Yes, but they intended it to be a one night stand.
You’re absolutely right and I specifically framed my point that Hitler’s use of Bismarc class ships were to dominate the ocean AND destroy Naval shipyards. I also stated that it would be as a delaying tactic. My reasoning (not stated earlier) is that we could have retooled shipyards on large rivers to build battleships on the premise that rivers could be blockaded from ocean access.
Yeah, I guess you could say 10% of the entire Russian population got screwed.
Not quite. The French knew that Hitler wouldn’t make a frontal assault on the Maginot Line. They counted on it, it’s why it was built - to ensure that any German assault would be funnelled north through Belgium. The French mistake was that they assumed the Germans wouldn’t make their main thrust through the Ardennes. So they fell for the German feign to the north and were caught flat footed when the main German force emerged from the Ardennes.
And they were freaking lucky to do that. The Belgians were supposed to be watching the Ardennes trails to make sure the Germans didn’t send any secondary forces through there. But the Belgian force that was supposed to be guarding it was called back when it became obvious the Germans were going to kick the crap out of Belgium. Except France was never notified.
Had the Belgians notified the French, the main German force likely would have been found while still in the Ardennes and it would have been completely annihilated. The terrain was rough and the trails only allowed single file. Well placed artillery or air attacks would have completely stopped the German armor advance and they would have been holed up single file with nowhere to go. They would have been slaughtered.
I think in general Germany was stronger in relative terms prior to and during WWI than in WWII. The choices, pre-war and during the early war that Germany would have to make to get a solid chance at victory in the two are different however.
I don’t think that on paper, pre war (or at least as of the end of '41) Germany is hopeless with respect to defeating Russia in either war. The population and extraction industry advantage of Russia is countered (somewhat) by the greater infrastructure and technical tradition of Germany. Bigger edge in 1914-18 obviously.
In both wars Germany was unwilling to put victory over ideology until too late.
Germany was forced to go to war in 1914 by it’s unwillingness to allow a significant numbers of non-aristocrats to be officers or non-peasants to be NCO’s for fear of the social democrats and socialists. In the first world war Germany could not force peace on the western allies and any peace agreement would have included insufficient west front conquests to allow the government to survive. Forcing the Russians out of the war with the punitive treaty (that German domestic opinion required) meant that vast numbers of troops were required to occupy the new eastern client states to very little profit.
In the second war Germany refused to risk negative public opinion by switching from a consumer economy to a war economy until too late in the game. This was compounded by an inability to realistically assess the situation on the ground - probably until mid '44 a separate peace was obtainable from the Soviets, had the Germans not insisted that any adjusted borders always be to the right of the front lines rather than to the left. (The terms that would be required for separate peace with the west, even if such were possible, were probably to onerous for the Nazi regime to survive).
No, but put a mid to late war American battleship or three against someone elses carrier and you have a solid shot at mauling the attacker.
Uh, what? The Bismarck-class vessels weren’t some kind of uber-battlewagon. They were well-built, well-engineered and modern, but they only had 38cm/15in guns in four sets of two. The US and Japanese navies had been running with 40cm/16in guns in four sets of two or three sets of three since the early 1920s s. The Japanese battleships were probably more capable than the Bismarck class (certainly the Yamato class were) and did the Imperial Navy precious little good. Certainly any of them would have been summarily sunk if they had ventured within shelling distance of a major shipyard. Aircraft carriers would definitely have been a better use of resources, with hindsight.
The US not a world power? In the sense of a the Army perhaps not, but the US had one of the worlds largest navies, a reasonable-size air force, and enough industry and money to bury any opponent. I don’t think anyone had any illusions after WW1 that the US was anything but a superpower.
Hitler could have nobbled the British isles with better strategy and more of a focus on industrial production, but the V1/V2 programs were toys - better fighters like the FW190 would have been the decisive factor, not ‘super-weapons’. If he had then kept away from Russia he could quite possibly have negotiated his way to some kind of arrangement that left him all of Europe, Stalin the Baltics, Poland and bits of Asia, and the US with the Americas/Pacific/Japan and former British colonies. Fortunately Hitler was a loon surrounded by other loons, so this never came to pass.
Yes, one of the great breaks in the war was the fact that aircraft carriers were absent at Pearl Harbor. They were the real target. However, the Bismark was heavily armoured. Despite the fact that England threw everything at the Bismark it was a bad decision that got it lost. The ship steered away it’s armored side to avoid a torpedo that nailed it’s vulnerable side. That was another great break in the war when a an antique of an airplane (a swordfish) managed to tag the rudder with a torpedo.
