World War II Myths, Misconceptions and Surprises Thread

Myths about Pearl Harbor.



Drachinifel and company gets these things wrong.

a. YES, the Japanese planned out their attack against Pearl Harbor in 9 months. They did not even entertain a deviation from Kantai Kassen in the Marianas Islands until Yamamoto pushed the attack plan in January 1941.
b. The torpedo bombers split up with the level bombing planes coming down battleship row coming from the southwest. The torpedo planes with the torpedoes came from in from the west with the intent to loop and u-turn after an overfly. They were briefed to perform that maneuver to overfly, look and get familiar with the very short drops they would have across the middle sound as they attacked battleship row. See maps.





c. The USN high command argued among themselves about moving the fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor.
d. The information about Japanese torpedoes is both correct and wrong. Bu-Ord was absolutely wrong about the range of run; but right about effective range of torpedoes in general. The Japanese fish were just as subject to deep running, and premature detonations as the American fish. The nose wander of the Type 93 was worse than the Mark 15. The Type 95 air dropped torpedo was the only torpedo of the era that used a PID controller to ensure hot straight runs.
e. The Japanese devised their main effort as a counter-air mission with the anti-ship element embedded in the first wave.
f. Kimmel was absolutely derelict, before, during and after the attack.
g. FDR sent out Nimitz (More on Nimitz in a moment.). He left it up to Nimitz as to how PACFLT's command would be handled, whether to clean house or keep Kimmel's team. Nimitz sent Pye off after Pye screwed up the Wake Island relief, and later Nimitz backstabbed Fletcher to slide Spruance in as his chief of staff, but by and large, Nimitz kept Kimmel's team intact and gave them the Knute Rockne treatment to get them to perform for him. I "think" Nimitz should have beached Halsey and Ghormley immediately, but he gave the two men the benefit of the doubt. Nimitz should have convened court martials for the USS California's captain and or the commander of the navy yard. He did not. This probably prolonged salvage operations by a half year because both men were incompetent to taskings. The USS Oklahoma fiasco, and the delay in clearing YFD-2 would have been enough to send those two to the naval disciplinary barracks to make desks and chairs for Captain Bimmington.
h. Side by side replenishment at sea was first demonstrated for liquid fuel transfer, and cross transfer of ammunition and dry stores along sling lines in 1914 by... one Chester Nimitz. There is no reason any navy could not have done the same. The Japanese mastered side by side underway refueling around 1937. The Royal Navy, in the Mediterranean, had achieved it in 1941 though neither mastered dry stores cross-transfer by 1941. I think the RN managed it in 1942 Therefore, there was no reason the BPF could not do it in 1944. NONE. Why they needed the PACFLT to teach, or rather sustain, the BPF, has more to do with the RN not providing the BPF the means and training, rather than the RN not knowing how to do it at all.

Thanks for the suggestion.

The North African campaign myths.




a. Rommel was "presented" as the clean German general. The post WWII allied governments were complicit in presenting this German "fiction" to give the defeated "west" Germans a "hero" to inspire them to cooperate with the West to create the Bundeswehr.
b. I could add that Rommel was further guilty of the same kinds of war crimes as other German generals whose area commands used slave labor to construct the West Wall in France. Refer to the video for his war crimes in North Africa. Yes, he was a war criminal. 
c. As for the tactical acumen that Rommel supposedly had; one must remember that Rommel had German signals intelligence units and the Italians (SIS) who supplied him with very accurate intelligence about British desert army intentions, plans and movements until Auchinleck and Montgomery in sequence tightened up British army signals discipline. It is debated whether British or American intelligence uncovered the American leak in the Cairo American embassy via the inept American military liaison officer, but that source of information was also instrumental in giving Rommel a situational awareness edge to explain some of his early astonishing victories. Rommel still had to show tactical skill to use his advantages to exploit this intelligence edge, but once the intelligence advantage he enjoyed, disappeared, so did his "miraculous victories".         
d. Though the video does not cover the other point that is oft overlooked, it must be understood that the majority of Rommel's troops for most of the North African campaign, especially the hard marching and hard fighting infantry, were ITALIANS. The Italians also supplied most of Rommel's logistics and transport support. Rommel and his DAK was very much an element of the Italian Xth Army functionally. Rommel, in many ways, reminds one of MacArthur and Alamo Force, in the way that the German general used his Deutsche Afrika Korps to execute some elements of tactical evolutions, while the "allies" contributions to the overall schema are lost in the popular imaginations (During Gazala, The Trieste division's role in saving the beleaguered Germans. See Map for this example.)


e. "Rommel" could also be something of a ghost written sock-puppet. 


