quote:

---

Originally posted by Tero:
But, the Nazis also had a strong racial bias with the Soviets, labeling the Soviets as untermenschen, or "subhumans," and this was not a bias generally held in western democracies at that time.

I wonder..... the Ameicans had gone against the Japanese during WWII and against the Chinese during the Korean war. The general mood against the Asian continent was not far from the "subhuman" characterization.

---

This issue came up in another forum recently.

The Japanese were lopping off the heads of POWs and this tended to make people upset. At some point news leaked out about the Bataan death march and this didn't do much to foster good will towards the enemy.

I don't know if they changed their minds in Korea, but during World War II the US military had a lot of respect for the Chinese Communists. They certainly held them in higher regard than Chiang Kai Shek. According to USMC lore, a Marine observer borrowed the words 'Gung Ho' (work together) from the Chinese Communist guerrillas fighting the Japanese Army.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Dan Stevlingson:
This issue came up in another forum recently.

The Japanese were lopping off the heads of POWs and this tended to make people upset. At some point news leaked out about the Bataan death march and this didn't do much to foster good will towards the enemy.

I don't know if they changed their minds in Korea, but during World War II the US military had a lot of respect for the Chinese Communists. They certainly held them in higher regard than Chiang Kai Shek. According to USMC lore, a Marine observer borrowed the words 'Gung Ho' (work together) from the Chinese Communist guerrillas fighting the Japanese Army.

[This message has been edited by Dan Stevlingson (edited 12-02-2002).]

---

Of course all armies tend to dehumanize thier opponents as much as possible. Look at Bushs rhetoric about Iraq or the american views on ger during WWII. Most of this is pure propagnada that is important during war and has little basis in reality.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Darrin:

Of course all armies tend to dehumanize thier opponents as much as possible. Look at Bushs rhetoric about Iraq or the american views on ger during WWII. Most of this is pure propagnada that is important during war and has little basis in reality.

While ger leaders and hard nazis may have seen the rus as subhumans this was not the general view of most citizens and soilders. Even the view of russians as subhuman by a ger minority may have been mainly the result of the communist dictarship then any racial idelogy.

In 1940 many US citizens and soilders rearged thier own black citizens as subhuman...

---

Did US citizens of the 1940s liquidate six million blacks by systematically herding them into purpose-built gas chambers ?

If you're an apologist for the Nazi depredations of the 1940s, I'm not buying.
No sale.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Dan Stevlingson:
Did US citizens of the 1940s liquidate six million blacks by systematically herding them into purpose-built gas chambers ?

If you're an apologist for the Nazi depredations of the 1940s, I'm not buying.
No sale.

---

You are (indeliberately ?) reading all the appropriate connotations to the word subhuman. The word in itself does not entail, or infer genocide.

I trust you are aware of the treatment of handicapped people all around the world, including the USA, during the inter-war years when the "racial purification" was at the top of the list of even the most respected geneology scientists of the world. That treatment was altered only after the excesses of the Nazi regime were revealed.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Greg LG:
With Soviet memoirs we can generally discern propaganda from truth.

---

That was not my experience. For the Kursk project, Dr. Richard Harrison ("The Russian Way of War") when through and extracted relavent passages from all the major participant memoirs in the south (all Army commanders except Shumilov left memoirs). While one could easily see the parts that were party line (seeing how most of these were ghost written), this did not means that the rest of the memoir was accurate. For example, I systematically went through Getman's (VI Tank Corps) account, which had details on day-to-day operations, and matched it to the narrative I had built from the First Tank Army, VI Tank Corps, and 48th Panzer Corps (and attached divisions) records and found it was full of distortions, mis-estimates of the situation and major ommisions. After that experience, I pretty much lost confidence in all the Soviet memoirs and only used them to extract an occasional reference to a meeting or an order. In effect, I found the Soviet memoirs only useful for a couple of sentences about who ordered what and what conferences occurred.

Of course, if one does the same test with Mellenthin's description of the battle, one also gets a large number of errors and major missing events. His maps are also wrong.

quote:

---

Not in all cases especially with numbers, but when compared with numerous other sources they can be found out and a pattern recognized.

