Latest / Generals of WWII: The Art of Command / German General Manstein and Romanian General Dumitrescu (with Grant Harward) | Ep 14

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German General Manstein and Romanian General Dumitrescu (with Grant Harward) | Ep 14 · Generals of WWII: The Art of Command

• 0:06
  Welcome to generals of World War 2, the art of command.
• 0:10
  We are super excited today to have a new guest, Doctor Grant
• 0:13
  Harward from the US Army Center of Military History.
• 0:17
  Hello, Grant. Today's topic, we actually have
• 0:19
  two generals we're going to talk about on the Axis side.
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  We're going to talk about General von Manstein from the
• 0:25
  German Army and General Dumitrescu.
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  Dumitrescu, yeah, of the Romanian army.
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  But before we get to that, Grant's going to read a brief
• 0:34
  disclaimer for us. I'm just disclaimer saying that
• 0:38
  these are my own views and do not represent those of the US
• 0:41
  Army, the Defense Department of the US government.
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  Yeah, now Grant actually has a book out.
• 0:46
  It's called Romania's Holy War, which you can find on Amazon.
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  And what's, what's that book about Grant?
• 0:53
  Basically, I'm trying to look into and dispel some myths about
• 0:58
  the remaining army, which is usually just described as, you
• 1:00
  know, a bunch of simple peasants who didn't know what they were
• 1:02
  fighting for. You know, they end up in
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  Stalingrad and and they really weren't that motivated.
• 1:09
  Instead, I want to argue that it actually they're highly
• 1:12
  motivated of Hitler's allies and they actually also participated
• 1:16
  in the Holocaust to a large extent.
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  And a lot of what their ideology was dovetailed with the German
• 1:24
  ideology. So it's kind of looking at the
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  motivation, it looks like ideology, but also doesn't
• 1:28
  forget, you know, discipline, remuneration, self-interest,
• 1:32
  other things as well, which we'll kind of mention some of
• 1:35
  these things about discipline I think here.
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  OK, yeah, we'll we'll dive into the Romanian army in just a bit.
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  We're going to start off with von Manstein.
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  He was born November 24th, 1887 in Berlin into a Prussian
• 1:47
  military family originally named Fritz Erich von Lewinsky.
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  He was adopted by his uncle, General George von Manstein and
• 1:56
  took the Manstein name. What was his early life like?
• 2:00
  Yeah. So it's interesting.
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  So I guess he was a tenth child in his family, but then his
• 2:04
  mother's sister, she and her husband, the Mansteins, didn't
• 2:08
  have any children. So evidently, I guess it was a,
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  it was a relatively common thing to kind of, if one part of your
• 2:15
  family didn't have children, you kind of gave them over for
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  adoption. But on either side, he came from
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  like a blue, blue blood. I mean, both aristocratic
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  Prussian families with hundreds of years of military service and
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  tradition behind him. That means you have a very
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  unusual childhood where you are steeped in tradition and it's
• 2:34
  basically assumed that you're going to be, I mean, especially
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  in his case where he's been adopted to be the son, you know,
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  of a general, right, that this the military is going to be your
• 2:45
  career. So you kind of had a delicate
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  constitution a little bit. He was a Lutheran.
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  I have some Lutheran Puritanism in there.
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  He's very correct and reserved. He's he's described as not being
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  quite like the stereotypical Prussian, you know, very
• 2:59
  asterbic Prussian commander, a more thoughtful one, but we'll
• 3:03
  see. The cat, that kind of his life
• 3:04
  there, you know, kind of developed there.
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  And he at 8 years old, he goes to the Strasburg lychee.
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  At 13, he's in the cadet corps in Berlin, right?
• 3:11
  So then part of the page corps in the court of the Emperor
• 3:14
  William the Second. So this is a very privileged
• 3:17
  young man being going into the infantry arm in the military
• 3:21
  from a very young age. OK.
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  But nothing, I mean, other than kind of his family to predict
• 3:27
  that he'll be one of the best generals in the German army yet.
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  Yeah, he's, as you mentioned, he's educated, educated in elite
• 3:34
  Prussian Military Academy. He's preparing for a career in
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  the Imperial German Army. What kind of a student was he?
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  It seems that he was intelligent and quick to learn a new
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  subject, but at the same time, he doesn't have, like,
• 3:46
  outstanding scores or anything. And there's some indication
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  that, you know, when he put his mind to it, he could raise up
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  scores, but he wasn't, you know, first of the class everywhere,
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  that kind of person. But when he applied himself, he
• 3:58
  usually did. Well.
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  Interestingly, World War One kind of interrupts.
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  He was fishing off his general staff school education, so he
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  actually never finishes that. So we he and he later becomes
• 4:08
  known as one of the best staff officers out there, but he
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  actually never finishes that proper education because of the
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  war. Yeah, as you mentioned, in War
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  One comes up and he serves primarily as a staff officer,
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  although he's wounded and is promoted.
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  Where were his early military postings?
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  So he was in a Guard regiment. It's pretty interesting.
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  In the first year of the war, he served in in the on the Western
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  Front, I think in the Battle of the Marne.
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  But then he's shifted out to the Eastern Front.
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  He takes part in the Missourian lakes in Tannenburg on the
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  Eastern front. So he's somebody who sees both
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  sides, but also at this early point of maneuver warfare and
• 4:48
  sees fighting against the French and the and the Russians.
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  He's wounded in Poland, gets bullets in the shoulder and
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  static nerve recovers and goes back to service in spring 1915.
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  But from there on he's he's acting as a staff officer for
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  army groups, armies divisions in Poland and Serbia.
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  He goes to Verdun, the Somme, then he goes back to the Eastern
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  Front in the Baltic States, and then he's a goes back to France.
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  And then he's there in the end as part of the the the
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  offensives in attempt to try to lock the allies out in the last
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  year that failed. So he has extensive experience
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  during the war on Staffs. Well, and and and sounds like
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  the front lines as well if he's getting wounded.
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  So I must he must have gotten a good dose of both both staff
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  officer and front lines. OK, yeah.
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  He remains in the small into war German army, the Reichswear like
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  getting a reputation as a brilliant planner.
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  What is he doing during the inter war years?
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  I understand he gets married around this time.
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  So he gets married to Utah Sybil von Losch in 1920.
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  They have three children over the next nine years, a daughter
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  followed by two sons. He's kind of a reluctant
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  defender of the new Weimar Republic in the immediate post
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  war period. He sees it as something that's
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  better than the threatened chaos of revolution.
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  During the Intrawar period, he mostly serves again on
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  divisional and core Staffs, but he has a couple of brief spells
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  finally as like a company and a battalion commander.
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  Yet his combat command wouldn't have to wait until World War 2.
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  So he's he's pushing through a lot of you know, he's been a lot
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  of experience during that period.
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  Once the the new Nazi regime comes in, he has a few
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  interesting decisions that he makes.
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  When in 19401934 there's a new racial laws that include
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  expelling soldiers deemed to be a mixed Jewish background being
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  thrown out. He's possibly the only only one
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  to protest this, not out of a sense of of sympathy for Jews,
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  but because there was a junior officer who he respected that
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  was 1/4 Jewish and was being thrown out of the army.
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  And he thought it was important for his honor to respect him and
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  his and to show loyalty to this soldier who suddenly was being
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  cast as a Jew. But in his response, you know,
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  in this petition, he made sure to say, I'm not against the Nazi
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  Party. I'm not against radiology
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  ideology, but we maybe can make an exception here.
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  It's not clear what happens there, but it's interesting.
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  He also in 1935, he gets involved in the a project to try
• 7:22
  to restore mobility to the infantry.
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  He he and he suggests the idea of an armored assault God.
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  And this is something that's going to be the the Stormgushitz
• 7:31
  in the Second World War these, you know, kind of tank like
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  armored vehicles that are meant to be able to bring up a
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  firepower and kind of travel with the infantry.
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  So this idea kind of comes out of some of his staff work in the
• 7:44
  mid 30s. But as we get towards the war, I
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  mean, he is not among the peace party that, you know, Halder and
• 7:50
  others are looking at during the Munich crisis, but he's actually
• 7:53
  a bit of a war monger. He's one that's looking towards
• 7:56
  Germany, reasserting itself on the national and international
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  stage. Yeah, and that was my next
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  question, because I can't tell if he's just a militaristic guy
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  or if he was really supporting Hitler.
