Was this decision stupid things?
Barbarossa was stupid idea or not?
Logan Nguyen
Joshua Johnson
It was a good idea but they attacked too late in the year because Italy couldn't defeat Greece alone. USSR was rearming fast and the longer they waited the less chance they would be able to actually succeed against USSR. Also it is highly likely that as soon as Hitler was placed into a vulnerable position Stalin would attack him so he needed to strike first.
Easton Young
Imagine if modern day Canada tried to invade the modern day United States.
Jaxson Lewis
Hmm Stalin would have attacked eventually. Maybe Germany would have been more successful in a defensive war. I mean thousands of Germans froze to death in the Russian winter.
Ayden Sanchez
Ignoring your logisticians is always a dumb idea
Oliver Campbell
>they attacked too late in the year because Italy couldn't defeat Greece alone
Meme. They attacked later in the year because flooding in Poland destroyed German logistics. Greece had nothing to do with it.
Justin Gray
A far more stupid decision was to attack at that particular point in time. Since the Soviets were content after the partitioning of Poland, Germans should've finished off the West first.
Jaxson Barnes
germany had no way of defeating britain
Dylan Young
Sure, they wouldn't have been able to occupy the British isles, but they were arguably strong enough to continually harass (bombing raids, disrupting the British maritime operations, etc.) the UK into submission, which could have potentially allowed them to force the British to pull out of the war.
In any case, by provoking the USSR, Germans dug their own grave.
Adrian Cruz
>In any case, by provoking the USSR, Germans dug their own grave
>implying
By the time Barbarossa kicked off, Germany had already dug their grave. Barbarossa was just the beginning of them burying themselves, one shovelful of shit at a time.
Dylan Reed
They were nowhere near strong enough in the air to do something like that. Just look at pic related, see the disparity in bomb tonnage dropped.
Britain dropped orders of magnitude more bombs, was building more and heavier planes, and STILL didn't bomb Germany into submission, so unless you have some reason to think Britain is more vulnerable to that kind of thing, they aren't even in the same solar system as what would be necessary to knock Britain out by airpower alone.
Eli Rivera
Its also worth noting that the luftwaffe was severely depleted after the battle of france and some real shady paperwork tricks were pulled to make it appear much stronger than it really was
Alexander Collins
how? Britain outproduced Germany in aircraft every month of the blitz, every month Germany lost far more pilots than Britain, the royal navy was rapidly improving at ASW, flower-class corvettes were proving to be extremely economical and useful ships at this task, and while food was rationed there were never any critical shortages.
Logan Wood
I don't think that Britain was more vulnerable; my claim is that given some time, the resources wasted on the Eastern front could've been re purposed into modernizing the navy and air forces, giving them a much needed edge.
Also, by harassing I meant not only the raids, which on their own would've been ineffective. With a strong enough navy (w/ land support), blocking the most important naval routes was a viable strategy at that point of time, and given that the Gibraltar was almost under their control at some point (thanks to Rommel), I think it's not unrealistic to imagine the Germans accomplishing that.
Justin Campbell
>and given that the Gibraltar was almost under their control at some point
I have no idea where you read that but you couldn't be any more wrong if you were trying to be wrong.
Grayson Bell
>I don't think that Britain was more vulnerable; my claim is that given some time, the resources wasted on the Eastern front could've been re purposed into modernizing the navy and air forces, giving them a much needed edge.
And given the same time, the British empire, with a vastly larger economy and manpower pool, could also have expanded their air and naval forces, faster than the Germans can, not to mention their considerable head start.
>With a strong enough navy (w/ land support), blocking the most important naval routes was a viable strategy at that point of time,
It would need to be orders of magnitude stronger. The High Seas Fleet relative to the Royal Navy of WW1 was about 2:3 in a position of inferiority, and they never got close to seriously threatening a blockade. The Kriegsmarine was much relatively weaker, with about a 1:5 inferiority. Again, Germany simply can't build ships as fast as Britain can, they have less money, and less shipbuilding expertise.
