When did Germany lose the war?

Well, (Mentioned in the Battle Of Britian Film) The RAF did not engage many targets in the air above the English channel. They were a little more Stuck on to defending their home although, don't get me wrong, the RAF and The Coastguard did defend the Channel well. I also belive Sealion was a fantasy due to the same reasons as you however, the Luftwaffe did have MANY more planes than the RAF and the Plan to destroy the RAF on the ground was a great idea, however maybe the planes could have been used to target navy so the ground troops could gain access to landing thefore making The Battle of Britian a little more difficult for the British.



Love your Signature by the way.

 

Its not substantial enough and as you said its not a proof

With a very good reasoning and certainly the motivation was not the fulfillment of Imperial Russia's dream.

Again completely different scenario..

The point here is SU moving in Iran in early 40s without a Barbarossa on her own initiative..

Of course but Irrelevant to the subject. The whole point of bringing ajax was to show that post war political dynamics were a lot different.

Which more has to do with strategical situation rather than fulfillment of some Imperial Dreams.

Actually you haven't, there is simply no indication in pre war politics which suggests that SU had such an intentions with biggest example being her flat out refusal of such proposal..

You have just given post war and 19th century examples which are completely different situation than in 41.

 

What do you mean by real peace proposals?? and if there is a peace why would there be a US aid in the first place??

At what terms?? Will UK agree for peace with France and lower countries occupied by Germany??

I am not very much sure about the Polish case either but Britain did gave indication that they are willing to fight for it. Didn't Hitler made such an offer to Britain (of which seriousness I doubt) which she refused..

Again on what terms??

It doesn't matter when there is a peace. Does it??

 

When Britain decided in june 1940 to continue the war,the result was that Germany's strategic situation was very serious :if Germany could not force Britain to give up in 1940,the chance that it could do this in 1941 or in 1942,or in 1943, was minimal :the war would go on,and,Germany could not afford a long war:the longer the war,the greater the risk that US would intervene.And there also was the problem of the SU:it was rearming,and,would it remain neutral in a long war ?

 

I am not that sure that the LW had more planes than the RAF,would it not be the opposite ?
There also is the point that having more "planes" is irrelevant for the outcome of the BoB;what's irrelevant is the number of fighters,the number of pilots .

 

The LW did outnumber the RAF in aircraft and pilots at the beginning of the BoB, but the opposite was true by the end. The British really started pumping out the fighters, both Hurries and Spits, and got a great pilot replacement training system up and going as well. If an RAF pilot was alive when his plane was destroyed, and he managed to bail and survive he fought another day. If a German pilot was shot down, and survived he was out of the game for good as a prisoner in the UK.

 

The Luftwaffe out nummerd the RAF with the factor 2,5 à 3 times at the battle of Britain. And it was the effort behind the British pilots, that changed the outcome of the battle. The Brits places earth walls between the airplanes on the airfields. So that by a airstrike, not 1 single hit aircraft can set the others on fire. The strenght of the RAF was not only the new, primitive radar, but a network of 50.000 people that was standing guard, and send all aircraft movements to central commant. The Germans did not know that. The system was allready designed, and operatieve before start of the war. From june 41, the Brits capture a Enigma device ( encrypet radio) and broke the Ultra Code. From that time, the allies know every attack that the germans where gone launch against the Brits. With this information, the Brits almost succed to prevent the capturing of Crete. The Brits, in pillboxes, shot the most Fallschirmjagers dead when they gone hit the ground. But the germans where spread arround, and it is a wonder, how a few Fallschirmjagers still caputure Crete. Rommel lost the dessert battle from the Brits, because they know what was comming. Hitler was devasted by the dead of so many Fallschirmjagers in crete, that he never gone use this powerfull, and ideal tool for Rusia. Afther the lost try to win BoB, Hitler go's east, for a preventive strike. Because he is affraid of the powerbuilt up of the SU. The German army was facing from the first day of the operation Barbarosa, a larger and stronger army than there own. the T-34 was develep in 1934, and there are more than 57.000 of this produced. But the KV1 and the KV2 tanks where realy monsters of 65ton, that the Germans can't stop, except to call in a 88 mm Anti Aircraftgun. So the Sovjets pushed Hitler to tanks of the same size of 65tons. And so is the need of the Tiger, the Phanter, the elefant, created. They get all the same 88mm gun. Running without resources, and dayly hit by daylight bombing of the Americans on the German war-industrie, Germany start to lose the war on all fronts. The Brits bombed only at night civil targets. But remember, when the war started, Germany occupied only the 6th place in the ranking of the stronghest army of the world. France was nr 1. Look it up, and you will be surpriced, how large the amount of captured French tanks and trucks the Germans use, when starting the Operation Barbarosa. The French and Rusian tanks where better than what the Germans than use at that time. Hitler makes many mistakes, and you can not point 1 battle are REASON, that he lost the war. The question is, what we won with outbrake of the war? TIME !! It gives the US and Britain, extra years to build up a military force, that Stalin respected afther Germany surrenderd, to take not entire Europe. Remember that Stalin "purified" ( murdered) 20.000.000 civilions of his own population, from '37 till '39. That the majority of the Sovjet populasion, the Germans invaders see like liberaters. But the Germans treated the population the same way like Stalin. For example:
If Goering accept the invitation of Oecraine, to help Germany fighting the SU, Hitler still have a big chance to win the war afther all. But visiting Oecraine, Goering believes that east-european people where less in value, and not fitt to join the axis forces.
I hope that this answer your question.

