WW II : "Operation Uranus" THE GAME CHANGER Stalingrad (R)

SOURCE:

https://us11.campaign-archive.com/?e=2b23b22499&u=781d962e0d3dfabcf455f7eff&id=33b716217b

              Stalingrad :GAME CHANGER 

                    

                     "Operation Uranus"

                                  By 

                     George Friedman

              INVASION OF SOVIET UNION

           Stalingrad :GAME CHANGER 

                     "Operation Uranus"

                                  By 

                 George Friedman

READ ALSO 

: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Uranus


Nov 22, 2017

On Nov. 19, 1942, the Soviet Union launched Operation Uranus. Its goal was to envelop and destroy the German army fighting in the city of Stalingrad. Uranus closed the noose on the Germans a few days later

I have been writing about the four great battles of 1942 that extinguished the Axis powers’ chances of winning World War II. So far, I’ve written about Midway, Guadalcanal and El Alamein. Now, it is time to write about the most massive, brutal and crucial of those four battles: Stalingrad. It was a battle that stretched over five months, from late August 1942 to early February 1943, but Operation Uranus was its decisive moment. As with the other battles I’ve discussed, Stalingrad did not win the war for Russia. What it did was make a German victory impossible.

Intelligence Failures

The Battle of Stalingrad had its origins in a pivotal German miscalculation at the start of the war. Operation Barbarossa, the code name for Germany’s invasion of the east, was designed to destroy the Soviet Union, securing Germany’s eastern flank and thereby guaranteeing German control of continental Europe. The invasion began on June 22, 1941.

But the Germans made a critical error even before the invasion began. Barbarossa was a three-pronged attack. One was into the Baltic states and then toward Leningrad (modern-day St. Petersburg), the second was toward Moscow, and the third was into the south, designed to capture Ukraine and then the Caucasus. Formulating the plan in this way violated one of the principles of warfare, one sacred to the German high command: the concentration of forces. By dividing their forces, none of the Germans’ goals were achieved. Leningrad held out in spite of Germany’s blockade, the Germans were stopped just outside of Moscow, and the southern thrust wasn’t set up to succeed

                                   Operation Barbarossa

The Germans’ blunder was rooted in an intelligence failure. The Abwher, Germany’s military intelligence, severely

underestimated the size of Soviet 

reserves.

Based on those estimates, German high command mistakenly believed it didn’t need to concentrate its forces. The Germans envisioned an initial battle of encirclement to capture Soviet armies, followed by an advance against feeble reserves, ending in victory well before the end of winter 1941.

The German plan also didn’t account for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor that December. Germany had hoped the Japanese would attack Siberia, pinning down the Soviet army stationed there. After Pearl Harbor, however, the Soviets knew that Siberia was secure. Japan could fight on only one front at a time, and the United States would keep it busy. This freed up the Soviets to shift their eastern forces – forces that German intelligence thought would be irrelevant to the European war – to Moscow, where they were instrumental in blocking the German advance.

This intelligence failure cost the Germans a victory in 1941. They might have knocked the Soviet Union out if they had taken Moscow, but that’s unclear. Leningrad was a strategic sideshow. But the war could certainly have been won in the south. And the crucial battle in the south was at Stalingrad.

The Meat Grinder

Modern wars and economies run on oil, and the Soviets’ major source of oil was Baku, in Azerbaijan. The city in the South Caucasus had been developed by the Nobel Brothers (the family for whom the prize is named) in the mid-to-late 19th century and had been Europe’s first major source of oil. Had the Germans focused their entire invasion on the south and captured the land bridge between the Volga and the Don rivers, Baku’s oil wouldn’t have been able to flow to Soviet factories, and no amount of lend-lease could have made up for it. But because of their faulty intelligence, the Germans felt as though they could have all three goals in 1941. They were wrong.

By the next spring, the Germans had realized their mistake. It was now Stalin who fell victim to bad intelligence. Stalin believed (and the Germans led him to believe) that the main German assault in 1942 would be toward Moscow. Instead, Germany concentrated its forces in a thrust toward the Volga, the Don and the city of Astrakhan, intent on cutting off Baku. Stalin was stunned when the Germans launched Case Blue in the south.

By August 1942, the Germans had reached Stalingrad. It was a way station for them that they expected to take easily before crossing the Volga and advancing toward Astrakhan. The Soviets immediately understood the threat that Case Blue posed, but their forces were concentrated in the wrong place.

