re: #258 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

Germany’s early successes were as much political as military. Hitler conquered Austria and Czechoslovakia without firing a shot. He signed a non-aggression pact with his biggest ideological foe, Russia, in order to invade Poland.

And in the West, he knew that the Allies would be divided. Belgium, desperate to remain neutral, refused any military alliance or cooperation with France and Germany and did not even allow allied forces into Belgium until the Germans invaded first.

They handed him the initiative and he used it. But both Poland and France were matters of only a few weeks. The strain did not begin to show until Germany got involved in campaigns that lasted longer.

Theirs was a military very much in the Roman manner: They did not live to conquer so much as conquer to live, every conquest feeding the machine and enabling the next campaign. They would draft able-bodied men either into the military or the paramilitary forces, enslave portions of the population to do manual labor, incorporate captured weapons into the line of battle, and plunder any resources to fuel the whole machine. Only when they encountered sustained resistance did the machine begin to hiccup and then eventually break down, as the initial head rush of constant victories first turned into uncertainty and then eventually into feelings of defeat.