Military History's Best Loser

If you’re ever in the Tampa, FL area, take a couple of hours to visit the S.S. American Victory. Built in 55 days and launched in 1945, she hauled military cargo to the Philippines and China during WWII, and also served in Korea and Vietnam. She’s a floating museum and training ship for first responders now. The American Victory is one of three remaining Victory ships. Well worth the time!

@RJL518:

The real question to be asked is how would a battle have gone if the Missouri and Iowa took on the Super-Battleships Yamato and Musashi.  
As Samuel Eliot Morison, author of the History of US Naval Operations in World War II, once said…“What a brawl that would have been!”
Even though the Yamato and Musashi had 18.1 inch guns compared to the 16 inch of the Iowa class, the Iowas were still faster and still had better range.  
But who knows.  
IMO it would have depended on the tactics and strategy of the captains in a great battle at that time.

And it was a match-up that nearly happened.  Yamato and two of the Iowa-class battleships, Iowa and New Jersey, missed each other by only a few hours in the area of the San Bernadino Straight during the closing stages of the Battle of Leyte Gulf.  And if Musashi hadn’d been sunk the previous day, there would have been the potential for a two-on-two fight.  I’d have given a lot to get tickets to watch a slugging match like that.

One interesting technical difference is that even though the belt armour of the Yamatos was thicker than that of the Iowas, its performance might not have been better by comparison.  Japanese industry wasn’t capable of producing 16-inch armour as a single block, so the Yamato belt armour was in two layers rather than monolithic, which reduced its effectiveness.  Also, the Class-A armour components of the Iowa’s defenses were more advanced than the grade of armour used on the Yamatos, and thickness-for-thickness had better resistance to penetration.  On the offensive side, the 16-inch AP shells fired by the Iowas were heavyweight designs, with a greater weight relative to their diameter than the 18.1-inch AP shells fired by the Yamatos (2,700 lb vs. 3,219 lbs), and they were fired at nearly the same muzzle velocity (2,500 ft/s vs. 2,600 ft/s) because the Iowa guns had longer barrels relative to their bore (50 calibers vs. 45 calibers).

The second Italian Facist regime : la Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI) was set up today, with its capital, not in Rome, but Salo, a small town in Lombardy on Lake Garda,  Northern Italy, where the RSI had his Foreign Office.  
Mussolini was its head, but it was nothing more than a German puppet, dependent on its military and financial support.
Mussolini had been rescued from captivity in a daring raid by a soon to be famous German SS Colonel, Otto Skorzeny on September 12th.
Italy had  surrendered on the 8th and the Allies had  landed at Salerno on the 9th and were fighting the Germans in the south of Italy at this time, though they had not yet captured the city port of Naples.

@Clyde85:

@KurtGodel7:

If I am banned for expressing the view that the communists were significantly worse than the Nazis, it would indicate to me that one or more list moderators subscribe to the latter philosophy. I would then go about finding another WWII forum run by people who adhere to the former perspective.

Which would be too great a loss for this site and greatly diminish the level of intelegent discourse on this site in the WW2 forums.

I can see and understand what you mean, I too often sympathize with the German solider and the German army, but I have no sympathy for Hitler and is Nazi party. What they did was far worse then any of that “Stabbed in the Back” nonsense from WW1. Hitler and his party did more to stab the German army and solider in the back with their idiodic occupation policies (one of the biggest factors to Germay’s defeat IMO) and their equally stupid racial superiority theories. I know Stalin and his “communist” cornies were just as bad as Hitler and his Nazi party, most people here know this, no one is disputing this, but like Gamerman said it’s like arguing if you’d rather be shot and hung, either way you end up dead! Hitler and his Nazi’s were defeated by the Soviets in the end because the reaped what the had sowen in their occupation of Russian lands. Had a more moderate policy been used maybe things would have been different. Hitler and his Nazi party are forever stained by the horros they unleashed during WW2 and no matter how terrible Stalin was people are not going to believe the “lesser of two evil” argument.

If thats what were doing here, then I say screw Hitler and Stalin and say go Cthulhu, why choose the lesser of two evils� :wink:

Thanks Clyde. I appreciate the compliments you and gamerman have given me. I also appreciate Gargantua’s recent post on my behalf.

