War Diaries - Advance to Moscow October 1941

@axis_roll I have not watched the History Channel in years. It became to heavily involved in reality TV.

We cut the cord.

@CWO-Marc said in UK World War Two Bombing Site Map:

German bombers attacked the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh on 16 October 1939. The last raid was a V2 rocket attack near Iwade in Kent on 29 March 1945.

Thanks for the interesting link!

The map seems to be offline right now ‘due to high demand’, but the data can still be accessed. And indicate that the first ‘attack’ actually consisted of two unexploded shells on 6 September 1939. Also, the last raid was actually a V1 according to: https://www.flickr.com/photos/22124479@N03/5001363807
The Wikipedia article on the V1 has Datchworth as its final British target, however. And the dataset lists 7 attacks on that day, apparently listing Datchworth as ‘Batchworth’.

He used it in the same manner as Hitler ( incorrectly) used Stalingrad to engage the bulk of German forces that are not bearing down against Moscow.

@Narvik:

….and the slaughter of Indians during 1800 was not pointless and unjust ?

The slaughter of Indians in the 1800s does not justify American intervention during WWI. Allied victory in WWI did not make the world a better place. It did not result in self-determination, the end of militarism, or any of the other idealistic principles for which Woodrow Wilson said he’d fought. Its main short-term effect was to allow France to exact a petty, unjust, cruel revenge against Germany for its victory in the Franco-Prussian War. The longer term consequence was to rob Central and Eastern Europe of its ability to resist Soviet invasion. According to former Soviet intelligence operative Suvarov, the main reason for the Spviet Union’s invasion of Poland in 1919 was the desire to continue on into Germany. Germany was weak, disarmed, and (in 1919 - '20) largely communist anyway. The German people had been partially radicalized by the famine conditions the Allies had created.

Fortunately, that particular Soviet invasion failed, due to the courage of the Polish Army, and due to the fact the Soviet Union was still in a state of civil war. But a disarmed Germany could not forever escape Soviet occupation. Germany’s only long-term hope was to elect a right wing leader–a militarist–who would match the Soviet military buildup with a strong military of his own. Unfortunately, the political circumstances the Allies created in the afermath of their victory were such that only a radical leader would throw off the unjust Versailles Treaty and seek to return Germany to a position of strength. It’s deeply unfortunate that the particular militarist Germany chose was a rabid anti-Semite and anti-Slav. Had WWI resulted in a tie or an Axis victory, Germany would presumably been able to maintain a strong military presence in the post WWI era without politically radicalizing itself. That combination (a strong German military and no radical anti-Semitism) would have yielded better long-term results than anything one could expect from the Allied victory.

We would have cut off all ties with them. The next one would have been a declaration of war.

@balungaloaf:

without US aid assistance via lend lease, without the allied strategic bombing campaign tying up much of the luftwaffe and anti air defenses, and without the threat of invasion keeping millions of german soldiers in europe, the soviets would have been smashed before they could ever set up a counter attack.  if moscow was taken, the people would give up on their communist overlords and capitulate.

You alluded to the pressure the U.S. and Britain put on Germany; and I fully agree that pressure was immense. Even in 1940–before the U.S. was technically at war–its industrial production created profound implications for the balance of power in Europe. With massive numbers of American aircraft being produced and sent to Britain, Germany had to either a) find a way to keep pace, industrially, with the U.S. and Britain combined, or b) watch its cities and people be destroyed by waves of British and American bombers. The invasion of the Soviet Union was largely precipitated by the desire to allow Germany to attain the raw materials and industrial capacity to achieve outcome A.

However, keeping pace with the production capacity of the U.S. and Britain also required Germany to invest heavily in its own production facilities. That investment diverted effort from what would have been immediately useful production against the Soviet Union. During 1942, the Soviets out-produced the Germans 3:1 or even 4:1 in all major land categories of production, and even out-produced the Germans 2:1 in planes.

Prior to launching Operation Barbarossa, the German military staff had incorrectly believed that the Soviet Army consisted of 200 divisions. Divisions which had fought very poorly in the Soviets’ 1940 invasion of Finland. In the spring of 1941, the German Army consisted of 150 divisions; 100 of which were used for the invasion of the Soviet Union. But in the months after the invasion, the Soviets were quickly able to expand the size of their army to about 600 divisions. Given the imbalance of sheer numbers, it is very unlikely Germany could have prevailed in a war against the Soviet Union even despite its military’s advantage on a man-for-man basis.

I  watched it on PBS, They repeated it today starting at pearl habor.

Awsome show.

KurtGodel7, very good post, thank you.

I’m still not convinced however, I’ll reply to a few of your points below further:

Germany desperately needed the Russian oil by 1943 (as well as Russian grain which I will discuss further below).  That they failed to take the Caucasus during this time was their last realistic chance at victory, IMO.  However, had they taken the oil wells, but with the Russians destroying them in the process as was quite likely, would the Germans be able to restore the flow of oil in sufficient time? It might take months, even years to rebuild the necessary infrastructure in the best of circumstances, let alone during a brutal war.  The German industry was already hard pressed to supply the necessary armaments and did not have a great deal of experience with oil industry in the first place.  I think they would not have been able to do this.

The same idea goes for the chromium, vanadium, etc., though this would be less difficult for the Germans to accomplish (or mitigate as you also suggest) than the oil problem.

While Germany might have been able to supply an equivalent amount of money, material and engineers to work on their atomic program, there simply were much fewer top nuclear physicists in all Europe than existed in the US.  Consequently, it would have probably cost more and taken longer than the US program for this reason alone.  I have no doubt they could have eventually done it, but I don’t see how they develop nuclear weapons before the allies developed a delivery system that could get through their defenses.

The German V-2 was a technological marvel, but other than size, no more advanced than the rockets being built by Dr. Goddard.  After the war, when Dr. Goddard was able to examine a captured V-2, he was convinced the Germans had stolen his work.  And the Germans might have because most of his designs were on file in the US patent office, available for public viewing (which the Germans did prior to the war).  I think had the Americans wanted to (and Dr. Goddard certainly did) they could have built a superior rocket in a couple months and have it mass-produced in six.  As the A-bombs designs at that time were quite heavy, it might have taken longer than that to build a nuclear capable rocket…but how much longer?

Alternatively, the Allies could have either copied the German jets to enable a delivery system, or devise other means (boats/submarines? special ops?) to deliver these weapons.

In addition, I consider the German attack on Russia to be about food as well as oil  The Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe, and helped the Germans tremendously in 1943.  But food was scarce in 1944 and onward.  Partly this was due to Russian recovery of territory.  But it was also because the Ukraine was normally not sufficient by itself to feed Germany (the year of the capture of Ukraine by the Germans was one of the best years for Ukrainian agriculture as the weather was nearly perfect).  Of course, the poor treatment of the Ukrainians by the Germans did not lend itself to helping this problem either. In order to assure itself of adequate food, I think the Caucasus (the next logical food source) was needed.