 

A great deal of this post if incorrect, from the Enigma section to the Crete invasion in specific. There are some portions which might be considered true, many are not. Rankings of military force is difficult at best, since it isn't simply "number of men or vehicles" but tactics and strategy, material resources and industrial production capacity which make the difference.

The "racial ladder" for the eastern populace was set in Hitler's racial ladder, Goering had little choice but to follow Hitler's lead. Goering didn't set the policies toward the civilian populace, Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich did.

 

Am pleased to see this discussion of "errors and possibilities" has taken such a positive turn.
Thank you, fuser... and to all who are involved... we are having a good time together now.

With the caveat that the first day and the last day of the war in Europe are disallowed as answers, I'm sticking with the onset of Operation Barbarossa as the point of no return for Germany. Some other viable suggestions can be justified as the moment when Germany was on the way to losing the war. However, the failure to maintain a detante with its larger and more powerful neighbor can surely be seen as a gross mistake on the part of Hitler's Germany. Were it not for his error in this regard, Germany and the SU could have had a very large pie to divide in a very short time, and might even have been able to wall themselves in, dig in their heels, and prevent any loss of conquered territory.

In June of 1941, the US was still only committed to defending England, and not to generating an offensive incursion of Europe as a whole. Germany could have stayed on its side of the Channel, negotiated a non-aggression pact with England and looked elsewhere for expansion. After all, what resources were in England that Hitler really needed?

 

The possibilities for Germany to negociate a non-aggression pact with Britain were NIHIL (=0.0000%)

 

Does seem strange that Hitler would declare war on the US, but perhaps there was some reasoning behind his madness.

As early as April Hitler told Matsuoka, the Japanese Foreign Minister, in the presence of Ribbentrop that Germany would " strike without delay " if a Japanese attack on Singapore should lead to war between Japan and the United States, & again later let it be known to the Japanese that if they attacked the US Germany would of course join in immediately, and declare war on the US.

And BTW, the Allies, who cracked the Japanese codes knew it.

Hitler had virtually given up trying to coax the Japanese into attacking the USSR, because from July with the Americans painting Japan into a corner by cutting off oil supplies, the Japanese were keeping their powder dry for a probable showdown with the US. And Hitler knowing he was sooner or later going to be locking horns with the US, was now eager for the Japanese to keep the US busy in the Pacific, particularly the US navy.

Which to a degree worked.

The biggest contribution the US made before Normandy [by then the war was virtually decided] was the bomber offensive, [which didn't get into gear until '43 & only got things sorted out in '44,]....and the battle for the Atlantic.

Hitler gambled on finishing off the Soviets before the Western Allies could make a decisive push onto the continent, & as he thought he could do the job in '42, it would have been done in plenty of time.

