147 - Tobruk: A second siege? - WW2 - June 20, 1942 

Another great video guys. With the start of the talk of the Manhattan project I just want to say that it will disappoint me so much if you guys take the opinion that the nuclear bombings of Japan are not what caused the ending of WW2 and saved millions of lives via their use. It has become popular in recent years for people on the internet to say that the USSR declaring war on Japan was actually what caused Japan to surrender when that is just completely incorrect and I will explain why and how you can confirm for yourself. Japan by the time the nukes hit them knew they had lost the war and were just fighting at that point to not have to agree to unconditional surrender. Japan thus knew that any terms they could get the Allies to agree other then unconditional surrender would include Japan losing all of it's colonies (Manchuria, Korea, ect). So in the months prior to the nukes hitting Japan, their military had been trying to move as many of their troops everywhere outside of Japan but particularly troops stationed in China back to the home islands. They were doing this in-order to make the Allies further believe that any invasion of the Japanese home islands would be so incredibly deadly to a even further level then they already thought such a invasion would be, that the Allies settle for ending the war with a peace deal other then unconditional surrender. By the time the USSR declared war on Japan the Japanese leadership had basically written off the remaining soldiers not within Japan. They were to be sent no more supplies or arms, food or anything. They just had to live and fight with what they already had or could gather. The troops within Japan at the point the USSR attacked were the top and only priority for Japan at that point. It got harder and harder for Japan to move troops anywhere as the war went on because of their low number of ships and fuel followed later by American submarine and airplanes hunting Japanese ships/transports (the US submarine force in WW2 was actually much more effective at sinking ships in WW2 then Germany was but that is rarely ever talked about). By the time the USSR attacked Japan the Japanese essentially had no capacity to move troops or supplies in any direction between Japan and mainland Asia or any other islands they still held. When you then read about the Japanese cabinet of their highest ranking leaders meetings after the 2nd nuclear bomb hit them, where they discuss and then vote on agreeing to unconditional surrender, they never even talk about the USSR having attacked them as a reason to now surrender. They already knew they were going to lose that territory within Asia under any peace deal they could get. So the Japanese goal in 1945 was to make a invasion of their home land so deadly that allied nations would be compelled to give them a better peace deal, giving them any other deal other then unconditional surrender by making the Allies fear the amount of further deaths they would encounter when invading the Japanese home islands. The Japanese showed how they would fight even harder and more savagely over their home islands during the US invasion of Okinawa. After the 2nd nuke hit Japan though the cabinet believed their nuclear scientists were wrong and that the US could have a continued supply of nukes that would be used to hit Japan over and over again and potentially kill the Emperor and just hit Japan over and over again from the air and never actually invade the Japanese home islands. The Emperor and the Imperial system were primary things the Japanese leaders wanted to keep and thus were preventing them from agreeing to unconditional surrender (the Imperial system was like a form of nobility that came with the Emperor that gave the Japanese leaders benefits that they also didn't want to lose). But if the Emperor was going to be killed by a nuke any way (that was a big concern of the leadership, they didn't know if the Emperor's bunker would withstand a nuke) that further gave some of the Imperial cabinet reason to now agree to surrendering (as well as the potential for the majority of their citizens to be killed, which always seemed to be a secondary concern to Japanese leaders of the time). After the first nuke hit Japan they didn't believe at first that a nuke had even hit them. But then after sending their scientists to Hiroshima the Japanese nuclear scientists told the Japanese leaders that it was in fact a nuke that blew up Hiroshima but that they believed it was the only nuke the US had since they believed the time it would take to get enough U235 to build a nuke would take a insanely long time. Both Germany, Japan and the USSR thought this, which is why all of them didn't spend much of their GDP on nukes during the war because they all thought there was no chance of being able to build a nuke before the war ended. So when the 2nd US nuke hit Nagasaki the Japanese leaders also no longer believed their scientists. Who still didn't think the US would have many nukes remaining after the second hit. And this also further pushed more of the Japanese cabinet to agreeing to unconditional surrender. Since as stated above the Japanese leadership thought the US was now just going to keep nuking their cities and military divisions and thus destroying the Japanese military without even having to invade or having it mostly destroyed when they then actually did invade the home islands. Many people don't know that Hiroshima was chosen as the first target to be nuked not just because it had not yet been majorly bombed as many Japanese cities had and because it was a major navel construction city but because Hiroshima had a military division headquarters and most of a divisions stationed within it. Which the US military at the time knew. Giving it further reason to be the first target to be nuked. And then lastly, even after that conference of the Japanese cabinet only half of the Japanese leaders wanted to agree to unconditional surrender at that point (they were that committed to going down with the ship and/or believed Japan would be saved again like the 2 times when the Mongols attempted to invade Japan). The cabinet had to call the Emperor in to break a tie in the vote to get Japan to agree to surrender. And then even after that the Japanese military tried to run a coup to overthrow the leaders in order to further continue the war thinking the current Japanese leaders were betraying the Emperor. The Japanese military and people were legitimately willing to fight and sacrifice the majority of their population's lives continuing the war to get better terms until the nukes hit them. Their opinion on fighting a massive last stand defensive invasion of their islands was firmly ingrained within their people and the USSR declaration of war didn't change what they wanted to do at all. So I always really hate it when people criticize the nuking of Japan at the end of WW2. That decision to nuke Japan is what got Japan to surrender since they then believed the US would just nuke them until all their people were dead. Thus preventing their goal of causing massive causalities to the allies when they would have to invade the Japanese home islands. Those nukes and the general bombing of Japan thus ended the war much faster and saved not just a predicted millions of Allied nations soldiers lives but many more millions of Japanese military and civilian lives that would have been lost in the general bombing of Japan and the insanely massive Japanese home islands invasions that would have made D-Day, Iwo Jima and Okinawa look like minor battles in comparison.

