Wall.Street Journal...how shall we say...fucks up?
I'm not entirely sure why the Wall Street Journal let Frank Lavin, a pro-free trade insider, write a historical essay about the Battle of the Bulge, but you only need to read the headline and the first paragraph to see that they shouldn't have.
Maybe it's just click bait, but Lavin makes enough errors in the beginning of his essay to ensure that there is no way I'm going to give the capitalist vampires at the Wall Street Journal any money to read the rest of what is obviously an idiotic extension of the Western Myth that the Western Allies won the war.
First, Operation Walkure was not "Hitler's Last Gamble." By any non-idiotic reading of history, Operation Fruhlungserwachen was. In fact, the backbone of the counterattack in Hungary were units ripped away from the failed Bulge operation, transported to Austria and unleashed in a last ditch (and ill thought out) effort to snatch back oilfields of Southern Hungary (the last available to the Reich) and prop up its last remaining ally.
There is no historical doubt about the chronology. Anyone who says that the Battle of the Bulge was Hitler's Last Gamble is an idiot. If Mr Lavin wants to call me I'll tell him so to his face. Fruhlungserwachen was far more of a gamble and far more desperate of a gamble than the Bulge. It not only took the last offensive units out of the Bulge gamble, but even stripped the best units from the defenses in front of Berlin.
Second, the idea that losing the Bulge would have lost the war for the Allies is laughable. Literally laughable. Only an idiot could have made such an assertion. The Soviets were 150 miles away from Berlin and gearing up (at Eisenhower's request) to relieve the pressure on the Bulge. The Battle of the Bulge would not have played a major role in the end of the war, even if it had been successful as the Soviets would have rolled into Berlin and probably have faced the same units (or even weaker units as the Germans would have had to keep garrisons in Belgium.) The fact was that not only was the war decided by this point but the post-war boundaries had already been laid out and--even though the Soviets had advanced well in to Austria--both sides more or less abided by those boundaries after the war.
Frank Lavin proves once again why you shouldn't get your history from reactionaries. He's an idiot and so is the staff of the Wall Street Journal for what can either be described as an attempt at satire of Comedy Central's drunken history or a complete disdain for facts.
Maybe it's just click bait, but Lavin makes enough errors in the beginning of his essay to ensure that there is no way I'm going to give the capitalist vampires at the Wall Street Journal any money to read the rest of what is obviously an idiotic extension of the Western Myth that the Western Allies won the war.
First, Operation Walkure was not "Hitler's Last Gamble." By any non-idiotic reading of history, Operation Fruhlungserwachen was. In fact, the backbone of the counterattack in Hungary were units ripped away from the failed Bulge operation, transported to Austria and unleashed in a last ditch (and ill thought out) effort to snatch back oilfields of Southern Hungary (the last available to the Reich) and prop up its last remaining ally.
There is no historical doubt about the chronology. Anyone who says that the Battle of the Bulge was Hitler's Last Gamble is an idiot. If Mr Lavin wants to call me I'll tell him so to his face. Fruhlungserwachen was far more of a gamble and far more desperate of a gamble than the Bulge. It not only took the last offensive units out of the Bulge gamble, but even stripped the best units from the defenses in front of Berlin.
Second, the idea that losing the Bulge would have lost the war for the Allies is laughable. Literally laughable. Only an idiot could have made such an assertion. The Soviets were 150 miles away from Berlin and gearing up (at Eisenhower's request) to relieve the pressure on the Bulge. The Battle of the Bulge would not have played a major role in the end of the war, even if it had been successful as the Soviets would have rolled into Berlin and probably have faced the same units (or even weaker units as the Germans would have had to keep garrisons in Belgium.) The fact was that not only was the war decided by this point but the post-war boundaries had already been laid out and--even though the Soviets had advanced well in to Austria--both sides more or less abided by those boundaries after the war.
Frank Lavin proves once again why you shouldn't get your history from reactionaries. He's an idiot and so is the staff of the Wall Street Journal for what can either be described as an attempt at satire of Comedy Central's drunken history or a complete disdain for facts.
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