French divisions mobilized in 1939

And the Allies never had it during the war? Would the Axis have won. I hear it’s very important.

Escaping Montevideo Harbour – possibly.  Getting all the way back to Germany – extremely doubtful.

In terms of getting out of the harbour, Langsdorff would have had two options: heading across the river Plate to Argentina, or making a break for the open sea.  If he’d headed for Argentina, there was no guarantee that he’d be any better off than in Uruguay.  Argentina had some Axis sympathies, I think, but it was still nominally neutral, and the British and French would have put the same diplomatic pressures on it as they had put on Uruguay to respect the Geneva Convention and either intern the ship or force it to leave.  Making a break for the open sea was problematic too.  The British had made sure that the Graf Spee’s departure from Montevideo was in a carefully defined time window by making use of an article in the Geneva Convention that prohibited a warship from sailing from a neutral harbor less than (I think) 24 hours after an enemy merchantman had left the same harbour.  There were British merchant ships in Montevideo at the time of the Spee incident, and the British arranged for one of them to leave the harbour at the right moment to put Langsdorff in a bind between the Geneva Convention and the expiration of the Uruguayan government’s deadline for the Spee to leave.  Harwood’s cruisers were lying in wait nearby, and it’s doubtful that the Spee could have given them the slip.  Moreover, the shallow waters of the Rio de la Plata area were unsuited for combat from Langsdorff’s perspective because his water intakes might have gotten clogged with mud.  Additionally, having the ship sink in combat in shallow water carried the risk that secret equipment and papers would have fallen into Allied hands (this being less of a concern if, as eventually happened, the ship was scuttled under controlled conditions).

Assuming for the sake of argument, however, that Langsdorff had managed to elude Harwood, getting back to Germany would have been very challenging.  Although the Spee was technically still able to sail and fight, the damage she had suffered in the original battle with Harwood had left her in very poor condition to make a long sea voyage.  Harwood, even if he’d initially been eluded, would still have been close by and would have sent his ships (and his scout plane) to look for the Spee; additionally, some British and French naval groups were already converging on the general area following Harwood’s initial battle a few days earlier, so Langsdorff would have had an awful lot of sea power focused on finding him.

I can’t really pick a favourite because I only know a few of the units involved (the 82nd, the 101, the 1st Airborne and the Polish Brigade), but Market-Garden always brings to my mind the scene in A Bridge Too Far in which General Horrocks stands in front of a big room of XXX Corps officers and jovially declares: “Gentlemen, this is a story you will tell your grandchildren…and mightily bored they’ll be.”

Only a few of them are war related, but all of them are definitely from the era. Incredible color photographs - enjoy!

http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2010/07/26/captured-america-in-color-from-1939-1943/

(a bit slow to load, but worth waiting for)

@ABWorsham:

@Dylan:

Hitler didn’t have a reason to invade Poland

Hitler had a reason to invade Poland. The rebirth of a new Polish State was at the expense of the Imperial German Empire. Secondly the Danzig Corridor seperate Germany from Prussia and Western Poland did have a minority of Germans living within it’s communities.

Along with the enslavement and extermination of the Slavic race, and to erase Poland from the world map for German “colonization”.

The French and British were willing to escalate a regional conflict into a World War over Poland’s freedom yet they did not have the backbone to keep the Soviet Union from controling Poland.

Hitler knew damn well what would happen if he invaded Poland. The British and French might have sown the seeds of war with the Treaty of Versailles, but Hitler has no one to blame but himself for starting it.

i agree…Stalin would have LOVED this outcome…

still amazing how the Finns held off such large numbers of soviet troops with those ski battalions of theirs

And it is a big difference if those German ships are new (build in 1939, or something), because a lot of British ships were older then that.