The untold story of Stalingrad concerns the Nazi allied troops-the Hungarians, Rumanians, Italians. these guys were often poorly equipped and supplied; their situation was even worse than that of the German troops. I once read that some of the italians captured at stalingrad didn’t get home until the late 1950s-their suffering must have been terrible.
It’s also interesting that people looking at the ratio of combat losses or forces engaged between the Soviets and Germans tend to ignore the 1.5 million Hungarian, Romanian, and Italian troops in the campaign, which artificially boosts the ratio in Germant’s favor. There was more than an occasional division of volunteers involved.
No he wasn’t.
And Nazi Germany and/or Hitler could have simply been swallowed by a micro black hole, it was at least equally as plausible to have suddenly occurred sometime after November 1942.
How does that “artificially boost the ratio in Germany’s favor” when they were fighting as allies of Germany? All of those nations were actual, real, 100% co-belligerents on Germany’s side.
I think it is more interesting to think of what would have happened had Hitler decided to not invade Russia or at least delay it until after an invasion of Britain.
Seeing as the Allies had to prepare for years to invade Normandy in 1944 I think they could have quite possibly taken the UK if Hitler had possessed even the slightest ability to delay gratification.
Imagine if Germany had maintained the air assault on the UK in 1940-41 while continuing the naval blockade. That would have given them time to launch an assault against Britain in 1942 with a good chance of success.
While they may have still failed on an invasion of Russia after this fact they would have only been fighting a serious battle on one front and this would have allowed them to dedicate more logistics to ensure supplies and to protect against flanking on the Eastern front. Without the British islands as a launching point it would have been very difficult for the Allies to launch an attack with ww2 technology.
Lucky for us Hitler wasn’t really known for his patience or pragmatism.
Stalin said the USSR was on the verge of collapse.
Accounts by Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan claim that, after the invasion, Stalin retreated to his dacha in despair for several days and did not participate in leadership decisions.[
This film makes the same claim:Stalin’s Psychiatrist
France collapsed. Poland collapsed. Czechoslovakia collapsed. So could the USSR.
Stalins purges had left the army bereft of leadership and with crappy morale.
Even if the Germans had taken Stalingrad, they still had extremely long supply lines and much of their equipment was not up for Russian winter conditions. And German industry was mostly in Germany and under US/UK bombardment. Soviet industry was moved far enough east of German lines to be fairly safe from the Luftwaffe and their equipment worked better under the local winter conditions.
Do you even read your own cites or just Goggle-vomit “Stalin himself was on the verge of collapse”? If you had bothered to read them, the first was a statement by Stalin to Churchill in early September 1941, the second again a reference to September 1941 and the accounts of Stalin retreating to seclusion in his dacha for several days after Barbarossa was launched on July 22, 1941 is quite well known. They have fuck-all to do with the situation in November 1942. Whatever crisis of confidence Stalin was having in July 1941 he overcame it rather quickly and was in no way, shape or form “on the verge of collapse” almost a year and a half later during Stalingrad.
Quite a lot happened on the Eastern Front between September 1941 and November 1942. Just for starters Barbarossa had failed, the USSR had thrown the Germans back in their first major defeat of the war during the winter '41/42 counter-offensive. The German Army had been so severely mauled by both the counter-offensive and Barbarossa itself which was not cheap (1 in 5 German sent East was a casualty by November 1, 1941) that Army Groups North and Center were incapable of conducting offensive operations at all in 1942; the 1942 offensive had to be restricted to Army Group South and did not look to produce any decisive conclusion to the war with the Soviet Union, it looked to apply economic pressure on the USSR and relieve the pressure from the lack of oil Germany was facing. Moscow was in no danger at all in 1942. While Germany was on the offensive during the summer of '42 things went very differently than they had in 1941; there were no huge encirclements and bags of hundreds of thousands of prisoners. The Soviets gave ground rather than allow themselves to be encircled, and in the process the length of the front line continued to increase, taxing the already overstretched Germans. Large stretches of critical sectors of the front weren’t being held by unreliable Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian Armies just because the OKH felt like it, and the whole time the front was lengthening, heavy losses were accruing in the city fighting at Stalingrad and the Axis was thinning out on the ground the Soviet Union was building up sizable reserves with which to launch a counter-attack to encircle and destroy 6th Army at Stalingrad and more ambitiously but less successfully trap Army Group A in the Caucasus. The USSR was no more going to “simply collapse” than Germany was going to dissappear into that micro black hole.
No. The Germans simply lacked the navy necessary to mount a successful invasion of Britain. This has come up many times in the forum, and we’ve linked to articles showing the impossibility of it.
And this claim by Khrushchev has been challenged by historians.
Attempting to compare the fate of Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union is more than absurd and actually harms your argument as no one with any sense of history could take that seriously. Are you really attempting to equate the conditions of those two countries? Hitler invaded the USSR with 3.2 million German troops and another half a million of their allies. Czechoslovakia could not possibly stand up to German power.
Likewise, the invasion of France is in no way comparable to Operation Barbarossa. Paris is a mere 250 km from the border of Belgium. Once their best troops were cut off to the north, they lacked the ability, tanks, resources and troops to regroup.
One of the reasons the French decided to capitulate was their assumption that Britain would also fall as rapidly, a fear without merit. Germany couldn’t drive her panzers over the channel, and the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine proved to be inadequate to the task.
The USSR was simply too large, they had too many tanks and soldiers which they could and did sacrifice to gain time until they were able to learn to fight. Germany simply could not fight handle the logistics of invading a country that large.
There are scenarios where Germany could have defeated the Soviets, but simply throwing out those two examples to prove a highly improbable case does not cut it.
