lurker's comment:
Hey, Germany finally won against Russia?! Good job, Rick! Looks like the extra workers (plus using radar...) really makes a difference.
Aksully: I have another "reading tip" for you. (May be interesting for you as well, Eric?!)
"Heinz Guderian: Memories of a Soldier". (There is an English translation available with the stupid title "Heinz Guderian: Panzer Leader".)
In parts it is a bit technical, like "on May 14th, 3rd Panzerdivision moved from A to B", which is of interest probably only to students of military tactics, but there are also very interesting chapters with high level thoughts (his theories about tank warfare, his explanation of how it was possible that the combined forces of France & England, which outnumbered the German forces by 2 to 1, were overrun in just a few weeks in May '40, his views on Operation Walküre (the
20th July Plot, etc.), and there are his personal accounts of how it was at the front, the rain and mud in spring & fall, the dust in the summer and meters of snow and -30 centigrade in the winter, which made the eastern front hell in all 4 seasons...
When reading it, you need to keep in mind that it is mostly a "military" book, ignoring the "human" side, i.e. the great sufferings and crimes of that war.
Here an excerpt of his assessment prior to the French campaign:
"A profound study of the First World War had given me considerable insight into the psychology of the combatants. I already, from personal experience, knew a considerable amount about our own army. I had also formed certain opinions about our western adversaries which the events of 1940 were to prove correct. Despite the tank weapons to which our enemies owed in large measure their 1918 victory, they were preoccupied with the concepts of positional warfare.
France possessed the strongest land army in Western Europe. France possessed the numerically strongest tank force in Western Europe. The combined Anglo-French forces in the West in May 1940 disposed of some 4000 armored vehicles; the German Army at that time had 2800, including armored reconnaissance cars, and when the attack was launched, only 2200 of these were available for the operation. We thus faced superiority in numbers, to which was added the fact that the French tanks were superior to the German ones both in armor and in gun-caliber, though admittedly inferior in control facilities and in speed. Despite possessing the strongest forces for mobile warfare, the French had also built the strongest line of fortifications in the world, the Maginot Line. Why was the money spent on the construction of those fortifications not used for the modernization and strengthening of France's mobile forces? The proposals of de Gaulle, Daladier and others along these lines had been ignored. From this it must be concluded that the highest French leadership either would not or could not grasp the significance of the tank in mobile warfare. In any case all the manoeuvres and large-scale exercises of which I heard, led to the conclusion that the French command wanted its troops to be trained in such a way that careful movement and planned measures for attack of for defence could be based on definite, pre-arranged circumstances. They wanted a complete picture of the enemy's order of battle and intentions before deciding on any undertaking.
...
So far as the French were concerned, the German leadership could safely rely on the defence of France being systematically based on fortifications and carried out according to a rigid doctrine: this doctrine was the result of the lessons that the French had learned from the First World War, their experience of positional warfare, of the high value they attached to fire power, and of their underestimation of movement."
And then, during the actual campaign, once the first French lines were broken through, they simply kept moving behind enemy lines as fast as their tanks would go, the French command never knew where they actually were at a given point of time and consequently was never able to even start its "carefully planned counter-measures": whenever the French command had made up their mind on what might be done now, the German tanks were already somewhere else and the situation was completely changed, requiring other "carefully planned counter-measures"...
So basically one half of the French forces was stuck in the Maginot Line and could only watch the events evolve from afar, while the "mobile" half of the French forces was paralyzed by its inability to make up their mind of what to do now... until their fuel and supply bases were overrun...