1944 - 1945: Military History of the Final Year of the War

By way of introduction, this weblog will have a distinct focus of discussion, and that will revolve around two topics. These two topics are military operations during the final year of the Second World War in Europe, and the organization and combat power of the military forces of the nations involved.

There is one unfortunate administrative note that I am compelled to discuss immediately. This weblog will in no way serve to advance the propaganda of radical political ideologies, whether they be or tend to be fascism or communism. This is not to say, for example, that topics like the death camps will be avoided. But, the political aspects of nazism and communism will only be touched upon as they relate to the two primary topics of the weblog. This only makes sense as discussion of the formation of units like the 1. RAD-Division would lack significant background if a reader was not aware of what the ReichsArbeitDienst had been. On a related note, I dislike what one could term "formation fan clubs". The end of the war in Europe saw hundreds of division-level units in action -- far too many to expend excessive bandwidth on only one of them or a class of them. In my view, an SS Panzer Division is only as interesting as a Guards Tank Corps, or, for that matter, the Guards Armoured Division.

On a more positive note, I hope to use this weblog to distribute some of the hard-won and often obscure knowledge that I've accumulated over years of study. In that sense, this weblog will be like many others in that the focus of the weblog will be driven by the owner. Discussion of the entries is welcome as long as it remains on topic and doesn't serve any of the varied ego trips that internet discussion seems to so strongly encourage. I hope it goes without saying that advertisements, attacks, political rants, and so forth, will be deleted as soon as I see them. In other words, my goal for this weblog is for it serve as a means of learning -- and that goal will unfortunately require me to exercise censorship at times.

I am no fan of ludicrous nationalism, and this leads me to a final administrative note. In the weblog, many geographical features and areas will be mentioned. In what I consider an instance of ludicrous national egotism, nations tend to have a habit of renaming cities, rivers, etc., in other countries to suit their taste. Thus, one may know a large city in southern Germany as Munich, Muenchen, or Monachiem, depending on one's nationality. My standard in this regard is to simply call the place as the locals call it -- thus, I will speak of the Rhein River and not the Rhine. In instances where I think this may cause confusion, I will add a local version of the name in parenthesis, i.e., Meuse (Maas). Finally, German Umlauts will be handled by the convention of adding an "e" after the vowel concerned. Slavic names will present other problems and I may have to develop other conventions for them.

Why host yet further discussion on the Second World War? After more than sixty years, has the war not been discussed as much as possible? In general terms, there has been a lot of discussion, writing, study, and so forth about this event. But after more than thirty years of studying the war, it has become apparent to me that the military operations that finally defeated the Germans are often ignored or covered only superficially. In some ways, western military history of the war seems to cover the Ardennes Offensive and the crossing of the Rhein as the closing events of the war, with everything else being basically a road march across Germany. Soviet military history is better in the sense that the final operations of the war are covered in as much detail as those operations that took place earlier -- but then, for the Soviets, the climax of the war was the Battle of Berlin in April 1945. Besides what I have judged as superficial coverage of the final operations, I have also come to realize that much understanding of why battles had the outcomes they did hinges on the organization of the opposing sides. Too often, standard histories throw around terms like armies, corps, and divisions, expecting the reader to have a detailed grasp of what these terms mean in terms of the militaries involved. Too often, stereotypes of armies pervade popular understanding of the war -- and I hope to address some of these and reveal a more factual, if more complex, mosaic of organization that made the units what they were.

With all that said, I hope to post another article soon. The topic I intend to address is the role and organization of certain of the German Festungen, probably with a lot of emphasis on Festung Posen, an example for which I have a fair amount of information.

Cheers!