To address your point about German occupation policy within the Soviet Union: there was division within the Nazi Party about whether the German occupation of Soviet territory should be benign or harsh. Ultimately those advocating a benign occupation lost the power struggle, leading to a harsh occupation policy. In contrast, Germany’s leaders from WWI had chosen a benign occupation policy for the eastern lands they occupied. That policy was part of the events which convinced the people of the Ukraine that “Bad things come from Russia, good things come from Germany.”

One of the Nazis’ main reasons for invading the Soviet Union in the first place was to obtain the food necessary to avert starvation in Germany and German-occupied Western Europe. It’s possible that the Nazi leaders concluded that, if they permitted widespread starvation to occur in German-held Soviet lands, they would be seen as dire enemies no matter what else they did. Ruling by fear may have seemed like their only practical option. I acknowledge that their racial ideology almost certainly contributed to this decision. They probably saw Slavs as cowardly and easily intimidated. (Such views would have been reinforced by the Red Army’s abysmal performance in its 1940 Winter War against Finland.)

Also, if Germany’s food situation was such that millions of people would starve to death no matter what course Hitler chose, he certainly would have preferred those millions to be Slavic rather than German.

More generally, I would break the Nazi ideology down into three components:

The Nazis were at their worst when acting upon the third of these components; and at their best when motivated by the first component. As an example of the latter, Hitler instituted improved workplace safety standards, improved clean air and clean water standards, reduced the unemployment rate to close to zero, significantly increased wages for German workers, greatly increased their vacation time, reduced the workweek to 40 hours, and arranged for government-subsidized cruises so that those workers could see the world. He also led an anti-smoking campaign which significantly reduced the rate of tobacco use within Germany. The Nazis encouraged physical exercise; and arranged for groups of adults to exercise together. German children who grew up in the '30s were consistently well-fed and in good physical condition. This contrasted with the poorer classes of English society–so strong a contrast that even someone as strongly biased as William Shirer noted it.

Another point worth mentioning is genetics. In nature, animals tend to have large numbers of offspring, only some of which survive to have offspring of their own. The fittest animals are most likely to be among the survivors, leading to upward genetic pressure. That source of upward genetic pressure has largely vanished for humans. Instead, the human gene pool is changing based primarily on the number of children individual people decide to have.

I have seen a Nazi propaganda poster which lamented the fact that intelligent, law-abiding people were having far fewer children than their less intelligent law-abiding counterparts, who in turn were having fewer children than unintelligent criminals. Communists have taken the opposite view of this situation. Karl Marx thought that individual differences were determined almost entirely through environmental factors. The communist movement would move even further in that direction.

Lysenko [caused] the expulsion, imprisonment, and death of hundreds of scientists and eliminating all study and research involving Mendelian genetics throughout the Soviet Union.

Mendelian genetics is the only scientifically credible form of genetics. The Stalin/Lysenko persecution of geneticists represented an attack on science–a far more severe attack, at least in terms of body count, than anything the Catholic Church had done to Galileo.

While communists have since backed away from Lamarckist quackery, they have continued to promote an anti-scientific, “yes, but” approach to genetic science. “Yes, Mendelian genetics theory is true, but it doesn’t do much to explain differences between humans.” “Yes, Mendelian genetic theory may apply to humans, but it does little to explain differences in human intelligence.” That sort of thing. Communists have violently opposed efforts to improve–or even arrest the decline of–the human gene pool, on the theory that such efforts are Nazi-like. Despite vast amounts of scientific evidence to the contrary, communists continue to claim that intellectual differences between individuals are caused almost entirely by environmental factors.

Upward genetic pressure, applied over time, caused apes to evolve into humans. Downward genetic pressure, such as we are now witnessing, will cause humans to . . . ?

I would argue that, to deal with current and future challenges and threats, the human race requires two things. 1) Ability. 2) Willingness to work together, and to sacrifice for a larger cause. Communists’ anti-scientific notions about genetics, in combination with the current decline in the gene pool, represent a direct, immediate threat to the first of these two things. Communists’ racial theories and racial objectives are a serious threat to the second.

Ants are willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony because they are genetically similar to the colony’s other ants. What is true for ants is also true for humans: people are willing to sacrifice more for their own children than they are for other people’s children. Adopted children are four times more likely to be abused, despite the fact that adoptive parents are screened, whereas people who want to have and raise their own biological children are not.