SOVIET  forces were concentrated in the wrong place.

Without a massed army to throw into the fight, the Soviets implemented a meat grinder strategy. They shipped poorly trained, poorly armed troops across the Volga to be annihilated by the Germans. The Soviets’ hope was that this would buy them time to shift their forces south for a counterattack. The Germans misunderstood the threat. They thought Stalin was sending tens of thousands of soldiers to their deaths simply to keep the Germans off-balance, and they decided that the Soviets were on their last legs. Instead of withdrawing from Stalingrad and engaging in a battle maneuver – the sort of thing the Germans were best at – they[GERMANS] accepted the worst kind of warfare for themselves: a static urban battle that put the attackers at a massive disadvantage.

Soviet soldiers in 1942 during the battle of Stalingrad. -/AFP/Getty Images

Some have said that Hitler and Stalin saw Stalingrad first and foremost as a potential propaganda victory; that they were less concerned with its strategic value and more concerned with capturing or defending a city named after the Soviet leader. That just wasn’t the case. Stalin had to keep Hitler from crossing the Volga. Hitler was sure that the Soviets were down to a suicide strategy and that if Germany could hold on a little longer, the Soviets would fall and the road to Astrakhan would be clear. Their mistakes were understandable, and German generals saw things the same way, despite what they said in their postwar memoirs. While the static battle raged, in September and October, the Soviets were stealthily massing forces north and south of the city.  On Nov. 19, 1942, they launched their  counterattack,                     Operation Uranus. STRIKE ON STALINGRAD BY SOVIETS The Battle of Stalingrad (1942-1943) Soviet forces struck to the north and south of Stalingrad, encircling it and trapping the German Sixth Army, which had been fully committed to the battle. The Soviets targeted troops allied with Germany – Italian, Romanian and Hungarian – knowing they were the least motivated and least resilient. The Germany knew this too, but they didn’t have enough troops to hold the line so they had no other choice but to use their allies. Once they had the city surrounded, the Soviets held firm. Rather than suffer more casualties  entering Stalingrad, they opted to try to  starve the Germans out. Hitler told the Sixth Army to hold and did not try to relieve it until the end of December. Withdrawal would mean that the war was lost. In the meantime, the Germans launched a weak offensive into the Caucasus in a last-ditch bid to take Baku directly. Crossing the Caucasus in early winter, however, was impossible. What If Baku was there for the taking in 1941, but by 1942, the Soviets were ready for war. Even after the start of the Battle of Stalingrad, Germany may have been able to recover if it could have given the Soviet troops in the city an alternative to the meat grinder. The troops there were trapped between the ruthlessness of the Germans and the ruthlessness of their compatriots. For the Soviet soldiers on the west bank of the Volga, the slogan was, “There is no land east of the Volga.” They faced certain death from the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, if the retreated, and certain death from the Germans if they were captured. This failure on the part of the Germans to give the Soviet troops in Stalingrad an incentive to surrender was a great failure. It cost them time and, eventually, the battle. Beyond Stalingrad, if the Germans had reached Astrakhan, there would have been no Allied invasion of France.  With the eastern front secure, Germany would have been able to transfer the majority of its forces to the west. The oil from Baku would have fueled Hitler’s war machine through Allied bombing, and the Germans could have built aircraft to respond in kind. Instead, they underestimated the reserves and resilience of the Soviets; they failed to understand that Stalingrad could be bypassed on the way to Astrakhan; and unlike Stalin, they didn’t have agility to shift strategy quickly. The Wehrmacht was not broken at Stalingrad, but by 1943, it was out of serious offensive options. The Germans needed to make peace, and apparently there were contacts with the Soviets. But the Germans insisted on retaining a great deal of their conquests. The Soviets had no reason to accept any such offer. They knew that if the Germans kept any captured territory, they would rebuild and strike again. And they knew that Germany was facing a war of attrition on two fronts that it could no longer win.  [A]   Midway and Guadalcanal dashed any hopes of a Japanese victory in the Pacific  [B]   War. El Alamein closed the door on the Germans’ effort to cut off the Suez Canal.   [ C ]  And Stalingrad eliminated the possibility of a Soviet defeat.  These facts stem from geopolitical realities.     The Japanese needed to control the flow of raw materials to Japan. They could jump out to an early lead over the U.S., but unless they could compel the U.S. to sue for peace, they couldn’t hold their advantage. The Germans needed the Soviets’ resources, but like the Japanese, they needed to win quickly or they wouldn’t win at all. They couldn’t sustain a two-front war. German and Japan were both mighty  powers with crippling vulnerabilities  that they tried to rectify through war. For a time, they were able to create the  illusion that they were stronger than  they were. It was an illusion sopowerful  that they themselves began to believe it.  They became blind to the fact that to  win, everything had to go perfectly. In  any human endeavor, nothing goes  perfectly. The post Stalingrad appeared first on Geopolitical Futures.

