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Radio War Nerd EP #470 — Operation Bagration, Pt. 4: WWII Myths, feat. Annibale (Patreon)

Published:
2024-09-15 13:46:56
Imported:
2024-09
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Guest: Annibale

Recorded: September 12, 2024

Annibale returns to discuss WW2 myths and distortions, from the revisionist-right ramblings of Darryl Cooper about the war's origins, to the controversy over Lend-Lease's role in the Red Army's successes up to Operation Bagration.

*Listen to Annibale's Operation Bagration series:-EP #453 - Background-EP #454 - Battle Begins-EP #462 - Wehrmacht Terror & Collapse

Total time: 1:35:31

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

*

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

Check out the Radio War Nerd Merch store here!

Order your print or ebook of John Dolan's new book Erdogan Pizza: Dispatches from a Violent & Grotesque World

Files

Comments

Ivan Lopez

Hitting the download button. Cheers!

William

Hitler, by his own writings I believe, was ultimately motivated to create an economic block equal to the US, so they wouldn’t become economic vassals

William

Earlier in the 1930s, when the Nazi project was about “defeating unemployment”, the war industries were great for soaking up unemployed specialized labor, putting money in people’s pockets, but without creating commodities gluts that would ultimately crash prices and lead to layoffs in a capitalist economy. Ships are incredibly complicated machines, (as are aircraft) and both take huge networks of contractors and subcontractors to produce in any amount. eetler was probably also partially motivated by internal politics within the armed forces to give the navy its share of funding. I also get the impression that there wasn’t some grand overarching strategy driving Nazi war goals, just resource needs like annibale mentions, so they probably didn’t think it was dumb to be putting money into a blue water navy at the time

Jack Ross

Playing second banana!

Danny Duplex

Hearing Annibale mention Operation Fugu and possibly doing an episode on Manchuria is interesting. Just doing an episode on the puppet state, Manchukuo, established by the Japanese would open up so many topics. So many things happened there before the end of ww2. The process of Japan building a puppet state out of China from scratch through brutal oppression is a pretty grisly story. That is the place where the Pan-Asian propaganda the empire spread was strongest. Looking at posters made from that era and how they promote a false picture of Chinese, Japanese, and Manchu unity is unnerving, knowing what was really going on. The Russian Fascist Party was also headquartered there, and those are some awful characters it is still interesting to read about. Finally, you have Unit 731 which is still a huge topic in current China/Japan relations.

William

I think I’m going to slightly disagree with Annibale- I think there was a very strong imperative for Germany to acquire more resource regions of the Soviet Union in their attack, the trouble was that they were getting their ideological reasons mixed into that as well. I don’t doubt that they thought they’d be a pushover, though

Al Goehring

It was a huge wake up call to me that Wolfenstein 3D was produced largely referencing the memoirs of Friedrich Wilhelm von Wolfenstein - and didn’t include any Soviet archival material, despite it being the 90s. Wolfenstein was clearly trying to put distance between himself and the actual events. The suggestion that Eetler was wearing a large mechanical exoskeleton at the time of his death came from Wolfenstein’s memoirs. It has very little basis in fact. The account of Castle Wolfenstein’s strange 1-story plan - with maze like corridors, low ceilings, incompetent Sturmabteilung security guards, and randomly placed food and ammunition - does not appear to have been exaggerated though. People have tried to link it to the architectural influence of Eetler and Speer but according to Richard J Evans, it looks more like Wolfenstein just wanted it built that way.

Al Goehring

Stick shifts AND no power steering. Imagine if they had had dashcams back then

William

A little confused now - Annibale, do you mean that the long term Nazi goal was to collapse the Soviet Union, but the short term goal of Barbarossa was to capture Ukraine and the caucuses?

William

Eetler did want Britian on his side, and thought they would come to view germany as an ally against the US in the coming decades of economic struggle. But dipshit cooper has no idea what he’s talking about

NYCM&AHole

This would’ve been great to solder to until 3am. Parallel or series; it affects the resistance.

