I thought that during the Battle of Britain the Germans began bombing cities instead of airfields, which led to Britain winning.
The focus was always on destroying the RAF, but attacking cities was never the primary goal; some raids meant to try to draw fighters up were launched.
By the time mass city attacks became the focus, the Battle of Britain was basically over because the goal of destroying the RAF had failed. German losses were becoming very heavy and a switch to night bombing was necessary.
Germany was never going to win the Battle of Britain (and many Luftwaffe commanders knew it.) The math just doesn’t work.
You could say the same thing about all the Axis powers in WW-II.
They were all doomed the moment they opened hostilities. The only question was whether the rest of the world would be angry enough to occupy all their territory, or just some of it and end up in a NK/SK sort of perpetual stalemate.
The math just doesn’t work.
The Nazis could possibly have made peace in early 1940. But that’s not what Nazis do.
Yep. Totally out of character for them and their ilk.
They wanted “total war” and they got their wish. Stuffed up their ass at bayonet point.
“Attack the world” is always a losing plan. The math just doesn’t work. As the USA is about to learn to its collective detriment.
Yeah, and even if things had been much more favorable for the Germans, they were never going to succeed in the stated goal of the Battle of Britain, that being the destruction of the RAF, which was in theory the initial stage of the invasion of Britain in Sealion, an equally impossible task for Germany to have undertaken.
All the RAF needed to do to survive was to refuse to engage in battle by moving north to airfields in the area of 12 Group, which was outside the range of German fighter cover. This was what they planned to do if losses became temporarily unsustainable, and which would have been a very small move. The range of the Bf-109 was very short. The parts of the blue circles on this map of Britain were the absolute limit of how far over Britain the Bf-109 could possibly reach. It’s a very, very small part of the country.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Battle_of_Britain_map.svg
The map is accurate as to airplanes’ ranges and the shape of the land.
What is leaves out is the relative importance of the stuff on the ground under the BF-109’s footprint. Ceding the skies over your own heartland and capital to the enemy was never going to be a good decision. It might, temporarily, be the least bad one available, but that’s really a “back’s to the wall, ammo running low” kind of situation. Lotta ways for that to snowball adversely to UK’s survival.
Not everyone in the RAF understood this however. Douglas Bader for example kept pushing for bigger and bigger formations of RAF fighters to intercept, the big wing concept, in order to have a decisive battle. Which is exactly what the Germans wanted.
It was Park, commander of 11 Group and therefore the defence of southern England, that kept the focus on surviving. He aimed to intercept the bombers before they bombed, even if it meant the defending fighters were outnumbered. He knew that as long as the RAF could put up continuous resistance the Luftwaffe would always fall short of the needed air superiority.
Of course he was not recognized for his brilliance at the time. The simplistic idea of big formations plus big battle equals big victory was too alluring for senior commanders and politicians to ignore.
It really doesn’t, though. As the bombing of both Germany and Japan demonstrated, and the night bombing of Britain that came about once Germany ceded that it could not sustain the losses of daylight operations during the Battle of Britain proved, bombing enemy’s cities just for the sake of bombing their cities was not an effective strategy to accomplish anything. The US Strategic Bombing Survey showed it didn’t even have a negative effect on civilian morale, for the obvious reason (in hindsight at least) that one can’t surrender to a bomber. All one can do is endure the bombing, which paradoxically had a positive effect on civilian morale. And night bombing was at times killing more bomber crews in Bomber Command than German civilians on the ground.
There was nothing vital under the range that the Bf-109 could cover that would win them the Battle of Britain. The biggest effect that US strategic bombing offensive had on Germany was the destruction of the Luftwaffe. They were able to accomplish this because 1) US fighters in 1944 were able to escort bombers over almost the entirety of Germany and 2) they would target the things that the Luftwaffe had no choice but to try to defend - aircraft production factories. Germany was unable to do either of those things during the Battle of Britain, because their fighters lacked the range to do it.
The idea that Germany lost the Battle of Britain because it shifted targets from airfields to cities, which started this tangent, is long discredited bunk. They weren’t able to inflict lasting damage to the airfields, were losing more planes and pilots than the British while trying to do so, Britain was producing more fighters than it was losing, training more fighter pilots than it was losing, and Germany was in the opposite situation, losing both more planes and pilots than it could replace.
Yeah.