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  In April 1939, he delivered a speech at the celebration of
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  Hitler's 50th birthday in which he praised Hitler as a leader
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  sent by God to save Germany. He warned quote the hostile
• 8:20
  world, End Quote, that if it kept directing ramparts around
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  Germany to block the way of the German people towards their
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  future, then he would be quite happy to see the world plunged
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  into another World War. So is he just catering to Hitler
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  or does he really believe this? I think in general, it's what he
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  believes. Maybe he's gone a little over
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  the top for, you know, the the leader's birthday party.
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  But at the same time, when you look at somebody that is coming
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  from this military, aristocratic Prussian background who was very
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  opposed to revolution, he was didn't like the the small army
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  of the Weimar period, the humiliation that they saw that
• 9:00
  they they perceived from Versailles.
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  I think, you know, you know, with his religious beliefs, I
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  mean, it's easy for a lot of people to see that here's the
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  right leader at the right time. That's the view at this point.
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  So, yeah, I mean, it's interesting.
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  I was I was kind of reviewing Benol Le Mai's biography of
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  Mannstein before this. It was interesting in his first
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  chapter, it starts off, you know, how emphasizing how
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  Mannstein ever stayed loyal to Hitler to the end.
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  He shuns military conspiracy, you know, And so it's
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  interesting that I thought that was an interesting way to start
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  off like before getting into his his youth, kind of reminding
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  readers like, is there somebody who sticks with Hitler?
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  They're thick and thin to the very end.
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  And after Hitler's gone, he's he's there to, you know, defend
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  the Vermont to its reputation. Yeah.
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  Once War 2 begins, I played a key role in developing Germany's
• 9:49
  1940 invasion plan of France, later called the Monstein Plan
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  or the Sickle Schnitt, the Sickle Cut.
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  Can you briefly summarize this plan for us?
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  Yeah, I mean, basically the idea is to not repeat on the
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  Schlieffen plan rather than, you know, kind of attacking with
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  most of, you know, the German army's wait on the right, going
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  through the Low Countries and pushing down South towards Paris
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  to try to capture that big, you know, juicy national, national
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  capital that you think will knock out the enemy, whether
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  it's through capturing their logistical hub or break wrecking
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  their morale. What he says, you know, we don't
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  want to do that. That's what that's being
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  expected. Let's shift down our forces to
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  the left. We'll have this kind of matadors
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  Cape of just enough people going into lowlands and then we'll
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  burst out further South. And instead of turning S, you're
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  just going to drive West and try to capture as many of the allied
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  forces up in the lowlands as possible.
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  And then once you've kind of decapitated, you know, by
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  encircling and decapitating the the best of the allied armies in
• 11:00
  the lowlands, then you can kind of turn at your leisure to go
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  take out France. So it's more of a destroy the
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  enemy army rather than capture the enemy capital type thing.
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  Yeah, they don't want to get bogged down in trench warfare.
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  They want mechanized units going fast and going straight for
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  Paris. And that's, that's the thing.
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  It's like also taking advantage of those new mechanized units.
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  You know, Mannstein, even though he's an infantry guy, he's very
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  up to date. And so he's, you know, kind of
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  pushing the envelope doesn't make him very popular.
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  And he actually doesn't get to take a big role in this because
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  of that, because of the higher leadership, you know, are kind
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  of forced on this. You know, Hitler is looking for
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  someone kind of other option and he grabs on to this plan.
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  And so Man Shine and Hitler have some good FaceTime.
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  It's you know, but in the end Man Shine only gets like an
• 11:48
  infantry core to command during this.
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  Yeah, the the strategy overall, though, led to the rapid, rapid
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  defeat of France during the Battle of France.
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  So how did the Germans complete the victory in such a quick
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  fashion? I think a very large part of a
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  lot of a lot of people, it's like the better command and
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  control I think is a big part of this.
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  You know, the one thing that Germany could produce a lot of
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  was radios and they thought to put them in all their tanks and
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  have them in all all their aircraft have really good
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  coordination there. I think also more recent combat
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  experience, we kind of jumped over it, but there was, you
• 12:24
  know, the invasion of Poland. So they're able to spend some
• 12:27
  time in Poland to, you know, hammer out some of the details
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  here. And then there's just a lot of
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  luck. I mean, in the Blitzkrieg Legend
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  by Carl Heinz Fraser, which is an incredible read.
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  I mean, he just shows how close run of a thing this was.
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  If there was a few more French units, you know, that were of a
• 12:47
  higher level of training in a few more different places, this
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  whole thing might have gone sideways and just everything
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  seemed to line up the Germans away.
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  I mean, I think a lot of that is that command and control, that
• 12:59
  combat experience, but also just luck and and all that.
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  Well, in in the avoidance of the Maginot Line and, and kind of
• 13:06
  the obsolescence of it. And I think that kind of hurt
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  the morale of the French army and just I think they were just
• 13:11
  shocked how quick it went. Yeah, I mean, I think that's
• 13:14
  definitely true as well. I mean, there are definitely
• 13:16
  something about that, about the, you know, what is the status of
• 13:20
  the French army and its its morale?
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  I mean, the national line has its role to play, which but it's
• 13:25
  negated by this strategic insight that Manchin puts in
• 13:30
  there and these new weapon systems that are being used in a
• 13:33
  new way where the French are still kind of the tank is an
• 13:35
  infantry support weapon. Very different attitude towards
• 13:39
  mobile warfare. Well, moving forward in War 2
• 13:44
  for Operation Barbarossa, about Mansion's commanding the German
• 13:49
  11th Army during the invasion of the Soviet Union, how vital was
• 13:54
  the surprise element and why were Soviet units overwhelmed so
• 13:58
  quickly? Right, so he starts with a
• 14:02
  Panzer corps in in June and he's with army Group NI mean he
• 14:07
  actually gets shifted down to German 11th Army in September.
• 14:11
  But in that time period, I mean, he's benefiting from the same
• 14:14
  reasons for the success of the German army writ large the
• 14:18
  Soviets. I mean, there's a few things
• 14:20
  here. I think there's a lot of flaws
• 14:21
  in the Red Army rapid expansion. My dissertation advisor, Roger
• 14:27
  Reese, he wrote his book Why Stalin soldiers fought.
• 14:30
  One of the things that he said when he is in his earlier book,
• 14:32
  but he was opening up and looking at the, this I think is
• 14:37
  the first song songs reluctant Soldiers.
• 14:38
  But he opened up kind of the, the, the League of Nations
• 14:44
  yearbook. This is this publication, the
• 14:46
  League of Nations point put, put out every year that gave a
• 14:48
  summary of every army and its capabilities.
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  And so he just opened the same page from two different years in
• 14:54
  the 30s looking at the Red Army. But he just saw like every like
• 14:58
  2 years. It was like double his, his
• 15:00
  insight was you just can't do this.
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  You can't double, triple, quadruple the size of an army
• 15:05
  and have that not impact, you know, the quality of that army.
• 15:10
  And so that he kind of that kind of led down how his views and
• 15:14
  his any research into the the Red Army where he sees a lot of
• 15:17
  its flaws. It's just it grew way too fast
• 15:20
  way too quickly. This is exacerbated because of
• 15:22
  the society that it really doesn't have a professional
• 15:25
  middle class mean before World War One.
• 15:27
  And then you have the revolution that really is against that kind
• 15:30
  of middle class. And so there's a lack of
• 15:32
  volunteerism, especially among the officer corps.
• 15:34
  People are getting Dragoon. I mean, the Soviet regime is not
• 15:37
  very volunteeristic in a lot of ways.
• 15:40
  And so you have these poorly educated guys getting told
• 15:43
  you're going to be an officer rather than in the German army
• 15:45
  or the American Army where you're you're you're getting men
• 15:47
  who want to be officers to go train and do that.
• 15:50
  That's a great point. In the 1930s, you know, Stalin
• 15:53
  purged a lot of his experienced officers.
• 15:55
  So what's left is, as you mentioned, kind of just
• 15:57
  inexperienced guys taking over. Everything, I mean, the purges
• 16:00
  are important, although like a lot of these guys do come back,
• 16:03
  but I think it's it's it's there's fewer of them shot than
• 16:06
  I think the popular attitude is that there's popular belief.
• 16:09
  A lot of them actually get brought back.
• 16:11
  But you do still have the impact, the fact that that makes
• 16:14
  everyone less are willing to take the initiative.
