Sorry. Took a wrong turn there, inspired by a day trip to Lake Windermere. For my quotation from the Lake District poet, see here. Let's start again:
There was a time when what I valued in fiction and on screen was physical action. A Western film, of which there were many then, could start with a voice-over about American history but had to end with a big gun-fight. The gun-fight at the OK Corral was misrepresented and mythologized. Between action scenes, fist-fights or gun-fights, characters talked and I did not always understand what they were talking about. You can see that this was a long time ago.
Let's apply this distinction between talk and action to Poul Anderson's Mirkheim, Chapters III and IV. In III, van Rijn talks with Lennart and Story. This is obviously a talk scene. IV begins as Muddlin' Through flies under full hyperdrive from Sol to Mogul. This is a prelude to action. An equivalent scene in children's matinee cinema would have drawn a cheer from the audience. However, this entire chapter is prelude. The characters play poker, which I would not have understood in childhood and scarcely understand now, then Falkayn reflects and reminisces alone. I appreciate this. My only point here is that it differs from what I would once have wanted.
Poul Anderson liked his action scenes and sometimes included them unnecessarily in my opinion although he wrote good military sf.
26 comments:
Nice choice. Appropriate, given the discussion:
"... in a state where men are tempted still
To evil for a guard against worse ill,
And what in quality or act is best
Doth seldom on a right foundation rest,
He labours good on good to fix, and owes
To virtue every triumph that he knows:
—Who, if he rise to station of command,
Rises by open means; and there will stand
On honorable terms, or else retire,
And in himself possess his own desire ..."
Kaor, Paul!
I don't understand poker either. Mostly because of my lack of interest. Chess is the game I like!
Ad astra! Sean
Note that at the higher levels of politics, talk -is- action, in a sense.
Hence that scene in TO TURN THE TIDE where Marcus Aurelius is meeting with his -comites-, the equivalent of his Cabinet and heads of departments. He assesses the intelligence available, decides on courses of action (raising a new legion, sending two raised last year to the Danube frontier, recalling detachments from the Middle East, etc.), appoints men to head various elements of his plans, and then the meeting ends and his subordinates fan out to implement the decisions.
He reflects that legions will march and innumerable lives be set on new courses because of what's discussed around that table.
Talk can also avoid action, of course - or at least, worthwhile action; consider the interminable trans-Atlantic debate between London and Washington in 1942-44 about the Second Front.
There "could" be a good alternate history on the impact of a successful ROUNDUP that has yet to be written, as far as I know.
Mr. Stirling, anything come to mind? Seems to be your arena ...
ROUNDUP?
ROUNDUP was the code name (more or less) for an Allied invasion of northwest France in 1943, as opposed to 1944; given the scale of resources the western Allies (historically) mustered for HUSKY, GOMORRAH, and the like in July, 1943 (and globally in the previous 18 months), and the strategic situation the European Axis found themselves in Q2-Q4 the same year, it's an interesting subject for a correlation of forces analysis.
Thank you.
Sure. Not to be confused with SLEDGEHAMMER, which was a TORCH-sized alternative for late in 1942; given the weather likely in the late autumn, probably longer odds than the summer of 1943 ... but the German garrisons, in both cases, were far from what they were (historically) by the end of Q2, 1944, as well.
I visit a guy who knows every war from the Napoleonic in this amount of detail.
Kaor, Dave!
Those discussions about ROUNDUP were interminable because the Anglo/Americans had to grapple with a host of technical problems needing detailed attention.
And, even so, D Day in 1944 was very nearly a catastrophe for the Western Allies. Many things went badly wrong as the landings began. Only the accident that Gen. Theodore Roosevelt III insisted on landing with the first wave averted disaster. He had the rank and authority needed for taking the measures preventing the invasion from failing.
Even so, D Day might have failed if the Germans had not been so fixated in thinking their enemies would attack further south, at Cherbourge. That delayed them just long enough from rushing reinforcements to Normandy in time.