Damnboooi

Additionally the surface fleet from what I’ve read can be seen as part of a diplomatic gambit. As it became clear that Great Britain didn’t want an alliance with Hitler (as he for a long time sought) he then thought that they could be convinced to accept basically a great power leveraged buyout where they could keep the British empire in exchange for german dominance. Hitler knew he probably couldn’t directly challenge the empire overseas in combat but felt as though if he posed a serious enough threat, the British might be more willing to back down against Germany on the continent. The building of a surface fleet was another gamble, that its threat would suffice to strengthen Germanys negotiating position, since Hitler knew actually putting it to use full force against Britain would be an uphill battle to say the least. Many of these calculations happened in the mid 1930’s, years before the specifics of Barbarossa had been contemplated, with the navy taking years to build up. While the drive to the east was always part of Hitlers plan, he first wanted to neutralize the threats in the west. The limbo state of war that existed between the fall France and the invasion of Barbarossa infuriated Hitler, since he had assumed he would have been able to bargain with the British. After it became clear that the threat of a naval/ overseas action against Britain wasn’t going to bring them to the table, he saw the next best thing was the invasion of the Soviet Union, since he assumed that Britain only stayed in the war because of the hope the Soviet Union would enter at some point. A preemptive knockout blow the Soviets would finally make Britain realize it had to negotiate (in Hitlers view). Thus the surface fleet wasn’t a completely thoughtless action, just another strategic gamble by Hitler that didn’t pan out. Its fundamental flaw of course was completely misreading British grand strategy and interests. I think it’s interesting that Hitlers assumptions and reasoning were quite similar to the reasons the Kaisers navy was built with the same results. It highlights how Hitler was not altogether a break from traditional German strategic thinking and how many of “crazy” Hitlers mistakes were rather indicative of the parochial and blinkered strategic perspective of German leadership broadly throughout the 19th and 20th centuries

a clash of purple

Hey now, the Japanese absolutely played a malevolent role in Chinese politics of that era, but we shouldn't let the Qing monarchists or the nationalists off the hook. One thing I've learned from Annibale is that all politics is local. Japan and the West certainly contributed a lot to the Century of Humiliation, and committed a lot of atrocities that they have yet to really answer for. They were all just opportunists profiting from the corruption and weakness of the late Qing dynasty and the resulting political turmoil and upheaval as nationalist, warlord, and communist forces coalesced to challenge the faltering emperors, however. Much like how the CIA and MI6 certainly played a role in the Years of Lead in Italy, but the real movers and shakers of the events were Christian Democracy and other Italian factions.

Isaac Suárez

Great episode! Sadly, this WW2 knowledge is becoming topical thanks to the rightward turn of X and western politics. Seeing NATO’s performance in Ukraine and the outright embrace of the Ukrainian far right, one gets a sickening feeling. Knowledge is the best to turn that nausea into something useful!

Isaac Suárez

I’d love a series on the “East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” and the role Japan played in Asian national consolidation/state formation. There’s so much there, from the Japanese role in the opium trade, Unit 731, Manchukuo and Jingwei KMT, all the way to the Indian National Army, the Bamar nationalist movement, and the Indonesian independence movement. We are left so ignorant by our anglophone milieu. There is so much to learn from the Asian experience of WW2 and the role it played in the Cold War and modern geopolitical landscape.

Horseloverfat

This episode had me wanting you guys to go deeper into the anti-communist right’s flirtation with holocaust revisionism — ran into this totally cracked ww2 “history” book called “Stalin’s War” by some guy named McMeekin at my local bookstore. Couldn’t believe that this kind of damn near holocaust denial was occupying the shelves of a left-lib establishment.

