James Stuart
King
I've never read anywhere else that Hitler was a fan of Napoleon. I'm not doubting it, I've just never come across the information before. Source?
Moscow burnt after it was occupied by the French, during the grande armee's looting of the city. It was likely started by the French, whether by accident or design, though no one knows for sure. It was not an attempt to deprive Napoleon of the city. Had Moscow not been accidentally burnt, Napoleon would have wintered there, and Alexander I would have made a humiliating peace after the winter. The scorched earth policy was designed to keep Napoleon from Moscow, not, as is often thought, to starve his army. That policy failed at Borodino.
No it didn't. The three objectives were Leningrad, with Kronstadt a necessary adjunct to that objective, Moscow, and Sevastopol. The Caucasian oilfields had nothing to do with Barbarossa. That came in 1942, after Barbarossa failed, and the Wehrmacht was running out of oil.
As the major threat from the Soviets over the Germans has always come from the land and that the country couldn't be neither invaded nor occupied, only the third objective, the Caspian Sea, was really strategic. The two first ones were just a waste of energy as even if Leningrad and Moscow fell,
You are on a forum dedicated to the Civilization series of video games. How much use was taiga in any of those games? Siberia was sparsely populated an lacking in resources, including food. Most Russian grain came from the Ukraine, and its industrial base was in the European USSR. Eveything east of the Volga was essentially useless in a war.
I'm sorry, but that's just plain wrong. This is why you don't make claims about things you don't know, and you certainly don't pull statistics out of your arse. Approximately 90% of Soviet military assets were in the European USSR, not 25%.
Saudi Arabia only struck oil in 1938, and didn't begin to exploit that find in earnest until after WWII, for somewhat obvious reasons. One might as well argue that Germany shouldn't have needed Soviet oil because their ally, Italy, controlled Libya, which had huge oil reserves; which no one found until the 1950s. What Germany needed was not untapped reserves, but operational refineries and platforms, which simply did not exist in Libya or Saudi Arabia in 1941. This is why Germany invested so much in Romanian and Hungarian oilfields, even though they produced a pitifully small amount; they were at least exploitable. The big danger was German intrigues in Iraq and Iran, not a military push into the neutral Saudi Arabia.
And Hitler never intended on entering Kazakhstan, except maybe its western-most areas. Where did you learn that?
Hitler couldn't invade the UK, for reasons I will elucidate later. If he could have invaded the UK, he gladly would have, because you are correct, it was a much more tempting target, had it been reachable.So overall, we could only guess that if Hitler hasn't targetted Suez, then that means he was incapable of controlling the seas... which were still dominated by the Brits. So we go back to the initial point, as Hitler had at least 3 good years from June 1940 before the USSR get enough powerful to be able to kick his ass, then wouldn't it have been wiser for him to focus first on... England?
That may sound silly, but it still makes better sense to me than launching a flawed doomed-from-start operation such as Barbarossa.
Now I'm ready to here what the History buffs around have to say about it.
Germany was effectively bankrupt as early as 1936. It took an ever-escalating series of military adventures to prop up the failing German economy. In 1936, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland opened up a previously untapped labour and capital pool for German industrialists to exploit, as well as enabling the military to ramp up conscription. By 1938, this well had dried up, but the anschluss provided Germany with both Austrian iron ore and, more importantly, the vast Viennese foreign exchange reservoir. Later that year, the Munich Pact provided Germany with the most economically successful part of Czechoslovakia. In March 1939, the annexation of rump Czechoslovakia gave Germany Prague's currency reserves, as well as the powerful Skoda munitions industry. In September, Germany seized Warsaw's reserves, looted Polish museums and art collections, appropriated the property of its Jews and gained control over the important ports of Danzig and Gdynia, in addition to obtaining a land-link with East Prussia.
This ignores the domestic appropriations which occurred in Germany from 1939 on. Germany had a process known as Aryanisation, in which Jewish businesses were appropriated from their owners, given to Party members, and systematically stripped of their assets. Just to squeeze out the last drops of revenue, the Jewish owners were also often forced to pay ownership transfer fees, fines for lost business in the transition period, and insurance for the business they no longer owned. In this way, the Reich followed the Henry VIII model; it robbed the wealthiest, most productive part of the community to strengthen the power base. It followed this model in every occupied territory during and before the war as well, refining it in the process.
Because Germany owed the USSR over 1 billion Reichsmarks in both cash and goods. Going to war with your creditor is a good way to avoid paying him. germany also stood to gain much from plundering the Soviets; the Amber Room was never found, for example.
This assumes that Germany possessed the capacity to seize Suez. They didn't.
Short of either swimming across or taking lessons from Jesus in walking on water, the Germans couldn't get "those 4 million dudes to England." And the Nazis would likely have thrown Jesus in a camp anyway, given his ancestry.
It's hard to push west when you're up against an ocean and you have no blue-water navy.
