Belgium and Netherlands were both neutral countries.
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
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jakobaggerLO THY DREAD EMPIRE CHAOS IS RESTOREDRegistered Userregular
There was also the reason Germany invaded Denmark; to secure the supply line for an invasion of neutral Norway.
Plus Luxembourg... everybody forgets Luxembourg.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
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Kane Red RobeMaster of MagicArcanusRegistered Userregular
I imagine Norway was neutral until it got invaded also. Really, thinking about it Sweden was the only Scandinavian country not invaded by someone in the war.
I imagine Norway was neutral until it got invaded also. Really, thinking about it Sweden was the only Scandinavian country not invaded by someone in the war.
Yep Norway was neutral right up until the fateful shots where fire from Oscarsborg.
Sweden managed to remain neutral after the invasion of Denmark and Norway by sucking up to Germany something fierce. Not that they had any choice.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
I can't fault Denmark. It saw how previous countries got steamrolled by Germany, so it quickly chucked its Jewish population to Sweden, and then surrendered. I will never blame a country for surrendering to save its people from a greater hardship.
I can't fault Denmark. It saw how previous countries got steamrolled by Germany, so it quickly chucked its Jewish population to Sweden, and then surrendered. I will never blame a country for surrendering to save its people from a greater hardship.
The Danish communists on the other hand were willingly and maybe even gleefully turned over to the Germans by the authorities (after operation Barbarossa got rolling, oc)
Except obviously most of them had already gone underground, but still
Also the lists of communists were in themselves illegal I think - surveillance with no other reason than membership of a legal political party
I can't fault Denmark. It saw how previous countries got steamrolled by Germany, so it quickly chucked its Jewish population to Sweden, and then surrendered. I will never blame a country for surrendering to save its people from a greater hardship.
That is not quite how it happened. They surrendered first and and only had their jewish population deported in September 1943, three years later.
In Norway the deportations took place in October 1942 and had been preceded by the arrest of many Jews in the previous year.
By the way, I was looking in wikipedia to get exact dates and I noticed that there wasn't any article for The Netherlands(or Holland). There where individual articles for the subject like the righteous among the Nations and such, but no big overview article like there where for other countries. Wiki Vandalism by a Wehraboo?
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
Oh, I seemed to have gotten the timing wrong. I guess I assumed arresting all the Jews would be top priority when the Nazis took over your country. I am still impressed that nearly all of the Jewish population was smuggled out of Denmark. I expected maybe two thirds would have escaped, but 99%? That's pretty awesome. Sweden was also awesome for accepting the refugees.
Compared to my country, where we specifically decided to block Jewish people from claiming asylum.
Oh, I seemed to have gotten the timing wrong. I guess I assumed arresting all the Jews would be top priority when the Nazis took over your country. I am still impressed that nearly all of the Jewish population was smuggled out of Denmark. I expected maybe two thirds would have escaped, but 99%? That's pretty awesome. Sweden was also awesome for accepting the refugees.
Compared to my country, where we specifically decided to block Jewish people from claiming asylum.
One of the benefits of the policy of cooperation was Denmark at first was allowed to continue to more or less govern its own internal affairs. It wasn't till I think 43 that the Germans 'assumed direct control'.
I can't fault Denmark. It saw how previous countries got steamrolled by Germany, so it quickly chucked its Jewish population to Sweden, and then surrendered. I will never blame a country for surrendering to save its people from a greater hardship.
That is not quite how it happened. They surrendered first and and only had their jewish population deported in September 1943, three years later.
In Norway the deportations took place in October 1942 and had been preceded by the arrest of many Jews in the previous year.
By the way, I was looking in wikipedia to get exact dates and I noticed that there wasn't any article for The Netherlands(or Holland). There where individual articles for the subject like the righteous among the Nations and such, but no big overview article like there where for other countries. Wiki Vandalism by a Wehraboo?
There is one for almost every European country and the Baltics,Croatia and Serbia even though none of these where independent countries at the time. Even the Channel islands have a separate article on the subject. Its weird that of all European countries the Netherlands should be without such a article.
The Article you linked are about larger issues article like the Occupation of the Netherlands or the history of Jews in the Netherlands where the Holocaust is only a part of the article. You can tell by the #.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
I imagine Norway was neutral until it got invaded also. Really, thinking about it Sweden was the only Scandinavian country not invaded by someone in the war.
Yep Norway was neutral right up until the fateful shots where fire from Oscarsborg.
Sweden managed to remain neutral after the invasion of Denmark and Norway by sucking up to Germany something fierce. Not that they had any choice.
Finland would have remained neutral, except the Allies (well, Russia) invaded us.
So we had to ally with Germany, which kinda sucks, but hey, needs must when devil drives and all that.
And then England declared war on us. (nothing really came out of that)
Then we negotiated peace with Russia.
And then we had a short war with Germany.
I can't fault Denmark. It saw how previous countries got steamrolled by Germany, so it quickly chucked its Jewish population to Sweden, and then surrendered. I will never blame a country for surrendering to save its people from a greater hardship.
The Danish communists on the other hand were willingly and maybe even gleefully turned over to the Germans by the authorities (after operation Barbarossa got rolling, oc)
Except obviously most of them had already gone underground, but still
Also the lists of communists were in themselves illegal I think - surveillance with no other reason than membership of a legal political party
The 30s, huh
yeah man good job we don't have anything like that in the 21st century
That shit would never fly now, right?
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jakobaggerLO THY DREAD EMPIRE CHAOS IS RESTOREDRegistered Userregular
I can't fault Denmark. It saw how previous countries got steamrolled by Germany, so it quickly chucked its Jewish population to Sweden, and then surrendered. I will never blame a country for surrendering to save its people from a greater hardship.