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Thanksgiving: A Monument to a Nation Nov. 23, 2017

SOURCE:
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/




Thanksgiving: A Monument to a Nation

                          Nov. 23, 2017 

Here’s to a holiday that helped rescue the                 U.S. from its own self-destruction.

Thanksgiving: A Monument to a Nation

Today is the fourth Thursday in the month of November. For most of the world, that doesn’t mean much. For our American readers, however, that means it’s Thanksgiving Day.

All countries have their national holidays. In the United States, July Fourth celebrates the Declaration of Independence, Memorial Day honors America’s fallen soldiers, President’s Day and Martin Luther King Day commemorate the lives of important men in the history of the republic. But Thanksgiving doesn’t celebrate a specific event or honor a person or group of people for service to their country. Thanksgiving was created to help rescue the U.S. from its own self-destruction. It did so by contributing to the creation of an American nation, and its continued and enthusiastic celebration is a measure of its success.

The Thanksgiving Myth

Many Americans will balk at the suggestion that Thanksgiving does not celebrate a specific event. In grade school, most young Americans are told the same story about what Thanksgiving commemorates. The story takes us back to 1621, the year after the Pilgrims made landfall in the New World. The Pilgrims had suffered terribly during their first winter. When spring came, a Native American tribe taught the Old World immigrants how to plant crops such as corn that were suitable to the climate. After the first harvest, the Pilgrims invited the Natives to take part in a great feast with them in the spirit of peace and brotherhood.

It’s easy to see why this story appeals to Americans, who have always had to reconcile they pride they have for their country with the fact that its creation meant the displacement of others. And as it turns out, an event like the Pilgrim feast probably did occur; a man named Edward Winslow wrote an account of the feast in 1622. But whether the feast occurred is not the point. The point is that the feast was not the inspiration for Thanksgiving. The origin of the misconception was the work of a historian named Reverend Alexander Young, whose active imagination led him to assert without evidence in 1841 that the feast in 1621 was the first Thanksgiving.

If the holiday didn’t come from the Pilgrim myth, then where did it come from? The answer to this question has two parts, and both are important for understanding what Thanksgiving is and how it continues to shape the United States today.

A Guatemalan immigrant carves the Thanksgiving turkey on Nov. 24, 2016, in Stamford, Connecticut. JOHN MOORE/Getty Images

From Local Custom to National Holiday

Americans think of Thanksgiving as a day that comes once a year. This has been true only since 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a law that fixed the date of Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November. But it was Calvinist principles, which the first settlers of New England brought with them to the New World, that served as the origin of the Thanksgiving concept. Puritan theology recognized two kinds of days of worship that could be called spontaneously: Thanksgiving days and Fast days. Today it’s mostly a secular holiday, but Thanksgiving had its roots in religious observance.

Looking back through American history, we find numerous proclamations of Thanksgiving and Fast days. James Madison was the last U.S. president to declare such days until Abraham Lincoln, who played a vital role in the story half a century later. Madison declared three Fast days during the War of 1812 and a Thanksgiving Day to mark the war’s conclusion. Presidents John Adams and George Washington also declared such days, and both days could be (and were) declared from time to time by local communities and government officials.

Over time, as New England’s Puritan roots receded into history, Thanksgiving days transformed and spread throughout the country. (Fast days fell by the wayside.) They did not lose their overtly religious tone, but they became days of rest or celebration as opposed to days of constant worship.

But this only explains where the notion of a day of thanksgiving came from; it tells us little about the annual American holiday. The superficial answer is that it started in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln declared a day of Thanksgiving in the Union. Lincoln was a brilliant man, but the idea of Thanksgiving itself was already prevalent throughout the country. By this point, it had become customary in many states in both the Union and the Confederacy to celebrate a day of Thanksgiving at the end of November. Many states in the Union and the Confederacy had already been celebrating a day of thanksgiving at the end of November for decades. The celebrations, however, were ad hoc and locally declared, though a growing chorus of advocates had been urging the U.S. government to declare a federal holiday for years. Lincoln took the fateful step. He could not have known at the time that the Thanksgiving he declared would take on the significance that it has. After all, previous Thanksgivings declared by American presidents had come and gone.

