly very tactically skilled, especially at maneuver warfare, but when it came to strategic level issues and logistics, he seemed to be pretty much clueless, and those latter things are important.
My understanding on overall generalship is that Germany's generals weren't really appreciably better or worse than those of other major powers (France not withstanding), but were given a pretty impressive chance to pad their legacy after the war thanks to two things - one, the western Allies were all too willing to let them engage in self-aggrandizement as the Cold War started and West Germany needed to be propped up and the Soviets and their army demonized, and two, they had the perfect scapegoat for pretty much any failing they had - Hitler, who was both dead, and thus unable to refute them, and also he was literally Hitler.
Japan dragged the US into the war precisely because they felt they had to. We were embargoing their oil, which they desperately needed to keep their Pacific empire working, and they had no intention of giving their Chinese gains back or any of the other concessions it would have taken to end the embargo. So instead, they took a desperate gamble on a surprise attack/show of force, even as cooler heads thought, but did not actually say, the famous line about Awakening the Sleeping Giant. Hitler then DOWed the US in hopes that Japan would help him with the USSR, thus doing part of FDR's job for him, though given that the USA and Germany were already pretty much at de facto war, making it formal probably wouldn't have been too hard.
edited 15th Sep '15 11:44:29 AM by Balmung
Probably much after.
Marshal Petain was a very well-known soldier before the infamy of 1940; it is no exaggeration to say that he saved France at Verdun, and was one of the steadiest, most competent French marshals in WWI, probably the most careful with his men's lives. For that reason he was called out of retirement to pull off an impossible miracle; one view of Petain was that he sacrificed France to try to save Frenchmen.
Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.Maintenant que je vis en Californie ça sera beacoup plus difficile de garder mon français.
Anyway, back to history.
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -Thomas EdisonThere are Petain biographies, to be sure; my sources were Alistair Horne's The Price of Glory, about Verdun, and To Lose a Battle, about the 1940 France campaign. Horne is pretty sympathetic to Petain; the man was genuinely a great general in 1916, and it's hard to imagine that he didn't want to spare his country more suffering in 1940. (At the time, no Frenchman could've really known that by choosing to avoid Verdun, they were dooming themselves to Dachau.)
In France, though, they see him as Benedict Arnold.
Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.That was actually part of the plan. The Czech government in exile was afraid that Heydrich's slightly more lenient rule of Czechia would erode resistance feeling, and a violent reprisal was hoped for because it would cause massive resentment against the Germans.
Schild und Schwert der ParteiPart of the reason for the assassination of Heydrich is precisely that the Czech government-in-exile was starting to lose favor with the British due the fact the Czech resistance wasn't doing all that much against the Nazi occupation. Edvard Benes (the leader of the exiled government) was thinking ahead, and he realized losing favor with the British would mean falling into the jaws of Stalin.
So the assassination was also something of a mad gamble to convince the British the Czech were doing their best to fight Nazis. It more or less worked, though at a great cost of lives.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."

Through the Red Cross, I think.