Special episode about the kingdom of Egypt during WW2 please

HER-ME-OWN how can you mispronounce Hermione? It's an English name (originally Greek so you can either have a silent e or an -ay or -eh as the final syllable).

I now Hate JK Rowling.

Where are the Aussies when ya need 'em? Don't worry lads we'll be back

Without Malta holding out things might of gone real bad for the Allies

kinda like Polskaland? ya, it was absolutely insane....

@@CBielski87 with better fishing.

@@CBielski87 what is "Polskaland" ?

@@mth469 Google it

They made a good black and white film on the siege of tobruk in the 50's

Not precisely, but Bogart's "Sahara" is a lot like this, although with a single M3 tank and a handful of men rather than 400.

Id love to watch sum like that

We need a special on this!

There's a gem of a film called Ice Cold in Alex [1958] about a British flight from Tobruk - only features 5 [mainly 4] people in one clapped out ambulance though.

This speaks to plane safety of the era .

lots of dumdums in position of power innit

removes airpods :"I hope the fuhrer wasnt saying anything important"

"Wait, was that 'don't or 'do'?"

And don't bring suitcases beyond the load limit of your plane.

"Filthy mudbloods!"

"We could have been sunked - or worse, expelled"

@@tredbobek "She *needs* to sort out her priorities"

Where was Hagrid, when the Westfolds fell?

