User Profile

The distractibility fosters chaos. You decide to clean your room, which, typically, looks like a tornado has just passed through. You pick a book off the floor and move to replace it on the shelf. As you do so, you notice that two volumes of poetry by William Carlos Williams are not stacked side by side. Forgetting the debris on the floor, you lift one of the volumes to place it beside its companion. Turning a page, you begin to read a poem. The poem has a classical reference in it, which prompts you to consult your guide to Greek mythology; now you are lost because one reference leads to another. An hour later, your interest in classical mythology exhausted for the moment, you return to your intended task. You are hunting for the missing half of a pair of socks that has gone on furlough, perhaps permanently, when another item of clothing on the floor reminds you that you have laundry to wash before the evening. As you head downstairs, laundry hamper in arm, the telephone rings. Your plan to create order in your room is now doomed.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté

The blitzkrieg method was never again successfully used. The scale and the shape of northern France had provided the perfect board for this exciting game. [..] And yet before we declare PLAN YELLOW to be the only successful blitzkrieg, it is worth looking at the declared objectives of that offensive. One stated aim was to engage and defeat the strongest possible part of the Allied armies. Hitler had specifically ordered the annihilation of the BEF and that it should be prevented from escaping across the Channel. The Germans had failed in that endeavour. It was to prove a fatal flaw.

— Blitzkrieg by Len Deighton (Page 327)

On Saturday, 25 May 1940, news reached Gort near Lille that the Germans had captured Calais as well as Boulogne. Reports were arriving at his room in the chateau at Prémesques that the Belgian Army was about to capitulate. The Germans had split the Belgian force and left it isolated from the British, who they must have heard had been evacuating men by sea for several days. For Gort, the Belgian capitulation would mean a 20-mile gap opening up on his left flank. Now came the most important moment in Gort’s career. At about six o’clock in the evening of 25 May, after sitting alone for a long time, he went next door to the office of his chief of staff, General Henry Pownall. Without preliminary discussion, he ordered him to move two British divisions from the south and ‘send them over to Brookie [General Alan Brooke] on the left’. There is no doubt that this decision, which went against his orders from the French, and from London, too, had come after much heart-searching. One of the men who knew him, Major General Sir Edward Spears, described Gort as ‘a simple, straightforward, but not very clever man’ and went on to say he was an ‘overdisciplined soldier who felt above all else that orders must be obeyed’

What Gort called a ‘hunch’ had come within an hour of a gap opening in the Belgian front line. Now it would be a matter of waiting to see whether the Germans could race through it before Gort’s two divisions could get there to plug the hole. For the French, Gort’s decision meant the end of any last hope for a counter-attack southward. For the BEF, it meant a chance of a fighting withdrawal. For Gort, it meant the end of his military aspirations – he would never again command an army in the field.

[..]

Yet if one contemplates what the British government might have been forced by public pressure to do, in coming to terms with a Hitler holding captive a quarter of a million British soldiers, then Gort’s decision was a turning point in the war.

— Blitzkrieg by Len Deighton (Page 306 - 308)

In the early months of 1938, as the US trade negotiations rumbled on, Chamberlain also tried to improve Anglo-Irish relations. Here too, Chamberlain was willing to offer up concessions in the hope of an improvement in atmosphere. Controversially, this included ceding control of the ‘treaty ports’ – three harbours on the western Irish coast from which naval power could be projected far out into the Atlantic, which had been retained by the British after 1921. Since, realistically, they could not have been defended against a hostile hinterland in time of war, Chamberlain thought they were better returned to Irish hands in the hope of friendship in the future. When the prime minister managed to settle the deal himself in direct talks with the Irish taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, it confirmed his faith in the power of personal negotiation.

— Britain's War: Into Battle by Daniel Todman (Britain's War, #1)

‘This is a service, not a trapeze act,’ he used to tell the novices at Beaconsfield. ‘We’re not here for the applause.’

— The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth

Easterhouse’s swindle was just a variation of the Fourth Cash Register scam, and would only be uncovered by the full annual Ministry audit the following spring. The fraud is based on the tale of the American bar-owner who, though his bar was always full, became convinced his take was 25 per cent less than it ought to be. He hired the best private detective, who took the room above the bar, bored a hole in the floor, and spent a week on his belly watching the bar below. Finally he reported: ‘I’m sorry to have to say this, but your bar staff are honest people. Every dollar and dime that crosses that bar-top goes into one of your four cash registers.’ ‘What do you mean – four?’ asked the bar-owner. ‘I only installed three.’

