Most important ww2 battle?

well us contribution to torch was ... british came from britain
and invading vichy colonies is one thing invading festung europa is another

its nice that you can see the attractions of a mediterranean approach beloved of uk strategists but if uk had fallen then ussr probably would as well and spain with no uk battlefleet to threaten them would no doubt have joined the new order meaning german forces in iberian peninsula in strength meaning torch would be a fiasco. landing in spain would have been a nightmare ... a country perfectly designed for defensive warfare and with long exposed supply lines across the atlantic .... i think you underestimate the difficulties involved my friend ....

 

Responding to you're first qoute!
Remember, it was an allied win,not an American win.
The Americans trubited alot to ww2 allied effort but America did not win ww2 on there own.

I would say the Battle! why??? if Briton was the important battle of ww2! It keep the Germans at bay,while wearing down the might of the Germans!

 

First, I'm confused by your statement "well us contribution to torch was ... british came from britain". Well, US forces also came from the US, including the 2nd Armoured Division and the 3rd and 9th Infantry Divisions. Clearly, the US was capable of making a amphibious landing from across the Atlantic.

Your supposition of the chain of events following a German invasion of the UK is flawed. First, the Germans could NEVER take Britain, but for the sake of argument I will assume they have. What are the German intensions toward Ireland? I assume they would allow Ireland to remain nuetral, though I'm sure they would begin a stronger leaning toward the Allies, and quite possibly join the war as the US makes peacfull landings in Ireland to stage the recapture of the UK. If Germany decides to take Ireland, and the US feels the need for a staging base before retaking the UK, there is still Iceland, being protected by US forces. This would make an exellent staging area, outside of the range of the LW.

Why would the Soviets suddenly lose? Simply because the UK falls, the Russians are not going to give up. Germans still lose at Stalingrad, fail to reach Moscow, and never take Leningrad. Nothing changes in the fact that the Russians are defending their homes, and will continue to do so with their lives. They will not just suddenly surrender, nor could Germany send enough men to make it possible.

Why would Spain join the Germans? Why would Germany suddenly decide to take on another ally who is more a liability and hindurance then a help? Franco at one point did offer the services of Spain to the Germans, but it was half hearted and demanded land from Vichy France in N. Africa. Hitler was not willing to exacerbate situations amoung his own allies to add a second rate military that was still recovering from a brutal civil war.

"i think you underestimate the difficulties involved my friend"
I think you overestimate the capabilities of Germany. There is a damned good reason they lost the war. They just didn't have the capabilities to do the things you claim are possible. If they did, they would have done it!

 

I think the single most important battle of WW2 was one where the confrontation was backed down, but it was a pivotal turn of events since it convinced Hitler of the correctness of his ideology regarding foreign policy whereas he was reportedly quite nervous and unsure of himself immediately before.
This was the moment his megalomania was at its greatest threat from the beginning of his career to his death. It was the one time he could've been convinced that it was all just a pipe dream and he should become more realistic as an elected politician rather than a despotic ruler who thinks he is a genius.

The remilitarisation of the Rhineland.

 

sigh ! i made the distinction between the USA foeces which sailed from USA and UK forces which sailed from UK as torch was very much a UKUSA op with prominince given to US troops to appease our french friends.

invading vichy territory is not the same as invading german territory ..
ireland would have been occupied of that there is little doubt.

iceland is hardly the place to build up millions of US combat troops stores aircraft etc etc. i think you have a vivid imagination.

the soviets would lose due to a number of reasons

peace with uk would either have allowed them to obtain vast ammounts of oil and rubber either as tribute/trade or by seizing it in the middle east directly by occupying iraq kuwait and trading direct with persia.

in these circumstances there is no doubt that turkey would see the way the wind was blowing and join the axis with a southern front via turkey/iraq and all the oil it needed from the middle east the ability to either seize or nomb baku and deliver a deadly blow to ussr economy

with no hostile UK the garissons of western europe could be massively reduced and the extra manpower allocated to poland/finland/turkey etc to increase the power of barbarossa to say nothing of increased luftwaffe strength and additional italian troops that could be deployed.

also with no UK there is no need to support italian sideshow in greece this possibly bringing forward barbarossa which opens up many possibilities

i think its a fair assumption to say ussr is doomed

as for franco .. it was fear of britsh attacks on long exposed coastline that kept spains enthusiasm for war in check

without a free Uk everything else falls down like a house of cards and that not nationalistic sabre rattling but a fair assesment of the period 1940-1941 and the overwhelming prestige of germany at the time and how inflated it would be by defeating UK or forcing peace terms upon them.

