AgBQ-00 said:

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Let's say for a moment that Hitler does the wise thing at Stalingrad and allows the 6th to pull back and reestablish itself in contact with the rest of the eastern front. Does the destruction of the Nazis in the Soviet Union still happen? Or do you think they can counter the Soviet masses from more consolidated positions?

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Langenator said:

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If it extended the war in Europe by, say, a month, would the Russians have invaded Manchuria in August 1945? (Stalin had pledged to go to war with Japan 90 days after the end of the war in Europe, and kept that pledge almost to the day.)

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nortex97 said:

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It's too late by that point, but going to Stalingrad (because of the name) was stupid in the first place. The city could easily have been ignored/bypassed instead of becoming a sea of death/failure/misery, and the strategic goals (which the allies were quite wary of) could have been reached (acquiring the oil fields around Baiku, possibly linking up with the Japs in India etc.)

It was Hitler's order in July of 43 that really doomed it; sending Army group B into...Stalingrad. Even there Hitler micromanaged the armies, ordering 4th panzer to assist the 1st crossing a river, which clogged up the roads heading toward stalingrad. He really was a remarkably dumb/idiotic leader.

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SEAN MCMEEKIN: THE STORY BEHIND "STALIN'S WAR"

Sean McMeekin is Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College and the author of Stalin's War: A New History of World War II, officially published by Basic Books today. Professor McMeekin is one of the most prominent of the younger generation of historians of the Soviet Union. His first book The Red Millionaire is a personal favorite of mine. He graciously accepted my invitation to send us a column that would allow us to give readers a preview of his new book. Professor McMeekin writes:

Like many Americans with a love for history, I was weaned on popular chronicles of World War II, from glossy secondary works and novels to Hollywood blockbusters, from Casablanca and The Dirty Dozen to Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan. The "Good War" always gives Americans a satisfactory conclusion, with Hitler and Nazi evil defeated, Holocaust horrors brought to an end, and the USA emerging on the world stage as a righteous superpower.

Over the years, however, doubts began to creep in about just how righteous the war's outcome was for millions of Europeans and Asians less fortunate in geography than Americans are. Coming of age in the late Cold War years, I learned to appreciate the wisdom of Churchill's famous warning about the "Iron Curtain" which had descended on eastern Europe in 1945, not to mention the war's unfinished business in Asia, from the Korean and Vietnam wars and the fallout resulting from them to the rise of Communist China as a strategic adversary every bit as formidable as the Soviet Union had been, if not more so.

As a young historian, I benefitted enormously from the opening of the Russian archives after the fall of the USSR in 1991, although in my first forays into Soviet history in works such as The Red Millionaire (2004) and History's Greatest Heist (2008), I chose subjects other than World War II, about which the Russian government remains twitchy and sensitive (indeed under Putin it is growing ever more so).

When my overseas travels and research trips took me beyond popular tourist destinations such as London, Paris, and Rome into central and eastern Europe, the Balkans, Russia, Turkey, and Asia, I learned that the Second World War is not universally seen as the "Good War," with a neat Hollywood cast of heroes and villains and a happy ending. In Vietnam and former French Indochina, the conflict emerging from the Japanese incursion in 1940 lasted until 1975, at least, and in Cambodia longer still. East of the Elbe river, the war did not end in 1945, but arguably in 1989, when Soviet troops finally began to go home. In Taiwan and Korea, questions arising from the conflict remain unresolved, and the military standoff is no less tense today than ever.

Probing more deeply, I began to see just how much messy material had been airbrushed out of our memory of the war. While German and Japanese war crimes have been endlessly discussed, and British and American excesses, such as the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have long since been exposed, there has always been an air of mystery about events behind Soviet lines in the war, and for good reason. Until 1991, western historians had no access to Russian war records beyond what was released by the Soviet government to promote its narrative of a morally unblemished "Great Patriotic War" against Nazi Germany.

Certain episodes, such as Stalin's "Katyn Forest Massacre" of Polish officers in 1940, were widely suspected but officially denied even the US government endorsed the Soviet line on Katyn until well into the Cold War. Entire eastern front battles, such as Operation Mars, a catastrophic Soviet offensive west of Moscow launched simultaneously with the Soviet counter-attack at Stalingrad, remained basically unknown to western military historians until the 1990s, because the Soviet government did not want them to know about it.

