tiger tanks, were they as fearsome as they are depicted ? Hi I have seen several documentaries most see it as a very deadly weapon as I’m sure it was . when the 88mm main gun starts firing don’t be in it’s sights. But the allies managed to eventually defeat the monster tank . was it down to just superior numbers or changing tactics
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Airpower. That’s the problem with all heavy tanks in that they can take a brutal beating and outgun their enemies at range like naval battle but planes can come in and drop bombs on the almost unarmed top of the tanks. And those bombs create such destruction around the tank even if they don’t knock out the tank, they can easily shred a tread, making the tank immobile.
Also by the time the Allies got to France, the Germans were undergoing SEVERE fuel shortages so they couldn’t be used in tactics of maneuver.
I’m not sure this video is completely right, so don’t take it as gospel, but it matches what I know:
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Thank You Charlottev . Yes Having air Superiority made a big Differance . When the sky is full of allied planes it is nearly impossible to move during daylight hours . I have also read that even if they were in a position to attack anywhere within 15 miles of the Normandy beaches naval gunfire was a problem . there isn’t much you can do even in a Tiger tank when a 15 inch shells from a battleship start exploding around you
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Hey everyone, in Canada there was an event called “If Day”, which was an event where the government locked down the city of Winnipeg under a fake German occupation. Real soldiers dressed in fake uniforms would patrol the streets and and stop people and such. My question is how did the rest of the country react to this and did it make news outside of Canada as well?
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Hi Indy and Team, thank you you for this wonderful dive in to history.
Intelligence gathering is done by all major beligerents to help their decision making. On July 2nd 1941, Japan made the decision to turn to the south. What spying, trade negotiations, or other intelligence gathering did the Empire of Japan employ in order to prepare for their push South and December 1941?
Highest praise for the TimeGhost and the entire team.
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You COULD…but the Nazis would have decided to play with N-Stoff and lob them at the ships n the English Channel once they were locked into support gunfire. And what is N-Stoff? Imagine xenomorph blood, but it sets EVERYTHING on fire and burns at 2400 degrees Celsius, explodes on contact with water, creates huge plumes of on not one but TWO horrific kinds of acid and doesn’t require oxygen to burn so you can’t even use air suppression to put it out. . Put this on a bomb, get a hit anywhere on a battleship and well…it’s gone If it doesn’t kill the entire crew, it will eat through the bottom of the hull after setting everything imaginable on fire. .
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Hello Charlotte, the n stoff you were referring to was that the same stuff to used in the rocket I believe it was HE 163 the swallow if I got my plans right was there two mixtures and mix them together they explode the first Naval gunfire goes HMS warspite wore 15 inch guns out firing shells at Normandy and several of the old battleships did the same as well as USS Nevada a Pearl Harbor veteran all together from what I found out 7 battleships including the warspite several heavy Cruisers light Cruisers and destroyers he may not have been 100% accurate but I know I wouldn’t want to be standing i nearby when one this big shells landed
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@doironrobert Imagine what would have happened if the Luftwaffe had deployed N-Stoff bombs, not at Normandy, but earlier, saying the invasion of Sicily? Beyond all the ground crew that might have burned alive carting around the stuff, if you deploy enough of it, you end the notion of a capital ship.
Imagine worse, if the Germans gave N-Stoff to the Japanese and they used it in the Layette Gulf or the battle of the Philippines more generally, even if it was only naval vessels?
I can’t even imagine a world where every naval ship has to be as expendable as a destroyer. I imagine what would happen in practice is that the world after the war, which might include Germany, Nazis or not, in signing the incendiary treaties decades earlier, which would have definitely taken things like WP off the ‘it’s legal in some capacity’ list. Cause infantry is easily replaceable and cheap in weeks. Warships are not
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Hi Charlotte, did a little checking into N Stoff and it was quite nasty ,as danger to the people producing it aswell as those you want to use it on. imagine you’re in a German bomber containing and N stoff bombs first thing is you lucky they can get them loaded on a bomber without it exploding and incinerating the bomber and all people around it. Next is 's making it to the Target knowing one or two hits from a fighter or anti aircraft means you go up in a terrible explosion which you have absolutely no chance of surviving. The stuff certainly was very dangerous but using it as a weapon especially in those days would have meant storing and handling the stuff then what if an Allied bombing raid drop the bomb close to where the stuff is being stored can you imagine a tank of the stock going up? The thing about a weapon like this is to have it work on the enemy it was so unstable that it was more dangerous to those handling it than those who it was being used on
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That’s the basic idea. If you had ANY another option than to use N-Stoff, you’d it instead. But it does things nothing else can. Like burning at 2400 degrees with exactly zero ways to put it out. One of the things we need to keep in mind is the Luftwaffe early in the war had NO good means or developed doctrine of how to sink ships, particularly capital ships. Hitler was building up for a land war and plan-z only kicked off in late 1938 and wouldn’t be finished until 1949 IF Germany had all the resource allocation it had in peacetime.