— The negotiator by Frederick Forsyth

Soon after the fighting at Arras, a story circulated that Rommel had saved the day by using 8.8 cm anti-aircraft guns in the antitank role for the first time ever. How this story gained currency is hard to imagine, for obviously the guns would have been virtually useless against armour unless they had already been supplied with Panzergranate (armour-piercing shells).

[...]

As early as the 1938–1939 Catalonian offensive in Spain’s civil war, the 8.8 cm guns had been towed into action behind the tanks, and it was estimated that over 90 per cent of their rounds were used against ground targets.

— Blitzkrieg by Len Deighton (Page 299 - 300)

by the following day – 11 May – Gamelin began to realize that here, in the region of the Ardennes, was the Schwerpunkt of the German assault. Even so, the French command did not panic. They calculated the German advance in terms of French logistic achievement. The Germans would have to halt at the river Meuse. There they would regroup, bring up the artillery, and prepare for the river crossing. Gamelin ordered eleven French divisions to move to aid the threatened sector. He gave them top railway priority. It meant that the first elements of French support would arrive at the Meuse on 14 May, the last of them by 21 May. But by 13 May, the invaders, using road transport, were already at the Meuse and preparing to cross.

— Blitzkrieg by Len Deighton

In ideal weather Guderian’s highly trained armoured force used equipment designed to the scale of Western Europe. Never again in the Second World War were such factors to provide another chance for blitzkrieg.

— Blitzkrieg by Len Deighton (Page 214)

Generaloberst Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, German army group commander in both the Polish and Western campaigns, was one of the world’s foremost authorities on defensive warfare. In 1936 he wrote an article and later a book on the subject (Die Abwehr). ‘Operative defence’, he wrote, ‘must meet the threat of offensive by using the same weapons and the same means.’ It echoed what Colonel de Gaulle had already written in his book, but the French Army would not believe it.

— Blitzkrieg by Len Deighton (Page 210)

Archibald Wavell, considered one of the finest of Britain’s generals, stressed the importance of such planning in a lecture on generalship in 1939. He said that strategy and tactics could be apprehended in a very short time by any reasonable human intelligence. But it was the principles and practice of military movement and administration – the ‘logistics’ of war – that was of prime importance. He went on: ‘I should like you always to bear in mind when you study military history or military events the importance of this administrative factor, because it is where most critics and many generals go wrong.’

— Blitzkrieg by Len Deighton (Page 190)

It is interesting in this connection to notice that, according to Liddell Hart, both German and British senior commanders agreed that German soldiers were more individualistic than their opponents. General von Blumentritt went so far as to complain of this, saying the Germans’ rank and file had too many ideas of their own and were not sufficiently obedient. However surprising this might be to British readers, studies of the desert fighting supported the contention that the German soldiers were better able to improvise in emergencies than their British opponents. Another finding was that British units commonly ceased fighting after losing all their officers, but Germans remained effectively organized right down to the last few NCOs.

— Blitzkrieg by Len Deighton (Page 182)

Emphasis has already been given to the vital role that radio played in the technique of the blitzkrieg, but this importance was due entirely to the way in which German commanders were prepared to change plans minute by minute in the face of enemy opposition. It is extremely doubtful if such radio contact would have made much difference to the French or the British Army, which was trained to fight systematic set-piece battles.

— Blitzkrieg by Len Deighton (Page 182)

It remains unwise to ban the sale of armaments to nations whose policies one wishes to change; they will need spare parts, repairs, and replacements and will have to bargain for them.

— Blitzkrieg by Len Deighton (Page 139)

There was no teleprinter communication between the HQs and the army commanders. At Gamelin’s HQ there was not even a radio. Gamelin’s usual way of communicating with Georges was to go to him by car. Questioned about the lack of radio, Gamelin said it might have revealed the location of his HQ. Questioned about the speed with which he could get orders to the front, Gamelin said that it generally took forty-eight hours.

— Blitzkrieg by Len Deighton (Page 116)