Really wonder why it wasn`t mentioned in this episode

Agreed, that was something that should have been given a few minutes of coverage I think. I don't think Operation Valkyrie will be skipped when it takes place. I would like to know the motivation of Park Soo Won to kill Tojo. I assume it is because he didn't like the treatment of Korean people under Japanese rule. But there was also so many Japanese Prime Ministers assassinated or almost assassinated prior to WW2 because Japanese civilians thought the leader was to weak. As I talk about in my post for this week's video the Japanese military tried to run a coup on the government and kill members of the cabinet after they agreed to unconditional surrender in 1945. Because they believed the Japanese cabinet betrayed the Emperor and they wanted to continue fighting until the end. The Pacific (Japanese) portions of the war need to be covered in equal or near equal level to the European parts of the war (which the team has done pretty well with points here and there that I wish would have been covered that were skipped or given more coverage time). A example of this would be the Niihau incident. It was mentioned in the Pearl Harbor episodes but was only given literally a few seconds of coverage and was not explained what it was. The Niihau incident was a major impact in FDR agreeing to have people of enemy nation ethnicity (particularly Japanese people) to be placed into confinement camps. This incident is where 3 Japanese-Americans tried to help a downed Japanese pilot get back to Japan after losing his plane during the Pearl Harbor attack. During the incident the Japanese-American couple that helped the downed pilot killed a Hawaiian man trying to prevent the pilot escape after hearing of what the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor. 2 of the 3 Japanese-Americans were native born Americans which was something that baffled FDR. He thought that only Japanese who were born in Japan and migrated to America would be a danger of helping the Japanese out in the war. And that point is what set him over the edge and agreed to his military officers recommendations for allowing them the ability to move anyone on the US mainland of enemy nation ancestry to confinement camps. The part of limiting it to the mainland is what really didn't make sense. Of the Japanese spies we know about they were almost all located within Hawaii which had a large Japanese population during the time of WW2. The Japanese spies did play a major role in the planning and execution of Pearl Harbor. Also while the Japanese camps were by far the largest, there were also German and Italian people living within America who were also placed in camps. All other major nations in WW2 also did this to some level. Lastly, of the Japanese camps, it should be understood by people who hear about them that they were nothing like German concentration camps. The people within the camps were largely treated very well. There were actually Japanese people who asked to stay within the camps when they were told they could leave. This is because as a whole the Japanese people living within the camps were actually making a higher average salary then Japanese people outside of the camps were making prior to the war (how much that had to do with America still being affected by the Great Depression I'm not sure).

@@PhillyPhanVinny I would guess that partly it is because it is not too well known and there aren't many sources to elaborate much on this. The assassination was reported on the then Schenectady Gazette and The New York Times on August 13 1942, two months after the incident. Source: news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1917&dat=19420813&id=GmhGAAAAIBAJ&sjid=4ugMAAAAIBAJ&pg=3697,4469702&hl=en

@@gunman47 Yeah I was googling it myself also after you brought it up because I had never heard of it before and found the NYT link about the story but couldn't read the full article because I am not subscribed to their site to see archived articles that they have there.

I really hope we will get a special episode about Korea during WW2

I really like your comments, they are very imformativ

@@thanos_6.0 Dickson is the only other guy other then me that I see post on the videos like me every Weds when they are released for Patrion members. Though I think I have seen your posts a lot recently as well.

Such a great weapon name. It is just fun to say, BAZOOKA!

@@PhillyPhanVinny Yeah, partly it is because the timing of the videos when they are released is pretty good on my GMT +8 time zone (normally just before bedtime) for me. Well it's not just me too, think there's a few other Patreon regulars as well that also post regularly every week. It’s just my habit to share interesting facts that I read or encounter with fellow history buffs here. Cheers! 😇

@@gunman47 Yeah I always enjoy reading your posts after the video on Weds. The videos work out good timing wise for me as well. They are normally up in time that I can watch them during my lunch break on Weds (US Eastern time zone EST).

Rommel actually made fun of Allied POWs "Gentelmen , you fought like lions but led by donkeys"

@@merdiolu in a way, Rommel is correct. British command chain is so messed up

Oddly enough Rommel himself was reportedly heard saying "Drive me closer, I want to hit them with my sword"

@@kevinramsey417 that sound more like war hammer then actual real world scenario

@@kevinramsey417 It also happens to be a favourite line of the Chieftain 😂

He will face them in Alamein line along with New Zealanders of Freyberg

@@merdiolu Spoilers! No. I know what you mean. The Australian and New Zealand experience fighting World War II is fascinating.

@@merdiolu just a pity freyberg is a miserable grossly incompetent failure completely and singlehandedly responsible for every single person who suffered and died at the hands of the 3rd reich on the island of Crete because he couldn’t be bothered listening to 100% accurate information.

Nope, what Rommel actually said was "thanks for giving me General Niel Richie, i could never have done it without him".

@@mystikmind2005 Rommel: Free real-estate

@@indianajones4321 It sure was free real estate... not that the defenders did not fight bravely, but when you got a fool like general Niel Richie in charge, not much you can do. Some may say it is a little harsh to call Richie a fool, but no, f-k that, honestly, you don't have to be a genius to observe what Rommel is doing and counter it or at the very least mitigate it, especially when you have the forces to do so. An actual smart general could have taken advantage of Rommel's boldness and sprung a trap and annihilated Rommel's forces, ... a huge missed opportunity.

@@mystikmind2005 exactly!

