How would you have done Barbarossa differently?

Had they done this, they would have lost a good amount of AGC just like AGS in 1942 at Stalingrad. Do you think Moscow would have just surrendered?

That was pre-ww1 that they sunk the Russian fleet. In 1939, the Russians dominated the Japanese in Mongolian border conflicts that the Japanese hurriedly signed a non-aggression pact.

>Wait what war are we talking about the last time i checked japan BTFO'd Russia and sank their Baltic fleet...
The border conflicts with the USSR in the late 30s.

Plus, that "victory" over Russia kind of destroyed Japan's doctrines as their navy decided that the right path later would be to attempt a similar decisive action against the US instead of playing a longer game. Midway and further losses came as a result of them risking too much for a big victory.

>against a foe that kicked their asses
Didn't the Soviets suffer way more losses at Khalkhin Gol?

As with the battles against the Germans, the Russians could afford any losses. Their opponents could not. Plus Russians had real tanks, Japan didn't.

Possibly. It depends on whose casualty figures you believe, and to be honest, neither empire involved in the battles were all that trustworthy. You look at say Wiki, and they base their sources on Soviet archival material for the Soviet losses and Japanese hospital records for their own losses, on the assumption that each side would be more likely to accurately report their own damage which they'd have better information access to than the other side's. If you do assume they're both right about their own losses, then yes, the Soviets took more damage than the Japanese, by a a factor of roughly 3:2

However, some of the numbers are themselves dubious. The 23rd infantry division was a full strength (and relatively new) type B infantry division, with about 20,000 men overall. It would be pocketed and essentially wiped out, along with other losses that would be sustained in the battle from other units, including failed attempts to relieve the 23rd. That makes a claim of 8,440 killed, and 8,766 wounded in combat extremely dubious.

>As with the battles against the Germans, the Russians could afford any losses
Could they have reinforced their forces as easily without the large population centers of European Russia or its better developed infrastructure, though?

Japan was so invested in China, there was no way they could devote enough manpower against Russia. That and there were no resources there to be gained. It would have been advancing through a wasteland. Russia could have ignored them.

Even if Stalin had kept the 30 or so Siberian divisions there in 1941 instead of moving them west, the German assault on Moscow had already stalled the day before they counterattacked. It may have taken longer, but Russia would still have won.

Focus on defeating the UK, instead of invading the USSR.

Let Italy flounder, devote minimal resources to helping them fight Greece. Start the Operation on time.
Put Rommel on the Eastern front. Do not let him advance to general under any circumstances.
Use copious amounts of Sarin gas on Soviet military and population centers. Leningrad holding out? Sarin gas. Can't break the Stalingrad encirclement? Sarin gas.
Allow collaborationist governments with limited autonomy to operate in occupied territory. Postpone the Final Solution for at least 5 years; too much of a waste of resources.
When winter nears, halt all advances and start fortifying the front, wherever that may be.

This

Waited until 1989 until Communism collapsed and invade then

>Leningrad holding out? Sarin gas. Can't break the Stalingrad encirclement? Sarin gas.
Okay, and when the 8th Air Force dumps it on Berlin and Hamburg?

Who cares, just hide in the bunker.

>Barbarossa
>Name the Operation after the German king that drowned in a river like a retard while on the way to Crusade.
>Start the operation exactly 129 years to the day after Napoleon launched his own abortive invasion of Russia

What did the Krauts mean by this?

The Germans would just be gassing slavs. No reason for the Western Allies to escalate things and gas someone who never gassed them.

>Could they have reinforced their forces as easily without the large population centers of European Russia or its better developed infrastructure, though?

>Even if Stalin had kept the 30 or so Siberian divisions there in 1941 instead of moving them west

Stalin not only didn't move the divisions (far more than 30) from Japanese border, but the garrison size has been continuously increased during the first two years (yes, even when Germans were nearing moscow) in expectation of Japanese backstab.

Russian sources have about 20-25% of entire USSR army being stuck on a Japanese border permanently.

He actually did move a fairly significant number of troops away from the Far East and Transbaikal regions, troop strength in those areas went up from new levies.

I like how everyone in this thread is pretending that Japan didn't want the oil and coal in the Soviet far east.

I like how everyone is also pretending that Japan and Germany fighting against the Soviets is totally the same as Japan fighting the Soviets alone.

I also like how everyone is pretending they know better than Guderian et al. about the strategic value of Kiev.

Not have it delayed by incompetent italians would haver been great also letting the generals do their thing and fully committing the industry for the war effort.

>oil and coal in the Soviet far east.
What oil and coal? That shit didn't exist back then
Japan needed oil now, soviets barely even started exploring Siberia in the past decade.
To get to coal during that period you would literally have to cross half of the union.
Soviet eastern oil sources are also far harder to develop than pretty much anywhere else in the world, it's why to this day Russia shits itself when oil prices fall while Saudi giggle and keep going. Their oil production is far less cost efficient.