The Danish communists on the other hand were willingly and maybe even gleefully turned over to the Germans by the authorities (after operation Barbarossa got rolling, oc)
Except obviously most of them had already gone underground, but still
Also the lists of communists were in themselves illegal I think - surveillance with no other reason than membership of a legal political party
The 30s, huh
yeah man good job we don't have anything like that in the 21st century
That shit would never fly now, right?
A 'fun' exercise is taking rhetoric or policy proposals made by European parties today and replacing the word Muslim with Jew
But yeah, also Patriot Act etc.
A lot of people are bad at learning from history, apparently.
I can't fault Denmark. It saw how previous countries got steamrolled by Germany, so it quickly chucked its Jewish population to Sweden, and then surrendered. I will never blame a country for surrendering to save its people from a greater hardship.
The Danish communists on the other hand were willingly and maybe even gleefully turned over to the Germans by the authorities (after operation Barbarossa got rolling, oc)
Except obviously most of them had already gone underground, but still
Also the lists of communists were in themselves illegal I think - surveillance with no other reason than membership of a legal political party
The 30s, huh
yeah man good job we don't have anything like that in the 21st century
That shit would never fly now, right?
A 'fun' exercise is taking rhetoric or policy proposals made by European parties today and replacing the word Muslim with Jew
But yeah, also Patriot Act etc.
A lot of people are bad at learning from history, apparently.
I remember a couple of people who stayed at a hotel I once worked at. They'd recently gone to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam and were talking about how the lessons from the Nazi regime should never be forgotten.
The next morning they were reading about some incident that had happened recently involving a Muslim, and were discussing how this should be used as a reason to kick all the Muslims out of the UK.
Turns out that the lessons from the Nazi regime included "Kristallnacht was a really useful political tool".
I blame the History channel. Before it turned into the garbage it is now, it spent a good couple decades basically being the WWII channel. And that entails a lot of shows like "Planes of the Third Riech". I don't know how many of those shows I watched when I was younger.
And for the many laughably impracticable 'super-weapons' the Nazi's turned out, they had the first jet fighter, the first theater ballistic missile, the first assault rifle, the best tanks(excepting maybe the T34), the best single artillery piece ever produced*, a machine gun so good(the MG42) that the US basically just copied it and called it the M60. *not saying its better than what we have now, but an anti-air, indirect fire anti-infantry, and direct fire anti-armor weapon. All in a single platform at its time is bonkers. The 88 is basically the antithesis of all the stupid 'super weapons' they made. One super flexible platform.
In addition to whatever historic truth there was about the German weapon superiority, it also is needed to fulfill the allies WWII narrative. Because 'well we sat on our asses for like the decade leading up to WWII and even the first year of the war, and then got our teeth kicked in' kinda makes you look like idiots.
I was in Denmark for vacation and one of the museums I was at had a part about the Nazi Invasion/Occupation and Resistance. It's a very weird version of WWII to see with a US perspective. Their entire armed forces took 41 casualties during the invasion. The collection took great pains to explain how much larger and better equipped the German forces were, and how Denmark had no choice but to surrender. The invasion was April 9th 1940 and lasted 6 hours before the Danes surrendered, Germany invaded Poland the previous September.
So 'Germans with massively superior weapons' is a more comfortable narrative to have rather than. 'We had plenty of warning and time to prepare and just decided it wasn't worth fighting against literal Nazis'
In addition to the Danish army being laughably tiny compared to the German war machine, the Danish landscape is also supremely ill-suited to any form of defensive guerilla war, consisting mostly of flat, open fields. Unlike, say, Norway which fought back with a lot more success and ferocity.
But apart from that, a lot of right of centre politicians had some sympathy for Germany, and there was an understanding the occupation would be, as occupations go, relatively friendly (the aforementioned polish occupation and its horrors served as a good demonstration of why you'd want to not make too much of a fuss).
Resistance didn't really get going until Germany attacked the USSR and all the Danish communists went underground (Danish authorities turned over their illegal records of communists to the Germans) - they were the biggest part of the freedom fighters, followed by conservatives. Venstre (the farmer party) and the social democrats mostly supported the policy of co-operation.
Being on formally good terms with Germany did enable some good things though, notably the smuggling of the majority of Danish Jew to neutral Sweden.
It's just generally part of the Phoney War though. With 6 months to prepare and mobilize(assuming they had never looked at the Wehrmacht and went..hmm might be something to worry about until it invaded Poland), the Danish Armed forces couldn't have mounted a defense to at least make it protracted and costly invasion? I mean there are single snipers who inflicted several times the kill counts the danish army managed.
A park in a city of ~18k people that I ran a race in last week has a war memorial listing all the residents KIA from WWI onwards. It has 73 names listed for WWII. That a country would capitulate after 6 hours and 40 casualties, is just something I can't wrap my head around.
For all the advantages of the German war machine, I'd argue it was primarily a lack of will to fight-and in many cases an active willingness to cooperate- that lead to these days/hours invasions. But "look at this insurmountable tech advantage" is much more palatable narrative.
It's not just an insurmountable tech advantage though. It's an insurmountable everything advantage. With no terrain and a 2-1 disadvantage in sheer numbers (to say nothing of the quality of those troops) and Denmark had absolutely no chance of stopping or really even slowing Germany down much.
Let's say - hypothetically - that the Danes had resisted.
Six months isn't really enough time to do much of anything. You aren't going to tool up an arms industry, and you're not getting substantial support from anywhere in that time. You don't have enough time to build substantial fortifications (and, after watching France, it would probably be pointless anyways).
So you're resisting several divisions - the Germans would probably have invaded with more than two or three divisions if they expected resistance - with about a division of troops, many of them under-equipped. Your army is barely trained (even a crash program can't train up an army in six months).
When the Germans invade, your people get slaughtered, maybe kill a couple hundred or even a thousand Germans. For what? You maybe slowed them down by a few hours or days. There's nothing to hold out for - help isn't coming - and you have fairly good reason to expect moderately good treatment if you don't resist.
