Axis Strategy Victory Scenario in WWII - Possible?

[TokyoBayer]

From the other thread in which I originally posted my alt-history, the following posts were made in response. I’ve copied them here.

@RickJay

No. There is no practical way to invade in the numbers needed without launching much of the attack from Poland.
Japan wasn’t bad at building things. Where they put their efforts, their weapons were top notch; look at how the Zero tore Allied planes to shreds earlier in the war. Japan simply did not have the resources to build weapons in the quantity AND quality to match the Allies, and had internal political rifts of the likes that no external advice was going to fix.

@lisiate

Take a look at a map of Europe in 1939 there’s no convenient way for Germany to attack the USSR other than through Poland. Japan was already in China (specifically Manchuria) before the Nazi’s came to power as well.

It would take a diplomatic genius to make all the alliances you’ve suggested (although to give Ribbentrop credit negotiating a non-aggression pact with the Soviets was a pretty sharp move).

More light tanks wouldn’t be particularly helpful, you’d just bounce even more ammo off the USSR’s better tanks (KV-1s and T-34s). The enormous number of soviet light tanks (BT series and over 10,000 T-26s) in 1941 didn’t help them very much in our timeline.

Pre-staging vast amounts of military equipment in other countries is sort of antithetical to conducting a surprise attack.

Leningrad was invested within 3 months of the launch of Barbarossa, yet despite the enormous losses inflicted on the Red Army was never captured. It’s hard to see how an alternate strategy could take it quickly while at the same time focusing on Moscow.

The gauge issue either requires massive infrastructure work to alter tracks or a huge conversion of rolling stock to be able to use wider track - either way it’s a big problem with no obvious solution.

All in all the invasion of the Soviet Union was about as successful as it could possibly be in our timeline, and still wasn’t enough to be complete.

@Bookkeeper

A problem with a lot of this is that it would have conflicted with the state capitalism part of Fascist ideology. Both German and Italian policies during the war often worked against military advantage if it would potentially interfere with the profits of German or Italian corporations. No equivalent of Lend-Lease, for example - if an ally wanted German tanks or aircraft they paid hard cash in advance and even then were usually given clapped-out combat survivors rather than new equipment, if they were lucky enough to be allowed to buy at all. If that meant the allied armies couldn’t fight well in combat, well, the Master Race didn’t *really *need them, anyway.

And forget about licensed production - the Nazi plan was that all post-war industrial production in Europe would be in Germany, and the occupied territories and remaining countries would only serve as resource sources for the massive German economy. They had no desire to encourage independent production by their (temporary) allies that would interfere with this goal. German superiority leading to an inevitable ultimate victory seemed to be an unquestioned assumption in much of their planning.