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If you know about it, how much support did the Morgenthau Plan have before it was leaked, and do we know why it was leaked in the first place?
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Apr 1, 2013 14:08
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Did the Allies know enough about Hitler's whereabouts to directly target him with bombing? Did they ever try? Thanks for this thread, by the way. I'm learning quite a bit, the horribleness of the subject notwithstanding.
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Apr 2, 2013 00:24
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Were there ever any cases, large or small scale, of German forces giving way to the Western Allies in the hopes of speeding up the war's conclusion before the Soviets ended it from their end? I guess part of this is also me wondering what the Allies would have done if a Hitler-less gov't just up and decided to capitulate en masse, but only to the West. Do you continue shooting the soldiers because you're committed to a total victory? Do you still stop at the Elbe even if the Germans will give you a clear road to Berlin?
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Apr 4, 2013 08:10
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Xenocides posted:Although it is unclear how many people he saved (probably over 6,000) Chiune Sugihara tried to get Jews out of the way of the Nazi war machine. I'm very fond of this story, if only because of the contrast of a Japanese citizen doing all this for the Jewish population, when Japan was supposed to have been part of the Axis. It also forms a nice complement to that German diplomat that saved all those Chinese citizens during the sack of Nanking.
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Apr 7, 2013 14:00
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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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Yeah throwing in a recommendation for Dan Carlin as well. He just has a particular style that really makes you feel like you're getting into the heads of the people he's describing, and more than once I've had to stop what I was doing, close my eyes and just feel what was going on in whichever story he was narrating.
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Jun 9, 2013 16:29
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IIRC the Germans had managed to break the codes of the American embassy(?) in Alexandria in one of the few intelligence coups the Axis had.
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Jul 2, 2013 08:38
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Besides the KMS Graf Zeppelin, what do we know of Kriegmarine ships that never were, even if they were just on the drawing boards? If Hitler wanted to build the Maus and the Ratte, I refuse to believe he didn't have something bigger than the Bismarck/Tirpitz planned.
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Sep 20, 2013 10:32
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Answers Me posted:Assuming everything went their way, at what point would the Nazis have considered themselves to have achieved all their military aims, and the war to have been won? Was there an endgame in mind, in terms of how far to expand territory etc? While we do know of things like Generalplan Ost and the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line being the military objective of the German invasion, there's really no reason to believe that Hitler would have stopped anywhere. When he defeated France, he was thinking about (and tried) England. When Rommel made large gains in Libya, he was thinking about Egypt. When Case Blue was driving into the Caucasus, he was already thinking about the Middle East. At the height of the Third Reich, there were plans for an Amerika bomber and later an upsized V-2 Rocket that could reach New York. What I'm saying is that what we would consider an endgame is only really that because of the limits of what Germany managed to achieve and by extension a limit on what the Nazis were thinking about 2-3 steps after their next victory, but AFAIK their Fascist ideology would lead them to declare war on someone else, and indeed everyone else, as long as they kept winning.
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Oct 15, 2013 12:05
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:One problem I've always had with the "Hitler conquers Moscow" scenarios is how Moscow is just assumed captured because the Germans have more tanks around. Wouldn't it be extremely difficult and time consuming to capture a huge city like that? Stalingrad was never fully occupied over 6 months of fighting, and it was a smaller city. Is there any reason to consider Moscow to be an "easier" city to fight in? The terrain around and the layout of Moscow made it somewhat more likely that it could be enveloped and invested, compared to Stalingrad continuing to receive reinforcements for months over the Volga. I think.
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Feb 9, 2014 10:43
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Chupe Raho Aurat posted:I was asking, were the troops/equipment on the "Barbarossa border" good enough to potentially fight the SU equipment held more in the center. The German Army destroyed something on the order of 300 Soviet divisions between Jun to Sep-1941. What they did not expect was that the Red Army could enlist another 300 divisions (and another and another ...) to take the place of those. To use a silly videogame analogy, the Soviet half of the map was Big Game Hunters while the Germans were still playing with regular mineral patches - it didn't matter that the Germans could and did destroy everything between the border and up to about three-quarters of the way to Moscow, the Soviets could just keep cranking out more men and equipment to replace them.
