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At that time too, the Red Army was in the midst of re-organizing and re-arming. Much of the officer corps, including three of five Marshals had been purged, much of the air force consisted of biplanes, and there wasn't much of a navy. If Stalin had his way, he would have completely rebuilt the Army and Air Force, and build a navy, including an insane sixteen battleships from scratch in the early 1940s. Hitlerstruck when the Red Army was at its weakest.
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May 2, 2013 17:09
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Raskolnikov38 posted:I would also argue that it was Von Kluck's stupidity and Joffre managing to pull his head out of his rear end by the end of August 1914 that made Germany lose the war but that's another thread. Someone make a WWI thread and link to it here. tia
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May 2, 2013 17:15
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Sunshine89 posted:At that time too, the Red Army was in the midst of re-organizing and re-arming. Much of the officer corps, including three of five Marshals had been purged, much of the air force consisted of biplanes, and there wasn't much of a navy. If Stalin had his way, he would have completely rebuilt the Army and Air Force, and build a navy, including an insane sixteen battleships from scratch in the early 1940s. I think it was also a big contributing factor that German intelligence suggested that the Red Army was smaller than it really was, and that the Germans had no idea that the Soviets would be able to muster up an entirely new Red Army (and another ... and another), let alone muster up one on such short notice. In some ways you can almost see why Hitler would think that it was a good idea to attack Russia, besides it being a long-term objective of his in the first place, and even though he was working with incomplete/incorrect information.
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May 2, 2013 18:13
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MN-Ghost posted:I have a question. Why did Hitler break the non-aggression pact with Russia and invade them before securing the western front by forcing Britain into surrender? I was taught that being forced to fight on two front between France and Russia was one of the biggest reason Germany lost WWI. So given that Hitler should have already learned this lesson, this always seemed to me to be a monumentally dumb move. The Battle of Britain was a defeat for Germany, but Britain was an impotent threat to the continent. There was nothing Hitler could have ordered that would force Britain to surrender, nor anything to accomplish for Germany from the Mediterranean. At the same time, Britain could be tied up with second-rate garrisons and recovering troops posted in Western Europe without any difficulty. Considering the scale of the Great Patriotic War, the piddling numbers of the Afrika Korps and the Atlantic wall were just a drop in the bucket.
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May 2, 2013 19:02
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MN-Ghost posted:I have a question. Why did Hitler break the non-aggression pact with Russia and invade them before securing the western front by forcing Britain into surrender? I was taught that being forced to fight on two front between France and Russia was one of the biggest reason Germany lost WWI. So given that Hitler should have already learned this lesson, this always seemed to me to be a monumentally dumb move. Other people have already said it, but how exactly could Hitler have forced Britain to surrender? Sealion was a complete fantasy from the beginning, and Germany had already failed to acquire air superiority, so not even Hitler would have attempted it anyway. It's possible but unlikely that the British could have been forced out of North Africa, but even this probably wouldn't have made them surrender. Britain knew the Empire was on the line, and if they were going to go down, they were going down fighting. Hitler sitting on his hands and waiting for something to improve, aside from being deeply uncharacteristic for him, was also a terrible idea. That just allows more time for the Americans to funnel resources to Britain and the Soviet army to rebuild itself. On top of that, the German economy was still not in great shape; they basically needed to keep conquering places so they could plunder them. But at the end of the day, I'd say it's because Hitler thought he could beat the Soviets. The dude had one hell of a hate-boner for Communists, and the German experience working with the Soviet army had been in the 20's, when the Red Army was far, far more of a trainwreck than it was by 1940. So Hitler has a bunch of armies sitting around, and a big old Soviet Union to attack which he hates, and thinks is undefended and incapable of fighting back.
