गोडाऊनच अमिताभच्या अंगावर पडले.....When Totalitarianism Married 20th Century Industrial Technology

#दुसरेमहायुद्ध
 
ऐंशीवर्षापूर्वी, आज, सप्टेंबर १ १९३९ ला दुसरे महायुद्ध सुरु झाले असे बऱ्याच प्रमाणात मानले जाते 

व्हिक्टर डेव्हिस  हॅन्सन (Victor Davis  Hanson) यांचे 'The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won' हे २०१७साली प्रसिद्ध झालेले पुस्तक एप्रिल २०१८मध्ये वाचताना  जर्मन लीडरशिपची कीव येते....

अशी भावना माझ्या मनात दुसऱ्या महायुद्धावरचे पुस्तक वाचताना पहिल्यांदा निर्माण झाली ....

कुठेतरी जर्मन लोकांच्या धडाडी बद्दल केंव्हातरी कौतुक पण वाटून गेले आहे.... त्याची जागा आता फक्त एक अत्यंत मूर्ख, क्रूर आणि बालिश नेतृत्व (आणि चरसी - आठवा Norman Ohler यांचे २०१५चे पुस्तक "Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany") या भावनेने घेतली आहे.....

जर्मनी , इटली , जपान यांना पहिल्या दिवसापासून युद्ध जिंकणे अशक्य होते ....

'दिवार' मधल्या अमिताभ बच्चनचा आव आणून त्यांनी गोडाऊनची किल्ली टाकून दिली खरी ... पण सहा वर्षात त्यांचा चुराडा झाला... किल्लीने गोडाऊन उघडणे लांब राहिले, गोडाऊनच अमिताभच्या अंगावर पडले....

सौजन्य : कॉपीराईट होल्डर्स 

 पुस्तकातील statistics पहा ....The Axis losers killed or starved to death about 80 percent of all those who died during the war.... म्हणजे पराभूतांनी मृतांतील ८०%लोक मारले!

हे समाज - जर्मनी , इटली , जपान- अजूनही कुठेतरी स्वत:बद्दल गैरसमज बाळगून आहेत का?

हॅन्सन यांच्या पुस्तकाचे दुसरे एक वैशिष्ट्य ते नेहमी Peloponnesian war पासून सगळ्या युद्धांची उदाहरणे देतात .... हे सांगायला की माणूस काहीच बदलला नाहीये .... दुर्दैवाने महाभारत आणि भारत भूमीवरील इतर युद्धे या पुस्तकात नाहीत....

त्या पुस्तकातील उतारे... भारताचा उल्लेख पहा (असं वाटत की जर्मनी, जपान ला एकट्या भारताला हरवण सुद्धा अशक्य होत) :

"Some sixty million people died in World War II.

On average, twenty-seven thousand people perished on each day between the invasion of Poland (September 1, 1939) and the formal surrender of Japan (September 2, 1945)—bombed, shot, stabbed, blown apart, incinerated, gassed, starved, or infected. The Axis losers killed or starved to death about 80 percent of all those who died during the war. The Allied victors largely killed Axis soldiers; the defeated Axis, mostly civilians... 

.... Starting wars is far easier than ending them. Since the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) between Athens and Sparta and their allies, winning—and finishing—a war was predicated on finding ways to end an enemy’s ability to fight, whether materially or psychologically. The Axis and the Allies had radically different ideas of how the wars of World War II would eventually conclude—with the Allies sharing a far better historical appreciation of the formulas that always put a final end to conflicts. When World War II broke out in 1939, Germany did not have a serious plan for defeating any of those enemies, present or future, that were positioned well beyond its own borders. Unlike its more distant adversaries, the Third Reich had neither an adequate blue-water navy nor a strategic bombing fleet, anchored by escort fighters and heavy bombers of four engines whose extended ranges and payloads might make vulnerable the homelands of any new enemies on the horizon. Hitler did not seem to grasp that the four most populous countries or territories in the world—China, India, the Soviet Union, and the United States—were either fighting against the Axis or opposed to its agendas. Never before or since had all these peoples (well over one billion total) fought at once and on the same side."

