The Worst Miscalculation Of World War II

Started by tbone0106, June 24, 2012, 09:52:40 PM

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Sci Fi Fan

Quote from: a777pilot on November 13, 2012, 04:40:52 PM
I'm sure Hitler declared war on the USA after the Jap attack on America because Japan declared war on Russia after Germany invaded Russia.

That Japan didn't is my whole point; it was a worse than useless ally.  Having a strong military and winning a few victories doesn't change the fact that it brought the United States into the war.

mdgiles

Quote from: a777pilot on November 11, 2012, 06:11:06 PM
Japan was not, repeat, not, an inconsequential ally of Germany.  I have a cousin still aboard the USS Arizona and an uncle KIA on Bougainville.  Both Marines that might not agree with your assessment of the quality of the Japs.
Yes, they were. Even the CiC of the Combined Fleet, Yamamoto, knew the Japanese would only be victorious for six months and it would be downhill after that. The army, which dominated the Japanese government felt the US would sue for peace after a few defeats; the navy knew better. The problem with the German/Japanese alliance is they never actually were allies. Real allies work toward the same strategic goal, they don't conduct their own separate wars. WW2 would have had an entirely different outcome had the Japanese kept going once they had broken into the Indian ocean. A Japanese naval force in the Indian Ocean would have allowed the Italians to sustain themselves in Ethiopia, and had disastrous effects on the British Middle East and Indian position. Britain may have had to drop out of the war. Instead Japan went in the other direction.
"LIBERALS: their willful ignorance is rivaled only by their catastrophic stupidity"!

Texas_Secession

#62
The miscalculation (misreading) of German intelligence prior to the Battle of the Bulge.  Toland, Butcher and D'Este talked about the "partying generals in Paris", while GIs were freezing in foxholes.  Meanwhile  the Germans were marshalling armor, men and supplies for the attack.  Had Eisenhower chosen to remain with his troops near the frontline, review intelligence or talk with Gerow or Patton  I don't beleive the Germans would have driven so deep - or the war gone on so long - as it did.  The attack would have been halted in the Ardennes by reinforced CCB's and reserves.

Patton predicted the battle in his diaries weeks before but like Henry Fonda's character in the movie - getting laughed at by a perfumed prince in the confines of a heated office 50 miles W of the front - he wrote that the Germans were up to something and he believed it would take place in the Ardennes.   
If your taking flak, your over the target.

a777pilot

Want to learn about what really was going on during WWII?  Read "Ultra Secret" By Fredrick William Winterbotham.
TO ERR IS HUMAN, TO FORGIVE DIVINE - However Neither is Marine Corps Policy

sn00ze

Determination!  or the will of the People of Russia made all the difference.  The best logistics or weapons don't necessarily dictate the outcome of a war.  Besides that, the Russians did indeed have good armor at the right moment in history, they stopped the Germans cold where the Germans clearly thought they had the upper hand.  Even today German technology is so complicated and intricate in everything they do that it would be a detriment to a long sustained war.  Of course they have limited equipment due to the surrender terms and they still follow those, but what they do have is in a lot of ways superior to the ours and other nations.  In WWII the Russians were fighting for survival, that alone has to be the most important factor.   

a777pilot

QuoteThe best logistics or weapons don't necessarily dictate the outcome of a war.

LOL!

Amateur.  Logistics is what determines the out come of wars.
TO ERR IS HUMAN, TO FORGIVE DIVINE - However Neither is Marine Corps Policy

sn00ze

I'll see your LOL and raise you one LOL, tell that to those less than 1000 remaining German POW's who invaded Russia.  Logistics don't mean squat if you don't have the people power with a will to win.  Your probably right about me being an amateur, my meager 3000 combat hours are probably much less than yours.  It's da peoples man, da peoples!

mdgiles

Quote from: sn00ze on December 17, 2012, 11:44:27 AM
I'll see your LOL and raise you one LOL, tell that to those less than 1000 remaining German POW's who invaded Russia.  Logistics don't mean squat if you don't have the people power with a will to win.  Your probably right about me being an amateur, my meager 3000 combat hours are probably much less than yours.  It's da peoples man, da peoples!
Logistics is EVERYTHING and that's where the Nazis and Japanese failed. It's a failure of logistics when you invade a country as expansive as Russia and don't have a mechanized army. The Nazis - once you got past their few Panzer divisions - were a horse draw/marching army. To conquer even western Russia you needed a motorized army. Didn't the Nazis ever pick up a history book? How could they have allowed themselves to caught without any cold weather gear. Hitler believed in the occult. He could have held a seance and asked the ghost of Napoleon about that one. And the Japanese? Their logistics were so bad they were reduced to cannibalism on their island outposts by the end of the war. And how could you go to war to obtain the riches of Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and give absolutely no thought as to how you were going to transport those riches back to Japan - and protect them on the way there. As for you 3000 combat hours obviously you didn't learn shit, if you don't understand the importance of logistics. You're like those Japanese generals who believed that "fighting spirit" was more important than a functioning supply system.
"LIBERALS: their willful ignorance is rivaled only by their catastrophic stupidity"!

