I apologize for the long time away, just been very busy, not so much away… Anyways I find it interesting that despite you really trying to answer my question directly which I appreciate, you seem a bit hesitant to say the Germans would have gained more with even more force. I think there is no doubt they would have performed even better with more tanks but also other things lacking for the German army in 1941. Here’s a section from one of my WWII books, The West Point Military History Series The Second World War Europe and the Mediterranean :“the Germans neglected to initiate all-out war production, despite the impression they gave abroad. Instead, German factories produced relatively modest amounts of first one weapon, then another in response to various needs of several campaigns. Even as Barbarossa began, Hitler was planning a shift to production of planes and ships to defeat Great Britain. As a result, the Germans were unprepared for a protracted war in Russia. To take the most important example, they did not produce the armor which would be needed. The Panzer III equipped with a short 50-mm gun which served as the main battle tank during 1941, was produced so slowly that only 1,090 were ready for the invasion of Russia. At the same time, over 800 Pzkw! and over 1,000 Pzkw II tanks remained on active service although the germans knew them to be obsolete. Although it was already in service during the summer of 1940, only about 550 Panzer IV’s were ready for Barbarossa. Rather than produce more armor, the Germans expanded their force by reducing the authorized strength of a panzer division. Each 1940 panzer division gave up one regiment which formed the nucleus of a new panzer division which was authorized only 190 tanks. Other crucial arms and equipment fared even worse than armor. The Germans produced few tracked prime movers, and their production of heavy infantry weapons and field artillery even declined during 1941.” I’m not exactly sure what the original size or 1940 size of a panzer division was but I’m gonna guess a regiment bigger would mean somewhere between 225 tanks to 300 tanks. Not only did my book point out that Germany had the room to produce far more tanks and of better quality, but the Germans could have used more heavy infantry weapons, field artillery and tracked prime movers. So yes the most critical area the Germans should have been better prepared in was Panzers. Getting rid of the obsolete Panzer 1 and II’s, and producing significantly more III’s and IV’s for Russia. Instead of 550 Panzer IV’s ready for Barbarossa like the book said, I imagine somewhere between 1200-1500 would have been adequate. Just did the calculation of tanks based off of this section of the book, 3,440. So if were are just going by that, how things played out, but with more III’s and IV’s produced and ready for combat by June 1941, I would actually believe the German numbers should be 1500-2000 Panzer IV’s and the other 1440-1940 tanks Panzer III’s… This is if the Germans had just produced the better quality tanks and still mustered out around 3500 tanks as they did in June 1941 for Barbarossa. If we are not assuming the Germans failed to realize they needed an all-out war production economy for WWII in September 1939, than surely the year between the fall of France and the start of Barbarossa is when we should mark their failure to realize they would need this type of economy. So if they had started producing for Russia in late June/early July 1940 as they should have, it would make sense that they would have had even more tanks for Barbarossa than the 3500 they had. Now a year is still definitely not a lot of time, especially for planning to invade Russia but there is no doubt the Germans should have been even more prepared and powerful heading into Russia. Considering this, I would guess that 2500 Panzer IV’s, 2000 Panzer III’s, and however many I’s and II’s the Germans still felt like throwing into the mix, lets just say what they had in reality, 1800. This is 6,300 tanks, this would mean considerably more Panzer divisions and likely a balanced amount in each of the three Army Groups heading into Russia. I would even consider the Germans strong enough to do better if we leave out the 1800 Panzer I and II’s but I digress. If the production had met the levels needed for an all-out war production economy, to me this would have changed Army Group North’s approach on Leningrad. With greater panzer divisions they surely would have attempted to take the city not try and starve it into submission. They also would have gone beyond Tikhvin and would have pushed all the more to link up with the Finns. If the first six months of Barbarossa play out the same strategically, it is open to debate whether or not the Germans could have linked up with the Finns east of Lake Ladoga, but I feel with the greater force they would have taken Leningrad and linked up with the Finns north of the city. With more field artillery this would have added to the misery in Leningrad and would have done even more to bring about the cities surrender. As far as the big debate that played out in reality, should the Germans have pushed on ahead to capture Moscow earlier in the summer of 1941 and not turned south, I guess it’s conceivable with greater Panzer divisions and more balance of panzers in each army group and great shift of