Something that kind of annoys me is when people say that the Germans were defeated in the Battle of Britain. I just don’t see it that way. The reason England was not invaded was more due to Hitler losing interest and wanting to invade the USSR. If the Germans focused on England and were not preparing for Barbarossa England could not have stopped them. While the air war was going badly for the Germans the Army could have made contributions that would have knocked England out. Had Rommel been supported he could have taken the Suez canal. I don’t think it would have taken much to get Spain to allow German troops to access their country to attack Gibralter. The U-boat war given more resources could have starved England. Preperation for the attack on the USSR (and the Balkans) is what saved England.
I am not trying to take anything away from England, but to say they beat Germany is a bit of a stretch. The Germans didn’t invade England because Hitler was an idiot and wanted to attack Russia. The Germans may not have been able to invade in 40, but if instead of attacking Russia they focused on England in 41 England would have collapsed. With the fall of Gibralter and the Suez Canal you could argue that England would have made peace (that or starve to death) making an invasion unnecessary.
Anyhow, any thoughts on this?
Worsham plan to defeat England.
1. Attack channel convoys, this is where the Stuka was able to deal the British a hard blow.
2. Attack the outermost RAF air installations with relentless air attacks
3. Heavy night raids on the western Lend-Lease ports.
4 Mine the Thames River continuously
Something that kind of annoys me is when people say that the Germans were defeated in the Battle of Britain. I just don’t see it that way. The reason England was not invaded was more due to Hitler losing interest and wanting to invade the USSR. If the Germans focused on England and were not preparing for Barbarossa England could not have stopped them. While the air war was going badly for the Germans the Army could have made contributions that would have knocked England out. Had Rommel been supported he could have taken the Suez canal. I don’t think it would have taken much to get Spain to allow German troops to access their country to attack Gibralter. The U-boat war given more resources could have starved England. Preperation for the attack on the USSR (and the Balkans) is what saved England.
I am not trying to take anything away from England, but to say they beat Germany is a bit of a stretch. The Germans didn’t invade England because Hitler was an idiot and wanted to attack Russia. The Germans may not have been able to invade in 40, but if instead of attacking Russia they focused on England in 41 England would have collapsed. With the fall of Gibralter and the Suez Canal you could argue that England would have made peace (that or starve to death) making an invasion unnecessary.
Anyhow, any thoughts on this?
Good post.
It’s worth bearing in mind that, in 1940, Britain produced more military aircraft than Germany. Britain also received large numbers of military planes from the United States. Britain rapidly expanded the size of its army; and was far better-prepared against invasion in '41 than in '40. If Germany was going to invade, the best time would have been in the summer of 1940.
Von Manstein believed such an invasion could have succeeded–if done the right way. Air battles deep inside British territory gave the RAF the range advantage. To avoid this problem, von Manstein wanted the Luftwaffe to stay near the coast; providing overwhelming air support shortly before and during the invasion.
During the Dunkirk evacuation, the British shipped large numbers of soldiers across the Channel without having complete control of the sky. Germany may have been able to achieve the same.
Hitler rejected the tactical risks associated with such a plan, and therefore had to accept the much more serious strategic risk of war against the Soviet Union. German military planners had thought the Red Army had 200 divisions. By the fall of 1940 it had 600 divisions. For most of the war, it added 500,000 men a month: a pace Germany could not possibly hope to match.
Something that kind of annoys me is when people say that the Germans were defeated in the Battle of Britain. I just don’t see it that way. The reason England was not invaded was more due to Hitler losing interest and wanting to invade the USSR. If the Germans focused on England and were not preparing for Barbarossa England could not have stopped them. While the air war was going badly for the Germans the Army could have made contributions that would have knocked England out. Had Rommel been supported he could have taken the Suez canal. I don’t think it would have taken much to get Spain to allow German troops to access their country to attack Gibralter. The U-boat war given more resources could have starved England. Preperation for the attack on the USSR (and the Balkans) is what saved England.
I am not trying to take anything away from England, but to say they beat Germany is a bit of a stretch. The Germans didn’t invade England because Hitler was an idiot and wanted to attack Russia. The Germans may not have been able to invade in 40, but if instead of attacking Russia they focused on England in 41 England would have collapsed. With the fall of Gibralter and the Suez Canal you could argue that England would have made peace (that or starve to death) making an invasion unnecessary.
