Honestly , not exactly. The point was - What could Hitler have done to win a war? It’s not just about only US involvement in a war. Which de-facto was already IN before the december 1941.If the Hitler couldn’t avoid the war with UK’s american ally- but he still could avoid a war with USSR, wasn’t he?
First you have to keep in mind, what Hitler said to General Jodl in Mid-December 1941: “Im Prinzip ist der Krieg verloren” (“We have essentially lost the war”) and years later: “since the end of 1941 I try to hold on and wait for a miracle”. He knew, that Roosevelt’s greatest desire was to declare war on Germany, Raeder and Doenitz urged him to act and not to wait until the US Navy has build up a effective defense against German U-Boats. In a state of desparation his thinking might have been something like: well let’s do em as much harm as possible for the moment and maybe widen the gap between now and the day they could strike back.
Again , if Hitler really was aware he would have losed a war- why then in the mid of 1941 ( in top of wermacht military success) he so easy start the another one giant new compain on the East? Sounds scepticaly…
Ensured the B.E.F was captured in June 1940. The UK would probably then have to have sought terms.
If not.
Captured Malta not Crete.
Sent an army to Libya not a Corps.
Captured Egypt, which would have secured his Southern Flank.
Possession of the Middle East would have given Germany access to oil.
Not Attack Russia.
As he did none of these things, not being a strategic thinker, Germany ended up fighting the World’s largest Empire, the World’s largest army and the World’s largest economy.
Defeat was inevitable.
Possession of the Middle East would have given Germany access to oil.
I believe the oil in the Middle East was mostly “undiscovered” at the time of WWII, and therefore would have no major impact on things. If I recall correctly, it was Rommel who also had the grand scheme that securing the Middle East would open a second front – through the Caucuses – on the USSR. Though of course, his idea came after Barbarossa.
And you might as well add “not declaring war on the US” and “Change ULTRA Codes” to your list.
Depends if Churchill survives as Prime Minister, and if not who replaces him. Halifax might have sought terms, although reading the cabinet minutes of the time it is apparent that he wasn’t willing to offer very much and Germany probably wanted a lot more. Churchill never would have - he was much more aware of how the RN made invasion impossible, and committed to fighting on. As I understand it the Labour party would never have supported Halifax, and that is why Churchill got the nod as PM - so if Churchill falls I’m not sure who else there is? Atlee? Eden is also a possibility, but I doubt he’d have behaved any differently to Churchill but with less oratorical skill.
Much, much harder target. Malta had 15 battalions of infantry dug in for defence in a very small area, and a hell of a lot of flak. Crete had 25 covering a much larger area, many of which were disorganised after the evacuation from mainland Greece and were nowhere near as deeply dug in. By the time the Germans got involved the air defence of Malta was also much better than that of Crete (it was being run by Keith Park after July 1942). If they could do it then clearly it would be a massive advantage to the Afrika Corps (Malta-based Wellingtons and Submarines were largely responsible for their terrible supply situation) - I just don’t think it could be taken.
Could they supply it? On a regular basis the Afrika Corps was reliant on diverting Italian supplies to keep moving. There are also the issues that the terrain in North Africa didn’t actually permit much larger forces to be used in many places - all the fighting effectively took place along one road, and there are few bottlenecks that could be blocked by an Army but not a Corps.
Actually quite hard to do - the Quattara Depression is one of the few places in North Africa that cannot be outflanked by mobile forces (the Mareth line being another, if less secure). It is also a hell of a long way from a suitable port for attacking forces, and right next door to their main supply base for the defenders. Additionally, it’s quite a short line (40 miles or so?) - meaning you can’t actually pack terribly big forces into it before you run out of room. The best chance of taking Egypt is frightening the British into keeping running straight through the Quattara line and on to Suez - which is by no means impossible.
Umm… not exactly, possession of the Middle East plus control of the shipping routes would have given them access to oil (the pipelines which would come later did not yet exist). To keep the RN from intercepting and capturing their oil supplies, they either need to conquer out as far as India and Kenya to deny the RN fuelling depots (easier said than done, and the RN was starting to use replenishment at sea for the Atlantic Convoys at the time) or build a surface navy. Capturing the Middle East is actually the hardest part of these - as Andrew Cunningham said over Crete “It takes three years to build a ship; it takes three centuries to build a tradition.” - and the Germans had neither. Outside the U-boat and S-boat arms, which could not successfully escort a convoy of fuel tankers, their navy was deeply ineffective.