Ultimately both Germany and Japan had the problem they could not replace their combat losses 1-for-1 almost from the git-go. And that was before the Allies began to attrite their production capacity and their demographically predetermined supply of eagle-eyed 19yos had dried up. And before the Allies, with the US to the fore, began to be able to replace one combat loss with 10 newer units of greater tech and near equivalent skill.
As long as the Allies could out-produce, and be confident in that ongoing out-production, a simple tit for tat one-loss-for-one-loss war of attrition was a winner for the Allies. Despite what that looked like to the news media or the public helplessly watching the carnage overhead and being dropped onto them day after day and later night after night.
That did not mean the experience was comfortable for anyone. Least of all the swashbuckling commanders raised on the idea of decisive battles rendering the few enemy survivors ineffective shell-shocked stragglers.
That’s interesting about the European war, but the massive firebombing campaign in Japan, with the simultaneous Operation Starvation, the mining of Japanese ports and waterways by air, and the submarine campaign, definitely degraded the civilian morale to the point that it was a serious factor by the Emperor in his decision to surrender.
I haven’t read anything detailing the loss of morale by the various components, but I suspect that the aggregate was what did it.
Even though most military leaders kept holding out with the belief that one final battle could cause enough Allied casualties to allow better terms, the utter destruction of their cities and shipping had brought the civilians close to a state where a revolution was thinkable.
By early August 1945, shipping losses and destruction of infrastructure was such that there wasn’t sufficient food to sustain vital workers, leading to high absenteeism. Another major problem was the amount of time required to find and purchase basic necessities such as food on the blackmarket.
Even after the atomic bombing and the entry of the Soviets into the war, the War Faction of the Big Six (the de facto ultimate decision making body) still wouldn’t give in. It took the extra-constitutional intervention by the Emperor to force the surrender. One major concern of the Emperor was a possible revolution which would eliminate the Imperial system.
I understand that this was completely different in the war against Germany, and certainly Germany never had the means to cause that much destruction against Britain.
Well - maybe, maybe not. The Nazi’s did make a peace offer to the UK in 1940 after the fall of France and the British army’s weaponry was left on the beach at Dunkirk.
So if Britain had accepted peace (and there were several plausible ways that could have happened - deposing Churchill being the first step) - what then?
The key war was always Germany vs Russia. But with Britain out of the war and not requiring all that lovely US equipment they received via Lend-Lease, would the US have ramped up its production as much? Would the US then have sent the 400,000 trucks, 10,000 tanks, 12,000 planes etc to Russia at all?
Now the Germans would not need to spend so much on U-boats and battleships.Add to that - no german troops sent to North Africa, a lot less to the Balkans etc - maybe they do win in Russia.
No, Germany most certainly did not make a peace offer to the UK in 1940 after the fall of France. This myth comes from taking one paragraph in a very long speech Hitler gave at the Reichstag on July 19, 1940, out of context. And I mean very long, I suggest looking at the length of the speech, full text of it here, it is 11,745 words long translated into English. The sole paragraph that comes close to an offer of ‘peace’ along with surrounding paragraphs for context is:
Mr. Churchill has repeated the declaration that he wants war. About six weeks ago now, he launched this war in an arena in which he apparently believes he is quite strong: namely, in the air war against the civilian population, albeit beneath the deceptive slogan of a so-called war against military objectives. Ever since Freiburg, these objectives have turned out to be open cities, markets, villages, residential housing, hospitals, schools, kindergartens, and whatever else happens to be hit.
Up to now I have given little by way of response. This is not intended to signal, however, that this is the only response possible or that it shall remain this way.
I am fully aware that with our response, which one day will come, will also come the nameless suffering and misfortune of many men. Naturally, this does not apply to Mr. Churchill himself since by then he will surely be secure in Canada, where the money and the children of the most distinguished of war profiteers have already been brought. But there will be great tragedy for millions of other men. And Mr. Churchill should make an exception and place trust in me when as a prophet I now proclaim: A great world empire will be destroyed. A world empire which I never had the ambition to destroy or as much as harm. Alas, I am fully aware that the continuation of this war will end only in the complete shattering of one of the two warring parties. Mr. Churchill may believe this to be Germany. I know it to be England. In this hour I feel compelled, standing before my conscience, to direct yet another appeal to reason in England. I believe I can do this as I am not asking for something as the vanquished, but rather, as the victor, I am speaking in the name of reason. I see no compelling reason which could force the continuation of this war.
I regret the sacrifices it will demand. I would like to spare my Volk. I know the hearts of millions of men and boys aglow at the thought of finally being allowed to wage battle against an enemy who has, without reasonable cause, declared war on us a second time.