---

The only way I could recognize the extent of the errors was to compare them to the account I developed by looking at both side's unit records. At that point, the memoirs were glaringly distorted.

quote:

---

With German memoirs, the extent of propaganda is not so easily recognized.

---

There are a large number of German memoirs available (especially if one looks into the Foreign Military Studies series), and they are individually written and often contradict each other. There is not a unified theme, although there is certainly bias.

quote:

---

...two, it was written during a period (the early 1950s) where certain Nazi political beliefs fit in very nicely with western democratic political beliefs.

---

I can't envision which "Nazi political beliefs" fit in nicely with "western democratic political beliefs".

quote:

---

The end of WWII brought on the Cold War, a time when the Soviet Union was seen by the western democracies in very biased terms due to conflicts of political ideology.

---

Various German memoirs have appeared in virtually every decade, not just the 50s (for example, Guenther Rall's authorized biography just came out).

quote:

---

This level of bias within western democracies was very similar, politically, to Nazi beliefs of the "Jewish-Bolsheviks" as they liked to refer to the Soviet State before WWII.

---

There is a world of difference between what occurred in the US in the 1950s and what occurred in Germany between 1933-45 (or 1918-1933 for that matter).

quote:

---

Namely, that German memoirs contain biased views of Soviet military capabilities and abilities.

---

So what...all memoirs contain biases. This is why I do not rely on them, except when there are no other accounts, or to supplement existing accounts.

quote:

---

This has made it very difficult to separate fact from fiction where Soviet capabilities and abilities are concerned.

---

Well, it would appear that large parts of the US Sovietology community did not read the German accounts carefully and grossly overrated the capabilities of the Soviet armed forces.

quote:

---

And because even secondary sources were often restricted or classified to the Soviet public, their veracity can be counted on to a better degree than previous public Soviet sources.

---

This is an assumption that really does hold up to close examination. For example, I have been able to compare the 1944 staff study transnlated by Glantz and Orenstein with post-war Soviet accounts and the unit records. It is clear that most of the post-war Soviet accounts were pretty much written directly from the staff study, with a few embellishments and ommissions. Having access to the staff study (which is a secondary source) does not show a significantly different picture that what one would derive from books like Progress Press' "The Battle of Kursk" (1974).

My view of the Soviet memoirs have come from actually trying to use them to write a book....and having the actual unit records sitting in my lap at the same time. This has pretty much lead me to make extremely limited use of them.

This does not mean that there are not errors and ommissions in the German memoirs (Guderian's recall of the the May 3-4 meetings, Mellenthin's descriptions of the battle, etc.). In the end, one should not trust anything one reads...but I think you grossy overrate the value and veracity of Soviet secondary sources. If you can independently seperate the truth from the BS in them without having both sides unit records in hand, then you have unique talents that vastly exceed my limited abilities.

quote:

---

Originally posted by WWII=interest:
I think the Germans did lose their nerve around Moscow in 41 with their failure to capture it. This could be what Glantz is talking about, though I would rather have liked him to be more specific.

---

I think he is talking about the defensive fighting...but I don't think the fundamental problems with their failure to take Moscow or to defend against the Soviet attacks had a lot to do with "nerve". It probably had a whole lot more to do with force ratios.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tero:
Seems mr Glantz is using Soviet sources unabridged.

---

That is what I have seen. It would appear that he writes entire paragraphs or even several pages looking at a Soviet source...and this leads to the Soviet view being incorporated lock, stock and barrel into his writing.

One sees a similar problem with the first pages of "When Titan's Clash."

That is what I have seen. It would appear that he writes entire paragraphs or even several pages looking at a Soviet source...and this leads to the Soviet view being incorporated lock, stock and barrel into his writing.

One sees a similar problem with the first pages of "When Titan's Clash."

The paragraphs on the actions against the Finns both during Winter War and later in 1944 in "When Titans Clash" were indeed an eyesore, to put it mildly.

Kind of threw me off the bench when he was supposed to have been THE expert on all things Red Army operations during WWII in the West and all I could see was, as you so eloquently put it "the Soviet view being incorporated lock, stock and barrel into his writing".

I was quite amazed to see him state in the Siege of Leningrad book the Soviet losses during Winter War as having been around 50 000 KIA. Yet he quotes Krivosheev elsewhere in the book and IIRC Krivosheev is on record for putting the latest Soviet KIA figure at 130 000.

