Operation Barbarosa starts in April instead of late June

1)The Soviets did NOT trade space for time (there never was an organized retreat)
2) As the Germans failed in the summer (and they failed again in the summer of 1942),the answer is :a start of Barbarossa in may (if possible) would have the same resultas in the OTL:a failure of the Germans in the summer,and ,this failure means ,or resu

 

With 6 million instead of 2.7 million men Axis would have enough manpower to conquer Moscow and even push farther. Moscow is the main railroad hub, so losing it paralyzes the entire Western Russia plus the demoralizing factor of losing your state's capital.

What the Axis needed for Barbarossa was the complete industrial and military coordination of its members and occupied countries. What Hitler should've done e.g. is not occupy France, but make her join the Axis and formally declare war on the Soviet Union. That way he has additional troops, armor, and factories. Everything is run and organized by French themselves, so there is small risk of resistance except by Communists, but they're too puny to cause any significant damage. With the Communism scare of that time I see no reason why wouldn't they help fight the Soviets.

The different rails factor would be mitigated by using the Luftwaffe to supply the troops under the presumption that there is no Battle of Brittain and so a large amount of airplanes are spared.

 

IMHO: Hitler actually tried to made France active to join the Axis or planed it. He failed. It was planed the LW supplies the troops but had not the capacity to do it at this scale...1200 bombers more (many of them Do 17 and Ju 88) wouldn´t change it ... And (in this forum) the change the gauge o the railroads was surprisingly fast.

 

I am only familiar with one organized retreat (at least IMO) and that was on the Leningrad front.

 

As the Ostheer needed daily 30000 tonnes of supplies,the LW supplying the troops was out of the question .

 

If you have a fource that is having significant supply problems more than doubling the number of men in that force makes things worse rather than better.

Delivering supplies by air is a desperation move. The quantities are limited and you burn huge amounts of fuel doing it.

Perhaps if the German plan had been to sieze the Ukraine and then pick a good defencive location and dig in in say August or September they might have had some chance.

 

Simply doesn't matter when they launched there assault, Even if they gained there objectives in '41 the Russians would still be fighting in '42. Not that the Germans ever had any set objective with Hitler getting involved.. Should have given each army group a set objective and stuck with it. Leningrad, Moscow and Rostov sounds pretty straight forward to me. Big problem Hitler had was he wanted Big Grand battles with Germany victorious. Sometimes better to still with small limited battled even on unimportant fronts, Such as in Finland, Launching what may require very few assets into securing the area's of Karelia and Murmansk Okrug. Strategically not very important, But less front needed to be defended, And more troop's are freed up.

 

First question is do the Germans try to take Moscow by assault or by seige. If by assault then will they have enough strength to survive the counter attack in winter and if by seige then how will the Germans make up for the shortage in trucks? Either the trucks will be used to run supply and leave the tank divisions with out infantry support or if used for support then how will they be supplied. By august september the Germans were already down to 50% or so of their trucks.
As far as the oil fields, maybe Maikop could be taken which is a stretch, but the distance to Baku from Rostov is the same as Rostov to Romania.

 

First question is do the Germans try to take Moscow by assault or by seige.

More likely a battle of encirclement, which they were attempting and which they had successfully executed throughout the 1941 campaign - Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Vyazma, Bryansk. The one difference might be that in each of those battles, the Germans enveloped essentially all the Russian forces facing them, so that the Russians were unable to mount any significant effort from outside the pocket before the encircled forces collapsed, which generally took about a couple of weeks. The question with Moscow would be whether Russian forces north or, primarily, south and east of the pocket could break the German lines before the encircled armies capitulated.

 

To encircle Moscow the Germans would need more men. These would have to be pulled from the Northern or Southern fronts exposing theyre flanks in the process..... A no go IMO.

 

Also during the battle of Moscow the Red Army was preparing for massive counter attacks so cannot see how the exhausted German forces could hold the lines. To me it seems the Oct-Dec 1941 German attack was the final plunge to victory, but instead they were facing more and more resistance the further they were going. If just the Red Army had concentrated their attacks the whole Army group Center might have cracked, now instead the pressure was distributed widely and the Germans managed to keep the frontline somewhat steady.

 

They would have definitely had more time to reach Moscow before winter depending on how stubborn the Russians fought after Stalin finally gave the long awaited order to start fighting back. Maybe even avoid winter and gain ground quicker if they had the vast resources which they did not have access to like the Russians.

 

More time? In one sense I guess but if they are hung up due to flooded rivers and mud in Western Russia I'm not sure it buys them anything. Indeed it may even give the Soviets more time to build up their defences and reserves.

 

that makes sense. It might have caught the Red Army a little more off guard but the amount of time the Germans were being stalled because of different circumstances, it would have allowed the Red Army to have more time to bring reinforcements and strengthen their positions. The Germans probably wouldn't have even gotten that close to Moscow as they actually did.