One little thing that showed how logistics could effect the war: the allies had tank carriers and the Germans didn’t. If the Americans wanted to move a Sherman tank a hundred miles to another front, they would load the tank on to a Diamond T and the tank would be delivered to its destination. The Germans on the other hand would drive the tank itself a hundred miles. The Germans had some tank transporter vehicles but they didn’t use them for routine movement like this; they only used them for recovering tanks that broke down. As a result of all these extra miles, the Germans had a lot more tanks out of service due to break downs than the allies had.
The river floodwater angle may be entirely correct, but there should be primary source citation
available (meaning May 1941 German or Soviet), and that is what it will take to fully convince me.
One photo caption here, and one Keegan blurb there is not good enough.
I did not accuse anyone of being facetious, and the I agree attrition of the Balkan Campaign
was not trivial.
FWIW IMO the Germans might well not have been able to win in the East even if they had had
good weather, had been able to leave Yugoslavia and Greece alone, and had jumped off five
weeks earlier against the USSR.
Quite right-the Germans had great difficulty supplying their columns, once they got more than 250 miles from the railheads (at that point, the transport used most of the fuel they carried just getting there).
So. Spring 1943. What were the German options. There been the surrender in Tunisia, with the loss of an Army Group worth of equipment and men. They had been defeated in the Caucases. Where else could the Germans attack. Towards Moscow perhaps.
This is one of, if not THE, most asinine cite request I have seen in five years. You’ve been given two cites already, you want more on the condition of a river in an active warzone.
:smack:
I’m glad you’re asking this; I first heard the Bug River floodwater delay theory two years ago, and it seems to have sort of sprung up out of nowhere. I’ve read some – not very widely, but some – on the subject, and never heard this until that recently.
Agreed: the Russians could have lost Moscow and still won. Assume that most other things fall out about equally – Hitler is still stupid, and Zhukov is still brilliant – and there is that much flexibility left within the margin of victory.
(Shrug. Berlin might have fallen to the western allies, and Poland might have been the divided city. Who knows?)
It doesn’t surprise me, I didn’t provide citation to convince him. That would be an exercise in complete folly; I provided it for the sake of others reading the thread.
With due regard, it isn’t a recent theory and didn’t spring up out of nowhere. Keegan wrote The Second World War in 1989.
Moscow wasn’t an option in 1943. Kursk tends to be a bit blown out of proportion; that it was the extent of the German summer '43 offensive is telling. The summer offensive in '41 was front wide with the intention of defeating the USSR. The summer '42 offensive was limited to the southern third of the front with the economic goal of seizing the oil fields in the Caucasus. The summer '43 offensive was to remove a salient in the lines. Even if Kursk had been a wild German victory all they would have accomplished was to smooth out the line. As Little Nemo has pointed out the Soviets had huge reserves uncommitted on either side of the Kursk offensive with which they launched their own successful offensives upon the defeat of Operation Citadel without breaking stride.
Back to you, pal. The issue is river flood levels before the war in the East began,
and even after the war had already started there should be copious documentation
from day one for what the weather was like. Does that make things a bit less fuzzy
for you now?
Do you have this Keegan book at hand? If so is the 5/41 weather report footnoted (as it should be)?
If it is maybe we can track down something better, and we do need something better for an issue
of this importance.
:rolleyes: Cute how you dismissively refer to what he wrote as a blurb. So your contention is that John Keegan who was until his recent passing one of the most highly regarded living historians, author of The Face of Battle, The Mask of Command, The Price of Admiralty, and numerous other works, knighted, OBE, FRSL, former senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst did what exactly - fabricated, strung the words together because they looked pretty or accidentally wrote such a deliberate, well-crafted sentence that is entirely on point about the effect of Marita on the launch of Barbarossa and how it was debated profitlessly by historians as the delay was due to the Russian weather in one of his best selling works a quarter of a century ago and was never called out for it? No citation that could possibly be provided would be good enough for you, I could provide daily weather reports from the OKH and you’d find some reason that it wouldn’t be good enough. I fear that the nature of your objection is more due to the fact that you were contradicted, and that I was the one contradicting you.
And yes, I do have a copy on hand. I’d have to in order to hand type what I cited as page 158 which is where I quoted from isn’t available online.
Non- responsive.
Keegan should have been called out if all he had to offer was an unsourced blurb,
no matter how well-crafted the blurb might have been.
That is not true-- I have already mentioned Halder, and there must have been
dozens of memoirs on both sides who would have mentioned the weather if the
weather had been a factor.
On the contrary, that would be even better than Halder’s diary.
I fear you are overlooking the fact that I was not contradicted, since I agreed in post #62
that the weather might indeed have been too wet to have begun Barbarossa in 5/41. If you
and Keegan could only rise above blurb level then you might win me over. Regrettably your
posts continue to display the same penchant for blurbiness that they have throughout
our previous encounters.