But I also know of the women and mothers at home whose hearts, despite their willingness to sacrifice to the last, hang onto this last with all their might.
Mr. Churchill may well belittle my declaration again, crying that it was nothing other than a symptom of my fear, or my doubts of the final victory.
For context, Freiburg was a German city bombed in error by the Luftwaffe on May 10, 1940, which the Nazis blamed on the British. At best the speech could be described as an ultimatum to Britain, not a peace offer. All it really amounted to though was Hitler rambling about how the war was the fault of the French and the British, which he did throughout the entire speech, along with blaming the Jews of course.
The Germans sort of expected an offer of surrender to come from the British after the fall of France, which wasn’t forthcoming, and shouldn’t have been a surprise considering Britain’s very long history of leveraging its advantage of naval supremacy and the English Channel to prolong European wars as long as it wanted to prevent the emergence of a single nation dominating the whole of Europe. The simple fact of the matter was that Germany went to war having no long-term plan for how to actually go about defeating Britain, and the Battle of Britain and the theoretical preparations for Sealion was them coming up with the closest thing that could pass as a plan to do so when the fantasy that Britain would just roll over didn’t happen.
Which is an interesting parallel to Putin’s temporizing since about week 4 of the current Ukraine war.
War is rarely the cakewalk the aggressors assume it will be.
How much did Hitler’s have a grand strategy prior to Poland? Was he anticipating France and Britain entering the war and easily defeating them? I understand that USSR was his main focus but did he expect he would have to fight both France and Britain first? Or did that happen because they declared war first?
Germany had obviously underestimated America or they wouldn’t have declared war after Pearl Harbor.
Japan’s situation was crazy. Famously, there was the Go North faction who wanted to tackle the USSR first, and the Go South faction which wanted to take NEI and British possessions first. There were even those who insanely believed they could go both north and south simultaneously.
The Go South faction believed that they could defeat the USN in a Decisive Battle.
Japan didn’t have any single person with authority for making decisions, and the driving forces behind the policies were often middle level officers in the planning departments.
Japan’s big gamble was that they could conquer the resource-rich regions, take the Philippines and
then grab a buffer zone, anticipating that the soft Americans would settle rather than fight a prolonged war. That obviously didn’t go well for them.
Did Hitler have an overall strategy? Did they anticipate defeating the USSR before winter?
Short story, no he didn’t had any grand strategy.
He anticipated a war with France, but after the fall of USSR.
After the seemingly flawless annexation of Rhineland, Austria, Sudeten and main Czechoslovakia, he had the hope that the Allies will not move when he will annex Poland. He misread the formal protection as a gesture of internal politic and thought that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact will suffice to deter any serious reaction. The plan was to seize Poland, complete the rearmament and then in '42 or '43 attack the USSR (and win before winter…). Followed by an attack on Netherlands, Belgium and France, with Britain being left alone (and maybe allied with, after all they’re Arians too…)
The war declaration of September '39 took him totally by surprise, with almost no forces on the West-wall. After that it was improvisation and opportunism.
Strategy, no. Goal, yes - the destruction of the USSR and the acquisition of lebensraum there. Everything else after the absorption of Austria and Czechoslovakia was a side-show, something he had to get past to get to his goal.
He thought the UK, as fellow Aryans and antisemites, would never fight him.
Yes, indeed they had to as they didn’t have the men, machines or other resources to fight an extended war there, let alone the two front war like they had in WW1.
Hitler’s line was “One good kick and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down”. The only way he could have been right is if there’d been a political collapse, as had happened in WW1 - but then only after 3 years of war, not 3 months!
Hitler had a grand strategy of sorts, as laid out in Mein Kampf. He wanted Alsace-Lorriane back, and lebensraum in the East. He had a sort of vague plan of the final line of that being in the Urals or thereabouts, with the territory being held by a distant line of German soldiers somewhat akin to the Roman legions of old keeping the barbarians perpetually at bay with no actual final peace with the Slavs. Over the following decades the lebensraum would be populated with German colonists and depopulated of ‘inferior’ races. This was already being accomplished during the war years, not just by the extermination and explusion of Jews, Slavs and other ‘undesirables’ but by the colonization of what had been Poland by ‘Germanic people’.
Germanisation in Poland (1939–1945) - Wikipedia
An intense process of Germanisation was carried out by Nazi Germany in German-occupied Poland during World War II, with the ultimate goal of eliminating Polish culture and people. This included the mass-murder of Polish intellectuals and the kidnapping of Polish children.