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May 2, 2013 19:15
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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So could the Nazi can afford to go public with the Death Camps compared to their Asian equivilant the Japanese who were not only known for their terrible treatment of the conquered but the unapologetic attitude tehy adopt to this day or would such a revelation cause Hitler's regime to crumble in fear of knowing they may next on the block if they had won the war and assumed dominion over mainland Europe.
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May 2, 2013 21:03
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Sunshine89 posted:At that time too, the Red Army was in the midst of re-organizing and re-arming. Much of the officer corps, including three of five Marshals had been purged, much of the air force consisted of biplanes, and there wasn't much of a navy. If Stalin had his way, he would have completely rebuilt the Army and Air Force, and build a navy, including an insane sixteen battleships from scratch in the early 1940s. Remember that Stalin ordered a lot of veterans from the Spanish civil war to be executed. He also executed shitloads of officers and soldiers after World War 2. Stalin was one of the biggest idiots in the history of mankind and the fact that the Soviet Union managed to survive through his regime is nothing short of amazing.
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May 2, 2013 21:16
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And also the developers of the Deep Battle doctrine. And also soldiers trained in demolitions, infiltration, and taught how to train partisans. Stalin was colossally idiotic.
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May 2, 2013 21:20
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Namarrgon posted:Was a German-Russian war that inevitable? Beyond that, there was a very real fear of Communists in Germany post-WWI. There had already been one attempted Communist revolution, which was put down by paramilitary forces, not the government, and there was major fear of another one. When the Reichstag fire happened, it was widely feared to be the start of another attempted revolution. The fear of that revolution led to the passage of the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act, which effectively removed Germany from democracy and directly led to dictatorship only a couple years later. Additionally, when Hitler decided to invade, the USSR was still recovering from Stalin's disastrous purges of the military leadership, but they were recovering. Every year, the Soviet military got stronger and their equipment got better, and at a much faster rate than Germany, so the longer they waited, the less of an advantage they would have had militarily. Finally, Hitler's intelligence gathering regarding the Soviet military was hopelessly optimistic regarding the overall size of the Soviet military. During the opening of Operation Barbarossa, the German army destroyed what they believed to be something like 90% of the operational strength of the Soviet army and were then absolutely shocked when another army of roughly equal strength showed up when they went on the offensive again. Which they destroyed in a similar fashion, only to have a third army show up to face them again. The Germans basically had no clue what they were facing when they crossed into Russia. If their intelligence gathering had been effective, they likely would not have invaded, but German intelligence in foreign countries was terrible. On the other side, Stalin knew how much Germany coveted their lands and how much Hitler hated Communism. He also knew how bellicose Germany was and I would argue that Stalin viewed the Nazis as an existential threat to the USSR. While I don't think that Stalin was massing troops to invade Germany at the time that they were invaded, I think that within 2-3 years, they would have found some cause to invade Germany. Nazism defined itself as being anti-Communist and the Soviets certainly did not believe that each side could peacefully coexist. Each side viewed the other as an existential threat and in a situation like that, war is inevitable.
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May 2, 2013 21:50
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Actually the Germans intelligence on the size and strength of the Red Army was nearly dead on. The problem was that they assumed that the "whole rotting structure" would collapse well before the deep source of reserves could be mobilized. They also weren't aware of the existence of the t-34 and KV tanks but that wasn't too big of a deal on the strategic level.
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May 2, 2013 23:01
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Hitler, Jodl and Keitel also just flat out refused to accept the figures on the red army provided by their intelligence as true. IIRC there's a bit in Guderian's book where Hitler laments that he didn't know what he was getting into and Guderian supposedly said something along the lines of bullshit we loving told you what they had. But who knows if thats true because Guderian's book is not a reliable source as he would edit/leave out bits of his military history that would make him look bad. Raskolnikov38 fucked around with this message at 23:21 on May 2, 2013 |
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May 2, 2013 23:14
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The only known clip of Hitler speaking in private(with Mannerheim on his visit to Finland in 1942) has Hitler speaking about how flabbergasted they were(at this point in spring 1942) that the Soviets still even had an army in the field since they had already capture more equipment than they thought the Soviets even had to put into the field. They(at least specifically Hitler in this case) I think honestly believed their own delusions.