• 16:17
  So you have a lot of people to even the soldiers, even the
• 16:20
  officers who are kind of better, lot more, are more motivated.
• 16:24
  They're going to be less willing to take risks or take because of
• 16:27
  this system that is kind of wants control over everything.
• 16:31
  The Red Army's in the middle of rearmament.
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  It's moved from its borders in 1939 up to these new borders
• 16:38
  after it's annexed the Baltic States and parts of Romania.
• 16:43
  So you, it's all these kinds of things putting together and then
• 16:46
  you have Stalin's refused to believe the attack is coming.
• 16:48
  I mean, the Red Army can't take proper disposition.
• 16:52
  They can't call up the soldiers, put them on the line, get them
• 16:55
  in the right places, the right, you know, instead, you have to
• 16:59
  be a pretty ballsy commander to do that when Stalin's saying
• 17:02
  we're not having a battle coming.
• 17:04
  That's a great point because you know, you do something too
• 17:07
  aggressive or too outside of your parameters or orders,
• 17:11
  you'll end up in Siberia or in prison or, or, or shot like you
• 17:14
  said. So yeah, you have to be kind of
• 17:16
  careful as an officer at this time in in Soviet Union.
• 17:20
  I guess lastly, like the German advantages, right Again, they
• 17:22
  have recent experience, you know, they're really fine tuning
• 17:25
  their combined arms their society produces.
• 17:29
  It's one of the most professional societies.
• 17:31
  You know, you have so many people that have so many skills
• 17:34
  and this, this, you know, there's no lure to the military.
• 17:37
  I think there's a despite the fact that you have a
• 17:39
  conscription, army conscription that pulls a lot of people in,
• 17:42
  the officers are still far more based on volunteerism.
• 17:46
  And they're in just overall this kind of attitude that's very,
• 17:49
  you know, kind of willing to go fight this kind of seen as a
• 17:52
  German thing to do almost as the German national profession is to
• 17:55
  fight war. So Mannstein, he takes over the
• 17:59
  11th Army actually because down in Army group S because the
• 18:02
  commander of the 11th Army Eugen von Schubert is killed.
• 18:06
  He's coming back from flying in his little reconnaissance
• 18:10
  vehicle and he lands in the air in a field that happened to have
• 18:13
  mines. And so this open said minded at
• 18:16
  some point he lands in it blows up, kills him.
• 18:19
  So we need a new army commander. This is where Mannstein comes
• 18:22
  in. German 11th Army is really
• 18:25
  interesting unit because it's got a huge roommate to do.
• 18:28
  It's got to drive E, it's got to cover a lot of territory in
• 18:32
  southern Ukraine. He is also supposed to drive
• 18:35
  South and grab Crimea. And it also is incorporated
• 18:39
  within it a allied force, the Romanian 3rd Army.
• 18:42
  So he's got to have a kind of inter allied or inter axis
• 18:46
  force. He's got to cover a huge of
• 18:49
  terrain and do two different missions, which is Dr. E as fast
• 18:53
  as possible, but also go South and take this very heavily
• 18:56
  defended difficult geographic position of the Crimean
• 19:00
  peninsula. Yeah, and Manstein, as to his
• 19:03
  laurels, he captures the strategic Crimean port of
• 19:06
  Sevastopol at their prolonged siege in 1942.
• 19:10
  How did he accomplish this? I mean, it's pretty incredible.
• 19:15
  I mean, there's the initial conquest.
• 19:17
  You know, he's a real focus on infantry and his, he has to do a
• 19:22
  lot of this with just an infantry army, does not have
• 19:25
  very many panzers. And in fact, his mobile reserve
• 19:29
  is actually mostly Romanian. He has a few Romanian motorized
• 19:32
  cavalry units and then he throws together a few German Recon, you
• 19:37
  know, motorized and armored Recon units and creates this ad
• 19:40
  hoc half German, half Romanian brigade.
• 19:44
  But he has to breakthrough in paracop to drive into Crimea.
• 19:48
  He uses, once he's broken through with the infantry of
• 19:51
  this very narrow neck Paracop, which he's able to then release
• 19:54
  his German Romanian force to drive down to Sevastopol.
• 19:58
  And this is in October of 41. And there's this attempt to take
• 20:01
  Sevastopol off the March, and it fails because the Soviets have
• 20:06
  really they build all these fortifications, the city.
• 20:09
  Is and the port is protected by these massive fortifications
• 20:11
  which they can just turn around these giant basically naval guns
• 20:16
  that are on land that they can use to turn around and fire
• 20:19
  towards the enemy. It's further delayed because the
• 20:21
  Soviets during Christmas are able to land reinforcements, but
• 20:24
  it's really interesting he gets very close before that happens
• 20:27
  to almost taking the city. It drags on the Soviets and land
• 20:32
  in the eastern part of Crimea during Christmas using these
• 20:35
  German and Romanian troops. He's able to hold that off.
• 20:38
  He's got to have he's actually has to fight a major battle in
• 20:42
  the spring in the Kirch Peninsula where he's able to
• 20:46
  finally get some an armored some Panzer units.
• 20:49
  He's able to entice the Soviets further north and he drives in
• 20:52
  in the South with these German Panzer units and able to destroy
• 20:57
  like 3 Soviet armies compared to like this motley crew that he's
• 21:00
  been able to assemble. Then he turns back to Sevastopol
• 21:02
  and just brings in lots and lots of artillery.
• 21:06
  I mean, he brings in all kinds of guns.
• 21:08
  The Romanians have given their their best kind of heavy
• 21:11
  weapons. They bring in some of these old
• 21:13
  Austro Hungarian like, you know, super mortars and rail guns.
• 21:18
  And and then he once he gets the, the to the north of
• 21:24
  Sarastopol, there's it's separated by a Bay.
• 21:26
  Once he gets to that northern shore, he does a quick lightning
• 21:30
  crossing by boats. It basically just and, you know,
• 21:33
  ends the Soviet resistance like, you know, bringing in German
• 21:36
  troops right in the rear and the whole thing collapses.
• 21:39
  And it's an incredible feat, but still takes months and months
• 21:43
  and months and tons and tons of firepower to eventually level
• 21:47
  this and then and coordination of using not just German but
• 21:50
  Romanian troops. Yeah, we'll come back to the
• 21:53
  Romanian troops here in just a bit.
• 21:56
  Von Manstein is promoted to Field Marshall 1942, becoming
• 21:59
  one of Germany's most respected commanders.
• 22:02
  He has a great quote about the idea of retreating.
• 22:05
  Quote, Retreat may be masterly, but victory is in the opposite
• 22:09
  direction. End Quote.
• 22:11
  Why do you think he was such a talented general and did his
• 22:13
  troops like him? I think the first question, I
• 22:19
  mean, he's just, he's smart. He has a strategic view and an
• 22:24
  operational ability. I mean, part of that I think
• 22:26
  also is he's so steeped in the Prussian tradition.
• 22:29
  He knows what the, the, the right solutions would be, but he
• 22:32
  also has that ability to think through the problem and find the
• 22:36
  right solutions and change things up.
• 22:38
  With the Romanians, for example, like before they get into
• 22:41
  Crimea, he breaks up the Romanian 3rd Army and he used to
• 22:45
  put some on the wings. You know, you put like a German
• 22:47
  corps in the middle. He put the remains on the wings
• 22:49
  and have, you know, we usually would be a river or like the Sea
• 22:52
  of Azov kind of protecting those flanks.
• 22:55
  When he gets into Sevastopol, he switches, you realize he was
• 22:58
  like the wings are going to be where I need to use the best
• 23:00
  troops. And he puts the Germans on the
• 23:02
  wings and then puts the Romanians in the middle and have
• 23:05
  them like kind of pushed towards.
• 23:06
  He's able to very definitely like know how to use the right
• 23:10
  people know, you know, kind of how to adjust things.
• 23:14
  And it's pretty amazing because he's an entry guy, but he kind
• 23:17
  of masters artillery. He's using panzers.
• 23:20
  I mean, it's, it's a pretty incredible toolkit that he has
• 23:23
  that he's able to kind of shift from these different jobs and
• 23:27
  understanding how to use these different things.
