I think that is an excellent point and certainly another reason why the RAF could maintain the numbers was exactly this sort of pragmatic decision-making. General bombing of cities didn’t materially harm the warm effort, losing too many planes and pilots would. It was Ali’s rope-a-dope in aerial form.
Curiously, production, repair, deployment, detection, direction, management, command and control were pretty much state-of-the-art but the one area in which the RAF was lacking was actual tactics in the air. From what I’ve read we were pretty backward in that respect and took more losses than necessary early on due to it. That isn’t in any way to diminish the skills of the pilots but I don’t think early methodologies did them any favours.
Well that’s ridiculous in a few spots. The U.S. wasn’t going to let Britain go down and why the hell would Germany declare war on America if they had taken Europe? Some historic need to get beat up?
The issue wasn’t so much the timing, it was as always, Hitler’s meddling. In early August, he halted the drive on Moscow by Army Group Center in order for them to help reduce the Kiev pocket.
Had he let the generals do their thing, they’d have launched the final attack on Moscow (Operation Typhoon) in September instead of October, and potentially could have avoided the bitter winter fighting that they were unprepared for in late 1941.
Rockets were still a wasteful technology in WWII. A V2 rocket could deliver a 2200 lb payload once. A B-17 on a mission with the same range could carry a 9500 lb payload and fly another mission the next day. Missiles just weren’t a good idea for bombing targets until you had nuclear warheads.
I’d say no significant difference. The Germans invaded Russia with 145 divisions. At the same time, there were two divisions in North Africa. The number of German divisions in Russia rose as high as 195 but the number of German divisions in Africa never got higher than nine.
Radar stations were an easier target than most of the things the Germans were bombing. By their nature, they had to be big and built out in the the open. They had to be located along the coast as close to the German bases as possible. And they had to broadcast in order to work which made them vulnerable to being located by German bombers. It would have been easy to equip German bombers with receivers that picked up the British radar transmissions and then they could have just followed those in to the station to bomb it.
The Russians managed it. They were moving supplies across a much greater distance in Russia than the Germans had to.
Russia isn’t a complete wasteland. The war was fought in European Russia not Siberia. It was less developed than Germany but not a barren tundra.
The main problem, as I wrote above is that the Germans were in such a hurry. They would race to the end of where their supply lines could reach and then they’d push on further. They’d always keep advancing until they ran completely beyond their ability to bring supplies up and then the advance would collapse.
They’d have done much better if they had slowed down and advanced at a speed where the supply lines could keep up. The front might not have moved forward as quickly but it would have been a lot stronger.
I think this might have been a situation where Hitler was right and the generals were wrong.
You have to remember the original reason the generals were focused on Moscow was not primarily the value of the city itself. What the German generals were trying to do was stop the Soviets from retreating. They wanted to force a battle where the Soviets would stop and hold their ground so the Germans could defeat them. They felt that Moscow was the only target that was valuable enough that the Soviets would stand and fight for it.
And then Stalin decided to hold Kiev. He sent a massive amount of troops to Kiev and told them to stand and fight there. In other words, Stalin was handing the German generals exactly the type of situation they wanted - only at Kiev instead of Moscow. But the generals had lost sight of why they were heading for Moscow and kept going there even though the reason for attacking Moscow had now moved to Kiev.
Hitler was the only one who saw this clearly and ordered his generals to attack the Soviet army at Kiev. Because that’s where the Soviet army was and it had always been the real target.
And the Germans won a massive victory at Kiev. They destroyed the Soviet army there just as they had hoped to destroy the Soviet army at Moscow.
The problem was they had underestimated the ability of the Soviets to recover and rebuild its army. The Soviets were able to recruit far more troops than the Germans thought possible and put a whole new army in the field after losing the army at Kiev. And that would have been equally true if the Germans had fought at Moscow instead.
In fact, if the Germans had gone on to Moscow, they would have been worse off. Because not only would they have been facing all of those new troops at Moscow, there would still have been all those original troops still massed at Kiev. If the Germans had taken Moscow, it’s doubtful they could have held it with the new army advancing from the east and the old army advancing from the south.