In that situation, the only sensible thing to do is try and get the best possible terms in your surrender.
I find policies along the lines of: "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender" to be far more sensible.
Using the low end of the US pentagon figures for counter-insurgency operations, having to actual secure 1940 Denmark would have require somewhere between 50k-100k security troops- between 3 and 6 divisions.
Just to be clear I'm not picking on the Danes here. Britain and France should have invaded Germany as soon as practicable after the invasion of Poland, rather than sit around and do nothing for 7 months. Even once France fell Germany should never have been able to invade Russia at all, simply because keeping the rest of conquered Europe in line should have made the manpower requirements unreachable. France alone should have required 10 times that number of troops to garrison.
I blame the History channel. Before it turned into the garbage it is now, it spent a good couple decades basically being the WWII channel. And that entails a lot of shows like "Planes of the Third Riech". I don't know how many of those shows I watched when I was younger.
And for the many laughably impracticable 'super-weapons' the Nazi's turned out, they had the first jet fighter, the first theater ballistic missile, the first assault rifle, the best tanks(excepting maybe the T34), the best single artillery piece ever produced*, a machine gun so good(the MG42) that the US basically just copied it and called it the M60. *not saying its better than what we have now, but an anti-air, indirect fire anti-infantry, and direct fire anti-armor weapon. All in a single platform at its time is bonkers. The 88 is basically the antithesis of all the stupid 'super weapons' they made. One super flexible platform.
In addition to whatever historic truth there was about the German weapon superiority, it also is needed to fulfill the allies WWII narrative. Because 'well we sat on our asses for like the decade leading up to WWII and even the first year of the war, and then got our teeth kicked in' kinda makes you look like idiots.
I was in Denmark for vacation and one of the museums I was at had a part about the Nazi Invasion/Occupation and Resistance. It's a very weird version of WWII to see with a US perspective. Their entire armed forces took 41 casualties during the invasion. The collection took great pains to explain how much larger and better equipped the German forces were, and how Denmark had no choice but to surrender. The invasion was April 9th 1940 and lasted 6 hours before the Danes surrendered, Germany invaded Poland the previous September.
So 'Germans with massively superior weapons' is a more comfortable narrative to have rather than. 'We had plenty of warning and time to prepare and just decided it wasn't worth fighting against literal Nazis'
In addition to the Danish army being laughably tiny compared to the German war machine, the Danish landscape is also supremely ill-suited to any form of defensive guerilla war, consisting mostly of flat, open fields. Unlike, say, Norway which fought back with a lot more success and ferocity.
But apart from that, a lot of right of centre politicians had some sympathy for Germany, and there was an understanding the occupation would be, as occupations go, relatively friendly (the aforementioned polish occupation and its horrors served as a good demonstration of why you'd want to not make too much of a fuss).
Resistance didn't really get going until Germany attacked the USSR and all the Danish communists went underground (Danish authorities turned over their illegal records of communists to the Germans) - they were the biggest part of the freedom fighters, followed by conservatives. Venstre (the farmer party) and the social democrats mostly supported the policy of co-operation.
Being on formally good terms with Germany did enable some good things though, notably the smuggling of the majority of Danish Jew to neutral Sweden.
It's just generally part of the Phoney War though. With 6 months to prepare and mobilize(assuming they had never looked at the Wehrmacht and went..hmm might be something to worry about until it invaded Poland), the Danish Armed forces couldn't have mounted a defense to at least make it protracted and costly invasion? I mean there are single snipers who inflicted several times the kill counts the danish army managed.
A park in a city of ~18k people that I ran a race in last week has a war memorial listing all the residents KIA from WWI onwards. It has 73 names listed for WWII. That a country would capitulate after 6 hours and 40 casualties, is just something I can't wrap my head around.
For all the advantages of the German war machine, I'd argue it was primarily a lack of will to fight-and in many cases an active willingness to cooperate- that lead to these days/hours invasions. But "look at this insurmountable tech advantage" is much more palatable narrative.
It's not just an insurmountable tech advantage though. It's an insurmountable everything advantage. With no terrain and a 2-1 disadvantage in sheer numbers (to say nothing of the quality of those troops) and Denmark had absolutely no chance of stopping or really even slowing Germany down much.
Let's say - hypothetically - that the Danes had resisted.
Six months isn't really enough time to do much of anything. You aren't going to tool up an arms industry, and you're not getting substantial support from anywhere in that time. You don't have enough time to build substantial fortifications (and, after watching France, it would probably be pointless anyways).
So you're resisting several divisions - the Germans would probably have invaded with more than two or three divisions if they expected resistance - with about a division of troops, many of them under-equipped. Your army is barely trained (even a crash program can't train up an army in six months).
When the Germans invade, your people get slaughtered, maybe kill a couple hundred or even a thousand Germans. For what? You maybe slowed them down by a few hours or days. There's nothing to hold out for - help isn't coming - and you have fairly good reason to expect moderately good treatment if you don't resist.
In that situation, the only sensible thing to do is try and get the best possible terms in your surrender.
I find policies along the lines of: "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender" to be far more sensible.
Using the low end of the US pentagon figures for counter-insurgency operations, having to actual secure 1940 Denmark would have require somewhere between 50k-100k security troops- between 3 and 6 divisions.
Just to be clear I'm not picking on the Danes here. Britain and France should have invaded Germany as soon as practicable after the invasion of Poland, rather than sit around and do nothing for 7 months. Even once France fell Germany should never have been able to invade Russia at all, simply because keeping the rest of conquered Europe in line should have made the manpower requirements unreachable. France alone should have required 10 times that number of troops to garrison.
It becomes a lot less sensible when it's your homes and your kids lives that are on the line. Fighting to certain death is a rare thing in the real world. Usually the only times you see it is when the people fighting are cornered and facing almost certain death otherwise, or are fanatical basically to the point of mental illness. Bargaining in the face of death is an almost universal human trait, which is essentially what Denmark did.