Anyhow, any thoughts on this?
Good post.
It’s worth bearing in mind that, in 1940, Britain produced more military aircraft than Germany. Britain also received large numbers of military planes from the United States. Britain rapidly expanded the size of its army; and was far better-prepared against invasion in '41 than in '40. If Germany was going to invade, the best time would have been in the summer of 1940.
Von Manstein believed such an invasion could have succeeded–if done the right way. Air battles deep inside British territory gave the RAF the range advantage. To avoid this problem, von Manstein wanted the Luftwaffe to stay near the coast; providing overwhelming air support shortly before and during the invasion.
During the Dunkirk evacuation, the British shipped large numbers of soldiers across the Channel without having complete control of the sky. Germany may have been able to achieve the same.
Hitler rejected the tactical risks associated with such a plan, and therefore had to accept the much more serious strategic risk of war against the Soviet Union. German military planners had thought the Red Army had 200 divisions. By the fall of 1940 it had 600 divisions. For most of the war, it added 500,000 men a month: a pace Germany could not possibly hope to match.
The British having a higher production of aircraft? BAH! Let me point out the obvious. Germany makes 32IPC a turn and England only makes 30. Don’t you feel foolish…
A&A kidding aside, between the submarine threat and the bombing of the airfields Churchill himself thought England could be done for. The few weeks the Germans were doing it right the RAF lost more aircraft than what it made, not to mention pilots they lost. That kind of pressure being kept on England would have made them crack.
The diversion of the German airforce to the Balkans and Barbarossa is what saved England. And again, lets not forget, massive German man power and material that Hitler designated for Barbarossa could have been used capturing the Suez Canal and Gibralter. With the Germans securing both of those, even the Italians couldn’t screw it up as far as the Med goes.
http://www.wintersonnenwende.com/scriptorium/english/archives/articles/stalwarplans.html
Articles like this show evidence that it was Stalin who was planning to strike first. He wanted to wait until the French/English and Germans bled themselves dry, and then invade a war weary Germany in order to dominate Europe. Huge amounts of Soviet equipment were being assembled on the borders of Germany in 1941 - for offensive reasons.
Hitler did not cooperate and launched a pre-strike - capturing huge amounts of Russian men and material. This helped delay the communist domination of Eastern Europe, but Germany was just not strong enough to fight the major powers on its own.
Hitler was no fool - he simply had no real heart to fight the English. He considered them racial brothers - this is why he held his panzers back at Dunkirk, enabling them to escape. He hoped for peace with the West, but Churchill would have none of it. Hitler’s real fight was always with the Bolsheviks to the East.
On 25 August 1939 Hitler stated to British ambassador Neville Henderson: “The allegation that Germany wants to conquer the world is ridiculous. The British Empire has 40 Million Square Kilometers, Soviet Russia has 19 Million and the U.S.A. has 9.5 Million, whereas Germany has not even 600,000 Square Kilometers. From this it can be seen who has as tendency to conquer."
Winners write the history books and this is why we all grew up believing history happened just as the Allies wrote it.
@Der:
http://www.wintersonnenwende.com/scriptorium/english/archives/articles/stalwarplans.html
Articles like this show evidence that it was Stalin who was planning to strike first. He wanted to wait until the French/English and Germans bled themselves dry, and then invade a war weary Germany in order to dominate Europe. Huge amounts of Soviet equipment were being assembled on the borders of Germany in 1941 - for offensive reasons.
Hitler did not cooperate and launched a pre-strike - capturing huge amounts of Russian men and material. This helped delay the communist domination of Eastern Europe, but Germany was just not strong enough to fight the major powers on its own.
Hitler was no fool - he simply had no real heart to fight the English. He considered them racial brothers - this is why he held his panzers back at Dunkirk, enabling them to escape. He hoped for peace with the West, but Churchill would have none of it. Hitler’s real fight was always with the Bolsheviks to the East.
On 25 August 1939 Hitler stated to British ambassador Neville Henderson: “The allegation that Germany wants to conquer the world is ridiculous. The British Empire has 40 Million Square Kilometers, Soviet Russia has 19 Million and the U.S.A. has 9.5 Million, whereas Germany has not even 600,000 Square Kilometers. From this it can be seen who has as tendency to conquer."
Winners write the history books and this is why we all grew up believing history happened just as the Allies wrote it.