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May 2, 2013 23:23
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gyrobot posted:So could the Nazi can afford to go public with the Death Camps compared to their Asian equivilant the Japanese who were not only known for their terrible treatment of the conquered but the unapologetic attitude tehy adopt to this day or would such a revelation cause Hitler's regime to crumble in fear of knowing they may next on the block if they had won the war and assumed dominion over mainland Europe. I suspect it wouldn't have mattered too much. It depends when they do it of course; if Hitler starts screaming about gassing all the Jews in say, 1930, it'd likely have kept him out of government. If it went public after the war is already underway, then it wouldn't change too much. Keep in mind that the German population knew something was up. I don't know if they knew exactly what was happening, but there's all sort of correspondences from regular German folks saying 'Jews are being rounded up and bad stuff is happening to them, that's pretty damned sketchy'. As always, a certain subsection of the population would have been totally on board. Mans posted:Remember that Stalin ordered a lot of veterans from the Spanish civil war to be executed. He also executed shitloads of officers and soldiers after World War 2. Stalin was totally an idiot, but it's not exactly miraculous that they managed to beat Nazi Germany. The Germans had just about everything go exactly as well as it could have for them, and they still weren't that close to winning.
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May 2, 2013 23:27
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Actually the Germans intelligence on the size and strength of the Red Army was nearly dead on. The problem was that they assumed that the "whole rotting structure" would collapse well before the deep source of reserves could be mobilized. They also weren't aware of the existence of the t-34 and KV tanks but that wasn't too big of a deal on the strategic level. Amused to Death posted:The only known clip of Hitler speaking in private(with Mannerheim on his visit to Finland in 1942) has Hitler speaking about how flabbergasted they were(at this point in spring 1942) that the Soviets still even had an army in the field since they had already capture more equipment than they thought the Soviets even had to put into the field. They(at least specifically Hitler in this case) I think honestly believed their own delusions. Azathoth fucked around with this message at 23:59 on May 2, 2013 |
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May 2, 2013 23:56
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I'm pretty sure there is a documentary out there where they only have film material of Hitler in private (apparently he was an avid film nut) and they had deduced a lot of his conversation from lip-reading.
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May 3, 2013 06:43
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PittTheElder posted:I suspect it wouldn't have mattered too much. It depends when they do it of course; if Hitler starts screaming about gassing all the Jews in say, 1930, it'd likely have kept him out of government. If it went public after the war is already underway, then it wouldn't change too much. Keep in mind that the German population knew something was up. I don't know if they knew exactly what was happening, but there's all sort of correspondences from regular German folks saying 'Jews are being rounded up and bad stuff is happening to them, that's pretty damned sketchy'. As always, a certain subsection of the population would have been totally on board. I remember seeing a documentary in which some Wehrmacht officers were horrified at the conduct of the SS in Poland during the invasion. They thought of themselves as professional soldiers, and the SS were doing things like stringing up Poles from a mass gallows and lowering them slowly, while the SS Germania band played to cover up the screaming. One of them wrote Hitler, earnestly believing that the great and powerful Adolf Hitler would never tolerate his subordinates acting in such an unprofessional manner, and Hitler replied "You can't win a war with Salvation Army tactics".