Citing the numbers required for modern COIN discounts the fact that the tactics the Nazis used were...well, let's say more brutal and effective / efficient...than what generated the modern Pentagon numbers. The numbers of troops also decreases when you have a large number of collaborators, something that - as we saw in France - greatly reduced the number of German security troops needed.
As for Britain and France...they didn't have the capability to invade Germany in September, 1939. Even if they wanted to, they simply weren't powerful enough to do so. If they were clairvoyant they may have focused on a defense that was less susceptible to blitzkrieg, but doing the best they could in the time between September '39 and May '40 they would have slowed the German advance by a few days or so.
Monday morning quarterbacking 75 years after the fact is great, but Denmark (and France / Britain) made the rational choices at the time - even when the choices may appear wrong in retrospect.
As for invading Russia, the Germans never really had the manpower to succeed anyway. Fight to a stalemate and sue for peace, maybe. But they would never have been able to hold Russia even if they stopped at the Urals. You can hypothesize some situations where they could maybe have done so, but those scenarios change the context of history so much that it's effectively fantasy.
Yeah, the nazi standard response was to go to the nearest village and execute a set number of civilians in retaliation for each attack. The Attack didn't have to be successful either.
Take the fate of Telavaag in Norway:
Telavåg tragedy[edit]
During the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany, Telavåg played an important role in the secret North Sea boat traffic between Norway and Great Britain. The village was the scene of the Telavåg Tragedy in the spring of 1942, during World War II.
On 26 April 1942, after having discovered that some of the inhabitants of Telavåg were hiding two men from the Linge company, Arne Meldal Værum and Emil Gustav Hvaal, the Gestapo arrived to arrest the Norwegian officers. Shots were exchanged, and two prominent German Gestapo officers (Kriminalrat Gerhard Berns and Kriminalsekretär Henry Bertram) were shot dead. Arne Værum was also killed in the incident. Emil Hvaal and his son were executed a few months later.
Reichskommissar Josef Terboven personally oversaw the reaction, which was quick and brutal. As the villagers were watching, all buildings were destroyed, all boats were sunk or confiscated, and all livestock taken away. All men in the village were either executed or sent to the Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. Of the 72 who were deported from Telavåg, 31 were murdered in captivity. Women and children were imprisoned for two years. 18 Norwegian prisoners (unrelated to Telavåg) held at the Trandum internment camp were also executed as a reprisal. Though smaller in scale, this atrocity is often compared to similar events at Lidice in the Czech Republic and Oradour-sur-Glane in France.
And then remember that Norway was treated nicely as nazi occupations went. Other places it went more like this.
The Wikipedia quote mentions Lidice and Oradour-sur-Glane
I can't fault Denmark. It saw how previous countries got steamrolled by Germany, so it quickly chucked its Jewish population to Sweden, and then surrendered. I will never blame a country for surrendering to save its people from a greater hardship.
The Danish communists on the other hand were willingly and maybe even gleefully turned over to the Germans by the authorities (after operation Barbarossa got rolling, oc)
Except obviously most of them had already gone underground, but still
Also the lists of communists were in themselves illegal I think - surveillance with no other reason than membership of a legal political party
The 30s, huh
yeah man good job we don't have anything like that in the 21st century
That shit would never fly now, right?
A 'fun' exercise is taking rhetoric or policy proposals made by European parties today and replacing the word Muslim with Jew
But yeah, also Patriot Act etc.
A lot of people are bad at learning from history, apparently.
I remember a couple of people who stayed at a hotel I once worked at. They'd recently gone to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam and were talking about how the lessons from the Nazi regime should never be forgotten.
The next morning they were reading about some incident that had happened recently involving a Muslim, and were discussing how this should be used as a reason to kick all the Muslims out of the UK.
Turns out that the lessons from the Nazi regime included "Kristallnacht was a really useful political tool".
It's always fun to guess just what people mean by "learn from history".
See also http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-assault-1987 (wanted to link the book, but its wikipedia article is Terrible) on a work that deals with questions about resistance, collaboration, reprisals and blame. It's a fictional work, but the writer, Harry Mulisch, did survive through WWII as a Jewish young man partly because his father (non-Jewish) was a collaborator.
Is the current rhetoric about Muslim Immigration the same as actively rounding up jews and sending them to death camps? Of Course
Only crazy people would think that.
Is the current rhetoric about Muslim Immigration similar to the kind of rhetoric we had about jews in the decades leading up to the Nazis? Yes, uncomfortably so.
Hatred of Jews didn't originate with Hitler.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
What i'm talking about about is that the current rhetoric is sadly a lot more based on real current events and not only by blind racism. And i cannot bear it being ignored just because of said rhetoric.
I think the current rhetoric about muslims out of europe is pretty similar to every outside immigrant group ever and making a comparison to nazi germany is reaching (unless you're going for what crazy people on facebook are saying)
override367 on
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AlazullYour body is not a temple, it's an amusement park.Enjoy the ride.Registered Userregular
Considering I read a comment on Facebook today in response to an article about a Muslim immigrant committing a crime that literally said, "Maybe we should put them all in camps!" I can see where people are coming from on that comparison.
User name Alazull on Steam, PSN, Nintenders, Epic, etc.
I think the current rhetoric about muslims out of europe is pretty similar to every outside immigrant group ever and making a comparison to nazi germany is reaching (unless you're going for what crazy people on facebook are saying)
How about comparing it to the US internment camps or the Allies turning back jewish immigrants to Nazi territory or the Trail of Tears? It doesn't start with one group being carted off to camps. It starts with groups being seen as the other and then blamed for the woes of the nation. The major thing that led to the denouncement of the US internment camps, outside of those affected, was the discovery of the German concentration camps. It still took an unforgivably long time for the connections between the two to sink in. The comparison is apt because it's important to remember what that has led to over and over again in the past, in many different countries, and in many different societies.