So Hitler in reality was honoring the pledge he made to the Japanese on two occasions.

Do you mean early '43 on?
For most of '42 the Sovs were sliced & diced again when the Red Army got another rude awakening to what Panzers could do when they bounced off a bit prematurely & attacked in the Kharkov region in May 1942.......Second Battle of Kharkov - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Glantz gives a vivid account in his book Kharkov, the end result was another bloody nose for the Soviets with 277,190 casualties.

Stalin misjudged the the German summer offensive of '42, thinking the Southern thrust was going to hook back around Moscow & by the time he woke up the that the Caucasus were the target, the Red Army was in big trouble again.
It wasn't until Hitler again split his forces at near Stalingrad & made the mistake of trying to take Stalins name sake that the Red Army recovered & bang, goodbye 6th army, goodbye Germany.

Hitler also probably had some chance of taking Moscow, and following on, Leningrad, if he listened to his Generals, and by October the Soviets were hanging on by their fingernails..............the SU was stripped of more then half [62.5%] of it's pre war coal output, more then two thirds of it's pig iron, steel & rolled metals [71, 68 & 67% respectively] & 60% of it's aluminum. Ammo production fell sharply as over 300 plants in European Russia were put out of action or fell into enemy hands. Almost half the land under grain crops [47%]was in German hands & 41% of the railway network was in German occupied areas.

The Red army fell to it's lowest point of the entire war, some 2.3 million men on the entire front, & the population fell by about 35 million including the work force down from over 30 million to 19 million.

After Vyazma/Bryansk Koniev is quoted in 'Erickson's 'The Road to Stalingrad' telling Stavka 'we have no way of stopping the German mobile forces, we don't have enough AA & anti tank weapons' and in his memoirs Zhukov reported that the road to Moscow was virtually open & the defenses of the Mozhaisk line were to weak to stop a determined attack.

At that point there was very little was left between the Germans and Moscow, & the Soviets will 'almost' broke according to Erickson, Clarke, Overy & Lees, among others.


That was when an atmosphere of pure terror & panic gripped Moscow when it seemed almost inevitable that the Germans would arrive in a matter of days. On 13 October Stalin ordered the evacuation of the Communist Party, the General Staff and various civil government offices from Moscow to Kuibyshev leaving only a limited number of officials behind. On 16-17 October, much of the civilian population tried to flee, mobbing the available trains and jamming the roads from the city.

And Zhukov was shocked to hear Stalin raise the possibility of a separate peace with Germany if matters got much worse.

Richard Overy mentions it was rumored in Berlin in October that Stalin had sought an armistice through Tsar Boris of Bulgaria....... It [making peace as Lenin had done at Brest-Litovsk in 1918] would not have been an irrational choice, any more than was Lenin's according to Overy.

Overy says the evidence on the peace mission is far from clear, but Erikson in 'The Road To Stalingrad' says that earlier Stalin sent an urgent note to Churchill saying he needed 30,000 tons of aluminum in October, 400 aircraft & 500 tanks monthly, plus a landing of some 20/25 British divisions in Archangel or Iran to take the pressure of the Red Army, without these two kinds of aid the SU would either be defeated or weakened to the extent that it would lose for a long time the ability to help its allies by active operations at the front against Hitlerism.


But the Autumn rains came & continued through the remainder of the month, turning the Russian countryside into a quagmire and stifling Army Group Center's offensive operations. The Panzer's were bogged down in a sea of glutinous mud.

File:Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-289-1091-26, Russland, Pferdegespann im Schlamm.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

File:Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-140-1220-17A, Russland-Mitte, PKW im Schlamm.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

File:Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1981-149-34A, Russland, Herausziehen eines Autos.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Autumn & Spring in Russia, not a time for rapid maneuver.

So those lost weeks at the start of Barbarossa plus Hitler turning Guderian South 'could' have meant the difference in Moscow/Leningrad falling, BUT, does losing those cities mean the end for the USSR?

Does a centralized dictatorship losing it's centre of communications & it's central railway hub face too many problems in morale etc to regain momentum?

Glantz doesn't think so, he says even if the Germans did take Moscow the Soviets would raise more armies & take it back again.