Ad astra! Sean
"Germans had not been so fixated in thinking their enemies would attack further south, at Cherbourge"
Wasn't that part of the succesful deception by the Allies to get the Germans to expect an attack anywhere but the Normandy beaches?
IINM the Germans were expecting an attack at a good port since they were unaware of the "Mulberry" harbors.
Given that the Allies had five assault division equivalents afloat for TORCH, for seven different beaches from Morocco to eastern Algeria, and eight for HUSKY, and successfully sustained 15th Army Group in Sicily for a month-long mobile campaign (and almost entirely over the beach), the only "technical issues" that mattered had been solved by 1943.
In 1944, BG Roosevelt was the senior officer present at one of the five beaches (UTAH, where the US 4th Infantry Division landed); his actions, although an excellent example of operational leadership from the front, made no difference at the other four: OMAHA (US 1st and 29th divisions), GOLD (British 50th), JUNO (Canadian 3rd), and SWORD (British 3rd); and, likewise, even on the toughest beach - OMAHA - the U.S. troops were through the beach defenses and moving inland before noon; pretty far from a disaster.
Cherbourg was a fortified port at the north end of the Cotentin Peninsula (northwest of UTAH); no one would have ever landed there, and the Germans knew it (and if they had any doubts, Dieppe/JUBILEE in 1942 made it equally clear to the Germans and the Allies that trying to "storm" a port from the sea was a non-starter (it hadn't been since Zeebrugge in 1918, but the British kept trying, including at Tobruk, Oran, and Algiers in 1942 - all three attacks failed, and for foreseeable reasons).
Cherbourg, however, fell to the US Army from the south on 27 June 1944, three weeks after the landings, and was open for ocean-going freighters by mid-July; by the end of that month, two dozen ships could be unloaded simultaneously. The Mulberrys were helpful, but not a necessity; given the Allied ability to supply over the beach using LSTs, LCIs, and LCTs, and the early capture and clearance of Cherbourg, much of the effort that went into them was complementary at best. The basic idea, of using otherwise marginally useful shipping as blockships to provide sheltered anchorages for smaller vessels, could have implemented at any time, of course.
The Germans were actually very concerned the Allies would land far to the north, in the Pas-de-Calais, where the Channel was much narrower; the Allies targeted their (generally successful) deception plans to encourage those concerns, and succeeded in tying much of a German field army to the Channel ports well into August, 1944.
Kaor, Jim and Dave!
Then I have to sit corrected. I was basing my thought on what another combox commentator said about Brig. Gen. Roosevelt. I also had in mind what a former RAF officer (now deceased) told me about the Germans not expecting the main Allied attack to be at Normandy.
Ad astra! Sean
There was no real case for an invasion in 1943: it would have been much riskier (there were a couple of near-disasters in 1944, after all) and the Allied forces were smaller, less well trained, etc. And crucially, the Germans weren't nearly as bottom-of-the-barrel as the were a year later. Bagration and other Eastern Front battles bled them white.
And why not let the Soviets and Germans devour each other? Then we swooped in and picked up most of the more worthwhile pieces.
My father once told me that there was a joke going around the Commonwealth and US forces in 1942-44:
Question: what is happiness?
Answer: Happiness is 3,000,000 dead Germans floating down the Volga... each one on a raft of 4 dead Russians.
Which is actually fairly close to the actual outcome.
Russia never really recovered from the losses in WWII, and it turned Germany into a nation of pacifists.
By comparison, we got off very lightly.
For example, the Soviets lost about 300,000 dead and seriously wounded in the Battle of Berlin alone.
The US, by contrast, lost 420,000 lives in the entirety of WW2 beginning to end.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I have wished the US and UK had never sent any aid at all to that monster Stalin! Let the Germans and the USSR rip each other apart as the UK/US attacked in the west. Stalin might have been so badly weakened he would never have been able to grab eastern Europe--at least not so much of it!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: we didn't send Stalin aid because we loved him; we sent him aid precisely so that he -could- bleed the Germans.