• 23:29
  Yeah. It sounds like a problem solver
• 23:32
  and I guess his troops would like him if he's winning all the
• 23:34
  time. And I think that's kind of the
• 23:35
  main thing, right? We're talking about the troops,
• 23:36
  like, I mean, later during the Battle of Stalingrad, when you
• 23:40
  know, they're the, the troops in there are encircled when they
• 23:44
  hear that Mannstein's coming, there's this kind of idea of
• 23:46
  their Mannstein combed, like Mannstein is coming and it
• 23:49
  raises people's morale. So I think if, if you're, if
• 23:52
  you're winning, you're probably like, I mean, if you are some of
• 23:55
  his soldiers, you may probably don't like them.
• 23:56
  And Sylvestopol was a really nasty, gritty, disgusting
• 24:00
  battle. It took a lot of infantry losses
• 24:02
  to overcome it. So maybe Fritz, you know, on the
• 24:05
  front line and Sylvestopol maybe didn't appreciate Manstein too
• 24:08
  much. But in general, once you win,
• 24:11
  you probably like the your commander a fair amount.
• 24:14
  Yeah, 194142 things are going good, but things start to go bad
• 24:17
  at Stalingrad. As you mentioned, General
• 24:21
  Paulus's, I believe 6th Army is surrounded.
• 24:25
  Von Manstein's leading the relief attempt to Operation
• 24:28
  Winter Storm, which ultimately fails.
• 24:32
  How close did he get through the Soviet lines to Stalingrad, and
• 24:36
  why didn't General Paulus attempt to break out to him?
• 24:40
  I think an actual distance, it's only like 3035 miles, but in the
• 24:44
  realities of war that might he might as well have been on the
• 24:47
  moon. The amount of like Soviet
• 24:49
  reserves in front of him was bad enough what he had to attack
• 24:52
  with. I mean, Manstein, he creates
• 24:55
  this, you know, he's given Army Group Dawn, but it's basically
• 24:58
  the remnants of the shattered Romanian and German forces, plus
• 25:03
  a few Panzer divisions that have been expedited out there.
• 25:06
  So he's got a couple Panzer divisions that are relying on,
• 25:09
  you know, basically kind of almost like regimental sized
• 25:13
  remnants of Romanian infantry divisions and some cavalry
• 25:16
  brigades. And I mean, as much as the
• 25:18
  Romanians are still in the fight here, which people don't
• 25:21
  realize, I mean, they do a lot of help in doing kind of flank
• 25:25
  security and helping the Mannstein's panzers go forward,
• 25:29
  but there's just not enough of them.
• 25:31
  They don't have a, the Romanians don't have enough.
• 25:33
  The Germans don't themselves don't have enough fuel,
• 25:36
  ammunition. And then even more importantly,
• 25:39
  like, you know, I'm talking about the ones right in front
• 25:40
  and what he's attacking with the Soviet strategic reserves.
• 25:43
  There are bills of launch operation little Saturn.
• 25:46
  That's really what forces Mannstein to to to to call off
• 25:51
  his attack. It's not the fact that he maybe
• 25:53
  couldn't get a few more miles closer to Mitch Stalingrad.
• 25:56
  It's the fact that after Operation Uranus that had
• 26:00
  encircled during six army, you know, you know, a month before
• 26:03
  now they're having Operation Little Saturn, which smashes the
• 26:07
  Italian Army 8th Army farther N on the dawn, which means
• 26:10
  Mannstein has to redirect troops that way to keep that from
• 26:15
  collapsing. And so it's that strategic depth
• 26:18
  that the Soviets have that really mean that no matter how
• 26:21
  close he got, it wasn't good enough.
• 26:24
  And Paulus is just, I guess he's combat ineffective or just
• 26:27
  doesn't have the resources to get those 30 miles to
• 26:31
  breakthrough that. Yeah, I mean, even before the
• 26:34
  Soviet, this is really forgotten that there is a logistical
• 26:37
  crisis striking German 6th Army and Army Group B in general.
• 26:41
  I mean, they're constantly fighting over who has to supply
• 26:43
  the Romanians on the flanks. You know, German 6th Army says,
• 26:47
  OK, Army Group B, you do it. You Army Group B is like, no,
• 26:51
  that comes out of your supplies. And so the Romanians are getting
• 26:54
  starved on the flanks, which is one of the reasons why they're
• 26:57
  going to collapse. But then German 6th Armies, it's
• 27:00
  also not doesn't have enough. And so they're sending horses
• 27:03
  out for, for winter quarters, you know, before this happened.
• 27:07
  So they're already demobilizing themselves because, you know,
• 27:10
  you're, you have in submission and logistics, meaning you have
• 27:13
  less fuel and replacement parts for your vehicles.
• 27:15
  You're sending away your horses, then you get encircled, right?
• 27:19
  And then you start eating your horses.
• 27:22
  You use it, what fuel you have. And so really, by the time we're
• 27:25
  looking at, you know, maybe you could have broken out right at
• 27:28
  the very beginning. And even then that would be
• 27:30
  really risky because they already had sent away a lot of
• 27:32
  their horses. They already were already were
• 27:35
  low on fuel. Then, you know, later when Man
• 27:38
  Shine shows a month and a half later, it's like you're even in
• 27:41
  a worse position. And then you'd have to basically
• 27:43
  abandon all your heavy equipment, heavy guns and
• 27:47
  weaponry and you're trying to retreat through the step.
• 27:52
  You'd have to like run across and you know, 30 kilometers of
• 27:57
  frozen bear step with no defenses and and you're leaving
• 28:00
  behind your heavy weapons. I mean, that's not really
• 28:02
  attractive. So I mean, the person I have,
• 28:05
  Paulus plays a role in there. A lot of people criticized him,
• 28:07
  but I think there's a lot more. It was the reality of the
• 28:11
  logistics and lack of motorization, lack of even
• 28:14
  horses to be able to move, and you, you'd be condemning your
• 28:18
  army to almost like destruction out on the step rather than, you
• 28:22
  know, fighting it out even longer in the city.
• 28:25
  The Stalingrad disaster kind of stymies the German advance, and
• 28:30
  the initiative kind of briefly passes over to the Soviet army.
• 28:33
  However, Manstein conducted a successful counter offensive at
• 28:39
  the Third Battle of Kharkov, briefly stabilizing the Eastern
• 28:43
  Front, and I've read that this maneuver saved the German army.
• 28:47
  How big was this victory? I mean, it was really important,
• 28:51
  but although I think perhaps it's more, it's less about the
• 28:54
  maneuver than the his efforts in the weeks before, you know, with
• 28:58
  help from the OK H dealing with Hitler and extricating German
• 29:04
  forces from the caucuses and especially Panzer for formations
• 29:08
  and then enabled to have him the reserves organize the counter
• 29:11
  attack. So it's all that kind of chaotic
• 29:14
  period and you know, February March after Stalingrad getting
• 29:18
  as many German soldiers, Hitler actually makes them leave behind
• 29:22
  some forces and this caucuses a so-called coupon bridgehead, but
• 29:26
  he gets most of the Panthers out, which means once the
• 29:29
  Soviets are kind of culminating overrunning their logistics.
• 29:33
  So in some ways, by that point, it's almost inevitable that they
• 29:35
  would have been stopped. I kind of find it difficult to
• 29:38
  believe that the Soviets could have knocked the Germans out
• 29:41
  completely. A different German commander
• 29:42
  might have been able to maybe pull off a battle like this, but
• 29:46
  it maybe took Mannstein to extricate these forces so deftly
• 29:50
  from the caucuses, then also fight this battle.
• 29:54
  Kind of Rob Cetino and his book about the German army during
• 29:58
  World War 2. Cram points out that, you know,
• 30:00
  Mannstein is, you know, he's part of this long military
• 30:02
  tradition, this sort of maneuver.
• 30:04
  It's like straight out of the German Prussian playbook where
• 30:08
  we're looking at Hindenburg and at Tannenberg or earlier.
• 30:13
  I mean, so it's another general might have seen the same
• 30:15
  opportunity and done the same thing, but maybe not as well as
• 30:19
  Mannstein. And like I said, maybe it was
• 30:21
  Mannstein dealing with all that insane chaos of getting the
• 30:24
  troops out and having support from OK H and dealing with
• 30:28
  Hitler to convince him, OK, get these guys out.
• 30:31
  Because if that hadn't happened, you wouldn't have had the
• 30:33
  forces. Then maybe the Soviets could
• 30:35
  have kept driving forward. It's a good point, but around
• 30:38
  this time he starts to frequently clash with Adolf
• 30:41
  Hitler over strategy and he's dismissed from command.
