Jump to content

Tony Evans

Banned
  • Posts

    771
  • Joined

  • Last visited

About Tony Evans

  • Birthday 11/09/1964

Contact Methods

  • Website URL
    http://

Profile Information

  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Saint George, UT
  • Interests
    History, Science Fiction, Cinema

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

Tony Evans's Achievements

Crew

Crew (2/3)

0

Reputation

  1. Turn right and capture the Ruhr. Kind of hard to see how it could have been successful, given the Germans being essentially on their side of the river, close to their logistics base, with the Allies trying to support themselves on the enemy side, hundreds of miles from theirs.
  2. Except that the Germans weren't at the end of their logistics tether, and didn't necessarily have to take all of their various objectives immediately in order to succeed. The Germans in fact took two months to secure Norway. On the level of principle? How about sound operational principles, like recognizing that every bridge objective had to be secured for the operation to be worthwhile. And, planning in accordance with those principles, assigning troops to actually try to secure those bridges before the Germans could do something about it. Of course, if all of the other objectives that were assigned were judged necessary to the success of the operation, either find ways to add the troops and transport needed to secure the primary objectives within an hour of the initial landing. Or Sacrifice some of the other objectives in order to secure the primary ones. Or recognize that the perceived opportunity was beyond the available resources, and refuse to make the grand gesture in hopes of getting unreasonably and unrealistically lucky.
  3. What I meant was that manuals for paintable military equipment generally include instructions for painting, and that those manuals are supposed to be available at whatever echelon that maintenance is accomplished.
  4. Okay, I'll bite -- doesn't it say in the maintenance manual where the paint is supposed to go, and where it isn't?
  5. My question would be how one can enjoy a non-fiction book that isn't good history?
  6. More practically, at 500 m, firing at zero superelevation would cause a miss short by a considerable distance. Firing at a superelevation for 500 m was probably good enough out to 700 or so meters, if you're just trying to hit somewhere on an enemy vehicle 6-8 feet tall. But if you're trying to hit a specific spot, or at longer ranges -- still well within the effective range -- one would have to be able to set a more precise superelevation. BTW, the range drum does show up in the video, at 1:30 to 1:45. It's been painted over with the same paint as the rest of the gun.
  7. It was brought to my attention: While that was not my intention, in any way, its obvious I did not think things through. I have no excuse. Bill, please accept my complete and unconditional apology. I'm sorry. I have also removed the offending review from Amazon.
  8. You have to understand, Phil, that Bill isn't looking for answers. He started with the answers. He is, I think, trying to rearrange the questions fit those answers.
  9. Absolutely correct, as far as the internal logic runs. However, there comes a time when one has to recognize that resources and opportunities don't match up. The opportunity with Market Garden could only be taken if all of the bridges could be seized and held within the first few hours. Let's set aside the fact that Germans didn't demolish the bridges historically -- they easily could have, and that had to be a planning consideration. If the Allies couldn't put enough force on the ground to take the bridges quickly and meet all of the other operational requirements, the operation wasn't an acceptable risk. The only way the risk could be accepted was if the Allies were willing to lose an airborne division (at some nexus in the operational area, not necessarily at Arnhem, though that was always the most likely place) and take heavy casualties in the others, on the off chance that: The Germans would somehow not manage to demolish the river crossings at either the Waal or Rhine (unreasonable to hope for), Sufficient logistics routes could be captured and quickly put into operation so that the Waal and Rhine crossings were the only choke points (possible, but only by expanding the operation to take in a lot more of the road network in Southern Holland), and Supposing that the contemplated successor operations could be supported over that logistics network (Van Creveld doesn't think so, and I agree with that assessment).Or the Allies could convince themselves -- which they did do -- that they were facing a collapsing army unable to turn and fight, and equally unable to blow bridges behind itself as it ran. It just doesn't seem that the operation could possibly have worked more than it did, and it seems more likely that with all of their failures and frustrations, the Allies actually wound up with a pretty reasonable outcome, given the real opportunities in hand. Varsity was much better prepared for, the airborne element was landed within ten miles of friendly troops crossing the Rhine, and they were landed in much denser clusters. This was a case of the resources available being matched to the opportunity. The plan had its flaws. But the killer was a concept of operations that simply couldn't be accomplished with the troops and support available.
