It is hard to separate hindsight in some of these discussions.
But it’s also hard to not see massive faults in the run up to battles that it seems that they should have known.
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Great point you make, exactly that is the point of issue on this topic: appreciate your input, the same question I ask on why the Germans chose Crete and not Malta to take by airforce
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Exactly.
Crete is a great point about Turkey, too. All getting Crete does is secure the eastern Med- to what end? Whereas Malta would make supplying N Africa light years more secure- let alone make the supply line much longer for England. Unless they were interested in Turkey. While there’s a “risk” of England jumping into Greece and the Balkans- the supply line that would have to go around Africa through the Suez could never support that had they gotten Malta instead.
A Youtuber called Montemayor did a great pair of videos showing Midway from the Japanese point of view- so we could get an idea of what they were thinking. I would like to see similar insights for some of the German decisions.
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As we can now watch what happens as the Suez canal clogs up it is interesting to contemplate on the impact of Rommel capturing it🧐
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Way to link the past with the present. I was thinking the same thing. After the fall of France taking Malta and invading Egypt should have been the real objective before invading the Soviet Union. What Germany (in both World Wars) did not understand was the concept of strategic warfare (one reason why they did not develop strategic bombers). Sun Tzu describes winning battles before they are fought, or defeating enemies with the least amount of effort. Defeating the British in Egypt cuts the British Empire in half, and results in the Near East being wide open for the taking of the Kirkuk oil pipelines and pushing on to Persian oil fields. As the Axis would advance, Commonwealth resistance would weaken as they could not strategically reinforce this hostile region effectively. This is contrary to the increased resistance of going through the Ukraine and the Caucasus region. This would also geopolitically isolate both Yugoslavia and Greece, resulting in no need to invade them as they most likely would have remained neutral or even increased cooperation with the Axis. The elimination of British from the Near East results in a more cooperative Turkey who may want in against the Soviets as they are the only threat to them. German bombers from Mosul and/or Tabriz would be in range of Baku and other oil producing areas. The oil situation for the Axis would be solved as Persia was also pro-Axis before the Commonwealth and Soviets invaded it. Persia and Afghanistan would also cause the Soviets to have to defend a huge portion of their entire border except for the border regions of China and Mongolia. The situation basically flips as now the Brits are now more starved for oil, unless they get it from the Western Hemisphere nations, and the Soviet army is now stretched thin before a single shot is fired in war.
As far as invading Turkey, I’ve seen it in war games that fighting through the narrow Constantinople/Bosporus is very difficult and Turkey’s supply infrastructure, like Spain, is quite limited. However, they do use the same rail gauge, unlike Spain and Portugal. Even then, the terrain in Turkey is very mountainous and difficult to move through, so it is not really worth it militarily, strategically, or geopolitically. As stated above, there are better options.
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Much appreciate your comprehensive contribution to the topic, John!
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I used to think like you did until I watched that Stalingrad series. The reason why Manstein was replaced with Model was because Germany in 1943 no longer had the fuel supplies to fight a war of mobility in which Manstein’s tactics relied on. In fact, as the war went on, the German Army became less motorized. Model was more of a static warfare tactician and was quite good at using such tactics to bleed the enemy. 6th Army could not break out because it lacked the fuel supplies to effectively do so. Same with the XIV Pz Corps when it was cut off early in the battle north of Stalingrad, but it held out and supply was reestablished. Demyansk also gave the false impression that large scale units could be supplied via an airbridge.
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I very much see your point. However, how much of that result was due to bad planning of the entire theater? I find it hard to believe that they didn’t notice that they were going SO far from the German supply chain that supplies were going to be the #1 problem with the entire attack. The fuel supply issue could not have just come up a year after the invasion. If it honestly did, the lack of planning pretty much doomed the attack from day one.
For such a powerful reputation for waging war, their planning was pretty bad, or perhaps the goal was never fully planned out- which made the structure of the attack just terrible.
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From what I have studied, the German’s did war game the invasion of the USSR, and it was determined that they lacked the supply logistics to reach the Archangel-Volga-Astrakhan line of the limit of the German advance. 3.3 Million troops was also inadequate to occupy such an area even if the Axis did not loose a single soldier in the invasion. So Paulus and the German Quartermaster knew the military resources were not enough. Much of the invasion was driven of ideological reasons…as Hitler stated “One good kick and the whole rotten structure will collapse.” There was also the racial superiority non-sense along with the belief by the Generals that if the Soviet Army could be surrounded and destroyed en masse before retreating across the Divina and Dnieper Rivers, then the rest would be a more or less a occupation mission against scattered and disorganized resistance at best. One of the reasons why the Germans turned north and south after the battle of Smolensk was that Army Group Center had reached its logistical limit as far as supply. The German’s also had intelligence failures in Soviet tank advancements and in manpower capabilities.
Indy has mentioned this in some of his videos and here is another source addressing the short comings.
Operation ‘Barbarossa’ And Germany’s Failure In The Soviet Union | Imperial War Museums (iwm.org.uk)
Or these videos:
why did barbarossa fail - YouTube
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Sorry, I didn’t understand what U mean: Hitler sacrificed armies ? Could U to explain, please?
Thanks a lot!
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Very interesting opinion, John! But! : “Turkey’s supply infrastructure, like Spain, is quite limited.”
