(Nick) wrote in message om...
(snipped)
Of course, Finland's most important achievement of the Continuation War--at
the cost of many lives and some territory (vis-a-vis the 1939 border)--was
simply in preserving its national independence.

"As a result of the development of technology, warfare becomes more and more
a battle of information rather than a battle of firepower. As weapons become
more accurate, the advantage goes to the side which knows exactly where the
enemy forces are. Accurate weapons without good information are useless.
And, as the importance of information increases, we see a gradual shift in
the balance of advantage from attack to defence. In a battle of information,
the defence fighting from hidden positions within its own territory has an
inherent advantage over the attack fighting from exposed and vulnerable
vehicles.

A remarkable example of the decline of the advantage of the attack toward the
end of World War II is provided by the defence of Finland against the last
great Soviet offensive of June and July 1944. I learned the details of this
campaign from Stefan Forss, a physicist at the University of Helsinki. The
Soviet Marshal Govorov was given thirty divisions of infantry with heavy tanks
and artillery, and about one thousand tactical aircraft, to knock Finland out
of the war. He was told by Stalin that he had to be in Helsinki in six weeks.
After that his divisions would be moved south to join the Soviet armies
fighting their way into Germany. There was a desperate battle in Finland,
with massive Soviet attacks breaking through three Finnish lines of defence in
succession. The Finns wre heavily outnumbered, but had superior information.
They had broken the codes used by the Soviet forces for communication by radio.
As a result, the Finns usually knew in advance where the Soviet forces were to
be concentrated before an attack. The Finnish defence, using carefully placed
artillery strikes, could take advantage of this knowledge to delay the attacks
and to limit the breakthroughs.

The decisive moment came after six weeks of terrible fighting, when the Finns
were barely holding their fourth defence line and the Soviet troops were still
100 miles away from Helsinki. The Finnish code-breakers picked up a personal
order from Stalin to Govorov, announcing that the time had run out and that
five Soviet divisions were to move south immediately. Govorov replied that
he could be in Helsinki in two more weeks. After an hour an angry message
from Stalin told Govorov tha the war would be decided in Berlin, not in
Helsinki. So the five divisions moved south and Finland was saved from
sharing the fate of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Two months later an
armistice agreement was signed, surrendering to the Soviet Union the parts of
Finland overrun by Soviet forces, and a little bit more, but otherwise leaving
Finland intact."

--Freeman Dyson (Infinite in All Directions, pp. 223-4)

"In September 1955, shortly after the signing of the Austrian Treaty, the
Soviet Union concluded a similarly reasonable treaty with Finland. Until
1955, the Soviet Union had maintained an occupation force in two areas of
Finnish territory, one at Hango at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, the
other at Porkkala a few miles from Helsinki. The 1955 treaty withdrew the
occupation forces and gave these areas back to Finland. In return, Finland
had only to renew the already existing non-aggression pact and commercial
agreement with the Soviet Union."
--Freeman Dyson (Infinite in All Directions, pp. 240-1)

--Nick

Chapman billy wrote in message m...
In article ,
says...
(snipped)
Tim Hanke is not a historian, and I don't take him seriously as a writer on
history. What I write about history is not altered by whatever he writes.

Tim Hanke certainly isn't a historian, but he does appear to have read a
fair bit....

'Historians are not accountable for the difficulty of learning to read.'
--Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

Dear Simon,

Someone who might have read many popular books on health care does not become
professionally qualified to practise medicine in a hospital. One can find
something in print to support nearly every conceivable view of history (for
instance, from Daniel Goldhagen to David Irving on German history 1933-1945).

Any really interesting historical subject tends to involve considering some
incomplete, inconsistent, or conflicting evidence. Yet not every source in
print is of comparable reliability or value, and professional historians are
generally better than amateurs at separating the wheat from the chaff.

"For my part I've gone back and forth on the A-bomb decision so many times
I can't have much confidence in hard conclusions."
--Stephen Ambrose (28 January 1993, letter to Gar Alperovitz, on the United
States's atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945)

'History is never a trustworthy guide to the thinker.
It is, at the best, only a staff, and a most unreliable one at that.'
--Albion Tourgee (Murvale Eastman)

--Nick

In article
,
says...
Someone who might have read many popular books on health care does not become
professionally qualified to practise medicine in a hospital. One can find
something in print to support nearly every conceivable view of history (for
instance, from Daniel Goldhagen to David Irving on German history 1933-1945).

Any really interesting historical subject tends to involve considering some
incomplete, inconsistent, or conflicting evidence. Yet not every source in
print is of comparable reliability or value, and professional historians are
generally better than amateurs at separating the wheat from the chaff.