 

As I had said, your sentence was confusing. Looked like you were implying that the US contribution was to let the Brits handle it. Besides, You had previously stated:

I simply pointed out that we were willing to, and did so.

While I do have a vivid imagination, it does not apply to historical possibilities. In concurrence with the Icelandic government, the defense of Iceland was transfered to the US. The US stationed 40,000 troops there. It is not outside the realm of possibility that it could be used as a launching point to retake the UK (if it had fallen). Why are millions of troops needed to land in Britain? Only 160,000 landed on June 6, in Normandy.

The UK would never have surrendered to Germany.
"We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." - Winston Churchill
Germany would not receive the oil. British forces would have kept up the fight in other theaters.

Turkey joining the allies was more ceremonial than action. After the losses sustained by the Ottomans in WWI, Turkey had no will to join either side. They only did, eventually to receive aid from the allies.

No, Conquering the UK only allows those units to be transfered to defend the new possessions.

Germany assisted their Italian Allies After Greece had pushed the Italians halfway back through Albania. Italy had fouled up, and so Germany came to do what they had failed to do.

No it does not. IF the UK falls then things get more difficult for the allies, but it does not mean that Germany wins the war. In the very worst case scenario, the US stands back and waits for the A-bomb to be completed.

This topic belongs, and has been discused many times, in the What If Section. I will no longer debate this topic in this section.

 

Just out of courtesy, could you use capital letters occasionally for we old farts with failing eyesight? Makes it so much less difficult to read.

Neither Franco's motives for staying out of the war (as you suppose) nor your assumption about the USSR being "doomed" are worth the effort.

Not a single one of your suppositions stands up to critical examination. Hitler himself set four conditions which had to be met for a successful invasion of Great Britain:

The first was that the Royal Air Force (RAF) needed to be defeated, so that the German forces had air superiority (never done).

The second was to clear the English Channel of British mines, and to cut off the straits of Dover from the Royal Navy by laying German mines (never done).

The third was to populate northern, occupied France, with artillery (never done).

The fourth and final condition was to use the German Navy to attack the British fleets in the North Sea and the Mediterranean, in order to prevent the Navy interfering with the invasion (never done).

Not a single one of these conditions were or could be met by the Germans. So no loss of Great Britain in any event, which makes the rest of your "what if" moot. If the first four prerequisites cannot be achieved it stands to reason the rest is simply "pie in the sky". With what are you going to arm the Nazis so that this first step can be taken for this "what if"?

As to the US being able to launch amphibious operations from the North American land mass without the use of the British Isles, of course America could have done so; Torch proves that, moving masses of troops across the Pacific would be, and was more difficult, but still done. It would have been less advantageous without the springboard of Great Britain, but certainly doable.

Perhaps Ireland would have been occupied, but without first occupying the main island of Britain, that is unlikely. The Irish in both the north and south are notoriously independent minded, even if those in the south (Eire) were on occasion pro-German on the surface, it was more because the Germans were fighting the hated British than sympathy with the Germans in WW1 or the Nazis in WW2 per se.

And where in the world do you get the idea there would be a "non-hostile" British homeland? The Scots and Welsh aren’t even all that happy about being in the UK at some levels, but they all unite to fight those who are even more foreign, Germans come to mind. The Germans had to leave almost 350,000 occupation troops in little Norway, with its pro-Quisling government until the end of the war, I can hardly see them leaving less on the British Isles. Re-instating the adbicated King Edward would hardly help mollify the Brits, and Mosely's British Fascists were a minority party and equally disliked. Putting them in power would simply make the occupation more difficult in the long run.

While Iceland is a less than hospitable place from which to launch air attacks, it was for that reason that the B-36 was designed. It was proposed and developed in an on again, off again manner simply because Great Britain didn’t fall to the Nazi. The design called for a plane to fly non-stop, non-refueled from the US mainland to Berlin and back. It could do it, in fact even before it was supplemented with the outboard jets (for faster climb rates), it could take off from Maine, fly to and back from Moscow non-stop. Berlin was well within its range. And before you complain that it would have been an easy target, check out the difficulty even F-86 Sabers had intercepting it in war games post war. It flew at such an extreme height that smaller winged aircraft like fighters didn’t have enough lift to follow it in lazy S turns and would fall out of the sky in stalls.

