Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Matter over Mind - Wild over Will , decided WWII

Germany : lost a war it should have won through inefficiency or lost a war it couldn't have won at 110% efficiency ?

The majority of old school (modernist) authors on WWII (men mostly 70 years or older) will go to their graves unbending from a belief that human factors, not material factors , decided WWII.

Because basically they are still modernists at heart and that is what modernists do - or did .
The modernists thought that modern technology had solved most 'natural' issues and so they saw the material world as a largely inert backdrop to WWII's ongoing human drama over unresolved human issues.

Younger writers - post-modernists in spirit - once again appreciate that there distinct limits to human abilities and that natural cum material reality is not something to be underestimated.

So we are more open to evidence that the German Empire used what scant resources it had as least as good as the American, British and Russian Empires used their far more abundant ones.

But the German resource base (conquered lands and peoples and all) was still far too weak to beat off all three of its major opponents at the same time.

It once again lost a long slogging match in a war of attrition.

It had tried and won a war of blitzkrieg on nine of the eleven european countries it attacked, but then tried and failed a war of attrition on the tenth, the UK.

As a result of that failure in September 1940, Germany had to divide its forces between the various UK fronts and the Russia front when it tried to brazen out a blitzkrieg war upon Russia in June 1941 -thus ensuring its ultimate defeat.

It simply could not front-load its Russian effort strong enough to sustain an assault on Moscow against what should Germans should have expected as resistance from Nature and Russian, given their nine earlier risk-filled blitzkrieg experiences.

Too many skilled men and too much good war material had already been lost on various other war fronts since 1938 and the replacements were simply coming in too small and too slow.

But even if Germany had conquered the British Isles and European Russia - what then ?

The Nazis were not racists - defenders of all the White Race or even defenders of just Western Europe.

Rather they were extreme nationalists who couldn't much abide even their own Italian and Hungarian allies or their closest Aryan cum Nordic cousins like the Dutch and the Norwegians - let alone any true 'outsiders'.

They quickly offended all their potential allies - mostly by being forced to be greedy with others' human and material resources, because their own country was too small in population or natural resources to sustain its war empire.

And this was a problem that only got bigger, not smaller, with each new "success" .

Without real heartfelt allies, Germany couldn't have defended an empire the size of the USA or the USSR against the rest of the world for long , not on its own national manpower base.

And your own national manpower base is truly a natural  limit - because even an all-out human effort can only increase it in terms of many decades not a few years.

Offending all your potential allies was a human failing of Germany - having too few people and natural resources of its own was a natural failing of Germany : together they doomed its war efforts ....

No comments:

Post a Comment