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Was invading the Soviet Union a stupid idea? - Barbarossa without Hindsight

HOA_KSOP said:
I'm not so sure about that. Rommel cuts the Suez and takes Alexandria, the Royal Navy is kicked out of the eastern Med. That only leaves one way to Malta and it makes it much easier for the Italian air force, navy, and the Luftwaffe to blockade the island and starve it into submission. Or you just airdrop onto Malta instead of Crete, since your plan is to own the Eastern Med, to begin with.
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With Malta in British hands, Rommel's supply lines would always be a disaster... and North Africa was a war of logistics -- DAK always fought on a shoestring and Italian merchant marine was virtually annihilated trying to keep Axis in North Africa suppled.
 
Rico said:
With Malta in British hands, Rommel's supply lines would always be a disaster... and North Africa was a war of logistics -- DAK always fought on a shoestring and Italian merchant marine was virtually annihilated trying to keep Axis in North Africa suppled.
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Are we talking about what actually happened versus what could have happened?
 
HOA_KSOP said:
"Hold at all costs, fight to the last man" as excellent tactics,
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I didn't talk about Hitler; he was a corporal with a good dose of PTSD I suspect. The only explanation I have for the obsessive anti-Semitism.
 
jobu88 said:
It ignored geographic reality and Russian manpower and industrial potential.
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If I remember correctly the Germans didn't want to take all Russia but "only" the European part of the country which is borded by the Ural Mountains. If they had managed to take Moscow and end the Soviet government there's the chance that many people beyond the Ural Mountains would have been happy with that so they could become independent countries.

If Germany had attacked Soviet Union in September 1939 instead of Poland they would maybe have had the moral support of the western European countries and USA as many were worried about the red threat.
 
HOA_KSOP said:
Hmmm, then makes you wonder why Hitler didn't give Rommel a Panzer Armee instead of a Panzer Korp and have him drive into Irag and then into the Caucasus from the south. If Rommel almost takes N. Africa and the Suez with a corps, he surely would have taken it with an army.
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Two words: the Royal Navy.
 
HOA_KSOP said:
The British stopped a panzer Corps, I doubt they would have stopped a Panzer Armee. The Panzer Armee captures Alexandria and the Royal Navy has no base.
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From Gibraltar, heck all the way from England, the Royal Navy could block supplies going from Italy to Africa. You don't have to have Alexandria. We did it to Japan operating out of Pearl Harbor nearly 4,000 miles away. Not saying it would have been easy but sea power was the UK's one huge advantage. A Panzer army requires a huge supply chain none of which can be flown by air, it has to go by sea. And it can't land just anywhere, there has to be a port facility, so you blockade Tobruk, you blockade Benghazi, where they gonna land supplies on that scale? Germany supplied the Afrika Korps on an absolute shoestring with whatever ships they could cobble together and it was never enough for a panzer Corps, now we're talking about an Army. There's lot of what-ifs and maybes, fair enough, but sea power beats land power when land power has to cross the ocean

P.S. I love good old historical what-if debates like this.
 
jobu88 said:
From Gibraltar, heck all the way from England,
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Yes, and Spain stayed out of it. For the Germans, a major disaster. Even the carrot on the stick aka Gibraltar was not enough to sway Franco. After all, Franco was in power thanks to the Condor Legion.
 
Well, I think Gibraltar could have been nullified if Germany would have told France they were going to allow basing rights in French Morrocco or there would be no Vichy France . Then you get your air power and a suitable garrison there and make life in Gibraltar very risky for the Royal Navy. In the interim, you do an air invasion of Malta in conjunction with an amphibious assault and then you build supplies for 60 days after Malta falls, then you steamroll Egypt and Palestine and Iraq and you eventually are sitting on the southern border of the USSR. Then Stalin has to defend against threats to the Baku Region as well as his frontier with Germany. In the interim Germany now has access to Romania and Iraqi oilfields, so petrol and lots of it are no longer a problem. The British have to respect the threat to the Arabian peninsula and to India, with the latter being pressed between Germany and Japan. Keep in mind that oil had been discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938.