The French couldn't control the French colonial empire. What chance did Hitler have? Chad immediately declared itself for De Gaulle, less than a week after L'Appel. Indochina fell to the Japanese, while Vichy looked on impotently. The French North American and South American territories, as well as French Polynesia, reached unofficial neutrality deals with the US and Australia, and most eventually fell to, or declared for, the Free French anyway. De Gaulle used Chad as a base of operations to conquer the entirety of French Equatorial Africa. Syria and Lebanon were seized by a combined British-Free French force when Germany tried to use them to support a coup attempt by pro-Axis figures in Iraq. Only French North Africa and French West Africa remained under Vichy control, and Hitler was never confident that either would not fight if he actually tried to exercise authority over them. SO he left Vichy as an officially neutral client-state, refusing to interfere with its overseas territories.
They did.
Yes. In addition to the German-Soviet Credit Agreement of 1939, which I linked to above, there were agreements signed in 1940 and 1941. Germany owed the USSR over 1 billion Reichsmarks in payment for goods received from the USSR, including oil, rubber, and most importantly, grain. That last link has a graph, which I can't post. It is under this sub-heading. I strongly recommend you read it. It points out that without Soviet assistance, Germany would actually have run out of four of its most important military resources, oil, rubber, manganese, and, most important of all, grain, by October 1941. Oil and grain would have expended before Operation: Barbarossa even began without Soviet assistance. From 1939-41, that assistance amounted to:
Germany, to put it simply, could not have fought WWII if the USSR had not given them a huge amount of resources on credit. Funnily enough, since Germany declared war on the USSR before it paid off that credit, the USSR essentially subsidised the German war effort.
The initial agreement with the USSR was to pay 200 million Reichsmarks, and provide a further 120 million Reichsmarks worth of manufactured goods - including the plans for several German vehicles and weapons, most notably the plans for a Bismark-class battleship, in exchange for raw materials from the USSR. The full amount was due in 1946, with interest, but Germany was failing to meet its requried regular payments, and the closer to Operation: Barbarossa it got, the less German materiel and plans were handed over to the Soviets. It was obvious that Germany would default on its debts to the USSR. This would effectively be a declaration of war and bankruptcy at the same time, and it's not a good idea to go to war when you're bankrupt.
Certainly. During the war, British production of both aircraft and naval vessels vastly outripped that of Germany. This meant that even if Germany had been winning the Battle of Britain, which it wasn't, it would still not be able to produce enough aircraft to gain air supremacy over Britan, as the UK was constructing plans faster than the Germans were. The Germans also could not produce enough ships to compete with the Royal Navy, meaning they could not defend a beachhead on the English coast, if they had the capacity to seize one, which they of course did not.
Additionally, despite the myth of German "wonder weapons," most of the German equipment produced during the war was qualitatively inferior to that of their enemies. Even the Soviets produced better tanks than the Germans, and the British produced better ships and planes, in addition to making more of them. The one advantage Germany had was its submarines; those were fantastic. But they lacked the necessary backing from a surface fleet to make them anthing more than a nuisance to merchant shipping, which they simply could not destroy enough of.
Then of course, there is the simple fact that Operation: Sea Lion was untenable, for the simple reason that Germany didn't have any landing craft capable of crossing the English Channel. Hence my earlier joke about them swimming across.
In short, Germany was making less planes and ships than the UK, the planes and ships they were making weren't as good as those made by the UK, and while the German army was larger and better, it didn't possess the transports to actually get it to the UK, or even across the Mediterranean to cut off Britain from its Empire. This is all ignoring the big red, white, and blue elephant in the room; the United States was subsidising the UK's war effort, rendering all other economic arguments moot, even if the UK's economy hadn't been winning the production war on its own.
It is when you have tanks and trucks that can get to Kursk, but no ships that can get to Dover. It's less distance for me to get to Norfolk Island than Perth, but as I lack both a plane and a ship, I can make it to the latter but not to the former.
You've never heard of Operation: Sea Lion?
No they didn't. Contrary to Churchillian propaganda and subsequent mythologising, the Battle of Britain was never in doubt. Germany was incapable of achieving air superiority, let alone the air supremacy it needed for an invasion, over either Southern England, and couldn't even hit the rest of the British Isles. This is why the school of thought that the Blitz was simply an attempt to terrorise the British into a capitulation, rather than as part of a legitimate strategy to prepare for an invasion, is gaining currency in the historical community.
No, they didn't. See my comments above to Ajidica, links included. Germany had a quantitave advantage in its army, and enjoyed a similar initial advantage with the Luftwaffe, but the RAF swiftly eclipsed the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht was incapable of reaching the UK, or of reaching North Africa in sufficient numbers to conquer Britain through the "back door," by taking Suez and threatening India.
