A very good point Nemo. More people were killed in a conventional bombing raid in Dresden than were killed immediately in either nuke strike in Japan, so it is not clear that the war in the west would have been changed by Allied possesion of nuclear weapons. However, if Germany had gotten nuclear weapons, it may have been able to force a peace with Britain. Germany was never able to build enough planes to hit Britain as hard as Germany eventually got hit, but nukes on V-2’s would have been bad.
However, Germany still most likely would have lost the war to the Russians even if it got nukes in 44. Just not enough nuke worthy targets that they could get to at that point. A limited German arsenal of nukes would have been able to take out a few Russian divisions, but Russia had soldiers out the wazoo in 44. There would have been a half dozen more wasted cites in the east, but the Reds would still end up in Berlin.
One of the points I gathered from above discussions was that Germany didnt have the best technology or production capability ex: T-34, Aircraft production.
But if am not mistaken Germans were the masters of Jet Propulsion. If V2 had come bit ealrier it would ve made a huge difference. If they concentrated on building nuclear bomb just like US , given the know how they had wouldnt they have been succesful? I thought all German rocket, nuclear scientists and research were snappend up by US and USSR as soon as they were captured.
Quantity cant always match the quality. Bit more focused on the industrial side rather than concentrating on total war would ve made the decisive difference.
But they had something equivalent at the time. Germany was the only country with nerve gas at the time. Heck, the rest of the world didn’t even know that there was such a thing as nerve gas. And it would have been a lot easier to make nerve gas warheads for the V-2 than nuclear ones.
A static fortress is one thing (ala the Maginot Line) but defenders generally have the advantage just the same. Even something as simple as trenches lend an advantage to the defenders. They also have the advantage (usually) of prepositioned supplies, better knowledge of the terrain and so on.
The Germans were quite aware of the futility of something as cumbersome as the Maginot Line since they were the ones who defeated it. The Germans reintroduced maneuver warfare and lightning strikes added to effective use of airpower. While at ther outset they may be stretched thinly and a Soviet army might well break through any given point that is by no means the end of the war. Look at the DMZ in Korea. The US military presence there is in no way sufficient to stop a serious, all-out attack by the North Koreans. What they are there for is to act as a trip wire force. Being defenders they can slow the advance sufficiently (or so it is hoped) of the North Koreans to allow reinforcements to arrive. The Germans were pretty savvy in the art of war and I see no reason why they wouldn’t play it similarly.
I think calling Russians “good” at defense mischaracterizes what they are doing. They are not so much “good” at it as just near impossible to effectively take them on. The country is just too bloody big for anyone to invade. Armies of millions can get swallowed up in there. Generally the Russians seem to rely on pure attrition with little regard to the death toll. Germany lost about 5.5 million people in WWII. Great Britain ~500,000. United States ~300,000. Soviets ~20 million (note these numbers vary depending on source and include civilian as well as military casualties). The of course the Russian winters seem to have stopped at least two serious invasions as well.
As to the attack I agree that at the outset of WWII they would have stunk it up badly. Stalin had purged the military of most of its effective commanders. What was left was barely worthy of a uniform and no real match for German commanders (the only worthy general Stalin had at the beginning I am aware of is General Zhukov although through the crucible of war other good commanders eventually appeared). Add to that the Soviet economy was in a shambles and they had nothing approaching a serious army in terms of equipment (remember the Soviets issuing a single rifle and a single clip of ammo to every two men?).
So again as to the OP I simply do not see how the Soviets could have successfully attacked Germany for years. Remember we are assuming a Soviet Union just prior to the start of WWII and not the Red Army we saw at the end of it. The Red Army at the end was huge and had a whole country on a pure war footing backing it up. At the start they had nothing of the sort and Germany would be sitting there with an army that just tumbled the better part of Europe in short order (read experienced and well equipped). How is it Stalin would attack Germany and think to win?
It may be worth noting that despite the endless bombing raids by the allies flattening cities all over the place German production increased every year of the war right to the end. In that light it would seem nukes were just a more effecient means of of doing what we did anyway and would have as little effect.
However, there is a psychological aspect to nukes that cannot be overlooked. Remember more people died in the fire bombing of Tokyo than died in either nuclear attack and it didn’t sway the Japanese one bit. Two nukes however were somehow perceived as being wholly different and ultimately forced Japan’s surrender.
V-2’s were terror weapons but otherwise not very effective but a nuke on one would have been something else entirely. If Germany had that and so much as pointed them at Great Britain I cannot see how the Brits could do anything but throw in the towel (and who could blame them?).