Actually some military historians call Rommel's capture of Tobruk as "Poisoned Fruit" bit by Panzer Army Afrika. Swift capture of Tobruk and its supply depots made Rommel (in combinated if promotion to Field Marshall rank while he was still too young and not trained enough for that rank) made Rommel too cocky and over confident he assumed he could over extend all the way to Egypt and Suez.

@@merdiolu Considering how incompetent Auchinleck, Ritchie and Cunningham have been up to now, I am not surprised.

I'm sure it was terrifying for the boys on the front line who had to fight before their countries were fully up to speed. But sitting at home in the USA you only had to do the arithmetic. Ultimately WWII was a war of economic production, and in 1942 the Allied economies far outweighed the Axis economies. But it would take a whole lot of Allied production to first win the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-boats, so you could get your army over to England, and to build enough airplanes so you could destroy the Luftwaffe over Germany and make the invasion of France possible and so on. Millions of men had to be recruited and trained and housed and fed and armed and supplied and transported. But people knew how to do everything that needed to be done. They just needed to scale everything up. Battles would be won and lost, both sides would take turns getting lucky. But ultimately the war was not going to be determined by luck. It was going to be determined by which side managed to build the most stuff. The USA was the ace in the hole for the Allies, with its massive factories safely beyond the reach of any real attack from Germany or Japan. Everybody else had to build while getting bombed. But the USSR also out-produced Germany despite getting bombed and invaded. The Battle of Midway was welcome good news for the Allies in the Pacific. But ultimately it only made a few months' difference to the outcome. The USA was busy building dozens of aircraft carriers, more battleships, cruisers, hundreds of destroyers and submarines, and there was nothing Japan could do to interfere. Once that massive American fleet was ready it would just roll over the Japanese empire as we saw in 1944. If the war had dragged on another year, America's advantage would have grown only more lopsided, with bigger aircraft carriers (what became the Midway class), more advanced airplanes like the F7F and the P-80, and so on. The war only seemed close in 1942 because the USA was fighting with maybe 10% of what it was about to have.

@@danielmocsny5066 I think you have forgotten the morale factor. Had the Allies and/or the Soviet Union lost the will to fight (especially the USSR), Germany would likely have won. It wasn't just production, but also the will to continue fighting despite the terrible news and defeats. It was a loss of will that drove France out of the war (they could have fought on from their colonies in North Africa and the Middle East). And it was the will to continue fighting that kept the Partisans in Yugoslavia in the war. It should also be remembered that the Russian defeat in 1905 was brought about by a loss of confidence in the military. Had the Russo-Japanese war continued, it is quite possible that Russia might have won (on land at least). It was the Allies and Soviet Union's abilities to galvanize their populations to heroic feats that enabled their production to overwhelm that of Germany, and to be able to continue replacing losses at the front.

Savage xD

Gotta love British Political sarcasm.

@@nicholasconder4703 "Terrifyingly sh*t" would have been too strong for the time...

Yes this entire series has been more in-depth than anything I've ever seen. If Time Ghost decides to sell this series after it's completed as a box set of DVD/Blu-Ray I will scoop that up very fast.

@@rblinson8136 I just regret not following earlier during 1940.

@@Zen-sx5io YOU FOOL!!! We have been following since 1914! (2014)

@@Tuning3434 Yeah, I'm aware some have been here since the Great War series.

There are two very important issues that are not mentioned in this video. 1) The Australian 9th Division commanded by Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead had been withdrawn from Tobruk the previous year. Rommel really rated these very tough troops because they did not panic when overrun by armour but remained dug in and decimated the infantry following the tanks, leaving the Axis armour vulnerable. They also regularly and aggressively attacked the besieging forces on night time patrols. This is one of the key reasons the previous siege had failed. 2) Rommel had been receiving detailed information about the strength and movement of British forces from reports sent to Washington by Colonel Fellers, the U.S. military attaché in Cairo, but the American code had been stolen from the US Embassy in Rome, so all these communications were being read by the Axis. That meant Rommel had a huge tactical advantage over the Allied forces in North Africa until July 1942 when the Americans finally changed the code.

Lose.

@@shawnr771 your rite, year

@@ummdustry5718 no problem. I know many people in this community are not native English speakers. I do that to help them. I could just imagine how poorly I would speak their language.

