Dreadful Axis Mistakes

@abworsham4

Germany spent a lot of money on synthetic oil-it wouldn’t have cost as much to expoilt naturally occurring oil fields, and those resources could have gone to producing more equipment (which the new massive oil fields, in conjunction with Romania’s could fuel). Germany might even have been able to the give the Italian navy more oil, which would help operations in the Mediterranean. Japan would be able to not attack the Western Allies, which would allow them to destroy China more easily, with all of Japan’s resources aimed at it, with a fully fuelled army and navy. Perhaps Japan, without a massive naval war, could even invest more in tanks and mechanized infantry which would be fully fueled, and would make a possible invasion of the Soviet Union much easier. Supply problems in China and the Soviet Union would have been not as bad. Perhaps several hundred more tanks and mechanized infantry at the Battle Of Moscow, completely fuelled, might have been decisive-and if that wasn’t enough, there would have been more casualties, which would set the stage for a renewed German offensive against Moscow without the need to take Soviet oil. Bombing the oil fieleds might have been sufficent enough to allow Germany to take Moscow in 1942. This would have been coupled with Japanese pressure on the Soviet Union. It would still be close, but the Axis may have won on the Eastern Front. After that, Germany can dedicate all their resources for submarine warfare and fighters to protect the oil fields, and the fighter force would still have performed well, as there would not be a loss of oil, which resulted in training cuts. All of this, with Vichy France and Spain joining the Axis, would have created a crisis in the Mediterranean, especially now that Germany could possibly send an entire panzer army to North Africa, and will have enormous amounts to men on the Atlantic Wall. If China falls, then altogether, the Axis would have won.

@general-6-stars

Oh! I understand what you mean now.

Sorry for not figuring out.

I remembered I watched a Video about this long ago. But I remember it:

1.Germany: they wanted to rule Europe and Western Russian as a one empire. They also wanted to destroy communism forever plus wipe every Jew off the face of the earth. :-o

2. Italy: Italy is simple: Create a “New Roman Empire”. They wanted Italy South spain,south France,Greece,Turkey,Western Middle east, and North Africa. They were also rename the med “Italy Lake” :lol:

3.Axis minors: They were forced to go with the Axis or be invaded. :lol:

4. Japan: They wanted to rule Asia and the pacific, saying “Asian is for Asians”. They wanted a Empire of the Rising sun.

I do not know if axis wanted to Invade North America, But their common goal was “Conquest”, Like Rome,Greece,Persia,Holy Roman,Franks, and alot of other empires.

Hitler should have just stopped the war after May 1941 and just fight UK and take her colonies and use his pact with Stalin to co-capture the Middle-East and finish off India. After 10 years of consolidation of capturing most of Europe and finishing off UK, invade the Soviet Union with the full enjoyment of all the jet fighters, super heavy tanks and greater war making capacity.

So i guess invading Soviet Union was the worst mistake and not using them as true allies until you didn’t need them anymore and causing a two front war.

Hitler should break any military treaty with Japan and try to 5th column USA with sympathizers to keep US neutrality.

The best chance Hitler had to convince Franco to enter the war was in 40 when France fell.
Yes…but heaven with that Franco said no.

_Do you honestly think it would have wasted troops taking the canary islands that serve little if any strategic value (England could barely defend itself, and if Hitler had waited on attacking Russia for a year and focused on England they probably would have been invaded). _

Yes I think because Canaries island would have been easily fall under UK control but worst, it would have been a strategic lost for Kriegmarine.
Uk would have acces to the middle of the Atlantic. A bad news for the U-Boat and give a better protection to cargos.

England did not have a good relationship with Spain.  I would compare that relationship to the US and Iran - yes, we aren’t killing each other but I would hardly call that a good relationship.
Sorry but you’re wrong. Of course it was not a real friendship relation but both konws the importance to talk.

Looking at it from Franco’s perspective, Franco wanted parts of France and Hitler did not want to give it to him.
No Franco wants Gibralter, Morroco and French catalogna but Hitler plan was to annexe Vichy and the southern France in 1942 and Hitler had to meet petain after the Franco meeting so it was not in the interest of Hitler to give to Franco parts of Vichy territory and see Vichy changing camp.