The killings by the Khmer Rouge, the sterilization campaigns in the US, Great Britain, and Peru, Stalin's gulag program. It just keeps happening and we don't seem to remember that it happens because we've already got a simmering resentment of a people that only needs a national emergency to tip it into full scale atrocity. Maybe we can break the cycle if we just cut the resentment first, but we have to be reminded of the cost if we can't.
I find policies along the lines of: "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender" to be far more sensible.
Using the low end of the US pentagon figures for counter-insurgency operations, having to actual secure 1940 Denmark would have require somewhere between 50k-100k security troops- between 3 and 6 divisions.
Just to be clear I'm not picking on the Danes here. Britain and France should have invaded Germany as soon as practicable after the invasion of Poland, rather than sit around and do nothing for 7 months. Even once France fell Germany should never have been able to invade Russia at all, simply because keeping the rest of conquered Europe in line should have made the manpower requirements unreachable. France alone should have required 10 times that number of troops to garrison.
If we're going to be playing Monday Night Quarterback with perfect hindsight, why don't we just go back to Sarajevo and talk Nedeljko Čabrinović & Gavrilo Princip out of their assassination plot? Surely this would do far more than insisting that Danish citizens throw away their lives in a bid to make the German invasion a Pyrrhic victory or that France & Britain should've acted like hawkish imperial powers despite the recent horrors of WWI.
There's simply no way to tell what any given change of plans you wish to posit would have affected the outcome of the war. Maybe if France had invaded Germany at the first signs of treaty violations, it would have triggered merely a different version of WWII, and then the Monday Night Quarterback of that alternative universe would say, "Well, obviously France shouldn't have been so hawkish over a mere treaty violation! Such an over reaction! Clearly nothing bad would've happened if everyone just minded their own business!"
With Love and Courage
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
At a guess, one reason for japans lack of damage control is probably the country's general lack of mechanical knowledge. Many of their recruits were coming from non industrialized farms that had barely changed since the Meiji restoration. With the rapid growth of the navy there was little time to train navy personnel in more than the core functions of their job.
Well, that, and Japanese high commands general lack of concern over casualties. They loved the romance of newer and better torpedoes and guns, sailors who didn't want to burn to death just deserved beatings until morale improved.
A big factor is that everyone is still trying to figure out how to make the aircraft carrier work. There were some assumptions as to how effective the armored flight deck would be, along with the various curtaining systems at the hanger level. Turns out that you can still get that one unlucky bomb. The Akagi got hit with a single 1,000 pound bomb. It just happened to hit the elevator just right and in the process take out part of the fire prevention systems and cause a bunch of full armed bombers to go off. The design of the Akagi didn't take into account that fueling and refueling aircraft would leave an mist of aviation fuel in the air. It's one of those things in which sometimes you don't learn the flaws of something until it goes boom. It doesn't help that they don't have a lot of damage control parties but in a lot of cases the damage control parties survived but found the infrastructure was fucked. Someone guessed how much redundancy you need in your damage control systems and was wrong. Some of the other stuff, like wood being used internally didn't help but it's a shitty situation. I can use steel to make enough chairs for a ship, or I can use it for airplane engines. Since steel is a limited resource and chairs and beds, and other things can be made of wood, they were made of wood.
The American tendency to have everyone be damage control is an idea that starts early but you don't see full crews trained in damage control till closer to end of the war.
One of the things the Japanese do get very right and the Americans don't get until well after the war is concentrating the firepower of a carrier group. They get the idea of take six carriers and coordinate strikes so your enemy has to deal with six carriers worth of shit, rather then piecemeal. Part of that is that focusing their strikes was what they viewed as the key to victory. If you're going to fight with a giant industrial power who can out produce you, then you need to always be in a position of superior striking power. Yes, they may make four carriers to your one, but in combat you're bringing six to their two.
Unfortunately from a Japanese perspective, they move away from this idea, and as a doctrine it causes other problems. The focus on having big hammer blows means that some of the other tasks a Navy needs to do aren't met. Like protecting their shipping. They couldn't produce enough destroyers, destroyer escorts, and general purpose shipping to keep up with American submarine warfare. One of the reasons that American subs have a field day in the Pacific is that the Japanese don't have enough hulls to stop them. And then you get the dysfunction that is the relationships between the IJA, the IJN, and the Government compounding things. It lead to problems on the manufacturing side.
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
-that a Tiger tank could easily go toe to toe with an Abrams or Challenger, and that Shermans and T34s were stupid garbage that could barely go a mile without catching fire and killing their crews?
Oddly enough this is pretty much what I've heard about Panther tanks. Of particular note was an incident during the battle of Kursk where, I think (I'll look for the passage later) a good number of Panthers caught fire just getting off the train.
Late war german tanks were a goddamned mess in terms of reliability.
Late war German tanks were awful. They had reliability problems out the ass. The Tiger II in particular was a god awful tank. Prone to just about everything breaking on it regularly. On paper the armor was amazing, but in reality the quality of the steel was absolute shit. So while it was quite thick, it was also not very hard to kill. It also had a tendance to create spauling inside the tank. So a round might hit, fail to penetrate but the armor breaking inside would spray the crew with high speed fragments of metal. You'll sometimes hear touted how few the Russians killed. That's because vehicles that were abandoned because they couldn't work got tallied separately.
People have a tendency to say how amazing German engineering was during the war, but it really wasn't. Their tanks tended to be temperamental beasts that were absurdly maintenance heavy. They have great specs on paper but the reality of their performance was quite terrible. A lot of the inflated reputation comes from Belton Cooper's book. He was a mechanic during the war and lamented how terrible the Sherman was against the Tiger. Of course his unit didn't fight Panthers or Tigers when he says they did and he wasn't at the front lines. He also spends much of his book ranking about how the Sherman nickname was a Yankee conspiracy to oppress the South, despite it being a British nickname. He's full of shit.