Can't really think any excuse for these kind of "distortions" in this day and age when the language barrier is no longer the most overwhelming obstacle.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Dan Stevlingson:
Did US citizens of the 1940s liquidate six million blacks by systematically herding them into purpose-built gas chambers ?

If you're an apologist for the Nazi depredations of the 1940s, I'm not buying.
No sale.

---

The discusssion in case you can´t remeber was about russia slavs not jews in geneneral many of those 6 mil killed were not even rus. Detaining and killing jews in such large number was not in any way acceptable or helpful to the war effort. Although many of these were killed in gas chambers not all were. Most were killed after having been worked to death. To give an example the number of ger jews killed was only 200,000.

Killing jews in numbers was totally out of line with german war aims. But dehumanizing an enemy you are at war with helps to motivte your population and army. Everyone does it and I have not seen any credible evidence the gers wanted too kill every single rus slav during or after the war. They were bent on taking over rus as a colony and using the local pop as a workforce to rebuild rus and work the huge land.

In 1940 most people in the world lived in colonies of other countries not FREE coutries. It was a very different world were colonialism was the NORM not the exception. In fact perhaps the ONLY major powers not to have a colony at all in 1939 was germany a hang over from WWI. The idea of them wanting to colonize rus like other western powers were doing around the world is more in line with reality then with them wanting to kill every single rus slav.

You should apolpogies or think before raving off in wrong directions.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Greg LG:

With Soviet memoirs we can generally discern propaganda from truth. Not in all cases especially with numbers, but when compared with numerous other sources they can be found out and a pattern recognized. But the bottom line is that it is assumed that Soviet era material contains politically-based propaganda.

---

I am not sure we (or rather many western ”experts on the Soviet Union”) can generally discern propaganda from truth. When checked, these sources usually prove to contain many errors. That we know some of the distortion patterns can not be taken to assume we know all. Furthermore, distortions can be almost random, without any particular pattern. For example, Soviet accounts of teh Korsun battle usually claim that the German generals inside the pocket were flown out or made their way out of the pocket leaving their men to take care of themselves. THis is just plain wrong. I don't see a pattern in this, just an error that is difficult to explain.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Greg LG:

So, what am I driving at? Namely, that German memoirs contain biased views of Soviet military capabilities and abilities. To what degree of bias these memoirs contain is difficult to determine, because it could've been motivated for a number of reasons:

1. Self-aggrandisement.
2. Political beliefs.
3. Racial beliefs.

This has made it very difficult to separate fact from fiction where Soviet capabilities and abilities are concerned.

---

Obviously there are risks by using memoirs for that purpose, no doubt about that. However, I am not convinced that the use hitherto made of Soviet sources has been an improvement.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Greg LG:

Even with the availablity of secondary Soviet sources, a better understanding of the Soviet military has begun.

---

I doubt it. While there certainly have been more details added, more aspects considered etc. I am am not sure that the use of Soviet secondary sources, beginning in earnest around 1980, really has resulted in a more accurate assessment of the overall capabilities of the Red Army, whether we talk of its WWII performance or is postwar capabilities.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Greg LG:
And because even secondary sources were often restricted or classified to the Soviet public, their veracity can be counted on to a better degree than previous public Soviet sources.

---

Why? This is exactly the line of argument used by C. J. Dick in his chapter on the Red Army during WWII in ”Armoured Warfare”. This chapter text is perhaps the worst I have ever seen on the eastern front.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Niklas Zetterling:

But if you have read it you could perhaps describe the methodology that leads
to the conclusion that the archives are reliable.

---

Statistical analysis.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Niklas Zetterling:

So they have, and I don't find anything surprising with that, do you?

---

I'm used to read many different opinions, in that sense I'm not surprised. But
they ddin't prove their claims.

Frederick L Clemens seems to believe that Soviet regime had a more complete
control of the societ than the Nazi regime. Do you know of a study the level of
control of those two regimes on the society, or more particularly on the armed
forces?
I only know studies related to the control of the central government on the
Soviet economy and they showed that the control was far from being complete and
economic agents enjoy a non negligible level of autonomy.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Niklas Zetterling:

I have not heard of one, and given the brief time Soviet archives have been
accessible to independent researchers, I doubt that any study of the kind has
been made.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Chris Lawrence:
I do not know of any one who has assembled such statistics although I
certianly could do so for Kursk.