No way they nerfed Tobruk this much in the 2.0 release. He must be using client-side cheats.

@@Raskolnikov70 I heard he imported some planes from the Greece and Crete campaigns that cheeky little cheatin' bastard.

The high water mark of Rommel's career. From here he would only know defeat.

@@Raskolnikov70 He's using cheat codes after the Germans hacked into the American servers.

@@tams805 no... no... read the news... only the Russians hack American servers... so we're told... (Always run your VPN through a Russian IP.)

The Japanese are conducting reprisal operations for the Dolittle Raid but that's pretty much it. Last time they tried somethign big they got their asses kicked in Changsha, twice. While the Chinese were focusing in Burma.

Pretty much, at this point Japanese forces in China are focused on holding and securing their positions, this includeds anti partisan operations, reprisals, and just harassing the front lines but no real pushes. China is in a poor state with the bulk of its army either in Burma or being re-organized after being decimated. Japans entry into the war has forced them to halt offensive operations in China and the Chinese are not in any position to attack.

The front lines in China been fairly static for the past few weeks

This Channel and the people watching it Are amazing a different breed truly we have a an interest in modern history which Alot of people hate

Prior to WW2 the 2 largest surrenders of British soldiers took place way back during the American Revolutionary war with the British surrenders of their armies first after the Battle of Saratoga and then after the battle that caused the British to agree to allow the US to become a free nation, the Battle of Yorktown. Some people will say those 2 battles were no longer the largest surrenders in British history after the Siege of Kut happens in WW1. But that is only if you are counting Indian soldiers which I personally count as a separate force. There were non-British soldiers fighting in both Saratoga and Yorktown but not to the level it was during Kut. Saratoga and Yorktown had minor numbers of German soldiers and were still majority British armies by far while Kut was mostly Indian soldiers that surrendered (10k Indian to 3k British).

@@PhillyPhanVinny Good information to note there 👍

GE does everything I swear. how is this comment older than the episode?

@@gunman47 That's cute, we took over 300,000 Axis prisoners in Tunisia alone. Singapore and Tobruk put together 163,000, are nothing to these numbers.

@@camrongray3406 Patreon supporters / TimeGhost Army get to see the video a few days early.

Shame that they didn't took precautions to protect it, 50 points from Gryffindor.

That would have been a nice reminder of him and his struggle.

I hate it when moms make us give back our Khukris from the Ghurkas. Come on mom, edged weapons and young boys what can go wrong?

@@danielmocsny5066 Better than having mom actually have to return it. The vet barely had time to duck before the weapon embedded itself in the wall where his head had been just an instant before. "The next time you give something like this to my boy, I won't miss." As bad as that embarrassing scene was, being banned from the pub for six months because of it was far worse.

Sometimes I think that Operation Pedestal was more important than many of the battles in North Africa, it was certainly a key to the ultimate allied Victories in Africa, the Mediterranean and the ultimate Italian surrender. It really deserves its own special episode on this channel.

"If this ship had not made it through, there is no telling what could have happened in North Africa and the whole course of the war from then on." Well, spoiler alert, the schedule of the war could have changed, along with the high-water mark for the German advance, but the ultimate outcome was scarcely in doubt. Recall that in mid- and late 1942 the USA was still barely into the fight. The Brits weren't going to lose Gibraltar as long as Franco wouldn't let the Germans attack through Spain. That meant Operation Torch or something like it was virtually inevitable. The Americans might have had to fight harder to attack Rommel from the west but they were coming no matter what. The Germans were never able to beat a fully supplied American army, although they did manage to defeat or capture a few divisions here and there. Rommel had one victory against the Americans, at Kasserine Pass. After that it was one defeat after another for the Germans. The last significant German advance, at the Bulge in late 1944, cost them almost everything they had left of their army. Holding Malta was certainly critical for the Brits at the time but mainly because the USA wasn't fully into the fight in 1942. Recall that Roosevelt had already promised Churchill to prioritize defeating the Germans over the Japanese. By 1944 the USA sent the most powerful fleet to that point in history to crush Japan and that was our second team. The USA could have sent whatever forces it would take to roll back the Germans from Africa no matter how far they might have gotten. Even losing Suez wouldn't have changed the outcome, as long as Anglo-American forces could still invade Africa from Gibraltar. America's link to Australia never got cut. Losing Suez would have been an inconvenience but not a show-stopper, and it would have been temporary in any case. The Allies could have crushed the Germans there from two or three directions simultaneously in 1943. Not to mention that Germany wasn't taking Malta for free. The Germans were taking heavy losses from fighting the island and its convoys, which they could ill afford.