The T-34 was not better technology. Indeed, the Panzer IV was arguably a “better” tank in so far as it was technologically superior in almost every way to the T-34. The reason the T-34 was considered a “better” tank was that is was still quite good and able to go mano-y-mano with a P-IV no problem. Add to this that it was cheaper to build, more durable, easier to repair in the field due to its lower tech build and in real world battles it can be considered the “better” tank.
AFAIK the Germans never really got a nuclear program underway because some of their scientists early screwed up some calculations that showed it would take something like 10x the amount of uranium to make just one bomb. In that day getting the uranium you needed and processed to make a bomb was a HUGELY problematical undertaking (why the US only built three at the outset and didn’t think they could build another for six months). You can see if you thought it would take 10x that amount for just one bomb the calculus of war says your resources are far better spent building other things no matter how big a BOOM you expect a nuke to deliver. By the time their scientists figured out the real story of how much uranium you’d need the thought of starting a serious nuclear program was pretty much out of the question (the US effort I think still ranks in adjusted dollars as the single largest government project ever…not sure but still a monster task at the time).
Time to clear up some misunderstandings: IBM had very little to do with assisting Nazi Germany in the Holocaust. It did provide some computing to conduct a census, but the involvement was limited to that.
As for GM and Ford, I’m not as certain, but German nationalism made GM and Ford smaller players than some make them out to be.
The IBM presence in Germany was a subsidiary. Nazi Germany’s laws prevented IBM from repatriating profits, by not allowing IBM to take the profits from its subsidiary out of the country. The money generated by the subsidiary (as with all companies in Germany) had to stay in Germany. It’s true that IBM was looking after its own self-interest by keeping the subsidiary running, but if it would have been shut down, IBM would have taken a loss, and the Nazis would have been likely to take control anyway.
There are other companies in Germany that had a much larger role in Germany during the Holocaust than IBM, GM, Ford, or any other American companies.
If you choose not to attack Poland and to isolate yourself (as Germany), then nothing happens. If you chose only to attack countries UK and France do not ally (such as Scandinavia, Balkans, Turkey), then nothing happens. Until 1944 that is, when Soviet Union attacks you without any warning, year or two earlier if you attack Persia, Finland or Blatic states. But it depends on your diplomatic skills too…
Every major power in the war, including the United States, had ample supplies of gas on hand. But every power had a “no first use” policy which surprisingly everyone kept so nobody ended up actually using gas. Some people have speculated that it was Hitler’s own experience as a victim of a gas attack in WWI that kept him from using gas. If so, it was fortunate for the allies - a gas attack at Normandy or Ardennes could have changed the outcome of these battles.
Slight nitpick. Terrorism is a tactic. Terrorists are those who employ terrorism to further their goals. Terrorism carries with it no inherent indication of what those goals are. Someone who uses terrorism to further their goals is a terrorist. That’s all the word means.
That said, I’m not up on the subject but I haven’t heard much about the resistance using terrorist tactics. From what I recall most of the actual ‘blowing stuff up’ involved fairly conventional [read military] targets with fairly conventional goals [disrupting logistics etc] rather then attempting to influence a population/politics through fear.
Read in a book somewhere that the French Resistance did use what could definitley be called terror tactics against the German soldiers in Occupied France. Stuff like loaves of bread rigged to blow up when you slice them with a knife (They had some help from Allied intel services such as the OSS in terms of getting the explosives and designing the things. The basic idea was to make the Germans afraid of even the most mundane objects if they didn’t themselves put them there.
This is somewhat less titanic an issue than some have rightly raised in this thread, but it should still be eliminated:
If this ever were a rational for Barbarossa, then it was completely dumb.
Rather roughly, precisely because of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, there was an open land route across the Soviet Union between the Third Reich and Japan throughout the period between September 1939 and June 1941. Nor was this a trivial theoretical passage. Several 100 thousand tonnes of supplies passed between the these two Axis allies via this rail route across Siberia in this interval. I’m not sure whether they also tried to establish an air link, but I doubt whether the Soviets would have tried to block it and it’d have been of marginal significance anyway.
Indeed the situation was such that there was a route to the Far East across Siberia even for Jewish refugees from the Reich in this period.
Barbarossa completely wrecked such arrangements. Some sort of link was part of the Tripartate Pact between Germany, Japan and Italy in 1940, so they then began to explore the possibility of air flights. However, all the obvious routes post-Barbarossa would overfly Soviet territory. What scared the Japanese was that such overflights involving them would be taken to be a violation of their neutrality with respect to the USSR. And they didn’t want that as a pretext for the Soviets declaring war on them. Despite any earlier attitude, they thus opposed most of the plans to fly such routes once Germany was at war with the USSR. Some flights were tried, in both directions, using circuitous routes that avoided this issue, but they all went missing. As far as I know, there were no successful flights between Japan and either Italy or Germany after the launch of Barbarossa.