Christopher Small

On the Lend Lease discussion, I've tended to come around to the idea that the war really was a team effort. Because while the overwhelming advantages of the allies probably meant victory was inevitable once the big three were all onboard, there were deficiencies that might have prevented them from getting such a complete victory if you removed any one For the USSR, lend lease (plus the resources the other fronts drew away from the Germans) meant primarily that they were able to maintain momentum once you get to 1944. And this was potentially crucial, because the USSR was scraping the bottom of its manpower reserves by that point, and it was only by mobilizing the manpower/resources of the land they took back that they could keep moving. If the advance stalled out, it would have been a lot harder to get going again, and the mechanization Lend Lease allowed was a big help to that. But the flip side of Lend Lease was that the US had a surprisingly shallow manpower pool for mobilization. The US had the same tradeoffs with industrial labor that Germany had, and potentially even severe in the sense that they were producing for all their allies and didn't have a slave labor force to try to sub in. This is to say that the 14 million or so that were mobilized by the US were about as much as they could pull before it affected production. They simply couldn't have taken the sort of losses the Russians were taking. So in a very literal sense, Lend Lease only worked with Russian blood. And as for Britain, for better or worse, the supply lines and raw material that the British empire provided were necessary for projection and logistics. Mostly for the US, of course, but as mentioned, Iran was a huge artery for moving supplies to the USSR, and Britain was a crucial part of that. So rather than bicker about who won the war, people should really focus on how the Allies were able to hold together as well as they did.

Maggie+Al

My favourite part reading up on the delusions around Barbarossa planing was some of the details around logistics frankly an entire episode could be spent on everything from french trucks who's spare parts supply chains the Germans had cannibalized to German trains that were too small to make it between soviet refueling stations.

ploob

Can't wait for the FUBU episode!

ChlamydiaPuppy2

he could definitely use an aggressive visit from super hans

a clash of purple

As an American, I always tend to view history from an American-centric perspective, and so I can't help but compare FDR's leadership vs. Hitler's as analogous to Lincoln vs. Davis. FDR's ability to coordinate the Allied war effort and manage all the various actors' competing agendas is borderline-miraculous, I think. When you talk about "the Big Three" I think there's really just Roosevelt, and then Stalin and Churchill were there too. Hitler, by contrast, much like Jefferson Davis, was a huge liability to his own side. Maybe the Axis would have lost anyway even with someone else as der Führer, but as Annibale pointed out in an earlier episode, Hitler had a unique talent for mistreating his own allies and alienating people who might have been useful to his cause. He really was a ruddy-faced little ignoramus, as J.R.R. Tolkien called him.

Hans Anders

The Nazis did do some agricultural reform. Most importantly, they changed inheritance laws so that farms would go to the oldest son only. This prevented fragmentation, built loyalty among oldest sons, and freed up the labour from younger siblings for the war machine.

Alexander Fuchs

heyo can you guys do a series on WW1 on the eastern front .. specifically on brest-litowsk and operation "Faustschlag" in early 1918? pretty please 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼 id really would like an analysis of how much trotzky fucked up at these peace talks

Annibale

No, it's more complicated than that. I realize that the way I discussed this in the episode is quite confusing if you don't know the background and history of Barbarossa's planning (which is worth a series of episodes per se, believe me). The short story is that the only immediate (realistic) goal of Barbarossa in the way it was implemented was the destruction of the Red Army on the frontier battles and a very aggressive penetration in the Russian space, with Minsk, Kiev and Odessa as the immediate goal. Beyond that Barbarossa had no "strategic end line" because 1) the plan had been designed to be flexible and allow for several variants 2) a lot of the "what's happen next" had been thought as depending to the Soviet response, and the "desiderable" response was a total Soviet collapse by August or September. Seizing Ukraine, Moscow pushing toward the Caucasus was never a goal planned in a sort of organic way together with Barbarossa, but "opportunities" to be taken as the situation developed. This said, Hitlar had always firmly Ukraine, Donbass and Caucasus as the things he wanted to control as soon as possible (after the Soviet collapse), while some of the militaries thought that seizing Moscow was the first thing to do "next", It was all very confusing and convoluted. We should definitely discuss this again in the future.