What this means is capital ships aren’t readily replaceable, and the RN isn’t going to risk unless the need is dire or the risk is low., which means if you can flush them from their hidey holes, you’d better make sure you get them.
Consider the battle of Jutland: the ships pounded each other mercilessly for two days. 250 ships, only 8,500 killed, ZERO battleships sunk and only 4 out of the 14 battlecruisers sunk. That means for the big capital ships, which are the important ones for fleet in being and blockade purposes, you either need to cherry tap them to death or…get creative.
I understand the trepidation but have you SEEN the 1969 movie ‘The Battle of Britain?’ That’s a pretty faithful recreation of the battle, and let me tell you when you are flying in a WW2 fighter plane, you are riding a giant fuel-air bomb. Your chances of bailing out are slim: you’re going too fast, the too many ways to spin, and no ejector seat. And those pilots flew anyway, mostly thinking it would never happen to them, as young men do.
More importantly, sinking the RN is such a war critical thing that either the USN or the RN losing huge amounts of capital ships, which take years to build and knowing they weren’t lucky shots like taking out the planes on the Japanese carriers in Midway, the Allies lose power projection capacity, you make the war all but unwinnable. In something like 1940, the only real bargaining chip the British had was the RN. You kill the RN, the empire ceases to matter, the wooden walls of England are gone.
So you’re not gonna be short of volunteers, even suicide squad types if their actions can win the war overnight.
Any notion of the other side bombing the airfields, that’s just a risk you have to take. Also despite N-Stoff’s horrific reputation, there weren’t many accidents with the stuff in weapons trials, nor with storing nearly 30,000 tons of the stuff in a single bunker. I mean the Germans didn’t even blow up the bunker, and it would have been trivial to do so.
Honestly, world wars are struggles for regime survival. I think the Allies might have made a peace with the German resistance, but not with Hitler. And the thing is Hitler never had a realistic way to threaten regime survival of the British elite. Take it out and he does.
The Germans…lacked imagination, Hitler on down. If you were to read Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction, he details how the Wehrmacht high command signed off on Barbarossa figuring that 20 million Russians would starve to death because the harvests would be disrupted, mostly because they had no idea how to prevent that short of not invading. It didn’t happen because the Russians simply depopulated the cities and worked on their parents now collectivized farms because in pre-modern agriculture the yield of land is dependent on how many people are working a given acre of crops. So when you watch Conspiracy and they are saying they need to exterminate the Jews cause there’s not enough food, they aren’t lying. They just had very bad, very conventional agricultural polcies that the Russians shows could have been worked around but they were…apathetic about trying too hard. It’s one of the most enraging things imaginable when you realize the death camps were born of Nazis LAZINESS, as much as malice. And mind you I got that from Tooze.
My point though is it’s a STUPIDLY dangerous substance, and deploying it IS a gamble, and IS going to kill a lot of your own people. But so is letting the war go on and on and on. Like IIRC in May of 1941, before Barbarossa, and pretty much ROFLSTOMPING everyone everywhere, Axis KIAs for the month were 7,000+. That’s 84,000young men killed every year. If the Germans lost that relatively paltry amount for the entirety of WW2 with no civilians killed, is 504,000 men who have died, and in practice, nearly 504,000 women whose chance of finding a husband and marrying is very low and their chances of having children goes down about 2/3 as much. Germany lost ten times as many, but 500,000 is marginally over 1/3 of the casualties the Germans lost in World War I.
