It’s not clear, though, if Germany could have won the “Battle of Britain” at all. What’s to win? Even had they defeated Fighter Command in the south of England, an amphibious invasion of Britain would have been night on impossible to execute successfully. Germany didn’t have the amphibious capacity to land that many troops in England; consider that it took the Allies until 1944 to have enough force to land five divisions in the first wave. Germany’s amphibious capability was dependent upon the use of river barges that were about as seaworthy as refrigerators and had about as much heavy lift capacity.
We had a thread a while back that detailed a number of Sandhurst exercises in the 70s that tried to simulate such an invasion. Even giving the German side a lot of benefit of the doubt, the result of every run was that the German invasion ended in a bloody catastrophe of epic proportions, with almost all the invading troops either shot, captured, or drowned in the Channel. The logistical capability to achieve a major amphibious invasion was simply not in Germany’s arsenal at the time.
Given the near-impossibility of executing an invasion, and given that at the time British aircraft production was outstripping German production three to one, and given that the Royal Navy was still a mightly force, all a victory over Fighter Command would have accomplished would have been to giver Germany local air superiority for a few months. By the time Britian had run a few classes through pilot training they’d have had hundreds of fresh planes in the air by Easter 1941.
The board is being uncooperative today, I apoligze in advance if this post doubles up or anything.
Just to keep this hijack going:
I remember from watching one of the many WWII programs on the History channel (not a great cite, I know, sorry) that the German victory in Russia wasn’t as close as I always assumed it was. Even though the Germans made it within sight of Moscow (40 km, I think) and nearly took the city before winter stopped them, the Russians were prepared to fight on even if their capitol fell.
Stalin apparently moved most of the heavy equipment from the factories surrounding Moscow farther East and was preparing to renew the counter offensive in the spring, even after Moscow fell. I was just wondering if anyone else had confirmation of this or am I just imaging things again?
On a side note, I also read in “The Mitrokhin Archive”, a very interesting book about the secret KGB archive smuggled out of Russia in the 80’s, the Russian intelligence service had broken the Japanese diplomatic codes and had evidence that the Japanese were not prepared invade them from the East. Knowing this, Stalin completely stripped the entire Eastern half of Russia of troops and sent them all to fight the Germans. Knowing they only faced a one front war must have been a major advantage to the Russians.
To get back to the OP, I would think that the war in Russia was a more deciding factor that the manpower dedicated to the camps, but the draining off of any resources at all probably didn’t help them much.
Stolfi makes a case in the book that Germany could have won against Russia in 1941 if it weren’t for poor strategic decisions in July and August; it’s not something that I particuarly agree with, but it’s an interesting read.
The spring thaw and fall rains are called the rasputitsa, the “time without roads.”
The real problem, as it has always seemed to me, was that the home guard wasn’t so much a trained fighting force as an unruley mob. An airbourne decent into southern england covered by the Luftwaffe to take a small channel port then proceed with an unopposed landing. (the real issue with D-Day was landing troops onto a beach while they’re being shot at. With a quick airbourne attack, this isn’t an issue.) Assuming that the German army could work like they demonstrated they were able to at Crete, taking the city, while a blood bath, would likely occur before any organized resistance could manifest itself.
As for the Royal Navy, the luftwaffe had already made the channel a death trap for the RN during the daylight, the movement of reinforcements for an invasion wouldn’t have been as large an issue if the RAF had ceased to exist in the South of England. Recall what did happen when the RN attempted to intervene in amphibious operations aimed at Singapore. The loss of the Repulse and Prince of Wales is illustrative of the level of preparedness for an arial threat. The bulk of the RN was at Scapa anyway, to far away to intervene in time, should a quick attack occur.
I have no doubt that the Airforce, Navy and home guard would have done everything in their power to intervene in an invasion, but without adequate air support, I’d have to lay my odds on the Germans, doubly so if they got a foothold.
