Der zweite Weltkrieg 1939- 1941

by Raymond Cartier

472 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1967

Reviews

[m4ltose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three lessons for everyday life I learned from worming through this brick of a book:

1.Risk, uncertainty and survivorship bias. A lot of Germany’s success early in the war can apparently be traced back to a) technological superiority and b) Hitler’s megalomaniac willingness to push the former past it’s perceived limits. Send tanks and aircraft hundreds of miles into France, facing the risk of failing supply lines, fuel shortage and open flanks? Yeah sure. From a general’s point of view at the time? Brick-headed stupid. The high risk of losing some of your most valuable pieces of equipment to the enemy, in circumstances where they could very likely be analyzed and copied… that’s just no gamble you should take. But it worked, and Nazi propaganda hailed their Führer as a visionary, a tactical genius. In reality, oh boy was that success lucky in many cases and, most of all, down to the hard work of many more down the command chain. The thing is: There were, far as I know, no cases to compare this new kind of warfare to – so only this success counted. In experiments, this logical error is called survivorship bias – asking only those who passed a test about its difficulty will make you think it was way easier than it really was. That’s why only looking at established, successful people and projects does not teach you how to be successful. Look at the failures, and if you can’t find any – expect whatever you are trying to achieve to be much harder than you think.

2. From large, systemical faults being overlooked because many in charge were “too familiar” with their systems to see the forest for the trees, to the very personal faults and mistakes of some key figures, to downright happenings of chance – this book illustrates wonderfully the weird ways of history / life. An event as world-changing as the failure of Operation Barbarossa might’ve been avoided, had 2-3 more people raised their hands against Hitler’s faulty plan one lazy afternoon, when a general finally dared speak up about the terrible state of the eastern front and a vote was taken. The short-sightedness of a handful of brown-nosing Yes Men opened the gates for a turning point in the war, which would destroy all they were so eagerly chasing.

3. Elaborating on this, all our concepts of reality are so vulnerable to drifting into mere illusion over time. During Barbarossa, the German leadership sat far from the frontlines. Hitler’s hands-on experience from France slowly faded – he didn’t bother much to learn about Russian terrain, or how his soldiers kept up. He denied sending winter clothes for way too long, to prevent the rumor spreading that he couldn’t take Moscow before the winter started. Meanwhile, his soldiers had to plunder red army corpses for their fur boots. The dictator of one of the, at the time, wealthiest and most powerful nations on earth got so detached in his bubble because of misinformation. Well, probably because of his deteriorating mental state as well, but still! The bottom line being, those among us who seem the most resilient against false information, are just as, if not even more susceptible to it. Power doesn’t necessarily make you more informed or better equipped. Often, it just makes people tell you what you want to hear. I can think of quite a few powerful people in our age who seem to have fallen into the same trap.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk and sorry for the clickbait headline. Now, a more general review:

520 pages deep into Raymond Cartier’s standard reference book series on WW2 and I never thought I’d make it this far. Some pages drag you along through paragraphs of “Division X goes to village Y. General Whoknows was commanding this and that part of the army at that point. The assault on Y was very successful.” – just bland, dry listing of facts without any discussion of the personalities and circumstances involved, which determined success, or failure. At those points, Cartier seems like a half-asleep history professor.

At others though, he brings history to life as if it were present day. Through hindsight bias, much of the Second World War seems so predictable: The high-technology Wehrmacht vs. the backwardly French generals? Obviously, France had to fall! The unprepared Germans vs. the cruel Russian winter? Obviously, Barbarossa had to fail!

Not with Cartier. He brings up all the uncertainties, misunderstandings and disagreements of that time and paints such a realistic picture of many key moments in the war (like Operation Barbarossa and Case Yellow), you really come to wonder how these current times we live in will be remembered once it’s all played out and easy to filter by “most relevant.”

[Victoria Schreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Drei sehr gute Bücher zum 2. Weltkrieg.

Die Bücher illustrieren hauptsächlich die eigentlichen Kriegsgeschehen während des Kriegs, was sehr interessant ist, da diese Seite des Krieges in vielen Büchern und auch im Geschichtsunterricht oft hinter den sehr wichtigen sozial-kulturellen Themen zurücksteht. Die zusätzliche Ausstattung durch zahlreiche Bilde und Karten hilft dem Leser das beschriebene Geschehen besser zu verstehen.