I hope Indy's team runs with this fascinating story!

There was one some months ago

@@Dustz92 oh, and I missed it o.O . Thx for the tip

@@nickdanger3802 Absolutely crucial contribution to Rommel's campaign - when the unit was lost, it was a hammer blow for the Afrika Korps.

And bad logistics

A river with pretensions. (A channel)

Not river, but brave soviet soldiers, including some women.

Booooo, every one hates spoilers 🤣

@@thanos_6.0 I can't wait to find out who wins.

It might seem obvious to you as a commentator (because you know it, of course), but would it have been as obvious in Icelandic, Turkish, or one of the Bantu languages? Indy and Spartacus deal with literally hundreds of languages and dialects and they do their very best to get all names correct, but it is nigh impossible to get it right every time. Even with English names it can get tricky when they aren't in your own dialect (perhaps even more so, as we are prone to think we know when it's our own language). While we try our best to get it right, mistakes will be made. Remember that none of us can know everything. Thank you for pointing it out though, we will pass it on so that we can improve pronunciation.

Thank you for your kind words!

My granddad was too. But he was a tanker. We was a regular soldier before the war in a cavalry unit based in Palestine in 1938. Stayed in Africa after war started, finally got home in 1943 to find his wife shacked up with a Yank. Then fought in Europe after D-Day. At the end of the war there were 8 men left from his original Regiment. Sadly one of those died the day after the war ended when he stood on a mine.

Booooooo

How did I know that this was coming?

I think it pretty much sums up my style. 5/5 from my end.

thank you for good advice .

@@geoking998 Hhhh You watched it you are a legend

Varied. Some were POWs to the end of the war, especially those shipped to Germany. Others escaped in 1943 amid the Italian armistice - the confusion allowed quite a few to just walk out the gate and put on civilian clothes.

@@stevekaczynski3793 Seems odd that they shipped POWs to Germany when they were having issues getting ships across with supplies for the Afrika Korps in the first place. Like they'd have bigger priorities than that or something...

@@Raskolnikov70 No stranger than the Japanese shipping prisoners to Japan in 1944.

@@Raskolnikov70 I don't think all were transported from North Africa, and these ones were freed in the first half of 1943 if not earlier. The chaos caused by the Italian armistice resulted in quite a few escaping among those removed to Italy, but some that did not or could not were removed to Germany. Initially the Italians were in charge of most British/Empire POWs. Conditions were often poor - more disorganisation than a deliberate campaign. One British officer in Italian hands drew a caricature of himself in a "hunger swoon", another of himself going through his rice ration to remove weevils or maggots.

@@Raskolnikov70 - Enemy prisoners were often viewed as an asset. Besides if you gave them back, they could rejoin the enemy and fight you again. A retreating army has trouble guarding its prisoners while simultaneously supplying its own needs. The fact that an army is retreating means it has supply problems almost by definition. The best way to safeguard your prisoners was to move them as far to your own rear area as possible - and that typically meant your homeland. Lots of Axis prisoners were shipped all the way to the USA and Canada, from which escape or rescue by their own forces was highly improbable. The cost of killing an enemy soldier was pretty high. The cost of holding the same soldier as a prisoner might not have been terribly high by comparison. Or just think of how much damage one enemy soldier might do if he gets back with his own army. A single Japanese kamikaze pilot might put a fleet aircraft carrier out of action! Shipping him back to a prison camp would cost peanuts by comparison. Shooting prisoners would be cheaper of course, but civilized countries don't routinely do that.

I’ll take you up on that if you’re ever in stockholm!

So Germans have learnt nothing.

@@Loreless why?

@@lucalavagnino5258 attack on the same date, when many german generals complaining about the delay in 1941 who costed the victory over USSR.