Not really. They didn’t have much success and the stations were soon back in use. The structure of the mast was an open lattice so not that easy to destroy.
Here’s a wiki cite but I have seen it said elsewhere as well.
Worth mentioning that even when the Germans did put a hole in the radar chain from 12th-23rd August, they still got severely spanked when attempting massed raids.
Plus, I’d question the ability of an existing German bomber to take out such a target accurately. The accuracy of WW2 bombing was shocking. Even the Stukas, they looked scary but were not particularly effective unless they had air superiority already (which was the thing their attacks were hoping to bring about) so…chicken and egg.
Arguably, there’s no point in bombing anything because a lot of bombs miss their target, some targets survive the attack, and destroyed targets can be rebuilt.
But bombing campaigns were still fought. It’s a percentage game. You force your enemy to spend resources defending and repairing targets rather than using those resources for something else.
There’s no reason radar stations would be less effective targets than airfields or factories and I’ve outlined the reasons why they would have been more effective. (It’s true that a bomb intended to target a factory won’t work as well if it’s dropped on an open structure instead. But that just means you should be using the appropriate bomb for the target.)
Managing to get a few barges of tanks and troops across the Channel doesn’t get you a successful invasion of Britain. You have to keep those troops supplied or they’re dead. Taking the beachhead is one thing, keeping the beachhead is another, and breaking out of the beachhead is still another.
For D-Day the Allies had absolute naval control over the Channel, and total air superiority. How are the Germans supposed to supply their invasion force with the Royal Navy and RAF still intact?
Perhaps, but I suspect to knock them out and keep them knocked out would have taken a ruinously intensive effort and I’m not sure they had the equipment and accuracy to do it.
Plus, the radar stations were not the only part, or even the major part of the early warning system. Even with those taken out there were other methods of detecting the incoming waves and the most crucial part of the whole system was the manner in which the incoming data was collated and displayed. The radar made it better for sure but even without it the system was formidable.
All interesting “what-ifs” though.
That’s not the way that I understand Blitzkrieg to work; the idea was to basically get into the rear areas (operationally or strategically) and wreak havoc by wrecking lines of supply, communications, reinforcement, etc…
By heading for Moscow, they were basically accomplishing that- the idea was that they’d wreck the transportation and communications systems which both more or less centered on Moscow. Plus, at that point, the Russians were reeling, and weren’t putting up much of a fight, so I suspect that if they’d have done Typhoon 6 weeks earlier, they’d have captured Moscow, with all that would have entailed.
The troops in Kiev didn’t have to be reduced in August; they were cut off from supply, and weren’t going anywhere. Plus they pretty much sucked, being pre-war, post-purge Red Army troops.
The Balkans didn’t delay Barbarossa, the weather did. May 15 was an unrealistic start date to begin with, and the spring of 1941 had been unusually wet. The rivers in Eastern Europe remained at high flood throughout May, operations in mainland Greece concluded on April 30 and German forces were back in position to launch Barbarossa before the end of May, yet Barbarossa was still delayed until June 22. Stolfi seemed convincing when I read him, but in reflection he was really being wildly optimistic about Germany’s ability to maintain a supply line as it stretched towards Moscow, how valuable Moscow itself actually was, and the German’s ability to simply ignore the size of the force undefeated on its flank in the Ukraine. The extent of the resistance Army Group Center was running into from July to September has also become better known since the opening of former Soviet archives after Stolfi wrote “Hitler’s Panzers East”; Glantz’s “Barbarossa Derailed: The Battle for Smolensk 10 July-10 September 1941” goes into considerable depth on the three Soviet counteroffensives launched against Army Group Center during this period that had previously been little mentioned if at all in official Soviet histories due to their failures. Although failing and coming at great expense, they had sapped a good deal of Army Group Center’s strength in the process and had also in fact inflicted the first defeat upon the Wehrmacht at Yelnya where they were forced to retreat and abandon the city.
