decisive battle debate

Perhaps the reaction of an opponent defines how decisive the blow was, not the devastation it causes itself? Russia has sustained such devastation and yet has managed to stand-up and win. While the French opened restaurants for the Bosches after the first slap.

 

Operation Bagration was pretty decisive...

 

There is a school of thought, here and elsewhere, that the final outcome of WWII was pre-ordained. The Axis had to lose utterly and this being based on the comparison of population, wealth and industry. If one accepts this premiss then no battle fought could be truly "decisive", just a step, positive or negative, that leads one on a path that can not be averted.

Personally I disagree with this assumption.

Each battle, and its resolution either opened or closed a door to to some possible outcome. We assume that the victorious side, Anglo-American-Soviets, would never compromise on total victory, yet prewar they each made many such compromises to either avoid a conflict or to take advantage of the current situation.

Great Britain and the Soviet Union were beginning to suffer severe manpower shortages and the US was becomming war weary by late 1944. That we did not reach the point where we collectively or individually decided that enough blood and treasure had been expended does not mean that there was no such point and that this point was near at hand.

No Axis power fought the war with any particular strategic acumen. Tactically they were often quite clever, at least in the first half of the war. Ironically the Allies fought in the reverse, poor tactically in the early phase, wise in the strategic phase, but if the allies failed in the strategic arena or the Axis had been more prudent in that phase, a much longer and more costly war would have resulted.

In such a event we can only guess what would have transpired, no matter the disparity of manpower and resources.

 

Here, I have to disagree : since the end of june 1940, the strategic situation of the Axis was deteriorating (IMHO,they had already lost the war).And every day that followed 30 june 1940, it became worse .And,this desperate situation explains the desperate attempts by the Axis to reverse the tide,and every time,they had to take more risks,which resulted in catastrophes as Stalingrad .

If the US joined the war, Germany had lost even if the SU remained neutral /was defeated .

If the SU was joining the war,Germany had lost, even if the US remained neutral .

The only option was to defeat Britain before the US/the SU joined the war .

 

I'm with Belasar here. While the Axis could not win militarily, by drawing out the war they could win politically by exhausting their opponents. There is a point at which any nation (or the people of the nation) decides that the cost in lives and treasure is more than they are willing to pay.

 

Post #31

There was a great read here previously that laid out the T34. There was a report issued that said something along the lines: the T34 was very rough straight out of the factory. Life expectancy was narrow. Some drawings may have been sabotaged -the carb?- or worker sabotage? Not even going to try and find the thread. It's hard finding previous threads through search here. Plus my handicap. Call me the scarecrow.

 

Yes indeed.

There were many moments when the political systems of the Allies could've shaken more. Such is not decided by a purely mathematical calculation of resources and manpower. A sense of defeatism encouraged by repeating scenarios whereby the opponent looses resources and battles after seeming close to a victory. Being constantly outfoxed shakes the political will to continue the fight.

Were war merely an exercise in statistics, Rommel would not have the successes he did.

 

What successes did Rommel have?

 

Are you serious?

 

Rommel advanced in the spring of 1941,was stopped in the summer and was forced to retreat in the winter .

In 1942, he attacked again, again was stopped in the summer and again was forced to retreat ,in the autumn,and this time definitively .

 

Your point being?

 

Seems to me that Barbarossa was born out of circumstances created by the very magnitude of the German Victory in 1917, and the harsh terms of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk.

And what exactly brought about the political and social conditions that allowed Josef Stalin to manage The Great Patriotic War in the manner that he did? Why, it was none other than the German decision to allow Vladimir Illyich Uliyanov to cross Germany from exile in a special train, getting out at Petrograd, and to begin the hijack of the coming February Revolution, known to the true believers as the October Revolution, without which, Russia would have stood no chance of surviving a subsequent German invasion any time in the future.

Every chaotic moment of the Russian Civil War, every politically significant event in the twenties, the death of Lenin from a stroke brought on by overwork, the rise of Stalin....ALL had their roots and consequences in that fateful decision to let Lenin's entourage cross Germany unimpeded.

