Hitler woulda needed super-duper tech from 2000 years in the future, like soldiers made of lasers. Then we’d know the score!
True, but the V1s weren’t in position to fire until June 12th, by which time the Normandy was pretty packed. A quick Google shows that by then there were 326,547 soldiers, 54,186 vehicles and 104,428 tons of materials, as well as the 7000 ships in the waters from the invasion. If Hitler had directed V1s at the Allies in Normandy, there’s a chance something could have been hit that could affect them militarily, but there’s nothing that shooting them at London could accomplish except his personal satisfaction that they were being punished. From a strategic perspective it wasn’t much better than if he just had shot them into the North sea.
Nah, we’d just deploy soldiers made out of mirrors.
I don’t even think that Hitler was politically savvy either.
His paranoia meant that he always had two or more agencies with the same areas of responsibility - which was in line with his eugenic thinking of the time.
To understand eugenics you have to take a twisted view of Darwinism, which postulates that the species that is best fit for particular circumstance will generally win out. The twisted view of this translates to the most powerful species or groups win out, and that is not the same thing at all - Darwinism is not about power, it is about adaptation.
So to take Hitler’s view of his national agencies, his view was that the strongest would overcome the weakest as long as they had the competition to drive them to higher standards. Hence the twisted incorrect view of evolution.
In fact what this meant was a huge amount of duplication, waste, lack of communication of essential information - rival agencies are not going to share critical information.
The Allies learned to play one agency against another when it came to intelligence, by finding out which part of the Reich had Hitler’s favour and which did not and using this situation to implant misleading information.
All these agencies, instead of ‘competing’ in the struggle for best performance took the other direction - black propaganda against each other, in effect a form of negative campaigning - and you can see the sorts of divisions this can create by looking at the US today with its very polarised politics - imagine something similar in Germany only at a much more extreme level.
Throughout the virtually the whole of the war, it may come as a real surprise, but Germany was not at all industrially efficient, Britain alone was outproducing Germany in just about every area. Another thing you may well find surprising is that the quality of output was lower, to an extent that Germany had to direct significant resources into reworking and reengineering various essential products. Germany even resorted to using Russian artillery in preference to their own since it was much more practical.
Yes Germany had a head start, but their tank production alone was never enough at any time, and the tanks it was building were too complex and difficult to maintain.
At a strategic level, diverting military resources from the Moscow campaign to the Caucases and then back again before either objective had been secured was simply madness.
When it comes to the science bit, Germany was in front early on in terms of radar and also in terms of the development of jet engines, but did not capitalise on these, the allies took very little time to catch up and overtake - remember that the submarine campaign was significantly damaged by the allied development of airborne centimetric radar through the invention of the magnetron, Germany was simply on the wrong route to atomic bombs.
How about the U-boat campaign, well it turns out that the U-boat themselves were an aging design, and although they were modified, it was not until very late in the war that those limitations were properly addressed and far better subs were built, far too late. You also might imagine that during the battle of the Atlantic that Germany would have made it a seriously high priority, however at the start of hostilities there were only 26 U-Boats on station, and look at the damage they did. By the time the numbers had climbed to around 100, the US was in the war, and it never did achieve the 300 boats on station that Scheer reckoned he needed to deliver the winning strategy. Also note that out of 100 U-Boats available by late 1942, many of those would be in transit to and from operational areas.
If Hitler was such a great strategist, then why didn’t he heed the expertise of his most senior navy advisors, had he done so, he might well have put UK out of the war in 1940.
So in summary, Hitler was paranoid, which in turn led to a lousy internal political system, he was economically illiterate, industrially incapable, ignored the advice of his best minds, was rubbish at selecting priorities, incapable of seeing a strategic initiative through fully, arbitrarily changed his priorities without thought for a wider and more coherent set of policies, in short, he was not even capable of running a drive in burger takeaway as a competitive business. The average CEO of a top 1000 Dow Jones company would have made a far better leader, but perhaps not as charismatic to his people.