The problem with that quote is that Liddell Hart wrote it when he helped edit and translate "The Rommel Papers" from the "recollections" of his German co-author as to what Rommel "said" and "wrote" in his diary..  
      
 Yeah. There is very little evidence that this event happened the way "Rommel" presented it. Refer to a. 


 

Perhaps call it, "WWII Myths that need correction." Or something similar?

Myths about Market Garden...



Article.



The popular history as presented about Market Garden (See video) contains a lot of myths and lies. Montgomery certainly reframes history (lies) to mask the magnitude of the disaster. The whole plan, as the Americans understood it, was to cut off the German 15th Army and make the Canadian attack into the Scheldt a lot easier. It was the PLAN Eisenhower authorized to strike at the Zuider Zee.

The main tactical fault has always been laid on Browning's planning of the operation and specifically the British First Airborne. He maldistributed his troops and selected the wrong drop zones around Arnheim, it is true. But he was not the only boob to screw up the operation.

Lewis Brereton, the guy who lost MacArthur's air force. Remember him?



General Urqhart failed to understand he had to drop onto Arnheim Bridge.



General Gavin made a huge mistake.





6.30 to 8.00 in the video covers Nijmegan. Then 18.00 to 20,00 covers the Grossbeck Heights and Browning's endorsement of Gavin's monumental screwup.

Actually, Gavin's mistake cost 36 hours of delay to Horrock's 30th Corps advance. THAT hurt.

Sure; there was a lot of lying to cover up the many mistakes made by the principles, but why lie about the actual plan's objectives and the chain of events that led to the disaster. Why round-robin the blame? Why blame the Canadians and the Poles? Why blame O'Connor? Why blame Horrocks?

Some myths needed to be laid on to make the bloodbath and the destruction of the British 1st Airborne seem justified.


Quesada's air staff could work fuels, loads and hours aloft. Browning's army staff apparently could not.  And who sided with Browning over his own air force? Brereton.

Let me remind the reader about the lies stated to justify the sacrifices...



That is as close to a mea culpa, one could expect from Montgomery and it is remarkable for the honesty expressed.

As a coda, I suggest that if Eisenhower had intervened, as he did during the Battle of the Bulge, to at least fix the mistakes that Brereton made by grounding US tactical air power, that the progress by Horrock's tanks up the "Highway of Death" would have the needed air support. I also agree with de Crevield. Brereton should have been court martialed and cashiered for his role in botching the air component of Market Garden, both in transportation of the paratroopers and in resupply and in that grounding of his fighter bombers.

HE as much as Browning deserves the primary operational blame for the failure.

Lots of bologna sandwich in that "official" account. 

The Myths still confound the official history and make it hard to understand why the US torpedo crisis was different and unique. It was a combination of insane Congressional and US Navy politics which allowed the Connecticut delegation to create and maintain a US government civil service monopoly on torpedoes and freeze private enterprise. 

It was legal chicanery which froze out Bliss Leavitt, the one US private torpedo maker out of designing or building US torpedoes. 

It was parsimonious funding of $150,000 1930 constant dollars, smaller than the USN's ICE CREAM budget, from 1933-1937 that fumble dorked the testing program. 