During the rise of the Roman Republic, individual soldiers were willing to sacrifice themselves for Rome. Government officials often placed law and honor above their own self-interest. During the decline of the Roman Empire, these things had ceased to be the case. Bribery was the norm rather than the exception. The phrase “Roman soldiers” had become almost an oxymoron: few if any real Romans were willing to fight for Rome. The definition of what a “Roman” was had become blurred. By this point, Rome had become what may (for its time) have been the most multicultural city in human history. “All roads lead to Rome.” Large numbers of people from widely disparate places had congregated in Rome.

Scientific studies have shown that people are happier and more altruistic when in homogenous workplaces than they are in racially diverse workplaces. Rome’s loss of its homogeneity and its loss of altruism were almost certainly not coincidental factors. Other places which have become racially mixed–such as Latin America–are also, like the dying Roman Empire, associated with high levels of government corruption, and a low level of military effectiveness.

Based on this scientific evidence and on this track record, it would make far more sense to preserve the existence of race, than it would to support communists in their goal of globalizing and destroying race. There may come a time when it is critical for humanity’s future that large groups of people work together to achieve a greater purpose. If or when that time comes, we will need to have better institutions than existed in the declining Roman Empire or in Latin America to deal with such challenges.

These guys had guts!

@Gargantua:

The question is then,  learning from WWII, is the science of Eugenics WRONG/BAD Science?  Or is the science legitimate, but leads to VERY slippery slopes…  What are your thoughts and experiences?  And lessons learned from your WWII readings…

You’ve raised an interesting topic for discussion. Prior to WWII, the promotion of eugenic programs was considered legitimate and relatively mainstream. Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, was a proponent of eugenics, as were a number of other leading Americans. Before I go any further, I should clarify that by “eugenics” I am not referring to comparisons between different races; but rather to the desire to see the best people within each given race have the most kids. Exactly which traits are most important is, of course, subjective and open to debate.

The arguments made in favor of eugenics were simple and straightforward: we owed it to future generations to give them the best possible inherited traits we reasonably could. As you hinted at in your post, inherited differences are roughly as important for humans as they are for dogs. If we care about dogs’ inherited traits (as shown through dog breeding) it was felt that we should care about the inherited traits of humans even more.

However, viewpoints changed during and after WWII. This was not because of any new scientific evidence that had been brought to light. On the contrary, the subsequent discovery of genes, and studies which show their importance, have made the scientific underpinnings of eugenics stronger than ever. Science has conclusively shown that differences between people are strongly driven by genetic differences, and are not (as is sometimes falsely claimed) merely the result of differences in environment.

Viewpoints about eugenics changed not because of new scientific evidence, but rather because of the wartime and postwar anti-Nazi propaganda effort. The Nazis believed in many things: hard work, a strong military, self-sacrifice for one’s nation, the preservation of their own race, eugenics, anti-Semitism, etc. After the war, some of those beliefs became socially unacceptable, while others remained mainstream. Eugenics happened to fall into the former category.

Possibly that’s because of opposition to the concept from the Nazis’ enemies. Karl Marx believed that differences between people were due wholly to the environment; and that belief found its way into the communist movement. Under Stalin, Soviet scientists who believed in Mendelian inheritance (the mainstream scientific view) were persecuted, and were either shot or sent to gulags. At least to a certain extent, the communist “environment-only” belief has permeated into Western cultures, especially when the subject of discussion is humans. However, there is no scientific support for that communist belief.

As for the large numbers of people who died under Nazi occupation: most of those deaths were the result of the Anglo-American food blockade of Germany, and of the resulting starvation. Occupied Poland is a good case in point. Like most places within 2000 km of Berlin, Poland was a food deficit nation. Early in the German occupation, food was sent from Germany to Poland to help avert outright starvation. However, Hitler’s attempt to get Britain to sign a peace treaty failed, and the war dragged on. Germany’s food reserves ran dangerously low; causing it to have to reevaluate its food policy. To avoid starvation in Germany itself, residents of German-occupied territories would receive less food in the future than they had in the past. Polish Jews were especially hard-hit by these changes: the plan had been to reduce their caloric consumption to zero; which would have meant three million fewer mouths to feed. The next-lowest priority was unskilled Polish workers not directly engaged in helping the war effort. It was expected that millions of people in this category would starve. They avoided starvation, at least for a time, only because the harvest was surprisingly good. Ukrainians received higher priority; and skilled Polish workers had higher priority still. At the top were the Germans occupying Poland: their food rations were almost normal.