resources to help Army Group South would have been necessary. So lets go from a if you’re better prepared the better you will do standpoint. If the Germans had the numbers of Panzers I described earlier, Guderian and others wouldn’t have been needed for a shift south, therefore they continue to head for Moscow in Army Group Center. This still needs huge debate though because theories of how the Russians would have responded need to be taken into account. But it’s true that when the Germans were ready to start going for Moscow in late September they had more force than the Russians could muster, basically a 2-1 superiority in Army Group Center. With a more powerful German Army in August/September 1941, a big push on Moscow I believe would have been more successful. In addition with the areas I mentioned the Germans needing to produce more I want to mention this certainly would have meant more aircraft for Barbarossa as well if they had adopted an all-out war production economy earlier on. The same book I mentioned earlier stated that by the start of Barbarossa, the Germans had 4300 first line aircraft, of which 1530 remained at western air bases at the start of Barbarossa. So if more planes were produced, I’ll guess the Germans should have had at least 4000 aircraft ready for Barbarossa instead of the 2,770 they had. This also would have highly contributed to more German success than they had in the way the war played out. Certainly more of a punch from the Luftwaffe would have also helped Army Groups North and South keep advancing along with Center. Now while I agree that the logistical situation for the Germans was a nightmare, clearly they had the potential and capability to be a much more well rounded force heading into Russia despite this and/or their fuel shortages. So wrapping this up and responding to points you brought up, would the Germans have taken Leningrad? Yes, I just don’t see how more tanks and field artillery wouldn’t have meant a much more successful Army Group North. Does Moscow fall? I believe it does, and before December, maybe even before November or in the beginning of November. Considering the loss of these two vitally important cities, especially Moscow, things would have played out quite differently in the East. Now from then out come the vast Russian hordes from the East, and many freshly trained armies… In the long run I would still feel that the Germans best bet was a treaty in which they control western Russia but the invasion had hit the Russians as Pearl Harbor hit us. Maybe they would have never stopped. But with better numbers and more success for Nazi Germany, This would mean by the time the Tigers and Panthers were introduced to the war Leningrad and Moscow would be in German hands… No doubt the war in the East would have been far longer and even deadlier than it was had the Germans been realistically prepared for Barbarossa in 1941.
So why didn’t the US start formulating a plan for switching to civilian economy immediately after the Yalta conference? You know the countries you are at war with are gonna lose and you immediately need to switch to the civilian economy for all the people you have “employed” for war.
That level of planning was, and is, anathema to the United States. Industry and Commerce would tolerate rationing, wartime price and wage controls and eye-watering tax rates only on the premise that they would be withdrawn after the war, that the economy would be private and left primarily to them.
Plus it wasn’t clear Japan would be defeated that soon; the US Army expected to still be xampaigning in Japan in 1946.
The gas perspective as always is supremely stupid. The oil shortages were always self-inflicted and political. All they needed to do was invade Turkey and secure the Middle East oil supply through the Berlin Baghdad railway, using anti-Turkish counter partisans from the Balkans to “counter” any Tuks who got in the way. This would also put them within striking range of the Caucusus in any Barbarosa so that the Soviets would early on have to torch the oil well there depriving them of freedom of maneuver with their tank armies if not also paralyzing their tractor armies for their remaining collective farms.
As to other material, I advise anyone who wants to run their mouths about other war material lookup German merchant submarines from world war I. These things made a total of I think four trips in 1916 and extended the German war effort before hyperinflation set in by at least a year, at least according to war economists by importing critical war assets from the United States.
I personally did back of the envelope calculations and if the Germans used their type 9s (they’d need more obviously) to import lard at 1940s prices they could have provided the caloric needs for everyone in the occupied territories for a year at half the cost of the V-2 project and gotten a much bigger production bonus in workers not dying and getting sick from hunger and black market activities, and also not stealing food from peasants. And that before buying rubber from Brazil, Uranium from smugglers across the border in VIchy Congo, Tungsten from wherever.
Probably a much better investment than the Battle of the Atlantic, if only from lack of attrition. This is why you DON’T piss off neutral nations. Another lesson Nazi Germany failed to learn from World War I.