It was the incompetence of key individuals: Harold Stark (Bu-Ord and later CNO, who was removed for his ineptitude.), William Blandy *(Bu-Ord, later the Atomic Playboy, when the torpedo crisis hit, who was fired for being too slow to act.),  Ralph Christie (program supervisor for the Mark 5 influence feature and the Mark 14 and 15 torpedoes, who failed to validate the weapons for obvious reasons (See below, for why he was ultimately fired and beached.).), James Fife (Just an evil politician in uniform who impeded genuine progress and reform and conspired against his superiors, during the torpedo crisis. He was finally done in by Hiram Rickover who fixed his hash and avenged the Silent Service by his force out.), Thomas Withers (First incompetent Comsubpac, who was fired and sent to manage a drydock.), Robert English (Second incompetent Comsubpac killed in a plane crash.) and Claude Swanson (Incompetent Secretary of the Navy who dropped dead in office.), who combined via coincidence in toto to ruin the device's development.     

One can measure the turnaround of the Torpedo Crisis to two dates. mid-February 1943 when Charles "Uncle Charlie" Lockwood became Comsubpac and one month later when Stark was told to pack his bags for England because he was through as CNO. King, his successor, received a blistering report from Lockwood, endorsed by Nimitz about the torpedo crisis causes and effects. Blandy ultimately gets the boot after he spends nine months generally obstructing progress with cover-ups while his bureau tries various in-house fixes on the sly, until one George Hussey in December 1943 finally pulls these things together. To be fair to Blandy, he did actually start Bu-Ord remedial programs for a score of torpedoes to REPLACE the defective Mark 14, but King was tired of excuses found out about the coverup and fired him for inefficiency. The "Atomic Playboy" ironically post war managed to grab hold of the USN atomic bomb testing program.



He was another James Fife.       

Here is what the printed record shows.

1. The torpedo testing program was supervised by Bu-Ord from 1934 to 1937. Included in this test program was a fight between Bu-Ord and Bu-Ships. Who were the two admirals who fought over whose budget would eat the costs of the targets that might be damaged?

Rear Admiral Harold Rainsford Stark, 1934–1937 Bu-Ord.
Rear Admiral Emory S. Land, (March 16, 1933 – March 16, 1937)

There were two practice shots to test the torpedo detonator function using old Mark 10 torpedoes. One function test succeeded. The other failed. With this result the Mark 14 and Mark 15 (not tested in the two runs) was certified by Stark as weapon proofed, over the protests of Ralph Christie and Bliss Leavitt engineers.    

2. Rear Admiral Land started putting outrageous numbers of torpedo tubes on US destroyers, once he got wind of the test results. His reason? He reasoned that if the function failure rate wass fifty percent in perfect range conditions, then extra launchers would be needed for large salvoes of fish.

3. The magnetic influence feature of the American torpedoes, it is claimed was never globally tested. This may have been the case with the British and German test programs which failed to conduct such tests outside of northern Europrean waters. but the USN sent a brand-new cruiser, the USS Indianapolis, on a series of cruises with the developer of the American version of the magnetic influence feature, Ralph Christie, aboard to test the feature from the equator to the region off Connecticut. Christie discovered to his surprise that the magnetic influence feature failed to function in direct congruence to the field flux lines orientation latitudinally of the Earth's magnetic field. He suggested a rheostat be included in the signal amplifier circuit and a set of tuning tables be developed to enhance the and / or adjust the sensitivity of the magnetic influence feature in the Mark 5 element of the Mark 6 exploder. Stark rejected the recommendation. No one has ever explained WHY during WWII, that Christie, who knew the magnetic influence feature DID NOT WORK from the Indianapolis tests, insisted his submarines out of Fremantle continue to use that feature. It is to be noted that Christie put two of his more technically gifted submariners, Chester Nimitz Jr. and James McCallum to develop the rheostat and compile the tuning tables he thought would fix the Mark 6 exploder's magnetic influence feature. That did not happen until post-war and under other men.       

Blair, Clay, Jr. (1975), Silent Victory, Philadelphia: Lippincott, p 62.         
    