Once an army is in the field in Southern England I don’t know that it has ever been defeated militarily (the Empress Maud, countess of Anjou was defeated eventually, but I don’t know if that counts. Being as much a political compromise as a military victory.)
Okay, it’s a hijack, but not such a hijack as everyone else is making. I have no cite for this, but I read it in a book called The Germans. Don’t know the author, and he was citing other historians, but he said that the Nazis, being conservative by nature (my understatement) were also opposed to the recruitment of women into the fighting forces. So all the military people who wanted to mobilize the women, in the way that the Allies did, were ignored. The consequent personpower shortage (sorry, I CAN’T say manpower there) significantly shortened the war, not to Germany’s advantage.
Of course, the women worked pretty hard afterwards, clearing up the wreckage, but that didn’t win the war.
For all the people talking about the Russian campaign, didn’t the exaggerated importance of Stalingrad play such a big role? That was always my understanding, but no-one seems to have mentioned it.
Then of course, the ‘Gypsies’ or preferably Roma, was the only other “race” that was targeted for extinction. We tend to see the Holocaust as being about the Jewish population, but many others were affected as well. From The United States Holocaust Memorial Musem:
Other sources speculate that the number may have been as high as 1.5 million Roma.
Nazism, a long with Fascism and a lot of other movements that coincided in time was largely a reaction by the ruling classes to the perceived threat of democracy that was budding in the earliest 20th century. Remember that many upper class Germans saw Hitler as a useful tool to controll the masses. Even without Adolf Hitler in charge, WWII would’ve happened as these totalitarian regimes struggled for power with more democratic countries. Considering how many medical experiments that went on, using humans as lab rats, around the world, there is no doubt in my mind that many of the autrocities would’ve happened, had Hitler never been born.
The large scale, systematic, genocide is of course an invention by the Nazis. Horrorful things happened in fascist countries, but nowhere near what went on in Germany.
One of the battles was the battle of the wizards. This is one that the bofins of Britain won by a huge margin.
A prime reason for this, despites German scientists great renown is that Hitler could be quoted to say, Germany will have t do without science for the time being. (not exact off the top of my head.)
As you know he persecuted the intellegensia of germany, many of whom are jews. The reason for this is that they of course were smarter than the average Joe and saw Hitlers dangerous potential very early (much like today with GWB).
So many were killed or fled to USA.
Taking knowledge that included among others nuclear physics…
From Antony Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945 (p. 429):
This is an excerpt from a report based on over 300 interviews of German officers. Their belief – which is by no means limited to officers – is essentially that the war was lost primarily because of bad decisions by Hitler. With Hitler dead and the NSDAP clearly discredited, much of the post-war blame was placed on these decisions. The report goes on to note that the essential wrongness of some of these decisions, particularly the decision to pursue genocide, was rarely given as a reason why these decisions were bad. They were wrong because they resulted in defeat, not because of the human suffering they caused.
The belief is rather common that the Nazis allocated so much of their resources to persecuting the Jews that it cost them the war. Likewise, Hitler’s decision to invade the USSR resulted in ultimate defeat. The implication, in a way, is that Nazi racism and hatred sealed the outcome of the war.
Some of Hitler’s bad decisions certainly did influence the outcome of the war; I’d put Barbarossa at the top of this list. I’d put the Battle of Britain at the bottom. The decision to start bombing cities and other often-cited foolish Nazi orders did not save Britain from certain invasion; the battle was won by aircraft production, pilot training, and defender’s advantage.
Returning to the OP, I do not think Nazi persecution, or hatred, or racism, resulted in their defeat. The moral message of World War II as a battle of ideologies, a moral war, a war of good against evil, seems to have endured time somewhat better than the details of how the war unfolded. So it seems logical that the Nazis had to lose because they were evil; therefore they must have poured so much of their resources into genocide that they lost the war.
To analyze in detail the potential benefits of using slave labor and murdering civilians unable to work would be unconscionable. Nor do I know the financial and industrial costs involved. There are stories of death trains receiving priority over trains of military goods, but this, and the cost of maintaining even a large-scale system of camps guarded largely by enslaved locals and staffed largely by prisoners, cannot explain defeat.