• 30:44
  And I read that he replied to his removal by Hitler saying,
• 30:48
  quote, please believe me when I say I will use all strategic
• 30:53
  means at my disposal to defend the soil in which my son lies
• 30:57
  buried. End Quote.
• 30:58
  What happened to his son? So this is his oldest son, Jiro,
• 31:03
  and he was killed actually in October 1942 action with the
• 31:09
  18th Motorized Infantry Division up with Army Group North in the
• 31:13
  Baltic region. And this was a week after his
• 31:16
  Manstein's favorite aid had also been killed.
• 31:19
  So he kind of had these major losses very close, you know,
• 31:23
  colleague and then his son all at the time when he was basic
• 31:26
  and when he was then being reassigned to go save the German
• 31:29
  6th Army. So that relief attempt is, you
• 31:32
  know, in the weeks after finding out that his son had been killed
• 31:35
  and losing his his favorite aide.
• 31:37
  Yeah, it's a tough, tough time for him.
• 31:40
  I mean, he actually didn't clash that too.
• 31:42
  I mean, this is the start of thing of these clashes with
• 31:45
  Hitler. I mean, before he kind of had a
• 31:47
  good relationship with them going back.
• 31:49
  You know that you know, discussion about sickle cut in
• 31:51
  in 40 in 1940. And I think, you know, he's
• 31:54
  fired in March in March 1944. And Hitler tells him that at
• 31:57
  that time, at the time of quote, grand style operations End Quote
• 32:01
  was over. So, you know, Hitler is looking
• 32:04
  for generals who are kind of more Nazi.
• 32:09
  I mean, not, you know, Manchester was Nazi enough, but
• 32:12
  he wasn't like a pure ideological kind of soldier.
• 32:15
  He's looking for more Nazi soldiers.
• 32:17
  He's looking for generals who are willing to hold out,
• 32:20
  generals who are less independent and less willing to
• 32:22
  question them anything. I mean people like Ferdinand
• 32:25
  Schoner, who became known as a hangman up with Army Group North
• 32:30
  because he was so brutal towards his men, willing to hang them
• 32:33
  for alleged cowardice in the face of the enemy.
• 32:36
  These are the kind of men that run the Vermont in the Eastern
• 32:39
  Front for the last war once you remove people like Manstein.
• 32:43
  Yeah, just kind of strange to me.
• 32:45
  I was. I just did an episode in Battle
• 32:46
  of Bulge and yeah, people like Seth Dietrich and Piper fighting
• 32:50
  that battle. Yet you have von Manstein on the
• 32:52
  bench, who might have been a better fit after World War 2.
• 32:56
  He's trying by the British for war crimes, convicted and served
• 33:01
  several years in prison before advising West Germany's military
• 33:04
  development. What were his later years like?
• 33:06
  Well, I mean, he he's able to re enter society fairly well and
• 33:10
  there's the sense of the victor's justice, which means
• 33:12
  that, you know, for a lot of Germans, he's not seen as a real
• 33:17
  war criminal. And then he makes it his life's
• 33:19
  mission to defend the Vermont reputation.
• 33:21
  He very effectively, even his memoirs, lost victories, right?
• 33:25
  You know, this kind of idea of you know what we, we should have
• 33:27
  won some kind of lost cause narrative, that kind of blaming
• 33:31
  stuff on Hitler, not the generals who are advising him.
• 33:35
  He writes his memoirs, you know, lost Victory, but also other
• 33:39
  ones addressing his earlier life.
• 33:41
  Extremely influential not just in Germany, but if you get
• 33:44
  translated and become hugely influential in historiography in
• 33:48
  the Anglophone world. And yeah, he becomes an advisor
• 33:51
  on the creation of the Bundeswehr.
• 33:52
  I mean, this is a person that has a fairly satisfactory, nice
• 33:58
  and fulfilled post war life after about four years in
• 34:01
  prison. Yeah, he dies in 1973.
• 34:05
  What do you think is his legacy is and how involved in the
• 34:09
  Holocaust do you think he was? So like the legacy, like I said,
• 34:13
  his major role probably was turning the war into something
• 34:15
  different in 1940. I mean, if that had gone a
• 34:17
  different way, I mean the entire war would be different.
• 34:20
  I mean, if that turned into trench warfare, if the allies
• 34:23
  amount scrape out of wind or something, I mean completely
• 34:27
  different war. So I think that plan and his his
• 34:29
  role when pushing it was really important.
• 34:32
  And then he kept the Vermont hanging as long as possible on
• 34:34
  the Eastern Front. And then longer term, once after
• 34:38
  the war, he he whitewashes the reality of the Vermont of
• 34:40
  fighting on the Eastern Front, its role in that war of
• 34:43
  annihilation and in the Holocaust.
• 34:45
  It's important to point out. So like I've said that German
• 34:47
  11th Army is kind of special. I mean, it starts out as part of
• 34:50
  Army Group Antonescu with his fourth forgotten Army group that
• 34:54
  people are at the start of Operation Barbarossa.
• 34:56
  It was composed of German 11th Army and then remaining 3rd and
• 35:00
  4th Army, but it gets assigned an Einsatz group, Ansatz Group A
• 35:04
  day. So this is an s s unit that's
• 35:06
  going to be tasked with murdering the enemies or
• 35:09
  perceived enemies of the Nazis and #1 would be Jews.
• 35:13
  And you know, I visited some of these areas like Nikolayev where
• 35:17
  like you had locals point out like all right, here's the
• 35:19
  German Left Army headquarters, the Romanian headquarters, 3rd
• 35:22
  Army headquarters across the road.
• 35:23
  And Ansatz Group A day was right there, right next to them.
• 35:27
  You basically have a German army with an army group sized
• 35:31
  Einsatzgruppa attached to it. That's everywhere it's going in
• 35:34
  this. Like I said, it had this big
• 35:36
  remit of clearing southern Ukraine and Crimea.
• 35:40
  Einsatzgruppo D is going everywhere and the and the
• 35:42
  Vermont is helping. Mann Shine is if issuing orders
• 35:45
  about the dangers of Jewish Bolshevism.
• 35:48
  His troops are supporting the S S and rounding up remaining, you
• 35:51
  know, remaining troops as well are doing this in Crimea, the
• 35:55
  helping round up Jews. And there's massive massacres in
• 35:58
  across southern Ukraine and into Crimea.
• 36:01
  And he's not just aware of it, he's part of it.
• 36:03
  And that all gets kind of swept on the rug.
• 36:05
  But until after his death, really.
• 36:08
  Controversial legacy for sure. Let's talk about Dumatrescu now.
• 36:13
  He was born February 18th, 1882 in Dobridora in Romania.
• 36:19
  What was his upbringing like? Now we can basically the the
• 36:23
  exact opposite. I mean, you know where we just
• 36:25
  had Meinstein, who's a blueprint?
• 36:26
  Even Vaughn in his name, right? Dumitrescu is from a small
• 36:29
  village, very modest means his family was better off with one
• 36:34
  of the nicer houses in this village.
• 36:36
  And they had to have had some more money because he was able
• 36:38
  to pay the horse tax to get to the artillery.
• 36:41
  There was this kind of added cost for cavalry and artillery
• 36:45
  units to join them or where it's kind of keep them more socially
• 36:49
  elite. And to a certain extent.
• 36:51
  So he's come from this very modest family but is able to
• 36:54
  use. Whereas Mannstein would see the
• 36:57
  German army as his birthright, You know, Dumitrescu would see
• 37:02
  the Romanian army as like a stepping stone way to socially
• 37:05
  advance, not something that, you know, his is his by right.
• 37:09
  And he's able to use it that way pretty successfully in his life,
• 37:12
  to go from a small, modest village to becoming one of the
• 37:16
  most respected generals of the Romanian army.
• 37:19
  Yeah, yeah. Enter military service and
• 37:21
  graduated from Romania's artillery and war schools and
• 37:24
  rose steadily through the ranks in the early 20th century
• 37:27
  Romanian army. What were his first military
• 37:30
  assignments? So he's a little bit older than
• 37:33
  Mannstein, so he's actually able to get some command experience
• 37:38
  before he has a section and a battery commander for in
• 37:43
  artillery regiments. He takes part in the Second
• 37:45
  Balkan War of 1913. Although Romania's role in that
• 37:48
  was mostly an out of hoes advancing to Bulgaria where the
• 37:51
  main enemy was cholera rather than the rather than the enemy
• 37:56
  soldiers because the Bulgarians army was basically fighting
• 38:00
  Turks and and Serbs. But still, he's able to actually
• 38:03
  have some command experience before the First World War.