Peace with the Nazis was a non-starter as soon as Churchill came to the fore in 1940. Never going to happen, and Operation Sealion is a non-starter.

And what oil? The mid-east oil was virtually unknown at that time with only a small field open in Kirkuk Iraq and two in Persia (Iran). In 1939-40, Iraqi fields only produced some 2.5 million tons of oil, Persian fields about 8.4 million tons, and NONE from Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. In any case, in early 1940, less than 15% of the UK's oil supply came from the Middle-East. But with the closure of the Med. and Suez in June 1940 for commercial shipping, even the British turned more towards US oil (80%), and the Caribbean oil supply, Iraq/Persian oil was used locally however, as well as sent to India, Australia, and the Far East, via the Persian Gulf, after the fall of Burma and Borneo. Production in Kirkuk didn't return to normal until after the war was over.

If the Nazi had gotten that far east, they would have reaped as much oil as they did from the two Soviet oil sites they did occupy (Maikop and Grozny). Not a single barrel of oil made it into the German stock from those fields. Consider this; oil facilities, and pipelines traditionally are very susceptible in times of conflict, simply because they are easily targeted, easily sabotaged, and are very difficult to repair. East Baku (Baku II), on the eastern shore of the Caspian was opened in the first months after Nazi aggression, and the original Baku field on the western shore sabotaged so well in anticipation of a Nazi take-over that it hardly came back on-line by the end of the war. The Soviets had sent over 4.5 million barrels of oil to Hitler before he sent his armies east in Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet Union was at the time the world's second largest oil producer. Despite strict internal rationing, it still had to import oil from the United States to meet its own needs.

From a purely fuel/oil standpoint, the fall of France has to be considered the greatest victory of the war for Germany. For the first and only time in WW2, Hitler ended a campaign with slightly more oil than he had when he started. When the French signed the armistice and the Vichy state was formed, the Nazis had captured more than 20 million barrels of oil from the French, Belgians and Dutch. Since the invaders had used only 12 million barrels through the campaign, the conquests represented a net gain of 8 million barrels. (For reference, though, and to show how precarious the Germans' situation remained, the United States in 1940 produced an average of 4 million barrels per day.)

Rubber (latex) is in the far south east of asia, i.e. Burma, French Indo-China, not the mid-east, nor under British control. That was one of the few commodities the Germans could get from their Japanese allies after they occupied the Vichy French controlled Indo-China, and the Germans got very little. Britain had little if any to share after the Japanese occupied the South East Asia area.

Turkey was not interested in the Germans or allying with them under any circumstances. Their loss of the Ottoman Empire was too vivid in their memory, and they had only the Germany to blame for it. I’m sorry, but you are just not going to get a "win" for the Nazis in any scenario you have proposed.

 

mikebatzel,


IMHO, Germany could not possibly defeat the USSR, even if she had NO other opponents.

She had a hard time getting to Moscow, Stalingrad and Leningrad. Those 3 cities were half way to the Urals, and the Urals were half way to Siberia.

Can anyone say 'Lines of Communication'?


John

 

Hi John. I think you misunderstood my intentions. I do not believe Germany could win.

 

A little hornests nest i have stirred it seems ....
160,000 landed in normandy but that was the spearhead-not the total forces employed also this was done with absolute air supremacy-something that would be impossible without english bases ... the ability to have air cover dominated any debate as to where amphibious assaults took place and i believe normandy was chjoses amongst other things because that was within range of the spitfire


as for churchills rhetoric . as stirring as it is .... it is in no way set in stone that this would be the case

turkeys main advantage lay in geography not in cannon fodder

and i cant be bothered dealing wth all the other points as im at work and at risk of the sack !

 

No America could not win without British surport!
Watch a program called Battlefield and it mention that America wanted to command on there own but realised they needed the Brits for surport.It mention that the Americans were not cabable in commanding without the Brits cause at that time the americans were not fully at 100% protentral and had no experence like the British had.
(may have been when America first join the war)

 

Stalin knew that Hitler wanted to invade Russia, however he did not expect Hitler to be so bold and attack before Britain was knocked out. If Britain had been knocked out of the war, Stalin would have been prepared for the attack and ready as the date for Barbarossa would have been later in time.

Turkey's entry has been discussed here numerous times and all led to one conclusion, Turkey would have never joined Germany again, especially if it meant that she would be fighting Russia. Turkey wanted nothing to do with Russia.