“All they needed to do was invade Turkey” ROFL.
It’s a very, very big country, starting with the Bosphorus, with a hell of a lot of really bad terrain. And, assuming that you actually manage to get to somewhere there is oil, how do you get it back to where it’s needed? There are no pipelines, you have no tankers.
The whole Nazi economy was buggered from the start, with sod all mechanisation and no intelligent central planning. Raping the conquered territories was never going to be a long term success.
The Nazis lost the war in 1940, when they failed to destroy the RAF. Or when they failed to build enough U boats early enough. The fact that it took another five years of slaughter to destroy them is an obscenity that must never be forgotten.
Never forget.
Dude Michael, Turkey is a country the size of France with a bunch of hills between a steppe and a fairly flat highland. It’s good cavalry country and has been for thousands of years, only exceptions are the Taurus mountains, the Pontus south of Trebizond and of course the Caucusus.
And the whole point of this counterfactual is talking about how to UNFUCK the German economy and there are plenty of ways to do this, merchant subs bypassing the allied blockade and giving the Nazis infinite more bang for their buck for their war loot would help immensely.
And besides…you put the tankers ON THE RAILCARS. I don’t know if you come from a country where you’ve never seen them but rail tankers are very common and very easy and cheap to make. If you then take the Panzers, overrun Egpyt, and keep going west until you “convince” the Vichy let you use airfields in French Morroco and bomb Gibraltar to bits and take it via air assault with Royal Italian Naval Support you can also safely ship the shit out of Adana(?) and or other ports in the Tarsus region.
You can’t unfuck something as fucked as the Nazi economy.
You say that, but the fundamentally even worse fucked up Soviet economy ran for 70 years giving away billions of dollars to every crank revolutionary under the sun, not just in AKs but also in “social development” money which the revolutionaries piteously stole for the hierarchies own luxuries just as the anticommunists stole the money just as rapaciously 95% of the time from the Western powers. It’s the power structure of dictatorships.
The unbelievable corruption we see in Nazi Germany in the War Against Humanity and Between Two Wars Episodes is actually perfectly normal for any dictatorship according to Bruce de la Mequista’s Dictator’s Handbook. It’s not just that power corrupts, i’s that corruption is a means to power and absolute corruption is a means to absolute power, which is why so many African dictations can simultaneously run their countries into the ground and remain in power for their entire natural lives. So have no doubts that this level of corruption existed in the Soviet Union too, as a matter of shoring up loyalty in the power structure.
As to the Dictator’s Handbook, despite the title and the really depressing first half, it’s actually the best systems leve defense ofl Democracy I’ve ever read. Democracy, when used correctly, is the best anti-corruption device we’ve ever come up with and that serves the people best in so many ways. It’s also free to listen to on Youtube and I cannot encourage everyone enough to listen to it.
You want to keep the authoritarians out of power, the real ones? Towards the end, there’s a bit of an action plan of how to actualy shore up the Instutions
I’m sorry, the previous assertion about the Berlin-Baghdad Railway was a classic case of fighting from the Map, not reality.
It is impossible to envision Germany exploiting Iraqi oilfields and operating the Berlin-Baghdad Railway as a pipeline through thousands of kilometers of hostile country at any practicable level. The British, for a start, would only need to sabotage the Iraqi oilfields in their possession to render them useless for a year in more. Plus there would be ample opportunity to counterattack with Indian troops through the Persuan Gulf, in a repeat of the Mesopotamian Campaign of WWI, plus air raids from southern Iraqi airfields, or Jordan, or even Palestine if Lancasters are used.
The Royal Navy would have little trouble providing arms to Turkey to make Germany’s life miserable through the long Turkish coast.
Sounds good in theory, but it’s ridiculous in reality.
No. Let me explain a couple of things:
In 1940 or 1941, it doesn’t matter if the British sabotage the oil fields or not because the oil crisis isn’t going to the Germans until 1942 and historically didn’t really bite them until 1943. This is an investment in case of a long term war.
Then you’ve got to consider in the chaos of war if the Arabs security forces would allow the British to do this which is a real possibility of being foiled. British holds over the mandates are not like the Soviet hold over the Baku oil fields. THey are not absolute in any sense and their manpower coverage is a lot thinner.