If the U.S. was hit by similar famine conditions, I would expect that American citizens would receive a higher ration priority than would the residents of (for example) U.S.-occupied Iraq or Afghanistan. I would also expect those with large amounts of money or good political connections would receive far more food than those who lacked these things. American distribution of scare food resources would likely be about as unequal as the Germans’ had been; except that the inequalities would be based on citizenship and economic status; rather than on ethnicity and contribution to the war effort. More generally, it would be very rare for a nation experiencing famine conditions to distribute food equally to everyone. The fact that Germany used a different basis for that unequal distribution than the U.S. would have does not mean that eugenics is either an intrinsically evil perspective, or that it represents some sort of slippery slope.

@WILD:

When Hitler awakes from his coma his generals most likely declare him incompetent and have him put in some institution, allowing Germany to win the war.
Either that or he has them all shot for not following his agenda and once again the axis lose.

I can hear him allready yellin’!!!

Oh those do no goods shoot em ,imediatly shoot em…
I should have taking care of em like Stalin did w. his Generals…  lol…ha ha ha
Bohemian private!!!-Boehmischer Gefreiter…lach

In some of my other posts on this forum, I’ve described how even in 1940 (when the U.S. was still technically at peace with Germany), it had devoted a significant amount of industrial potential toward winning the air war against Germany; with plans to considerably expand the effort over the next several years. America’s strongest single asset was her industrial potential, as Hitler clearly understood. But that potential was going to be increasingly turned against Germany, whether the U.S. was technically at war or not.

Hitler’s plan to counter this was to expand Germany’s industrial output over the short-term, so that he could at least keep pace with the air war over Germany in the long haul. His method of expanding Germany’s output included industrialization and conquest. The industrialization aspect of his plan meant that instead of putting everything he had into weapons output for 1941 or 1942–in a massive effort to crush the Soviet Union–he had to divide his nation’s economic activity between short-term military production and long-term output increases. The result of all that industrial investment was that Germany increased its aircraft output from 16,000 planes per year in 1941 to over 40,000 planes per year by 1944. It also increased its military production in other categories, such as tanks and V2 rockets.

In late 1941, Hitler knew that his window of opportunity to win the war was relatively slim; and that 1942 would be critical. Germany had to win a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in that year, both to take pressure off its eastern front, and to provide it with the raw materials and manpower it needed to hold its own in the air war over the long haul. Hitler believed that the overwhelming majority of America’s naval strength would be needed in the Pacific to counter the Japanese; at least until the end of 1943. That gave him what he believed was a two year window with which he could sink the American Lend-Lease Aid pouring into Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Sinking those ships would increase Germany’s chances of obtaining the victory over the Soviet Union it desperately needed.

However, the Japanese Navy proved less adept than Hitler had hoped. The Battle of Midway occurred six months after Pearl Harbor. That battle took the naval pressure off the U.S. in the Pacific, and allowed it to focus more of its efforts on convoy protection in the Atlantic. More generally, the failure of the Japanese military meant that Japan would be far less successful in taking military pressure off of Germany than Hitler had hoped.

In 1942, the Soviet Union outproduced Germany 3:1 - 4:1 in tanks, artillery, and other land combat categories, and even 2:1 in military aircraft. It also fielded a much larger army than Germany. Thus evaporated Hitler’s hope of a decisive victory on his eastern front.

Had Hitler not declared war against the U.S., large amounts of American Lend-Lease aid would still have flowed to his enemies in Europe. Over the long-term, he still would have needed to devote a significant portion of his military production to defending German skies and German cities against American-made bombers. He would have lost out on the Second Happy Time (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Happy_Time ), which would have resulted in a stronger Soviet war effort for 1942. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have had to deal with the U.S. invasion of Algeria in 1942, its invasion of Sicily and Italy in 1943, or the Normandy invasion of '44. It’s easy to say in hindsight that the harm of the American invasions exceeded the benefit of sinking that Lend-Lease shipping in '42. But that distinction was less obvious at the time.