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May 3, 2013 06:53
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Sunshine89 posted:I remember seeing a documentary in which some Wehrmacht officers were horrified at the conduct of the SS in Poland during the invasion. They thought of themselves as professional soldiers, and the SS were doing things like stringing up Poles from a mass gallows and lowering them slowly, while the SS Germania band played to cover up the screaming. There's no question that many Wehrmacht personnel were unaware the actions of the einsatzkommdano. When they were aware, there does seems to have been genuine anger, though it is important to consider this light of a couple of things. One, most accounts of this come from post-war memoirs and interviews. Officers living in the shadow of Nuremberg, many trying to cast their wartime activities in a more positive light, aren't going to be completely reliable sources. Two, there are very few recorded cases of Wehrmacht personnel preventing reprisals or mass killings. There are however, hundreds of cases where Wehrmacht personnel instigated or participated in civilian massacres, POW executions, and reprisals. Now, whether or not these cases were incidents provoked by junior officers (see My Lai, for a similar example) or formal, army-wide policy is more questionable. I suspect the former was usually the case.
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May 3, 2013 09:55
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Off the top of my head at least field marshal von manstein issued orders for his troops to assist the eintzgruppen and I think demanded that the soldiers assisting them be given a share of the deads' possessions instead of the SS keeping everything.
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May 3, 2013 10:34
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Actually the Germans intelligence on the size and strength of the Red Army was nearly dead on. The problem was that they assumed that the "whole rotting structure" would collapse well before the deep source of reserves could be mobilized. They also weren't aware of the existence of the t-34 and KV tanks but that wasn't too big of a deal on the strategic level. They also treated the population like poo poo due to the Nazi view of the Russians as 'subhuman', and earned themselves a lot of hate in the process, which would come back to bite them in the arse both in 1941 and in 1945 when the Red Army took it's revenge on German civilians.
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May 3, 2013 11:05
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One pattern that repeats itself a lot in the history of wartime Nazi Germany was the unwillingness of the guys below Hitler to cooperate, even when it would have been beneficial to the war effort. If you read memoirs of people like Speer, Galland, Guderian and Manstein, a pattern emerges where people were unable to convince Hitler of making changes to policies because they never got backed by other people. Especially Göring and Keitel were really adept at avoiding responsibility by never backing anyone, until it was too late. This led to things like the self-defeating occupation policy in the East and serious prioritization issues in the aircraft industry.
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May 3, 2013 11:13
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gyrobot posted:So could the Nazi can afford to go public with the Death Camps compared to their Asian equivilant the Japanese who were not only known for their terrible treatment of the conquered but the unapologetic attitude tehy adopt to this day or would such a revelation cause Hitler's regime to crumble in fear of knowing they may next on the block if they had won the war and assumed dominion over mainland Europe. They made considerable efforts to conceal their crimes. Sonderkommando 1005 was tasked with unearthing mass graves and incinerating the bodies. They did this within the areas of the death camps, as well as with a number of Einsatzgruppen mass graves. It is clear from some evidence, though, that a number of persons transiting through or stationed in the Generalgovernment of occupied Poland would have been at least aware of extermination rumors. Two contemporary diaries from Wehrmacht soldiers -- along with post-war testimony and contemporary Polish and Jewish testimonies -- attest to this. Wehrmacht NCO Wilhelm Cornides in an August 1942 diary entry posted:6.20pm – we passed Camp Belzec. Austrian private Hubert Pfoch saw witnessed