Thank God he ignored the generals

Time on a treadmill is boring, so I try to find interesting stuff to watch.

I was watching the lecture series World War II: Battlefield Europe, presented by David Stone who teaches at the U.S. Naval War College. This series looks at WW II from a European perspective, but I was surprised that the series of lectures starts with The Battle of Moscow: December 1941. Why start there?

Well, it turns out, according to Professor Stone, this battle was THE defining battle of the European theater. If Germany had taken Moscow, Hitler would have been free to move all his forces west and focus on England.

Side note:

The U.S. was not yet in the European war and two-thirds of German troops were in the East, not the West. Defeating Russia would have doomed England who Hitler expected to surrender after the fall of France but, strangely enough, did not. Darn Brits upset Hitler’s assumptions.)

The Story

Here’s the short version of what happened. Germany found itself in a war with two fronts, Russia to the east and England to the west. And for over two years all Germany knew was victory. Moving east, Hitler’s army had stunning early success in trying to defeat Russia but, like Napoleon in 1812, weather and mud stopped his army outside of Moscow and winter brought unexpected defeat to the feared German army.  

Furious that his army had been unable to take Moscow, Hitler dismissed his seasoned generals and took personal charge of the Wehrmacht, effectively taking control of all military decisions.

And since he had dismissed his combat tested generals, he surrounded himself with staff officers with little or no recent combat experience. Lack of relevant expertise was certainly one of the root causes of Germany’s defeat in the long run.  

Hitler didn’t want to listen to his generals and, thank God, he fired them. He was clearly outside his real circle of competence, but he was now in charge of military strategy.

 The lesson

What’s the lesson for today? Well, your circle of competence is smaller than you think. People may not like the messages that come from experts, but we are fools not to at least listen to them.

Many people have opinions about the efficacy of vaccines but are they experts?

Many people have opinions about climate change, but where do they get their information? From other opinionated people or from experts?

For that matter, much of my father’s generation had opinions about the nature of smoking. Too bad they (he) didn’t listen to the experts sooner. By the way, the early “experts” were wrong. But science has a way of getting to the truth.

To quote the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

All of us need to know when to let the experts take the lead.