Phillip

Quote from: mdgiles on December 23, 2012, 09:11:41 AM
Logistics is EVERYTHING and that's where the Nazis and Japanese failed. It's a failure of logistics when you invade a country as expansive as Russia and don't have a mechanized army. The Nazis - once you got past their few Panzer divisions - were a horse draw/marching army. To conquer even western Russia you needed a motorized army. Didn't the Nazis ever pick up a history book? How could they have allowed themselves to caught without any cold weather gear. Hitler believed in the occult. He could have held a seance and asked the ghost of Napoleon about that one. And the Japanese? Their logistics were so bad they were reduced to cannibalism on their island outposts by the end of the war. And how could you go to war to obtain the riches of Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and give absolutely no thought as to how you were going to transport those riches back to Japan - and protect them on the way there. As for you 3000 combat hours obviously you didn't learn shit, if you don't understand the importance of logistics. You're like those Japanese generals who believed that "fighting spirit" was more important than a functioning supply system.


Hitler made the mistake of fighting on too many fronts. The Battle of Britain destroyed any notion of Germany's air superiority. That battle was also fundamental in shifting U.S. opinion of Great Britain's ability to survive and counter Germany, although the U.S. still didn't directly participate for another year. Instead of sticking to a battle with Britain and allies, Hitler broke off any ceasefire with Stalin and invaded via Operation Barbarossa. Napoleon made a similar mistake of making too many enemies and then erroneously trotting into Russian territory without preparations.

JustKari


Paris

IMHO, the worst mistake in WWII was made by Hitler when he failed to occupy Gibraltar.  I have read that Franco demanded too much for his cooperation, and I've read that Spain was not entirely secure, but, in my view, the outcome of the war depended on control of the  Mediterranean.  If the Germans had control of Gibraltar, the British would have been denied access to the Med, and the Suez Canal, and a short route to the Indian Ocean.  North Africa, and the Middle East would have been completely under the control of the Axis, and Hitler would have had a secure base from which to supply his campaign in the Ukraine.  What's more, all of the Middle eastern countries, Turkey, Palestine, Arabia, and Afganistan would have tumbled into the Axis camp.  India would have been isolated, and Britan could only reach her eastern colonies by taking the long route around the Cape of Good Hope, all the whle exposed to U Boats.  That, BTW, is my vote for the second bigest mistake, not building up and modernizing the U Boat force.

Mountainshield

#71
Quote from: mdgiles on December 23, 2012, 09:11:41 AM
Logistics is EVERYTHING and that's where the Nazis and Japanese failed. It's a failure of logistics when you invade a country as expansive as Russia and don't have a mechanized army. The Nazis - once you got past their few Panzer divisions - were a horse draw/marching army. To conquer even western Russia you needed a motorized army. Didn't the Nazis ever pick up a history book? How could they have allowed themselves to caught without any cold weather gear. Hitler believed in the occult. He could have held a seance and asked the ghost of Napoleon about that one. And the Japanese? Their logistics were so bad they were reduced to cannibalism on their island outposts by the end of the war. And how could you go to war to obtain the riches of Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and give absolutely no thought as to how you were going to transport those riches back to Japan - and protect them on the way there. As for you 3000 combat hours obviously you didn't learn shit, if you don't understand the importance of logistics. You're like those Japanese generals who believed that "fighting spirit" was more important than a functioning supply system.

The "logic" behind the invasion of Russia was that Poland fell in 46 days, France was completely conquered in 43 days, Denmark was conquered in 6 hours. Hitler was applying the same reasoning behind the invasion of Russia and thought it would fall after 3 months. (Souce: Victor David Hanson "Father of us all").Hitler was intelligent, but he was fool and didnt have any wisdom. And you are right about the national socialist being occult, the only history he read was occult articles, and his occult religion outlined in Ostara and by Guido Von List said that the German people were a mystical race and many NSDAP/SS believed they had power of telekenisis etc. If he had read the history of Russia, from the tactics of Peter the Great, Ivan the terrible and Alexander I, then they would have known Stalin would use scorch eart tactics.

