A lot of retoric is produced here about Manstein but it reads mostly like a negative ad in a political campaign where the opinions of the opposing party are misrepresented. In his memoirs Manstein only makes a detailed assessment on the red army leadership concerning the Stalingrad campaign and its aftermath (Verlorene Siege pp 469-471) and there he does not not present it as awfully bad. He acknowledges that the red army leadership had gotten much better at handling large mobile formations and achieving breakthroughs but criticizes it for not achieving more in the circonstances by not being strong enough at the decisive point. In his judgment the red army could have cut off the whole southwing of german eastern front by being more bold. A not surprising judgment in view of Mansteins operational philosophy and his campaigns. It is all very well to have a negative opinion on the operational abilities of Manstein but the misrepresentation of the many that have a very high regard of his operational abilities is unacceptable. Manstein may not always have been right in his military judgment but they were honest opinions of the commander in the field who does not have the benefit of hindsight. Trying to put part of the responsability for sixth army staying in Stalingrad on Manstein is unjustified and not supported by any documentary source. Even if Manstein had argued for an immediate breakout of sixth army - the necessity of which he was not convinced of on the condition that it could be supplied by air - Hitler would never have authorised it. As soon as all the facts were known to Manstein he made a clear description of the dire situation of the sixth army and expressed his conviction that it could not be supplied by air and needed to abandon Stalingrad as soon as a link was established. It gets worse when Manstein is even accused of forging the historical record in his memoirs. Anyway, an article in an encyclopedia cannot contain just ONE opinion on any fact of history. It is also unacceptable to state that Manstein passes himself off as perfect and always right while the others are supposedly nitwits. Manstein did not write in absolutes. His opinions are not presented as the absolute truth. The possible objections to his ideas are taken seriously even when they come from Hitler. His assessments of his fellow german officers are at worst mostly balanced and with a lot of positives even concerning those he did not really like. Manstein certainly did not write that he realised the war was lost after he was dismissed. The only comment he makes at the end of his book is about him and his officers being convinced of the possibility of exhausting the offensive power of the red army in 1943 by a war of manoeuver. Julian144 (talk) 14:32, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
You do no service to wikipedia by trying to protect the actual text from the masssive improvements it needs. The article was rewritten by an individual who does not hide his objective of making Manstein looking as bad as possible.
As sources the individual used mainly a general book on ww2 and a few others who were no biography of Manstein neither were detailed authorative works on the campaigns Manstein was involved in. One would expect the biographies on Manstein to have been mainly used but the author of the most recent version of the article clearly did not consider that it is necessary to do this.
In wiew of his anti-german bias the individual could have chosen to use Glantz but he did not even do that . He did not even read Mansteins writings but did give a detailed description of the content of them.
Rejecting changes simply because they contradict the few books the author used, is prety silly as there many more books written by eminent historians who contradict his few sources. And even where the content of Lost victories is concerned the book itstelf is rejected as a source which comes down to saying that one should not read a book before writing about its content. And historians certainly do use lost victories as a source so rejecting that as a matter of principle is strange.
The article is full of factual errors and bias.
The list is long:
- the misrepresentation of what Manstein proposed to Hitler regarding Stalingrad
- making a statement about Mansteins frame of mind after Kursk which could only be based on his memoirs but finds no support in them neither in any of the recent biographies
- having him sending away all his armoured reserves while actually three divisions were left in place, 2 were taking away by Hitler to AGC and one corps was earmarked for Italy by Hitler
- having Manstein not retreat the assault forces back to the starting positions before the kursk offensive which is,among others,contradicted by Glantz' book on Kursk
- several errors in the chronology after Kursk
- a totally wrong start date for the german counterattack in november 1943 near Kiev(it was 16 november and not late december)
- the whole bait theory including incorrectly stating that Vatutins christmas offensive attacked over the Dnjepr which is contradicted by other wikipedia articles(eastern front among others) which correctly have Vatutins offensive taking place in the same area where he was counterattacked
- a complete lack of detail on what happened in the beginning of 1944
- the whole description of the content of lost victories which is not even close to what it actually says and is in firm contradiction to the specific wikipedia article on lost victories
You can choose to let the article stand and then it will simply be living evidence of what is wrong with wikipedia. Articles are simply not reviewed and so you have extremely flawed articles which are even contradicted by other wikipedia aryicles. If the manstein article had been reviewed by somebody with a detailed knowledge on Manstein, the most recent version would have been rejected for all its flaws and bias.
I will certainly point out the flaws on at least one military history forum and maybe that will inspire others to have a go at it.
And I can come back too.
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