similar atrocities around the same time. Pfoch in an August 1942 diary entry posted:When at last our train leaves the station at least fifty dead, women, men and children, some of them totally naked, lie along the track [from a nearby Jewish transport]. We saw the Jewish police remove them - all kinds of valuable disappeared into their pockets, too. Eventually our train followed the other train and we continued to see corpses on both sides of the track - children and others. They say Treblinka is a 'delousing camp.' When we reach Treblinka station the train is next to us again - there is such an awful smell of decomposing corpses in the station, some of us vomit. The begging for water intensifies, the indiscriminate shooting by the guards continues.....Three hundred thousand have been assembled here [throughout the camp's history] ... Every day ten or fifteen thousand are gassed and burned. Any comment is totally superfluous. In the case of Pfoch he was traveling with an entire Wehrmacht infantry company. He later told interviewers that he and his colleagues urged their first officer, a young lieutenant, to file a complaint to the SS -- to which an SS officer menacingly retorted that he could have them put on a train, as well. It's clear, then, that from the suspicions of locals Poles and Polish Jews in other sources and validating evidence here (Cornides speaks at varying times with an engineer, two separate police officers, a police officer's wife and an ethnic German local) that knowledge of mass extermination, at least in the form of hearsay, was fairly widespread in the vicinity of the camps, and these camps shared transiting routes with units going East and were in close proximity to many garrisons. It is worth noting that the details as told to Cornides were not necessarily correct (i.e., a heatwave death) but they do confirm that whispers pretty close to the truth couldn't be kept secret. edit: Raskolnikov38 posted:Off the top of my head at least field marshal von manstein issued orders for his troops to assist the eintzgruppen and I think demanded that the soldiers assisting them be given a share of the deads' possessions instead of the SS keeping everything. Yep, about 300 Wehrmacht soldiers from the Eleventh Army joined an Einsatzkommando D subgroup in executing 400 Jews from Kodyma on August 12, 1941. The event is also recorded in the Eleventh Army's official war diary. It's also worth pointing out that all Einsatzkommando units were explicitly attached to larger armies. Ohlendorf's Einsatzkommando D was attached to Manstein's Eleventh Army and they shared headquarters together. Manstein technically had authority over Ohlendorf, and in Romania he used the Einsatzkommando for sentry purposes -- allowing them to pursue their "duties" once they were deeper East. He also furnished Ohlendorf with supplies, fuel and Wehrmacht drivers. Eleventh Army soldiers also witnessed a mass execution of Romanian Jews by Romanian forces before they made it far East, which prompted Einsatzkommando staff to issue an Army-wide order prohibiting photography of executions or mention of it in letters home. Eleventh Army HQ even required that all liquidations had to occur within 200 kilometers of the Army's HQ -- presumably to keep the unit in check. At least once the Eleventh Army command even requested the Einsatzgruppen in places before they arrived. Fearing "famine" and a lack of housing, Eleventh Army HQ requested (on the urgency of the Army's head quarter master) Ohlendorf's men for a liquidation in Simferopol that wasn't yet on Ohlendorf's agenda. The killing there was so intense that the 4th Company of Police Reserve Battalion 9, which normally assisted with liquidations, requested another assignment and forced the killings to halt until Ohlendorf brought in another police unit. Ohlendorf also spoke of the problem of "unguarded talk" among Wehrmacht soldiers causing issues. MothraAttack fucked around with this message at 12:01 on May 3, 2013 |
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May 3, 2013 11:25
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Were the Nazis aware that their "ally", Finland, had Jews serving in her army, and if they were, why was it tolerated? I remember reading about Finnish Jewish soldiers fighting side by side with the Germans and Jewish medics saving the lives of German soldiers. Some of them were even awarded with Iron Crosses (an honor which they understandably refused to receive). All of this sounds rather bizarre and ironic. Were there Jews serving in other minor Axis ally/co-belligerent armies as well?