For these occult reasons Hitler declared war on the USA, because they viewed the american people as a mix of black and white untermenchen which could not put up a fight against the more pure germans. This was the greatest miscalculation of WW2, and just show how much a fool Hitler and the rest of NSDAP was (Lets not forget that Nazi germany was run by The National Socialist Party of Germany and that Hitler was just one man out of many).

Both the Japanese and Germans believed they were ethnically superior, which made "fighting spirit" and "ethnic purity" bullshit more important than logistics and scientific analysis of enemy war capacity.

Quote from: Phillip on February 03, 2013, 12:19:28 AM
although the U.S. still didn't directly participate for another year.

Don't forget the massive amount of war material, capital, resources and tanks/planes that were shipped to USSR and GB which made both countries possible to continue the war, without these resources both GB and USSR would have fallen.

EDIT:
Quote from: sn00ze on December 17, 2012, 11:44:27 AM
I'll see your LOL and raise you one LOL, tell that to those less than 1000 remaining German POW's who invaded Russia.  Logistics don't mean squat if you don't have the people power with a will to win.  Your probably right about me being an amateur, my meager 3000 combat hours are probably much less than yours.  It's da peoples man, da peoples!

Again, there was never any will of the Russian people and the fact that destroys your entire argument is the fact that the Russians had machine guns at the back of the line killing all people who tried to escape. If there was ever a people with the will to win a war then it was the germans, they had the morale, the invincible mentality and the belief that they were superior in every aspect. It was US resources that saved the USSR, your crackpot theory about "Der Triumph des Willens" dies with the Russian commisars and SS.

TboneAgain

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. -- Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution

Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; IT IS FORCE. -- George Washington

TboneAgain

Gotta go with Giles on this one. Logistics really is everything, and the bigger the battles, the more logistics matter. Talk about national determination and will to win on the part of the Russkies is piffle. Russian officers had to literally force recruits into battle at gunpoint early on. As a nation, the USSR gave up tens of thousands of square miles of the most productive part of the land mass of the largest nation on Earth at that time, and sacrificed MILLIONS of men and women just to slow the poorly-prepared Germans down enough so they could literally move the capital machinery they needed far enough east to be out of the Nazi reach, to make the T-34s (their equivalent of our Shermans) and Yaks and other tools of war that finally turned the tide after years of miserable defeat and retreat. In the first six months, in addition to horrendous battlefield casualties, the Germans took 3 million Soviet prisoners (most of whom never returned from captivity), and sat within sight of Moscow's outskirts.

Hitler was an idiot to invade the Soviet Union, particularly when he had already achieved his European goals (except for England), and particularly when his move was made so late in the summer. (I often wonder how differently things might have turned out if he had launched Barbarossa in, say, early or mid-May.) But as poorly as the Germans were prepared for the conflict -- as Giles points out, they were only fractionally mechanized -- they caught Papa Joe with his pants all the way down, and they damn near pulled it off. Even the Germans were far better positioned logistically than the Russians, who were in almost complete disarray.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. -- Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution

Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; IT IS FORCE. -- George Washington

Mountainshield

Quote from: TboneAgain on March 28, 2013, 11:40:52 PM
Hitler was an idiot to invade the Soviet Union, particularly when he had already achieved his European goals (except for England),

Hitler never wanted to crush Britain, he wanted Britain to remain strong and continue to have its empire. He always lamented that Britain was under the control of Churchill and that the sympathetic wing of the aristocracy of Britain was not in power. Sycophantic but equally occult Rudolf Hess went to Britain to broke a peace treaty in a move to save Hitlers wish in this regard.

As for the Soviet Union it was a necessary part to make "lebensraum" for their deurbanization plans and germanization of eastern europe after the war.

It really annoys me that people think the Nazis were warmongers, because they were not, they wanted peace but on their terms not Treaty of Versailles terms. I.e Study the Hitler Youth, they preached hippie nonsense about pagan spirituality. They wanted lebensraum to make possible the race purification in their perfection of man and to regain the lost Aryan powers such as telekenisis. They also wanted to prepare for their next war, which they believed would be an invasion from the east.

If you really want to understand the Nazis then I recomment actually reading their works and philosophy instead of just historical accounts of the war.