In addition to invading the Soviet Union in spring not being possible - the semiannual mud even has a name, rasputitsa, the season of bad roads - having the Germans being very nice to the Ukrainians and Russians requires the Nazis not to be the Nazis. The entire point of the war for Hitler was to seize lebensraum in the East from the Slavic peoples, who as untermensch were to be exterminated, enslaved, or driven into Siberia. If you remove Hitler and the Nazis in order to allow the Germans to be ‘nice’ to the Russians while taking over their country, you’ve also removed the reason for Germany to be at war with Russia in 1941 in the first place.
They didn’t need to reach the channel to defeat a cross-channel invasion fleet, a force of light cruisers and destroyers was stationed in the channel throughout the Battle of Britain that on its own was more than enough to defeat any invasion force the Germans could muster. Getting there on time to intercept the German invasion force wouldn’t have been a problem in any event even if there wasn’t a force stationed in the channel; the German invasion plan called for using Rhine ferries which could only make 2-3 knots. It would take the ferries coming from the furthest ports 30 hours to make a one way trip, and these ferries were so unseaworthy that they would founder and sink in anything above sea state 2, which is produced by the wash of a destroyer moving at speed. The Royal Navy wouldn’t even have to open fire on the German invasion fleet in order to sink it; they could literally just sail past it and sink it.
Hitler’s ‘Second Book’ makes it clear that he viewed war with America, which would probably be allied with the British Empire, as both necessary and inevitable in the long run. That was why he placed emphasis on the need to knock Russia out quickly before this happened.
But the V2s don’t get shot down and there’s no life lost (on the German side). V2s had no tactical effectiveness but if they were raining down on Britain with little impunity (and assuming there is no evacuation at Dunkirk) then I can imagine the UK accepting a peace agreement.
Not only would the Eastern Front have received more troops but also all the material that was sent to North Africa. By 1941 Britain was making great use of Ultra and according to historian Harry Hinsley about half the supply ships sent to NA were sunk. That’s a lot of supply.
Hitler was attempting to resolve WW1. That was a reasonable plan as far as repatriating lost territory and using creative demographics to annex other areas. Using that strategy, he probably could have annexed Eastern Ukraine by treaty. Brest-Litovsk left the area contested.
There was no real benefit to invading France and Benelux
The invasion of Russia was insane. The Soviets had a well developed defensive strategy and superior weaponry - move industry east to the Urals and scorch the earth left behind. Allow the enemy to exhaust himself in the Russian winter, then counter attack without mercy.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a strategic blunder. That alone provoked the US to mobilize for war.
Engaging in the European Christian hobby of persecuting Jews was non-productive. Some German organizations were actively assisting the emigration of Jews to the Middle East. Those programs were humanitarian and had propaganda value. That would have been a sufficient solution to their perceived problem.
Germany had been the center of science and technology before WW1. German industrialists were regaining that position when they brought Hitler to power. Germany could have continued it’s expansion in areas that did not require warfare. The superiority of the Aryan race could have been demonstrated in international competitions like land speed, airspeed and altitude records, auto and air racing. That sort of thing implies military strength without the expense of warfare.
Germany could have negotiated the communication corridor with Poland.
Given 10 years of industrial expansion after Munich (1938-1948), would have placed Germany far ahead of both Britain and the US militarily.
Without Pearl Harbor and the invasion of the USSR, by 1948 Japan and Germany would have made progress toward linking up in India. The turmoil created by the independence movement might have provided the needed excuse. Not having been exhausted by world war, they both would have been in a strong position to succeed.
On the other hand - who says they lost. No major corporation in Germany, Italy or Japan failed as a result of WW2.
I have read that various Military Academies have studied Operation Sea Lion under various conditions - even when they posit that neither the RAF or the Royal Navy exist AT ALL, Germany could not have mounted a successful invasion. They just could not support large enough supply lines across the channel, even with no opposition. They had no way of getting large equipment like tanks or guns across. Even at best, they could probably land 5-10,000 men per day - on a beach, with bugger all supplies.
All wargames scenarios ended the same way - a small group of German diehards holding out approximately one quarter of the way to London. About 3-4 weeks.