---

So basically you do not know if Soviet memoirs contains more errors than the
German memoirs. Then I don't see how any of you could claim that Soviets
memoirs are less reliable.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Chris Lawrence:

[...]
then you must either beleive they have equal validity, neither has any
validity, or that the Soviet memoirs have more validity.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Chris Lawrence:

Now, how do he know "his audience" recognized this. This was obviously drawn from a Guderian statement, so this may have been Guderian's impression but Guderian did not speak for the entire audience.

---

Which statment are you refering to?

quote:

---

Originally posted by Chris Lawrence:

I am not sure how this conclusion was reached. The actual statement by Guderian about Manstein was that after Hitler rejected Manstein's request for two more infantry divsions he received no clear answer. He did state that Manstein was not his best in this situation.

---

Guderian wrote that von Manstein was often not at is best. Why are you leaving out the word often?

quote:

---

Originally posted by Chris Lawrence:

Speer, Model and Thomale was not at the conference of 4 May according to Ernst Klink's book, who quotes a 1958 memo by Gen. Busse (COS AG South) in his footnotes.

---

Are you giving more credential to a 1958 memo than memoirs published in 1951? If it is the case I would like to understand why.

Statistical analysis.

How ? You mean you can determine XX % of the facts are correct (correspond with what happend) and XX% do not.

That is a VERY poor start off point to for determining the validity of archived materiel.

Frederick L Clemens seems to believe that Soviet regime had a more complete control of the societ than the Nazi regime. Do you know of a study the level of control of those two regimes on the society, or more particularly on the armed forces?

I only know studies related to the control of the central government on the Soviet economy and they showed that the control was far from being complete and economic agents enjoy a non negligible level of autonomy.

Which is totally incompatible with what you compare here. The system that had complete, total and unquestionable control of what was being printed. Sure, you could circulate pamflets but once you got caught the jig was up. You had your means to print taken away and you got a sentence in the gulaks. The offical truth was sancrosanct even if you could propably hear rumors and quess by reading between the lines.

The Soviet archives are still largely complete. The thing is access to them is very restricted.

Finnish historians had access to the party archives in Petrozavodsk and they found lists of several thousand ethnic Finns who had been executed in the 30's. When they dug deeper and found men like Andropov had been involved in partisan activity with war criminal aspects in it (execution of POW's after interrogation were written down in the reports) the archives were sealed again.

Are you telling me that you actually don't know if the Soviet archives are less reliable than the German archives?

Don't know about the German archives but it would appear all the incredients for finding out what really happened are in the archives. It is just the access to the archives is very limited and it would appear the Russian government is bent on keeping up the Soviet era truths in selected fields, which unfortunately seems to include WWII related materiel which rocks the boat.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Samuel:
quote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by Niklas Zetterling:

But if you have read it you could perhaps describe the methodology that leads
to the conclusion that the archives are reliable.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Statistical analysis.

---

That must rank among the most obscure answers. There are many different ways statistical analysis can be made. Its like answering the question, ”how was electricity discovered” by saying, ”through experiment”.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Samuel:

quote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by Niklas Zetterling:

So they have, and I don't find anything surprising with that, do you?
------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm used to read many different opinions, in that sense I'm not surprised. But
they ddin't prove their claims.

Frederick L Clemens seems to believe that Soviet regime had a more complete
control of the societ than the Nazi regime. Do you know of a study the level of
control of those two regimes on the society, or more particularly on the armed
forces?
I only know studies related to the control of the central government on the
Soviet economy and they showed that the control was far from being complete and
economic agents enjoy a non negligible level of autonomy.

---

Well, as memoirs were written after the fall of the nazi regime, it seems its control of the society was limited.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Samuel:

quote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by Niklas Zetterling:

I have not heard of one, and given the brief time Soviet archives have been
accessible to independent researchers, I doubt that any study of the kind has
been made.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Are you telling me that you actually don't know if the Soviet archives are less reliable than the German archives?