Dear Nick,

The words "professional historian" have been sorely
abused for some time now. Given Daniel Goldhagen's
position at Harvard one could count him as a professional
historian, without necessarily agreeing with the reality
of his chaff. David Irving's research methods were
praised by John Erickson in his notes to either "The Road
to Stalingrad" or the "Road to Berlin"; yet I suspect you
would agree with me that Erickson is a historian par
excellence. Not that this prevents the odd slip up (e.g.
on page 120 of the first edition of "Road to Berlin" the
text reads: "Now Koniev could strike for Kharkov, though
intelligence reported the presence of SS Das Reich,
Totenkopf, Wiking, and 3rd Panzer divisions which had
been moved back from the Izyum-Barvenkovo area: SS Gross
Deutscheland was moving into the Kharkov area from
Orel."), probably due to tiredness and late night working
at what I consider a very impressive book.

Newspapers further muddy the water by describing highly
dubious individuals as historians: one person so termed
purchased his degree, he then went on to libel another
who won the subsequent court case, not that the victim
ever saw a penny from the libeller: indeed in one of the
appeals, this time with the libeller as plaintiff, the
presiding judge found the plaintiff's case so
preposterous that he ordered the plaintiff's lawyers to
pay the costs of the defence, there being no possibility
of monetary redress otherwise.

Biographies are properly overlapped with history: I can
recall the favourable reviews of Norma Major's biography
of Joan Sutherland; I had the dubious pleasure of being
given this as a present, it would never have occurred to
me to buy it. What was wrong with it was not Major's poor
vocabulary (e.g. she seemed not to know that anticipate
is not a synonym for expect, nor that "refute" should not
do the work of "reject", never mind her bidding "complex"
to replace "complicated"), an all too common, and
probably lost, battle (possibly sometimes deservedly,
e.g. I consider "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists" a
superb book despite its poor grammar and the associated
historical baggage): my objection was that Major had so
little idea what to write, not being a musician or
musically trained, that she was reduced to describing the
operas that the great diva performed in, which does not a
biography make, I threw the book away. Contrast this with
the great Maxim Gorky when he wrote (or was told) a great
singer's biography. Yet biographies written by those who
know the subject are frequently of great value, for
instance the biography of Rosenbach has many fine
stories, such as "The Rape of York", which are not
without value.

Unfortunately, history is an easy subject to pretend to
an expertise in. I suspect that is why there are so many,
how can one put it, society historians. In eighteenth
century England, it was easy to laugh at the
presentations, sometimes justified, made to the Royal
Society because of the presenter's ignorance of the
method of fluxions; today it is even easier, and with
more justification, to dismiss the efforts of charlatans
in the mathematical sciences: in history it is not so
simple.

We both know that much of the material on Napoleon's 1813
campaign (amongst others) is based upon the work of
Petre; yet it is not sufficient just to read him.
Likewise many people relied and rely upon Wedgewood's
excellent book "The King's Peace" for 17th century
English constitutional history. But there are many highly
questionable, or so I believe, books doing the rounds,
which are merely inferior rewritings of these.

Apart from the Erickson quote, I have written this from
memory, so please forgive any inaccuracies.


Regards,


Simon.

Dear Simon,

I hope to reply to your interesting comments when I have some more time.
Best wishes.

--Nick

Chapman billy wrote in
message m...
In article ,
says...
Someone who might have read many popular books on health care does not
become professionally qualified to practise medicine in a hospital.
One can find something in print to support nearly every conceivable view
of history (for instance, from Daniel Goldhagen to David Irving on German
history 1933-1945).

Any really interesting historical subject tends to involve considering some
incomplete, inconsistent, or conflicting evidence. Yet not every source in
print is of comparable reliability or value, and professional historians
are generally better than amateurs at separating the wheat from the chaff.

Dear Nick,
The words "professional historian" have been sorely
abused for some time now. Given Daniel Goldhagen's
position at Harvard one could count him as a professional
historian, without necessarily agreeing with the reality
of his chaff. David Irving's research methods were
praised by John Erickson in his notes to either "The Road
to Stalingrad" or the "Road to Berlin"; yet I suspect you
would agree with me that Erickson is a historian par
excellence. Not that this prevents the odd slip up (e.g.
on page 120 of the first edition of "Road to Berlin" the
text reads: "Now Koniev could strike for Kharkov, though
intelligence reported the presence of SS Das Reich,
Totenkopf, Wiking, and 3rd Panzer divisions which had
been moved back from the Izyum-Barvenkovo area: SS Gross
Deutscheland was moving into the Kharkov area from
Orel."), probably due to tiredness and late night working
at what I consider a very impressive book.