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May 3, 2013 13:37
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Frungy! posted:Were the Nazis aware that their "ally", Finland, had Jews serving in her army, and if they were, why was it tolerated? I remember reading about Finnish Jewish soldiers fighting side by side with the Germans and Jewish medics saving the lives of German soldiers. Some of them were even awarded with Iron Crosses (an honor which they understandably refused to receive). All of this sounds rather bizarre and ironic. Were there Jews serving in other minor Axis ally/co-belligerent armies as well? Finland occupies a very weird place in WWII. Of all the Axis countries, they more than any other did not subscribe to Nazi ideology and instead were allied based on a common enemy, Russia. They did not appear to have any dreams of grand territorial expansion and instead fought to restore their border to where they felt it should be, which was remarkably limited given what they could have taken. Numerous times, the Finnish army refused to advance further than where they felt proper, particularly at the Siege of Leningrad. Germany had no way to compel Finland to do something it didn't want to do, whether it was pushing further into the USSR or implementing antisemitic policies. Hitler accepted that the Finns were not going to do anything to their Jewish population entirely out of political necessity. He needed Finland more than Finland needed Germany. The Finns had a strong enough army to fight off the Russians twice and any attempt to compel them to do what they didn't want to do would likely have been met with a polite "gently caress off". As for the other, smaller Axis members, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary all provided military help to the Axis, but had proportionately less internal control, as they effectively occupied by Germany. If they did not comply with what Germany asked, particularly in regards to the Jews, they would likely have been taken over directly by Germany as there were German soldiers in and around all of them. The differences in what they chose to help with are telling though. Bulgaria saved most of the Jewish population but Romania participated wholeheartedly in the Holocaust. However, the only way that someone of Jewish ancestry was going to serve in any capacity in their military was someone like Erhard Milch, who was of Jewish ancestry, but did not consider themselves to be Jewish. Even asking whether Jews served in the Axis military is a tricky question, as it depends on whether you mean someone who is just ethnically Jewish serving in an Axis army or whether you mean someone who is a practicing Jew serving in one of those armies. I would be highly surprised if there were any practicing Jews in an Axis army outside of the Finns, but there were many people of Jewish ancestry who fought on behalf of the various Axis powers. A quick Google search gives me a number of around 150,000, which seems very plausible, though I haven't read the book where that claim is made.
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May 3, 2013 16:42
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Bacarruda posted:There's no question that many Wehrmacht personnel were unaware the actions of the einsatzkommdano. When they were aware, there does seems to have been genuine anger, though it is important to consider this light of a couple of things. One, most accounts of this come from post-war memoirs and interviews. Officers living in the shadow of Nuremberg, many trying to cast their wartime activities in a more positive light, aren't going to be completely reliable sources. Two, there are very few recorded cases of Wehrmacht personnel preventing reprisals or mass killings. There are however, hundreds of cases where Wehrmacht personnel instigated or participated in civilian massacres, POW executions, and reprisals. I'm aware that the myth of a "clean Wehrmacht" was just that, but it's almost tragically funny to see things like: "We were just trying to have a nice orderly invasion when these assholes in black jackets start riling up the population and wasting resources by attacking every Jew and every Pole that can read. The Fuehrer probably would be mad if he knew, so we'd better tel him"
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May 3, 2013 16:57
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PittTheElder posted:Stalin was totally an idiot, but it's not exactly miraculous that they managed to beat Nazi Germany. The Germans had just about everything go exactly as well as it could have for them, and they still weren't that close to winning. Well, i was mostly talking about the overall government, not only talking about Stalin exclusively during World War II. Still, Stalin's eagerness to starve the Ukrainians could've been used as a massive kick in the balls had the Nazis any brain in their heads and the stubbornness with which he refused to accept the information of an imminent German invasion could've save countless lives. And in the end he took all the loving credit. Chuikov? Rossokovsky? Zukov or Konev? The night witches? That kickass sniper dude of Stalingrad? No one knows them unless they study the war. Stalin is still considered a hero all over the world by some people. At least we got a kickass war-cry thanks to him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAWktuDM8XQ
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May 3, 2013 23:00
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Mans posted:Still, Stalin's eagerness to starve the Ukrainians could've been used as a massive kick in the balls had the Nazis any brain in their heads... True, but if the Nazis were going to treat Slavs like people, then they wouldn't have been the Nazis.
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May 3, 2013 23:35
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Mans posted:Well, i was mostly talking about the overall government, not only talking about Stalin exclusively during World War II. To some extent, it was. Some Ukranians, paritculalry in Western Ukraine, welcomed German soldiers as liberators. Ukranians did volunteer to fight alongside the Germans in units like the Nightingale Battalion. Though the Germans did not exploit this to the extent they could have, partly out of racial and national politics, partly out of distrust for turncoat Ukranians.