The Soviets came very close to defeat in 41-42. If the Germans -had- beat the USSR, then we'd have faced a very uphill climb. The bulk of their forces were on the Eastern Front from the start of Barbarossa to the end of the war.
Fighting what we did fight was hard enough! Without that diversion, and with the oil and other resources of Russia to draw on, it would have been very much an uphill climb.
Also keep in mind that the top echelon either didn't know about the Manhattan Project or didn't know that it would work or didn't know how decisive it would be if it -did- work.
Best not to take chances if you don't have to.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
If monsters like Lenin and Stalin didn't make me feel so nauseated it would be much easier to agree with you.
Couldn't the US/UK at least had demanded tough and real concessions from Stalin in return for aid? I suppose the Baltic states could not be saved from Soviet fangs, but otherwise we could have demanded Stalin agree to stay with his 1941 borders. And not occupy eastern Europe.
Ad astra! Sean
The case for invasion in 1943 is simple, really; the sooner the Anglo-Americans were on the Continent, the sooner France and Belgium could be liberated, which means the sooner the Ruhr could be captured, which means the sooner the Germans would be defeated - which, was both a) the point of the entire effort; and b) ultimately, the fewer innocents would die ... which was also the point.
Not aware of any "near-disasters" for the western Allies in Europe in 1944; from Normandy to VE Day, it took all of 11 months, which was lightning fast historically, compared to both the Soviets on the offensive in 1943-45, much less what the Allies had managed in 1914-18 - granted, at a vastly different level of technology, but still ...
Actually, the German ground forces in France in 1943 were significantly weaker than they were in 1944, while the Germans in the USSR were hundreds of miles farther east in 1943 than they were in 1944; and the Soviets were quite capable of grinding up the Axis in 1942-43, as shown by Stalingrad, Kursk, KUTOZOV, etc.
And any German resources sent west would simply have made the path easier for the Soviets; two-front wars have that impact.
As stated, there's a good alternate history on the impact of a successful ROUNDUP, based on a thoughtful and realistic analysis of the opposing forces and a realistic appraisal of what the western Allies accomplished from 1943-onwards; not the usual "Fritz was 12-feet-tall, wore Hugo Boss, and carried wunderwaffen" bilge that tends to get published.
Dave: the only innocents I'm really concerned with are those on my immediate side. Most emphatically including soldiers like my father.
I don't give a damn about Russians or (in this context) Germans; the more of them who die the better. Let the Russians bleed the Germans, and then swoop in.
Nor was a year's difference in the date of the liberation of France and the Netherlands significant; and on the political side, French support for Vichy cratered between 1942 and '44, because more and more people became conscious (despite German attempts at censorship) of the way the wind was blowing.
Amphibious assaults extremely difficult. And are like any other operation; you get better at them by doing them. '44 was a good balance between the need to keep the Soviets from overruning the whole of Germany and them weakening the Germans and being weakened in turn.
By 44-45, the Russians were conscripting teenagers and middle-aged men, and had more thoroughly devastated land to take care of.
The landings in North Africa and then Sicily and then mainland Italy were progressively more difficult, starting with unopposed, or fighting the French and Italians, and moving up to opposed landings and fighting the Germans.
It was a learning curve.
Innocents would be, oh, dunno, the European civilian men, women, and children, and Allied POWs, murdered by the Germans between the summer of 1943 and that of 1944, perhaps?
Or, I dunno, the British and Allied civilians who died under the V-weapons in 1944-45 that, obviously, would not have died in 1943-44 because the V-1 and V-2 systems were not operational?
But set aside the moral argument; there was a strategic point to the war for the US and British - defeat Germany as quickly as possible because, after all, Germany was the only one of the three major Axis powers that could both development various nightmares (of the biologists', chemists' and physicists' varieties) AND deploy them against the US and UK at home.
Well aware of the realities of amphibious operations; spent several years in an organization that has been conducting them successfully since the 18th Century, thanks.