GERMAN RESETTLEMENT POLICY IN OCCUPIED POLAND 1939-1944
The first territories to be “Germanized” were the areas directly incorporated into the Reich. As early as October 1939, the inhabitants of Pomerania (approx. 35,000 people) and Warta County (about 70,000 people only from Poznań) were expelled during the first six months of the war. By mid-March 1941, a total of approx. 460 [sic, I’m assuming the word ‘thousand’ is missing] people, including 420 [again sic, I’m assuming thousand] Poles were deported from the territory annexed by the Third Reich. This territory was taken over by German settlers, whose population in the Polish lands incorporated into the Reich is estimated at 353 thousand “ethnic Germans” and 370 thousand Germans that came from the Reich (data refer to the beginning of 1944; at the end of 1944, due to the progress of the Soviet troops and the evacuation from the eastern territories, their number increased by approx. another 250 thousand).
Those were only the broad strokes of a grand strategy though, his strategy as carried out can best be described as opportunistic. He took a huge gamble remilitarizing the Rhineland in 1936 at a time when German rearmament had barely begun and could have been easily squashed by the French if they had intervened, and it is doubtful that his regime could have survived such a humiliation. His continued push for territory in the Anschluss with Austria was something his future ally Mussolini didn’t particularly like but was unwilling to do anything to stop on his own. Taking the Sudetenland through the capitulation of the British and French (which Stalin actually showed a willingness to become involved in preventing - but how exactly Soviet troops were supposed to get there was another matter, with a justifiably wary Poland in the way) could be described as Hitler reaching the point of simply not caring if war came at that particular moment or not, he was going to go to war with France and the UK eventually anyway.
After swallowing the rump of Czechia and making a puppet state of Slovakia, the UK and France did guarantee Poland’s borders. There’s evidence to be taken either way that Hitler knew this would trigger war with the UK and France when he attacked Poland or that he thought he could continue to get away with expanding and the British and French wouldn’t actually act. There is also a lot of evidence, which is also my personal belief after looking it over, that Hitler simply did not care one way or the other. As far as he was concerned, the war was going to happen, and it didn’t really matter to him too much when it did.
Hitler did tell his generals that he wouldn’t go to war with the French and British until 1942, but that isn’t really evidence of a certainty of a timetable considering his actual actions. This was also done in the context of Plan Z, his promise to Raeder to massively expand the Kriegsmarine by that date, a promise that was wildly impossible to meet. Simply producing the ships in the plan would have taken until 1948, and it assumed no reaction on the part of the British to such a naval buildup, which was utter folly considering Britain’s reaction to the expansion of the Kriegsmarine prior to WWI.
The path toward a major fleet expansion was paved shortly thereafter, on 14 October, when Generalfeldmarschall (Field Marshal) Hermann Göring announced a colossal armament program to dramatically increase the size and power of the German armed forces. The plan was to be completed by 1942, by which time Hitler planned to go to war against the Anglo-French alliance.[17] He nevertheless assured Raeder that war would not come until 1948.
He certainly did not expect France to collapse in six weeks, he was expecting it to take a very long time and come at a substantial cost. The war plan, Fall Gelb (Case Yellow) was very conservative, and assumed defeating France would take years:
On 9 October 1939, Hitler issued Führer-Directive Number 6 (Führer-Anweisung N°6).[34] Hitler recognised the necessity of military campaigns to defeat the Western European nations, preliminary to the conquest of territory in Eastern Europe, to avoid a two-front war; these intentions were absent from Directive N°6.[37] The plan was based on the seemingly more realistic assumption that German military strength would have to be built up for several years. Only limited objectives could be envisaged and were aimed at improving Germany’s ability to survive a long war in the west.[38] Hitler ordered a conquest of the Low Countries to be executed at the shortest possible notice to forestall the French and prevent Allied air power from threatening the industrial area of the Ruhr.[39] It would also provide the basis for a long-term air and sea campaign against Britain. There was no mention in the directive of a consecutive attack to conquer the whole of France, although the directive read that as much as possible of the border areas in northern France should be occupied.
Luckily for him, fate stepped in with a confluence of two events: Manstein’s plan with the sickle stroke through the Ardennes to destroy the Allied armies in Belgium and Northen France being written as a third alternative to a rewrite of Fall Gelb drafted by Halder which would likely have been utilized, and the Mechelen incident of January 10, 1940, where a German plane carrying a copy of the war plans for Fall Gelb became lost and crashed in Belgium, and the plans fell into Belgian hands and were given over to the French. Had either the original or the Halder revision of the plan been carried out, the war in the West against the French and British could well have lasted years.
