@SuperbattleshipYamato hard to argue against any of this really. The IJN was so far gone by this point in the war that there’s not really much they could have done to salvage their situation one way or another. The bit about the allies not having many LSTs in general is something I never knew before though.
Kursk…
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Re: Bunnies rides again!
That is to say . . .
You’re asking what if Germany won Kursk. Your likely reason for doing so is asking if that would have changed the German-Russian dynamic in the later part of WW2. But that ignores in a huge way all the reasons why Germany did not win at Kursk.
It’s like asking what if you were a man, and you got pregnant by accident. If you’re a man, you’re not going to get pregnant by accident. If a man put a lot of work and money into a lot of surgeries, then pregnancy could be ARRANGED, but that’s hardly by accident.
If you made clear it was ENTIRELY hypothetical, and said something like
“What if a hurricane hit Kursk, wiping out the Russians, but doing minimal damage to the Germans? and not messing up the railways in the area either” it makes more sense as a question.If you’re trying to ask about Kursk seriously, the question has to be something like . . .
“What if German intelligence wasn’t headed up by someone who had his head stuck up his butt for most of the war and had managed to successfully feed false intelligence to the Allies regarding Kursk? (This alone would have made a huge difference, but of course both German and Japanese codes were broken by the Allies.) What if Hitler hadn’t micromanaged offensives as much as he did? What if the Russians had been completely incompetent and not anticipated the German strike at Kursk? (I mean, REALLY incompetent) What if the Russians had not managed to gear their industries for wartime production at the speed at which they did, retroactively over the past two years? What if Germany didn’t have to think about its western front at the time? What if Italy had a far more competent military? What if the Germans had portrayed themselves at the beginning of the German-Russian war as liberators from Stalin?” etc.
If the answers to ANY of these had changed, then it’s not really a question about Kursk at all, but a question about “what if (such and such) a fundamental thing had been different?” But then, why even ask about Kursk in the first place, just ask about that fundamental difference. Sort of like what I meant by referring to feathers and gold and ounces in that earlier post; it’s a question of focusing on what really matters.
All that makes it sound like Russia was always going to kick Germany’s ass at Kursk. But to be clear, I don’t think that’s the case. (It isn’t even quite what happened; the Germans gave the Russians quite a bloody nose.) What I am saying is Kursk wasn’t really a turning point for the Allies. All the contributing factors that led to Germany’s eventual defeat were already there, Kursk just happened to be a point at which it started to happen. Even if the Germans had won at Kursk, the Germans would just have lost later, at another time and place. It’s like, if you’re in a rowboat in a typhoon, and you get hit by a wave and turn over, you could ask yourself what if that particular wave hadn’t knocked your boat over. But it wouldn’t really have mattered, because there would just have been another wave. By the time Kursk came around, it was the fundamentals that were killing Germany, not individual battles. Even if the Germans had managed to squeak a win at Kursk, it would not have been enough. The Germans needed a huge reversal, and they just weren’t going to get it at all, considering all the factors against them
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What if the Superman had joined the Germans…
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Too little too late. If they had ignored the Balkans and gone into Russia earlier they could have taken Moscow before winter.
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What if the Superman had joined the Germans…
Too little too late.
For a moment I thought that that was the most epic answer the world had ever heard. :) and then I read
If they had ignored the Balkans and gone into Russia earlier they could have taken Moscow before winter.
:S
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They would have had to make time go backwards to do that i guess.
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The Battle of Kursk consisted of two phases: Operation Citadel (the German attack) and the Soviet counteroffensive after the attack had failed. Amazingly, the Germans achieved a 3:1 exchange ratio during Operation Citadel (when attacking prepared Soviet defenses), and 4:1 exchange ratio for the battle as a whole. However, the Soviet Union had much deeper manpower reserves than Germany. With the British and Americans invading Italy, and preparing to invade France, an exchange ratio like that probably brought the Allied victory closer.
The Soviet force at Kursk consisted of 1.9 million men, compared to 800,000 men for Germany. Germany had seriously depleted other parts of its eastern front to achieve its force concentration at Kursk. The Soviets had concentrated their forces as well–they had been warned by German traitors to expect an attack–but they had not needed to deplete other areas of their front to the same extent Germany had. The Soviets used their months of preparation time to make the Kursk salient one of the most heavily defended areas in human history.
In a best-case scenario for Germany, the Kursk salient would have been completely encircled and destroyed. To create this best-case scenario, four things would have been necessary. 1) The Germans would have needed to identify and destroy the traitors responsible for handing over valuable information to the communists before the decision to attack Kursk had been made. 2) The Germans would have needed to attack quickly, before the Soviets’ defensive preparations had been complete. 3) The Germans would have needed to keep attacking, even if the U.S. launched an offensive in Italy. 4) The Germans needed a lot of luck.
In the actual attack, Germany experienced 54,000 casualties. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Germany had been able to encircle and destroy the Kursk salient at the cost of 150,000 Germans. Roughly 2,000,000 million Soviets for 150,000 Germans would have been a 13:1 exchange ratio: far better than the 3:1 - 4:1 ratio it actually experienced. A 13:1 ratio is probably the absolute best Germany could have hoped for on the Soviet front, and truly represents a “best case” scenario. (There were other times when Germany had achieved a 13:1 ratio on its eastern front. But those were times when von Mannstein had been in charge. At Kursk, both Mannstein and Guderian were overruled; and Hitler sided with the majority of German generals.)
