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AnEdgelord posted:Invading the USSR is absolutely NOT a secondary reason lol. Even if the USSR was as weak as the germans thought, operation barbarossa was a terrible plan that was doomed to failure from the beginning, the Japanese high command looked over it and said as much even before the germans invaded.
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Nov 21, 2021 18:55
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AnEdgelord posted:Invading the USSR is absolutely NOT a secondary reason lol. Even if the USSR was as weak as the germans thought, operation barbarossa was a terrible plan that was doomed to failure from the beginning, the Japanese high command looked over it and said as much even before the germans invaded. Got a link to the Japanese analysis? Hadn't heard of this before.
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Nov 21, 2021 18:59
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Knightsoul posted:Gentlemen, let's been honest and put aside nationalistic egos: the main (not only) reason Germany lost the 2 world wars (especially WW2) was decided when the U.S.A. entered the wars with its immense industrial/military/call-it-what-you-want capability. cite your posts
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Nov 21, 2021 19:00
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Gort posted:Got a link to the Japanese analysis? Hadn't heard of this before. They talked about it on an episode of Radio War Nerd about the Italian auxiliaries on the Eastern Front. I'll have to see if I can dig it up.
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Nov 21, 2021 19:03
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There's something of a pot calling the kettle black when it comes to the Imperial Japanese making that criticism.
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Nov 21, 2021 19:09
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Oh yeah. I'm also surprised the Germans risked leaking the plan by showing Japan ahead of time, I'm not sure what they intended to gain from doing so.
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Nov 21, 2021 19:10
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Gort posted:Oh yeah. I'm also surprised the Germans risked leaking the plan by showing Japan ahead of time, I'm not sure what they intended to gain from doing so. If I remember correctly it was a combination of a half-hearted attempt to get the Japanese to support them and Japanese intelligence uncovering the plan themselves.
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Nov 21, 2021 19:16
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The Japanese looking at Barbarossa and saying nah but China, now we wanna do that.
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Nov 21, 2021 19:17
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Minenfeld! posted:The Japanese looking at Barbarossa and saying nah but China, now we wanna do that. Japan had already been fighting China for like four years by the time of Barbarossa
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Nov 21, 2021 19:20
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Minenfeld! posted:The Japanese looking at Barbarossa and saying nah but China, now we wanna do that. They were already deep into a Chinese quagmire with no end in sight. They saw Barbarossa and decided soloing the US while also taking all of SEA and maybe India, if we have the time, was more realistic.
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Nov 21, 2021 19:21
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Minenfeld! posted:The Japanese looking at Barbarossa and saying nah but China, now we wanna do that. Yeah their experience in China was exactly why they had no appetite for a fight with the Soviets (in addition to such a fight doing nothing to resolve their strategic peril of course).
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Nov 21, 2021 19:30
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Not to mention that the Japanese had already fought a short war with the Soviets in 1939 and it didn't go well for them.
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Nov 21, 2021 19:32
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Gort posted:Japan had already been fighting China for like four years by the time of Barbarossa Yeah? Next you'll tell me the war started before 1941!
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Nov 21, 2021 19:37
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AnEdgelord posted:Invading the USSR is absolutely NOT a secondary reason lol. Even if the USSR was as weak as the germans thought, operation barbarossa was a terrible plan that was doomed to failure from the beginning, the Japanese high command looked over it and said as much even before the germans invaded. The obvious failure of Operation Barbarossa accellerated greatly the end of WW2, but it's still a secondary reason. Would it been possible to win the war for Hitler if he never launched the eastern campaign? No way, sooner or later Germany wouldn't been able to compete against the U.S. war machine. Same pattern happened later for the cold war, only on an economic scale where USSR bankrupted tryin' to compete. History repeats itself......