Well, at least this one wouldn’t be still holding out against the invaders:
And if he had an AK-47 and a box of clips. Or a starship with phasers and photon torpedoes.
And boy, would he have hated that. Always reminding him of that one village in Brittany…
[QUOTE=YogSototh]
Wait a second, Hitler *had *Hitler’s technology and he still lost! Your logic does not compute
[/QUOTE]
Well, yes and no.
The popular imagery of the Nazis is that they rolled into Austria, France, Poland et al. with their über tanks and crushed the dumb fucks who still believed in fixed emplacements and trench warfare by tea time. Pwnd, n00bmenschen !
In reality while German tank designs were indeed kinda cool, their optics were awesome, and their air doctrine (if not their air force itself) was novel ; this idea that Nazi forces were wunderwaffen’d to the gills is not nearly historical. And blitzkrieg itself is a myth. As of the conquest of France, only a mere ~10-15% of Germany’s forces were fully mechanized. The rest of 'em walked, with a 70+% chance of doing it singing “Lili Marlene” instead of the Horst-Wessel Lied. Shameful, I know. Also, German logistics relied a lot on… horses and carts. Yeah. There’s your steampunk empire right there.
Same about Barbarossa - they had a handful of shit hot divisions equipped with state of the art fuck-you technology, but the grand majority of the troops didn’t so much roll in as hoof it. In the mud, then in the snow. Did I mention that, in his “military genius”, Hitler & chronies neglected to provision their troops with *any winter gear whatsoever *because OF COURSE invading fucking Russia would be done by fall, Christmas tops ? That was in 1941. Many German troopers would still be freezing their balls off in their T-shirts in winter '44. The ones that hadn’t frozen alive in the meantime, that is.
And even what genuine Wunderwaffen they did have have been extremely distorted with time, or were hamstrung by Hitler’s “genius”. The quasi-mythical (even back then) Tiger tank was a piece of crap that needed near-constant maintenance, threw a cog every 50 miles and was a bitch to drag off the battlefield to repair when immobilized. Which it often was because it turns out that moving 70 fucking tons isn’t easy. Good enough for static defensive work, I guess. Coulda used a bunker instead, no ?
The first jetplane ever, the Me-262, had an intriguing tendency to blow itself up at inopportune times (i.e. any time while in flight), and Hitler insisted on using it as a dogfighter when it would have been a very dangerous bomber-killer.
V1s and V2s were more about spite than anything, never achieved much and probably couldn’t have achieved much even if directed at more worthwhile targets than civilian populations. And there again, had they used the V1s as proto-SAMs and thrown them at bomber formations, they could have buggered the Allied war machine but good. But I guess that’s military genius for you.
Later generation U-Booten were out of this world, but there again Hitler fucked it because it turns out that contracting companies with zero experience in shipbuilding and using malnourished, mistreated slaves to build the boats you need to capture more slaves ? Don’t work all too good. Astounding, I know ! The XXIs could have turned the tide though, they really could have. They honest to god were 1960s tech in the 1940s era.
The genuinely innovative, proto-AK-47 (the StG-44) was only mass-produced by tricking Hitler into believing it was a machine pistol (what we’d call a sub-machine gun today), instead of the great auto/semi-auto rifle it was. Because Hitler The Genius believed that SMGs were the absolute shiznit. Which they might have been… back in the days of trench warfare. Or for murdering unarmed civilians at point blank by the bushel, always an invaluable strategic contribution.
And so on, and so forth.
On the whole, Hitler’s military successes had less to do with superior gear or firepower, and more to do with the fact that his troops and his officers were very, very apt at making do with whatever they had on hand at any given time : operationally, strategically, tactically they were genuinely damn good at the whole “adapt and overcome” thing. When the Great Leader wasn’t ordering them to do it his way under penalty of death, that is. Then it tended to go all pear-shaped. Call it the Führer Dolchtoß, if you will*.*
ETA : Dammit, **Malthus **!