Again, he did have an overall strategy of sorts in terms of what he wanted the results to be but actually carrying it out was just done on the fly. As noted earlier, prior to the war Germany had absolutely no plan whatsoever to defeat Britain if they didn’t simply capitulate, which again as noted, ignores Britain’s centuries old policy of relying upon naval supremacy and the English Channel to refuse to end a European war with a single nation dominating the continent and their willingness to prolong wars for a decade or longer if needed to achieve this.
Hitler did anticipate that defeating the USSR would be easy and done well before winter, but a large part of this plan relied upon the kind of hubris and denial of logistical realities that you’re more than familiar with the Japanese high command suffering from: the superior will of the German soldier would be able to accomplish anything, overcome any material deficiencies, and negate any logistical realities.
David Stahel wrote a series of books covering the Russo-German war from the invasion to the battle of and retreat from Moscow, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East, Kiev 1941. Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East, Operation Typhoon. Hitler’s March on Moscow, The Battle for Moscow and Retreat from Moscow. Wow I’m getting old, I was going to say recently, but the last one was written in 2019. I’d have to dig them up to properly quote from them, but the upshot of his conclusions is that Germany lost Barbarossa because it unequivocally failed in its stated objective: the destruction of the Red Army before it could retreat to the interior. I’ve long known the German logistical situation was bad to the point that it made defeating the USSR before winter an impossibility, but some of the research in his books was astounding even to me. For example, even after the months long operational pause in Army Group Center from August 1941 until Operation Typhoon, the planned final push to Moscow in October 1941 the German logistical situation was so terrible that there was not enough stockpiled petrol on hand when Typhoon was launched to actually make it to Moscow. (!)
Hmm, actually checking search there is a quote here from an old thread that I won’t copy here since this post is already getting rather long, but the upshot is Typhoon was launched on Oct 2nd, and the panzer and motorized divisions were already unable to exploit opportunities due to lack of fuel on October 5th, with generals clamoring for fuel and begging the Luftwaffe to fly in fuel in amounts to they were completely unable to do and would have done little to alleviate the situation even if they could.
Oh, and I knew I was forgetting something in that essay. The MEFO bills. It’s another whole bag of worms, but the upshot is that Hitler and Germany were operating on borrowed time. The Mefo bills were practically a pyramid scheme being used to both pay for and conceal the extent of rearmament. But like all pyramid schemes, it couldn’t go on forever, and if Germany didn’t start wars of conquest soon, its economy was going to implode. While self-imposed, and without a certain drop-dead date, there are obvious parallels with Japan and the oil embargo.
Mefo bills were issued to mature in six months, but with a provision for indefinite 90-day extensions at the government’s behest. To further entice investors, Mefo bills carried an annual interest rate of 4%, higher than that of other trade bills at the time.
To make sure that the bills were never exchanged for Reichsmarks, which would lead to inflation, the 90-day maturation period was continually extended until the maturation was changed to a period of five years by 1939.[5] The exact total volume of Mefo bills issued was kept secret. However, as previously stated, it is assumed billions were printed.
Essentially, Mefo bills enabled the German Reich to run a greater deficit than it would otherwise have been able to. By 1938, there were 12 billion Reichsmarks of Mefo bills, compared with 19 billion of standard government bonds.[6] This enabled the German government to increase war production while delaying the economic problems associated with draining government funds.
Tooze says the Germans needed about three times the resources they actually had to defeat the USSR. so, lacking a political collapse as per WW1, it just doesn’t happen.
Due in part to a reliance on trucks rather than rail; the only rail lines in the USSR that used the same gauge as Germany were in the Baltic states, which helped Army Group North get to the outskirts of Leningrad. Elsewhere the process of converting the rail gauge so German trains could use it was slow, hampered by partisans, and just didn’t get the priority it needed.
It didn’t help that even the German rail system had been neglected for years in favour of building more military hardware, so even if the rail gauge problem had been fixed they probably didn’t have the rolling stock or locos to do the job at the scale needed. As with their tanks, sophisticated German locos were great for conditions at home but unsuited for Russia. Russian locos were simple and cheap to build and fix.
Relying on trucks mean that the further and faster you advance, the more of your fuel is used by those trucks instead of your tanks. And of course they can carry a lot less anyway.