• 38:06
  OK, Yeah. He continued his career in the
• 38:10
  in war period, becoming known as a capable and discipline
• 38:13
  officer, promoted to general and given significant command
• 38:16
  responsibilities by the late 1930s.
• 38:20
  So what are his inner war years like?
• 38:23
  So during the war, he becomes an operations guy.
• 38:26
  He's on the operations staff of the Romanian Second Army, which
• 38:29
  is commanded by General Alexandro Alvarezcu, who becomes
• 38:33
  one of the main heroes lionized for his role.
• 38:37
  He also, he leaves the army, retires in 1918 in order to
• 38:42
  enter politics. So this is somebody who's
• 38:44
  Dumitrescu is associated with and he can kind of, he has like
• 38:48
  reflected glory, right, that he was part of this important staff
• 38:54
  during the war. And so during the interwar
• 38:56
  period, he's able to continue to climb the ladder.
• 39:01
  He goes in, becomes an operations officer and the
• 39:04
  general staff. He gets some more commands and
• 39:09
  artillery regiment and artillery brigade commands.
• 39:12
  He gets in assignment as an attache to France and Belgium.
• 39:16
  This is kind of important kind of rounding experience that
• 39:19
  you're going to see a lot of the key generals get.
• 39:22
  And then eventually division and core commands, even becomes
• 39:25
  deputy chief of staff and Inspector General of the
• 39:28
  artillery. So this is this is a guy who
• 39:30
  just keeps climbing the ladder during the interwar period.
• 39:33
  By the by the time the war starts, breaks out and Romania
• 39:37
  begins general mobilization in a defensive way during the Phony
• 39:41
  War, they're kind of still neutral.
• 39:44
  But in 1940 he gets an army command.
• 39:46
  He's stuck in charge of the 1st Army initially.
• 39:50
  So yeah, it's interesting, although as this time in 1940,
• 39:56
  you know, you have various political things happen and
• 39:58
  remain abandoned neutrality and then be joins the Axis.
• 40:03
  And it's interesting that we have the German evaluations of a
• 40:06
  lot of the generals. And so as they're kind of going
• 40:08
  through the list, I found this in one in the official German
• 40:11
  history of the war that came out.
• 40:14
  They actually evaluate Dumitrescu as one of the bad
• 40:18
  Romanian generals, so they don't really have much respect for
• 40:20
  him. I wasn't very there wasn't a lot
• 40:22
  of detail. I'd have to go dig in here.
• 40:24
  But for the Germans, they, they thought he was overrated.
• 40:27
  They didn't think that he really measured up compared to some of
• 40:31
  the other Romanian generals. And you always wonder, well, why
• 40:33
  did Romania side with the Germans?
• 40:36
  And even Mussolini was kind of waiting to see how the German
• 40:41
  invasion of France went before he saddled up with, I mean, they
• 40:46
  were friendly, but he didn't fully commit to Hitler until
• 40:48
  they saw, oh, well, they're winning.
• 40:49
  Maybe we should join with them. So maybe that's what Romania was
• 40:52
  thinking as well. Yeah, I mean, the fall of France
• 40:55
  has a huge impact on European geopolitics.
• 40:58
  I mean, that really convinces a lot of people and most
• 41:00
  importantly convinces the new dictator, General Yon Antonescu,
• 41:03
  that, you know, the Germans, they're basically going to win
• 41:06
  this thing. Moreover, as part of the Molotov
• 41:10
  Ribbentrop Pact, there been a secret protocol that had signed
• 41:13
  away part of Romania, this Arabia, this eastern portion of
• 41:17
  Romania. So after the fall of France,
• 41:19
  it's a few days after the French capitulate, that the Soviets
• 41:25
  then sent an ultimatum to the Romanians saying give us Bis
• 41:29
  Arabia and northern Bukuvina, which the Germans hadn't been
• 41:32
  expecting for the Soviets demand that territory.
• 41:34
  The Germans basically tell the Romanians you're on your own,
• 41:38
  you got to give it. You got to give it over.
• 41:40
  And that's what leads to Antonescu.
• 41:41
  He's able to take power from the king at that point.
• 41:44
  And so they then kind of kind of quickly makes an agreement with
• 41:47
  the Germans because then it's like, hey, if I get in the
• 41:49
  Germans camp, they'll make sure that the Soviets don't take any
• 41:52
  more territory. There's that, you know, the fall
• 41:54
  of France, the fall of that major power, the Soviet threat,
• 41:57
  and you know, with the end of the the fact that Romania had
• 42:00
  become a military dictatorship and all those things kind of
• 42:03
  made Romania alliance with Nazi Germany make a lot of sense to
• 42:07
  most Romanians. Sure.
• 42:08
  So when Operation Barbarossa comes up, I'm sure they're like,
• 42:11
  yeah, you know, we're in. We don't want to protect our
• 42:13
  provinces. Duma Dress, who commands the
• 42:15
  Romanian 3rd Army during this operation and he participates
• 42:18
  some major campaigns in Ukraine, southern Russia alongside German
• 42:23
  forces. Seems like they performed well
• 42:26
  at first. Yeah, Dumitrescu.
• 42:29
  He's so he was, he gets transferred a few months
• 42:31
  beforehand to the remaining third arm.
• 42:33
  Part of this is the Marine 1st Army goes kind of becomes a
• 42:36
  reserve force. So he gets pushed up.
• 42:38
  So he's respected enough that he they want him in charge.
• 42:40
  And 3rd Army is important because it's actually has the
• 42:43
  best Romanian troops. It's got the Mountain Corps and
• 42:47
  the Cavalry Corps aren't they don't charge.
• 42:49
  These aren't guys with Sabres. I mean, they do have Sabres, but
• 42:52
  they're basically trained as dragoons.
• 42:54
  But the cavalry units, they're well trained, maneuverable,
• 42:59
  they've got motorized regiments. The mountain core, these are
• 43:02
  these are mixed mountain brigades.
• 43:04
  So they're actually a little bit bigger.
• 43:06
  They're almost division size and they're trained to fight kind of
• 43:09
  an individually kind of more of a combined arms.
• 43:12
  So he has the best troops, which are then subordinated to German
• 43:15
  11th Army before the invasion. And they're basically attached
• 43:18
  to that knowing they are going to push into southern Ukraine
• 43:21
  and assuming as far as like the Bug River.
• 43:24
  Dumitrescu is mostly given a flank support role.
• 43:27
  I'm so there's a lot of advancing with short sharp
• 43:29
  battle. So, you know, kind of this
• 43:31
  initial invasion period, he's doing his job well, but in part
• 43:33
  it's because the Soviets are taking a beating by the by the
• 43:36
  Germans and he's able to do a lot of mop up and protecting
• 43:41
  stuff. I mean, and at times the Germans
• 43:43
  are able to kind of levy him for his motorized units.
• 43:48
  And like I talked about that brigade that Mannstein uses,
• 43:51
  that comes from Dumitrescu's units.
• 43:53
  Yeah, it seems like he was mopping up quite well.
• 43:56
  He plays a role in advance toward the caucuses during the
• 43:59
  1942 German offensive, and I read that his army marched 1700
• 44:04
  kilometers, fought in four major battles and 42 minor skirmishes.
• 44:09
  His army also inflicted 75,000 Russian casualties versus only
• 44:14
  10,000 of his own. So do you think he was a good
• 44:17
  general or you just had good troops working under?
• 44:21
  He has good troops. I think he's pretty competent.
• 44:25
  And the fact that he's given these missions that the Germans
• 44:28
  know that he they can do is helpful.
• 44:31
  They're not being given kind of major cities to take or anything
• 44:35
  like that is a part of this as well.
• 44:38
  He's extremely aggressive. He works very well with the
• 44:41
  Germans. I mean, he actually is very
• 44:43
  critical of Romanian generals who aren't Dumitrescu.
• 44:47
  He's interested. He's also a strict
• 44:48
  disciplinarian. I think one thing important to
• 44:51
  between these two advances, we talked about whether Barbarossa
• 44:54
  from June to about October of 41, after that period before he
• 45:01
  before July of 42, his headquarters becomes
• 45:04
  administrative headquarters, basically turns over control of
• 45:07
  the Romanian Mountain Corps and Cavalry Corps to Mannstein.