As to Turkish resistance, the Turkish population is significantly lower than Poland at this time, there are probably a number of cypto Christians of various Ethnicites who can be used as collaborators if put under Italian or self govering administration and that’s before we get to the Kurds.
Then considering this would be before Barbarosa, the Germans have plenty of manpower to garrison the country. Afterwards and even before: there is the crucial factor of Balkans and Anatolian history:
The Turks, especially under the Ottomans, were some of the most cruel and dickish Imperial overlords in human history and they were overlords for a LONG time. Their Muslim subservients hated them and they didn’t have their first borns collected as tribute to be raised as Janissaries. EVERYONE not Muslim in the Balkans hates the Turks. They don’t like each other, but they all hate the Turks, and have more or less since the Turks arrived in Gallipoli in the 1350s.
So, you can bleed off nearly every pro and anti Axis partisan group in the Balkans by offering them free farmland in Anatolia, especially in Greece where the survivors of the Greek Genocide could get first dibs on their historical villages and homesteads. If the Nazis are REALLY unmerciful and let the Balkan pioneers go whole hog you easily get a situation where there isn’t a Turkish partisan within a 100 kilometers of either side of the railway because there isn’t a Turkish man woman or child left alive within 100 kilometers of the railway. If the Hutu could do it, the Serbs and the Greeks could too, faster because they’d have guns.
This would also work really good in reconciling the Greeks in general to the Greek puppet government. Lose most of Thrace but get back provincial Asia maybe good chunks of Bythinia, maybe a self-governing Pontus under nominal Pontic Greek control.
And as I said before, the manpower thing, is illusory when you consider occupation is less intensive than fronts, and that it puts you right next to the Baku oil fields, which you can now bomb or threaten with mountain and airborne troops. Even if you can’t get them it means you can either neutralize them or force the Soviets to torch them, which means their vast tank armies are mostly paralyzed, which is effectively a huge force multiplier to the Wehrmacht.
Plus, just conquering the Middle East and Egpyt shuts down the Suez Canal and frees up the Afrika Korps which is something like 10% of the Wehrmacht’s motors pool. Yeah, look it up, it’s that extreme, it might be 15%, it was an enourmous machine comitment.
The British could and did deal with recalcitrant Iraqi officers in the Anglo-Iraqi War of 1941. The British had the manpower advantage and shorter supply lines through Basra allowing reinforcement by troops from India.
The Germans would be unable to hold, let alone meaningfully exploit Iraqi oilfields, railway or no railway.
The logistics of supporting such an operation were clearly beyond Germany’s capabilities which were always modest logistically. Bleeding them the German Army with attrition was a useful strategy.
Are you kidding me? Really? The Germans had no trouble fielding forces this far south in the last war, they’ll have no trouble in this one. Most of the forces of Middle Eastern Command are in Egypt, the AFVs are second rate, and German military logistics in this theater were always historically constrained by trying to ignore or isolate Malta. Overland the Germans always did much much better. And even historically the British were getting the crap knocked out of them by TWO German divisions without a single railhead from Tripoli, not until they had a completely unflankable position at El-Alemen AND the Americans invaded Africa on the other coast, threatening to roll up the Axis position like a Parchment in the Library of Alexandria, which they did.
The Royal Navy proved very decisively they could not and would not fuck with the strongpoint at Gallipoli (despite Churchill BEGGING them while the Aussies died in huge numbers), which means the Germans can and will transfer troops and supplies overland with imunity both their and the Bospohourous, with a double-wide train track all the way down along with a few older rail lines they’ve already used to great effect elsewhere, with air force covering them that’s already proven that it flies wherever it wants and shit on whatever it pleases like a fleet of incontinent pigeons.
The African War this is not, the Greek slaughter, this is, except no sea evacuation. That is the difference. In the historical Iraq uprising, Germans were far away. Here, Germans very very close, Halitosis close. And…if you want to get technical…if they can’t get the oil from Iraq, and believe me, they would be getting quite a bit very soon given their toehold experience in the Caucuses right as Stalingrad kicked off, they would be getting plenty from Iran.