Most of the German Super tanks like the Tiger I & II, The Panther and the King Tiger where killed by fighter bombers anyway. A 500 pound bomb landing your roof courtesy of the RAF and Army Air Force would ruin anybody's day.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
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ElldrenIs a woman dammitceterum censeoRegistered Userregular
At a guess, one reason for japans lack of damage control is probably the country's general lack of mechanical knowledge. Many of their recruits were coming from non industrialized farms that had barely changed since the Meiji restoration. With the rapid growth of the navy there was little time to train navy personnel in more than the core functions of their job.
Well, that, and Japanese high commands general lack of concern over casualties. They loved the romance of newer and better torpedoes and guns, sailors who didn't want to burn to death just deserved beatings until morale improved.
A big factor is that everyone is still trying to figure out how to make the aircraft carrier work. There were some assumptions as to how effective the armored flight deck would be, along with the various curtaining systems at the hanger level. Turns out that you can still get that one unlucky bomb. The Akagi got hit with a single 1,000 pound bomb. It just happened to hit the elevator just right and in the process take out part of the fire prevention systems and cause a bunch of full armed bombers to go off. The design of the Akagi didn't take into account that fueling and refueling aircraft would leave an mist of aviation fuel in the air. It's one of those things in which sometimes you don't learn the flaws of something until it goes boom. It doesn't help that they don't have a lot of damage control parties but in a lot of cases the damage control parties survived but found the infrastructure was fucked. Someone guessed how much redundancy you need in your damage control systems and was wrong. Some of the other stuff, like wood being used internally didn't help but it's a shitty situation. I can use steel to make enough chairs for a ship, or I can use it for airplane engines. Since steel is a limited resource and chairs and beds, and other things can be made of wood, they were made of wood.
The American tendency to have everyone be damage control is an idea that starts early but you don't see full crews trained in damage control till closer to end of the war.
One of the things the Japanese do get very right and the Americans don't get until well after the war is concentrating the firepower of a carrier group. They get the idea of take six carriers and coordinate strikes so your enemy has to deal with six carriers worth of shit, rather then piecemeal. Part of that is that focusing their strikes was what they viewed as the key to victory. If you're going to fight with a giant industrial power who can out produce you, then you need to always be in a position of superior striking power. Yes, they may make four carriers to your one, but in combat you're bringing six to their two.
Unfortunately from a Japanese perspective, they move away from this idea, and as a doctrine it causes other problems. The focus on having big hammer blows means that some of the other tasks a Navy needs to do aren't met. Like protecting their shipping. They couldn't produce enough destroyers, destroyer escorts, and general purpose shipping to keep up with American submarine warfare. One of the reasons that American subs have a field day in the Pacific is that the Japanese don't have enough hulls to stop them. And then you get the dysfunction that is the relationships between the IJA, the IJN, and the Government compounding things. It lead to problems on the manufacturing side.
not to mention the IJN HQ and the actual fleet admirals
Nobody was on good terms with anyone in the Imperial Japanese military
and the situation where every single one of those branches has their own priorities, then trying to meet them all, simultaneously, is what causes the carrier group to be split up.
When you have one carrier group and IJN HQ wants one thing, Admiral Yamamoto wants another, and the Army wants a third...
fuck gendered marketing
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ElldrenIs a woman dammitceterum censeoRegistered Userregular
-that a Tiger tank could easily go toe to toe with an Abrams or Challenger, and that Shermans and T34s were stupid garbage that could barely go a mile without catching fire and killing their crews?
Oddly enough this is pretty much what I've heard about Panther tanks. Of particular note was an incident during the battle of Kursk where, I think (I'll look for the passage later) a good number of Panthers caught fire just getting off the train.
Late war german tanks were a goddamned mess in terms of reliability.
Late war German tanks were awful. They had reliability problems out the ass. The Tiger II in particular was a god awful tank. Prone to just about everything breaking on it regularly. On paper the armor was amazing, but in reality the quality of the steel was absolute shit. So while it was quite thick, it was also not very hard to kill. It also had a tendance to create spauling inside the tank. So a round might hit, fail to penetrate but the armor breaking inside would spray the crew with high speed fragments of metal. You'll sometimes hear touted how few the Russians killed. That's because vehicles that were abandoned because they couldn't work got tallied separately.
People have a tendency to say how amazing German engineering was during the war, but it really wasn't. Their tanks tended to be temperamental beasts that were absurdly maintenance heavy. They have great specs on paper but the reality of their performance was quite terrible. A lot of the inflated reputation comes from Belton Cooper's book. He was a mechanic during the war and lamented how terrible the Sherman was against the Tiger. Of course his unit didn't fight Panthers or Tigers when he says they did and he wasn't at the front lines. He also spends much of his book ranking about how the Sherman nickname was a Yankee conspiracy to oppress the South, despite it being a British nickname. He's full of shit.
Yeah, the tank is officially the Medium Tank, M4
The US Army didn't do official nicknames, just model number designations. But due to lend-lease a lot of American tanks end up in British hands, and the UK didn't do numbered designations, just nicknames. So every US tank model the British get ends up getting a nickname in the process (or sometimes more than one, as is the case for the Grant/Lee). And the British decided to use Civil War generals.
Elldren on
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ElldrenIs a woman dammitceterum censeoRegistered Userregular
Most of the German Super tanks like the Tiger I & II, The Panther and the King Tiger where killed by fighter bombers anyway. A 500 pound bomb landing your roof courtesy of the RAF and Army Air Force would ruin anybody's day.
But let's face it, usually that bomb was dropped by the Soviet Air Forces
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"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Oh. Derp.