• 45:10
  They basically get assigned to German 11th Army and Mannschein
• 45:13
  gets to play with him how he wants and Dumitrescu is actually
• 45:17
  given a job of being in charge of kind of admission of control
• 45:20
  of all Romanian soldiers east of the Easter River.
• 45:23
  So he has to deal with inter working, working with the
• 45:27
  civilian government, and then he's also working with the
• 45:29
  Germans to, because you have little Romanian garrisons across
• 45:35
  southern Ukraine. Now he's got to try to like make
• 45:38
  sure that the troops in Crimea are getting supplied and
• 45:43
  everything. So he has this, he has this
• 45:45
  interesting role kind of switching back and forth of
• 45:47
  being an operations general and then he switched and then he
• 45:50
  stops and he becomes an administrative general.
• 45:52
  Then for the caucuses, he becomes an operations general.
• 45:55
  But there's signs that he maybe is too demanding, that he
• 46:00
  expects too much. We're talking about going into
• 46:04
  the caucuses, the the remaining Cavalry Corps is given a mission
• 46:07
  of clearing the coastline. And he actually thinks that the
• 46:13
  local commander, Rocco Vita, is not doing a good enough job.
• 46:17
  He's taking too long after, you know, crossing the Kuban River.
• 46:20
  And so he sends his chief of staff, General Arboray, to take
• 46:23
  over the Cavalry Corps during the fight.
• 46:25
  And in one case, he pushes and they actually come up against
• 46:29
  one port where the Soviets decide not to evacuate
• 46:32
  immediately, put up a fight and remain and take a fair amount of
• 46:35
  casualties. So there's a lot of kind of back
• 46:37
  and forth later after Rockovitz saying like, I wasn't taking too
• 46:40
  long. I was doing as fast as I could.
• 46:42
  You know, you had Dumitrescu bringing down, breathing down my
• 46:45
  neck, sends in his chief of staff to lead in the attack and
• 46:47
  which doesn't go off well, right.
• 46:50
  And there's it's happened the fewer times he's going to.
• 46:51
  So Dumitrescu is going to fire people.
• 46:53
  He pushes really hard. He's very pro German.
• 46:58
  He's very, he's, you know, critical of anyone who's blaming
• 47:01
  the Germans for not providing enough help.
• 47:03
  He's like, these are our allies. We need to provide them every
• 47:05
  bit of help. So he's a, he's a, he's a really
• 47:08
  difficult personality. And then in that administrative
• 47:11
  role, it includes discipline. I mean, and he is somebody, I
• 47:15
  mean, the remaining army reintroduces flogging on the
• 47:18
  Eastern Front. And I can't tell you how many
• 47:20
  orders I have from him where he's just ordering a guy to be
• 47:24
  flogged 25 times or deserters just flog them and send them
• 47:27
  back to the front. You know, there's this whole
• 47:29
  kind of process that, you know, if a soldier's found as a
• 47:32
  deserter, he's supposed to go through court martial and do me
• 47:35
  this rescue that too. Just like, oh, you got some
• 47:37
  deserters, Just give him 25 lashings, Send it back to the
• 47:40
  front. I mean, he's very old school in
• 47:43
  the discipline department. All right.
• 47:44
  Well, I won't ask you if he was popular with the troops.
• 47:47
  I can take a wild guess on that. And we kind of talked about the
• 47:50
  Stalingrad situation with von Monsie.
• 47:53
  So just briefly the the Germans were trying to mop up downtown
• 47:57
  Stalingrad, but on the outskirts was the Romanian army, the
• 48:01
  Italian army. So what happened there?
• 48:04
  Yeah, so like we talked about Dumitrescu going down the
• 48:07
  caucuses because that's where, like Army Group A, right?
• 48:09
  Supposed to be pushing. That was supposed to be the
• 48:11
  main, you know, push. And then all of a sudden Hitler
• 48:13
  decides and his generals say, yeah, let's go to Stalingrad
• 48:16
  Army Group B. So then Dumitrescu gets sent up
• 48:18
  there and addition with a bunch of forces, and he leaves behind
• 48:23
  the Cavalry Corps, the mountain corps, those stays in the South,
• 48:26
  even Crimea and the Caucasus. Dumitrescu and his headquarters
• 48:30
  move up West of Stalingrad along the Don River, and he gets these
• 48:34
  new formations that are being remobilized.
• 48:37
  These were troops that fought on Odessa under the Romanian 4th
• 48:40
  Army in 1941. They'd taken heavy losses and
• 48:44
  not actually been able to take the city until the Soviets
• 48:46
  withdrew. So you have a kind of a
• 48:48
  combination of veterans of that battle who haven't had the best
• 48:51
  experience. I mean, some of them now are
• 48:53
  kind of more experienced, you know, know how to fight, but
• 48:56
  they've also, they fought a nasty, you know, battle.
• 49:00
  And now they're being remobilized and they have a
• 49:02
  bunch of kind of fresh recruits. So maybe with Rescue, who's used
• 49:08
  to commanding these elite mountain and Calvary troops all
• 49:11
  of a sudden has these kind of run-of-the-mill infantry guys.
• 49:15
  And they're not just, you know, and some of them are actually,
• 49:17
  they're not even like the kind of the best because he'd been
• 49:19
  using some of the these other infantry units or divisions in
• 49:22
  Crimea and the caucuses that had a bit more training and
• 49:27
  experience. And he's getting these guys
• 49:29
  who've been remobilized. And so he is very skeptical of
• 49:32
  them. He keeps accusing him of not
• 49:34
  having like enough heart to bata de enema.
• 49:36
  I mean, like beating heart. He's convinced that the Soviets
• 49:40
  are like overmatching them, which is kind of true.
• 49:43
  But he's also like saying, oh, we have too many deserters.
• 49:46
  He's always missing. And he has some of his core
• 49:48
  commanders actually right back and say, well, actually you're
• 49:51
  just getting like the preliminary reports.
• 49:53
  So we have a bunch of guys Miss Mark missing, who then within a
• 49:56
  few days to figure out, oh, they're dead or they're with a
• 49:58
  unit. Like they're not actually
• 50:00
  running away. It's just that we're fighting
• 50:02
  these like these small battles, kind of company, battalion sized
• 50:06
  battles. And, you know, you're just not
• 50:09
  giving us cutting us any slack. But so he knows that like there
• 50:14
  are these Soviet bridgeheads on the dawn.
• 50:16
  The Germans know they put the remains in there and the Germans
• 50:19
  and the Italians couldn't eliminate them.
• 50:21
  And Dumi Trescu says, hey, let's get rid of these.
• 50:23
  And the Germans say we don't have the tanks, the men to help
• 50:26
  you do that. And so Dumi Trescu, when
• 50:30
  Operation Uranus comes, he kind of knows that he's in a bad
• 50:33
  position. And, you know, the remains are
• 50:36
  kind of constantly sounding alarm.
• 50:38
  Dumi Trescu is doing his best, but they're getting shafted on
• 50:41
  the supplies. Like I described earlier.
• 50:44
  The Germans are not kind of paying attention to them,
• 50:46
  assuming that they're just kind of, you know, this hysterical
• 50:50
  that like every like week they're like, oh, here comes the
• 50:52
  big offensive and then it doesn't come.
• 50:53
  But then it came. But then it eventually came and
• 50:56
  the Romanians fight the best they can, but Dumitresku quickly
• 50:59
  loses control just because his the forces get bashed apart and
• 51:03
  you have these huge holes. The last God group fights as you
• 51:07
  know 3 or 4 days to like try to encircle.
• 51:10
  You have a small encirclement on the dawn that almost no one
• 51:12
  talks about, but it's this mini encirclement where this remains
• 51:15
  hold on as long as they can. But then you know Dumitrescu, he
• 51:18
  is unlike a lot of Romanian generals the Germans are
• 51:21
  criticizing. They have one German commander
• 51:24
  wants to I think like court martial an entire like corps
• 51:29
  remaining corps headquarters. But they never touched
• 51:31
  Dumitrescu because Dumitrescu, they know is like on side and he
• 51:35
  gets the he gets the remnants, puts him on the Cheer River and
• 51:39
  he says authorizes the most severe measures.
• 51:42
  And that could be up to like execution of, you know,
• 51:46
  soldiers, you know, or you're flogging.
• 51:48
  You know, he's like, do everything you got to to get
• 51:50
  this line put up so that we have a line of resistance.