But Lincoln’s Thanksgiving fell during the middle of the Civil War, and that made all the difference. Lincoln’s declaration was profoundly religious, an exhortation to the American people to take stock of their blessings but also to atone for their sins. (In this way, he combined the Puritans’ Thanksgiving and Fast principles into one day.) More than anything, though, Lincoln hoped that the day of Thanksgiving that he declared would be “reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.” If government of the people, by the people and for the people was to survive, a new people would have to emerge from the Civil War to rebuild what the war had destroyed. Lincoln saw an opportunity to take an event from the realm of local custom and elevate it to a national experience. This was far from the only thing Lincoln did to try to lay the groundwork for healing the wounds of the nation post-war, but it would turn out to be one of his most consequential and lasting contributions.

Strength in Shared Experience

It is easy to forget that the U.S. is a young country relative to others. There is no U.S. cultural artifact that speaks to the longevity of the American people – no Forbidden City, Palace of Versailles, Windsor Castle, Taj Mahal or Blue Mosque. Furthermore, the people who came to the New World and founded the United States displaced the original inhabitants and could not claim to have come from the land itself, as many other national ideologies do. Thanksgiving became America’s monument to the strength and unity of an American nation, of a people who shared not just the protections of the U.S. Constitution, but a cultural bond that transcended local bonds. Countries often build physical structures to mark their successes, but Thanksgiving is more potent because it enshrines the American nation not in steel or stone but in time. Every year, it creates a sense of what it means to be American for new generations, and every year, it molds itself as necessary to the issues of the day.

Sarah Josepha Hale, a New Hampshire-born writer and editor who in the 19th century lobbied tirelessly for the establishment of Thanksgiving as a national holiday, wrote in an editorial in 1860 that “[Thanksgiving] contributes to bind us in one vast empire together, to quicken the sympathy that makes us feel from the icy North to the sunny South that we are one family, each a member of a great and free Nation, not merely the unit of a remote locality.” The nation Hale was writing about has come a long way since 1860 – and since 1776, and 1621. It’s come so far that it has forgotten how Thanksgiving started in the first place. That is not necessarily a bad thing – it’s a testament to the holiday’s success and malleability.

Today, more than 300 million Americans are sharing the same experience, regardless of whether they are eating turkey, falling asleep watching NFL football or spending time with their families. There is tremendous power in shared experiences, and the American nation is a tremendous power. These things go hand in hand

DEGRADATION OF ARMED FORCES : Is anyone listening? - SOLDIERS ARE FOR FIGHTING.......

SOURCE

http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/soldiers-are-for-fighting/500250.html

             Soldiers are for fighting....

                                     By

               Lt-Gen Baljit Singh (retd)

  

COMBAT-READY: Armed forces personnel need to be update-to-date in military training. PTI

Learn from History

• In the 1950s, the battle-hardened 4 Infantry Division, then located at Ambala Cantonment, due to monetary austerity, suspended all military training for nearly two years, with the ranks used to construct barracks.

• When during conflict with China in 1962, the Division, entrusted with the defence of Se la and Bomdila. And to our shame, this Division simply crumbled without giving a fight even though terrain was to its advantage.

It is worrisome that we are tending to divert the armed forces’ time and energies away from constantly upgrading their war-waging and war-winning skills by assigning them tasks way outside battlefield applications. 




TODAY, when neighbouring countries on India's western and northern borders issue directives to their armed forces that their implicit mission is to "win wars", it is worrisome that we in India are tending to divert the armed forces' time and energies away from constantly upgrading their war-waging and war-winning skills by assigning them tasks way outside battlefield applications. The Indian Army's record of the past some 200 years is replete of successful war-winning history when trained and equipped adequately and led assiduously at the political level and from the front in combat on battlefields, both on Indian soil and continents across oceans.

When Duke recalled bravery in 1850

The first example of excellence in war-winning determination of the army from the very beginnings of its creation that merits recall flows indirectly from the Duke of Wellington's interview by a correspondent of The Times, London, on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 1850. 