Newspapers further muddy the water by describing highly
dubious individuals as historians: one person so termed
purchased his degree, he then went on to libel another
who won the subsequent court case, not that the victim
ever saw a penny from the libeller: indeed in one of the
appeals, this time with the libeller as plaintiff, the
presiding judge found the plaintiff's case so
preposterous that he ordered the plaintiff's lawyers to
pay the costs of the defence, there being no possibility
of monetary redress otherwise.

Biographies are properly overlapped with history: I can
recall the favourable reviews of Norma Major's biography
of Joan Sutherland; I had the dubious pleasure of being
given this as a present, it would never have occurred to
me to buy it. What was wrong with it was not Major's poor
vocabulary (e.g. she seemed not to know that anticipate
is not a synonym for expect, nor that "refute" should not
do the work of "reject", never mind her bidding "complex"
to replace "complicated"), an all too common, and
probably lost, battle (possibly sometimes deservedly,
e.g. I consider "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists" a
superb book despite its poor grammar and the associated
historical baggage): my objection was that Major had so
little idea what to write, not being a musician or
musically trained, that she was reduced to describing the
operas that the great diva performed in, which does not a
biography make, I threw the book away. Contrast this with
the great Maxim Gorky when he wrote (or was told) a great
singer's biography. Yet biographies written by those who
know the subject are frequently of great value, for
instance the biography of Rosenbach has many fine stories,
such as "The Rape of York", which are not without value.

Unfortunately, history is an easy subject to pretend to
an expertise in. I suspect that is why there are so many,
how can one put it, society historians. In eighteenth
century England, it was easy to laugh at the presentations,
sometimes justified, made to the Royal Society because of
the presenter's ignorance of the method of fluxions;
today it is even easier, and with more justification,
to dismiss the efforts of charlatans in the mathematical
sciences: in history it is not so simple.

We both know that much of the material on Napoleon's 1813
campaign (amongst others) is based upon the work of
Petre; yet it is not sufficient just to read him.
Likewise many people relied and rely upon Wedgewood's
excellent book "The King's Peace" for 17th century
English constitutional history. But there are many highly
questionable, or so I believe, books doing the rounds,
which are merely inferior rewritings of these.

Apart from the Erickson quote, I have written this from
memory, so please forgive any inaccuracies.

Simon.

Nick wrote:

Dear Simon,

I hope to reply to your interesting comments when I have some more time.
Best wishes.

--Nick

Chapman billy wrote in
message m...
In article ,
says...
Someone who might have read many popular books on health care does not
become professionally qualified to practise medicine in a hospital.
One can find something in print to support nearly every conceivable
view of history (for instance, from Daniel Goldhagen to David Irving on
German history 1933-1945).

Dear Nick,

I may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb :-)

Can I toss the following from the "professional historian" the late Barbara
Tuchman into the battle? it really is egregious.

From page 174 of "The First Salute":

'The Seven Years War, fought mainly between France and Britain in rivalry
for sovereignty of the seas and for colonial dominion in America and to a
lesser extent in India, was the central war of the century. In America it
was known as the French and Indian War. With hindsight later historians
have seen it as the first real World War because of its subsidiary
conflicts in Europe in the web of territorial and dynastic disputes and
tangled alliances centering around the duel of Prussia and Austria for
dominance. France on Prussia's side was opposed to England allied with
Austria, with Sweden, Spain, and the United Provinces variously involved.'


No wonder Rossbach was such a shock!



Regards (yes I know I'm cheating),

Simon.

chapman Billy wrote in message ...
Nick wrote:

Dear Simon,

I hope to reply to your interesting comments when I have some more time.
Best wishes.

--Nick

Chapman billy wrote in
message m...
In article ,
says...
Someone who might have read many popular books on health care does not
become professionally qualified to practise medicine in a hospital.
One can find something in print to support nearly every conceivable
view of history (for instance, from Daniel Goldhagen to David Irving on
German history 1933-1945).

Dear Nick,

I may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb :-)

Can I toss the following from the "professional historian" the late Barbara
Tuchman into the battle? it really is egregious.

From page 174 of "The First Salute":

'The Seven Years War, fought mainly between France and Britain in rivalry
for sovereignty of the seas and for colonial dominion in America and to a
lesser extent in India, was the central war of the century. In America it
was known as the French and Indian War. With hindsight later historians
have seen it as the first real World War because of its subsidiary
conflicts in Europe in the web of territorial and dynastic disputes and
tangled alliances centering around the duel of Prussia and Austria for
dominance. France on Prussia's side was opposed to England allied with
Austria, with Sweden, Spain, and the United Provinces variously involved.'


No wonder Rossbach was such a shock!



Regards (yes I know I'm cheating),

Simon.

Hehe. Nice post, Simon :-)