The chaos of Russia's defeat in 1917 enabled the transfer of 700,000 trained troops to the Western Front, letting the HL combination think that victory could still be had militarily, and throw away Germany's last slim hope at a compromise peace in the idiotic "Kaiser Battle".....Which Corporal Hitler survived, to sit at Pasewalk Hospital railing against the injustice of it all....determined to see that it never happened like that again.

And so, Barbarossa was born in concept....

 

You are calling these successes ?

 

If Germany had sued for peace after taking Poland in 1939, a cold war would have gone on into the late 40's and possibly into the early 1950's. A peacetime Germany eventually would have developed a deliverable a-bomb around 1946 and well before the Soviets, they would have had many squadrons of jet fighters well before the Allies, as well as V2 rockets and later and much larger models. Werner Heisenberg, Werner Von Braun, and other german scientists would have had the time they needed to put them ahead of the Russians. Another thing that would have helped Germany immensely would have been an early death for Hitler, hopefully that new german leadership would have realized that extermination of the jews would have mean't that Germanys intellectual elite would have been decimated (with the exception of Von Braun, Heisenberg, and some others). There are however a lot of possibilities in German history after Hitler. A civil war between the remaining Nazi leadership and the rest of Germany would have been a real possibility.

 

A peacetime Nazi Germany post 1939 would've collapsed.

It was precisely because the relative and comparative industrial and economic importance of Germany was being withered away, by the Soviets on one hand, and the USA on the other, that Hitler was motivated to carve out his empire with force.

The German coffers were empty, national debt was mounting, rampant inflation was threatening. They had already stolen almost everything that could be taken from Jews in Germany. There were possible alternative paths, but because of the German experience during the Crash, they weren't a reality Germany was willing to experience again. Additionally, during that time, the USA had shown itself to be isolationist at precisely the wrong point in time.

The injection of plunder from Poland helped offset and delay some of these issues somewhat. But negotiating peace wouldn't have bought terms Hitler was willing to live with. Why would the Commonwealth and France accept this peace?

And the Soviets, well, they were already pushing on the borders to Europe everywhere, each time going beyond what they'd agreed to. They weren't going to sit around and wait for 10 years before provoking more.

 

The only caveat I would add is that Nazi Germany was in economic trouble because of the Nazis. Guns and Butter doesn't work when you can only afford a limited amount of one. Even the Austrian gold reserves wouldn't have bought them more than another year or two.

 

Bagration is a decisive moment only if you can squeeze more peasants into uniform, setting them up as trained professionals, whilst your industries turn out nothing but war material, your allies are providing iron rations and strategic resources and your people starving to death in numbers that you cannot be bothered keeping track of. And further, your corrupt and brutal government has no prospect of being replaced with more humane elements that can actually run a war effort without incurring battlefield casualties off the scale and civilian starvation levels worse than China....

I suppose you could call Bagration decisive on those terms. Dreadful mismangment, like the rest of the Russian war effort.

I see they haven't changed much. They are intervening in the Ukraine because their insurgent thugs are losing the contest. Thugs they were in 1918 and thugs they remain today.

 

Another 2p.

Hitler was in some ways trying for a re-run of Ww1, but with by a national socialist state and led by a man who considered himself to be own of the greatest military leaders of all time. He was trying to do better than the Kaiser. In WW1 the Kaiser's army beat the Russians with ease but could not defeat the Western Allies, despite two cunning plans in 1914 and 1918.

In 1940 the Germans were surprised by their own success and the ease with which they had defeated France, occupied Western Europe and forced the British back into the sea. Having done the difficult bit, they may have assumed that Soviet Russia would be a push over.

And to bring this on topic... There was no single "decisive victory" on the East front in WW1 The Battle of the Tannenburg was only decisive in as much as it prevented the Russians from occupying East Prussia. I think Barbarossa was intended to be a re run of 1916-17.

 

This is more than questionable : it is the old Marxist theory that the economic policy of the Third Reich failed,because national socialism was only a variant of capitalism and capitalism was doomed to fail (see the discussion between Mason and Overy).

You are also giving an importance to gold reserves which they didn't have .

Although the Third Reich had economic difficulties, it was not on the point of collapsing ;on the contrary :a lot of countries were envious because Germany had solved the unemployment problem .