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May 4, 2013 01:08
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Bacarruda posted:To some extent, it was. Some Ukranians, paritculalry in Western Ukraine, welcomed German soldiers as liberators. Ukranians did volunteer to fight alongside the Germans in units like the Nightingale Battalion. Though the Germans did not exploit this to the extent they could have, partly out of racial and national politics, partly out of distrust for turncoat Ukranians. Yeah, in sum about 20,000 Ukrainians served in the SS. Hundreds worked in the death camps. That said, it's clear that a lot were POWs who were conscripted.
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May 4, 2013 03:10
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MN-Ghost posted:I have a question. Why did Hitler break the non-aggression pact with Russia and invade them before securing the western front by forcing Britain into surrender? I was taught that being forced to fight on two front between France and Russia was one of the biggest reason Germany lost WWI. So given that Hitler should have already learned this lesson, this always seemed to me to be a monumentally dumb move. Because Hitler really would've won those two fronts if the U.S. didn't get involved in both theatres of WW2 after Japan attacked pearl harbor. At the time Hitler launched Barbarossa, Britain was literally a sitting duck that could barely do anything. Yes, the Germans had the problems with the winters on the eastern front, but they still would've crushed the Soviet Union if the U.S. wasn't invading from the west & the south. Barbarossa was launched in 1941, the U.S. got involved in 1941. Simply put, if Japan didn't attack the U.S., U.S. involvement would have been too late in the europeon theatre and by that time there would just be no way the allies/U.S. could strategically invade Nazi-held europe effectively thus enabling Hitler winning ww2. 
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May 4, 2013 03:46
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The US didn't start invading from the West and South until 1944. I have not seen a single historian suggest that the war was winnable by Germany in 1944.
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May 4, 2013 03:58
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Ensign Expendable posted:The US didn't start invading from the West and South until 1944.
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May 4, 2013 04:11
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Er, I specifically meant the "second front" Stalin was asking for. Not that the US didn't do anything until 1944.
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May 4, 2013 04:13
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Italy would still have been a real thorn in Germany's side. The US, being the one major belligerent that had its production facilities in a completely safe location, also did a hell of a lot by just supplying the UK and USSR
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May 4, 2013 04:56
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If Germany hadn't invaded the USSR in 1941, the Soviets would have terminated the trade agreements that propped up the German economy sooner or later and the German economy would have imploded. Germany was hopelessly in default and eventually the Soviets would have figured out this was because the Germans literally could not meet their obligations and had no way of doing so until Germany ended the war with the Commonwealth, which Germany and her allies had no realistic prospect of doing on favourable terms. Bear in mind that throughout the first three years of the war the UK could credibly state that every neutral ship attempting to reach German-held ports would be stopped and turned back by the Royal Navy. And neutrals basically accepted that this was true. Even with unrestricted submarine warfare, the Germans never came close to convincing anybody the Kriegsmarine could do the same to the UK. Mostly because neutral ships could count.
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May 4, 2013 05:07
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Devour posted:Because Hitler really would've won those two fronts if the U.S. didn't get involved in both theatres of WW2 after Japan attacked pearl harbor. At the time Hitler launched Barbarossa, Britain was literally a sitting duck that could barely do anything. Yes, the Germans had the problems with the winters on the eastern front, but they still would've crushed the Soviet Union if the U.S. wasn't invading from the west & the south. Are you writing a paper for socials class?
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May 4, 2013 08:22
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Devour posted:Because Hitler really would've won those two fronts if the U.S. didn't get involved in both theatres of WW2 after Japan attacked pearl harbor. At the time Hitler launched Barbarossa, Britain was literally a sitting duck that could barely do anything. Yes, the Germans had the problems with the winters on the eastern front, but they still would've crushed the Soviet Union if the U.S. wasn't invading from the west & the south. Is this a joke? If Japan never attacks, the soviets probably win sooner because now lend lease can go across the pacific to Vladivostok in US freighters all year round instead of only in a handful of soviet ships.
