Not to hijack, but something I’ve always wondered about (and periphally mentioned above so the hijack isn’t too great)…
How did Franco’s Spain stay out of WWII? Seems he owed Germany a debt of gratitude following the Civil War, and even if their sole contribution was relegated to the Med (Gibraltor, Malta, maybe NAfr), it would have helped the Axis. What shape was Spain’s navy in at that time? Were they just weary of war and not want to get involved? Could Spain have taken/controlled Gibralter and sealed the Med?
Any other socio/political insights on Spain at that time appreciated.
Spain had just emerged from a costly civil war. Time to rebuild, heal, and stick around to make sure the other faction is indeed down for good.
Spains navy (and slightly less so, the air force) was in rough shape, (lack of regular maintenance, at the least…) and somewhat small, compared to France or Britain (or even Italy). Spain has a long coastline. Britain can blockade Spain, hurting them much more than it would Germany. Spain has to worry about seaborne raids and invasions along quite a few possible points. I am not sure, but I think a lot of imports (food, oil?) came from overseas, and not the continent.
Maybe Franco was smarter than Hitler. Franco knew how much he could “get away with”, internationally speaking, and remain in power for the long haul. Hitler became star struck by his own early and dramatic political and military successes, and started “buying into” his ideas of destiny and superiority. Franco kept his feet more firmly planted in reality.
Admiral Canaris was the chief of German Intelligence, the Abwehr.
He was a known friend of Franco and vistied often. More importantly, although a loyal German, he hated Hitler and was part of the plot to kill Hitler. It seems like Canaris advised Franco to not enter to war on the side of Hitler. And, a pro-Axis neutral was handy for the Germans, too.
“There is a letter that remained from a Spanish contact he had that confirms clearly his opinion against the Nazi regime. He tried to hinder Hitler’s attempts to absorb Czechoslovakia and advised Franco not to permit German passage through Spain for the purposes of capturing Gibraltar. It has been written that all of Franco’s arguments on this stance were studied and dictated in detail by Canaris, while at the same time an important sum of money had been deposited by the British on Swiss accounts for Franco and his generals to further convince them to be neutral.”
I’ll grant that Hitler may have over-estimated his ability to directly attack the United States - he never really had a global sense of strategy. There were vague plans for building extreme-range bombers and missiles to attack American cities but the main German and Japanese plans to attack America was to attack American shipping and military forces in areas closer to themselves. The idea was basically, “if we kill enough Americans over here, then America will surrender over there.” It may sound impossible but it did work for the Vietnamese twenty five years later.
That said, Germany was able to significantly increase its attacks against the United States after declaring war. In the period from September 1939 to December 1941, Germany and the United States had been fighting an undeclared war in the Atlantic over shipping to Europe. But American shipping traveling in American coastal water had been left alone. Once Germany declared war, the u-boats immediately moved in to attack these ships, which had not acquired the defensive skills their oceanic counterparts had and suffered huge losses.
[ol]
[li]Failure to develop a first-class, non-ideological Intelligence Service. His people were great at counter-intel, lousy at getting the facts.[/li][li]Failure to develop a long-range, 4-engined Heavy Bomber. Without it, he couldn’t hit the Soviet Factories beyond the Ural Mountains.[/li][li]Not enough U-boats.[/li][li]Jet engine research funding cut after Dunkirk. Not restored until far, far too late.[/li][li]Demanding that early Jet Fighters be turned into Bombers. Delayed the project by months.[/li][li]Split his Eastern Front forces, one going towards the Middle Eastern Oil fields, the other towards Moscow.[/li][li]Unwillingness to use Chemical Weapons when the going got tough.[/li][li]Money/resources wasted on Battleships, when a Carrier would have served him better.[/li][/ol]
Actually, pointing towards the trucks in particular as critical is very guided. How did the army supply itself? The retreating German army did a splendid job of ripping up railroad tracks. And, regardless, when you have 100 km advances, the trains aren’t going to keep up. Trucks took supplies to the front. The German advance in 1941 ground to a halt when the supply lines stretched beyond the breaking point. The Russian advances in 1943 and, in particular, 1944 didn’t grind to a halt because they had the trucks to ferry material to the front lines. Those trucks were US made and made a very big difference.