Articles like this show evidence that it was Stalin who was planning to strike first.
It wasn’t a question of if Stalin would strike. It was a question of when.
I personally believe that Stalin intended to wait several years before invading Germany. His 1940 winter invasion of Finland proved the Red Army was not yet ready for war. Germany’s conquest of France during that same year proved Germany was.
Moreover, Stalin had invested enormously in infiltration efforts directed against the United States. Those efforts had yielded enormous dividends. Stalin appears to have believed that Soviet influence in America, in combination with FDR’s own pro-Soviet, anti-Nazi thinking, would be sufficient to get the United States into the war regardless of Germany’s actions. From Stalin’s perspective, why let Soviet soldiers die fighting the Germans, when American soldiers could fill that role just as easily? After Germany and the Western democracies had bled themselves white in a war which did not benefit either Germany or the democracies, then and only then would the Red Army begin its push west.
Huge amounts of Soviet equipment were being assembled on the borders of Germany in 1941 - for offensive reasons.
This is true, but not in itself proof that Stalin planned to launch his offensive in 1941. At the time, Soviet doctrine called for using offense as the best form of defense. While all that equipment may have looked very threatening to the Nazis, there is a strong chance Stalin planned to delay for a few years, in order to let the Western democracies bear most of the blood cost of destroying Germany’s military.
He hoped for peace with the West, but Churchill would have none of it.
Traditionally, British foreign policy had been based on creating balance on the Continent. If one power became too strong, Britain would side with that power’s enemies, in order to restore balance. Hitler had expected Britain to continue this kind of foreign policy; in this case by favoring balance between Germany and the Soviet Union. Instead, it completely abandoned that line of thinking. It favored (and eventually achieved) the complete destruction of the German military. This created a power void in Europe–a void inevitably filled by the Soviet Union. Given that the long-term objective of Soviet foreign policy was world conquest, Hitler could not understand why the British would abandon their traditional foreign policy in favor of a war which did not serve British interests.
On 25 August 1939 Hitler stated to British ambassador Neville Henderson: “The allegation that Germany wants to conquer the world is ridiculous."
Hitler was correct as far as that went. The allegation was pro-communist propaganda and an outright lie.
“Germany has not even 600,000 Square Kilometers. From this it can be seen who has as tendency to conquer.”
This part of Hitler’s statement was a little disingenuous, given that his long-term foreign policy objective was to conquer the European portion of the Soviet Union. However, he was correct to imply that the Soviet Union and the Western democracies had a taste for conquest. After WWI, Britain helped itself to most of the Ottoman Empire. Around the turn of the century, it had conquered Dutch nations in south Africa, because it wanted their gold. After the Dutch launched guerrilla operations against British tyranny, the British responded by putting the Dutch civilian population in concentration camps. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LizzieVanZyl.jpg for a picture of one of the victims.)
During WWI, Britain and France imposed a food blockade against Germany and Austria. According to one government estimate, this food blockade resulted in the deaths of 700,000 civilians. It certainly played a role in the collapse of Germany’s war effort in 1918. Prior to the end of hostilities, France had agreed to Wilson’s 14 points. Britain had agreed to 13 of the 14 points, with the one point of disagreement being freedom of the seas. When Germany laid down its arms, it expected an honorable peace treaty based on Wilson’s 14 points.
After Germany laid down its weapons, the Allies decided that instead of the 14 points, they would impose a harsh, vindictive peace which bore no relation at all to anything they had promised. Britain continued its food blockade against Germany into 1919, to force it to agree to these new peace terms. The Versailles Treaty was so harsh that Germany could not afford to purchase the food imports it needed. This meant that during the '20s and early '30s, most Germans faced periods of prolonged and insatiable hunger. One of the reasons Hitler wanted Lebensraum was so that Germany could feed its people regardless of Allied food blockades or anti-German economic measures. He’d also pointed out that no one had ever succeeded in imposing a Versailles Treaty on the Unites States. He felt that if Germany conquered the western Soviet Union, it would achieve the same position of strength relative to Europe that the United States had in North America. This would protect Germany from hunger, from hostile foreign invasion, and from peace terms dictated by hostile outside parties.
Great points - this is not the version of history I was taught in school, but thankfully with access to the internet and the benefit of hindsight we are able to learn some of this untold history now.