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Feb 11, 2014 13:43
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Raskolnikov38 posted:CoH2 is also awful. I don't know how well this plays, but apparently there's a fairly big Eastern Front total conversion mod for Company of Heroes 1
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Feb 12, 2014 09:18
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Amused to Death posted:In some cases is actually pretty often. The Heer was not the mechanized monster it's often portrayed as. Also in regards to supplies I've read from some German soldiers that even at the very start of Case Blue the supply situation, particularly of fuel, was already pretty critical, partly from stockpiles, partly from having to get the fuel all the way to across the Don and Donnets There's a great podcast episode about this very topic. The ratio of men to horses in the Wehrmacht was as high as 1:4 at times, and so many horses were killed in the Falaise Pocket in 1944 that I'd say it was a zoological calamity (not that the rest of WW2 wasn't calamitous in all other respects)
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Feb 12, 2014 23:26
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Were there any foreign nationals, from the Allies or otherwise, that were still in Germany when the war broke out? What happened to them? Does the regime let you stay in whatever hotel or house you're already in, do you ride out the war in your nation's embassy, or was there a ship or planes that could cross combatant borders?
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May 12, 2014 14:05
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Rhymenoserous posted:An "Ask me about how Japan was poo poo during WW2" thread could be interesting. I would be interested in this. I'm familiar with more than a few wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese, but at times I do wonder just how fascist they were on the ideological and domestic and day-to-day aspects.
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May 13, 2014 02:08
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Were the SS significantly better than their Heer counterparts throughout the war? I can understand that they would be from 1940 up to say 1943, but by the later years wouldn't they have suffered enough losses without enough training time nor men to maintain their edge?
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May 15, 2014 15:02
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Comrade_Robot posted:My understanding is that the quality of Waffen-SS units varied wildly, such that a statement like "The SS were better than their Heer counterparts" is at best a wild oversimplification. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/36th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS Most games seem to depict them as being elite units no matter what , but it was a claim that I felt was really dubious, which is why I asked
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May 15, 2014 17:05
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Cyrano4747 posted:The Army had all the good contracts with the various arms industries and hoovered up all the product they could produce. Just to use one concrete example that I'm a bit familiar with: the SS had a devil of a time getting K98k rifles for their infantry units and had to make due with all sorts of grey market upgrades of WW1 surplus, foreign mauser action rifles, and the odd shipment of K98ks made out of parts other factories had rejected for quality reasons. Eventually (I don't have my notes handy but I'm pretty sure it was '43) they managed to get some solid contracts with Steyr, who remained until the end of the war the only plant that would make them K98ks. The K98k was the basic small arm of the German military, so you can well imagine this was kind of a big loving deal.  The "your particular section of the army needs to be cushy with the arms manufacturers if you want to get guns" is a gently caress-up of the Nazi regime's particular brand of capitalism, isn't it?
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May 15, 2014 19:32
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Cyrano4747 posted:The difficulty arrises when you had paramilitary units being raised by political organizations. Simply put, they don't have this apparatus and when their representatives went calling to the various arms manufacturers it wasn't all that clear if they even had legal authority to take possession of small arms, much less poo poo like artillery and tanks. The relationship between the SA, the SS, and the Heer is long and tortured but the tl;dr of it is that the Heer hated the existence of these "private armies" and wasn't eager to give them any weapons at all. This is a huge reason why the SS was so big on trying to manufacture stuff at concentration camps - it was an industrial base that they could control and which they could divert to their own needs. Thanks for elaborating! I understand a lot better. My incredulity was over the idea that Chrysler could even refuse to send tanks to the army at all, but yes, I do get it now that the SS are paramilitary units and so wouldn't be as entitled to them as the German Army proper.