Hmmmm.  This just gave me an idea for a new thread
Good, it’s always interresting to discuss.

@KurtGodel7:

@Octospire:

You make some ineteresting points, the strategic alliances between the French and Soviets basically doomed Germany to either fighting WW2 or being a sitting duck when the Soviets came a knockin’. Chamberlain could of been bigger than Churchill in the current popular imagination if he had of engineered a successful alliance with the Germans and then defeated the Soviet Union. You are very much correct that forging an alliance would of been very difficult considering the Pro-Soviet sentiments amongst the worlds elites, however I think with the right propaganda they could of turned the tide. In reality it wouldnt even have to be propaganda just the truth about the Soviet Union under Stalin, the labour camps and purges that were reality long before exterminating the Jews was even a thought on the Nazi parties planning table.

Germany and Britain had ties going back centuries that could of been rekindled in spite of French protests, the Soviets werent going to sit within their borders forever especially with their massive advantages in manpower and industrial capacity.

What is facinating about this whole era is how accomodating Hitler tried to be with the British at least at first, he wanted an Anglo-German alliance so badly just like the alliance between the Prussians and the British during the Napoloeonic era. Had the British been receptive to these offers or at the very least not signing their way into world war 2 by alligning themselves yet again with the French things could of been very different.

As I previously said I think the key would be proganda making the Nazi’s seem like the lesser of two evils and demonising the Soviets to the point where it would be essential for the British to side with Germany. It really shouldnt of been that hard as the atttitudes of the late 1940’s and 1950’s Western world illustrated. There was already communist uprising in China undermining the Nationalist government, how hard would of it been to demonise the communist way of life and show the world what life in the Soviet Union was really like.

Good post! :)

From a purely ethical standpoint, several differences between the Nazis and the communists occur to me.

The Soviet government had murdered tens of millions of innocent people even before WWII began. (And added considerably to that total both during and after the war.) Conversely, the Nazi government did not begin killing large numbers of people until its food situation precluded feeding everyone within its borders.

The Soviet government was bent on world revolution. Outside of communist-controlled areas, their focus was primarily on tearing down the existing social order and anything which supported it. As an example of this, David Horowitz (an ex-communist who’d been raised as a red diaper baby) noted that shortly after he got married, his wife attended a meeting of communists/radical feminists. She came home in tears: the radical feminists/communists had harshly judged her for choosing to stay home and raise kids instead of putting her career first. That was the last such meeting Horowitz’s wife attended. He went on to add that within a year, every woman who chose to continue attending those meeting had had her marriage end. Communists felt that stirring up trouble between the sexes was a good way to harm the existing social order. In contrast, the Nazis were generally pro-family, and even brought Mothers Day to German-occupied France.

Recently, a relatively well-known Canadian journalist decided to quit her career, and become an artist instead. She went back to school to obtain her art degree. She was successful in obtaining that degree, but she said it nearly killed her as an artist. The postmodernist (read:communist) opinion is that until the world’s sexes and races are equal, beauty has no place in art. Consequently, no effort should be made to make art beautiful. This journalist chose, as her subject matter, to paint the people who cleaned up the art room after the art students were finished using it. She felt such people were too often unnoticed. Her postmodernist professors harshly condemned her for this, and asked her what she, as an educated and well-off white woman, could possibly know what it was like to be a poorly paid racial minority. While the politicization and perversion of art to suit a twisted and evil political agenda may seem like a minor thing in comparison with the mass rapes and mass murders for which communists are responsible, I still see this as significant. In contrast to this, the Nazis tended to prefer traditional to modern art, and believed that it was perfectly appropriate for art to be beautiful or visually pleasing. They sometimes censored depictions of the nude human form, which they saw as decadent.

If the common people could be made to see these and other difference between the Nazis and communists, I firmly believe that most people would respond by becoming significantly more anti-communist than they were anti-Nazi. The problem was that Western elites tended to sweep communists’ crimes under the rug, while focusing excessively on (and often exaggerating) those of the Nazis. Outright lies were told, and believed. For example, Walter Duranty of the New York Times told a number of pro-Soviet lies, including the whitewashing of the Ukrainian famine. (A forced famine that the Soviets committed in the early '30s, which resulted in deliberate starvation and death of 7 million innocent people.) Against such a backdrop, it is possible to tell the truth without necessarily being believed.