Fundamentally, the Nazis were doomed to lose not because they were evil, but because they were involved in a war with an alliance that vastly outnumbered, outgunned and outproduced them. This is evidenced in the progression of the war from roughly evenly-matched battles and relatively small-scale bombing raids circa 1940 to the overwhelming scale of war in 1944, when the war was being fought in large part to determine the position of the sides at the beginning of the Cold War that was bound to follow. It does not seem that the persecution of the Jews led either to the involvement of the USSR or the USA. The involvement of the USSR was inevitable, since Communists were are almost as bad as Jews to the Nazis and would have been bitter enemies even for a non-racist facist state (or capitalist democracies). The involvement of the USA may well have been inevitable provided that that of the USSR was. Many people do not realize how important the future conflict of communism vs. capitalism was in deciding the outcome of the war – a battle of ideologies, but not the ideologies usually stated.
On the subject of what if’s. If Germany had of supplied arms to finland, enough to keep them proped up till spring then there was a very good chance france and england would have declared war upon Russia.
With USA already being sympathetic to Finland it is easy to see lend lease being extended to this new front.
Anyway, BoB was a great blunder of Hitlers, not only did they ignore the vulnerable power plants that would have knocked out englands production but they ignored the oppurtunity to inflict a maritime blockade upon england.
They easily denied her the channel, only about 50% of germanys bomber force could have starved england into surrendering in 1940.
Sorry for the delay MeanJoe , I recall reading that in John Keegan’s The Second World War, an excellent history of the war that I highly recommend.
Many of the factories were moved east to the Urals, so the Russians were somewhat safe, though if I remember correctly Moscow was basically the hub of the comparatively few railroads that ran throughout Russia at the time, so taking Moscow would have been devasting to the Soviets from not only a moral standpoint, but also in strategic & logistical terms. I believe that came from Keegan’s book as well :).
One thing I’ve always wondered about is what would have happened if the Japanese had sent some of their huge army in China into Russia and opened up a second front for the Russians. I wonder about this mostly due to the troop reserves that bolstered the Russians after a German diplomat (Russian spy) assured Stalin that Japan would not begin another front. Only then did Stalin allow the transfer of more Eastern troops to the west.
Dissonance - Thank you, that was the kind of information I was looking for. Once I finish (my third) reading of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and An Army at Dawn I will pick up Hitler’s Panzers East.
Thats one of the great ‘what ifs’ of history IMO…if Hitler had of convinced the Japanese to attack Russia instead of the US very early in the war, then Russia might have fallen and the US might not have entered the war early enough to prevent that. If Russia falls, even if only the western half, then its a whole different ball game at that point with the Germans given some breathing room to consolidate their gains. However I seriously doubt that anything would have brought the Japanese into the war with Russia instead of America…and I doubt even less that they would have entered the war with Russia AND America.
This is getting pretty well hijacked away form the OP, so my apologies, but the bulk of the Japanese army was fairly well tied down in their war in China. The entire reason for Japan to attack the US and the UK was to allow them to turn south against the Dutch East Indies in order to secure oil that had been cut off to them by embargo in order to continue their war in China. Turning north instead against the USSR would have left Japan with serious oil problems looming on the horizon. Additionally, Japan came off very badly in the 1939 border fighting against the USSR in Mongolia. There is a link here to the conclusions of a US Army War College study on the causes of Japan’s failings against the USSR in 1939, they would apply as well to a hypothetical war between Japan and the USSR in 1941; namely lack of sufficient material and flawed doctrine to deal with this fact, a motif repeated time and time again in later fighting with the US throughout the Pacific War after the shock of the early victories wore off. For example:
Well, the first problem with that plan is that Britain was at the time defended by a REGULAR Army of several hundred thousand men. Even granting that they’d lost a substantial portion of their heavy equipment in France, the remaining force could easily have overmatched an airborne division, which of coruse wouldn’t have had any heavy equipment either, and Britain’s heavy equipment was being replaced at a pretty brisk pace. The task of capturing an entire port and simultaneously defending it from a force many times their own size, which would have been equipped with at least a limited number of tanks, heavy artillery and armoured vehicles, was well beyond a small airborne division’s capability.