 

In fact Stalin's readiness to counter Barbarossa is well documented. The problem was he concentrated the bulk of his forces in the Ukraine, and Gen.Halder dictated the the postponing of the offensive in the south until July.
Stalin believed initial movements north of the Pripet marshes were a feint designed to goad the USSR into declaring war first and ordered his forces not to respond in any fashion which would threaten the treaty. He still believed the main thrust of the attack would be to the south even as the forward airfields in Belarus were being overrun. It was not until 6 hours after the initial artillery barrages that he ordered the Soviet defences into action, but unfortunately the forward communications were primarily by telegraph and most of these had been knocked out by the initial artillery barrage...

The point being, and I'm happy to support the statement with documentation, Stalin utterly expected, in fact was repeatedly and incontravertibly informed not only of the German attack but even the exact date and time of the attack.
It is all the more reason a great part of the Soviet collapse at the forward defences is attributed as much to the Stalin himself than any genuine Wehrmacht superiority by military historians.

As for Turkey and Russia, once again the Turkish and Russian interest in the seaways leading into the Black Sea are well documented, these stretch back to the Crimean wars of the previous century and in fact were one very large factor directly behind WW1: effective control of the Balkans.
That being said Turkey was apparently satisfied that Rumania and Bulgaria would remain neutral, but a large part of Turkey's national interests involved ensuring this would remain the case, they were opposed to Nazi or Soviet control of the Balkans. And as we all know one way to deal with a monster is to appease to it.
Certainly Great Britain was concerned enough to launch a peripheral campaign in Turkey, and the Nazis held treaties with them, had officially sanctioned Turkish Jews to be Aryan believe it or not, no lie, and supplied them with export version of the Fw-190A.
I don't think Germany expected any less than a Turkish ally in 1941.

 

there are no ww2 important battle. All battles that took place in ww2 were important.

 

I am pretty sure that Stalin did not think that Hitler was going to Invade him by any means. The idea was presented to him many times but he refused to believe it. He thought that Germany would not be so stupid as to try and conquer Russia. General Zhukov even presented Stalin with a plan for a premptive strike on Germany which Stalin clearly refused

 

I think some of the most important battles that happened in WWII were ones that never happened,malta and gibralter are the ones i think of first.
If hitler had ignored Canaris then there would have been no reinforcements for the british north africa campaign.

Either el alamein or stalingrad because they prevented the germans getting their hands on the oil.
If the germans had enough oil then the ardennes offensive might well have suceeded.

I'll go for stalingrad because of the double whammy of the destruction the 6th army and the denial of oil.

 

1. Battle for Moscow 1941 . It reduced strength of most German divisions to 50% from which most of them really never recovered.
2. Stalingrad. 6th Army with it's 20 VETERAN German divisions is without a doubt most powerfu Army in WWII that would see Alies swimming on D day without even breathing twice. And that is with their air and naval superiority. For comaprison, in Africa Rommel had only four supply starved German divisions. And look what he did to poor British 8th Army.

 

Hitler's Mein Kamfp, was quite a big hit when it came out. Stalin read his book and was very well aware of Hitler's intentions. Upon signing the Ribbentrop act, he told Molotov, "Im reluctantly signing this treaty with the very same nation who's ultimate goal is to destroy us".

This treaty would secure him the crucial time which he needed to build up his forces, or so he thought. There are several reason why Stalin didn't believe the information of an impending attack.

1. He couldn't imagine Hitler attacking him before he defeated England.

2. He thought that the information warning him of the attack, really came from the West in an attempt to ruin the relations between the two.

3. He was naive and simply didn't think that Hitler would double cross him.

 

Yes, that sums up Stalin's feelings about Hitler and the west as well, quite nicely. Then one must remember that just as Churchill and others were warning him of the Nazi build-up on his western borders, what happens? Hess flies to Scotland! Now, are the British secretly making deals with the Nazis while telling him to prepare for the Nazis attacking him?

Are they trying to goad him into a pre-emptive strike for which he is not prepared so they can now team-up and wipe the Soviet off the map? Not a lack of information, nor his not knowing full well of Hitler's designs on territory in the east; his own copy of Mein Kampf was well thumbed and with blue underlining marks under the "territory in the east" portions.

I suspect it was too much contradictory information, coupled with his own suspicion of the western democracies which led him down the "garden path" of thinking that Hitler would not be such a fool as to open a second front without completing the dealing with the British first.

 

Thats right, I forgot all about old Hessy's flight over the channel.... Good point.