It’s wishful thinking to think the British would perform anything other than dismally given their track record at any point previously in the war. They would FIGHT very well at the tactical level, but the British Army is simply the short end of the three branches. The money went into the Navy, the Air Force, and the Army in that order pre-war because the French were supposed to be doing the ground-pounding in a tussle with Germany. For the same reason, the German navy was always destined to suck. It’s simple triage: unless you are the US and you have more money than God and Crassus owes YOU outstanding loans.
That’s the Wehraboo interpretation.
Nothing Heer or Luftwaffe is a Wherboo interpretation pre-Barbarossa. Once the US comes in with 40% of the world’s industrial capacity and the German strategic oil supply starts to run dry then you get to cry Wehrboo, not before.
Because before then, the historical record firmly says otherwise. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the British army got its ass handed to it every single time it faced the Germans or the Japanese except Arras, El_Alemein, supported or flanked by the American army or led by Slim. Possible minor exceptions aside this is the flow of the war.
Give me some credit I’m WAY too critical of the technically proficient pinhead German officer corps to be a Wehrboo, but I can’t roll over and pretend the British made a single correct doctrinal or design decision outside of fighter command single 1918 (when it was pretty amazing), nor that the British weren’t completely on the ropes from Dunkirk to Torch. To deny this is to be a …TeaBoo, and frankly invest that energy in the Peninsular Army, Wellington might actually deserve it.
More like the bearer of false news. Speaking as a Canadian, your comments are insulting.
Well, sense you feel that way, I have to a basic truth:
Feelings have no place in analysis, NONE. This really pissed me off in some of the bombing threads six months back. Doesn’t matter if grandpa lost his house and leg to German blitzing, violence is a fucking TOOL, not a pastime, not a means of Catharsis either. The only grounds for bombing back is if those bombs are actually the most cost-effective means of spending war material when morale, retaliation, post-war rebuilding, and material losses delivering the thing are put into account.
But since we are all human, allow me to offer a counterpoint, an American counterpoint, a mea culpa that sticks in my crawl, our big screw in Afghanistan. Now I need to make clear in both cases, it’s not the soldiers who screwed up, small unit tacts were fine and I don’t think there was a German who is a small-arms fight respected anyone more than the British soldier and his commanding officers (they feared the Americans more because they would throw a fuckton of artillery at them move up a bit and throw a fuckton of artillery at them again).
So why did we lose, and we absolutely lost a 20-year war in God’s open-air opium pit, so why? Because we lost Doctrinally, because we didn’t learn the lessons of when we actually won, cause we didn’t quite realize how we actually won at least won the peace. And there’s a book on this
Theives of State by Sarah Chayes
Now in the case of the British military in World War II, you have a state that is borderline insolvent, in danger of breaking up and by the time the French sign the armistice, it’s too late to make substantial changes to interwar doctrine and design practices. Just watching Chieftain’s channel on Youtube, tank designs are a five-year process from scratch to production, and most weapon systems are also years in the making. Doctrines are the same. In the time span of any theoretical invasion of Tukey and into the middle east, were talking 18 months at most from first contact from seeing how badly antiquated and wrongly built the army was in May of 1940 to when the pressure would be taken off it.
That’s not enough time to correct for any army. That not insulting, that’s the truism you go to war with the army you have.
The American case with Afghanistan and also Vietnam is actually far worse because we had AMPLE time to get our heads out of our asses and we largely refused to. Now ours were political doctrines rather than operational ones, but both are painful lessons in having your thinking done by fools.
And believe me, the lessons of both wars insult both sides in America.
The left says: These wars are imperialist and immoral!
And the Right says: “You dishonor the dead by running! We’re also fighting really bad people who will kill and enslave without mercy if we leave!”
Both are emotional, and thus bullshit, in that they don’t address the problems, nor do they point towards solutions. Values are meaningless, only solutions matter.
Now even I had had an emotional investment in these which being a misanthrope was:
We can’t leave: it’s safer to bleed in front of a shark than show weakness in front of a human! And given the age of terrorism that followed VIetnme in the West but not the east, I think I have a point. But that doesn’t solve the endlesss money and lives I guess being sent down the sinkhole.