I have to say maybe this was one of the few smart things he did.
As a soldier, Hitler was almost blinded by gas in WWI, I do think he realized if he did use Chemical Weapons that the allies could produce more than Germany ever could, and I think even he could picture a future were thousands of blind Germans would not remember him fondly.
But that was only on the field of battle side of things, because one should not forget that Hitler was willing to use gas in a different setting…
That gas use was an example of how the holocaust not only robbed Germany of knowledge, but also how wasteful it was on resourses that could have been used in the defense of Germany. (on a related topic, using trains to transport Jews to the death camps was an incredible waste of resources when they were needed for troops and other efforts when things turned sour)
Not to mention that if by any chance he had slowed the allied advance with poison gas, that then nuking Berlin would had been entirely justified.
But if the US hadn’t been sending the Soviets trucks, they would have made their own. The only reason they were so heavily dependent on American trucks were because they could afford to be. The USSR did have a bit of operational heavy industry, you know.
Perhaps the raw total resources represented in Lend Lease were the difference between Allied success and failure on the Eastern Front. I don’t pretend to know. But the Red Army wouldn’t have been truckless absent Lend Lease.
People love to talk about this but it’s really hard to see how jets could ever have made a difference, even if you gave Hitler total prescience with regards to their potential. The largest delay in producing the Junkers Jumo jet engine was the lack of correct alloys for various key parts. The prototypes worked well, but they used some exotic metals that just weren’t available in quantity sufficient for production. The resulting production Jumo had a ridiculously short service life. 8 hours of flight, or something on that order. Nor did the Luftwaffe have pilots or fuel to operate the Me262 in quantity. Their “Squadron of Aces” racked up some impressive kill totals with the Me262, but those pilots were the best of the best and would have racked up impressive kill totals in Fw190D-9s or Bf109-Ks too. Outside of those rapidly dwindling veteran pilots, the Luftwaffe mostly had half-trained pilots who would have done well to take off and land without crashing in a twin engine jet, let alone engage successfully in combat. A perfectly run jet interceptor program would have resulting in a few more 8th Air Force losses, but that’s about it.
After the initial blitzkrieg of Operation Barbarossa petered out, WWII was a straight war of attrition, and the US and USSR could simply absorb vastly greater losses than Germany could. Short of 1920-style death rays, there was no technological fix for Hitler’s troubles.
Jets were never going to be a war winning technology for Germany. If Germany had succeeded somehow in deploying enough jets for them to be a factor in the air war, they would have held air superiority for about six months. Then the United States and Britain would be putting their own jets into combat (it’s not like jet engines were a secret) and the balance of technology would be restored. Except jet aircraft were more expensive to build then prop aircraft so Germany would have to use more of its resources and fallen farther behind in the economic war in order to maintain its place in the air war.
Another factor to consider is that jet fighters were so much faster than prop planes that it was difficult for the jet pilots to hit anything. Air-to-air munitions were machine guns, cannons, and sometimes unguided rockets, but that was it. There weren’t any targeting computers or guidance systems that could be used from a fighter aircraft.
I think Hitler’s biggest blunder was waiting until the Berlin bunker to commit suicide. If he’d gotten it out of the way at age 18, he’d have saved the world a lot of trouble.
Actually, his intelligence services were not that great at counter-intel. They relied on technological security that was broken very early in the war, despite having suffered heavily in WW1 from compromised codes. They also failed to detect communist moles like Richard Sorge.
A 4-engined bomber would have been nice to have, but was hardly essential. The RAF and USAAF combined didn’t manage to smash german industry using heavy bombers, so it’s highly likely that trying the same in Russia would have been a waste of resources. A decent long-range fighter or a better version of the Ju-88 would have made a big difference though.
