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."
