Gerd von Rundstedt Quotes

Some scholars look back at the allied bombing of German Cities in WWII with criticism that it was morally improper to bomb populated cities, and that the use of the adjective “exterminating” indicated that Churchill was more interested in killing Germans than strategic victory. This revisionist history has two failings. First, the Germans had already bombed Coventry, London and other civilian targets in England as well as cities in Holland, Poland and other countries killing many civilians. As a result, under the rules of war, Germany was no longer entitled to protection for their cities. Further, Hamburg and other targets were manufacturing sites of war material and as such lost the protection anyway. Even Dresden, which had very little war manufacturing was the main location for R&R of German Officers and by their military presence in the city converted it into a legitimate target. FDR agreed with Churchill, that the bombing was a good strategy to cause Hitler to fall as they thought the public would rebel. They were wrong however and his grip on the population through the Gestapo and the military was so strong that, it took a land invasion and occupation to put an end to Hitler. However, the devastating bombing all but crippled the German weapons development and deployment. For example. The Germans had developed the Jet Airplane Engine and actually put a few in the fight at the end if the war. Without the bombing, they would have had many more and countered the allied air supremacy. However, it is also true that Churchill and many Englishmen and some Americans believed that the English were morally entitled to retaliation for the innocent civilians killed with the German bombing of civilian targets.

This was hand written the day before D-Day by Eisenhower. It was to be issued in the event of a failure of operation Overlord—the D-Day landings. The success was by no means a sure thing and the greatness of Eisenhower is indicated by the fact that he was not arrogant, kept the possibility of failure in mind, and took it upon himself to accept the responsibility of things had not gone well. This was one of the greatest quotations that was never made.

The reference to Munich was to the famous appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. See {585941}.

Both Hitler and Stalin were gross egomaniacs who each thought that they had gotten the better of things. The result was that 22 million Russians were killed and the industrial base if Russia Was destroyed. On the German side, the German military was virtually destroyed, many civilians were killed, the nation reduced to rubble and starvation, German leaders were killed, jailed or committed suicide including Hitler, and the country was occupied for years. Neither leader appeared very smart if one judges by the results.

Although most of the American Military Experts thought the strategy a loser, Presidential Assistant Harry Hopkins made an inspection trip to Russia and recommended to President Roosevelt that we support Russia. The Russian strategy defeated the Germans but the Russian losses were horrendous—over 20 million killed. See {626597} for the Clausewitz commandment he refers to.

Although a fervent Nazi, he detested Hitler. When Hitler consolidated power, one of the first things he did in 1934 was to order his guards to murder Strasser, just as Strasser had feared.

He was absolutely right, but Hitler paid him no heed. See {631290} for his suggested course for Germany.

An irony is that Timosheko used German Prussian traditional military strategy to successfully defend against the German invasion of Russia.

Each day the German Airforce was sending air assaults over England. The English defenders were shooting down 2 Germans for every English plane lost. The British however were running out of pilots. Both sides were terribly weakened. However it was the Germans who cracked and called off the air assault prelude to the planned invasion of England.

This was an incredible order not allowing any Russian Army unit to retreat or surrender. However, it worked. The Russians, with American help of arms, held off the mighty German invading Army. However the German invasion cost the Russians a staggering 22 million lives, mostly civillian.

Mussolini allied with Hitler. Ciano turned out to be right.

Conant, a great scientist in his own right, had the confidence of the political, academic, and industrial establishment and was appointed to the Committee that was to set policy for the Manhattan Project representing President Roosevelt. Germany had been the world leader in Physics before the war. American leaders and scientists were certain that we were in a scientific race with the Germans. Even after Germany had been defeated, President Truman was told that we had beaten the Germans in the race for the bomb. Actually, although almost no one in the US government realized it then, the Germans had NO PROGRAM of nuclear weapons development at all. Hitler did not trust the Theoretical Physics and Theory of Relativity because Einstein and other Jewish scientists had been instrumental in its development. He derogatorily referred to it as “Jewish Science”. Germany bet its scientific efforts on the V2 Rockets and the Jet Airplane, both of which they were successful with but too late to have any material effect on the war. Ironically, even after most of the great German physicists were run out of Germany, there were still two of the greatest who may well have been capable of nuclear weapons development. But neither Werner Heisenberg or Otto Hahn were inclined to engage in that kind of research, and neither of them were even asked whether or not they thought it was possible. The anti-Semitic Nazis just assumed that it could not be. Truman and his associates did not find out for another year or more that there was no race. There was one OSS spy, Moe Berg, who had actually talked to Heisenberg in the midst of the war, and concluded that he not only was not working on an atomic bomb, but was not up on the latest pre-war critical research needed to develop a bomb. Hahn knew and had created the first chain reaction for which he later won the Nobel prize but he was a chemist and didn’t really understand the Physics and mathematics involved in making a weapon and was a confirmed pacifist. Ironically, his colleague, Lise Meitner who had done the physics and mathematics on that experiment was Jewish and had to flee Germany. In Denmark she gave the results to Niels Bohr, who shared them with Leo Slizard and Einstein when Bohr came to the United State and that initiated the famous letter that was sent to FDR which triggered the Manhattan Project. The German first nuclear reaction was used by the Americans because the politicians listened to the scientists, while in Germany, the politicians gave no credence to their scientists and their experiments in nuclear fission.

While the President had total faith in American scientists, at the time the state of American physics was not world class in several key areas. Oppenheimer, was for example, the ONLY senior American theoretical physicist at the outbreak of the war, and he had been trained in Germany. What the President did not quite realize was how many of the key scientific positions on the Manhattan Project were foreign refugees who had fled the Nazis in Europe. Many American scientists and engineers did not want to go to Los Alamos where they could not leave for the duration of the war, had to give up their own personal research, and whose relatives who did not accompany them would never know where they were or what they were doing. But there were enough great American scientists who Oppenheimer recruited that combined with the Europeans formed the greatest and most effective concentration of scientific manpower working in history.

When the doubts began to be expressed, the scientists were briefed on the planned invasion of the Japanese mainland and the military medical preparations for treating and caring for ½ million serious wounded casualties. In addition, given the state of war, there was expected about the same number of American Military deaths. On top of that, there would be many more Japanese military casualties plus even more Japanese civilian deaths and wounded. The use of the Atom Bomb would save all those lives but have casualties of its own, but far fewer. At the time, surprising to most people now, the use of the atomic bomb was not an issue of controversy at all. There were no Congressman who questioned it, no newspapers which editorialized against the use of the bomb. There were not even any other counties which protested its use.