---

The question I answered concerned the effect of ideology on reporting, there are several other factors affecting reliability. Don’t jump into conclusions.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Samuel:

quote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by Chris Lawrence:

[...]
then you must either beleive they have equal validity, neither has any
validity, or that the Soviet memoirs have more validity.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Really?
Do you often try to force people to defend a point of view they never expressed?

---

Samuel, find this somewhat bizarre. You usually refuse to say what your point of view is on many issues here. If you really had wanted, you could of course have stated the alternative point of view Chris allegedly did not mention. Furthermore I can’t see the ”force” Chris applies here. To me it just seems he can not find any alternatives and he tells us that.

You have still not provided a single word supporting your statement that the Soviet archives are reliable on Katyn; you have only given an evasive answer to the inquiry for evidence that
the Soviet archives on the Census 1937 are reliable; you bypass many of our questions with silence.
Furthermore, on 22 November you said you wanted to take issue with Chris on some more of his ”26 areas of disagreement with Glantz”. You stated that you had to check some documents first. That is almost two weeks ago, We are still waiting. If you sincerely want to pursue this, I suggest you tell Chris which areas and which documents you want to check.
Also, we could go forward with some of your (rather few) statements. For example, on 23 November you wrote ”You can also find them telling lies (von Manstein about his role at Stalingrad is an example).” Well, I am sure von Manstein may have been wrong on some occasions (I have not read what he writes in his memoirs about Stalingrad). But do we know he lied, not just made a mistake, confused matters etc. I have not seen you proving that.

To sum up, I don’t think it is worth spending more time discussing with you unless you begin to answer our questions. You can not go on asking everyone else for rigourus proof and yourself ignoring questions addressed to you.
As I see it, we have a number of alternatives. We could simply ignor WWII. I don’t like that alternative, becuase I find it a very interesting subject. From that point, the next question is, shall we be content with the present level of knowledge or not. I am not content, but want to improve the knowledge and weed out some myths. If that point is chosen, the question is, how do we best proceed. Then we have alternatives and it is a matter of choosing the one that seems to hold best promise for obtaining a reliable, accurate and representative understanding of the events and their causes (obviously, if no alternative seems likely to produce a reasonably accurate understanding, then we will have to reevaluate our process). I can not see that your posts have contributed to that choice. You don’t even present an alternative, you just try to avoid this. Until you begin to present anything worthwhile on that, I probably will not spend more time discussing with you.

[This message has been edited by Niklas Zetterling (edited 12-04-2002).]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Niklas Zetterling:
[B]Until you begin to present anything worthwhile on that, I probably will not spend more time discussing with you.
B]

---

Actually, it looks like a classic Soviet propoganda ploy, showing the German leaders abandoning their troops.

quote:

---

. I am am not sure that the use of Soviet secondary sources, beginning in earnest around 1980, really has resulted in a more accurate assessment of the overall capabilities of the Red Army, whether we talk of its WWII performance or is postwar capabilities.

---

It appears that the postwar Soviet army stood 10 feet tall. This served a lot of people's agendas.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Samuel:
So basically you do not know if Soviet memoirs contains more errors than the
German memoirs. Then I don't see how any of you could claim that Soviets
memoirs are less reliable.

---

I think I just posted an fairly in-depth discussion in response to Greg on what I looked at and compared with the Soviet memoirs. So, yea....the pattern is clear. Furthermore, I tag some of this in the book....but as the manuscript is already over a 1,000 pages....I didn't pursue this subject to exhaustion. As it is....I believe I am the only author (unpublished though) who has compared the Soviet and German battle accounts to the unit records of both sides. As such, I think I can speak with a little authority here.

quote:

---

Really?
Do you often try to force people to defend a point of view they never expressed?

---

Well, I only see four permutations here, so if you don't accept my arguement, then which of the remaining three positions are yours?

quote:

---

Originally posted by Chris Lawrence:
[b] [QUOTE]Originally posted by Niklas Zetterling:

For example, Soviet accounts of teh Korsun battle usually claim that the German generals inside the pocket were flown out or made their way out of the pocket leaving their men to take care of themselves. THis is just plain wrong. I don't see a pattern in this, just an error that is difficult to explain.