And all of this is really beside the point, which is that by Stalingrad, neither the country or her leader were in danger of a collapse. In line with Dissonance’s suggestion, we could very well count on space weapons as to suggest that the Russians would roll over in late 1942.
The air assault in 1940 was bad enough for the UK that they were thinking of moving fighter command to the north and allowing the bombing to happen mostly unopposed- but Germany’s terror bombing wasn’t going to shut down British war production, and would be a temporary delay while the UK built up forces. Britain alone was outproducing Germany on fighters, and lend lease was getting stronger as 1941 rolled on, and by 1942 the US air force would be involved too. There’s no way Germany was going to come out ahead in an air battle against the US and UK.
The British army in 1940 had lost badly at Dunkirk and had difficulty fielding real units in Britain. By 1941 they had plenty of heavy equipment on their own, plus lend-lease, and the US as an ally in 1942. On the naval front, Britain was the one blockading Germany, not the other way around, and the US effectively entered the naval war in 1941, and would be officially involved in 1942. Germany didn’t have the capability to build significant numbers of transports, and would be relying on river barges that could be defeated by a destroyer sailing by within a few miles of them. If they did land some troops, they didn’t have any way to move heavy equipment or supplies across beaches, so would have had some lightly equipped infantry going up against superior numbers of better equipped forces. Also in the unlikely event that Germany did get a foothold on the island, Churchill would almost certainly have used gas at that point, which makes offensive operations even harder.
Well, pretty much I have to, as you never come up with any. Just your own pro-Soviet opinions.
True. Operation Sealion was a political move, not a military move.
Yeah, but Stalin’s appointments diary? Dairy notations can be faked or filled in after. Khrushchev knew Stalin better than anyone.
It doesnt make any difference how many troops you have in reserve if moral or leadership collapses. As was noted, Stalingrad was a critical moral turning point."*Regardless of the strategic implications, there is little doubt that Stalingrad was a morale watershed. Germany’s defeat shattered its reputation for invincibility and dealt a devastating blow to German morale. On 30 January 1943, the tenth anniversary of his coming to power, Hitler chose not to speak. Joseph Goebbels read the text of his speech for him on the radio. The speech contained an oblique reference to the battle, which suggested that Germany was now in a defensive war. The public mood was sullen, depressed, fearful, and war-weary. Germany was looking in the face of defeat.[96]
The reverse was the case on the Soviet side. There was an overwhelming surge in confidence and belief in victory. A common saying was: “You cannot stop an army which has done Stalingrad.” Stalin was feted as the hero of the hour and made a Marshal of the Soviet Union.[97]*"
I dont know if you believe that "There are scenarios where Germany could have defeated the Soviets, " I have never seen you posit anything other than WWII was foregone conclusion.
Good analysis…another thing that people forget-the German ME-109 was TOTALLY outclassed by the Spitfire. The Spitfire was faster, more maneuverable, and was equipped with 8 machine guns-their combined fire would shred an enemy in its sights. Plus, the Spitfire was much easier to fly-which made a big difference to s stressed, tired pilot-many an ME-109 pilot lost control of his plane and crashed-because the ME-109 required constant pressure on the control surfaces.
I’m talking about boosting the ratio in favor of the ‘German soldiers were super elites fighting the mindless Russian hordes’ myth. If you have 3 million Germans and 1.5 million allies facing 5 million Russans, you can say ‘look at how awesome the Wermacht was, they were outnumbered by more than 3:2 and still did all this,’ even though the actual ratio of troops on each side was almost even. If in a given time period Germany took 1 million casualties, her allies took .5 million, and Russia took 2 million, you can say ‘Germany dished out twice as many casualties as she took’, even though it was really 4:3.
So I guess that’s a no, you don’t even read your own cites and an admission that you either have no memory at all or don’t read any cites I provide either. The notion that I never come up with cites and have only pro-Soviet opinions is laughable considering the volume of cites and lack of pro-Soviet bias I have provided just in response to you alone over the years.
The German battle losses (especially KIAs) must have been pretty sobering…by Dec. 1941, they had almost 200,000 battle deaths. Even though 1942 went fairly well for Germany, they were still losing more men than they could draft and train. I read that there were 40 year olf privates in Stalingrad-that tells you that even then, they had to draft men far beyond military effectiveness age.
They were; as I noted earlier 1 in 5 Germans sent East was a casualty by November 1, 1941. For all of its spectacular victories, Barbarossa was a strategic failure and had been very costly; the German Army was never able to recover from the losses it had sustained. From Ziemke, Moscow to Stalingrad: Decision in the East:
The sad thing for the Germans was that they actually did take most of Stalingrad (at a high cost), but on several areas the Germans never had complete control, by the time Hitler claimed to his henchmen that they had for all practical reasons taken Stalingrad, the trap by Zhukov was trigged and the sixth army was surrounded in the very same place where the Germans were already dying in large numbers.
Hitler was getting frequent injections of meth amphetamines from 1942 until his death. This kind of fixed obsession and mono-mania is a typical reaction of long term users. Fortunately most meth-addicts aren’t in control of major world military powers.
After the failure of Barbarossa in 1941 Hitler (and others) were resigned to the fact that if the Russian political system held together the Russians would eventually win. As early as September 1941, when the Germans were very superior in armaments and troops in the field, Hitler expressed an opinion that Germany had lost the war. In August 1942 he threw a tantrum at his headquarters and is reported to have repeatedly shouted: “Don’t you realise? We’ve lost the war!” There is even a hint that he was looking for a way to hand over the leadership to someone else. It has been claimed that he was placed on some sort of medication for the duration of the war.