Over the years, many western historians have absorbed and passed on a sanitized Soviet version of Stalin's war, without quite realizing this is what they were doing. This is apparent in everything from the Barbarossa invasion of June 22, 1941, which is often treated like a context-free bolt from the blue, entirely unprovoked and unexpected, to heroic tales of the evacuation of Soviet factories east of Moscow in 1941-1942, to endless paeans to the "legendary T-34 tank" and the triumph of Soviet war industry (with concomitant disparaging of inferior British, Canadian, and American Lend-Lease tanks, said by Soviet critics to be "death traps"), to a near-exclusive focus on Stalingrad in 1942 to the exclusion of events elsewhere, to wildly exaggerated tales of Kursk in July 1943 as a crushing Soviet victory in the "greatest tank battle of all time," to the utter neglect of opportunistic Soviet invasions in the "Molotov-Ribbentrop" period of Soviet-German collaboration between 1939 to 1941 and in northern Asia in August-September 1945.

Some of this neglect reflects Stalin's own cunning. Aside from the Soviet invasion of Finland in November 1939, which did at least warrant condemnation at the time (though it was largely forgotten later), many key Soviet moves were camouflaged by high-profile German actions, from Stalin's invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939 piggybacking on Hitler's invasion two weeks earlier, to the Soviet invasion of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania launched on June 17, 1940 the very day a beaten France sued Germany for peace. Few people outside Romania even remember that the Red Army invaded that country, too, on June 28, 1940, giving Bucharest cause to join Barbarossa in 1941.

A less obvious, but no less revealing example, is Stalin's pledge at the Teheran conference of November 1943 to launch a diversionary offensive on the eastern front simultaneously with Overlord the planned US-British amphibious assault on the French Channel coast. Since Roosevelt and Churchill themselves forgot to remind Stalin about this in the lead-up to Overlord, allowing the Soviet dictator to betray his promise (the Soviet offensive "Bagration" was launched only 16 days after D-Day, which allowed the Germans to transfer armored divisions westward, opening the field for "Bagration" and ensuring the western Allies were badly bloodied in France), historians can perhaps be forgiven for forgetting all about it, too.

Perhaps the most amazing memory trick of all is the way Stalin's loud bellyaching between 1942 and 1944 about his Allies' alleged refusal to open a "Second Front" in Europe against Hitler (even though they actually did open one in Italy in 1943!) is still accepted at face value notwithstanding the fact that Stalin refused to lift a finger to help the U.S. against Japan for nearly four years after Pearl Harbor: he even had hundreds of US pilots, forced to bail out over Soviet territory after bombing raids on Japan, arrested and interned as prisoners of war.

Even more bizarre is the story of how the U.S. shipped 8.244 million tons of war materil, including a million tons of motor and aviation fuel, to Stalin's Far Eastern armies between 1941 and 1945, right through Japanese territorial waters Japan's admirals apparently not minding that the U.S. was wasting its precious resources on neutral Stalin rather than using them itself or to aid China. They did not mind, that is, until Stalin ripped up his Neutrality Pact with Japan after Hiroshima and rushed to conquer a north Asian empire larger than Britain and France combined in several weeks, with mechanized Soviet armies generously supplied and fueled by American Lend-Lease.

At least one reason so few western accounts have challenged Stalin's preferred narrative of the war is that, until recently, they did not have the sources to do so. In some areas, we had almost no information at all. Stalin did not permit the Red Cross to investigate Soviet prisoner of war camps the USSR, unlike Nazi Germany, was not even a signatory to the Hague or Geneva Conventions.

Even seemingly positive stories, such as the role of American Lend-Lease aid in reviving Stalin's factories and equipping his armies, could only really be guessed at, as Stalin did not permit American observers, during the war, to see how US war materil was being used in factories or at the front (aside from U.S. engineers flown in to troubleshoot, who were all sworn to secrecy).

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Rabid Cougar said:

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agforlife97 said:

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Anyone interested in the eastern front should read David Glantz's books, they are essential.

I think perhaps the only way Germany could have won is if the UK had made peace in 1940, as some wanted to do. Barbarossa combined with a Japanese attack in the Far East on the USSR, AND then the US didn't do lend lease. Even then probably unlikely.

Even a German victory may have looked like an armistice line near the Urals, with Russian partisan activity in perpetuity (as in the novel Fatherland).

One thing people should realize is that WWII was decided on the eastern front. The Soviets were aided immensely by lend-lease - the US mechanized all their divisions with over 500,000 trucks, which enabled them to win probably 1-2 years sooner than they otherwise would have. But it is likely that the Russians win anyway. They had a massive manpower advantage, and they were very good at manufacturing the basics in quantity, and their focus on heavy firepower is notable. The Russians are brutal and clever. Even today their focus on the basics like heavy firepower makes them formidable, even while their economy is the size of Canada.

