World War II myths

World War I was nearly as far reaching as World War II, also reaching many parts of the globe. The latter was not a single war, but actually two: one in Europe and another in and around the Pacific ocean. Germany, Italy and Japan formed the Axis powers though the cooperation between the European and Asian partners was very limited.

Before World War II, Mussolini was an example for Hitler, who still had to drag his country from under the burden of the World War I reparations. Only in 1939 did Nazi Germany overtake fascist Italy in power. Afterward, Mussolini was indeed the weaker of the two.

The Wehrmacht started the war with too few and too light tanks. It could not even have attempted its attack on Poland without Czech tanks that it had obtained during the occupation of Czechoslovakia. German tactics were based more on speed and surprise than pummeling its opponents into submission. Only in the second half of the war did the Wehrmacht get better tanks than its opponents.

The Poles were not so stupid as to set horses against tanks; they used anti-tank cannons. They did employ old-fashioned horse cavalry, but used them for surprise counterattacks against the German rear, with considerable success.

Blitzkrieg is a word that was invented by the English speaking press since the 1920's and applied to German tactics when World War II broke out. The Germans themselves, by the mouth of Hans von Seekt, used terms like of 'Bewegungskrieg' (maneuver warfare) and 'Auftragstaktik' (assignment tactics). This applied to rapid breakthrough tactics that were developed during World War I and successfully transferred to tanks and airplanes in World War II.

Planning of the evacuation of the queen and the government started in late 1939. When the Germans invaded the Netherlands half a year later, Wilhelmina fled to Britain almost immediately. She sent her children and grandchildren to Canada. King Haakon of Norway fled too. Only Leopold III of Belgium stood fast. Queen Wilhelmina returned only in May 1945 when the Germans had been driven out.

Stalin feared Hitler when he saw him rise to power. The only reasons that the Soviets struck the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the nazis were that the western allies had nothing to offer them and that he hoped that Germany and the western powers would start a war between themselves, exhausting each other. Stalin expected Hitler's betrayal. He tried to undo his purges of the Red Army in the 1930's and build its strength up again. He was surprised by the timing of the attack, at least a year sooner than he had deemed possible.

Raids on North Africa and the Atlantic coast by the SAS were daring and difficult but mostly failed with high casualties on the side of the attackers. They did cause damage, though not proportional to the number of men and the amount of training and resources poured into the operations. The Chindits, operating in Burma, did not do better. They suffered as much from disease and malnutrition as from combat.

Most of the murders were committed by the SS. The Wehrmacht not just stood by and watched while the SS shot prisoners of war and civilians, but several times actively assisted. Some examples are the massacres of Kragujevac in 1941, the Acqui Division and Kalavryta in 1943, the aftermath of the Warsaw uprising in 1944. Most victims fell on the eastern front, where countless prisoners of war were shot or starved to death.

Though there are many photographs and a few movies from World War II, several of the most famous ones are not real but staged afterward. Examples includes the movie of the two wings of Operation Uranus meeting up south of Stalingrad and the photograph of American marines raising their flag on the highest point of Iwo Jima. The photo of Soviet soldiers raising the flag on the Reistag building in Berlin is real, but has been tampered with by Soviet censors.

Before the war, Germany was home to some of the world's most renowned physicists. It was Germans who discovered nuclear fission in 1938. When Hitler came to power, many of the scientists had fled the country, a significant brain drain. The Nazis set up a program to develop nuclear weapons, but never put real effort in it, judging the attempt unlikely to succeed. The Americans, alerted by emigrated Germans, proved them wrong.

On the eastern front Germany and the USSR fought each other savagely, torching, raping and killing alongside fighting. Both Germany and Japan worked prisoners to death in work camps and experimented on them with chemical weapons. But the Allies too became increasingly grim while the war progressed. They flattened many German and Japanese cities, civilian rather than industrial targets, with fire bombs.

Rommel fought well during the invasion of France and in Africa. He led from the front and won several times against British forces who were stronger. Tactically, he was a good commander, but strategically he was severely lacking. His dream of fighting into Egypt and the Middle East was completely unrealistic. Had he fought a defensive war, the Germans may have lost fewer men and material in Africa.

Montgomery always fought methodically and cautiously, saving the life of many a British soldier in the process. Meanwhile other soldiers and civilians suffered while Monty failed to make progress. He defeated Rommel only when he had a 2:1 advantage in numbers; failed to break out at Caen after D-Day and totally botched Operation Market Garden.

A unit of fallschirmjäger did liberate Mussolini from the Campo Imperatore Hotel in 1943. The raid had been planned and prepared for for some time; Skorzeny attached himself to it at the last moment. Due to a delay with the plane that carried the mission's leader, Georg Freiherr von Berlepsch, he was late to arrive and could not take credit, so it was Skorzeny who showed up before the cameras.

The end of the nazis started much earlier, in 1942. And it happened in the east, not the west. When Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, 80% of the German forces were committed to the east, while 20% guarded the west. When the allies invaded Sicily, the ratio became 75% vs. 25%. After Operation Overlord it became 67% vs. 33%, still one western soldier for every two Russians.

Hitler took more than a decade to rise to power and for several years after was not sure of his position. He deliberately assigned conflicting responsibilities to people and departments to keep them fighting each other instead of him. Von Stauffenberg's bomb in 1944 was the most famous assassination plot against him, but not the only one. There were some 40 attempts, possibly more, starting as eary as the 1920's.

Kamikaze attacks hit more often and did more damage than bombs and torpedoes fired by non-suicide airplanes, so were more efficient. Ultimately they were not effective because the Americans improved their air defenses and already had an overwhelming advantage in numbers and equipment.

Japan needed imports to supply its industry and feed its population. By the end of the war, the USA had completely throttled Japanese shipping and the government was already extending peace feelers. The country could simply have been starved into submission. The atomic bombs were used to demonstrate the USA's power to the USSR and other countries, with an eye towards a post-war world.

The Chinese claim that 300,000 people were killed in the Nanjing Massacre, but a figure of 200,000 or less seems more realistic. The atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed approximately 117,000 and 60,000 people respectively at the time of the bombings and in the immediate months afterward. So the total number of deaths is about equal. Still the first was done with guns and knives and the other two with nuclear weapons.

Many of the countries that suffered the most did little actual fighting. The top most suffering countries, in deaths, both military and civilian, in relation to the 1939 pre-war population, are: Japan 3.9%, Hungary 5.1%, Estonia 7.3%, Germany 8.6%, Yugoslavia 8.8%, Greece 9.1%, USSR 13.7%, Lithuania 14.4%, Poland 17.1%. In contrast the losses of several major combatants are relatively low: USA 0.3%, Britain 0.9%, Italy 1.1%.

These are Hitler's thoughts. Before the war, there never was any organized movement, let alone a conspiracy, of either Jews or Communists against Hitler. The resulting Holocaust, the mass murder of Jews, was real.