1. Interview every Wehrmacht officer that trained with the Red Army during the 1920s on their tactics and doctrine
2. Stop laughing at the Red Army's humilition in The Winter War and point out the heavy tanks they fielded against the Finns
3. Increase production of medium tanks and tank destroyers that could more easily penetrate the armour of T-34s and KV series tanks
4. Tell Military Intelligence that the Soviets can raise a shitload more divisions than previously expected
5. Delay the entire invasion until we have enough construction crews to rebuild Soviet railway systems (using the German guage) as our frontline makes it slog towards Kiev. I'll probably start in the Spring of 1942
6. Capture Soviet industrial and grain-producing regions in Ukraine and then dig in. If possible, capture and fortify Western ports so that the Soviets lack warmwater ports where they could import food from the allies.
7. Starve the Soviets out in a war of attrition

I would just never let the tanks stop

Skip all the lebensraum bullshit, atleast for now
Create a whole bunch of puppet states and armies to go along with them
Scrap the SS altogether and just keep the jews restrained instead of killing them but also put them to use for the war
Now Germany has several million more men to fight on the front which should be enough to defeat the russians

More or less the same strategy with with an earlier strike. I'd do this by putting German commanders in charge of Italian divisions attacking Greece. If Musillini had a problem with this I'd remind him that he got BTFO'd by Ethiopia and that his military is a joke.

I would have also NOT massacred hundreds of thousands for no reason and formally conscripted anti-Bolshevik partisans into the Wermacht.

I'd only bother pushing them to the Urals though. After that I'd force a peace treaty.

Winning and taking heavy losses is kinda the Soviets' thing

>use gas
Enjoy Bomber Harris emptying your cities

>not just sending 1 truck to drive straight to Moscow while the Russians ignore it and send most of their forces to Manchuria.

1. Put Guderian in charge
2. Give him whatever the fuck he wants
3. Get the fuck out of his way
4. ?????
5. PROFIT!!!1!

I would have brokered a peace deal before the first winter by using the massive amounts of captured Soviet Land as a bargaining chip. It only would have been a temporary solution though because Nazi Germany's economy was fueled by war, and probably would have collapsed.

I wouldn't have done it at all. What's the point?

autistic nazi fantasies about crushing "jewish bolsheviks"

>what is getting flanked

>thinking Rommel was good enough to make a difference

And fyi you'd get based back.

Don't forget the cavalry divisions :)

>yfw operation get- fucked- in-the-ass (uranus) begins
>tfw not sure if Mongols teamed up with Bolsheviks
>tfw Soviet autistically charge with men riding t34s and horsemen that throw AT grenades at your tanks

based

the only thing they needed was finland to pull their weight and cut off murmansk.
wasn't this the main port used to receive lend lease?
properly isolating leningrad from supply over the lake would of gone a long way.
shouldn't have bothered with the city of stalingrad. taking baku is way more important.
That's all really. It's hard to say if Germany ever had any chance. But im confident they were on a knife's edge with how close they were to winning.

>How would you have done Barbarossa differently?

Firstly I would go back to 1940 after Italy invaded France and immediately begin sharing technology. I'd give them panzer plans, aircraft blueprints, we'd settle on a single common issue round for every category of small arms that both could easily produce. I would do the same with every single ally.

In fact I might make them all specialize in one area of production. The important thing to remember here is we would have standardized equipment and organization across all armies and I would cut out the hand-me-down bullshit the Hungarians, Slovakians, Bulgarians and Romanians had to put up with because they're now my reserves and since now I know exactly what they have I know exactly what I'm throwing and where.

Secondly I re-gauge all my train engines.

All of them.

The Soviet railroads use a different gauge from everyone else because they're snowflakes so I'm going to need trains that run on it. I would prefer my engineers figure out a way to retrofit locomotives in the field but if they can't I'll change as many as I can and set my engineers to designing a liberty ship equivalent of a train car. Cheap and easy to build but otherwise a total piece of cheap crap even the Chinese in the 90's would be embarrassed to sell.

I'm moving as many factories as I can. Concealing them. In woods, camouflaged to look like hills or farms from the air. Whatever, the details I leave to my generals I just want them to disappear before the allies get all fucked up on strategic bombers.

Unify Axis command. We'll have a single multinational organizational command structure that unites all Axis militaries in Europe in the pursuit of a centralized strategic goal: Gaining as much land for all involved. It will be independent of any one nation but operate under nominally civilian government oversight and in line with the goals of the Axis nations but otherwise will be free to pursue strategies it deems necessary.

>horsemen throwning AT grenades
Has this ever happened?