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Nov 21, 2021 19:49
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Even if WW2 was limited to a European front of Germany vs the UK and a pacific front of Japan vs China and the colonial powers I don't think the axis wins. The UK won the Battle of Britain pretty handily, and out-produced Germany with respect to aircraft. Germany did not have a viable fighter or bomber for sustained success against the UK even when based out of northern France. There was no realistic way they could have launched Sea Lion, regardless if they used the subs they produced in reality, or some sort of surface fleet designed to support a naval invasion of the islands. Maybe Germany gets to have some sort of big western European state that the UK alone couldn't have invaded. But that would not have met with Hitler's ultimate goals of Lebensraum in the East. It would have been an isolated large nation likely subject to an unbreakable blockade. The Brits functionally beat them in Africa on their own, so the Italians would have lost their African holdings. Japan may have faired slightly better. But again the UK defended India largely without US assistance, and China resisted Japan with incredibly minimal assistance as well. Japan probably did not have the army, equipment, or doctrine to make significant gains in Asia. In the scenario where Barbarossa doesn't happen, you likely have a big isolated Germany with a hothead authoritarian who felt like he failed in his goal of creating a giant frontier to populate with ethnic Germans. Hitler would almost certainly declare war on the USSR at some point before he died, and it's unlikely that adding some of the resources from a subjugated France would offset the immense advantage that the USSR would have by not being hobbled by WW2 into the 1950s or so. Similarly, Japan would likely have most of coastal East Asia, and secured many of the islands and oil resources they wanted in Oceania, but they would be embroiled in an unwinnable landwar in China that would have made our 20 years of being stuck in Afghanistan look like a picnic. The Axis lost WW2 the moment the UK decided to fight on alone. Hitler banked on the UK recognizing his European conquests, and actively sought diplomatic resolutions with the UK to split the globe amongst themselves.
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Nov 21, 2021 20:24
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Counterfactuals about the Nazis not invading the USSR are completely pointless to argue about because there's no universe in which they don't. It wasn't some flight of fancy Hitler had one evening and could've been talked out of, it was the entire point of starting any war at all to begin with. A deep fundamental pillar of the Nazi ideological project was doing Manifest Destiny all the way to the Urals, and even if you somehow eliminate everyone high on ideology (e.g. basically every name you've ever heard in a history book from the time period) with a magic wand it was economically necessary too. The German economy at that point was functioning on nothing but looting, they had to keep looting or die, and the Soviets were the only people with enough food and coal and oil and industrial metals and slave labor left to loot. The Eastern Front was where most of the fighting happened, it's where most of the dying happened, and even after the Western Allies were on mainland Europe in multiple points the Eastern Front stayed the premier front until the end of the war. It was in no way secondary, strategically or operationally, and the modern professional/academic consensus among historians is that it was hands down the most important single front even if everyone's public school propaganda narratives obviously play up Normandy or the Italian campaign or whatever the gently caress.
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Nov 21, 2021 20:47
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Love watching the WW2 in real time channel and seeing them talk about El Alamein and Stalingrad like those events are equivalent in scale or importance. Torch gets non-stop attention and specials; Rzhev hasn't been mentioned since January.
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Nov 21, 2021 20:55
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Yeah, I think in the US specifically, WW2 is seen as a fight against a group that was out to destroy global freedom, when really Hitler's true goal was to wipe out every non-German east of the Vistula, and replace them with pure German stock. The war with Russia was the endgame, not some weird tertiary front unrelated to the goal of Hitler visiting the Eifel tower. I still stand by my argument that in the bizarre and unrealistic world where Barbarossa doesn't happen, that US involvement was not required to end whatever you want to call the war that occured from Sep 39 to Apr 41.
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Nov 21, 2021 20:57
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Knightsoul posted:The obvious failure of Operation Barbarossa accellerated greatly the end of WW2, but it's still a secondary reason. Wait, you were serious? I guess there is some hypothetical where the US fights and wins WW2 effectively on their own, and the paradox thread is probably not the worst place for it, but the actual war in Europe was more or less fought and won by the USSR. Not going to get into cold war chat, but it's quite conceivable that the US would not have managed to militarily destroy the Nazi empire if they hadn't invaded the USSR. That doesn't mean the Nazis would "win" in any way, the idea that they could threaten the continental US is laughable and it's hard to imagine their political project surviving without the steady influx of plunder, but the conflict ending with a complete US victory was hardly inevitable. Though obviously the main beneficent would have been the USSR.