Annibale

He saw what was happening in England and wanted to avoid it. However, some domestic considerations also had to be taken into account. Hitler, much more than Mussolini, was obsessed with "consensus," the idea that the German people could be really united behind him. He thought the conquest of a large land empire would have sealed his role as a guiding light for Germany (and, to some extent, "German culture", but that's a tricky business). He wanted resources but coveted "land" (in the most physical form) more than resources.

Doug Cartel

Man I hate looking at this thumbnail Classical liberalism had some good ideas but it also gave us this hyper focus on people's inner thoughts and motivations that is so powerful that a moron can say "hitler was a pacifist" and 100% mean it because hey, doesnt matter what the killer did, all that matters is what his intentions were Cop argument

William

What you’re saying makes sense to me now- they thought that just by attacking they’d collapse the entire Soviet Union like they were pulling a leg out from a 3-legged stool. “And then we can grab all these great resources” - eetler, probably. Man, ideology is a hell of a drug

William

But it was still took something like 11x labor to produce the same as mechanized farms in the US and Britian

William

People should be reasonable instead of pushing their stupid ideological agendas? Nonsense

Doug Cartel

It's so funny how many hitler simps start from the position that he wasnt a lying sack of shit "I love peace and I'm a socialist" "Well he said it so it must be true"

Christopher Small

To be fair, Hitler was arguably just conducting German foreign policy in a way that was the norm through human history, where an obvious regional hegemon rides roughshod over the interests of their nominal allies. The main difference was that his megalomania and bigotry made him miss that it wasn’t doable in the context. Meanwhile, backslapper FDR slipped pretty easily into the mantle of Europe’s long tradition of counter-hegemonic coalitions, where there’s enough of a sense of shared interest and congeniality (among Europeans) to maintain a degree of multilateralism, at least for a time. Then you have Churchill, whose ideological pretensions and ethno-chauvenism made him always one step away from, like, bombing Baku or some other stupid venture. Truly the two wolves of western diplomacy…

Yairo Martis

Great epsisode as always. Annibale always great.

j

Had hoped there would have been a more serious discussion about Coopers analysis and works… should one want to understand in the slightest he explains himself better in this interview https://podverse.fm/episode/R3CXFh3O- His body of work speaks for itself… obviously most people won’t take the time, why when one can jump on the trope wagon…

grey

Have you guys ever though about having Dan Carlin from Hardcore History?

William

I don’t think you need to be fair to any of those individuals mentioned, but I get your point

CR

To mock?

CR

Like you said. It speaks for itself.

CR

America: words count, actions are irrelevant.

DumbDumDumbDumb

And unit 731 is very important to the development of current biochemical warfare— the US paperclipped the commander of the program and took all its research for itself after the war

a clash of purple

The myth of the Wehrmacht as an indestructible, infallible war machine is, ironically, a lot stronger and more enduring than the actual Nazi military ever was. To this day, it's common (at least in Anglo mainstream discourse) to imagine that they were unstoppable and all-powerful, and the fact that they lost rather catastrophically doesn't seem to puncture that belief. Hitler seems to have wagered everything on the notion that his army was invincible, and then shot himself when he could no longer sustain that delusion.

j

Will be interesting to know how historians will frame all of this in 500 years..

Nicholas Levis

After many years I no longer think Hitler's declaration of war on US is all that puzzling or, possibly, decisive. In the same 24 hours as Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Empire also started war with Britain. Germany was at war with Britain. The US was Britain's main backer. Hitler would have been right to think the US desired to have Europe as its main war focus. He had a pact with Japan, they both were at war with same enemy. Not making the state of war official, or thinking that US would feel constrained about Europe if Germany did not declare war, seems to be too subtle a line of thought for Hitler. I'd think he'd think a declaration would strengthen Japanese resolve to go all the way (and help collapse British Empire). Whether Hitler could have delayed US action in Europe by not declaring war seems dubious to me. Would no declaration have stopped US from building the AEF in Britain? There were no US engagements in theater until Oct 1942 (North Africa). US govt had the propaganda and moral high ground at home. I think they would have easily been able to portray Germany as Japan's brother and equal enemy to US, just as esential to attack. With the war on and in total mode dissenters would have been muted.