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Very true on the lend lease. You also have to consider the 2,000 steam locomotives, 10,000 rail cars and 60% of all aviation fuel, 1/3 of all ordnance and 4 million tons of food stuffs. Even a complete tire manufacturing plant. The amount of aid sent by the Persian Route alone (27% of total) was enough to maintain 60 front line divisions in combat according to the U.S. Army.

The Russians out numbered the Germans in WWI and quit because they could not sustain their armies in the field.

Without the above mentioned assistance the Soviets would have failed again and there would have been another truce just as in WWI.

You can have all the soldiers and heavy artillery you want but if you can move them or supply them they just exist.

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The reason that Hitler failed to avail himself of this opportunity to end the war with the Soviet Union on favorable terms to Germany is that he deluded himself into believing the German Army could successfully conquer Soviet territories far beyond the German gains of World War One instead of accepting more realistic and achievable gains and objectives. Even in June 1943 when Hitler had given up any plans for further offensives, had ordered the construction of a defensive line in the east and sent his foreign minister to meet with his Soviet counterpart to try to negotiate a peace agreement with the Soviets, he still refused the Soviet peace offer. In retrospect, the wisest thing Germany could have done would have been to complete their encirclements of Soviet forces and/or capture Moscow first and then negotiate a Second Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Stalin beginning in early October 1941 after they succeeded in capturing or destroying the vast majority or the Red Army's tanks and combat aircraft. Then the Germans could have constructed a fortified defense line to protect their hard-won gains.

The next and final installment of this series will focus on the reasons why Adolf Hitler himself was the biggest reason that Germany lost World War Two and how taking him out of the equation might have helped secure a German victory.

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Overthrowing Hitler or assassinating him was probably the single most important thing Germany could have done to win World War II, assuming it had ended up fighting it at all without him. Hitler made a series of critical strategic errors beginning with his decision to violate the Munich Pact in March 1939 and continuing with his decision to spare the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk in May 1940. By the time he decided to halt the German advance on Moscow in August 1941 and declare war on America in December 1941, he had all but guaranteed ultimate German military defeat.

There were over forty known coup or assassination attempts against Hitler, many with wide support by top German military leaders, including eleven German Field Marshals at various times. But the first and perhaps the most promising was planned to occur in September 1938 in response to fear by the German General Staff that Hitler's demand for the German Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia would result in a war with Britain and France, which Germany was woefully unprepared to fight and would have surely lost. The Germans had only about one-third as many divisions as they were able to mobilize in September 1939 and the Czech army had the same number of troops as the Germans did and six more army divisions! Needless to say, they would have had to use the bulk of the German Army to successfully invade leaving Germany's western borders largely undefended against a potential French invasion and occupation of Germany's Rhineland industrial region. Thus, the German generals led by Gen. Ludwig Beck felt it would be necessary to remove Hitler from power in order to avoid a near certain German military defeat.

...

Hitler's insistence on making all of the major military decisions, instead of allowing his generals to run the war resulted in a series of avoidable mistakes that assured Germany's ultimate defeat. Not only did he halt the advance of Army Group Center and prevent it from taking Moscow in summer 1941, but he issued "no-retreat" orders that led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of German troops as the tide of war began to shift against them. Entire German armies were surrounded and captured as the tide of war began to shift against them. Some historians have argued this "no-retreat" order prevented the German military withdrawal in the face of the Soviet offensive in the winter of 1941 from turning into a rout, which may be true, however, that was an exception. Also, he ordered militarily dubious offensives at Stalingrad in August 1942 and at Kursk in July 1943 and later the Ardennes at the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and in Hungary in March 1945, which resulted in heavy German losses without which Germany could have likely defended against successive Soviet offensives at least a couple years longer.

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Hitler spent over $2 billion (as much as the United States spent on the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bomb) developing and producing a large arsenal of Tabun and Sarin nerve gas, which were much more deadly than the Allies' stocks of mustard gas. The stockpile weighed about twelve thousand tons. Still, Hitler declined repeated requests from his military commanders to employ it against enemy troops on the battlefieldeven when Germany was in the process of being totally overrun by the Western Allies and Soviet Red Army from January to May 1945 and he was preparing to commit suicide. The Germans could have employed their vast stocks of nerve gas to potentially repel the Allied amphibious invasion of Normandy on D-Day. The Germans could have delivered Sarin nerve gas via mortars, of which Germany had considerably more of than did the Allies, along with other types of artillery rounds since delivery by air in the face of Allied air superiority would likely have proven much more challenging. Winston Churchill, on the other hand, had no such scruples and reportedly planned on using mustard gas against German troops on the beaches if they had ended up invading Britain. Nerve gas might have also been used successfully to repel Soviet troops advancing on eastern Germany from Berlin, given favorable wind conditions. Interestingly, all German mortars and multiple rocket launchers above ten centimeters in diameter during the war were designated by the Germans as Nebelwerfers, which translates to "smoke or fog throwers," and were initially assigned to the German Army Chemical Corps, being primarily designed to deliver poison gas and smoke rounds.