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May 15, 2014 20:36
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What was the German civilian economy like, particularly in the late war? Did they get hit by hyperinflation? Did Germany have a war bonds drive similar to the US and UK?
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Jul 21, 2014 12:18
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Woolie Wool posted:And speaking of infeasible, Blut und Boden might have been the single stupidest part of the Nazis' plans, and considering the Nazis' plans that's saying a lot. I read in a book about the drive on Moscow that the Germans had planned to do the same to that city: instead of taking it by force, the Wehrmacht was supposed to surround it, establish a cordon around it, starve it out and shoot anyone that tried to flee. That was why they had Panzertruppen swing around as far north as Kalinin and as far south as Tula. It just struck me as being incredibly stupid because they couldn't even pull that off with Leningrad, a city that borders Finland on one side, the Baltic on another, the Germans on a third and Lake Ladoga. How the hell would they have managed that with a landlocked capital?
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Sep 10, 2014 17:15
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The Official Response In July 1944, after learning that over 400 000 Hungarian Jews had been sent to Auschwitz and were being mass-murdered there, Churchill asked the Air Staff to look into the possiblity of bombing either the camp directly, or the rail lines between it and Budapest. Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air, reported back that attacking the railways would be ineffective, as they would be repaired too quickly. Attacking the camp itself was possible, but it would have been an extreme measure that would be more to incite the Hungarian government to stop the forced deportation of their Jewish population (ostensibly out of a lack of a final destination). Expounding on the possibility, Auschwitz would have been too far to be attacked effectively at night, so Sinclair proposed sending the question to the Americans for their consideration. The call-to-action was sent to Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, who responded that such an endeavour would have entailed "diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations." This was in line with the official policy of the War Department: "the most effective relief which can be given victims of enemy persecution is to insure the speedy defeat of the Axis." Hypothetical Mission Profile A bombing mission to Auschwitz by the 8th Air Force would have been a distance of 1 540 miles, although fighter cover could have been present throughout the trip. They might have done it via shuttle bombing: Take-off from England, bomb targets in Greater Germany, land in specially approved airbases near Kiev, take-off again, bomb targets in Eastern Europe, land in USAAF bases in Italy, take-off yet again, bomb targets in Greater Germany, finally landing back in England. Such missions were done under the code-name Frantic. The issue with this approach though was that since such missions were only allowed by Stalin's good graces, he had tight control over what the targets were, and he only approved those which were of assistance to the Red Army's summer offensive. The Soviet Air Force's sometimes lackluster ability to defend the Frantic airbases from Luftwaffe attacks were also a concern. A more likely alternative would have been to use the 15th Air Force, based out of Italy directly. Foggia to Auschwitz was a distance of only 640 miles, and the 15th AF was already attacking targets in Upper Silesia near Auschwitz, so going after the camp would not have been a significant change in range nor region. The biggest problem facing such a mission was time: you needed to have clear skies to have a shot at hitting just the crematoria and the gas chambers without inadvertently hitting the prisoners' barracks (which, given the bomb aiming technology at the time, might have happened anyway). You needed to allot time for assessing bomb damage via photo-reconnaissance. You needed to allot time to make mission profile adjustments in response to changes in enemy defenses. You needed multiple strikes to complete the job, and you needed to spread these missions out over multiple weeks to prevent predictability and fool defenders. Secretary Sinclair gave his initial report to Churchill on July 15, 1944. On August 2, Carl Spaatz heard about this inquiry from a counter-part at the RAF and was "most sympathetic". If we peg the first of these Auschwitz raids as starting sometime between those two dates and allotting for four missions being necessary to destroy the camp's death apparatus, that puts Mission Accomplished at some time in September 1944. Historically, we know that all of the Hungarian Jews were dead by then. There may still have been lives saved insofar as Auschwitz remained active until November of that year, but then you circle back to the issue of the precision of that era's bombing, the possibility of prisoners being moved even closer to the gas chambers in response to the potential inaccuracy of bombing, and the possibility of the prisoners being moved elsewhere or killed via other means.
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Apr 22, 2015 13:19
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