Now I’m imagining waves of troops building a bridgehead with their bodies, ant-style.
Although I know the basics of WWII, I’m far from an expert on the details.
If indeed conquering the western SU was the plan all along, what was the point of the entire silly diversion into Poland, the Low Countries, France, etc., for years before Barbarossa? Sure, to a degree these were all allies of the SU, but there was far from deep-seated solidarity between the SU and the West.
It sure seems old AH put a really massive cart in front of a pretty small horse there.
Or perhaps it’s an exaggeration to say Germany’s entire aim was to the East and not at all to the West.
Kind of hard to get to the USSR without going through Poland, isn’t it?
The alliance between Poland and France/UK would draw them into the war once Poland was attacked.
It is important to knock out France/UK before commiting all of your resources into defeating the USSR.
It is much easier to attack France if you wheel through the low countries first.
The almost entire point of Hitler’s Nazism was depopulating the east for settlement by ethnic Germans, as stated by Hitler himself in Mein Kampf. The wars in the west were a sideshow (to the Germans).
Anything else?
AH: Have to take out Poland to get to the USSR. Army and industry not yet ready to take on USSR. Have had war declared on me by various Western powers, cannot ignore that for the time being, must deal with it.
By end of 1940, mostly dealt with. Can now resume original goal, army will as ready as it will ever be in 6 months.
Nope, it is the case. AH thought that Europe in general and Germany in particular would be overwhelmed by US industry (which as he saw it defeated Germany/AH in WW1), and thought the way to compete with that would be to create an economy with a comparable area and population. Conveniently the lands to the east were populated by untermenschen and could be emptied with no qualms. This is all laid out in unambiguous terms in Mein Kampf and AH’s second (unnamed) book.
What was AH’s war aim in your estimation?
You’re talking about an amphibious invasion by British forces in 1940? The British were saying they weren’t ready for an amphibious invasion in 1943 - and that was just across the Channel rather than the Indian Ocean.
And where are you going to get the planes and ships from? Are you going to strip the defense forces back in the UK in order to send them to India?
To establish Germany as the dominant power on continental Europe.
And he needed oil to do that. If he had known there was an accessible source of oil in North Africa, then he would have secured North Africa. As it was, he almost conquered North Africa even though he had no reason to do so.
You don’t need to strip defence forces from the UK to send them to India, the British already had a very large Army in India (and Egypt and Palestine)*. They had transport assets in place already. Indeed they had been carrying out sea bourne operations in those regions for decades. In this case they would have been fighting against isolated garrisons not landing on a continent against troops backed up all they way to the Rhine.
It would have taken sometime to get the assets in place, but they would have moved in by 1942, thats the same year they took Madagascar, which was much more difficult a campaign than Aden would ever have been
*One of the reason troops from India were not sent to NW Europe in WW2 (unlike WW1) was that the British Indian Government resisted it, they already had enough of an area to look after thank you.
Was the Afrika Korps large enough to affect German performance in Russia? As I recall, Rommel had a problem-his force was not large enough to defeat the British, but Hitler did not want to send more troops, because he needed them in Russia. Had Hitler sent Rommel and adequate force, N. africa would have been conquered, and no more fears of a third front war for Germany
I don’t have a great deal of confidence in my thinking here, powered mostly by vague recollection, and a current unwillingness to read a few chapters just to write a post here. So here goes:
As a matter of geography, AH needs a path to the USSR. Poland, or a part of it needs to be gone through to get there. If that’s the goal, then outright conquering Poland, and certainly taking on Western Europe is a gigantic distraction from the goal.
Better to whack off a hunk of southern Poland, defend you left flank against the surviving Polish forces, and press East for Moscow. Leningrad, etc. Use diplomacy / bribery / threats to persuade the rest of the West to tolerate the partition of Poland since they gain the potential decapitation of Russia.
Given the weak militaries of the Low Countries and the essentially defensive nature of French forces (e.g. Maginot Line), the only folks really itching for a chance to engage the Germans were the Brits. And they lacked a land front and aircraft with long enough ranges at the time. In early days the Americans where quite content to watch from the sidelines, and may even have been a restraining influence on the Brits.
Instead of taking this essentially defensive economy-of-forces approach to the West, AH chose to attack westbound. And to go all-in while doing so. That was always going to be a much harder slog per square mile of land overrun, plus the greater difficulty in controlling the overrun territory long term.
The day before he entered Poland he was already resource-constrained versus the full Allied alliance. Choosing to try to eat the whole elephant from both ends simultaneously was a victory of balls over forehead. With abject defeat as the completely predictable outcome from the git-go; only the timing and size of the maximum extent of the Nazi conquest was ever in question.
As I say, this is not my area of expertise, so fire away.
I didn’t say defense forces. I said planes and ships. And the British did not have enough of those to launch an invasion.
And seaborne movement is not the issue either. Because I doubt the Germans were going to give the British permission to use the port facilities to unload their troops.
Arguing about how the British are getting there is putting the cart before the horse - as I asked above, how are the Germans getting there? The Italians got there before they were at war.
In the Tunisia campaign the Axis had 40-50,000 casualties and 238,000 prisoners. I don’t know how many were German. Maybe more important, they lost over 1,000 planes and more than 600 were captured. Goebbels thought it was a disaster on the scale of Stalingrad. Hitler compounded the situation by not reinforcing Rommel right away and then doing it when the battle was lost.
In his book on D-Day Stephen Ambrose says the synthetic fuel for tanks and ME-262 jets were a major cause of the German potato famine of 1945.
As you point out, the Italians were there. The Germans would have simply had to send troops to reinforce an ally, which is what historically happened (albeit not in East Africa).
Italian entry into the war was pretty flexible. Mussolini wanted to make sure Italy was involved but Hitler didn’t see any real advantage in encouraging Italy to declare war. But if Italy had controlled oil fields and the territories needed to secure that oil, the numbers would be different. In such a case, Hitler would have encouraged Mussolini to declare war alongside him in 1939 rather than wait until 1940.
As for crossing the Bab-el-Mandeb, there’s a big difference between doing it from East Africa across twenty miles of water and doing it from India across over fifteen hundred miles.
“Simply send troops”? Again, how? They have to go around the Cape, or through the Suez canal, or persuade Turkey, France, and Saudi to give them right of passage - none of these are going to happen while they are at war with Britain.
The Italians got there years before the war started.
They Italians take Aden. Fine. Now what? The British are just going to sit there? From what is now Dubai to Aden and the entire coast of the Persian gulf is under British control. Oman and all of what is now Yemen is a British protectorate, garrisoned by Indian troops.
They can simply use troops in theatre to counterattack.