---

Actually, it looks like a classic Soviet propoganda ploy, showing the German leaders abandoning their troops.
[/B][/QUOTE]

How did this discussion, which began as a comparison of the value of ex post facto published memoirs versus archival unit records devolve into this childish argument over whose memoirs were better?

The sole unarguable fact on that subject -- at least as far as I can see -- is that the postwar German memoirs were uncontrolled (except so much as many originally were written from prison camps immediately postwar) while those of the Soviets were written within a society that closely controlled writing and publication of all sorts. We can see just by contrasting the memoirs of Remer, Mellenthin, Manstein, and Guderian that the German memoirs were not written to a "party" line (except perhaps Remer's, which were written to the Nazi Party line ). They were mostly written with a similar theme -- that Hitler lost the war for Germany because he wouldn't listen to his generals -- because that in fact is what they believed (or at least what they wanted the world to believe, their capacity for self denial of their own complicity was astounding) but that is somewhat different from the systematic distortions one finds in the Soviet memoirs.

But all that obscures the most simple truth, that it is rare for any memoir to have more value than the actual records created by the units at the time. Which is why the work that Chris is producing is so important since in the details of the battle he relies on the unit records of both sides. He utilizes postwar memoir and interview material only for "color" and for those passages where the records are either non-existant or sparse (I believe he has already given a few examples of that).

quote:

---

Page 7, paragraph 4: "The highly centralized German maintenance system, which relied upon returning vehicles to the factory for major repairs, could not keep pace with the demands of the Russian campaign."

I believe the Germans had forward repair capability.

---

Would some one please explain to me the error here...what mr glantz reports seems to be absolutly true from my readings...the back log of unrepaired panzers accumulated to the point where there were no operational runners by dec-41. The german system of maintinance was not at all up to the task of major repairs and major over hauls...which do appear to have been done at fixed locations in Germany [factories?].

As broken down pz were set back to the rear they where either repaired [ 14 day repair] or unrepairable and sent further back [long term repair]. FRom what i read....

June-41
3500 tanks ~ 90% operational
Sept-41
3500 tanks ~ 1/4 write offs , 1/4 down for repair and ~1/2 operational.
Jan-42 ~ 1500 tanks ; ~ 1/4 write offs & maybe 0-10% operational [depending on how you interpret Jentz figures].

Seems to me the germans had a terrible time with the maintenance of their tanks...that didn't get much better as the war progressed.

Looking at Jentz figures for 1943 [eastern front],it seems that -except for the lead up to Kursk- german 'monthly operational availability' ran at something around 40%..By comparison ,I recall the SHerman tank had an 'operational availability' of ~ 80% through out the western front? Maybe if they'd devoted more effort into repair services they'd have done better in the war...something was clearly 'rotten in the state of Denmark'.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Paul Lakowski:
Would some one please explain to me the error here...

---

I think Niklas Zetterling's post on the first page of this fairly extended thread pretty well covers the subject.

quote:

---

THis is a very depressing debate, if I'd have to chuck out every history book based on if it did or did not have any errors,...

---

There is really nothing to be depressed about. It is the nature of any "scientific" process that data and assumptions are challenged and corrected. If this was not going on, then you would have reason to be depressed.

quote:

---

Firstly I'd have to chuck out all my expensive history books and second, I'd naught buy any more books [including yours] cause sooner or later errors are bound to surface ...

---

Every book is going to have some errors. The question becomes the degree and nature of them. The reason that I originally got into looking at Glantz' book (and Nipe's and Zetterling's) was that I had finished the first draft of the manuscript and was now conducting an extended edit of it. As part of that process I am going through the last three books published on the battle. Obviously, if I have a disagreement with those books, then most likely it contradicts something I have already placed in my book (for example the May 4 conference and specifically which nations sent out "peace-feelers"). This needs to be resolved somehow.....

....while this may not be the best way to resolve these differences, it is a way, and for whatever my thinking was at the time, it is the way I decided to address the issue at 0530 in the morning. Note that my posts are labeled as areas of disagreement...as I have not ruled out that I could be mistaken.

In general though, there are a lot of poor military history books published. I am often frustrated to have spent the money and time reading them. The standards for the industry are not as high as they should be.