I agree with your premise. In the game of “what ifs” the aircraft carrier would have ruled the seas, even if they had been taken out early in the war. My scenario has always been that an early strike (including shipyards), would have delayed the US from entering the war. England was the only thing keeping Europe alive in the early years of the war. IMO, the fall of England would have changed Europe’s history.
Yes, at the beginning of the war Bismarck was an uber-battlewagon. Certainly not at the end of the war. It was able to sink the Britain’s finest ship (HMS Hood) in a matter of minutes. My premise has always been that a fleet of these boats could have preemptively destroyed the US Navy and more importantly the coastal shipyards. It would only work as a tactic to cut off American supplies to England. The key to the domination of Europe was Great Britain.
The flaw in my “what if” would be the massive US buildup prior to the war. If the US exceeded Germany’s production of dreadnoughts it would have prevented a preemptive strike. The US buildup was in direct response to Hitler’s early move on Czechoslovakia and Poland. Had Hitler waited he could have built a larger Navy. He understood the need to stop US supplies, he just underestimated the requirements to do so.
I agree. That’s actually a valid counter to my premise. If Germany did not have the capacity then it’s a moot point to speculate on it.
So these ten Bismarcks are going to sit 20 thousand yards off the shore of Camden, New Jersey and pound the shipyard to bits without being sunk by aircraft, submarines, torpedo boats or the US Atlantic fleet? Will you pardon me if I am somewhat sceptical about this? While Japanese aviation was superior to US at the time and the ships were nowhere near Bismarck standard, the British didn’t have such a great time against forward-deployed Japanese aviation operating out of Malaya.
And no, the Bismarck was not even remotely close to the level of superiority you assign to it. I assume you refer to HMS Hood, which was an inadequately modernized 1918-vintage battlecruiser accompanied by a brand-new cut-price ‘battleship’ which the Brits had armed with feeble 14-inch guns in the vague hope that everyone else would stick to popguns rather than moving up to 16 or 18 inch weapons. Even so the Bismarck was holed in a fuel bunker in the exchange, and following a hit from a 1934 vintage torpedo plane, was then hammered to pieces by another popgun battleship and a Washington Treaty mutant launched in 1925. A mutant armed with similar guns to those used by the larger ships in the US navy, but in a slower and more fragile hull. Given that the shipyards you posit as targets would have been protected by exactly what killed the Bismarck, but in larger quantities, with the addition of shore-based modern aircraft rather than antique carrier planes, how would the outcome be different?
I concur with phead. The Bismark was difficult to sink, but other than that unremarkable. Remaining floating but immobile and unable to shoot is not a war winning combination.
Wasn’t this because the HMS Hood had little to no armour on it’s top deck allowing a shell to pass straight through and into it’s armament cache? Am I thinking of something else?
And, btw, the Hood wasn’t Britain’s finest ship. It was probably their finest battlecruiser, but they stopped designing new battlecruisers after the Washington treaty. They had better battleships than the Hood, like the “George V” class. The most notable of those was the HMS Prince of Wales (which actually engaged the Bismarck along with the Hood, and damaged it, receiving no damage itself). The George V class did have smaller guns than the Bismarck, but more of them, and was hardly inferior.
But during the war, the British were able to launch 5 ships of that class (King George V, Prince of Wales, Duke of York, Anson, and Howe), as compared to the 2 Bismarck class ships the Germans were able to produce.
Magiver, you misread my post, though admittedly that’s partly because it’s not a model of clarity. By the Great War, I meant WW1, which is what it was called at the time. It’s that war which Germany could have (arguably shoud have) won, at least on the western front, in the first month.
As for MEBuckner’s point, there’s something to that argument. I agree Hitler wasn’t particularly spoling to attack west in the beginning. But I do think he was planning to go there eventually. In any event, he was taking diplomatic risks disproportionate to his country’s resources. Whereas Germany in the Great War had fairly accurately tailored the risks taken to its means. It just failed to execute correctly.
The Bismark argument is a new one for me. Frankly, I don’t see it. In both wars, one of Germany’s biggest naval handicaps was that its only safe home ports were on the Baltic. Difficult to rule the seas from that jumping off point. Not saying it couldn’t have worked, but not where I would have invested.
Sorry, this is sheer techo-fantasy stuff. Germany bulds 10 BBs and a whole new airfleet of jets and squadrons of rockets. I mean honestly, where do they get the resources? Their army was almost entirely reliant on foot and horse transport throughout the war, as it was. The Nazi state was inherently inefficient, there just was not the ability to churn stuff out like the US or USSR did. Remember the UK alone was outproducing Germany in planes and tanks in 1940!
Battleships were easy to stop and were repeatedly during the war. Name one single case where a battleship had a significant military effect on the course of the war.