The distance between me and my toes is short, but I'm damned if I can touch them half the time. I can't touch my roof, as I do not possess a ladder. Germany did not possess the requisite landing craft to invade the UK. Now, they could have landed small detachments on British soil. They landed spies there on multiple occasions. They also paradropped several spies. But they could not launch a sustained, prolonged invasion of the UK, due to the lack of necessary ships. They were so desperate they considered modifying barges built for traversing the Rhine to cross the English Channel, which would have simply resulted in a lot of German helmets and guns at the bottom of the English Channel, just waiting for scuba divers to turn them into a tourist attraction.
This is true. But Hitler also never wanted to invade Poland or France. He had tremendous respect for the French, telling Goebbels; "Except for us, the French are the best fighters. They will be great allies..." He wanted Alsace-Lorraine, but was willing to sacrifice it for the greater goal of getting France onside, much as he sacrificed South Tyrol to Mussolini's Italy for the same purpose.
He also pursued a rapprochement with Poland for five years, aimed at forming an anti-communist bloc in Eastern-Central Europe, until Ribbentrop, to Hitler's immense frustration, provoked a diplomatic furore by expelling Polish-born Jews from the Sudetenland, sending them back to Poland, which, as a very anti-Semitic state in its own right, didn't want them. Ribbentrop was prone to such idiocy, but he was sycophantic enough that he usually got away with it. If Hitler had the capacity to invade the UK, he would have done so.
I did? I don't remember doing that.
Don't mind if I do.
Mannerheim wasn't a Nazi, he was Finnish. Do you mean the recorded conversation between Hitler and Mannerheim where Hitler admitted that invading the USSR was a mistake?
Firstly, distance doesn't matter if you have the fuel and other supplies to travel it. The US launched a successful trans-continental invasion from across the Atlantic, and occupied both Japan and Korea from across the Pacific. Germany's problem was logistics, not distance. And very little of that land beyond the Volga was useful; if the Soviets were forced back there, they wouldn't be able to do much with it.
To your "initial point," Moscow was the administrative centre of the USSR, as well as its cultural, economic, telecommonuications, and transport hub. If Moscow is taken you effectively cut off Siberia and the Caucasus from Archangelsk, Leningrad, and everything else west of Moscow. The Soviet transportation system was both incredibly centralised and incredibly backwards by the standards of the time. There was absolutely no redundancy, with the sole exception of the Trans-Siberian railroad, which passed Moscow anyway. If Moscow were seized, the rump Soviet Union in the west is now out of communication with the evacuated Politburo in the east. Supplies from the US that go through Archangelsk and Murmansk are now unable to reach the Soviet forces east of Moscow, and the overland route from Vladivostok is both slower and capable of carrying less. It also takes longer to get supplies from the US to Vladivostok than it does from the US to Murmansk. The other route, through Iran, is even slower.
Then there's the morale issue. Stalin already descended into depression and was almost overthrown during the initial stages of Operation: Barbarossa; it would appear that he kept his job mostly because none of his potential successors - Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, Zhukov, etc. - had any better ideas for dealing with the German advance, and didn't want to engender a political crisis on top of a military one. But if Moscow falls, Stalin is almost certainly being overthrown. I imagine this is more likely to be a decision by the military than the Politburo, which leads to a power struggle at the worst possible time. Stalin did such a poor job of handling the initial stages of the war that it would be only prudent to overthrow him in the event that the capital fell. And that's assuming that Stalin, who refused to leave Moscow during the German advance, despite evacuating the rest of the government to Kuibyshev, isn't killed or captured by the German advance.
Finally, there's the administrative issue. The USSR's centralising tendencies have long been overplayed in the West, but they certainly existed. Information, like the transportation hubs mentioned earlier, had to pass through a very stratified, centralised system. Stalin's USSR was a bureaucratic nightmare. And that bureaucracy all went through Moscow. What happens when that bureaucracy, absolutely essential to running a state of the USSR's size and complexity, already dislocated by war, suddenly finds that it's end-point is under enemy occupation? At best there is a bureaucratic freeze as functions are transferred to Kuibyshev. More likely, there is panic and confusion, and law and order break down. This is disastrous in wartime, as the military relies on that bureaucracy more than any other organisation; Stalin bureacratised his military early, so as to ensure its loyalty. Since many of the USSR's officers were newly liberated from the gulag, where they were sent on Stalin's orders, it's unlikely they would be terrible interested in rebuilding bureacratic networks, rather than simply pillaging for the resources they needed to keep their soldiers alive.
It is far from certain that the fall of Moscow would doom the USSR; it is possible that the alternate arrangements made by Molotov at Kuibyshev would have kept the Soviet state alive, and that Germany would face similar issues of overstretch and undersupply at any rate. But a German victory, while impossible without Moscow, suddenly becomes very, very likely with it.
This is an excellent summation of Moscow's importance as a transport hub.
To be fair, Speer was not exactly known for his honesty. And Hitler wasn't known for having a particularly coherent foreign policy.