Wars lost by Guderian: 1
Wars lost by me: 0

>Allow collaborationist governments with limited autonomy to operate in occupied territory. Postpone the Final Solution for at least 5 years; too much of a waste of resources.
This. So many locals hated the soviets, Hitler could have started a good will campaign and get a massive force, while presenting himself as a loving person helping the poor oppressed masses. Instead he got a bunch of partisans fucking up the already shitty supply lines.

Maybe also focus more on the north and Murmansk.

>focus less on kiev

God your strategic thinking is genious lets just bypass this million people city with 400k troops in it.

Why didn't they think of this.

>Start the Operation on time.
They started as early as they could.

Rasputiza

I wouldn't. I can see why they genuinely thought it was a decent plan at the time.

Had clear objectives instead of vague shit about Moscow and then send all the mechanized units south in direct contradiction of the the stated aims

The Soviets trained dogs to run under T-34's and blow themselves up (went about as well as you'd expect when they tried to use them against German tanks), I wouldn't put anything past them

>win a war of attrition against USSR
Lad...

>I'll probably start in the Spring of 1942
So you'll start once the decimated officer corps has fully recovered from the purges?

I would have saved the Soviet and German people the trouble and just surrendered.

Considering that a German victory was impossible in every way

Not actually do it at all.
Instead make defensive line against the Soviets in Poland and watch another incompetent soviet assault (Winter War). Use limited Panzer assaults and pincers to encircle their attacks, similarly how it happened in 2nd and 3rd Battles of Kharkov. The only reason Soviets did as well, is because they fought on the homeground which did miracles to their morale and fighting spirit. When they're fighting for some bullshit reason (Stalin's ambitions) they'd collapse like the house of cards.

>When they're fighting for some bullshit reason (Stalin's ambitions) they'd collapse like the house of cards.
Guess that's why the Soviets lost in Berlin

are you that dense?
that was after the fact that germans pillaged, looted and murdered millions of their people
they were pretty pissed about that

I've thought about this too. Deny the soviets the Great Patriotic War and force their leadership to justify the millions into meatgrinder.

They'd just make some shit up, they did anyway with very embellished stories

It's one thing to believe things when you see villages and their inhabitants burned down to crisp with your own eyes.
It's another to just hear about it and going on a meatgrinder assault because Uncle Stalin said so.
It would be 1917 mutinies all over again.

It's another
> I think the Soviets were just mirror images of Hitler and would have attacked under any and all circumstances because I'm fucking retarded
post. Protip: Stalin, and the Soviet governmental machine in general, was cautious and calculating. If their necks aren't on the line, and there is either no war or a phoney war, they're not going to repeatedly make senseless attacks. Sort of like how they didn't senselessly attack the West at the aftermath of WW2.

>It's one thing to believe things when you see villages and their inhabitants burned down to crisp with your own eyes.
Considering how many Soviet soldiers came from the stans I don't think that mattered a great deal

Stalin would have attacked Hitler 100% if the war in the west turned into a WW1 style stalemate, but it didn't so he had to compromise and he did that by trying to make Hitler happy because he sure as hell wasn't ready for war in 1941.
Both Soviets and Germans knew that war was coming.

>Stalin would have attacked Hitler 100% if the war in the west turned into a WW1 style stalemate, but it didn't so he had to compromise and he did that by trying to make Hitler happy because he sure as hell wasn't ready for war in 1941.
>Both Soviets and Germans knew that war was coming.
[citation needed]
[an extra double strength citation needed for why Stalin would attack if it looked like Hitler was in fact ready for an attack.]

Kind of how the allies didn't escalate when Germany invaded Poland right? After all, they're just slavs.

they didn't attack the west because of the A-bomb, nothing else

[citation needed]

Which is why they went all out on fucking with Berlin and then sending pilots in Soviet marked planes to Korea

Poles are jews, not slavs.

But user. Muh racism and inferior slavs and communism! I can't do the sane thing to win if it means I'll have to be less of an obsessed ideologue!
I'd rather have guerilla resistance groups pop up everywhere I go to bully the untermench, and fuck me in the rear as I try to push into the USSR than try to play the liberator card!

>All those arrows in HOI 3
>Literally just decorating your map to feel clever

>Left: OP Barbarossa as percieved by German generality
>Right: OP Barbarossa as percieved by Hitler

In one of the cited diaries in "enemy at the gates" a t34 tank commander recalls one of the steppe horsemen charging right at a panzer 4 that was in full reverse, threw an AT charge, destroying the tank. The explosion killed his horse, the man got up and advanced on foot holding a mosin nagant.

He also remarks how the German gunner may have hesitated out of fear of killing the horse.

>impossible for krauts to win

The almost did and had every reason to believe so. They were unstoppable for almost a year before getting BTFO. The red army was on the verge of collapse according to zhukov and every other general. He even writes how the nkvd were deserting in mass numbers...