Now it should be noted that the original program manager for the Mark 14 torpedo was Ralph Christie.  This person ran afoul of Charles Lockwood, Thomas Kincaid, and James Fife. Of the three officers, Fife probably should have been cashiered and beached for the incompetence for which Christie was blamed out of the Fremantle submarines poor performance. Christie was cashiered instead because he failed to follow security protocols with regard to MAGIC, refused to follow Comsubpac recommendations regarding the magnetic influence device which he, Christie, designed, and then told Admiral Kincaid, his boss, to go to hell over the radio.  Getting Husband Kimmel's son killed and losing Sam Dealey did not help his cause, either. Fife helped bury Christie in those proceedings. Fife was a master of USN politics who wanted Christie's job and of course credit for Christie's successes.

One really hates James Fife after reading Blair's "Silent Victory". 

4. Other errors in the official accounts one notes *(See videos.).       

5. The USN had developed a pre-WWII anti-circular run device. It worked. The problem was that it was part of the tail control rudder steer assembly and added six inches to the length of a torpedo. US destroyer torpedoes could carry the device because at 24 feet long that 6 inches could be added to the standard Mark 15 torpedo as part of the tail cone with no sweat. The Mark 14 torpedo was 20 feet 6 inches long and it was conformed tight in length to the existing US submarine torpedo tubes of boats built after the V-class.  It should be remarked that the Mark 14 was the smallest of the 21 inch torpedoes used by WWII submarine users. The usual length of German and Italian torpedoes was 23.5 feet. Japanese Type 95 was similar in length at 23.6 feet. The British Mark VIII was 21.5 feet long and the British Mark X was 23.45 feet long. All of those fish had anti-circular run collars fitted. The Mark 14 did not. The fish, it was decided, did not need one.     
6. The background on the USS Tinosa and Captain Mommsen dropping derated torpedo warheads from a ninety-foot-tall crane onto a steel plate, are true. What is not stated clearly; was why that firing pin jammed in its guides. It was supposed to be driven by a shotgun shell into a detonation charge. The problem was that the entire GUN assembly was placed so as to be at right angles to the direction of torpedo travel or parallel to the plane of impact. In other words, the IDIOTS who designed the Mark 6 exploder, installed the contact pistol SIDEWAYs instead of vertical to the vector of impact. The pin was not the problem. The guide rails were. They bent under the side forces imparted and the pin jammed in the travel. The Japanese propellers taken off the shot down Zeroes were slippery and of a light aluminum alloy so that they could move fast enough before the rails bent and jammed the courser steel pins that were original issue with the gun assembly. Pig grease also helped slicken the guides. The ball switch mentioned, was a tack-on cover our rumps feature of no practical effect whatsoever, mandated by George Blandy, the atomic playboy, who was in charge of Bu-Ord at the time all of this offal hit the screws. It was meant to show that something had been done to fix the contact exploder. The contact exploder still was mounted sideways instead of parallel to the vector of impact. That ball switch was for the benefit of Admiral King who was about to court martial everyone at Bu-Ord for making these mistakes and being obstructive.

7. The USN changed its vending practices in the middle of the war. Goat Island and the Alexandria Nuthouse (The two US government torpedo factories.) had turned into Brewster Aircraft type disasters. Changes in management and bringing in private businesses management teams to re-order those establishments were undertaken as in-war remedies. In addition to these facts; Westinghouse, General Electric, Bliss Leavitt and a halfd a dozen other companies either took up torpedo production or began research into replacement torpedoes for the Marks 13, 14, and 15. Instead of 144,000 American dollars for torpedo development in 1930-1937, the US government spent 1 BILLION dollars in WWII to develop 39 different models of torpedoes. That money resulted in;

a. acoustic ASW torpedoes in 1943.
b. electric lead acid battery torpedoes (Copies of the G7e, the Mark 18s) in 1943.
c. oxygen or rather hydrogen peroxide torpedoes in 1944 (Ralph Christie's designs of 1929 updated to fit Mark 14s).
d. silver zinc seawater battery torpedoes in 1945.  
e. wake-homers in 1947. 
f. wire-guided torpedoes after the Korean War.
g. Multichannel function sonar fire control for torpedoes in 1957.                  

IOW, the USN did due diligence and made the largest investment in naval ordnance in its history between 1942 and 1945 and by far, the torpedo was the most intensively developed piece of ordnance of WWII costing half the price of Project Manhattan. 