Had Germany achieved that 13:1 exchange ratio at Kursk, it might well have been able to win some follow-up victories as well. But the Soviets would have continued to add 500,000 men a month to their army during 1943 and into ‘44. The Germans could not possibly hope to come anywhere close to the Soviets’ recruitment rate! There were limits even to the Soviets’ manpower reserves, but they could afford to lose several 2 million man forces before reaching those limits. The best a German victory at Kursk could have achieved would have been moderate-scale follow-up victories in '43, followed by a relatively stable German-Soviet front in '44.
However, the German force in Italy was greatly outnumbered by its Anglo-American counterpart. While the Germans were skillful in using terrain and superior generalship to slow the Allied advance with relatively few men, the Germans were slowly losing ground. The German military’s strategy in Italy was to buy time. But time to do what?
The D-Day invasion was launched in '44, about a year after Kursk. The Allies won at D-Day for a variety of reasons, including their air supremacy, the truly massive bombardment efforts of their battleships, the sheer scale of their invasion effort, and the fact they’d deceived the Germans into thinking the invasion would hit Calais, and the fact that so much German military strength was tied down on its eastern front. A victory at Kursk could (potentially!) have allowed Germany to mitigate that last factor. However, sending some additional strength west would not have been overly helpful, unless that strength had been coupled with the realization that Normandy needed to be defended as effectively as Calais. Also, that strength would have been shipped away from the Soviet front, at a time when the Soviets would have recovered from their (hypothetical) defeat at Kursk; and would have been at least as strong on that front as their German counterparts.
The Anglo-American army was strong enough that, if it was not stopped on the beaches of Normandy, it would quickly overwhelm all of France. It’s a stretch to imagine that the Germans might have achieved a 13:1 exchange ratio at Kursk. It’s also a big stretch to imagine that this Kursk victory might have translated into a victory at Normandy. But had both those things happened, Germany would have received the gift of time–on both its eastern and western fronts. Only on its southern front–in Italy–would there have been significant Allied progress. Possession of most of Italy was non-critical to Germany’s war effort.
Had Germany achieved stability on its eastern and western fronts in '43 and '44, it could have used the resulting reprieve to do two things: 1) increase its industrial capacity, and 2) increase its technology. Between '42 and '44, Germany tripled its military output. That alone would not have been enough to win Germany the war: in '44, Soviet military output was roughly equal to Germany’s, while the U.S.'s was double that of Germany. But if Germany could combine that increased military output with significantly more advanced weapons than those the Allies were using, the effect would have been much stronger. The wonder weapons Germany needed–and was in the process of deploying–including the jet, the Wasserfall, the air-to-air and air-to-surface missile, the smart bomb, the assault rifle, the long ranged Panzerfaust anti-tank weapon, the E-Series tanks, and the Type XXI U-boats. Had Germany been able to achieve wide scale deployment of all of these weapons by the end of 1945, 1946 could have been a very good year for Germany. (1945 would have seen wide scale deployment of some of these weapons, thereby buying Germany an extra year.) It would have been critical to deploy large numbers of jets, Wasserfall, and air-to-air missiles in 1945, so as to prevent the United States from dropping an atomic bomb on Berlin. (Which it otherwise would have done.)
To make a long story short: even if the Germans had won at Kursk, a number of other things would have had to go right for Germany to have had a chance.
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Excellent post Kurt,
After buying time, Germany would have needed “The Bomb” to win IMO.
And that didn’t happen. :)
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If Superman had jouned the Germans, he would have used tanks like bowling balls, throw 500 lbs & 1000 lbs bombs like darts, used his bullit proof skin to ricochet machine-gun fire back at the Russians, and if that didnt work he would huff and puff untill he blew them all into China . . . . better than the BOMB
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I thought the Germans were a race Supermen
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What if Germany won the battle of Kursk? Â
…then new Goals would have been to be set up!..
A win constitutes the entire encirclement of the Kursk bulge and destruction/surrender of the Red Army trapped inside?
Yes, leveling the Frontline and breaking out of it with again strong Tankforce Pinchers…
that´s the way i understood the questions!..It is clear that according to that time anything else would have been quiet impossible for the German Army to even think that a victory could possibly occur, German HQ was aware of that, but that was not the question…for mindgames sake and play it through this would be the next step. After a win at Kursk, to break out on several points again and gain Initiatve back…
1943 the German Wehrmacht was not the same like in ´41 ,The ´43 Wehrmacht was not used to win anymore but achieved more and more experiance in Defending and holding Teritory so the mass could flow back to prepare a new defensivline… -
I think if they had won they would have met with another Stalingrad like disaster later in the year. By 1943 Germany’s best East Front strategy was Manstein’s: elastic defence. Hitler would not hear of any retreats, but was the best way to keep ground in the long run. Not attacking in July, but counterattacking an over stretched Russian army later, was better. Everyone knew the Allies were landing in the West soon and much needed mobile units would have to leave the Eastern Front.
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