Talk:List of World War II military operations

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[edit] Ops Potluck & Slapstick

I reinstated Slapstick as a part of Baytown and deleted as a standalone. Also reinstated Potluck - it's documented here [1], so I don't understand why it was deleted. Folks at 137 19:42, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Deleting Potluck must have been some technical error of mine. Slapstick was listed twice, under Baytown and alone (the second option is easier to search by alphabet...). Pibwl ←« 19:34, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
The current practice is to list "sub-operations" within the main, it gives a broad structure. One can find a known op by using <ctrl-F> to find the text. Apologies if I get possessive!! Folks at 137 20:28, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Errors

I've assumed that definition is as appearing at 'Military operation' and not just operations involving military personnel.

  • 'Taube ("Pigeon") (1943)' didnt exist. Only Taube i'm aware of is the plan to transport Sean Russell & Frank Ryan to Ireland in a uboat. It had no military component.
  • Majority of operations involving Ireland which are included had no military component (I authored the articles). These missions belonged either to the Abwehr or German Foreign Ministry and were intelligence focused. Obvious exception being Case Green by OKW.
  • 'Artur' was a name the German Foreign Ministry used to refer to a plan sketched out by the IRA known as Kathleen. Having it listed as an Axis plan is bending the facts to breaking point.
  • "Valkyrie" wasnt the codename for any of the plots to assassinate Hitler. Operation Walküre was more like a policing plan of action anyway involving military personnel.
  • Major military operations of the ThirdReich are listed under 'Miscellaneous and Unclassified' eg. Weiss, Grun, etc. alongside highly unusual plans like Reinhard, or Abwehr plans such as Taube, Hummer, Pastorious etc. This seems a rather dubious classification. Describing plans for genocide as a 'military plan' is nonsensical and could be seen as legitimising the activities as part of a 'battle' against various ethnic groups/political activists etc.

Fluffy999 22:30, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I think you're being too restrictive in your definition. In this context maybe "military" means furthering war aims or resulting from the state of war. In this context, Taube fits as it ties in with the German objective of under-mining Allied influence (in any case, use of a u-boat is military in itself). Activity by intelligence organisations - SOE, Abwehr, etc - also fits. If your argument on Kathleen and Valkyrie are correct (and I don't dispute them), then make a suitable amends - but they both seem like plans to influence the outcome of the war, so deletion might not be correct. The accusation of "...legitimising the activities as part of a 'battle' against various ethnic groups/political activists etc" is erroneous and insulting to contributors (including me) who have tried to make this list as complete as we can. The misc section is for those items that are difficult to classify, or await classification. There were also a number of post-war operations, eg, to garner technology or repatriate personnel, that might not be strictly wartime, but it seems appropriate to include them as a part of the WWII milieu. Perhaps a resolution is to remove "military" from the title, but it might be appropriate to gain a consensus. Folks at 137 18:32, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
Well the listing of Reinhard as "military" is suprising and I can perhaps alay your hurt feelings on that by arguing that plans to exterminate european jewry fall way outside what most people would consider the meat & potatos of "military operations" - waging war. The 'final solution' was in fact considered a criminal activity postWW2 ie. outside activites constituting "military operations". This does come to the nub of my problem with the list- although distinctions are somewhat made between Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, SOE and regular Allied ops no distinction is made for Abwehr owned ops (or SS for that matter eg. Op Reinhard & Op Himmler). Lumping Abwehr, SS, etc under the broad heading "military" will lead to a false impression with the reader.
Highly insignificant Abwehr missions aimed at intelligence gathering appear with ops like Barbarossa. Taube and Barbarossa are comparable only in so far as they both involved some degree of planning. Barbarossa was OKW & Fuhrer owned- it was military. Abwehr was off on its own acting largely for Canaris or without any oversight- non military. Yes spying and sabotage are military in a lot of ways but more simiar to SOE/French Resistance and way less than OKW.
I'd fix the list in 1 of 2 ways; list Abwehr Ops in their own area (SOE ops are listed separately), or break the entire list into sub categories listed by type eg. humanitarian, spying/ intelligence gathering, sabotage, military etc. The former is the easiest. Either way they should be kept apart from OKW/Fuhrer ops to avoid creating the misleading impression that operations of German military constituted much more than what they actually were. And I should point out one mistake I failed to mention previously- Kathleen was nicknamed Op ArtuS not ArtuR by German Foreign Ministry. Fluffy999 00:58, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
The original idea behind the list was to gather operation names for reference and interest and I doubt the originator wished to be strict about the definition of military or the relative significance of ops. I think the scope needs to be clarified in the intro. I would argue for the retention of the "ops" that you refer to (I doubt that Reinhard would have been proposed outside the circumstances of Barbarossa), but I like the idea of separate categories for Abwehr and for actions such as Reinhard (title?). (Recently, I proposed a task force for war crimes or similar but I'm mulling over the scope for edit wars.) Also Ireland is IMO a category on its own, your opinion sought. Folks at 137 17:49, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
No problem with the Abwehr ops being retained/listed. There were lots of such Abwehr ops all across europe, only a fraction are listed here. If enough Abwehr are accumulated for each country then a new list can be created.
Splitting the genocide activities off is wise. Asking at project Final Solution about how best to tackle the listing of these would be another good step. It is, as you suggest, a source of conflict between various opposing political positions. Fluffy999 22:06, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Made few Changes

After checking the source for this article I figured out that it was missing a lot of operations and inaccurate in a lot of places. Short of weeding out the bogus by hand I dont see how it will be fixed. I dont have time to do that or time to add the many, many missing Axis operations. Anyway I placed a caveat on the link to that source to warn browsers who might take it as gospel.