8. They never did get the Mark 14 to work properly until they changed the front end out completely. The USN took inspiration from Italian torpedo designs for some of the fixes.  In war, they adopted British torpedo explosive filler, tinkered with the Mark 5 influence feature based on Christie's pre-war work and engaged the University of Washington Engineering Department to develop an entire new type of magnetic influence exploder feature (Mark 9) which actually worked on a principle somewhat similar to how steel cased land mines were detected which did not work either. Postwar the UoW did develop a proximity fusing which would work, but by then the idea was hit to kill ASW weapons, including ASW torpedoes. Work on a keel-breaker did not become important again until there was a largish Russian surface fleet to sink. Then two methods of keel-breaking were employed; a WWII JAPANESE method used to shatter the USS Hornet and USS Indianapolis among other US ships, and a still top-secret magnetic influence method.  About the only thing I know about that method, is that it does not use the magnetic influence feature as seen in the Mark 5. It is a proximity-fuse based system that works because I have seen it tested.       

Here is a myth; the American soldier was eager to avenge Pearl Harbor.

The common belief is that the American racist attitude led to an intense urge to get at the Asian enemy and extirpate him.



Aside from the observation, that a man who makes such a statement and means it, is not exactly mentally fit for the stress of command; one would assume the USN was mentally prepared to "hate the enemy".

How about the American army?



Read the rest of the article at the link.

Summary: Elmo Roper Jr. (Roper Polling) suggested opinion polling as a morale measuring tool to the army. For reasons of service cohesion and fear of criticism, Secretary of War Stinson forbade the practice. Marshall allowed it on the sly, because he needed data. The 9th US Inf. was selected as the Guinea pigs. They were mobbing up at Ft. Bragg, NC and could be slipped a secret survey without most objectors noticing it.

The results were... "not too good".



Soldiers were more concerned about their furloughs than about fighting the Japanese. Further surveys of the army showed the American soldier was not motivated to "hate the enemy" enough in the opinion of the American high command. One understands all the "Why We Fight" films and other Hollywood generated indoctrination generated as a result?

In the end... This program of propaganda and artificially generated racism had a curious effect.



The thing is, that remark came from a man who fought Italians and Germans and had yet to experience Japanese soldiers as an enemy. How would he have formed an opinion like he expressed unless:

a. He based it on his experience fighting Italians and Germans.
b. He extrapolated his experience to what he was shown in the propaganda films and applied his experience to what he expected the Japanese were?

BTW, for the record... he was correct.

Some "fun" facts (I use sarcasm here. There is nothing funny about any of these facts.), to negate the mythology.

1. 2/3 of Americans were drafted to fight in WWII. In Vietnam, of the troops in country, 2/3 of the those who fought, volunteered.
2. Nazi death camps killed at least 11 million human beings. Ask an American and if they know about the camps at all, they will tell you 6 million people were killed. They forget the Romani, political prisoners, religiously persecuted, gays, artists, intellectuals, and whoever else fell into categories the Nazis defined as "subhuman" including the mentally and physically challenged. They were mass murdered in the same system.
3. Referring to (2) the Germans killed 13 million Russian civilians. Stalin killed another 7 million. The Japanese killed 14 million Chinese, 1 million Filipinos, an equal number of Koreans, Indonesians and some 50,000 + Allied POWs.
4. Americans head hunted Japanese soldiers in New Guinea. This was in retaliation for the Japanese eating Allied prisoners of war. Seriously, it was a common practice for Japanese cannibals to medically amputate an arm or leg off an Australian or American and eat that as ingesting the spirit of their enemy.
5. How many Axis soldiers reached the United States? 400,000 of them. Many were overflow from British operations.
6. Referring to headhunting in 4? The decapitation rate in Saipan was 60%. 
7. The Americans actually were fairly well disciplined. They only committed about 35,000 sexual assaults of record. Globally. That is about half the recorded British cases in Europe.
8. Tokyo, not Berlin was the most heavily damaged city via means of aerial bombardment. 
9. It was not the atomic bombs alone, but the Russian attack on Manchukuo, the neutral nations' collective rejection to act as go-betweens for Japan and 5th Fleet and 20th Air Force operations combined that caused Hirohito to agree to a surrender. HE was the one who had to quit, not the Japanese imperial government.
10. The Soviet Union fought the bulk of the Germans. The British held the Germans at bay between the Fall of France and German-Soviet war, and the Americans supplied 2/3 of the physical means to beat the Germans.  THAT is the fundamental way the Big Three actually beat the Germans. Not one of them alone could have done it. Special notice of British geography. Gatekeeper is an important role and advantage when it comes to WWII.   
11. WWII can be broken down into these main components, er wars:
a. Sino-Japanese war.
b. Precursor period in Europe and Africa. *This includes Ethiopia and Spain and all German and Italian aggressions committed prior to Barbarossa.
c. British-Italian war. 
d. German-Soviet war.
e. Japanese-American war.