Christopher Small

History books are always framed in terms of the time they're written, so it'll probably be like "the island hoping campaign was a preview of our war against the crab men of Polaris 5"

a clash of purple

I think my biggest question for Eetlehr (and Napoleon, for that matter) is why he didn't invade England. In both cases the worst-case scenario is your whole army drowns in the Channel. It's still better than losing your army AND antagonizing Russia. Or, if they don't want to get their feet wet, invade India and conquer/liberate the Raj. I mean, what is Europeans' sick obsession with murdering Slavs?

DumbDumDumbDumb

Now the counter to that is, Why didn’t Japan declare war on the USSR? Because they knew it was a huge tactical and strategic mistake. Germany under the Nazis were not thinking longterm at all.

j

🤣

a clash of purple

Well, Japan already was trying to conquer China, which is probably even more insane than Germany trying to conquer Russia. There's probably a world where the Axis went south instead of east, took over Africa, and survived for at least a few decades longer. I don't think there's a world where Japan's plan of antagonizing the most populous country in the world AND the most economically powerful country in the world at the same time could have ever worked out for them. Maybe they were thinking of Britain's success in India, but that was a long time ago in a very different world. And quite unlike Britain (or even Nazi Germany), Japan still has a lot to fear from their historical victims. So I don't think the Japanese were any more rational or forward-thinking than their Nazi allies, overall.

Kevin Walsh

My understanding is that following the disasters at Trafalgar, Copenhagen, etc. Napoleon couldn't defeat the Royal Navy so long as it was able to import Russian hemp. The invasion of Russia was supposed to be a punitive expedition to force Russia to abide by the Continental System. The problem was that hemp was Russia's main export, and France being a hemp producer itself was unable to act as a substitue market.

a clash of purple

That reasoning only makes Napoleon's decision seem even dumber. To punish the Russians for selling hemp to the Brits, he's going to have his entire army march into the snow and commit suicide. That'll teach them. And even if he (somehow) succeeded, what then? The Brits can't get hemp from anywhere else in the world? No matter how strong you think you are and how weak the Russians seem, as Dolan said in a previous episode, all you have to do is look at a map. Russia, even just the westward European-adjacent part, is too big to invade. It can't be done. It doesn't matter if you manage to march all the way to Kiev, or Crimea, or Tsaritsyn, or Moscow. It is logistically unsustainable.

Pavel Abramov

I actually prefer his pronouncement of 'probably' to the original

PW

Annibale has been the only guest that I have struggled to understand through his accent and usually turn off before the show is finished out of frustration. Which is a shame because he is so knowledgeable.

Josh

More Eastern front myth-busting with Annibale would be amazing! or just a general Eastern front Q&A

Damnboooi

Losing your whole army in the channel is a massive blow and strategic disaster. Hitler at least (I dont know as much as napoleon) was determined to push Britain out of the war somewhat diplomatically, not by outright conquest of the isles. Hence the submarine campaign, the strategic bombing, and moves to threaten the overseas territories of the Empire, both by feinting toward the Middle East and encouraging the Soviets to go for India. A sea invasion that almost would certainly have failed would have strengthened Britain’s position remarkably, as they would no longer have it as a potential threat, and been a propaganda disaster for Hitler internally. The land army was Germanys pride and most potent instrument (the luftwaffe having failed to subjugate Britain), so using it made the most sense to German leaders. Much of the German leadership believed A) a campaign against the Soviets would be relatively easy B) Britain was only avoiding making peace in the hope a greater power would help them out Therefore, removing the Soviets from the board would force Britain into suing for peace. There were many flaws in this reasoning but in many ways it makes more sense than a certain failure of a naval invasion that would leave Germany in the same position as before except now with with a loss of their navy and many land resources , while giving the Soviets additional time to prepare and build their army and defense industries, while also emboldening Britain and therefore making it less likely for them to sue for peace

xnfec

The wealthy "zionist" who rescued Churchill that was mentioned, was, I believe, Bernard Baruch, who was quite an interesting character - though I don't know how much of a zionist he was. He was a speculator, industrialist and goldbug and a southern Wilsonian democrat who was put in charge of the War industries Board in WW1 and is credited with organising American industry in support of the American war effort. Baruch's father was a medical doctor who served in the Confederate ranks during the Civil War and could apparently still do the rebel yell into his old age. Baruch (Fils) was considered to be one of Churchills closest friends.