Then I guess it was just an assumption that Denmark's lack of almost any strategic significance might save us.
Edit: and the fact that Germany had respected our neutrality in WWI.
Let me tell you about unrestricted submarine warfare
And a little thing called the Zimmerman Telegram
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Yes yes, but no actual invasion.
I'm not sure how the Zimmermann telegram relates to war against Denmark though? I guess my 'our' might have been ambiguous, but I'm not American.
Plus Luxembourg... everybody forgets Luxembourg.
I misinterpreted the partial quote as regarding US neutrality in WWI, not Denmark's. Comprehension failure on my part.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Yep Norway was neutral right up until the fateful shots where fire from Oscarsborg.
Sweden managed to remain neutral after the invasion of Denmark and Norway by sucking up to Germany something fierce. Not that they had any choice.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
The Danish communists on the other hand were willingly and maybe even gleefully turned over to the Germans by the authorities (after operation Barbarossa got rolling, oc)
Except obviously most of them had already gone underground, but still
Also the lists of communists were in themselves illegal I think - surveillance with no other reason than membership of a legal political party
The 30s, huh
That is not quite how it happened. They surrendered first and and only had their jewish population deported in September 1943, three years later.
In Norway the deportations took place in October 1942 and had been preceded by the arrest of many Jews in the previous year.
By the way, I was looking in wikipedia to get exact dates and I noticed that there wasn't any article for The Netherlands(or Holland). There where individual articles for the subject like the righteous among the Nations and such, but no big overview article like there where for other countries. Wiki Vandalism by a Wehraboo?
Compared to my country, where we specifically decided to block Jewish people from claiming asylum.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
One of the benefits of the policy of cooperation was Denmark at first was allowed to continue to more or less govern its own internal affairs. It wasn't till I think 43 that the Germans 'assumed direct control'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Netherlands#The_Holocaust
Is that what you're looking for?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Belgium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_France
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Poland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Italian_Libya
There is one for almost every European country and the Baltics,Croatia and Serbia even though none of these where independent countries at the time. Even the Channel islands have a separate article on the subject. Its weird that of all European countries the Netherlands should be without such a article.
The Article you linked are about larger issues article like the Occupation of the Netherlands or the history of Jews in the Netherlands where the Holocaust is only a part of the article. You can tell by the #.
Finland would have remained neutral, except the Allies (well, Russia) invaded us.
So we had to ally with Germany, which kinda sucks, but hey, needs must when devil drives and all that.
And then England declared war on us. (nothing really came out of that)
Then we negotiated peace with Russia.
And then we had a short war with Germany.
-Thucydides
The history of the small countries in WWII in a single phrase.
yeah man good job we don't have anything like that in the 21st century
That shit would never fly now, right?
A 'fun' exercise is taking rhetoric or policy proposals made by European parties today and replacing the word Muslim with Jew
But yeah, also Patriot Act etc.
A lot of people are bad at learning from history, apparently.
I remember a couple of people who stayed at a hotel I once worked at. They'd recently gone to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam and were talking about how the lessons from the Nazi regime should never be forgotten.
The next morning they were reading about some incident that had happened recently involving a Muslim, and were discussing how this should be used as a reason to kick all the Muslims out of the UK.
Turns out that the lessons from the Nazi regime included "Kristallnacht was a really useful political tool".
I find policies along the lines of: "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender" to be far more sensible.
Using the low end of the US pentagon figures for counter-insurgency operations, having to actual secure 1940 Denmark would have require somewhere between 50k-100k security troops- between 3 and 6 divisions.
Just to be clear I'm not picking on the Danes here. Britain and France should have invaded Germany as soon as practicable after the invasion of Poland, rather than sit around and do nothing for 7 months. Even once France fell Germany should never have been able to invade Russia at all, simply because keeping the rest of conquered Europe in line should have made the manpower requirements unreachable. France alone should have required 10 times that number of troops to garrison.
It becomes a lot less sensible when it's your homes and your kids lives that are on the line. Fighting to certain death is a rare thing in the real world. Usually the only times you see it is when the people fighting are cornered and facing almost certain death otherwise, or are fanatical basically to the point of mental illness. Bargaining in the face of death is an almost universal human trait, which is essentially what Denmark did.
Citing the numbers required for modern COIN discounts the fact that the tactics the Nazis used were...well, let's say more brutal and effective / efficient...than what generated the modern Pentagon numbers. The numbers of troops also decreases when you have a large number of collaborators, something that - as we saw in France - greatly reduced the number of German security troops needed.
As for Britain and France...they didn't have the capability to invade Germany in September, 1939. Even if they wanted to, they simply weren't powerful enough to do so. If they were clairvoyant they may have focused on a defense that was less susceptible to blitzkrieg, but doing the best they could in the time between September '39 and May '40 they would have slowed the German advance by a few days or so.
Monday morning quarterbacking 75 years after the fact is great, but Denmark (and France / Britain) made the rational choices at the time - even when the choices may appear wrong in retrospect.
As for invading Russia, the Germans never really had the manpower to succeed anyway. Fight to a stalemate and sue for peace, maybe. But they would never have been able to hold Russia even if they stopped at the Urals. You can hypothesize some situations where they could maybe have done so, but those scenarios change the context of history so much that it's effectively fantasy.
Take the fate of Telavaag in Norway:
And then remember that Norway was treated nicely as nazi occupations went. Other places it went more like this.
The Wikipedia quote mentions Lidice and Oradour-sur-Glane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane
I suggest certain people read up on those two places and shut their mouths about Guerrilla warfare and Pentagon Coin estimates.
It's always fun to guess just what people mean by "learn from history".
it's a goddamn affront.
Only crazy people would think that.
Is the current rhetoric about Muslim Immigration similar to the kind of rhetoric we had about jews in the decades leading up to the Nazis? Yes, uncomfortably so.