--Structurally the initial German aggressions can be considered next country over invasions for the purposes of loot and plunder for the main war against the Soviet Union. The 1940 French campaign falls into this precursor period.
--The western allies were an adjunct to the German-Soviet War. Still, they tied down 3 million Germans in the air campaign and denied the Germans the parity they needed to stop the Russians.     
--Britain's war in Africa and the Mediterranean was against the Italians. The German component was an adjunct. And in that respect the Americans show up as an adjunct to the British.
--The CBI was a sideshow. The main war, the Japanese found they had, was a two-front war. Chinese to the west, Americans to the east. They were winning in China. How were they doing in the east? Not too good. 

12. The UK lost her empire. 
13. The South Americans fought in Europe. An example is the Brazilian expeditionary CORPS in Italy.
14. WWII started at the Marco-Polo Bridge.
15. Pearl Harbor was actually expected and predicted. What made it work was American arrogance and Japanese "luck". And the Hawaii command asleep on duty.
16. US entry into WWII can be pegged at the invasion of Iceland.
17. Most middle level Nazis (Werner von Braun, Gerd von Rundstedt) skated scott-free of their war crimes. So did most Japanese war criminals. Was Kondo, Nobutake hanged for the 25,000+ dead slaves, who dug out those submarine pens at Rabaul on his order?  How about Hirohito? Or the commander of unit 731 who murdered 200,000 Chinese in medical experiments? 
18. Most of the military transport on the Eastern Front was Mister Ed, not Mister Ford until 1943. The Germans used 400,000 trucks (300,000 of them French) during Barbarossa, but by January 1942, most of the looted trucks were broken and the French were not able to "supply" new ones, no matter how hard the Germans pressed Vichy. The Russians got 400,000 trucks from the American, and built 100,000, but Mister Ed still accounted for 1/2 their military land transport. Estimates are that 5 million horses died in Russian service. Stalin treated his horses better than he treated his "convict" infantry. His incompetence killed 9 million of them with a lot of German help.
19. It was not the French civilians or the French troops who lost the 1940 French campaign. That was purely the French high command, and I mean Gamelin, Huntziger, Weygang, Petain et al. Those "people" were either traitors or incompetents. Make a choice. Criminality was present in the cases of Huntziger and Petain. Gamelin was incompetent. 
20. Winston Churchill liked de Gaulle. It was Roosevelt who hated his guts. 
21. The French resistance was "there". The Titoists and the Dutch fought harder. 
22. Even then, it was known that Churchill was less than the grand strategist he thought he was. The joke; "Hide the Balkan maps!", was a carryover from WWI. Some of his schemes for Norway and the Baltic Sea and Sweden, ignored Orville and Wilbur Wright and William Moffett and John Holland and geography, topology and weather and common sense. The only other allied war leader who was this "uniquely unqualified" for military operations and strategy was Stalin. 
23. FDR was about as naive as Machiavelli or Sun Tzu. If nothing else; he on the jobbed as assistant secretary of the American navy in WWI. He clearly knew enough to outwit Churchill and Stalin and Hitler at every turn and get the war he wanted.