There’s really no chance at all Germany ever could have achieved complete air supremacy, either, since Britain would have been continuously putting new planes in the air; in late 1940 Britain was producing a hundred fighters a week, while Germany was producing a hundred a month. British aircraft production was outproducing German aircraft production four to one; given the relative size of the air forces involved, that’s a ratio that was going to rob Germany of any advantage in a very short period of time.
According to the RAF dails logs, the RAF had 667 fighters available on August 1. On September 30, they had… 687. Britain was capable of replacing every aircraft in Fighter Command in about seven weeks; the absolute cold mathematics of this affair was that Germany could not shoot down British planes as fast as Britain could build 'em. In fact, the number of available fighters was only slightly dented by the GErman efforts; Fighter Command had about 670 fighters available on August 1 and had 680 available on SeGranted, pilots are harder to come by, but there was a plentiful supply of young men to train as pilots, plus pilots coming from Canada, South Africa et al., and the Luftwaffe could not project power deep enough into Britain to deny the RAF the use of all airfields. There would have been some RAF resistance the entire time, and given the Luftwaffe’s limited range…
The second problem of course is the Home Guard. It’s become sort of a British entertainment industry trademark to make fun of it, but the Home Guard likely would have put up a hell of a fight. A German invasion force would have been faced with a professional army several times its size backed up with a reserve army of nearly the same size. I don’t know how they could have succeeded.
Of course, the D-Day invasion itself started with an airborne assault many times larger than anything the Germans could have launched, and it was still astoundingly difficult and the better part of the airborne forces were scattered about, killed, captured or reduced to fighting in isolated groups. I don’t think you can overstate the difference between invading a heavily armed industrial nation in the teeth of an army of 250,000 men, and invading a little, lightly defended place like Crete.
There’s a colossal difference between two battleships without destroyer escort or submarine screens, with no air cover at all, and the bulk of the Royal Navy, including a large force of subs, with some air support. Sandhurst exercises assumed the Royal Navy could not stop the INITIAL invasion - but they choked off Germany’s extremely limited ability to support it. The central problem remains that Germany did not have the sealift capabilities required.
I agree with the consensus that the final solution was not the source of Germany’s defeat. One could argue that a kinder, gentler, less racially obsessed Third Reich could have done much better, especially against the Soviet Union by actually making all of the various occupied countries into allies rather than behaving like, well, Nazi’s.
Operation Sealion (the semi-planned German invasion of Britain) was a joke, a bad joke. Army, navy and air force could not/would not agree on a plan. The invasion fleet (made up of river barges) would have been sitting ducks for the Royal Navy (okay, very slowly floating ducks with very low freeboard). The Luftwaffe could not achieve necessary air superiority because they were losing planes and pilots more rapidly than the British. The RAF kept a substantial proportion of its forces in bases outside the range of German planes, so even if the Battle of Britain were lost (i.e RAF no longer regularly contested skies over southern England/London) the RAF retained sufficient planes to contest the channel in the event of an attempted invasion or other crisis.
Operation Barbarossa was stopped by logistics as much or more than mud. Prewar German logistical wargaming predicted a stoppage of offensive actions after x weeks and y miles, based on the gross inadequacies of the German logistical system to the task at hand. It pretty much happened as the logisticians (but not the operations planners) expected (okay, my citation is the author of A War to be Won, as seen on Book TV a while ago - I am not sure this particular tidbit made it into the book). Positions might change slightly as a result of an earlier start, but the outcome would not be too much different. Logistics is also why merely shifting more troops to the north rather than central or southern operations would not have helped take Moscow- more troops means that the same supply pipeline, crappy roads, inadequate railheads now are tasked with even more of an overload.