“Hitler, for all his talk of Aryan science, could not even brag that German researchers and industry had given him superior weapons on the eve of war. The Messerschmitt Bf 109 was not markedly better than the British Supermarine Spitfire fighter. In 1939, the French Char B1 tank was better armed and armored than its German Mark I, II, and III counterparts; so was the lighter but reliable French Somua S35 (over 400 produced). Hitler had little idea that the Soviet Union had vastly more planes, tanks, and divisions than he did—and soon of a quality equal to or better than the Wehrmacht’s."

"World War II was largely a deliberate effort to kill civilians, mostly on the part of the Axis powers. Most of the fatalities were not soldiers: perhaps 70–80 percent of the commonly cited sixty million who died were civilians. Noncombatants perished mostly due to five causes: (1) the Nazi-orchestrated Holocaust and related organized killing of civilians and prisoners in Eastern occupied territories and the Soviet Union, as well as Japanese barbarity in China; (2) the widespread use of air power (especially incendiary bombing) to attack cities and industries; (3) the famines that ensued from brutal occupations, mostly by the Axis powers; (4) the vast migrations and transfers of populations, mostly in Prussia, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Manchuria; and (5) the idea prevalent in both totalitarian and democratic governments that the people of enemy nations were synonymous with their military and thus were fair game through collective punishments."

".... From the German performance in the Spanish Civil War to its annexation of Austria and its incorporation of the Sudetenland, the consequences of blitzkrieg were too often vastly exaggerated and falsely equated with inherent military superiority—a fact true even later of the so-so operations of the German military in Poland and Norway at the beginning of the war itself.
Most overly impressed observers ignored the fact that such lightning-fast German attacks were hardly proof of sustained capability. They were no way to wage a long war of attrition and exhaustion against comparable enemies, especially fighting those with limitless industrial potential across long distances, in inclement weather, and on difficult terrain. Few pondered what would follow once Germany ran out of easy border enemies or guessed that it would predictably have to send Panzers across the seas or slog in the mud of the steppes. That proved an impossible task for a nation whose forces relied on literal horsepower and had little domestic oil, no real long-range bombing capability or blue-water navy, and a strategically incoherent leadership. German blitzkrieg would never cross the English Channel. It would die a logical if not overdue death at Stalingrad in the late autumn of 1942.
Of all the services of the Wehrmacht, the air force should have been the most critical. In fact, it was the most incompetently led, by a cohort of energetic but mentally unstable grandees—most prominently the World War I veterans Hermann Goering, Erhard Milch, and Ernst Udet. The Luftwaffe hierarchy carved out bureaucratic fiefdoms that impeded aircraft production. For too long it was wedded to a bankrupt idea that bombers should focus on dive bombing. Luftwaffe commanders had designed a superb ground-support air force that could facilitate surprise attacks against small vulnerable states, but had not committed to creating a truly independent strategic arm. In a larger sense, the early Nazi war machine, like that of the Japanese, had grown confident in the prewar era that new sources of military power—naval air power, strategic bombing, and massed tank formations in particular—if used in preemptory fashion, could wipe out enemy counterparts and thus end the war before it had started. Even the new weapons and strategies of the Allies would cede the battlefield to the technological superiority and strategic sophistication of the Axis powers, rendering the greater industrial potential of the larger states immaterial.
The Kriegsmarine—predicated on the idea that battleships might one day challenge Britain at sea (along with Admiral Doenitz’s insistence that U-boats could do what surface ships could not)—possessed not even a single aircraft carrier. It built just enough heavy surface ships to siphon off precious resources from the army and U-boat fleet, but not enough to pose a serious threat to the Royal Navy...."

"In sum, World War II was in some sense a traditional conflict that was fought over familiar military geography of the ages. It was sparked by age-old human passions such as fear, honor, and self-interest, and more specifically by the loss of classical deterrence that can be predicated on impressions and appearances almost as much as hard military power and resources. However, its twentieth-century incarnations of totalitarianism, whether German Nazism, Italian fascism, Soviet communism, or Japanese militarism, often made the aggressors erratic rather than circumspect and predictable. All the warring parties assumed that the end of the war would not be achieved through armistices and concessions but through the existential destruction of their enemies. Such resolution accepted not just that the Axis powers were skilled killers, but also that Germany and Japan in particular would likely concede defeat only when ruined, thus requiring their Allied opponents to embrace commensurate levels of violence. Totalitarianism, when married to twentieth-century industrial technology, logically led to general destruction on a global scale."