So, what would it take for Hitler to get a political victory?

[*Lava*]

ORIGINAL: Panama
War was definately NOT a surprise.

The Spanish Civil War clearly foretold the future, and that future would be a war to the death.

The question was not "if"... only "when."

[Berkut]

Never attribute to conspiracy what can be adequately explained by simple incompetence.

[DTurtle]

May be a few days late, but I still wanted to address this:

ORIGINAL: PyleDriver

Oh, there is the bomb, I don't think we would ever dropped it on Germans..

IIRC, the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan instead of Germany was made somewhere between August and October 1944. Up until then Germany was first on the list.

ORIGINAL: PyleDriver

Paullus, and just where do we get the bombs, we only had 3. I think the threat of dropping them after the two on Japan would have brought them to the table...

This memorandum (pdf) from July 30, 1945 quotes the following production number:
September: 3-4
October: 3-4
November: "At least" 5
December: 7
and the number should "increase decidedly in early 1946."

There simply was no way any hostile nation could have stopped the United States from nuking them into oblivion.

[fbs]

ORIGINAL: DTurtle

There simply was no way any hostile nation could have stopped the United States from nuking them into oblivion.

Unless the enemy can retaliate. Fear of retaliation prevented everybody from using of poison gas or bacteriological attacks -- only Japan and Italy used against enemies that had zero chance of retaliating in kind. Even at the later stages of WW2 nobody used these in Europe.

The enemy doesn't need to develop an atomic bomb to retaliate. A dirty bomb will do, or chemical bombs.

But then again, by that time the a-bomb was just a more powerful bomb. Nobody was aware of radiation effects. So if the US gas-bombed Japan that would be mighty risky due to retaliation; atom-bombing, that probably was not the case.

[Lrfss]

ORIGINAL: DTurtle

May be a few days late, but I still wanted to address this:

ORIGINAL: PyleDriver

Oh, there is the bomb, I don't think we would ever dropped it on Germans..

IIRC, the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan instead of Germany was made somewhere between August and October 1944. Up until then Germany was first on the list.

ORIGINAL: PyleDriver

Paullus, and just where do we get the bombs, we only had 3. I think the threat of dropping them after the two on Japan would have brought them to the table...

This memorandum (pdf) from July 30, 1945 quotes the following production number:
September: 3-4
October: 3-4
November: "At least" 5
December: 7
and the number should "increase decidedly in early 1946."

There simply was no way any hostile nation could have stopped the United States from nuking them into oblivion.

Interesting Memo! For sure if Germany was still a major threat on the same scale as Japan was by the time the Bombs were ready for deployment, Germany would have got at least one or more as well... If Patton was in charge, the Russians would have got a few as well a bit later on.

[Lrfss]

All this talk of Atomic weapons makes me ask can one be modded in WitE, course I suppose the Planes for both sides to drop them would have to be modded as well[8|]

[joliverlay]

I want to repeat something said earlier. The Russians approached the Germans in 1943 before Kursk offering peace. After Mansteins backhand blow they still feared the summer offensive would hurt them badly. The negotiations failed over the position of the proposed border. Hitler wanted all of pre war Poland etc.

They only stopped proposing peace after Kursk.

To say Stalin would never have made peace is, in my opinion, contrary to the record of contacts where it was offered by the Soviet side. Am I wrong?

[joliverlay]

For all of you who say no nation could have stopped the US from dropping A bombs. I'm not entirely sure. The only nation that had nerve gas (not chemical weapons) was the Germans. They had the ability up until very late in the war to kill vast numbers of people in the UK, and perhaps have halted the Russian advance. Use of the weapon was vetoed by Hitler who had been gassed in the trenches and did not like the weapon. (He also did not like the MP44 initially either).

It is possible that the delivery of German nerve agents by V-weapons or advanced jet aircraft might have produced a WMD stand off. Our side wrongly believed that this was achieved by our chemical weapons because we did not understand that the unknown German nerve agents were orders of magnitude more toxic than any WWI style nerve gas possessed by the Allies.

They had them and the means to use them as warfare agents. As a US president I would be hard pressed to drop additional atomic weapons on Germany (after the first) if one of them resulted in the death of tens of thousands in the UK by nerve agents.

[shermanny]

Nerve gas isn't as effective as most people think. We now know that Bashar Assad, dictator of Syria, used nerve gas repeatedly on civilians in Syrian rebel areas. The gas killed hundreds of people and crippled hundreds more with permanent nervous system injuries.

But the Syrian civil war itself has cost tens of thousands of lives. The nerve gas was a cruel weapon, and deadly, but it was not remotely as destructive as an atomic bomb would have been. Had Assad dropped a Hiroshima-style atomic bomb on the cities he was hitting with nerve gas, fatalities would have been more like twenty thousand to one hundred thousand each time. (I give a wide range because I don't know how stone buildings fare under nuclear attack. Obviously they're far less likely to burn, but what about cave-ins?

V-weapons loaded with nerve gas, aimed at Britain, would not have compelled the Americans to stop nuking Germany, had it come to that. The lives saved at the front through destruction of German war industry and consequent loss of German military capacity at the front would have more than balanced the difference between lives lost to V-weapons carrying high explosives, and lives lost to V-weapons carrying nerve gas.