The logistical flaws suggest that better preparation would have helped Barbarossa, which no doubt it would have. (Here’s an idea - let’s standardize on a rugged and reliable transport truck rather than cobbling together Belgian and Danish delivery vans!) However the entire German war plans required that any wars be quick, free and bloodless (from a German perspective) - the Nazi’s had few delusions of the popularity of an extended and bloody war. This is one of the reasons it took them a long time to really mobilize.
Somehow the Germans managed to combine the worst aspects of totalitarianism and capitalism during the second world war. They never achieved the gains that the US (through the profit motive) and the USSR (through threats and hatred). Germany never coordinated and prioritized its production as the allies did and German industry never seemed to look pasts what was asked of it (were there any German equivalents of Higgin’s boats or Willow Run?). When Hitler asked his aircraft industry to quadruple production they declared it impossible and expanded by a significantly lesser factor. When Roosevelt called for 50,000 aircraft a year the eyes of dozens of industrialists lit up.
It is highly unlikely that Japan could be induced to attack the Soviet Union in 1941. In the first place the Japanese army was severely mauled in Manchuria and Mongolia during 1939 and 1940. Barring some change in the odds it is unlikely they would desire a repeat, especially with the continuing drain of resources into China. Second, Japan had no interest in fighting long wars. Any quick German victory would happen before the Japanese could achieve much in the east even if Siberia were denuded of troops (which it was not until later). The distances are too vast and the infrastructure too inadequate (logistics again). After the Soviet Union was defeated there would be plenty of time for the Japanese to renegotiate their nonagression pact with the weakened/defeated Soviets.
Basically, once the manpower of Soviet Russia was combined with American Lend-leased industrial power the writing was on the wall. An actively belligerent America just put the final few nails in the coffin.
IIRC, this force (the Dunkirk evacuees) were slowly reequiped and then sent to fight in N. Africa, forming the nucleus of the British armies there, and taking part in the disasterous support for Greece and the battle for Crete. This strategic switch gave the British army the oppertunity to continue fighting while the battles on the continent had finished (allowing for better allied propaganda,) protected the Mideast oil fields, and stripped England of much of the regular army and equipment that would have been needed if the RAF had failed.
The first stage of Luftwaffe attacks on the RAF were channel shipping and Radar/Airfield emplacements. Even with new fighter production, if they had to come from the wrong side of london, and without radar support, they’d have had little influence on the conduct of Luftwaffe incursions. No one can deny that British fighter production was stupendous, but they lacked pilots for those planes during the important period of assaults on airfields.
Churchill notes in his history of the war, that on Sept. 15th, after a 80+raid into london and its environs, EVERY PILOT in Group 11 was refueling simultaneously. 20 Luftwaffe bombers could have taken out the bulk of the RAF, including support personel and pilots. That raid never came, the Luftwaffe had redirected bombers to terror attacks on London. But it should have, and would have, had the build up to SeaLion continued in a meaningful fashion.
See above re: pilots. Also re:radar instilations and flight times. If the RAF wasn’t fighting over its bases the legs on its fighters would have been shortened, and the Luftwaffes range wouldn’t have mattered as much. Also note that the first target of any airborne invasion is an airfield…
again, the regular army was being shipped out to N. Africa (by August most of the Tank strength in the UK was shipped out.) The Home guard lacked training, weapons, ammunition, and heavy weapons. Fight fiercely they could, but a division or two of crack airbourne troops against a local militia? I think that a well thought out invasion plan could adequately overcome the Home Guard.
The RN’s light ships weren’t designed to fight an anti-aircraft threat until the advent of the Battle Class Destroyers in 1944. The heavies had AA bolted on, especially after the PoW/Rep disaster, but keep in mind that the German navy could also intervene, and it’s U-Boat forces were just as formidiable. I’d say its a toss up, especially w/o air cover. Personally I’d really like to see the report on the Sandhurst paper. I’m goning to go scouting for it, but if anyone has a direct link I’d be obliged.
