What went wrong?

What went wrong?

Hitlers autism

Case Blue was a meme in general

Stalins autism

What could be done differently

Not pulling out sooner and cutting ones losses.

Fighting for a city in the age of modern war creates a paradox: As fighting for it goes on the sunk costs increase, while the actual value of the object competed for (the city) decreases. Its production decreases, its infrastructure degrades, its population shrinks, while both attacker and defender have to progressively invest more and more into maintain their presence there. Eventually, a city has no value except in being a very defensible pile of rubble, which of course favours the investment of the defender more than the attacker.

If you're not gonna take a city any time soon, don't. Fall back to a defensible location and let the enemy keep the city in exchange for preserving ones battle strength.

Sperging out and going against stalingrad instead of going after just the oil fields
putting the 6th army in a position where their flanks had to be guarded by romanians

Also they bombed the city so much that they couldn't move their tanks in. The Germans started the battle with and advantage, but that couldn't help.

'Dolf believed Goring's claim the Luftwaffe could supply the 6th Army adequately from the air.

Good post.

Half of what makes Stalingrad so horrible is how utterly senseless it all was. A giant dick measuring contest between Hitler and Stalin that got hopelessly out of hand after sacrificing an entire city and an army to the meat grinder.

If there's any doubt in anyone's mind that Uncle Adolf didn't give a shit about the soldiers or anyone but himself, remind them of Stalingrad

POL BTFO!!!

Romanians.

Hitler and Stalin's autism

It wasn't Moscow. Who the fuck even invented the bullshit of splitting your army into 3 small armies?

I would have thrown everything I had at Moscow. You can't tell me that it wouldn't have been a gigantic moral blow to the Russians.

You can build more stuff if your factories get destroyed.
You can recruit more humans if your soldiers get killed.
But you can't suddenly create meaning out of thin air. If Moscow was always the heart of Russia you can't simply say: "Hey Russians, unfortunately the Germans have Moscow, but don't worry Irrelevanosk is our new capital!"

That's not how motivation works. Losing Moscow would have been catastrophic.

Paulus did nothing wrong

>Losing Moscow worse then losing the city named after the current ruler for morale.

You know why they called it *~_Stalin_~*grad, right?

> I would have thrown everything I had at Moscow.
This is exactly what Stalin was expecting Hitler to do in the summer of 1942, so the Soviets had prepared defensive positions and all the reserves were stationed around Moscow. Throwing everything at it in 1942 would result in a Kursk a year earlier. If anything, going South in the summer of 1942 was the next best decision Hitler had made during the war after the suicide.

Retard they didn't go to stalingrad instead of the caucasus they did both.

You cannot capture thr caucasus with a gigantic city on "your" side of the volga threatening your north flank.

Educate yourself before you make a fool out of yourself again.

theres no falling back in an organized way when your shit is hauled by horses and the opponent is decently motorized

Pls be in london

Absolutely nothing went wrong. 9th of may 1945 best day of my life.

Stalin's flunkey

Not him, but by that point the overwhelming majority of Lend-Lease motorization second echelon assets had yet to arrive. The Soviets were a little better off, but not by much than their German counterparts.

The bigger problem is that it's just hard to pull out of an active combat zone, and for good or for ill, the Soviets tried an operational handbook where they always attacked and never gave a letup for respite to either side, which made it damn hard for either of them to pull out cleanly.

>Stalino isnt named after Stalin

Yeah, like that other time Moscow got burnt to the ground by an invading army, the Rusky's gave up so bad after that.

needs more PPShs.

I wouldn't go for Moscow or Stalingrad or Leningrad. But straight to the oil fields.
The moment Germany invaded the USSR, they would be in a war of attrition. They needed raw materials and oil.

And when the Soviets counterattack across the Volga and cut off your forces in the Caucasus mountains?

teleport behind them

Correct. Trying to go for Moscow in 1942 would probably have created an even larger Stalingrad, this time in front of Moscow. Moscow was extremely heavily defended. If the Germans failed to take Stalingrad, how would they have taken Moscow with 1942's armies?

But wasn't it too hard for them to pull out with the entire 6th army surrounded?

I assume he meant pulling out before the 6th army got surrounded.

I think he means that the Germans should have pulled out before the Russians launched their encirclement operation. So probably some time in September or October

>They needed raw materials and oil.

Wouldn't change a thing they ran out of everything not only oil.

They never had a chance just look at the counterattacks in winter 41.

the war was already lost by the end of 1941

the wermacht understimated soviet numbers and resolve. despite huge successes they didn't break the red army, the soviets managed to ship all their industry to Siberia which the Luftwaffe didn't have the planes to bombs and in the battles they lost a large portion of the well trained professional veteran soldiers who had done so well so far in Europe. From 1942 onwards the quality of German troops steadily decreased as troops with less and less training arrived, and they came to depend more on more on unreliable troops from their allies, hence why the soviets broke through 6th army's flanks so easily, they were defended by Italian and Hungarian troops.

German success after 1941 in the east were basically down to the soviets not yes understanding how to fight modern war. Oncce they knew how to use tanks, infantry and aircraft in conjunction correctly they would dominate the overstretched Germans. Until then literally all the Soviets had to do was hold on and not lose anything too critical like Moscow and German defeat was essentially inevitable.

Stalingrad was basically the Germans demonstrating their overconfidence and hitler being an autist leading to them getting totally fucked by the soviets in a way that could easily have been avoided for at least another year.