To slim down the page I removed duplicates where noticed and also removed a little superfluous text ('occupied Yugoslavia' for example). Where noticed I cleaned up the spelling of German words and added the name in German. Again these errors originate with the original source. Eventually I did add some operations to the list, ones which are either key or weird (Rabat) and also moved the SOE stuff off to its own article. As discussed above I also separated the genocide plans apart. Fluffy999 15:57, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Added some more operations. The invasion of neutral Iceland by britain is listed, im nearly certain its White Falcon but could be wrong so left a cite on the listing. The invasion of neutral Norway by britain plus the plans to send British French troops to aid Finland against the USSR arent listed as I dont know what theyre called. Fluffy999 17:29, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
Nice to have someone take serious interest in the list. A few quibbles:
  1. beware the temptation to add too much description - it's a list pointing at the main articles which should carry the expansion
  2. not sure why SOE have been moved out, while Abwehr remains, it dilutes the comprehensive nature, IMO
  3. why divide technology into Axis and Allies?
  4. I did consider adding references to each op, but I think the main articles should do the validation.
Folks at 137 20:16, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
At the end all the lists will have their own article so no slight against SOE. I moved text simply to keep within page size guidelines and an Abwehr list will be next thing I work at. Axis is all im interested in to be honest and there are many Abwehr operations in all theaters to list which would overwhelm this article.
Yes articles on individual operations should confirm the details but I noticed that articles possibly created using the same data from the original source are incorrect eg.
  1. Adler linked to Operation Adler which talked about "Adlertag". The actual operation was Adlerangriff, "Adlertag" being the kickoff day (think D-day).
  2. Herbstnebel linked to Operation Herbstnebel but it was a prong of Wacht am Rhein which incorporated the majority of Fall Martin instead of a renaming of Wacht am Rhein as the source indicated Herbstnebel to be. Wacht am Rhein doesnt have its own article (for some strange reason), it links to Battle of the Bulge which in turn neglects to mention much German activity. How is reader to confirm Autumn Mist / Martin there?
Yet if you check Battle of Britain, angriff is flagged there, and if you check wikisource USArmy history, OB West & Army Group B planning prong Herbstnebel is mentioned (although not in Battle of the Bulge).
I think any book on the actual campaigns would mention these and I hope to eventually cite each Axis operation to remove doubt.
Separation of some theater lists into Axis/Allies was because each list isnt complete. As operations are confirmed and added then the list will become less easier to survey. A compromise would be to list by combatant in theater, then list in sequence of execution. Reader then gets both overviews. The space to do this will exist as each theater has its own page size to work within. Another idea may be to separate only planned operations, ie. operations devised but not executed, this would also aid comprehension as this is not dealt with in a uniform way so far. Fluffy999 21:28, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
Don't wish to criticise, but .... Given the extent of the changes, it would have been better to have canvassed opinion and got a consensus - other ideas might have surfaced and objections dealt with. I proposed similar changes a while back, but backed off when they were opposed. Other users used the list in ways that the layout supported. It feels fragmented now (the size issue is a real one, I acknowledge) and I wonder whether an overview with just "significant" ops (definition?), with minor and most subsidiaries only in the subsidiary lists. The idea is to give casual readers an overview, but retain the depth of info for those who wish to dig deeper. Given concerns about the reference, might be better to delete it: I certainly didn't use it without double-checking elsewhere. Some confusion has been caused when op names have been reused, or intended to cover a series of actions - it may be that Herbstnebel was one of these. Folks at 137 08:47, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
Just checked. "Neutral" Iceland (mentioned above) is debatable. It was Danish territory and Denmark had been occupied by the Germans as part of Weserubung on 9th April 1940. Although Denmark never formally declared war, its troops did resist briefly before the surrender. Folks at 137 14:53, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
Consensus is ideal but was there dispute that the page was huge for a single article- around 189kb? Moving out SOE cut that but it was still too large and only got below the 50 threshold with final page creation/move (no more warnings). Value of individual articles derives from the considerations listed- easier to manipulate, add to, rearrange, correct etc. If you know of a way to make the overview be bold, in truth im only interested in a reliable reference so political matters are secondary. Will go do Abwehr list. As for iceland, its really not worth debating; check history of iceland article :) Fluffy999 20:22, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
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