In the American case, our jackass State Department is so eager to work with established governments or easy to control puppets from within the American establishment (Syngman Rhee, Karsai, and this last president of Afghanistan were ALL American university professors before becoming presidents of American client states), that we don’t pay attention to their often black hole like levels of corruption which causes the people to not support the other side which often scares them to death but they hate our guy so bad they sit on their hands in spite or dispair and hope, somehow both will die and they will be left the hell alone/ That was certainly the Sarah Chaeys experience with Afghans after being shaken down often multiple times a day by the Karsai police.
This is illustrative of how a bad basic doctrine, in this case, security comes first then good governance spirals into catastrophe in practice. Now I’m not familiar with any stories how exactly bad doctrine sapped the fighting ability of the British army in detail, but I can tell the overview that throughout the way until the very end, we’re talking late 44, and certainly, in 1940, 1941, the Britsh Army had very low initiative, bad reconnaissance (General Freyberg’s reaction to the paratroopers landing on Crete being a comical exaggeration but not by much, and he was considered a very good officer until that point) and coordination with the RAF was from what I understand borderline piss poor.
I have to be honest, you’ve pulled the Wehrboo card, the pulled the insult card, you’ve pulled the ‘they can’t pul the logistics card’, and at every turn, I’ve given fairly detailed reasons why these are not the case.
I submit you suffer from a rather severe case of lack of imagination. You can only think about what did happen, but not what could have given the materials at hand.
See, given your responses, I don’t think if the Japanese hadn’t taken Singapore the way they did, I think you’d be arguing with me right now the Japanese could never, EVER have ridden 200 miles down the Malay jungle on motley collection ob BICYCLES, riding them until they were grating on the rims to outflank the British at every turn, that would be ABSURD!
And that’s EXACTLY what happened.
Conventional wisdom is a dangerous thing, so is national pride. Both are paper fortresses. And I say this as someone who’s been licking my wounds since August.
Yes, you are being a Wehraboo. The chronic deficiencies of US tactics could be its own thread cough Admiral King cough Anzio**cough
“Now I’m not familiar with any stories how exactly bad doctrine sapped the fighting ability of the British army in detail, but I can tell the overview that throughout the way until the very end, we’re talking late 44, and certainly, in 1940, 1941, the Britsh Army had very low initiative, bad reconnaissance (General Freyberg’s reaction to the paratroopers landing on Crete being a comical exaggeration but not by much, and he was considered a very good officer until that point) and coordination with the RAF was from what I understand borderline piss poor.”
That’s highly ignorant. It has been explained many times on this channel just how poor German logistics and sustainment were from the start.
Secondly your brazen dismissal of the British and Commonwealth Armies is at odds with the record where the British sand Commonwealth forces stood on their own records in Africa, Italy and Northwest Europe. We can start with El-Alamein, continue through Sicily and the Italian mainland and pass on to D-Day.
Your comment on British Armour are also misguided. The Matilda was one of the finest early-war tanks and inadvertently touched off a tank arms race. The British Army was the only fully motorized army in Europe in 1940 and it remained highly motorized throughout the war.
Yeah, British troops fought very well and the and the Matilda literally tanked everything short of an 88 shell…
ON THE TACTICAL LEVEL
Here we are talking past each other, in fact in a lot of ways we are talking past each other. On the tactical level doesn’t matter when you lose on the operational and strategic which the British did until Torch. The Germans lost in North Africa because they were world-class Dumb Dumbs, and you are right about the logistics system…for North Africa. For Europe on the European gauge rail system the German logistics system isn’t that bad, it’s significantly degraded from what it was in World War I and that is ALL Hitler’s fault, but it’s pretty decent. In Russia, dear Lord…
Hitler needed to autodictat himself the tonnage capacity of putting shit on boats.
All the squeezy squeezy the British could do to Rommel through Malta, Tito couldn’t hope to do a tenth of that to the supplies running through Yugoslavian rail lines. Rommel got to Lybia and the local command told him in Morpheus voice “Welcome to the Desert of total lack of Italian Infrastructure” he couldn’t even really use Benghazi are a port. Turkey was really backward in the early 1940s in terms of infrastructure but not nearly that backward.
