Sneaky German Marksmen

You are off topic again, Kurt, 4 engines remember ?

How would the German light cruisers have preformed as commerce raiders?

@abworsham4

I think there are two possible problems with this strategy:

Firstly, whilst it would have been indeed much easier to produce, could Germany have produced enough of them to match Soviet production with Western Allied bombing and fighting in North Africa and later in France and Italy? At least Germany would have a qualitative advantage due to crew training.

Secondly, could Germany hypothetically had enough manpower to equip those tanks? I admit this is a lesser problem, as I would favour having one tank than 3-6 infantrymen.

@abworsham4

Please send me his strategies and game reports!

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 officially stated target for Barbarossa was the Astrakhan-Archangel line.

@balungaloaf:

i heard on a show lately that the german army lost 1/4 of all supplies and material that the germans ever produced in the ENTIRE SECOND WAR!

i was like whaaaaaaa?!

is this accurate?  it makes sense of a lot of things for me.  by number losses of troops alone i always thought that the germans should be able to recoup their losses by their volunteer campaigns in occupied territories, or by forcing human labor in the territories occupied to free up more german men to be put into the wehrmacht.

1/4 of all supplies produced lost is staggering.

makes you wonder why in the hell Hitler didnt allow a tactical retreat from the area after the soviets counterattacked en masse.

the question is this. is the 1/4 loss number accurate?

I think this may be be reference to a line in the “Stalingrad” episode of “The World at War”.  Towards the end of the episode, as the narrator describes the German losses in men and equipment at Stalingrad, he says that enough equipment was lost to equip one-quarter of the German army.  So it’s not a reference to one-quarter of the equipment produced, which would be a much larger number.

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.