Difficult one that - there is a fair amount of evidence that Stalin was planning on a war in 1943 or 44. Additionally, as Talleyrand said, “The only thing you cannot do with a bayonet is sit on it”. The German army was confined by the weasel-pee poor logistics routes to the south, the Royal Navy to the North and West, and Russia to the East. Germany had either to fight Russia or demobilize their army. In a situation where Hitler had been preaching since the 1920s that Russia was the ultimate enemy of the German people and that the Germans should seek living space in the East, a fight with Russia sooner or later was inevitable. That being so, the best chance the German army would ever have was in 1940 or 41, while the Red Army was still weak after the purges and the winter war. As the German army was busy elsewhere in 1940, that leaves 1941 - and the weather dictated that to within a week or two.
Thing is, that’s all integral to the philosophy (racial superiority of Aryans over other races) which brought him to power in the first place. A Hitler who wouldn’t make these mistakes is also a Hitler who would have remained a failed Bavarian artist.
I wonder, if Hitler could’ve waited a bit longer than 1939 before he acted, so the jet aircraft would be ready for the Luftwaffe. The Jet aircraft could’ve easily knocked out the propeller aircraft which, both US and Britain had.
The German Jet aircraft’s would’ve been ready by 1946-47, If Hitler waited until 1941, things could’ve been a lot different.
Hitler admired the British Empire(it appealed to his racial fantasies), his preferred policy outcome was an alliance with British Empire giving him a free hand to reverse Versailles and to destroy Bolshevism in the East. Where a new German Empire would be forged.
He either didn’t know or ignored the main driver of British Foreign Policy in Europe, that no European power should achieve dominance, to that end the British would organise and fund coalitions to oppose any power with that ambition.
No wonder in September '39 ,when he found himself in an alliance with Russia and at war with France and Britain he turned to Ribbentrop and Goering and said, ‘what now’.
Without Hitler, there would have been no WWII.
Actually, I tend to doubt that, though its nature might have been substantially different. There were too many “isms” around, and too many folk ready to make a land/power grab in the wake of the economic desolation of WWI treaties and the Depression. All you have to do is look at the pre-war behavior of Stalin, and you’ll get the idea.
I wonder, if Hitler could’ve waited a bit longer than 1939 before he acted, so the jet aircraft would be ready for the Luftwaffe.
If I recall correctly, the British were about on par with the Germans in terms of jet development, and the US was also involved in its own development efforts. Time is a two-edged sword. And due in part to Churchill’s prodding, the UK was already in catch-up arms race with Germany before the war. One of the things Winston happened to focus on? Air power.
True early in the war, by the end of the war the British were a LONG way ahead. The Soviets got copies of pretty much all the German jet engine research after WW2, and they still had to buy and copy RR Derwent engines to get a high performance jet. The early Meteors were about on a par with an Me-262, the later ones (1946 onwards) much better. The P-80 and Vampire/Spider Crab were also significantly better than the Me-262.The German jets get a good reputation because they were fighting against P-51s, Spitfires and Tempests. Change their opponents to jets of their own generation (an artificial restriction - the RAF would not permit their jets to fly over enemy-held territory) and the story is rather different.
Even if Germany developed Jet technology a bit earlier, and I’m not any sort of expert on Luftwaffe aircraft but recall reading they really couldn’t have developed anything much earlier than they did - the Allies still had countermeasures. Strategic bombing could have more aggressively been shifted to aerodromes. In addition, while the Me-262 was extremely formidable against Thunderbolts, Mustangs, Spitfires, Migs, etc. in the air, the Swallow still had engines that took time to ‘spool-up’ and they were unresponsive thrust-wise at low power - and were very vulnerable upon takeoff and landing as a result. As it was, the USAAF if not the RAF as well blanketed their fighters around Luftwaffe air bases just out of sight and attempted to pounce any Me-262’s taking off or landing for easy kills.
The little problem of chronic fuel shortages probably might also limit the already slim advantages the Luftwaffe would have had fielding more jets a little earlier. Not to mention many of their best pilots were either dead or being preserved with ineffectual training of replacements hindering the real potential jets had anyways as they were more difficult to fly AFAIK …
Rather than thinking of it as a war-winner, it is probably better to think of the Me 262 as one of the delusive “wonder weapons” in which Hitler appears to have placed his faith in the latter part of the war, albeit one of the most successful.
On the question of fuel, it is worth bearing in mind that one of the latest points in time at which Germany could have been said to have lost the ability to win the war is following the failure of the confused Stalingrad/Caucasus campaigh of 1942. Germany was buffered against the consequences of its inability to import petroleum in the wartime situation by pre-war stockpiles, and by the availabililty of stocks captured from defeated enemies in the early years of the war. However, an important element of their strategic calculation in invading the Soviet Union (not, in general, the greatest achievement in the history of German strategic thought in any case) was the rather lazy assumption that the oilfields of the Caucasus would be captured fairly straightforwardly - possibly by end-1941, on some assumptions. In the event, the Germans only obtained a toehold in the Caucasus oilfields in the 1942 campaign, and had to abandon this gain before they could undo the damage done to the facilities by the retreating Soviets. The failure of that campaign marked the end of Germany’s last chance to secure this, the only reasonable prospect of a sufficient petroleum supply. Artificial petroleum was never going to be the answer. Best regards, JR.