What does Caesar Invictus need with a starship ?
Is this the alternative universe where the National Bocialist candidate wins the North Minehead by-election?
Only if it’s the same alternative universe where Napoleon’s invasion of Britain succeeded, but he’s ultimately defeated by the English peasantry after he introduced a poll tax.
He’s right, you know.
Hitler wasn’t one of the 100 best military thinkers named “Adolf” in Germany in 1939.
What I find fascinating about this “Debate” is that Hitler’s lack of understanding of military strategy is an extraordinarily well-documented fact, one that a person who had actually done any degree of study of the relevant literature would know. Hitler struggled to understand strategic-level military matters. His level of military understanding was at about the level of regimental operations; things like large scale logistics or the movement of divisional and corps-level assets confused him, as was evident to pretty much everyone around him. That’s one of the reasons he liked to delve into pointless minutiae, as people who are out of their depth are prone to doing.
I hate Hitler as much as the next man, but it’s hard to deny that he accomplished something pretty extraordinary… going from being imprisoned in a country which was busy paying off war reparations, surrounded by enemies and restricted by international law from building a military, to leading that country, acquiring a ton of territory without firing a shot, and then leading his country to an incredible series of military victories in a row, before it all came tumbling down. I mean, that’s sure as heck evidence of SOMETHING, although I don’t really know what the right word is for it.
I’ve also always been a bit skeptical of the idea that invading the Soviet Union was just guaranteed suicidal from day one. If you take Barbarossa as it happened, and then modify it by taking 5 or 10 stupid things that Hitler himself did or ordered and making them smarter (bringing winter gear, going after oil fields more aggressively, not issuing never-retreat-at-all orders, etc.) you’d have to think that an already very successful initial campaign gets even more successful, and even as big as the Soviet Union was, is it just going to be able to keep losing land and falling back forever without hitting some tipping point of losing its ability to function as a nation? In discussions of this sort there seems to be a general consensus that it was certainly within the realm of possibility for Moscow to fall, but then some people claim that the Soviets would have effectively fought on, and others don’t.
(emphasis mine)
But those factors didn’t cause the invasion of Russia to fail. Particularly considering Stalin’s the one who gave the “no retreat” order ;). But playful jab aside, the main reason Barbarossa failed was because Barbarossa couldn’t actually succeed. From day one. Hell, from before day one.
In order for Germany to push further into Russia than it did, tanks needed fuel and shells, men needed food and bullets (also more men), and artillery needed to pick up the verdammt pace.
But none of that could happen, because a) Germany didn’t have enough trains to supply that large a front and b) those they did have were the wrong gauge. Russia’s existing railroad tracks weren’t spaced the same as Germany/Poland/Hungary’s, which meant the Germans and their Balkanic allies had to unload everything and re-load it on a Russian gauge traincars half-way through the trip. Which, considering the sheer amount of freight being moved ; the state of Russian rail immediately post-military invasion (not that it was in great shape before, but… :)) and the fact that partisans, unhappy about being rounded up and murdered, kept blowing the tracks up just to be mean ; made for one hell of a bottleneck. Add to that the fields and what few roads there were turning into deep pools of rich, thick mud come the fall…
It wasn’t the Russians stopped the German push, they were in quasi-retreat pretty much all over at this point. The advance just petered and stalled more or less on its own. Then winter set in, and, well, Russian winters. You must’ve read about those. When the sun dared shine again, the Russians had regrouped, reinforced, their officer corps had been given a swift kick in the pants, and the rest is History Channel.
The German higher echelon brass knew about the glaring logistics issue, by the way. They went in pretty much expecting Fall Gelb to, if not fail outright, at least not get anywhere near its optimistically planned objectives (and that was without them realizing they were underestimating the Soviet forces by a factor of three or so). But The Big Man was so adamantly convinced he just had to “kick the door in” and everything would fall like V’s dominoes, and understood so little about logistics to begin with, he didn’t think it was that big of an issue and didn’t want to hear any dissent about his brilliant plans.