a clash of purple

damnboi, I hear what you're saying, but what you're saying is that the German leadership was completely insane and delusional, which is what I'm saying. Maybe they correctly calculated that an amphibious invasion of England wasn't feasible (and I'm not saying it would have worked), but my point is that to then turn around and launch an utterly suicidal invasion of the Soviet Union based on horrible intelligence and, frankly, their bizarre and evil fantasies about the world that had no basis in reality, is, honestly, a more disastrous decision. And really, their strategy towards England, while it never involved an attempted invasion across the Channel, wasn't much less idiotic than that would have been. The U-Boot blockade was a completely counterproductive failure that only made them look both evil and incompetent while also bringing even more countries into the war by accidental sinking of their ships, and did no damage to Allied logistics. And the strategic bombing accomplished absolutely nothing except steeling the British population's resolve.

a clash of purple

Really? They have definitely had guests with thicker accents/weaker grasp of English than Annibale.

PW

Such as?

Bill Rose

Can you cite the books that you reference in the show in the post description more often? I am very interested in the book that was brought up earlier about Hitler's motivation for invading eastern Europe, the seizure of the Ukraine, Baku oil fields, etc. Was the author Miller or Mueller?

Damnboooi

Yes all true. The point of what I was explicating was that the invasion was a poor decision not taken on a whim by a madman but based in deep rooted ‘logical’ traditions of German strategic thinking. Another point about why they decided to invade was that they knew the Soviet army was in a generally poor state but rapidly improving in terms of training and material. They feared a strike from the soviets in the future (although there is little actual evidence this was going to take place anytime soon at Stalins directive, communist ideology does advocate world revolution) and were growing increasingly reliant on Soviet materials. The entire point of Hitler starting the war was to try and force Germany to permanent world power status without needing to rely on others. A long war against Britain (and eventually likely America) hitler was concerned would turn Germany and the Soviet Unions relationship to one more like Britain and America-developing a dependence on materiel that would undermine autonomy and could lead to a vassal-like position. In Hitlers mind (and he wasn’t alone in Germany) this would be as good as losing the war. Thus, they would have to fight the soviets for their materials, and if you have to fight the soviets, better to do it now rather than later. It was a narrow tactical calculation ( in some ways similar to imperial Germanys invasion of Belgium in 1914) which was ultimately a massive strategic blunder. It’s important to note not a single significant German general expressed serious hostility to Barbarossa. Many German strategic decisions, made by Hitler, but also before him, were the result of a logical process elimination, where tactical expediency and an overly mechanistic worldview led intelligent and serious people arriving at completely irrational decisions. Insane and delusional? Yes. But, not like the Joker, who just seems to do craziness just because he feels like it. They were the end result of narrow logic and myopic thinking characteristic of an entire system. Postscript; German self-regard and chauvinism played an enormous part in distorting their ‘logical’ strategic calculations, and is the firmament out of which many of their blunders emerge. I personally think the tendency of German leaders and thinkers pre 1945 to focus on intensely narrow logic and their own self regard is deeply connected.

Annibale

Yes, you're right; I should post a bibliography. Otherwise, it's difficult for listeners to dive deep into the subject. Rolf-Dieter Muller wrote "Enemy in the East," which is an excellent history of Barbarossa's prehistory and planning. Another terrific recent book on this topic is David Stahel's "Operation Barbarossa."

Bill Rose

Thank you Annibale. It is enlightening listening to you and the rest of the war nerds talk about the motivations behind so many wars. I only want to read the books you have read and follow the thread. Podcasts are a wonderful tool for picking the next books to read, for that is where the real knowledge is stored.