Bomber boys - bbc one

[csThor]

Just a few things that reading brought to my mind ...

1.) The history is always written by the winners. If you don't believe that try to look up the history of the wars of Rome vs Carthago and how the Romans villainized their opponents to the point of razing their city and spreading salt after their ultimate victory. The historians don't know that much about Carthago and its interior workings - most of the sources are roman and therefor not really reliable. And the reason for all of that? An ordinary power struggle between two aspiring nations.

Now, with our modern perspective, the NS ideology was so far off the moral and humane scale that it's not funny today, either. They are the villains, from our perspective today, but if they'd have won the war (what a hair-raising thought, especially for me as a german) they would have been the shiny knights and their opponents would have been the villains (personal tip: read "Fatherland", a what-if novel about a german police investigator in the 1960s who has to solve a murder case in Berlin only to find the truth about the holocaust and dies to make sure the info gets out to the US).

2.) To criticize Rommel for not following orders to the letter is a bit too simple. He was totally in line with Prusso-German tradition in that sense and the prussian and german armies have bred that kind of officer (bold, aggressive, offensive-minded and hell-bent on independence) for centuries. Even a certain Hans-Joachim von Ziethen defied his king when Frederick ordered a charge and Ziethen declined because he felt the situation was not yet favorable:

"After the battle his Majesty may have my head but during battle he may allow me to make use of it."

In this Rommel was by no means alone. Guderian defied orders as early as 1940 when he received a stop order and declared the following advance of his Corps as "armed recon". Same goes for the withdrawal in front of Moscow in late 1941. Manstein objected to Hitler's orders more than once and finally got sacked because of it. History is full of such little (or larger) infractions but they're the result of the pecular way the prussian and then the german armies operated and trained their officers corps. (another personal tip: "The German Way of War" by Robert M. Citino)

As for his blatant disregard of the Italians there's a history and it is not limited to Rommel. Rommel's first meeting with the Italians was in 1918 and what he saw there gave him a thorough disregard of italian potential as warriors. It was an unfair impression, after all the country had never been a fan of participating in the war at all, but it stuck. Secondly, however, many german officers felt that the italians weren't persecuting the war with the vigor and resolution that was necessary. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the small circle of german liaison officers to Supermarina which in late 1940 wrote reports on italian capabilities that painted a depressing picture and argued - forcefully - for a german takeover of the war planning and execution. Rommel was the most visible of the officers who had contempt for the italians as warriors but he was by no means alone. To the italian's defense it must be said that they were saddled with a virtually non-existant armament industry, that the participation in the war was not popular again and that they did not have the germans' "warrior tradition" with all that it entailed.