Jet engines were pretty much unnecessary, as per **Gorsnak **- more and better prop planes and pilots would have been adequate in the timeframe up to, say, 1943. After that it’s all over anyhow.
Instead of building two battleships and two battlecruisers, they could have maybe built four carriers - so what? The only foreseeable use for them would have been in the invasion of Norway (itself a total waste of time and resources) or in a Taranto/Pearl Harbour style raid on Scapa Flow - which could probably have been done easier and better using long-range land-based planes like the hypothetical tarted-up Ju88.
I don’t think that they had the essentially unlimited industrial capacity you assign to them - only the US was that powerful. Take a look at the production numbers for Soviet weapons, the proportion of their equipment that came from Lend-Lease, and bear in mind that Soviet industry was running at 100% capacity for 100% military production during the entire war. Every truck made would have meant some other military production being cut back - tanks, artillery, ammunition, small arms, aircraft, what would they give up? If you assume 10 trucks=1 T34 in productive capacity, the US trucks delivered would represent the equivalent of more than 33,000 T-34s[li] - or in other words if the Soviets had built those trucks themselves, they would have had less than half the medium tanks they actually built. [/li]
Particularly during the early days when Soviet industry was being relocated and then ramped up, Lend-Lease was critical to keep the Red Army alive. http://www.theeasternfront.co.uk/lendlease.htm
[*] Number plucked from air for illustrative purposes only. Tanks and trucks are rather different beasts, so you can’t exactly run them off the same production line, but you get the idea.
There was a meeting in Irun. Hitler came, asked Franco to give him permission to move his troops through Spain, Franco said “no”. The only help Franco gave to Hitler was the Brigadas Azules, a corps of volunteers who was sent to the Russian front.
That’s the gist of it.
In more detail, and note this is completely 20th-hand info since most of my relatives were busy trying to get things like food for the baby, Dad out of jail, etc.:
Spain was a shambles. The so-called help from the Axis had consisted of a bunch of Italians who were busier chasing our girls (who didn’t complain much about the chasing) than fighting and an even-worse bunch of Germans who didn’t bother chase our girls because they were too dark for their taste.
Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao were pretty much destroyed. Some secondary industrial centers (notoriously Gijón) had fared better, not having seen much fighting. There was still some minor fighting going on (the maquis); a lot of resources were being devoted to things like trying to figure out who should be in jail, who should not (my great-grandfather was a Guardia Civil, a cop: after all the officers in Barcelona were murdered, he, a non-com, became the ranking officer, which he was for two years; he was put in jail after the war on an anonymous tip and spent 3 months in Montjuic military prison, being freed as soon as the judge got around to his case); paperwork for things that should have been routine (there’s still cases being filed nowadays for people who disappeared during the war, either “taken for a walk” or “gone to buy tobacco”; people in the Red side would get married for 3 hours, in front of the union’s representative and with everybody dead drunk)… There wasn’t enough for our own people to eat, and we would have been expected to feed the Germans?
And also there’s (this is completely based on family history, note that Dad’s side is “National”, while Mom’s is several shades of “Red”, so I get kind of an interesting puzzle) the fact that Franco knew his ass would have been walked in front of a wall without the Carlistas. Who liked Hitler about as much as they liked Stalin and might have said “hey, know what, I still haven’t put Grampa’s gun back in the attic… María, bring me the gunpowder!”
The Spanish navy wasn’t just “in rough shape”. Most of the military Navy had “declared Red”… and within a week of the start of the war, the officers had been killed and the ships run ashore by sailors who didn’t know how to conn a ship! My Red gramps says he would have liked to take a sledgehammer to his own idiots (his phrasing) when he heard of La Masacre de los Oficiales.
The problem with security agencies in totalitarian countries is that they learn that a lot of domestic problems can be easily solved by force. You just round up all the suspects and torture everyone until somebody confesses. It’s generally a simple and effective solution.
However, it doesn’t solve every problem. One of its main flaws is that it’s generally unusable once you cross the border. But a security agency that’s learned to rely on brute force won’t have developed any subtler techniques.