Furthermore, the factor pushing for a U-boat link between Germany and Japan was that surface ships had proved an erratic and unreliable replacement for the trans-Siberian route.
True, everybody had stockpiles of gases (mostly mustard gas, which was the most powerful war gas used in WWI). However, Germany was the only one with Tabun and Sarin.
You can protect from mustard gas with a gas mask, you can’t protect from nerve gas unless you have a NBC suit or something similar. You don’t have to breathe it. A drop on your skin can kill you.
Nerve gas is a terror weapon, not a strategic weapon. While they may have possessed it, that is a far cry from being able to effectively distribute it via V2 over a large population base.
Prepositioned supplies are prime targets to bomb. Prepositioned supplies limit the maneuver of the defenders and give prime targets to isolate and capture. Trenches were not used in WWII much for a simple reason: Mobile warfare easily bypasses them. 100 miles of trenches become 100 miles of troops stuck in place with no supplies. The comparison to Korea is misplaced. American troops are in Korea as a trip wire to force America to bring down her might if an invasion takes place. This only works because it assumes that only tiny fraction of American forces are deployed in Korea. Germany would have required the bulk of her army simply to man the line.
The Russian army was ready to go by mid 1942. Stalin would have had every hope in the world to win at that time. Perhaps he would have waited until 43, but he would be starting right on Germany’s doorstep, and still be facing a front a thousand miles long with the holes that entails (assuming the Balkans still fell on Germany’s side). Russia still had oil, while Germany’s oil fields in Rumania may very well still have been bombed by the Allies.
I wonder if what the OP really meant was “What would it have taken for Germany to win WWII?” We would have to approach this as a strategic question ignoring the German atrocities. And define what “Win” meant. And since Germany cannot control responses by other nations, we woud have to assume historical responses and speculate as to what Germany coudld have done to avoid those responses.
I would say that Germany could not win a 2 front war. I would also say that Britain and France would not have intervened in a German war on Russia, but that Russia may very well have opportunistically intervened in a war on the west. I base this on my view of Stalin as very much espousing the spread of comunism and by extension the spread of his own power, and on the western democracies general reluctance to spill blood. Sadly, it is late and I have no cites for this.
Truly I am amazed this is still in General Questions and not debate of opinion at this point.
Anyhoo, I think that Germany had a chance to survive. I think that had they not invaded Poland, but instead concentrated on gaining influence in the Balkans, they could very well have opened up a front with Russia that did not bring in the west. This of course would have left Italy holding the bag and unable to prosecute a war on Britain in Africa, but that really didn’t gain the Axis much in the long run anyway.
So, Germany does NOT make the Ribbentrop pact. Germany + Italy take on Yugoslavia and Greece. Germany negotiates with Bulgaria, Rumania and Hungary. Does Russia still take eastern Poland and the Baltic States? This passes beyond what I can speculate. But it seems that if Nazi Germany had not acted like Nazi Germany, it may have expanded farther than it did.
True, but how would the British have reacted if London had been on the receiving end of a couple of Sarin laced V-2 each days for months on end ? Or for that matter, if the German had started using it during the Battle of Britain ? (don’t forget they are persistent agents).
What possibily prevented the Resistance/Terrorists from filling a lorry full of explosives and go against a german military buildings , recreation places etc? I have read Israel Hannah was the pioneer in this regard with world first proper terrorist attack on Kind David Hotel in Jerusalem. Watching all the holocaust wars like “The Pianist” makes me wonder , what the hell are they doing like getting in to war with soldiers…where are the hit and run tactics…rigging a bread to blow up, u can hardly call as a terrorist tactic…its a boobytrap ! Can the BBC radiocast to the captured areas that 1 soldier killed because he had bomb in his bread…?? Only known place of terrorism realted warfare was Yougoslav partisans…They had whole divisions tied up with their small armies.
FYI all my infor is based on books and documentries . I have not met a single person in my country directly involved in world war… :smack:
Rigging bread to explode sure is a terrorist tactic if it makes the Germans experience terror at the sight of phantom loaves of bread. It’s not that the BBC reports that a german officer was killed when his attempt to make French Toast blew up in his face, it’s that you know that the Resistance rigs loaves of bread to explode. Repeat for fruitbaskets, cigars, and stray dogs and you see where this can begin to have a psychological affect far out of proportion to the actual application of explosives.