It probably all came down to will power, if under those condition the Soviets crack, it's over, if not the Germans, as happened, are cactus.

 

What about Lend-lease? It kept both Britain and the Soviet Union in the war.

 

@ANZAC

Why are you mixing 42 with 41??

You are talking about 42 and suddenly you come to the October panic of 41, it doesn't make any sense...

But what matters is that still after that defeat Red army on whole was stronger than Wehrmacht.

Stalingrad was actually an important objective and not just for its namesake, besides it wasn't an unilateral decision of Hitler.

And do exactly what?? This theory has been debunked several times. You shouldn't take German General's word as 100% truth.Most ofthese assertions were developed after the war.

And what makes you think that capture of Moscow will result in Soviet Capitulation..

And early winter put an end to it, oh but wait winter is also hampering German advance.. So, many excuses but what really stopped German advance was soviet resistance. Period.

After all why Germans were fighting in autumn in first place, according to original plan the war should have been over long before the onset of autumn.

There was no possibility for a early Barbarossa even without balkan campaign. It has already been discussed several times.

It was only logical thing to do. Guderian at that moment couldn't have moved towards Moscow, it was an impossibility logistically and also from military pov.

 

That's questionable,the 1941 US LL for Britain was not that important(the Cash and Carry was more important) and for the SU,it was negligible in 1941.

 

While it is true that the first LL shipments didn't even leave the US ports until late Oct. of 1941, you must keep in mind that under the Cash and Carry law the USSR started to immediately purchase arms and war material from the US to take from the west coast to their own ports in their own hulls. The reason this could happen so much faster was that Congress didn't have to get involved. When Stalin and Hitler had signed their "pact" in 1939 FDR had frozen the Soviet assets in America, the night the Nazis attacked he freed them up for Soviet usage.

 

I know,but, the problem is that there are no figures available about the "Soviet Cash-and-Carry",and,I doubt that it would be important for the following reasons
a)The Soviets had to pay cash in $,not in gold,and,I doubt they would have that many $ available;they also had to carry themselves the things they bought and, I doubt that they had that many merchantships available .
b)on 22 june 1941,the (still limited) US armaments industry was producing for
-the US armed forces
-the Cash-and-Carry for the British (if I am not wrong,the UK had ordered for some 4.4 billion $)
-the L-L for the British
and,the Russian orders would lagging behind.

 

We are getting pretty far off-topic here "LJAd", but I'm going to post one more on this tangent. The Soviets had just over $40 million dollars in assets in America when FDR unfroze them, and it was gold deposits (not in Ft. Knox, but Manhattan), that translates to about $621 million in today’s dollars adjusted for inflation. And since we (America) were still using a gold standard base for our dollars (in international business), it would most certainly count as "cash".

We didn't take "Pounds Sterling" in bills when dealing with the British, only bullion. We sucked the last of Britain’s gold reserves out of South Africa in May to pay for the four-piper flush-deck destroyers just to get Congress to approve the Lend Lease action. People forget that we didn't just accept those British bases in trade for the L-L aid bill.


The U.S. started sending supplies, particularly of gasoline (and POL), to Vladivostok almost immediately after the Germans attacked the Soviet Union, well before Lend-Lease was formally established. There were all kinds of freighters going back and forth, though the path they took shifted. The U.S. had surveyed a path north of the Aleutian Islands. Ships would leave San Francisco or Los Angeles and they would go north of the Aleutians then come all the way down the coast of Kamchatka.

Goto:

Lesser Known Histories of the Soviet Merchant Fleet | Washington ProFile - International News & Information Agency

This deals with post L-L ships as well, but the Soviets had about twenty or so ocean going freighters and tankers in the Pacific when the Nazis invaded. Most had been built in the interwar years in other countries like Sweden, Britain, and America.


1941:

In June, the FESCO fleet of the (Soviet) Far Eastern Shipping Company included 70 steamships and 15 motor vessels with 5 tankers among the latter ones. On 8 December the Japanese government declared La Perouse, Tsugaru and Korea Straits to be its "marine defensive lines." This resulted in the Japanese armed forces arresting 178 Soviet merchant ships between 1941-1944, using arms in some cases.