Hitler could have won World War Two, only with a better apparatus for foreign espionage, penetration, and subversion. The Nazis effectively had none of these. They had a good propaganda apparatus for fooling Germans, but not the rest of the world. They also had enjoyed no penetration of foreign governments, except by agents who were turned and fed them false information.
Really? You think? I don’t think this was a particular strength, but there were spies and fifth columnists in several gov’ts and some believe the Purge of the Soviet Red Army and the execution of of one of the USSR’s best generals, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, was part of an elaborate agent provocateur operation by the SS under Reinhard Heydrich. Although many think this was just an excuse used by the NKVD to “out” him as a ‘fascist agent’. But also bear in mind that the warning Stalin received from his communist agents on the eve of Barbarossa were largely ignored - basically nullifying much of Stalin’s intelligence and espionage advantage.
The Germans did enjoy some success in frustrating Allied operations in supporting the resistance and probably had the Dutch Resistance penetrated to the corp. So while the British rolled up the Abwehr networks under Double Cross, the Germans did the same thing to many an Allied agent entering both Belgium and The Netherlands. But ultimately, part of the problem the Nazis had was their unique, meteoric rise to power which offended many on both the left and right and fostered the turning of both communist agents, internal resistance, and Allied sympathizers…
^they had zero espionage victories in the United States, whose involvement decided the whole thing. Germany had zero penetration into American newspapers or government, while the USSR had battalions of agents in American media and government
Fighting 3 major allied countries at one time. France and UK were no threat but to declare war on US and to invade Russia nearly at the same time was way too much. IF Hitler kept the war in-between European boarders and waited until the defeat of Britain to invade Russia, then victory may be German’s hands. German forces were way to stretch out.
Wasn’t Hitler aiming for a quick war? German forces made for a quick war, Hitler was expecting a much quicker war?
Edit: Sorry, my initial reply was dipped in sarcasm. Let’s just say that before the war, France was widely viewed has having the best army in the world, and Germany certainly viewed it as a “threat.” Likewise, Germany feared the UK’s manpower and navy. Germany obviously felt Britain a threat, even after the fall of France, as its efforts in the Battle of Britain proved. And, of course, it was the effort to remove Britain’s “last hope” that Hitler turned East in the first place and attacked the USSR. Germany’s inability to defeat Britain and all its consequences – an off-coast base for the US, bombings that withdrew the Luftwaffe from the Eastern front, the Lend-Lease Murmansk pipeline to the USSR, etc – may well have been enough to ensure Germany’s eventual defeat all by itself. And if Hitler hadn’t struck east, he’d at best have a kind of uneasy stalemate, a situation that wouldn’t last long in the unstable times of the day. Whether already being planned or not (I tend to doubt anything concrete was in the works), sooner or later, Stalin would have moved against a stalled Germany, and at a time and place of his own choosing.
Ardee already covered the mains points well, so I’ll just address your last sentences.
Hitler’s “quick war” was a widely held view, but one that is becoming less and less credible. Hitler really didn’t have much of a plan at all! No one in the German command structure thought, or even dreamed, that The Battle of France was ever going to be over in six weeks or so. In fact the initial plan by Gen. Halder envisioned a large scale battle of attrition and blood bath through Belgium, which was why a good number of German officers wanted Hitler dead because they thought defeat was almost inevitable! And also because Hitler’s initial order for an attack in the Fall of 1939 into Belgium could have been a total disaster for the Heer…
It was Manstein’s brilliant plan as well as Halder’s revisions and his delegation of authority to Guderian and Rommel for Fall Gelb that essentially flanked the French defense plans by driving through the Ardennes that caused the collapse of the French military system by bypassing their formidable units that drove into Belgium in one of the worst operational plans ever (The Dyle Plan). In short, while the German Army (Heer) was very good, they (and by extension Hitler) were very lucky that the French military acted very predictably in anticipating a “long war” of attrition rather than one of strategic envelopment in which they tragically found themselves…
This is from a very imperfect memory, but I think it was Speer who said that Hitler would never have invaded Poland without the synthetic fuel technology supplied by General Motors.
I have no understanding of what that technology was or how it related to Germany’s ability to produce ersatz fuel and related resource and logistical issues during the remainder of the war.
G.M. or Standard Oil (Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, and a few others)?
I would also like to know more about German fuel and lubricants production in WWII. I recall that many panzer crews on the Eastern Front were pleasantly surprised that not only was their synthetic motor protecting their engines better than the day’s conventional lubricants, but that the cold flow properties were vastly superior to conventional motor oils. I imagine that this in no small part saved much fuel in the panzerwaffe as they didn’t need to idle their tanks (or other vehicles) in the cold as much…
