Fantastic! The multifarious talents of people on this forum is a constant source of amazement to me. Keep it up!

BUCCANEER!!!!!

Lovely – as a chap who obviously knows his stuff 😉 would you care to offer a similarly cogent analysis of why the US/UK forces advanced so slowly across Germany (and into Berlin) in the dying months of the European War? Was it
(a) to limit cost of US lives
(b) to limit cost of US and UK lives
(c) only [a] above .. the Limeys would have gone at it harder
(d) to increase cost of Russian lives
(e) to pay back Germany for being the b’s who started it all ..let the Red Army deal to them
(f) because of supply chain extension or other practical difficulties
(g) something else

cheers D

My tuppence on the above, for what it is worth. Orthodoxy has it (and as I have argued before, orthodoxy is only there to be challenged, at least for its motivation if not its fact) that individual generals (Patton, Montgomery) favoured a single ‘dagger thrust’ into Germany – each wanting to be the one to do it. Eisenhower meanwhile, favoured a single, slower moving ‘broad front’. Whatever the motivation for this, a) through e) the fact was that supply chain was near breaking point by September 1944 for both northern and southern forces. There were not enough resources to supply both racing armies – Patton got himself into such a squeeze he had to be bailed out by RAF ground attack forces while Montgomery ground to a halt from lack of fuel as the Germans regrouped in the Netherlands only weeks after defences there had fallen to pieces.

If a) and indeed b) are a factor in the closing months of the war it is probably because of the loss of life in the Arnhem adventure, and the discovery that German defences were a lot stronger than anyone thought they were at the time.

Basing my answers again on Cornelius Ryan, the suggestion that British and/or Commonwealth forces would have ‘gone at it harder’ than the Americans seems, on the face of it, unlikely; on the ground the feeling seemed to be that American forces were keener to get the job done whatever the cost, while the British field commanders made decisions like refusing to advance XXX Corps tanks up the single, raised road to Arnhem without infantry support, postponing the second and third wave of airborne forces and supplies because of weather conditions etc.

Alternatively, it seemed like the British command was far more willing to take risks than the American. The Arnhem operation was undoubtedly a high risk strategy by general Browning and FM (as he was then) Monty, very much an all-or-nothing gamble based on the hope more than the knowledge of low resistance – whatever the suggestions at the time and afterwards, both men must have entertained the possibility that the scheme would end in massacre. It was British forces after all that had the most dangerous and isolated task of seizing Arnhem itself while the Polish regiment was well and truly thrown to the wolves. Ike, meanwhile was initially highly opposed to such strategies, continuing to favour his broad front – and only allowed himself to be seduced by the idea of the biggest airborne operation in history.

I would suggest then that slow moving towards Berlin at the end of the war was probably mostly down to c) coming from Eisenhower alone, for political reasons because he was the one who had to think of the reaction to the loss of American lives – and possibly a determination to keep dissenting generals in check. I find e) unlikely given the experiences in the Pacific where MacArthur is said to have kept Commonwealth forces out of the conquest of the Pacific so it could be regarded as an American victory, instead finding less important and more dangerous missions for UK/Aus/NZ forces in the region – it was simply that Ike had more eye on the body bag count after Arnhem.

A suggestion for g), letting the little revisionist sitting on my left shoulder get the better of me, might be that US forces were giving the Soviets more to do in Europe instead of letting them get a free hand to invade Japan before the Americans got there (with a large helping of d) not doing any harm either). However, I have absolutely no basis for this other than the recent-ish suggestions that dropping The Bomb on Japan was to pre-empt a Soviet invasion and with one eye on postwar politics in the Pacific. I have not read any legitimate texts about this theatre so what I have offered is populist-revisionist surmising which doesn’t even warrant the title of a theory.

A tip off, I have it on good authority that Peter Jackson is going to make the ‘Dark Materials’ Trilogy by Philip Pullman next year.
I think that this series of books knocks Harry Potter off it’s pedestal.
Filming to be in Oxford and New Zealand, script being written at the moment, filming due to start in August, my apologies if I’ve been given the wrong information, but I think thats it’s a wonderful series of books and have got very excited at the prospect of them being filmed, can’t wait.
Sorry, not knocking Harry Potter, but I do think that these are superior stories, and very complex, it will take up a great amount of Mr Jacksons time to make this.

I thought that these were already in pre-production and I hadn’t heard Jackson’s name in connection with them. I could be wrong though. The last I heard was that the story was being rewritten to remove any implied criticism of religion and God, which suggestion many found to be ludicrous and would have ruined the story. If Jackson is involved I have a better feeling about it.

Lies, damn lies and statistics!!!! You only need to look at the discussion of the Sea Vixen performance in the thread on Simon’s Sircus to realise that published data is not always what it purports to be. I’ve seen two different tables of data for the relative performance of the Hurricane Mk1, Spitfire Mk1 and Messerschmitt 109E recently which disagreed in almost every detail. One said the Bf109E could turn inside a Hurricane and Spitfire at 10,000ft and 300mph. The other suggested that the turn of a Bf109E was almost double the radius of the Hurricane!

If you can find the RAE data for British aircraft, you will be well on the way. Also there is some useful comparison of British aircraft and captured German aircraft. This is available on the web at least in the case of the Fw190A in comparison with the Spitfire MkVc, MkIX and Mk XIV.

There is a vast amount of information out there but check, check and check again the source of anything you come by.

If we compare the XN923 and Doc Sterlings Posts, we come up with another problem – what exactly do we mean by revisionism? I’m quite sure that the people with accademic historical training would veer towards XN923’s view but can’t help thinking that the general public would be more in tune with Doc Sterling (appologies Doc if you are an accademic).

Of course both deffinitions/views are valid and there in lies the rub, if at one point in time a word can be understood in two such divergent ways, then how does our understanding of words used by writers of primary source diverge from the authors?

I think this means that over time the way a primary source is viewed may well change, perhaps in the subtlest of ways, purely because the conotations of the words use evolve. A historical revision may therefore well end up being invalid, due the the historian not fully understanding what a sources writer really meant. This is scarey, as it could call into question all historical research – a good example of this would be a historian in 100 years time reading an article in which Michael Jackson is discribed as ‘Bad’ or ‘Wicked’ words that today can already mean the exact opposite of what they meant 50 years ago.

Tricky things, words. A character in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes calls them ‘the great foes of reality’. He has a point.

This is part of the increasing (in my view) tendency of popular culture to appropriate and subvert academic or artistic movements and terms. Look at ‘minimalism’ – once it meant Gorecki, now it means only having one chair in your living room. People say ‘minimalist’ when they mean ‘minimal’.

I’ve no doubt that the generally accepted meaning of ‘revisionism’ is as Doc puts it, the deliberatate subversion of accepted facts. Quite where this leaves us in terms of interpreting primary sources, I’ve no idea!