• 51:53
  If we didn't have Dumitrescu there, like putting in that iron
• 51:56
  discipline, you know, that's what allowed the Germans a
• 51:59
  chance to have Manstein come out and even attempt.
• 52:02
  Because if you didn't have Dumitrescu, like half his army
• 52:05
  gets eaten up, dashed apart. He takes what's left and like
• 52:09
  forms a line and does everything he can for the Germans.
• 52:13
  Yeah, eventually the Soviets inflict 109,000 Romanian
• 52:17
  casualties and Duma Trescu's remnant force limps back towards
• 52:21
  Bucharest. Despite the disaster, he was
• 52:24
  still regarded as one of Romania's more competent wartime
• 52:27
  commanders. Correct.
• 52:29
  Yeah, I mean, at the time it's really interesting like within
• 52:32
  days I found this communication from the the chief of this
• 52:36
  general Staff, the Romanian General Staff Staflia to of
• 52:40
  Dumitrescu. And he says very upfront, like
• 52:42
  we aren't blaming you like this is not your fault.
• 52:45
  You guys were overmatched. Germans certainly listen, but
• 52:49
  the German forces are, you know, Germany is just too strong
• 52:52
  because it's a temporary set back.
• 52:54
  We're going to be OK. And in the and really
• 52:55
  interestingly, because I haven't didn't find a lot of marginalia,
• 52:59
  but in this case, Dumi Trescu like wrote on this report saying
• 53:03
  this is also my Christian belief.
• 53:05
  I will communicate it to the men, which he then does, you
• 53:08
  know, kind of tells his soldiers like, yeah, we've taken a
• 53:10
  beating, not our fault. You know, we did our best.
• 53:14
  We're going to hold on here and the Germans are going to come
• 53:16
  through with for us and we're going to.
• 53:18
  And so it's really not that doesn't happen.
• 53:21
  But I mean, it's probably not until like, you know, Kursk, I
• 53:25
  mean, I think really when like Dumi Trescu starts losing heart,
• 53:28
  there's a time where it's like they think that there's going to
• 53:30
  be the research because a year before, right, there was a big a
• 53:33
  big Soviet winter counter offensive.
• 53:35
  Things look pretty nasty. And then man trying to come in
• 53:38
  came in Crimea and perform this miracle at Kirch, right?
• 53:42
  So there's this hope that this is going to happen again at
• 53:44
  Stalingrad. That doesn't happen the next
• 53:46
  month. And then by the summer when you
• 53:48
  have cursed, that's when like the Romanian generals start
• 53:51
  realizing, OK, the game's up. And then and at this point
• 53:55
  again, Dudi Trescu is more in an administrative role.
• 53:57
  He's again responsible for all troops, Romanian troops.
• 54:00
  He's not really doing operational stuff up until March
• 54:04
  of 44, which is when he's given an opera, you know, operational
• 54:08
  control over portion of the front defending Romania.
• 54:11
  Yeah, Romania switches sides in 1944 and he's sidelined and
• 54:16
  later investigated by the new regime there was he put on trial
• 54:20
  for war crimes. Yeah, he was in 1946, but they
• 54:25
  were dropped allegedly due to lack of evidence.
• 54:29
  Although important to point out that in 1946, when he's being
• 54:32
  investigated, you don't have a communist government.
• 54:35
  It's a transition government. So a lot of the people, a lot of
• 54:41
  the prosecutors were rather sympathetic with Trescu.
• 54:45
  He wasn't at any of the major kind of infamous Holocaust
• 54:51
  events, the Yosh Bagram, the Odessa massacre, He wasn't
• 54:55
  involved in those. He was also with the Romanian
• 54:57
  3rd Army. I mean, he was plenty guilty of,
• 55:01
  I mean, I found orders of whether you're talking about
• 55:04
  like a command responsibility, like his corps commanders are
• 55:07
  talking about burning down villages and shooting hostages.
• 55:10
  They're taking a Jews as hostages, specifically taking
• 55:13
  Jews as hostages to shoot. I mean, if he's willing to
• 55:16
  order, you know, severe measures against his own men, what he
• 55:19
  does for partisans and he will definitely believes wherever
• 55:23
  there's a Jew, there's a partisan, but he's not kind of
• 55:25
  not directly attached to some of these really notorious big
• 55:29
  massacres. And so he kind of, he gets off.
• 55:32
  He's kind of, you know, because at that time they're not willing
• 55:35
  to kind of punish everybody. They're not wanting to do that.
• 55:38
  Then by the time like the communists take over and they
• 55:42
  start a new round. I mean I we have examples of
• 55:44
  people who were let off in 4647 and then they get re prosecuted
• 55:50
  but under the communists later on in like you know, in the 50s
• 55:54
  and get locked away. He conveniently dies before any
• 55:57
  of this happens. Yeah, yeah.
• 55:59
  It dies in 1950, largely out of the public eye during the early
• 56:03
  communist period in Romania. What do you think?
• 56:05
  His legacy? Is his legacy is it's one of
• 56:08
  also of, of having done everything he could to make sure
• 56:12
  Romania did everything it could to help the Germans win this
• 56:15
  war, regardless of what that alliance meant, right?
• 56:19
  That you were out lying with the Nazis.
• 56:21
  He also was involved in actual war crimes and against Jews and
• 56:25
  also civil, you know, Soviet civilians, non Jewish.
• 56:27
  And then he also kind of has a it's a bit different.
• 56:31
  But because when he starts in this investing run up to the
• 56:34
  investigation for war crimes, he knows that someone they're
• 56:38
  gunning for him. So he writes a short account
• 56:41
  called like considerations on the fight on the Don Bend.
• 56:45
  It's something like that. And it's this self-serving
• 56:49
  basically saying I'm so great. We won all these battles and
• 56:53
  then all the Germans wouldn't listen to us and the Germans are
• 56:57
  all to blame for Stalingrad. You know, I, I did everything I
• 57:00
  could. He didn't even says like at one
• 57:03
  point he's like Antonescu never blamed me, the other dictator.
• 57:06
  He didn't blame me when I we lost Stalingrad.
• 57:08
  So why should I be blamed now? Because one of he thinks he
• 57:11
  could be taken for trial for was being like leading the nation to
• 57:15
  disaster. It wasn't just war crimes
• 57:17
  against, you know, Jews or, you know, kind of these hall.
• 57:20
  He's it was just, you know, he could be Ettinescu's man who
• 57:23
  helped take the country disaster.
• 57:24
  And he was like, oh, no, like, but like, but he has the balls
• 57:27
  to say, like Ettinescu didn't hold me responsible for
• 57:29
  Stalingrad, So why should you? Why should I be responsible for
• 57:32
  it now? And then he even goes so far as
• 57:34
  to claim that, like, the army was part of the resistance
• 57:39
  against the Germans because, you know, they didn't actually
• 57:42
  didn't really want to be fighting along.
• 57:44
  The Germans are really to blame for why the war went bad.
• 57:47
  And the thing that's really incredible is that this gets
• 57:50
  published early on. It gets kind of suppressed
• 57:52
  during communism. But after communism falls, it
• 57:55
  comes back. And it's now been republished
• 57:57
  in, like, military magazines. It didn't republish in
• 58:01
  collective volumes like, over and over and over and over.
• 58:04
  Like I have like two or three books with like accounts of
• 58:07
  Stalingrad written by different generals and his is like in
• 58:09
  every single one. It's been published as a stand
• 58:11
  alone booklet. And it's like this self-serving
• 58:15
  version of events is kind of still how Romanians look at it,
• 58:19
  where it's Manstein's lost victories.
• 58:21
  People we people look at it and think, all right, it's biased.
• 58:24
  We finally figured out after 50-60 years that maybe we
• 58:27
  shouldn't take him at face value.
• 58:31
  Do me Threscu's little pamphlet that is accepted as like the
• 58:35
  gospel truth by a law of Romanians to this day.
• 58:38
  Right, yeah. And if you'd like to learn more,
• 58:41
  please check out Grant's book, Romania's Holy War, which you
• 58:44
  can find on Amazon. And Grant, this is fantastic.
• 58:48
  I learned a lot about Manstein and Duma Tresco and we loved
• 58:52
  having you on the show, my friend.
• 58:54
  Well, thanks for inviting me, and yeah, maybe we'll find out
• 58:56
  some other Romanian profile someday.
• 58:59
  Ready when you are, ready when you are.
• 59:01
  Thank you, Grant.