AgBQ-00 said:

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Do you think that Barbarossa would have failed no matter what? If they had launched at the time originally planned and had army group center had not detoured and had taken Moscow even after the late start; would the Soviets had the ability to regroup?

I keep thinking about Stalin hiding in his dacha and when they came to get him he thought it was for execution. If Moscow falls do the Soviets ever get the chance to rally the people to protect mother Russia?

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In my opinion, if Hitler had not declared war on the United States in December 1941 and had not wasted his Air Force attacking Great Britain in 1940, he would have had the necessary manpower, planes, tanks, and supplies to lay siege to Russia, ultimately leading to their destruction.

In answering this question, we first need to define some terms"

Operation Barbarossa was a distinct operation whose goals were to destroy the Red Army west of the Dvina-Dnipr river line, and thus cause the collapse of the Soviet state. Barbarossa for all intents and purposes was complete after the Kiev encirclement battle in late September, 1941. The subsequent drive on Moscow was a separate operation, which is why it had its own name - Operation Typhoon.

Barbarossa was largely successful in its first objective, the destruction of Soviet military forces west of the Dvina-Dnipr line, but failed utterly in the second. It failed because German intelligence, as well as Hitler, vastly underestimated the resilience of the Soviet state, and underestimated both the size of the Red Army and its ability to regenerate new forces. On the first part, the Germans believed that the Stalinist state was as fragile and rickety as its tsarist predecessor, which it manifestly wasn't. On the second, German intelligence was totally unaware of the existence of the Red Army's Reserve Front, composed of 5 entire armies, stationed east of (behind) the Dvina-Dnipr river line. Further, the Germans were taken by surprise by the Red Army's ability to generate new forces - 194 new divisions built from their mobilization base in 1941 alone.

Hitler's declaration of war on America - December 10, 1941 - had no bearing on Barbarossa, which had ended roughly two months before, or on Typhoon, which had ground to an exhausted halt and been hit by the Red Army's counteroffensive on December 5th - two days before Pearl Harbor.

Now, if you're asking if Germany could have won it's war against the USSR - that's a different question. The Soviet Union was probably closest to collapse in the late summer/early fall of 1942. That near-collapse was economic - caused by loss of resources, food, and population - not political. It's impossible to know, but it is very possible that Lend-Lease aid, in the form of raw materials like iron and aluminum, fuel, and especially food, rather than higher profile things like weapons or even trucks, might have staved off economic collapse in the USSR in 1942. Again, I'm not sure Hitler declaring war on America made any difference here, since FDR had approved sending Lend-Lease to the USSR in 1941, even before Pearl Harbor.

Sorry, came here looking for a Jane Fonda reference.

Moscow in 1941 was much more important than in was in 1812, for one simple reason - railroads. Moscow was THE hub of the entire Soviet rail network. See this map for illustration. Without Moscow, Soviet transportation capabilities would have been crippled, or at least badly hobbled.

That said, even if the Germans had launched Barbarossa earlier, I don't think they would have taken Moscow before their attack ran out of steam. The biggest reason is distance and logistics. In an earlier post in this thread, I noted that the German objective for Barbarossa was to destroy the Red Army west of the Dvina-Dniepr river line. This was suspiciously close to where German logistics planners identified as the limit of advance before the Wehrmacht would have to come to an operational pause, resupply, reorganize, and generally get their sh*t together before they could advance further. (This is also probably why the battle of Smolensk was as long and nasty as it was - the Germans were pretty much at the end of their rope, logistics-wise, and the Soviets took advantage to launch a series of (extremely costly) counter attacks.)

Railroads were the key to transport in the USSR. The roads were crap, mostly unpaved, and you really don't want to be moving supplies by truck (and the Germans had a serious shortage of trucks anyway) over those kinds of distances. The fact that Soviet/Russian railroads were a wider gauge than western Europe is well known. One additional complication that I didn't know about until recently was that the distances between water and coal stations in the USSR was also greater than in western Europe. So German locomotives would run out of coal and water unless more stations were built. The Germans had counted on capturing Soviet locomotives and rolling stock, but the Soviets either moved them east or destroyed them. So not only did the Germans have to fix the tracks, they had to build more water and coal stops as well before they could use the railroads.

Some argue that Hitler should have kept Army Group Center driving on Moscow, instead of turning it south to help Army Group South destroy the Red Army forces in Ukraine. The problem with that is it would leave Army Group Center with an enormously long exposed flank, protected only by thinly stretched, foot-mobile infantry units, with very large Red Army forces in Ukraine. And even as they were being driven back, one thing the Red Army had shown a marked propensity for was launching counterattacks, even if they were extremely costly. If the Soviet Forces in Ukraine had attacked north into that exposed flank, they could put the supply lines for Army Group Center in jeopardy, and thus pose a dire threat to Army Group Center itself.

The other thing is, even when Army Group Center resumed its advance toward Moscow in Operation Typhoon (the fact that this is a separate named operation is, by itself, an acknowledgement that Barbarossa failed to meet its objectives), the German army was badly beat up and its units were significantly understrength in both men and equipment. They might have gotten closer to Moscow before the rasputitza halted them, but they still wouldn't have gotten there. And the mud didn't stop the Russians from bringing reinforcements, because mud doesn't bother railroads.

My favorite summary comes from historian David Glantz*. To paraphrase, "Moscow determined it would be a long war; Stalingrad determined that Germany would lose that war; and Kursk determined that that defeat would be total."

*I highly recommend Glantz's book, When Titans Clashed, written with Jonathan House.