In my opinion, Hitler didn’t think about it too much. Because Soviet infrastructure the same, not enough for nazis. And Turkey’s terrains…. Russian mud in RASPUTICA is same terrible thing for trucks and even for tanks. Also length of communication lines is much much longer in SU, than in Turkey. Also PARTISANS….
I think Hitler’s design was not to invade because really he knew that friend better than enemy.
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If I remember by thought, there were times Hitler demanded his armies not back down, when had they done that, it would have saved them for a later day. He did it quite a few times in Russia.
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Haven’t been on here in a while but wanted to respond. Turkey was not a threat to Germany but the Soviet Union was. National Socialism was the rival on the left to Communism. Along with ideological rivalry, there was the resource and lebensraum reasons for Germany to invade the USSR. Germany was blockaded like in WWI, so to break the blockade, Soviet resources were needed. Now, as I stated above, taking the Near East before an invasion of the USSR would have somewhat alleviated the oil situaiton, or at least denied it to the Commonwealth. Soviets eventually were going to attack Germany around 1943 when the army reforms were complete. So attacking the USSR had to be done from the German war perspective, but could have improved their position by taking the Near East and aligned Mid East nations. Going through Turkey would have been a real pain logistically, would have added another enemy nation to have to fight aided by potentially both the Commonwealth and USSR. Best to keep Turkey neutral or gain them as an ally after victory in Egypt and taking the Suez Canal and Eastern Mediterranean coastline.
Don’t people like you ever get tired of spreading this “nazism was ideologically left” nonsense?
Nazism, as a racial nationalist ideology is on the extreme right. The party itself was literally born as a vehicle of the extreme right, with much of its early membership representing a who’s who of late 1910s Munich radical right wing underground.
It consistently worked together and associated itself with everything nationalist right wing under the sun at that time. The Freikorps, Ludendorff, Thule Society, Harzburg Front and so on.
This is further corroborated by the fact that today’s extreme right are the ones who tend to have the most similar (to the nazis) views on jews, women and racial nationalism.
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As someone who’s undergrad history degree focused on Modern German History, I can say unequivocally that the National Socialists are to the left, just not as far to the left as the Communists. The political spectrum ranges from absolute government control of all socio-economic policies on the extreme left (communism) to absolutely no government control of anything on the extreme right (anarchy). So where does National Socialism fit on this spectrum?
Like any socialist form of government, it participates in crony capitalism with large industries to prop up the government financially, while exercising considerable influence over those industries. All the while, the small private owners get marginalized out of the market while big government policies provide social services like health care, welfare, and big government projects like Goring’s Four Year Plan.
Four Year Plan - Wikipedia
Philosophically, the National Socialists did not believe in objective truth, and thus were morally relativistic, with an ends justifies the means philosophy. This was represented in policies like the Lebensborn brothels, tolerance of same-sex behavior if such people serve their purpose (Ernst Rohm and the Brown Shirts until they got too powerful), promotion of bigamy and rejection of traditional judeo-christian morals and social norms. The Nazi’s actually lamented that Germany became christianized in 800 under Charlemagne. They would have preferred an Islamic history for it’s promotion of bigamy, slavery, and hatred for the Jews, and using aggressive warfare to develop a warrior culture as was used to spread Islam (See William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich under the sub-chapter “Persecution of the Christian Churches”). Like the communists and other leftist socialist governments, they did not believe in the dignity of the human person with each person having the right to exist. The proof of this is the T-4 eugenics program that eliminated “undesirables” and legalized abortion due to "racial "reasons. It can be discerned that if the technology would have existed, that children who were diagnosed with genetic disorders (ex. like occurs today with children with down syndrome) would have been murdered via abortion while genetically engineering other children in the womb in order to create the “Master Race”. IVF (in vitro fertilization) would have been used to increase the “master race”. Like the communists, there was no freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and there was only one legal political party with a repressive secret police (SS/Gestapo like the NKVD/KGB).
Theologically, the National Socialists embraced a neo-paganism, like the Thule Society did. The swastika was seen as a “good luck” symbol taken that originated in the Persian and Hindu cultures and belief systems.
Swastika - Wikipedia
People of such beliefs are not right leaning conservatives by any measure as they vote predominantly to the left of the traditional values and morals of the people on the right.
The National Socialists were liars and wanted to give the impression of being to the right to garner votes from a sizable traditional values german voters during the moral and political chaos of the Weimar Republic. They were political rivals to the communists who did not promote total control over every aspect of the economic sector, and thus were to the right of the communists. However, further scrutinizing all their other policies, and the government control they did exert economically, they clearly leaned to the left of most political parties. Unfortunately, this distortion and proper understanding of the political spectrum has not been corrected in the historical record.
See this Wikipedia page:
Weimar political parties - Wikipedia
They have the National Socialists, as stated as anti-capitalist, categorized with the Reich Party of the German Middle Class, which is correctly represented as limited government and pro-capitalist economic policy political party on the right. The National Socialists represent policies that are the complete opposite of the RPGMC yet are grouped with them. This is a contradiction and an error that causes much confusion on this issue.
With all that has been stated and evidence given, the National Socialists were on the left and should described and categorized as so. Once in power, there were only limited differences between their form of government and the socio-economic policies of other socialist and communist political parties.
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