Turkey eliminates the three bottles necks Rommel had historically
Malta
Lybia itself
And the limits of an Italian merchant fleet scattered internationally in June 1940
And see the Berlin Baghdad railway is a European gauge railway, and the Germans have the cars and the engineers and everything to handle this brand spanking new railway like they would anything in France, which they did with aplomb.
As to the America, I will not defend Anzio as landing in front of a cliff is generally not a smart move and generally the kind of thing Mark Clark would come up with. But you kind of missed the point. Napoleon remarked that artillery is the king of the battlefield, the Americans came with way more than anyone else, even before air support, which again they had more of than anyone else, and if you’re ever played an operational level strat game, enough artillery covers a MULTITUDE of sins.
Another thing to consider is not simply cooperation with the RAF, which was not good in 1941, 42, but also pre-Barbarosa, the bulk of the Luftwaffe was free to reign down on Middle east Command if they could get there. And they almost did it with VIchy Syria which is the British invaded. The main problem with your contention is the vast bulk of MEC is deployed by necessity to Egpyt and really can’t be moved to northern Iraq. The British have motor pool more limited than Germany and even more commitments because they are rightfully expecting a Japanese attack in the Far East soon. The Germans can concentrate and that is it’s own logistics advantage.
The Nazi’s still very much thought of themselves as a political party; keeping the civilians back home happy was important to them. That meant producing military ‘goods’ as important as producing civilian goods. And let’s remember, that right up until about December 1941, the Germans had been able to do a pretty good job conquering countries that were attached to Europe.
Also, all them extra tanks and aircraft would have cost a ton of money, and would have required massive increases in production (of iron, for instance), fuel, supply, tankers, tank-repair shops, and so on. It would have required the Nazi’s to be something they weren’t (see below.)
Pz-IV’s with the long-barrel 75 didn’t start being produced until mid-1942, and even the 50mm-armed Pz-III was in the minority in June 1941. (Want to go up against a T-34 with a 37mm popgun? Not me, either.)
The Nazis talked a good game about “total war” (declared by Goebbels - but not until February 1943), but they didn’t do it very well - because it was really just sloganeering. Consumer goods were still produced; food and goods were stolen from other countries (mostly France) to keep the civilians happy. The civilian ‘mood’ was carefully monitored by the SS, and when rationing required things to be less good for the folks at home, the Nazi’s got really nervous. (Goering, for instance, threatened Reich Commissioners in August 1942 with unspecified retribution if they didn’t get better at stealing from conquered countries.)
The Nazis announced they were going to comb through the bureaucracies to get surplus manpower. All the bureacracies declared that everyone was ‘indispensable’, and the Nazi’s didn’t push. They didn’t mobilize female workers in any real way. The Nazi’s still thought of women as baby-factories, and nothing could be done to ‘threaten’ the next generation of good little aryan cannon-fodder.
The Nazi’s never really did come up with a complete plan for military production; as the war got into 1943 and on, Hitler began announcing that one thing or another would have “absolute priority”… until the next thing (the bomber/fighter silliness over the Me-262 is an example.) Weapons manufacturers were not carefully watched, and so would tend to keep right on developing a specific aircraft when told not to. For 1943, Hitler insisted on Panthers and Tigers be built, when Guderian kept advising long-barrel Pz-IV’s – more could be built faster, and would be better in most situations. But Hitler wanted his Panthers-that-still-threw-tracks, Tigers-whose-engines-kept-failing, and Elefants-with-no-machine-guns.
Speer tried to ‘rationalize’ production, but largely failed, because the companies that made up the German war economy were just independent enough to make it impossible.
So, if the Germans had realized that the Soviets were going to be a long-term, tough opponent (which they didn’t, or didn’t want to, in June 1941) – maybe. But they’d still have to move supplies for all them vehicles.
So following Napoleon’s strategy.
Would a thrust at Moscow have been able to move faster? Concentrating more panzer divisions may have made faster progress, but they would just have left their supporting foot infantry even further behind.
How difficult would it have been to protect a long narrow thrust against flank attacks.
How much would Soviet war production outside of Moscow been enhanced by not having to relocate east?