Goto:

Fesco

 

But the question is:how long would last the 40 million Soviet $? How would be paid the local entrepreneur from Indiana producing trucks(or something other) for the Soviets ? He would demand US Dollars .Maybe the Soviets could exchange their gold for Dollars,but,would the banks be obliged to accept the Russian gold ?
The problem is that,while we have informations for the 1941 LL to Britain (some 1 billion $)and for the 1941 LL to the SU (some 360000 tons,but nothing in value),we have nothing about the amount(in value/tons) that Britain got from the orders during the Cash-and-Carry Act:we know they ordered for 4.5 billion $,but not how much they recieved,and also,we don't know how much the Soviets ordered/recieved by the Cash and Carry Act (from june till october),was it 40 million $,more,less ?Also,what sort of goods were they buying?Food?Weapons? Trucks ?

 

That $40 million would last quite well until the billion dollar, interest free loan was extended to Stalin under L-L. The "producer" would get US Dollars, since they would be covered by Soviet gold. The banks (through the Federal Reserve) would love to have Soviet gold backed "certificates" since its price in America was set, and not fluctuating on the open market where they could sell it in "transfers". It wasn't as fast as today, but it was faster than moving the actual material.

We do have the exact amounts received by the Soviets, not the amount shipped as inside the L-L rules the "stuff" the L-L recipients took possession of was all they were liable for. They and all L-L recipients kept very careful records of this. Since they (and other L-L recipients) were only responsible for what they received and use, not what was shipped.

These amounts were disclosed when they (former USSR) needed to qualify for IMF and US loans as the USSR was collapsing. What they were buying between June until the late October shipments (Cash and Carry) was mostly POL, sheet steel, and aluminum ingots. They needed the POL since they had done two things; first sent millions of barrels of oil, bushels of grain, and tons of alloy minerals to the Nazis. But when they were attacked by the same Nazis, they closed down (sabotaged) their western oil-fields and moved to the eastern Caspian Sea fields. This is Baku II, and they didn't get up and running for some time after June, 1941.

They needed and bought American Petroleum, Oils, and Lubricants in that time period, and continued to receive POL from America throughout the war. I have never found any reference for the Soviets buying grain from either the US or the South Americans in the "Cash and Carry" period, but I have found that they were selling their grain to Italy while they started the famine in the Ukraine in the thirties.

The twisted economics of the then "new" Soviet Union and how it was treated in the rest of the world is; and will probably remain difficult to unravel for years. The things which were seen as "war material" continued to alter as the war approached a global scale, America restricted some fuels (avgas) to Japan, but not other fuel types. America was slow to remove scrap iron/steel from the list which Japan could purchase, but still shipped raw grains and cotton to Japan for months after they should have been curtailed as war loomed.

 

1) IMO, they could have achieved victory after Barbarossa if they conducted the Soviet campaign differently, and if they didn't declare war on the US in December. If they would have limited their goals in the USSR to pushing the Soviets east of the Urals, they may have been able to achieve victory.
2) IMO this was a blunder that cost them everything their Generals had been striving for in Russia. The whole point of Barbarossa was to get to Moscow by winter. Strategically Moscow was, and always had been the key. The USSR did not just have a centralized government in Moscow, but the whole country was centralized around Moscow. All major lines of communications; roads, rails, industry, everything was centralized in Moscow. Stalin had already begun trucking his war industry east of the Urals, figuring that Moscow was lost.
3) Even had they taken Moscow, we all know with hindsight that this was going to cost him the war because of the bomb. Already discussed here.
4&5) But thats it, isn't it? The whole problem was Hitler's incompetence. Had Hitler resigned himself to assigning the military with broad strategic goals, like "defeat the Soviet Union" then they could have been victorious. His meddling cost them throughout the war-starting with Dunkirk and moving forward.

An interesting question would be when were the Germans (the one's that still possessed all their marbles) certain they were defeated, and when were the allies certain they would win. I believe that after Kursk the German High Command (and probably Stalin) knew it was over, and I believe that after Hitler declared war on the US that Churchill and the western allies knew they would eventually win.