The sooner you end the war, the sooner you staunch the bleeding. You end the war one month early, you save 7,000 lives, just one your side. You’re not gonna get sub crews to use this in the battle of the Atlantic, you’re not gonna get flamethrower troops to strap this stuff to their backs, cause the payoff isn’t worth it. But in very very select circumstances where the targets are super high value, it’s worth the risk, and it’s even worth the risk to the pilots and ground crew.
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Hi Charllotte , By 1944 the third Reich was in a bad way , and Hitler was getting desperate . The Allies had landed in Normandy and the Russians were at the borders of Eastern Europe and The allies have broken out of their beacheads and by September had liberated part of France . ( My uncle Victor was Killed in action on sept 5 1944 during the build up to take the channel fort at Boulogne , he was with the Canadian 3rd Division he is buried at Pas de Calais cemetary ) The German Army fought for nearly every inch but by that time the mostly knew it was finished . As for using Nstoff why didn’t they use it in the V1 or V2 the V2 was a ballistic missile and the allies had no defence against it would you imagine a few hundred pounds of this stuff in a V2 warhead ! there was no warning when they fell on London one minute people were going about their lives and another minute they were gone . yet to my knowledge i don’t think it was used . like all Hitler,s wonder weapons they caused terrible damage and t killed allot of people but they didn’t change the outcome . and like with the V2 it was years ahead off anything the allies had . but more people were killed building and launching them than were killed when they hit … n stoff was just too hard to handle and when you don’t have any way to control it one accident could spell disaster .the Americans found their own answer to Nstoff and they used it to destroy Tokyo and other Japanese Cities Killing more people than the 2 atomic bombs it is Nalpalm …
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In his book, Panzer Leader By Heinz Guderian, he asserted that the German Wehrmacht was clean, is this true, and if so to what regard where they clean?
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Hello Indy, Sparty, Astrid, Anna and Crew,
Great job with the series. The recent episodes of War Against Humanity have made me wonder about how the Kriegsmarine was involved with Nazi acts of brutality. Beyond serving under Nazi leaders and sinking merchant ships in the Battle of the Atlantic, do you know of any specific examples of Kriegsmarine involvement in the Holocaust or other Nazi atrocities? I haven’t been able to find much information on this subject.
Thanks for your help and keep up the great work,
Ben
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Hello guys! Thank you so much for the brilliant work you’ve continued to pull off throughout the years
My question is:
In your between two wars episodes covering Italy and most dissections (documentaries, books etc) of Italy’s economic and military performance throughout 1930-1944, the Italian bureaucracy is often blamed for being bloated, convoluted, and incredibly inefficient. What precisely made Italy’s bureaucracy inefficient, and what are some examples of the way that it hurt the economy and the military?
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Indy,
Did the Nazis consider giving independence to Non-Russian Soviet States and allying with them (Ukraine, Baltic States, etc…)? Or did they have the same disdain for them as they did with the Russians?
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There were semi independent state of Lokot Autonomy established in 1941 with help of Wehrmacht. As well as Zuev Republic, but it was much smaller.
Hitler considered Cossacks aryans and respected them as great warriors, when Germans would come in to Don and Kuban they would permit Cossack meetings, the meetings would support Germans and together they would creat brigades who would fight against communists.
In Caucases hitler considered Georgians, Armenia’s, Azeri and other mountain tribes as aryans. Germans established many divisions from their groups.
In Urals and Siberia Turkistan Legion was created, serving in it were people from Idal-Ural, Kalmyks and others.
Would there be states for them or would they be puppet states we will never know. There might have been and might have not
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Thanks for sharing! I appreciate the insight
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Hi Guys! I was wondering what Vichy’s political reaction was to Syria getting invaded. How close did they come to declaring war and why didn’t they?
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You might be interested in these news articles and State Department telegrams that I have compiled regarding the Syrian situation. It’s admittedly a long catalog but it’s worth the read. 
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HI Indy, Spartacus, and Astrid.
I know that Indy in the Great War series talked about how the German military’s fear that in some years Russia’s economy and industry would be too powerful for Germany to ever confront so that’s why they wanted it go too war with Russia then rather then later, I was thinking due to the fact that most World War Two generals on the German side served in World War One that it could explain there rush to start conflict with the Soviet Union that soon rather then end it with the allies first?
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