Bypassed Stalingrad. Not attacked at Kursk.
Get started a month earlier.
I’m told the weather simply didn’t cooperate; wettest spring in years.
Another question: most people agree that getting bogged down in city sieges was Germany’s undoing. Did anyone anticipate just how hard taking a city held by a determined resistance might be, or did they expect that the defenders would be killed out in a few weeks?
If you are talking about Kursk, he shouldn’t have waited until he had the new Panzer V’s in production, and instead hit them before they could dig all those ridiculous fortifications. Either that or tried to draw them out into a running fight that played more to Germany’s strengths.
If you are talking about Stalingrad, then the last thing he should have done was trying to fight his way into the city and capture it. That was truly idiotic, and basically threw away all of the Germans advantages and fought the Russians on their own terms and ground.
Myself, I think that the real problem with Germany and Russia is that the Germans had victory disease…they couldn’t conceive of losing (especially against the Russians) and so they didn’t plan on a campaign that would methodically take the Russians down, and instead simply threw everything at the Russians in the expectation that they would just collapse. When that didn’t happen they were fucked, since they hadn’t planned on what would happen in that event, and had no contingencies. What they needed to do was to capture strategic terrain, move up their ‘heavy bombers’ (such as they had) so that they could attack and threaten industrial targets that were out of range to them from Germany, and basically bled the Russians to death logistically. Also, they needed to get Japan on board with at least threatening the Russians eastern flank. After German failed to capture Moscow the first time, what saved the Russians were the 40-50 reserve divisions(!!) they transferred from Siberia…something they wouldn’t have been able to do if they thought Japan was going to pounce on their eastern territories.
-XT
Yes, I have done Wargame after Wargame (computer, simulations, board games) and this is what can allow the Axis to win. Yes, there was little in such a move for the Japanese- except ultimate victory. But they thing was- the Allies more or less acted as allies. The Axis were either pawns of Hitler or “we have common foes”, the Japanese and Nazis never really acted as allies.
And, it’s not only the reserve divisions, it’s fresh un-purged officers.
Wow - did they not purge the eastern divisions too?
Yes, but mostly only at the top. The Commisars, Generals, etc got purged, but the line officers mostly survived.
Did not know that. Were there future purges planned and just stopped by the advent of war, do you know?
Planned on the campaign lasting into 1942 at least rather than defeating the USSR before winter '41. It probably still wouldn’t change the outcome though; Germany had grossly underestimated the Soviet’s capacity and determination to wage war. Halder’s diary entry in August that they had reckoned on 200 Russian divisions and had already counted 360 sums it up pretty well. Russia was a bit like Rome in the 2nd Punic War; the crushing defeats that Hannibal inflicted at Trebia, Lake Trasimine and Cannae would have broken any other nation but Rome kept picking up the pieces, raising new armies and refusing to give in.
The biggest mistake the Germans made (and this was largely Hitler’s fault) was that they made no plans for defeating the Soviet Union in stages. They kept trying for a knock-out blow that would win the war in one step. They’d have done a lot better if they had made plans for taking the Soviet Union apart one piece at a time.
Japan made the same mistake in their wars - they planned out the first few months and then they figured they’d improvise after that.
The allies didn’t do that. They made plans for what they were going to do this year - and next year and the year after that. And this planning started to have an effect a couple of years into the war. The allies were all receiving the advantages of a couple of years of building up while the axis powers where still trying to throw things together at the last minute.
I once read a comment that explained a lot about why Germany lost WWII. The writer said that Hitler made plans for six months in the future and fifty years in the future but he never made plans for what was going to happen in between.
Historians claim that Hitler received his ideas about the capabilities of the Soviet Army, from the “Winter War” with Finland (1939).
In this brief conflict, Finland deployed a small army of (at best) 100,000 men (with no armor), against a Soviet force of >2,000,000 (fully supported by heavy armor).
The Finns humilated the Soviets (at first)-and Hitler was supposed to have gotten the impression that the Red Army was a joke (“we have only to kich the front door in, and the whole rotten thing will collapse”).
I find this these a hard thing to accept-the German Army had attaches in Moscow, and knew a gret deal about Soviet capabilities-is this something that historians have made up?
Too many people look at Napoleon and Hitler and assume Russia is unconquerable. But they forget that the Germans beat Russia in World War I (although this victory was overturned by the western allies when they in turn beat German) so Hitler would have had no reason to think it couldn’t be done again.
Defeating Russia and even peeling away some of Ukraine/Belorussia is a vastly different proposition from invading and conquering Russia with the avowed goal of exterminating it’s population. Hitler was determined to annihilate the Soviet Union and yet was hoping to reach a truce with Britain, when in hindsight it would have worked better the other way around.