There is a link to a short version of the Sandhurst wargames here; there are also a couple of good documents on the problems that attempting to carry out Sealion would have entailed here and here. Probably the most crippling of the many fatal flaws in Sealion was that it would have depended on Rhine ferries which were barely seaworthy and extremely slow. They would capsize in anything above Sea State 2, which could be produced by a destroyer traveling at speed. As they would take 30 hours just to cross the channel, Germany was faced with the problem of having to keep any substantial elements of the Royal Navy out of the channel for days while it landed troops and built up supplies, as the Kreigsmarine was horribly outnumbered by the Royal Navy. The Luftwaffe couldn’t have prevented this from happening, either. It’s important to note that the Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk by large numbers of dedicated long range torpedo bombers trained in naval attacks, something the Germany didn’t have. The Luftwaffe wasn’t trained or equipped for naval attacks, and wasn’t able to inflict substantial damage on the Dunkirk evacuation fleet. Even if they did manage to score big and sink a couple of capital ships, that alone wouldn’t stop the Royal Navy from wrecking the invasion. Night attacks by the lighter elements of the Royal Navy would avoid any real interference by the Luftwaffe, and by itself would be able to break up the invasion fleet. With regards to the British army, the troops sent to North Africa didn’t denude the defenses by any substantial amount, a large home force was maintained and continued to grow while they were sent overseas.
This might give you some idea of just how worried about invasion the British government really were at the time. In any case, there were still significant forces around, including plenty of tanks and artillery.
The radar system ws actually pretty hard to damage. Equally, pilots bailing out in battle landed either on home soil, ready to go back into battle in a da or two, or on enemy soil, ready to go into a POW camp. Guess which is which side.
And these 20 Luftwaffe bombers would have known about their opportunity by what, satellite recon? Never mind just what laser-guided bombs they’d have used to hit hundreds of planes and thousands of people. And never mind again the other Fighter groups, which mostly stayed out of the battle, in case of just such an invasion.
Ah, so the Luftwaffe is going to be based in Southern England? It’s a bit trickier than just flying the planes across, and you might want to worry about artillery.
IIRC they had roughly 1 division of pretty good airborne troops? Given that the Home Guard was not entirely abandoned by regular forces they’d have still been heftily outnumbered. A division isn’t a very big a force to conquer a country, so you’ve got to get the rest of your army across somehow.
Force Z was sunk (what, a year later?) by a large force of Japanese torpedo bombers trained for anti-shipping work, with no friendly air cover at all. The Luftwaffe lack any such force. Note that at Dunkirk they managed to sink a handful of the destroyers sitting still by the beach. (Also, just because the lighter ships weren’t as great at AA then as later doesn’t mean they were defenceless)
U-boats are pretty much useless against warships charging into battle, they’ve got to sneak up on them when they’re unprepared. And I’ve no idea what you think the surface Kriegsmarine would do, in 1940 they were dwarfed by the RN in home waters.
Here’s a rather enjoyable website with some secondhand comments on the Sandhurst exerciese: http://www.flin.demon.co.uk/althist/seal1.htm
The short answer as to why Sealion won’t work is that it took the Allies years to build up immense forces dedicated to the task, with total air and naval supremacy, and they still found it tricky. You want the Germans to do it with naff all preparation and experience, against a comparable airforce and a huge overmatch on the waves.
That may be true for the camps filled with “foreign” workers, for example from Poland. These labour camps weren’t necessarily aimed at killing the working force though.
The systematical extermination of 6 million of your own people on the other hand and the way some of the brightest minds were driven out of the country certainly wasn’t a net gain, but a huge disadvantage.
As it was already pointed out, if Hitler had been less fanatical, then there might not have been a WWII. But if we’re going to play the “what if” game and argue for a war, then I think that without the holocaust, the atomic bomb could have been developed in Germany first and that might have altered the outcome of the war. Besides, other nations might have been more eager to negotiate a peace treaty with Germany, if they hadn’t commited those atrocities.