Yes. I don’t think Hitler really had much of a global perspective. Russia and France were Germany’s traditional enemies and, at least early in the conflict he was preoccupied with them, although he also lusted after some of England’s African territories. And he was intelligent enough to know that an invasion and occupation of Great Britain would have been horribly costly, possibly suicidal, and that an all-out attempt to blockade and starve England would draw the U.S. into the fight - a losing proposition for Germany.
Hitler’s fondest hope initially was that Britain would stand aside while he took France & Russia and gained some African territory, then from a position of strength negotiate an agreement with England whereby he controlled central Europe and shared control of much of the African and Asian empire. Didn’t work. Churchill distrusted him and opened the ball. England was definately caught short for a time, but with their affiliation with the commonwealth countries, particularly Canada and Austrailia, and their close ties to the U.S., for the Germans to defeat Britain militarily was practically impossible. Hitler’s only real chance was to push hard and try to force some sort of power-sharing arrangement. Had he not been quite so overeager, and had Churchill been less astute it might have worked.
SS
And Spain was a country that was already worn out from a long civil war. It would have fallen easier than France did. Hell, it probably would have fallen easier than Poland did.
Carriers are good against other navies or islands or coastlines. Can you think of any land campaigns where they had a major impact? It wasn’t like the British were flying a lot of carrier strikes against Rommel in North Africa and that was against an army that was traveling in open country along the coast. In East Africa, the German army would have been traveling along routes that were two hundred miles inland.
The entire length of a 4,500 mile long supply line stretching from Cairo to Cape Town would be vulnerable to being cut at any point by the Royal Navy conducting an amphibious landing. Even if the British were not to do this for some reason I have severe doubts that the infrastructure between the two could logistically support such an operation then or even today without control of the sea.
The attack on Pearl takes out the tank farm and all the fuel for the Pacific fleet
The attack on Pearl also takes out the submarines
US has effective torpedoes at the beginning of the war.
Japan continues to develop new aircraft after the start of the war to replace the zero
Japan uses their submarines more in the manner the US did, against shipping in an organized way.
I don’t think 1, 2, 4, or 5 would have changed the outcome, but I believe it might have taken longer #3 would have shortened the war IMHO
Keep in mind that the main routes in East Africa pass through cities like Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Dodoma, Lilongwe, Salisbury, and Pretoria - cities that are a couple of hundred miles from the coast. The Royal Navy could no more launch an amphibious attack against these cities than they could against Berlin.
I agree. It was impossible for Japan to knock the United States out of the war in 1941. Even if they had sank every American carrier - the United States built over a hundred new carriers during the war. Even if the Japanese captured every island in the Pacific including Hawaii and Australia and New Zealand and captured all of China, India and Southeast Asia as well, the main industrial centers of the United States would be untouched. We would have just build up enough ships and troops to take it all back.
Ah, thanks. That’s a critical point that I wasn’t aware of. So UK and France were still shell-shocked into a war avoidance stance. Meanwhile, Germany was practically fanatic about picking a fight to avenge the 1914-18 war, which was initially a rematch of the Franco-Prussian War, which was partially German unification to prevent a repeat of the Napoleonic Wars, which arose from the chaos of the French Revolution, which may have been an after-effect of the Seven Years’ War, which was at that point the latest in a series of armed political disputes dating back to 1066. Do I have that right?
No need to be snarky. I was simply pointing out that it isn’t realistic to suppose that in the 1930s Britain or France could have had contingency plans based on immediately taking the offensive. They’d tried that in WW1 and gotten their teeth kicked in. When you win a war and still think that it was a ruinous folly, you aren’t going to be in a hurry to fight another.
As a sub buff, from a strictly pragmatic perspective the relative failure of the IJN to use their submarines against Allied shipping is deeply puzzling. A major push along these lines would have made things very dicey for Allied supply/resource convoys-Australia would have suffered greatly, among other things.
Doctrinally of course it was a non-starter; the Japanese simply didn’t consider that their campaign would devolve into a long-term battle of attrition-instead they were always eager to fight that “one decisive battle,” and the submarine arm was almost completely subsumed to that end. Once they win the big battle, they can sue the US for peace, no attritional war will be fought. Except that the US wouldn’t have been dissuaded in the least; they knew way before the time of Midway that they had the Essexes in the pipeline, the Iowas, and whole bunch of other ships getting commissioned in the next year or two. Losing the Big E, Yorktown, and Hornet at Midway wouldn’t have made much of a difference, long term (note that 2 of those ships were sunk anyway by the end of '42).
What-ifs have to consider doctrine as well; if the Japanese were more realistic about how the war would have unfolded, yeah they would have unleashed their subs in this way-but then again perhaps they would have also realized that they couldn’t win such a war (as Yamamoto himself said) and thus never would have escalated things, including launching the Pearl Harbor strikes.