The Duke had agreed after much persuasion to talk about his life and times, but being taciturn by nature, the correspondent was unable to draw him out to reminisce freely and in sheer desperation asked 
“…..and which is the one battle from your military career you would like to be remembered by, Sir?” 

At last, the Duke's eyes lit up, but imagine the downright bewilderment of the interviewer with the prompt and forthright pronouncement, 
"The battle of Assaye." 

Flabbergasted by the clipped answer and, in all probability, not even aware of where Assaye was, the last question posed was
 "….and who were the best combat soldiers in your experience, Sir?" 

Once again, without even a momentary pause, yet another clipped response was: 

"The Madras Native Infantry!" 

Now Arthur Wellesley (the future nemesis of Napoleon) had arrived in India in 1794 with assignment as a Major in the Madras Presidency Army. He showed a remarkable ability to assimilate with and win the confidence of native troops and set about to impart to them the basic battlefield manoeuvres to close with and prevail upon the adversary in combat. As the Presidency armies were constantly in a state of active war against local satraps and during the pitched battle against Tippu Sultan at Srirangapatnam in 1897, Arthur Wellesley (AW) emerged among the bright, young combat commanders.

Six years later, Colonel AW's war waging tactics and battlefield nerve would be put to the ultimate test against the combined armed might of the Marathas across River Kaitha around Peepulgaon and Waroor villages (between Hyderabad and Mysore). AW had under his command five battalions of the Madras Native Infantry, two battalions of the Royal Highland Fusiliers and three squadrons of the Madras Native Cavalry, numerically no less than an Army Division of the present days. Though outnumbered by 15 to 01 in Infantry and 03 to 01 in Cavalry, the battle raged over 10 hours before the Marathas conceded defeat. 

But AW was honest to record, 
"I shouldn't like to see such a loss as I sustained on 23 September, 1803 even if attended by victory…….. the bloodiest for the numbers I ever saw…… won in rivers of blood…… Assaye the finest thing I ever did in the way of fighting even when compared to my later Military career."  

Even 150 years post AW's experience at Assaye here is what Field Marshal APJ Wavell recorded, in the Preface to a book: 

"…. The Fourth Indian Division will surely go down as one of the greatest fighting formations in military history: to be spoken of with such as The Tenth Legion, The Light Division of the Peninsular War, Napoleon's Old Guard….A mere summary of its record is impressive: in five years it fought nine campaigns, traveled more than 15,000 miles, suffered over 25,000 casualties, captured upwards of 150,000 prisoners…. Its campaigns include the great victory of Sidi Barrani,…a gallant costly assault at Cassino against defences even more formidable than at Keren…the successful breaching of the Gothic Line….The Fourth Division has a claim on history even beyond its fighting capabilities…. and its commanders will always salute one of the greatest bands of fighting men who have ever served together in this troubled world of wars and warriors."

What an incredible war-fighting and war-winning record! It would be the envy of the armed forces of the world at large. Let us raise a salute to the Indian soldiers and the officers who led them from the front, in combat.

Shameful Crumbling

Now back in the 1950s, that battle-hardened 4 Infantry Division was located at Ambala Cantonment which had insufficient accommodation for married officers and jawans. At a time when paucity of budgets had enforced monetary austerity, the GOC, Maj-Gen BN Kaul took the initiative to suspend all military training for close to two years and use all ranks to construct barracks. When the first phase was completed around mid-1958, the GOC had Prime Minister Nehru as the chief guest at a gala opening of the buildings followed by a grand "Bara Khana" (lunch) with the jawans and their spouses. 

When conflict with China in the Thagla ridge area in 1962 became a possibility, 4 Infantry Division, sans military training for almost two years, was entrusted with the defences of Se la and Bomdila. And to our everlasting shame, this Division simply crumbled without giving a fight even though  the terrain was to its advantage. 

Let us please learn from history the lessons in the propriety of application of armed forces as an instrument of statecraft. Furthermore, understand and respect the nuances of a soldier's dignity in uniform and desist the temptation of bonhomie outside their code of discipline such as offering a ladoo in his mouth. It is gross indiscipline for a soldier wearing uniform to be found masticating any eatable or imbibing beverage or taking a smoke, except at meal times in the dining halls or in the domestic privacy of his home. A firm handshake is all that is needed to make a soldier feel wanted and on cloud nine.

Is anyone listening?