If you have a copy, then how about those footnotes I was asking for? I assume you
are aware of the fact that footnotes may not necessarily be numbered on the page
where they occur, and can be identified in the Notes section by page number and partial text quotation.
I found some information on another discussion forum:
The citation quoted is apparently from Hitler’s Balkan Campaign and the Invasion of the USSR
or Greek-Soviet Relations, 1917-1941 both written by Andrew Zapantis. The former book was
published in 1987 and so may have been Keegan’s source.
From link, in part presumably quoting Zapantis, emphasis added:
If Guderian says there were floods in his sector in early 5/41 then there were floods
in his sector in early 5/41. Whether a floodcrest on 5/7/41 would have forced postponement
of the original 5/15/41 invasion date, and if so for how long remains ambiguous.
Oh C’mon! Kursk is like the biggest freakin battle in history. It HAS to be the worst German disaster!
Then why were there fewer German losses than Soviets, huh?
There were fewer Germans fighting than Soviets. But that’s a quibble; the Soviets lost a higher percentage of troops as well.
But the strategic situation is that the Germans couldn’t afford to lose troops by 1943 while the Soviets could.
So it was a monumental strategic turnaround, not a sound defeat in the field.
To my mind, the real issue is this: the Germans were counting on a Soviet collapse of morale and willingness/ability to fight, going into Barbarossa. The quote widely attributed to Hitler was that all he had to do was kick in the door, and the whole rotten edifice of the Soviet system would come crashing down.
In hindsight, this was obviously in error, and it is an error that cost him the war - asking whether the worst defeat was Stalingrad, or Kursk, or Bagatron, somewhat misses the point: behind all of these defeats was the fact that the war as a whole was misconceived from the start.
The Germans had some sound reasons for thinking the Soviets would collapse. They had watched the Soviet performance in its war with Finland (lamentable). They knew (and even had a hand in) Stalin’s murderous purges of his own army. They knew Stalin had overextended himself in swallowing up the territories bequeathed to him as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and in defiance of all military logic had posed his soldiers to guard every inch of his new possessions–where they could easily be encircled and destroyed. They knew the Communists were widely hated by the subject nationalities they oppressed, like Ukrainians (and now Poles). Soviet incompetence and maladministration was legendary. Most foreign observers gave the Soviets little chance against the Nazis.
But the fact remains that if the Soviets didn’t collapse on schedule, if they absorbed the terrible punishment of the initial blow and kept on, Nazis were in for a hard fight. Perhaps an impossible one.
And in an odd reversal of historical fortune, Hitler begain increasingly as the war went on to mimic the same poisionous relationship with his military that Stalin had started out with - where Stalin’s poisionous relationship with his military had enouraged Nazi hopes in the first place. The longer the war went on, the more Hitler micromanaged and purged his generals, and the less Stalin did.
Nicely put.
It is true… a German victory at Kursk would not have bought them much. At that point, the Germans had a choice:
-negotiate some kind of peace with Russia, or
-set up a defensive line, and shift from weapons of offense (tanks, dive bombers) to weapons that could defeat the Russian tank armies (tank destroyers, mines, heavy artillery)
Neither strategy was acceptable to Hitler-which is why the enntire next two years were a story of defeat and staggering losses. At best, the Germans could hold their own…but the idea of settling the eastern “lebensraum” was a chimera.
More the opposite, it was a very sound defeat in the field but not so much a monumental strategic turnaround. The Germans were forced to terminate the offensive without ever having come near to achieving their very limited goals at Kursk. They were not even allowed to pause to catch their breath by the Soviets, who used those massive uncommitted reserves in the manner they had intended to use them: to launch their own successful offensives in the directions of Bryansk-Smolensk, Belgorod-Bogodukhov and Belgorad-Kharkov after the defeat of the German summer offensive at Kursk. The Soviets had deliberately chosen to allow the Germans to strike first in the summer of '43 at Kursk, which was both the extremely obvious target for the Germans and which was confirmed as such by the Lucy spy ring. The result was that the Germans not only exhausted themselves at Kursk, they could not even claim the slight victory of having forced the Soviets to commit their reserves for their own offensive operations in doing so.
It could be seen as a strategic turnaround in that it marked the last time the Germans undertook the offensive on the Eastern Front in what had become a series of back and forth swings with the Germans attacking in the summer and the Soviets in the winter, but the swings of the pendulum were already drifted more and more in the favor of the Soviets. Again, the scope of Kursk tends to be a bit overblown; the goal was to remove a salient in the front lines left over from the Soviet winter offensive. This very limited objective was the entirety of the German goal in the summer '43 offensive. The elimination of a very similar salient left over from the previous year’s Soviet winter offensive at Kharkov had been merely a preliminary spring operation for the German '42 summer offensive.
I’d only add to that the gross underestimation of the Soviets as opponents and Halder’s oft quoted diary entry of Aug 11, 1941 “At the start of the war we reckoned with 200 enemy divisions. Now we already count 360.”