While these things would have represented an obstacle to a NATO-style Anglo-German alliance, they were not necessarily an insurmountable one. But it would have been an uphill battle, even if both Hitler and Chamberlain were both fully committed to the idea, and even if the Nazis had been as good at understanding political considerations outside Germany as von Bismarck had been.

While with hindsight we can see what the Nazi’s were capable of, but we forget they were up against the wall and fighting for their very existence who knows what the British or Americans may of done in the same position. The fire bombing of Tokyo killing up to 210,000 a single night is just a preview of what the allies were capable of when faced with the massive casualties possible with an Invasion of mainland Japan.

The Germans in the early 1930’s were an intolerant towards Jews and other minorities such as gypsies but in reality they were not that much more intolerant towards Jews than the Americans in the early years of Nazi rule in Germany. Had the Nazi’s got their alliance and not surrounded on practically every side by Anti-Nazi nations it is likely they would not of comitted much of the atrocities they did in reality. As Kurt Godel quite correctly said the Soviets were already an evil regime long before the Nazi’s put the first Jew in the gas chamber. Had the Germans had alliance to maintain with the British they couldnt take the hard line with ethnic minorities and under take the actions they did in reality, I think carving up the Soviet Union would of been seen as more than worth the trade off of not so publicly persecuting ethnic minorities in the eyes of the Nazi leadership.

I agree that it would of been difficult for Chamberlain and Hitler to forge a NATO style alliance but as you say it wasnt entirely impossible and looking at the reality of World War 2 in a lot of cases the highly improbable did actually end up occuring. For instance the quick fall of France and decimation of Allied armies and also the suprisingly successful early U-boat campaign against Allied shipping in the Atlantic. I think if the Nazi’s had of been less agressive and built up their strength perhaps even getting a treaty where by their armies had free passage through Poland to the Soviet Union, that combined with a continued anti-communist propaganda campaign in Britain may very well of turned the tide of public opinion and made Hitler look like the possible saviour of the peoples of the Soviet Union. Of course had the Alliance materialised the peoples of the Ukraine and Soviet Union been treated fairly and with compassion as the invasion continued its likely that the Soviet Union would of crumbled under the weight of internal revolution and Anglo-German attack.

@ABWorsham:

Should the Italians and Germans occupied Tunisia in 1941? This would have given more airfields to attack Malta bound convoys, provided more ports for shipping, ports that were closer to the Apennine Peninsula. The addition of these ports would forced the British to hunt for shipping west of Malta, which could have helped ease the stress on Tripoli and Benghazi convoys.

Those might have proved to be advantages to the Axis, but they might have come at the cost of negative consequences that would have offset them.  Tunisia was a Vichy-controlled territory at the time.  If the Axis had invaded Tunisia, the Vichy regime would likely have regarded this as a breach of the 1940 armistice terms with Germany, and would probably have reacted in ways Germany would not have liked.  Remember that when the Allies invaded North Africa, Germany occupied the “unoccupied” Vichy-controlled southern part of France, to which France responded with the scuttle of its fleet at Toulon to keep it out of German hands.  France might have done the same thing if the Axis had walked into Tunisia in 1941, and might even have jumped to the Allied side entirely.  So the cost-benefit analysis of an Axis invasion of Tunisia involves some tricky might-have-beens.

The Allies would have lost. Hitler’s turning on Russia at the time and place he did was one of the biggest reasons his thousand year Reich failed when it did. I am sure most people on these forums have tried out the USSR neutral scenario. Just with them neutral the game becomes much more difficult.

FDR was playing for time prior to Pearl Harbor. He had already comment the US to a virtual state of war in the Atlantic and had sent Pacific naval units over to the Atlantic already. Maybe the atom bomb could have still shifted the balance. But the allies weren’t the only ones working on technology. Conflict with Japan was coming, their preemptive strike on Pearl Harbor brought the USA in too early.