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May 4, 2013 10:11
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Devour posted:Because Hitler really would've won those two fronts if the U.S. didn't get involved in both theatres of WW2 after Japan attacked pearl harbor. At the time Hitler launched Barbarossa, Britain was literally a sitting duck that could barely do anything. Yes, the Germans had the problems with the winters on the eastern front, but they still would've crushed the Soviet Union if the U.S. wasn't invading from the west & the south. This is based on a lot of assumptions. Britain was not a sitting duck. They were stalemated. The British did not have the manpower to launch an invasion of Europe. The Germans did not have the sealift, the navy, or the air superiority needed to invade Britain. The uboat campaign was largely a failure and was not going to starve Britain either literally with actual food or metaphorically by cutting off the resources Britain needed. If the U.S. had stuck with isolationism and not gotten involved would the Soviets have been beaten? Maybe. While lendlease and the allied bombing campaign were a big deal I am not sure it tipped the scales. I suspect that while it might have taken longer the Soviets would still have won and the Iron Curtain might have reached to the British Channel in the NW and to Spain's border in the SW. Of course this is all speculation. It is easy to talk about inevitabilities when you can never be crudely proven wrong. At least until we invetn time travel.
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May 4, 2013 10:13
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Is this a joke? If Japan never attacks, the soviets probably win sooner because now lend lease can go across the pacific to Vladivostok in US freighters all year round instead of only in a handful of soviet ships. No it's not a joke. Without the U.S. in the Europeon theatre, it was basically Britain & the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany and its allies. Again, Britain did not have the resources nor the manpower to invade Nazi-occupied france/the Atlantic wall without the support of the U.S. militarily or economically. Meanwhile, Nazi Germany has already conquered Europe & North Africa, effectively taking control of the resources/raw minerals in these occupied territories. So you are going to tell me, that if Nazi Germany did not have to split up it's armed forces even more to try and reinforce the southern (Africa) and western fronts (Atlantic Wall) from the U.S., that the Soviet Union would have defeated Nazi Germany on its own?  I'm not even getting into the specifics of how badly trained/equipped the Red Army was, or how stupid Stalin was with his generals.
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May 4, 2013 22:21
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Stalin got his head out of his rear end pretty early on, and let his generals do their jobs, which got the strategic initiative back into the Soviet hands by 1942/43. As for badly trained/equipped, the Red Army wasn't peasants with pointy sticks like the History Channel makes them out to be.
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May 4, 2013 22:25
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Devour posted:No it's not a joke. Without the U.S. in the Europeon theatre, it was basically Britain & the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany and its allies. Again, Britain did not have the resources nor the manpower to invade Nazi-occupied france/the Atlantic wall without the support of the U.S. militarily or economically. Even if Britain could not liberate France by herself, merely holding it sucks up garrison troops for anti-partisan activity/raid blocking. Now I grant I was unable to find numbers for how many German troops were stationed in France between Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor, but assuming it was solely for anti-partisan work, the Germans still failed. quote:Meanwhile, Nazi Germany has already conquered Europe & North Africa, effectively taking control of the resources/raw minerals in these occupied territories. Second El-Alamein concluded 3 days after Operation Torch began so Monty, as loathe as I am to credit anything to him, was going to throw the Afrika Corps out of Libya eventually. quote:So you are going to tell me, that if Nazi Germany did not have to split up it's armed forces even more to try and reinforce the southern (Africa) and western fronts (Atlantic Wall) from the U.S., that the Soviet Union would have defeated Nazi Germany on its own? Yes that is exactly what I am saying. The entry of the US did shorten the war but victory for the allies had already been assured by then, mostly thanks to Hermann Goering actually, for being so terrible at his jobs.
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May 4, 2013 22:43
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