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Nov 21, 2021 21:00
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Knightsoul posted:Gentlemen, let's been honest and put aside nationalistic egos: the main (not only) reason Germany lost the 2 world wars (especially WW2) was decided when the U.S.A. entered the wars with its immense industrial/military/call-it-what-you-want capability. Buddy you seriously need to share us the paradox thread where your sourcing your posts from because this lunatic had never read about either war outside of video games.
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Nov 21, 2021 21:45
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Knightsoul posted:Gentlemen, let's been honest and put aside nationalistic egos: the main (not only) reason Germany lost the 2 world wars (especially WW2) was decided when the U.S.A. entered the wars with its immense industrial/military/call-it-what-you-want capability. I would love to hear what Germany would have been able to accomplish with more battleships in WWII. I can't even imagine it.
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Nov 21, 2021 21:48
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This whole discussion reminds me of this: Vizuyos posted:I would love to hear what Germany would have been able to accomplish with more battleships in WWII. I can't even imagine it.
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Nov 21, 2021 22:03
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The Frenchmen saying the UK are the most pathetic.
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Nov 21, 2021 22:05
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Good for France in May of '45.
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Nov 21, 2021 22:05
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Raenir Salazar posted:Made by our GM, (I have my own project but its aimed at more geographically 'realistic' looking maps, I post about in the Game Development megathread) currently its just for our megacampaign but we've (the players) have all been enjoying it immensely and have been suggesting he should collaborate with Idhrendur to add it to the Megacampaign paradox converter project. I'll go tell him people here seem to be impressed with it and hopefully he iterates over it (initially its a bit buggy but I imagine those can be ironed out). That would be cool! After 1000+ hours in every iteration of EU a truly new world to poke around in would be a ton of fun. I'm really sad that Paradox never took the Random New World just that extra bit further to do full Random Worlds. EDIT: realistic maps are even cooler, I'll be keeping an eye on that too! Fintilgin fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Nov 21, 2021 |
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Nov 21, 2021 22:15
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Lum_ posted:yeah, as mentioned above the German economy was in an equally bad shape if not worse; the war didn't end because Americans marched over the Rhine, it ended because Germany collapsed into a revolution because its workers were starving. Tanks were also about to finally crack open trenches as seen in the battle of Cambrai, which happened independently of US involvement. Germans were far behind Britain in tank development. Sure, but the fact of US intervention (and the hordes of US soldiers who started arriving in 1918 and would be even more present in 1919) is what allowed the Entente to make the aggressive pushes they did in 1918 that collapsed the western front. Without US intervention, the Entente probably don't have the money, reserves, or confidence to push the Hundred Days nearly as much as they did historically. You end up with a situlation where Germany is slowly dissolving but the Entente doesn't have the strength to actively push it, and that almost certainly leads to less of a defeat.
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Nov 21, 2021 22:26
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Without the US the continental powers would have collapsed in mutual exhaustion, allowing socialist revolutions that failed in our timeline (Hungary, Bavaria, Germany) to succeed and spark a European and then worldwide revolution.
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Nov 21, 2021 22:31
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Woodrow Wilson: history's greatest monster.
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Nov 21, 2021 23:08
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PittTheElder posted:Love watching the WW2 in real time channel and seeing them talk about El Alamein and Stalingrad like those events are equivalent in scale or importance. Torch gets non-stop attention and specials; Rzhev hasn't been mentioned since January. I mean they are at least honest about why they cover what they cover. They need to make money to keep the show going and most of their viewers are American. Which like yeah, fair enough. Series was certainly a lot more interesting before Pearl Harbour though, that's for sure.
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Nov 21, 2021 23:22
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Mantis42 posted:Woodrow Wilson: history's greatest monster. It's true
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Nov 21, 2021 23:44
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PittTheElder posted:Love watching the WW2 in real time channel and seeing them talk about El Alamein and Stalingrad like those events are equivalent in scale or importance. well they're both maps in battlefield 1942
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Nov 22, 2021 00:02
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Lum_ posted:yeah, as mentioned above the German economy was in an equally bad shape if not worse; the war didn't end because Americans marched over the Rhine, it ended because Germany collapsed into a revolution because its workers were starving. Tanks were also about to finally crack open trenches as seen in the battle of Cambrai, which happened independently of US involvement. Germans were far behind Britain in tank development. Without the US in the war the French would have collapsed into revolution first. Their economy would absolutely not have been to function without British subsidies.