All the landings in the MTO in 1942-43 were opposed during the assault phase, by Vichy in North Africa, by the Italians and Germans in Sicily, and by the Germans in Calabria and Salerno. At none were the Allies prevented from seizing their desired beachheads, and at none did the Axis - including the Germans- pose any significant threat to the Allied expeditionary forces that were landed and, in fact, successfully moved from the amphibious assault phase to the mobile, combined arms offensive phase.
That's "opposed" in the case of Vichy, and semi-opposed by the Italians.
The Germans... the Germans were -real- opposition.
My father-in-law was a BAR gunner in the 2nd infantry, and landed a few days after D-Day. By the time he got to Pilsen (nowadays Plzen) he was one of 9 survivors of his original platoon of 48, and was on his 3rd lieutenant. And that was after -winning- every fight.
As I said, of gradually increasing difficulty. Glyph of irony.
And no, defeating Germany as quickly as possible was not the only objective.
Defeating Germany as quickly as possible, -at minimum cost- particularly in casualties, and producing the optimum strategic situation -after- Germany was defeated, were the (interlinked) objectives. The last was the most important. There's little point in winning the war and losing the peace.
Civilians? We ourselves killed 30K or so French civilians when we switched aircraft from the strategic bombing campaign to interdicting the French railway net in the month or so before D-Day, over 1K dead Frenchmen (and women and children) per day. De Gaulle, who wasn't shy about complaining, didn't say much about that. C'est la guerre.
Those objectives I listed involved maximum possible losses for the Soviets, for example.
Remember, there's always another war/struggle after the current one is concluded. Always.
"Uncle Joe" Stalin was just Hitler with a different mustache and our 'alliance' with him was pure expediency, so it was important to bleed his forces and his base as much as possible. He'd been Hitler's ally from 1939 up until Hitler sucker-punched him in 1941.
The Germans did a rather good job at bleeding the Soviets, and vice-versa, so why prematurely interrupt their mutual slaughter? Pass the popcorn and watch.
We needed to give the Soviets just enough aid (and strategic distraction of Germany) to keep them fighting and wear down the Germans, while positioning ourselves to swoop in and take as much as possible of the prizes when the Germans started to fold.
While doing as little of the actual -fighting- as possible.
A delicate balancing act.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
While I agree with your analysis, the immediate aftermath of WW II was unsatisfactory. Stalin still grabbed the Baltic states and far too much of central/eastern Europe. E.g., did the UK/US really have to let him devour Bulgaria, which the Soviets did not occupy till January or February of 1946? Sending a few hundred UK/US troops there in 1945 might have made Stalin decide Bulgaria was not worth a fight with the Western Allies.
Ad astra! Sean
SM - Okay, so you don't care about the lives of civilians. Got it.
Not that it matters, but if one is playing family anecdotes, along with the Cold War (where the US and company managed to win without nuking everyone by standing on guard for 40+ years), the previous generations of the "Dave Shoup" family included an American soldier who spent much of 1943 getting shot at by the Italians and Germans in the MTO (and would have rather gotten it over with in France and/or Germany in 1943-44, rather than waiting for 1945).
The point was that despite hindsight, in 1942-43 no one knew what the Germans were cooking up, in terms of bacteriological, chemical, radiological, or - quite clearly - nuclear weapons; much less if the Soviets would last - which is why trying to manage that "delicate balancing act" in 1943-45 is likely to have cost more Allied lives (including American GIs) than simply biting the bullet and getting the job done in 1943-44.
Given that Marshall, King, et al all agreed (but set aside their professional judgment because of the ghosts of the Somme), the aforementioned "good alternative history" writer might actually achieve something worth reading, rather than yet another paean to the Hugo Boss models.
Kaor, Dave!
Unfortunately, civilians die in wars, even if the combatants try to minimize that. And the UK/US killed a lot of German civilians in that mistaken strategic bombing campaign. A mistake because, after the war, the Allies found out how little that damaged German war production.
Also, the US/UK was also fighting Japan, meaning resources that might have been used against Germany had to be sent to the Pacific theater.
No, I think 1944 was the earliest the Western Allies could have mounted a really major attack on Germany.
Ad astra! Sean
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