Your scenario also assumes Germany does something different starting in maybe 1934, but no-one else does anything different than they did historically. Both the UK and the US could and would have matched the Germans ship for ship, or better. The battleship had had its day, and investing more time, money, men and oil in them than they did would lose the Germans the war faster than almost anything else I can think of.
No, he never imagined after the West piked out of supporting the Czechs that they would then go to war for the Poles. Are you aware of any source that says differently?
The Russians had been “in bed with” the Germans long before day one. The Russians had been helping the Luftwaffe train since the 30s. But it was purely a marriage of convenience for both sides, the Germans for raw materials and the Russians for manufactured goods.
As I said, this was never going to happen. The “allliance” with Russia was purely for temporary gain, Hitler’s entire purpose in going to war was to have a go at Russia.
Perhaps so, but you’ve failed to provide a plausible way for them to do this. The Allies could actually have done better than they did historically in the Atlantic, whereas the Germans didn’t has as much room to improve.
Super guns now? :rolleyes:
That’d be the V3. But “super” is a relative term. Being able to dump ordnance on Kent is not the same as pounding England into dust.
IMO the V-weapons were a big waste of resources, start to finish. They might have been scary (and incidentally killed the women’s world chess champion, or maybe ex-champion, I’d need to look it up) but in terms of bang per buck, not so much. Better standardisation in terms of armour design and manufacture would have accomplished more, or even supplying the Wehrmacht with effective winter clothing.
Well, if they had ever got the V3s working properly they would certainly have had an impact, and they certainly were cool. As were the jets, which could also have been pressed into service much faster if the Nazis had gone all-out for industrial production from day one.
Having said all that, I think you are 100% correct in all your points. The only way I have ever been able to see Germany pulling off WW2 is if they stayed cosied up to the Russians until they won the western front, and then turned east. But since the western front only came into existence as an unexpected result of Hitler’s Eastern obsessions, it was never likely to play out that way. If one moves the starting point backwards a bit and posit a situation where Hitler managed to avoid the issueance of the Polish Guarantee, you could then maybe work out a scenario where he receives tacit western backing to conquer the Soviets with Japanese assistance and keeps his nose out of Western Europe altogether.
No, not so much. The limiting factors with regards to deploying the Me262 were two: engines and pilots. The Junkers Jumo engine prototypes used exotic alloys for the parts of the turbine that needed to be highly heat-resistant. Problem was, the Germans couldn’t produce Jumos using those alloys, because they didn’t have the raw material. So, there was delay after delay trying to make the things work with lower grade steel, and in the end the production Jumo was still ridiculously prone to failure, and had an abysmal service life. So it’s not at all clear the the Luftwaffe could have deployed the jets much faster than they did. And even if they had, by that point in the war they had no experienced pilots to fly the things. The tempermental nature of the engines and the very high closing speeds made the 262 rather more difficult to fly than the piston-engined alternatives, but the Luftwaffe pilot training was a complete joke by the time the 262 was being deployed. Guys were being sent up on combat missions with virtually no flight time. Send those guys up in jets and they’ll just stuff them into the ground. As it was, the Germans skimmed off the top, pulling many of the few remaining veteran pilots into a few squadrons equipped with 262s, but there just weren’t any more available.
It’s popular to say “If only the Germans had done this, that, or the next thing, they could have won the war.” But it’s wrong. WWII was a war of attrition and a contest between industrial bases, and Germany didn’t have the manpower, raw materials, or manufacturing capacity to hang with the Allies in the long run. The day the blitzkrieg stalled in Russia, it was all over.
Besides, even if they survived till August '45, Berlin gets nuked.
They were cool, and they would have made an impact - big difference from changing the outcome. Changing the production priorities assigned would have altered the speed with which the things were available for use to some extent, which would in turn have changed some of the parameters in terms of manufacturing capability and pilot skill.
But I agree, even if they had made it into production in large enough numbers to affect air superiority, they would only have caused a prioritisation of the Allied jet programs in response, which would have tipped things back again. Putting a greater emphasis on motorisation of the army would have helped in Russia, but caused the fuel shortages to bite harder and sooner. Better diplomacy and politics could have made a difference before it all started, better aircraft and strategy could have tipped the Battle of Britain, and there is an outside possibility better strategy and planning could have captured Moscow, but I’m not sure that would have affected things so much.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is SIGINT. If the germans hadn’t had total faith in Enigma, and had kept their communications largely uncompromised, how long would this have dragged things out? Another year or so at most?
IMHO the above quoted clause is the the single biggest factor in Germany getting roughed up/outperformed by the USSR in WWII. Nothing to do with jets, battleships, v-weapons, or any specific system. Just taking war seriously.
One of the few advantages of getting your ass whooped early in a war is you tend to take things seriously.