Others have pointed out how Britain and France were trapped by their memories of World War I. Japan was trapped by its history as well - it spent all of World War II trying to fight another Tsushima.
Its a nice theory, to say that generals are moulded by their experiences (as junior officers)…but consider this:
-The German generals who experienced the horrors of WWI, were determined NOT to get dragged into such a war again. That is why they developed fast tanks (the “Panzers”). Generals like Von Runsted, Rommel, and Guderian saw that mobile warfare was the answer. Henceforth, armored columsn would drive deep into the enemy territory, surrounding forward enemy positions, and sowing fear and panic. There would be no more staionary “fronts”-eating up men and equipment. This strategy worked brilliantly against the older French generals (like Weygand and Gamelin)-who saw the war as essentially a replay of WWI. So what did Hitler do? He used his best divisions to beseige Russian cities-which was blunting the armored lances that should have been driving deep into Russia-he even slowed down the armored columns so that the plodding infantry could keep up! This is what condemned Germany to ultimate defeat in Russia.
-generals who took command of the Soviet forces were youngsters-the previous generation of officers were all killed off by Stalin. having little direct experience, the learned on the job-which made them more flexible commanders.
Had Hitler left his panzer generals in charge, it is likely the USSR would have fallen by December 1941. Germany reverted to seige warfare, and it doomed them.
Suppose Hitler’s senior generals ignore him? Germany might have won.
I apologize for coming across as snarky. I was just trying to put things in context for me – that even for a continent used to warfare, WWI and its aftermath gave people a major brainfuck (to use the technical term). I guess I went more overboard than usual.
Well Rommel succeeded in ignoring Hitler pretty successfully. His career wasn’t harmed. He received no punishment as far as I know for refusing to execute POWs, especially Jewish ones. However, starting to lose, and involvement in the failed bomb plot was pretty bad for his health.
Nonsense. This simply did not happen during Barbarossa; once the Panzer Groups broke through they kept driving far ahead of the slower moving Infantry Armies, that is how they were able to conduct the great encirclement battles that bagged prisoners by the hundreds of thousands. They most certainly were not wasted besieging cities or slowed down to allow the infantry to keep up, they were regularly operating 50 or more miles ahead of the foot marching infantry, logistical realities more than anything else kept them in check.
The only major disagreement between Hitler and Guderian was in ordering Army Group Center’s Panzer Groups south after a logistically enforced pause in September to encircle Soviet forces around Kiev. The argument can (and has) been made that if they kept moving forward Moscow could have fallen before winter set in. However, Army Group Center was at this point far ahead of Army Group South as can be seen on this map. AG Center already had a long exposed right flank which moving forward to Moscow would have both lengthened and much further exposed. The encirclement at Kiev netted 600,000 prisoners, leaving a force this large free to operate on their flank would have been a dangerous thing to do, even for the Germans in 1941. Moving laterally also wasn’t as stressful on logistics as continuing to move towards Moscow would have been. The USSR used a different rail gauge and converting it to the German’s gauge was a slow and painful process. Supplies still had to be moved forward by horse and truck from railheads far behind the front lines. Had AG Center kept moving for and conquered Moscow, it is far from certain that it would result in a German victory. It certainly didn’t work for Napoleon.
But the Germans and the Russians didn’t want to repeat World War I - they both lost that war. So they were motivated to do something different. It’s the victors who get trapped by history - they want to repeat their success.
I said in a previous thread that I think Hitler made the right call on this one (even though his generals disagreed).
One of the big reasons the generals had made Moscow the main focus of their campaign was because they thought it was such a valuable city that Stalin couldn’t afford to give it up without a fight. He’d have to mass his defenses there and the German generals figured that would give them the opportunity to smash the bulk of the Soviet army when it couldn’t retreat away.
Then Stalin did something foolish. He decided to mass a huge amount of troops at Kiev (which admittedly was a major city) to try to hold that city. He was doing what the Germans wanted him to do only he was doing it at Kiev instead of Moscow.
But the German generals have become so locked on to Moscow as the point of their campaign they couldn’t shift their focus off of it. They wanted to bypass Kiev and keep going towards Moscow even though the opportunity they were looking for in Moscow was now at Kiev.
Hitler spotted this. He realized that the German army should attack the Russians wherever they made their stand. Moscow had been the expected location for that stand but if the Soviets made their stand at Kiev instead, that was where the Germans should attack them.
And being Hitler, he got his way. He ordered his generals to attack Kiev and hold off on going to Moscow. They obeyed and the result was a massive defeat for the Soviets - they lost over a third of their army.
Ok, so Hilter did the smart thing in attacking the Soviet army where it made it’s stand, and the Soviets got badly mauled; Germany still lost and the Soviet Union still won. So what should Germany have done differently (given that it attacked the Soviet Union at all)? Maybe Moscow wasn’t the best strategic target, but would driving the Soviet government out of Moscow have been a crippling political embarassment to Stalin’s regime?