Barbarossa was about as wildly successful as it could be, the problem was its ultimate goal was unachievable. Time and again the Germans were able to surround and destroy Soviet armies, bagging hundreds of thousands of prisoners at a time. The Germans had grossly underestimated the ability of the Soviets to mobilize fresh forces, with the result that they were able to take repeated massive losses and keep fighting. They could also afford to lose massive amounts of land, and the further into the USSR the Germans went the worse their logistical situation became. The Germans had already impressed into military service trucks from all over the countries they had occupied (which created its own nightmare maintaining dozens of different models of trucks), but they were still heavily reliant upon horses for logistics, and as Kobal2 noted, the railroads were the wrong gauge and it was a slow process converting it from broad to standard gauge. Bringing winter gear and going after the oilfields in the Caucasus would be outside the scope of Barbarossa; the plan for Barbarossa was to knock out the Soviet Union before winter came.
Hitler’s political success is worth studying. An interesting mix of pandering and brashness. But most politicians who aren’t born into the club in some way resort to pandering to their electorate somehow. Hitler managed to turn that into a belligerent indignation, but it’s still a form of the basic tactic of politics in a democratic nation-state.
Just on the issue of Australia, I don’t think the OP appreciates how incredibly close Australia and Britain were at the time. Prime Minister Bob Menzies announced in 1939, “Fellow Australians, it is my melancholy duty to inform you officially, that in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Australia is also at war.” (bolding mine) No discussions, no consultation, just “as a result.”
There was an automatic expectation that wherever Britain went, we followed. This even persisted after the war, although post-war immigration from non-British European nations started to change that. For the first time there were large numbers of people who were not either British immigrants or descended from British immigrants. Yet my first passport, issued in 1972, still stated my nationality as “Australian citizen and British subject.”
I simply cannot accept the statement “Australia gladly enters the Reich.” Not unless Britain had also gladly entered the Reich.
Barbarossa was not winnable as a matter of military campaigning. But then, that wasn’t Hitler’s plan, until it was forced on him by failure.
Hitler’s original plan was that the shock of Barbarossa would cause a political collapse of will in the Soviet Union - that Stalin’s evident failure and lack of the initative would cause the top-heavy Communist leadership to implode; and that chaos at the top would lead to collapse in the field.
As Hitler was quoted, “kick in the door and the whole rotted edifice would collapse to the ground”.
Notably, Stalin allegedly feared the same thing (great dictators’ minds think alike, I guess) and suffered what appeared to be a nervous breakdown following the invasion.
This was of course a huge gamble on Hitler’s part, and it failed. In hindsight, it was nuts to take the risk. If the Soviet leadership failed to collapse on cue, Nazi Germany was doomed, for all the reasons you have stated and more.
However, he’d taken a series of similarly huge gambles in the past that paid off big - and he’d won as much, or more, from collapse of political will on the part of his victims as from sheer military prowess of the German army. More than a politician and a military leader (he sucked as a military leader as you know), he was a lucky gambler that kept doubling down and throwing the dice, and like most such he simply did it once too often.
Mmmm…Stalin considered true Russians to be reliable and had contempt for the slavic races which he literally used as cannon fodder. The ethnic troops from Tajikistan etc were thrown into the front line with the NKVD in the rear to shoot deserters.
Yes but Adolf Hitler grasped eugenics like a life bouy because it gave him a clean and simple message. Aryan racial superiority explained everything and the German people loved it. Remember - this was at a time when such ideas were believed.
Barbarossa was stupid but there is no doubt Germany would have eventually faced the USSR. Hitler decided to strike first.
In hindsight the Germans would have been better to continue through Egypt into the gulf oil states and left Russia alone.