Another related major mistake was Hitler's decision to control the Panzer divisions in Normandy instead of giving full control to Rommel to repel the Allied landing forces on D-day while he slept through D-day and missed the opportunity to do so believing the Allied ruse that the invasion of Normandy was merely a diversion from the main planned allied landings.

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Rabid Cougar said:

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agforlife97 said:

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Anyone interested in the eastern front should read David Glantz's books, they are essential.

I think perhaps the only way Germany could have won is if the UK had made peace in 1940, as some wanted to do. Barbarossa combined with a Japanese attack in the Far East on the USSR, AND then the US didn't do lend lease. Even then probably unlikely.

Even a German victory may have looked like an armistice line near the Urals, with Russian partisan activity in perpetuity (as in the novel Fatherland).

One thing people should realize is that WWII was decided on the eastern front. The Soviets were aided immensely by lend-lease - the US mechanized all their divisions with over 500,000 trucks, which enabled them to win probably 1-2 years sooner than they otherwise would have. But it is likely that the Russians win anyway. They had a massive manpower advantage, and they were very good at manufacturing the basics in quantity, and their focus on heavy firepower is notable. The Russians are brutal and clever. Even today their focus on the basics like heavy firepower makes them formidable, even while their economy is the size of Canada.

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Very true on the lend lease. You also have to consider the 2,000 steam locomotives, 10,000 rail cars and 60% of all aviation fuel, 1/3 of all ordnance and 4 million tons of food stuffs. Even a complete tire manufacturing plant. The amount of aid sent by the Persian Route alone (27% of total) was enough to maintain 60 front line divisions in combat according to the U.S. Army.

The Russians out numbered the Germans in WWI and quit because they could not sustain their armies in the field.

Without the above mentioned assistance the Soviets would have failed again and there would have been another truce just as in WWI.

You can have all the soldiers and heavy artillery you want but if you can move them or supply them they just exist.

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aalan94 said:

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Once again, I'm going to attack the "Germany Couldn't Win" nonsense.


2. The German army did amazing feats of delayed retreats. The war in the East was "over" in early 1943, but it took the Russians 2 years to regain the ground the Germans had seized in five months.

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Langenator said:

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Of course, if Hitler had simply stopped after conquering France, he probably could have held onto his conquests for decades, if not longer. Without the Russian front draining resources, Germany could have made the British bombing campaign prohibitively costly. Naval operations in the North Sea and the waters around the British Isles would have probably resulted in a stand off.

Eventually, the Brits get tired of the whole thing, Churchill's party loses Pariliament, and they negotiate a truce with Germany.

But that wasn't the question asked.

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the deployment of the soviet army alone proves that, as does the fact that real data has largely never been released.

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Jabin said:

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the deployment of the soviet army alone proves that, as does the fact that real data has largely never been released.

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Any support for those statement, i.e. the deployment of the Soviet Army immediately prior to the German invasion?

Also, where can one find the "real data that has largely never been released"?

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Old RV Ag said:

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Jabin said:

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the deployment of the soviet army alone proves that, as does the fact that real data has largely never been released.

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Any support for those statement, i.e. the deployment of the Soviet Army immediately prior to the German invasion?

Also, where can one find the "real data that has largely never been released"?

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It's stored with the data on the millions of Germans the US starved in labor camps after the war

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Old RV Ag said:

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cbr said:

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Old RV Ag said:

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Jabin said:

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the deployment of the soviet army alone proves that, as does the fact that real data has largely never been released.

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Any support for those statement, i.e. the deployment of the Soviet Army immediately prior to the German invasion?

Also, where can one find the "real data that has largely never been released"?

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It's stored with the data on the millions of Germans the US starved in labor camps after the war

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the only thing worse than a dogmatic flat earther refusing to learn anything, or even consider anything, on a history discussion forum, is an obnoxious snarky one that thinks misquoting some old argument is funny.

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Seriously, there was no intent or effort to be funny. The comment is valid in this discussion as you use that phrase "never been released" so often - it's simply a discussion on consider the source.

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