What's more, the Germans had already earned the bitter enmity of both Britain and the US. Nerve gas attacks would have just meant that what little sympathy remained for German civilians would have evaporated. The strategic bombing attacks would have been pressed with new fury.

[von altair]

Simple political solution: Assasinate Stalin and the rest would collapse.
Stalin was the force, who kept everything under control.

Without him there would not have been working faction. That and
controlling Leningrad & Moscow would have been total victory.

[heliodorus04]

Did you really just ask if Batman could defeat Superman?

No better way to bring out the zealots.

[micheljq]

I think Germany did not have the industrial backup and manpower for a long war in USSR. They OKW largely underestimated industrial capacity of the USSR, despite warning from some german officers who saw the factories in the Urals in 1940.

Moscow was well entranched and prepared after the initial summer surprise and managed to have a functional army despite staggering losses in 1941, something like 4 millions soldiers against 700000 - 800000 soldiers for Germany end of 1941. The whermach simply did not have the supply level, logistics level, to stay strong on such a large scale. They were not able to take Leningrad nor Moscow, far from it, maybe close geographically but that is all. In 1942 they were only able to do a serious offensive in the south, center and north stayed mainly idle. Their offensive in the south was a success, because the soviets helped them (partially at least). I mean the soviets did a disastrous offensive in may 1942 aiming to retake Kharkov.

I agree that we can say that USSR did not had unlimited manpower. But Germany already had serious manpower problems early on. They had to maintain forces all accross occupied Europe, large garrisons in France, Norway, Yugoslavia, the Afrika Corps in north Africa, etc. It did only get worst with time. During Koursk battle, the little austrian caporal had to divert divisions in Sicily because of Operation Husky for example.

Germany faced the manpower problem long before USSR ever did.

Germany was not able to create divisions from occupied countries a lot, unlike Napoleon who had a lot of germans, italians, and others in it's Grande Armee when he invaded Russia. That manpower was used for factories and other tasks. I have read somewhere that the so called SS Wiking Division had more german soldiers than danes/norwegians, for example.

There was the hungarians, romanians, italians, allies but they were not well supplied/equipped and not very willing to do that war. The finns, despite a high quality army, were not very willing either.

Michel.

[randallw]

Here is some stuff presented in books and I can buy into a lot of it.

Stalin's worry/paranoia/iron hand/whatever didn't want outside/Western influence, since he didn't want a revolution on his hands. The purge eliminated a bunch of those military guys ( but not all ), some of whom seemed to have interest in military theory outside of their region of the world; Soviet theory was based around the offense and anything different....well, you just couldn't have that! No no no...

As the world gets a little more tense the Kiev MD ( future Southwest Front ) is packed; this is either a real threat to invading Romania or just a bluff.

Later on Hitler decides in Dec 1941 that he will be heading east the next year. The Soviet intel network passes along this info reasonably quickly. Stalin decides to have some large exercises, held the next month. Moscow is the host location with most of the military leadership there.

Things do not turn out well; Zukhov playing the Axis invader side crushes Pavlov. The Bialystock area ends up as a salient and the Western Front gets rolled pretty badly. Zukhov and Pavlov also have an exercise where they switch sides, with the battlefield being not quite the exact same place; Zukhov, leading a Soviet offensive, manages to get something of a victory but not decisively.

The next month ( February ) another exercise is held, but this time in the field. Some people, like Pavlov and his staff, are not told about it. The map area is quite a distance from the border, being around the Chernigov area, with formations like the 21st army hitting the southern flank of AGC; this is how actual results ended up. Zukhov and Timoshenko presented the results to 'the boss'.

So Stalin had the info that war was potentially coming, with potential early results of being poor. He was left with the advice of guys like Zukhov and Timo that the border would have to look out for itself early on, then formations from the interior would have to bring the Germans to dead stop then force them back.

[Aurelian]

ORIGINAL: von altair

Simple political solution: Assasinate Stalin and the rest would collapse.
Stalin was the force, who kept everything under control.

Without him there would not have been working faction. That and
controlling Leningrad & Moscow would have been total victory.

Nothing would collapse. Just as Russia didn't collapse when Alexander II was assassinated, Russia would of gone on.

And a country that lost thousands of square miles of territory, the effects of several 5 year Plans, and millions of dead, would not of rolled over because it lost two more cities.

The commander of the Soviet 6th Army, captured and interrogated, pointed out the true situation. With the fate of Russia in the balance. Russia would fight. The loss of territory meant nothing and the shortcomings of the regime became irrelevant.

In a war of ideology, of extermination, surrender meant just that. Extermination.

[darbycmcd]

Von Altair, please provide some evidence for what you have hypothesized. I have yet to find any serious military historian who agrees with your position, but would be happy to be enlightened with the irrefutable data you will provide.

[Mehring]

ORIGINAL: Shermanny

We now know that Bashar Assad, dictator of Syria, used nerve gas repeatedly on civilians in Syrian rebel areas.

Actually, we know nothing of the sort, though a cui bono approach would indicate the opposition were responsible.