Hatred of Jews didn't originate with Hitler.
What i'm talking about about is that the current rhetoric is sadly a lot more based on real current events and not only by blind racism. And i cannot bear it being ignored just because of said rhetoric.
How about comparing it to the US internment camps or the Allies turning back jewish immigrants to Nazi territory or the Trail of Tears? It doesn't start with one group being carted off to camps. It starts with groups being seen as the other and then blamed for the woes of the nation. The major thing that led to the denouncement of the US internment camps, outside of those affected, was the discovery of the German concentration camps. It still took an unforgivably long time for the connections between the two to sink in. The comparison is apt because it's important to remember what that has led to over and over again in the past, in many different countries, and in many different societies.
The killings by the Khmer Rouge, the sterilization campaigns in the US, Great Britain, and Peru, Stalin's gulag program. It just keeps happening and we don't seem to remember that it happens because we've already got a simmering resentment of a people that only needs a national emergency to tip it into full scale atrocity. Maybe we can break the cycle if we just cut the resentment first, but we have to be reminded of the cost if we can't.
If we're going to be playing Monday Night Quarterback with perfect hindsight, why don't we just go back to Sarajevo and talk Nedeljko Čabrinović & Gavrilo Princip out of their assassination plot? Surely this would do far more than insisting that Danish citizens throw away their lives in a bid to make the German invasion a Pyrrhic victory or that France & Britain should've acted like hawkish imperial powers despite the recent horrors of WWI.
There's simply no way to tell what any given change of plans you wish to posit would have affected the outcome of the war. Maybe if France had invaded Germany at the first signs of treaty violations, it would have triggered merely a different version of WWII, and then the Monday Night Quarterback of that alternative universe would say, "Well, obviously France shouldn't have been so hawkish over a mere treaty violation! Such an over reaction! Clearly nothing bad would've happened if everyone just minded their own business!"
A big factor is that everyone is still trying to figure out how to make the aircraft carrier work. There were some assumptions as to how effective the armored flight deck would be, along with the various curtaining systems at the hanger level. Turns out that you can still get that one unlucky bomb. The Akagi got hit with a single 1,000 pound bomb. It just happened to hit the elevator just right and in the process take out part of the fire prevention systems and cause a bunch of full armed bombers to go off. The design of the Akagi didn't take into account that fueling and refueling aircraft would leave an mist of aviation fuel in the air. It's one of those things in which sometimes you don't learn the flaws of something until it goes boom. It doesn't help that they don't have a lot of damage control parties but in a lot of cases the damage control parties survived but found the infrastructure was fucked. Someone guessed how much redundancy you need in your damage control systems and was wrong. Some of the other stuff, like wood being used internally didn't help but it's a shitty situation. I can use steel to make enough chairs for a ship, or I can use it for airplane engines. Since steel is a limited resource and chairs and beds, and other things can be made of wood, they were made of wood.
The American tendency to have everyone be damage control is an idea that starts early but you don't see full crews trained in damage control till closer to end of the war.
One of the things the Japanese do get very right and the Americans don't get until well after the war is concentrating the firepower of a carrier group. They get the idea of take six carriers and coordinate strikes so your enemy has to deal with six carriers worth of shit, rather then piecemeal. Part of that is that focusing their strikes was what they viewed as the key to victory. If you're going to fight with a giant industrial power who can out produce you, then you need to always be in a position of superior striking power. Yes, they may make four carriers to your one, but in combat you're bringing six to their two.
Unfortunately from a Japanese perspective, they move away from this idea, and as a doctrine it causes other problems. The focus on having big hammer blows means that some of the other tasks a Navy needs to do aren't met. Like protecting their shipping. They couldn't produce enough destroyers, destroyer escorts, and general purpose shipping to keep up with American submarine warfare. One of the reasons that American subs have a field day in the Pacific is that the Japanese don't have enough hulls to stop them. And then you get the dysfunction that is the relationships between the IJA, the IJN, and the Government compounding things. It lead to problems on the manufacturing side.
Late war German tanks were awful. They had reliability problems out the ass. The Tiger II in particular was a god awful tank. Prone to just about everything breaking on it regularly. On paper the armor was amazing, but in reality the quality of the steel was absolute shit. So while it was quite thick, it was also not very hard to kill. It also had a tendance to create spauling inside the tank. So a round might hit, fail to penetrate but the armor breaking inside would spray the crew with high speed fragments of metal. You'll sometimes hear touted how few the Russians killed. That's because vehicles that were abandoned because they couldn't work got tallied separately.
People have a tendency to say how amazing German engineering was during the war, but it really wasn't. Their tanks tended to be temperamental beasts that were absurdly maintenance heavy. They have great specs on paper but the reality of their performance was quite terrible. A lot of the inflated reputation comes from Belton Cooper's book. He was a mechanic during the war and lamented how terrible the Sherman was against the Tiger. Of course his unit didn't fight Panthers or Tigers when he says they did and he wasn't at the front lines. He also spends much of his book ranking about how the Sherman nickname was a Yankee conspiracy to oppress the South, despite it being a British nickname. He's full of shit.
not to mention the IJN HQ and the actual fleet admirals
Nobody was on good terms with anyone in the Imperial Japanese military
and the situation where every single one of those branches has their own priorities, then trying to meet them all, simultaneously, is what causes the carrier group to be split up.
When you have one carrier group and IJN HQ wants one thing, Admiral Yamamoto wants another, and the Army wants a third...
Yeah, the tank is officially the Medium Tank, M4
The US Army didn't do official nicknames, just model number designations. But due to lend-lease a lot of American tanks end up in British hands, and the UK didn't do numbered designations, just nicknames. So every US tank model the British get ends up getting a nickname in the process (or sometimes more than one, as is the case for the Grant/Lee). And the British decided to use Civil War generals.
But let's face it, usually that bomb was dropped by the Soviet Air Forces