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Nov 22, 2021 03:10
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DaysBefore posted:I mean they are at least honest about why they cover what they cover. They need to make money to keep the show going and most of their viewers are American. Which like yeah, fair enough. Series was certainly a lot more interesting before Pearl Harbour though, that's for sure. Are they? I've never actually hear them say that explicitly anywhere.
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Nov 22, 2021 03:12
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Crazycryodude posted:Counterfactuals about the Nazis not invading the USSR are completely pointless to argue about because there's no universe in which they don't. It wasn't some flight of fancy Hitler had one evening and could've been talked out of, it was the entire point of starting any war at all to begin with. Absolutely. You can however do counterfactuals about not-Nazis. 1920s Germany had a huge amount of tiny little right-wing groups and it can be considered largely accidental that this particular one under this particular leader ended up eating the others and taking over by the early 1930s. Take out the failed painter somehow and it's quite possible that we'd end up with some other, similar but different and not quite so extreme, bunch of fascistoid assholes in power, without quite the same type of divorced-from-reality apocalyptic racist ideology behind them.
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Nov 22, 2021 10:54
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Just tangentially relevant but still posting cause I love reading it: Comparison of US and Japanese war-making potential in WW2 http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm
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Nov 22, 2021 10:56
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PittTheElder posted:Are they? I've never actually hear them say that explicitly anywhere. Yeah Indy talks about it in this video they had to make to specifically address why they're going to focus so much on DDay when there's Bagration in the eastern front. And I get it, it's an English-language WW2 channel, most of the viewers are going to expect the big names from our history classes. Maybe I'm too trusting but I think they're not like secret fascists or ignoring the massive, overwhelming importance of the Eastern Front. The specific talk about why starts around four minutes in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK1BM2fHw-o
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Nov 22, 2021 11:29
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I don't think looking at the numbers alone does complete justice to the story of the war. There is plenty, plenty of GPW-centric material on ww2, and there's even plenty of pop-history documentary material on it. I don't think this is some conspiracy to deny the Soviets their due in winning the war. That being said, I think the focus on the numbers does a bad job of showing the linkages involved in the different parts of the war. One of the reasons the Germans didn't have sufficient airlift to help the Stalingrad pocket is that they needed that airlift capability to shop in troops to stop the Allies marching on Tunis. The transfer had been made before Uranus because of the belief that they would be better in the winter months in Sicily, but that's significant. When Hitler re-commits to Tunisia, those are forces that, many of which, could have been sent to help in Ukraine, but were not. Was the surrender at Tunis as consequential as the 6th Army's at Stalingrad? No, but they certainly had some effects on each other. In the Soviet offensives in Ukraine from 1943-44, the Germans had to maintain a significant and disproportionate amount of armored divisions in France to be ready to parry a potential invasion. OKH was begging to be able to transfer them to Ukraine to stop the bleeding, but Hitler stood pat- only in April 44 did he allow a very temporary transfer of three divisions to take part in a counteroffensive in Galicia, but this was sent back as soon as possible. This, then, forces the Germans to put a disproportionate number of their remaining armored divisions in the east in Romania to protect it, leaving Belarus and Poland open for Bagration. The other fronts make a difference in this one, it's a very linked together kind of war. And Overlord was important for obvious reasons. It seems like people just want it to be a 2 minute footnote or something.
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Nov 22, 2021 13:10
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Charlz Guybon posted:Without the US in the war the French would have collapsed into revolution first. Their economy would absolutely not have been to function without British subsidies. What fantastic scenario is this where not only the US but also the British back out of the fight? The entire reason they were in the fight was because the German empire was making colossal diplomatic disasters since the literal time of its creation.
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Nov 22, 2021 15:29
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Mans posted:What fantastic scenario is this where not only the US but also the British back out of the fight? "How would the war have gone without US intervention" is literally the hypothetical being discussed, so it really shouldn't be at all surprising that people are talking about what they think would have happened if the US had stayed out.
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Nov 22, 2021 15:37
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Also I think theres a difference between "what if the US never declared war in WW1" and "what if the US didn't bankroll France and Britain in WW1"
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Nov 22, 2021 16:32
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