Germany sitting on the border of the Ottoman Empire remnants might be enough to induce them into the Axis fold, as German's in French Morrocco attacking Gibraltar might be the inducement Franco needs to join as well.
 
Guys, you are missing the point here. Hitler had no choice but to start the war. If he did not start it at the time he did Stalin would have invaded Europe in two weeks and with German army busy fighting Britain it is very possible that Soviet army would have steamrolled straight into the heart of Europe.
There is a book with detailed analysis of why this was the case by Viktor Suvorov - Icebreaker. I am not sure if it is translated into English or not. The idea is that Stalin concentrated huge army on the Western border that was an attacking army. There were no fortifications built and he never planned on being on defense.
Here is a wiki page about the book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icebreaker_(Suvorov) - of course it is better to read the book as a whole.
The fall of Third Reich was not due to the failure of capturing Moscow in 1941. The fall of Reich became inevitable when Japan attacked The Untied States and the most industrious country in the world got pulled into the war on the allied side.
 
It's difficult to argue that Hitler fought a pre-emptive defensive war against the Soviets when he had been openly declaring his intention to conquer Russia since 1926, as published in Mein Kampf vol. 2, chapter 14: "Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy".

And when there was a whole masterplan for how the inhabitants of the Soviet Union would be exterminated to free up their lands for German settlers (Generalplan Ost).
 
Read the book. It is very well written. I don't know how one can argue against his arguments.
I grew up in the Soviet Union. It was a very agressive state that tried exporting its ideology worldwide. The idea of exporting the world revolution was one of the foundations of communist ideology, especially in early stages. Of course noone knows what Stalin thought. To dismiss the idea that he wanted to conquer the world based on (what exactly?) is simply crazy. Read Karl Marx, read Lenin and especially Trotsky. You will get a better feel about what Suvorov was talking about.
 
Communism and National Socialism. One, Workers of the world unite! The other justice for the ethnic German majority only. Surprise, surprise the Russians fought like lions for some reason. Compared with the feudal system of the Tsars it was not bad for them.
 
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@Larsen I don't think anyone is arguing with the fact that Stalin coveted other peoples land, in fact he was watching with interest at developments between Germany and the western democracies to see what the response would be to the Austrian Anschluss, the Munich Agreement and further annexation of Czechoslovakia, etc. When the response was timid at best, he welcomed the Molotov-Ribbontrop pact in order to - in theory - keep Germany on-side while they divided eastern europe between them knowing that Britain and France wouldn't do anything about it.

In the long run, Stalin almost certainly intended to take over the entirety of Europe if given the chance, the Iron Curtain and puppeting every state in his sphere of influence post-WWII is evidence enough of that, but in 1941, let alone 1939, he knew his forces were nowhere near ready to carry those plans out.

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As for the topic at hand, Germany could well have beaten the Soviet Union in 1941 had they played their cards correctly. If not for the idiotic 'master race' ideology the Nazis espoused, they would have found willing and eager populations in eastern europe to enlist in helping carry the war to Moscow, Ukrainians absolutely hated the Russians for their policies which caused famines throughout the 1920s and 30s, the Baltic states and Finland also had no love for the Soviets after attaining their freedom post WWI, even the Poles, despite their differences with the Germans, may well have welcomed the chance to get revenge at a hated neighboring bully, or just simple opportunism.

Of course, without the whole racial purity thing, the Nazis wouldn't have been Nazis, so the point is academic.

The other obvious points have already been mentioned, starting the campaign earlier, not dividing up the army groups in an attempt to grab more objectives than could realistically be managed. Conquering Leningrad instead of just besieging it, thus tying down German forces in the area for years, etc etc.
 
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I'm not dismissing the theory that Stalin might have planned for an attack, but I have seen no real evidence for it. No memoirs, diaries, plans, etc. Not on the Soviet side, and not on the German side either.

I don't even think any of the people on trial in Nüremberg after the war claimed that the reason Germany attacked USSR was because they had credible intel that the Soviets were about to attack Germany. Correct me if I'm wrong here.
 
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