@@Loreless I don't think that attacking earlier could have been possible for two reasons: 1. Same reasons as last year (ground not dry enough) 2. Hitler wanted Sevastopol taken before operations to start. Anyway Indy already said last year that barbarossa wasn't delayed by Italy's invasion of Greece. Barbarossa failed to reach Moscow for many reasons, one was the dispersing of AG Center to help AG north and AG South (taking of Kiev) in August.

An Italian pioneer battalion played a key role in piercing the defences at Tobruk. Its commander was a Major Montemurro.

@@stevekaczynski3793 I wasn't aware of that, thanks!

Auchinleck goofed up as usual. He was well aware that Tobruk could not be defended in a second siege , its defences were in disrepair , minefield were mostly lifted , anti tank ditches were filled , he insisted to hold the place , and ordered not to destroy supply dumps therefore solving Rommels supply issues for a few weeks

Also, South African units in general were weak link of the Desert Force. Combined with all the mess mentioned in the episode and Rommel gambling on fast assault...

@@Rabarbarzynca There was a significant amount of pro-German sentiment in South Africa, especially among Afrikaans speakers. Resentment of the British over the Boer War was a factor for some people. To what extent this worked through to their troops in North Africa is unclear - the most open partisans of Germany were interned.

He didn't like the situation, but he did at least technically have a superior. He sometimes even ignored instructions from Berlin, let alone those emanating from Rome.

@@Rabarbarzynca Actually I disagree with you!! We did fight with distinction, check where their positioning was at El Alamein their abilities were crucial to the success of the battle. From my readings etc The English soldiers were lacking and relied on colonial soldiers!

Just curious - by whom was Paul McCartney knighted again? Never heard of a Princess Elizabeth in Great Britain in 1997...

@@tobiusgregory2805 She was known as Princess Elizabeth in June 1942 which this episode is discussing. Obviously she was Queen in 1997.

Thank you for your support!!!

Sorry to hear, but there is no such thing as a video that can crash the media player playing it, provided that the media player software is sane. I am pretty sure the problem is from your Android TV or maybe the media player app or its codecs that it is using. Moreover there is nothing we can do about this, as youtube is re-encoding all uploaded videos.

That’s actually hilarious and very WW2-era Soviet of that ambassador

In the 18th century, British Admiral Byng was court-martialled and shot after losing a battle to the French. Voltaire heard of it and made the famous quip about the English needing to shoot the occasional admiral "to encourage the others". In WW1 generals who failed tended to be given unimportant assignments rather than face more serious consequences - it was called "stellenbosching", after a town in South Africa where British officers who failed in the Boer War were sent. Shooting generals or admirals was no longer done, however.

well, the ambassador was right, hahaha

@@JuanPerez-vv5lk Well no, it was the fear of shooting that made soviet generals so unimaginative and unwilling to disobey the 'hold at all cost' order at the begining of Barbarossa that allowed the germans to inflict such heavy losses on them. Had they disobeyed that order and retreated when about to be encircles, or had they shown more independence and flexibility about following orders to the letter a lot more soviet soldiers would have survived to fight another day. Fear of dieing because of failure leads to even greater failure in war as the generals take the safe but obvious choice in the hopes that they can justify potential failure with "it was what we were taught, it was what doctrine said we had to do, it was exactly as ordered". The germans in France and N Africa achieved stunning victories because their commanders were very independent and sometimes disobeyed orders completely when they saw what they believed to be a golden opportunity. They were also willing to accept blame if it went tits up. Fear of political repercussions is also the reason the British attempted to hold Tobruk despite the plan calling for it to be abandoned, which was a much better strategic idea. Thus the commonwealth loses a lot of men and material because of "what would the ppl/politicians say if we just give it up without a fight now".

Dear Stalin, the terror of execution doesn't make people smarter. - Smarter People Than Stalin

Bah! Imagine a fox in the desert...

SPOILER ALERT: 14 October 1944

Straight road to Cairo now, surely...

Rommel is so clever that I'm convinced he'll replace Hitler someday.

Churchill made his wish to hold Tobruk , that is true but he did not make it an order. It was General Claude Auchinleck's weak will to please Prime Minister that led him to turn around from the decision to abandon Tobruk made in January 1942 when there was no timer or preperation made. Auk klater confessed "I thought enemy was out of his breath" (which it regained)