  10. I'm sorry -- when did I ever claim to be an expert? Please don't confuse Bill's ranting about my motives and objectives with my actual motives and objectives. I claim absolutely no bonafides. Just like everyone else, I'm simply offering my opinion. Also, let's not confuse reasoned disagreement with a "thin understanding". I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said by many people you would probably call "recognized expert". I'm certainly not the first one to point out that the operation conducted on the basis of poor intelligence analysis and wishful thinking. I'm certainly not the first person to recognize that the airborne portion of the operation was too thin on the ground for all of the objectives assigned to be secured before the Germans could do something about it. I'm certainly not the first person to suggest that the operation was flawed from the start in its reliance on the Germans somehow missing their chance to destroy just one pair of road and railroad bridges. It doesn't take bonafides to learn and understand those things, and integrate them into an opinion that the operation was fundamentally mistaken in its foundation.
  11. There were a lot of ways in which the operation failed simply because the Allies couldn't help themselves around obstacles imposed by chance. Or, to put it another way, the Allies failed to make a robust enough effort to withstand such exigencies. I understand the desire to wish upon the Allies better leadership and better "application". The problem is that if we could wish all of that on the Allies, we need only wish one single better choice on the Germans to make the whole thing fall apart -- the prudent and timely destruction of the Nijmegen bridges (or the Arnhem road bridge; either would have done). If the Allies could be argued to help themselves to so much more, some of it questionably within their grasp, certainly the Germans could be argued to help themselves to so little, unquestionably within their power. To reasonably mitigate that one capital risk, the Allies would have had to land many more troops a lot closer to the bridges, in order to take them quickly and decisively at the beginning of the operation. But I think we all know that that was simply not within the capability of the 1st Airborne Army, no matter how well led, given all of the other responsibilities assigned that formation. Instead the Allies trusted to luck that the Germans would miss on that most obvious of expedients while the British airborne worked its way to the Arnhem bridge and the US Airborne secured the Groesbeek heights (freeing up more than the single battalion that was actually earmarked for capturing the bridge). This is illustrative of the level of unreality that permeated the entire operational concept. The operation's overall success was totally dependent on good luck, and a lot of it. That was the kind of luck that the Allies had no reason to believe in at that point in the war, certainly not when dealing with the Germans in the field. Yet they talked themselves into believing in it.
  12. Wow...really? You're relying on the good opinion of men whom you have told what they want to believe about themselves and their service? That's about as meaningful as every other piece of alleged history that has done the same thing. Here's a news flash, Bill, just because I don't agree that you or other historians have proven something doesn't mean I haven't read your book. It just means that I wasn't impressed by it. I'm sure you believe that. Too bad its self-congratulatory nonsense. When "[P]roperly" reading a book consists only of agreeing with the author in every respect, we kind of know what's going on, don't we? I happened to read your book during my enforced absence, Bill. I decided that there was only one real place to respond to it, since I had no guarantee that I would ever return to participate here. And I didn't do a "hatchet job" on you, Bill. I wrote what I think fellow readers need to know to decide whether or not to purchase the book. If that impugns your professional reputation, how much of a reputation is it, really? Also, since I've been back, that review was posted here, by another person. Obviously you have read it, since you seem to know something about what it says. I would post it here, right now, but I am sure that you would accuse me of spitefully and enviously piling on. If you give me your leave, I will copy it over. Or you can do so yourself. You know where to find it, and I'm certainly not afraid of what it says. Finally, Bill, in the interest of avoiding derailing another thread, let's understand once and for all that the motivations you ascribe to me may have meaning in your world, but in mine they're complete, worthless shit. I'm totally uninterested in your life or your perceived reputation. I just don't agree with what you have to say.
  13. I think this answer, though grounded in reality, just isn't satisfactory to a lot of people. They need to make up their own realities, in which the 1st Airborne and the entire operation would have succeeded, if just given the good ol' college try. IOW, the argument is really about the sentiments of the dissatisfied, nothing else.
×
×
  • Create New...