Re: The various mentions of Hitler’s delay of Operation: Barbarossa (Invasion of Russia) in order to conduct Operation: Punishment (Invasion of Yugoslavia) and Operation: Marita/Merkur (Invasion of Greece/Crete)
Try as I might, I’ve never been able to find a direct reference to Barbarossa having been directly delayed by the Balkan operations. The major cause of delay in Barbarossa was simply the time required to assemble the various forces at their starting points, and preparing logistics for the invasion. German transport and logistical support was woefully primitive and haphazard throughout WW II, in contrast with their fighting forces, and this was a major drag on the pace of advance in Russia once the invasion actually began. The second chief cause of delay was an unusually prolonged spring rainy season (“Rasputitsa”, I believe, though I’m uncertain of the spelling. Russia has rainy seasons in both the spring and fall). I don’t think more than two dates were ever set for the commencement of Barbarossa. The first, in mid-May, I believe was set well before the Balkan offensives were executed. It was postponed into June because of assembly delays and because various rivers near the border were still swollen from the spring rains. I don’t believe that the forces that invaded the Balkans were involved in the initial invasion of Russia in any event.
I would perhaps question the assertion that the Germans “planned on 6 weeks to reach Moscow”. The main strategic weakness of the invasion was its lack of a real plan. Hitler’s famous quote that “we need merely kick in the door, and the whole rotten edifice will come crashing down” was pretty much the extent of the strategic planning. If some of the General Staff and theater commanders saw Moscow as the primary objective of the invasion, many others did not. The chief concern of all commands was with the encirclement and obliteration of as much of the Soviet army as possible. The possibility that reserves and newly raised forces might be more than sufficient to replace that standing army doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone. While it is possible that the fall of Moscow would have crippled Russia due to its importance as a transportation and administrative hub, the Germans never even got to the point of developing that expectation. The drive to take the city in the late fall of '41 was merely an ad hoc move by Army Group commanders who saw an opportunity. The “shift” of objectives in 1942 to conquering the Ukraine and Caucasus was, in fact, the first real set of geographic objectives the invasion had ever had.
Backtracking a bit, the Balkans were not an inexplicable distraction for Hitler. The Italian situation in Greece had deteriorated to the point of the Greeks threatening to throw the Italians out of Albania. Worse yet for the Germans, the Greeks were feeling out how much British assistance they might be able to receive, and I believe were already hosting British aircraft. Hitler actually wanted to avoid a “two front war”, since he considered Britain to be dead on its feet and affairs in the west to be essentially concluded. The last thing he could tolerate on the eve of an invasion of Russia was the possibility of matters in the Balkans snowballing, with Yugoslavia and Greece perhaps encouraging independent thoughts on the part of his other halfhearted Balkan allies, with the British possibly even getting their foot in the door. The whole thing had to be crushed in short order, and that is what was done.
The real blooper/bonehead move in the Balkans was Italy’s back in 1940. Mussolini, in a snit over not having been granted French North Africa in reward for his 11th hour participation in the invasion of France (Hitler left it under the control of the Vichy French government, lest it look like even more of a joke), decides he needs to conquer /something/ in order to look like a big league player. So he invades Greece, a military dictatorship which until that time was likely to have eventually fallen in line as a German ally alongside Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria. Tens of thousands of Italian troops, which might well have made a difference if employed against the British in North Africa, were instead sent to their deaths against a Greek army dug in in formidable mountain terrain.
Also, regarding Yugoslavia, while Tito eventually developed wide enough support to seize the country as the Germans retreated, I don’t think the German army was really bled all that badly by the Yugoslavian resistance. Rather, they raised various local forces and legions to keep the partisans in check. While the partisans can be credited with keeping the Germans from exploiting Yugoslav resources and industry as effectively as they were able to in many of their other conquests, most of the fighting involved Croats vs. Serbs vs. Bosnians, etc., without the real line elements of the Wehrmacht having to get their hands dirty. The Germans encouraged an ethnic bloodbath because it prevented any significant unified opposition until they were in full retreat anyway.
Re: The Maginot Line
The fall of France was most certainly not a case of the French high command building the Maginot Line and hiding behind it while the Germans “went the other way”. Moreover, the Ardennes forest was not the main route of the German advance in 1914 (though it was in 1871).
The Maginot line went no further than it did for reasonable diplomatic reasons. Not only would it have been unneighborly for France to fortify its border with Belgium and Luxembourg, it would have implied that France was writing off those countries in the event Germany went on the warpath again. The Allied plan of defense was to assist in the defense of Belgium if the Germans threatened its neutrality again, and to defend from behind the Maginot line if it did not.
The original German invasion plan (“Plan Yellow”) called for a tank-assisted rerun of the World War I Schlieffen plan. Whether the Allied defense plan would have been able to halt the Germans in Belgium is debatable, though many modern historians seem to think that they could. A copy of Plan Yellow was captured by the Allies when a German courier plane was forced down, and the Allies used this information to encourage Belgian defensive cooperation.
The Germans, however, knowing that the plan had been captured, were not as bound by inertia as they had been in 1914, and considered modifying their invasion plan. General Manstein, backed by Guderian and other panzer generals, proposed a plan called Sichelschnitt (sickle stroke), which was essentially an inversion of Plan Yellow. Instead of sweeping along the coast through Belgium and down on Paris, the Germans would drive through southern Belgium and Luxembourg, and sweep up to the coast, thus cutting off the Allied forces attempting to defend Belgium. While many in the German General Staff doubted that armor could move effectively through the Ardennes, and feared that the flanks of such an armored drive would be horribly vulnerable to counterattack, Hitler approved it.
To make a long story short, most of the German High Command was as surprised by what the plan accomplished as the Allies were. France fell, not to a calculated German operation that bypassed a static and timid Allied army, but to a punch thrown by the Germans on-the-fly, which caught the Allies off balance as they tried to move rapidly to defend Belgium. Was building the Maginot Line a mistake? Probably, but only to the extent that less money could have been spent to adequately fortify the same frontage. The Allies real mistakes were in assuming that the Germans would not modify the captured plan, and in not taking greater care to guard their southern flank while massing on the Belgian border.
Re: Burnside’s Bridge
I’ve visited the Sharpsburg/Antietam battlefield, and seen the infamous bridge which, the guides note, crosses a stream that could easily have been waded. What they don’t mention is that the banks of the stream are very steep, and the stream would have impeded an advance as much as a fortress moat would have. Advancing across the bridge was tough, but trying to advance without the bridge would have been even tougher.
Re: the Petersburg Crater
This was an unorthodox idea, but not a dumb one. The failure came as a result of no one really wanting to commit their full support to the unorthodox tunnel/mine plan, with non-existent organization the result. As I recall, Burnside trusted an alcoholic subordinate to command the actual post-detonation assault, and it was he whose drunken stupor delayed the advance. I also recall the story that a last minute substitution was made, which replaced a specifically trained black regiment with a poorly briefed caucasian one. The justification was allegedly a combination of a racially-biased lack of confidence on the part of the local commanders, coupled with fear that if the attack failed it would seem that the black troops had been used as cannon fodder in a harebrained scheme. As it happened, the black unit ended up being committed in a later wave and being decimated anyway.
Re: the Magic Bullet
I agree with the comment about the positioning of the bodies. As the first bullet struck Kennedy in the back while the view of the famous Zapruder film was blocked by a road sign, there is no clear record of his and Connoly’s precise positioning at the moment of impact. A PBS special some years ago showed how a positioning of their bodies which would put their wounds in essentially a straight line is not at all far fetched.
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