>and given that the Gibraltar was almost under their control at some point (thanks to Rommel),
What the fuck are you talking about? The Germans were nowhere near to taking Gibraltar, and Rommel was attacking in the other direction. Not to mention he never really got anywhere close to Alexandria, let alone Suez, which he really had no hope whatsoever of taking.
Xavier Scott
The Germans didn't stop the development of their navy either, even with their limited resources they managed to invest pretty heavily into their U-boats. With the manpower and money diverted from the East, the results would've been even better, I imagine (the submarine fleet might've become their ace in the hole, so to speak).
Eli Johnson
The Germans never really developed a method for taking on heavily protected convoys. I wish I coined the phrase, but someone here once said that u-boats are the insurgents of the seas; they're great at avoiding combat by hiding, they're annoying as all hell to root out, they strike when and where they wish, but they can't actually take on regular forces and win.
The entirety of tactical and technological development of German u-boat forces in WW2 was centered around ways of finding and converging submarines on lightly or undefended merchant ships. The British solution was to simply ensure that all of their convoys had a steady guard of minesweepers, corvettes, CVEs, and other protective vessels. By 1943, you weren't finding targets anymore, and the u-boats were getting sunk to no real purpose.
Michael Davis
My bad, I meant the Suez, not Gibraltar
Dylan Cook
Well, like I said, he was nowhere close to Suez either, and had enough trouble taking Tobruk, where the British ability to project force is considerably less than around the canal, and his own ability to project force is considerably greater.
Plus, taking Suez (even if he had done so) doesn't block the most viable trade routes. Those Italian ships are designed to fight in the Med and have terrible range; not to mention chronic fuel problems meant that they were in port most of the time. Sending them loose into the Indian Ocean to try to commit acts of piracy is going to burn that up real fast.
Jaxson Ward
The American submarine campaign in the Pacific is a great example of a case of unrestricted submarine warfare actually working as intended. The main difference is that Americans had far more submarines, both numerically and in terms of quality. Besides that, the Japanese never really had the time or resources to develop proper counter-measures like the British did.
Luke Powell
Also, Japanese shipping was relatively concentrated. While they did have some tendrils all throughout the Pacific trying to supply all those outlying bases, the overhwelming majority of their shipping by volume was either going from Korea to Japan, or going through the China Sea to Japan; with an important exception of NEI oil going up through the South China Sea, into the China sea proper to get to Japan.
You went in that area, you were almost guaranteed to find something. The Germans tended to have to search a much wider area looking for convoys, as the British were importing and exporting shit all over the place.
Andrew Clark
as the other fellow said, it wouldn't have made a difference. The British had rapidly adapted to ASW. Did you know that of the aproximately 12,500 U boats Germany built during ww2 more than two thirds were built in 1943-1945? Many were destroyed (with all hands killed in action) without even sinking a single ship.
John Ward
He was close enough to Alexandria, a key city in the region.
Also, why send ships through the Suez if you can simply pick off the passing ships with the Mediterranean fleet and from the shores?
Angel Wilson
Not that user, but I think you added an extra 0 there.
Bentley Gonzalez
>He was close enough to Alexandria, a key city in the region.
He was 115 km away, and running on fumes to get to El Alamein. That is a LONG fucking way from beating the British dug in around the Qattara depression, forging on ahead, investing the city, actually taking it (Go look up German attempts to take Tobruk back in 1941), and then advancing from there to the actual Canal, which would necessitate forcing their way across the Nile at the very least.
>Also, why send ships through the Suez if you can simply pick off the passing ships with the Mediterranean fleet and from the shores?
Because the British aren't stupid. If by some unfathomable miracle you manage to take Suez, they're not going to try to send their shipping through it anymore. There won't be any passing ships, not that there were that many going through the med anyway.
Caleb Lewis
I'd say it was not the British that adapted, but rather the Americans.
Charles Mitchell
you know how in a dota game the enemy team has 50k net worth advantage, one guy says "let's go roshan", you do that and all die and lose your raxes
it was like that. they were already fucked so there's not anything to judge a decision by.
Kevin Perry
Well, that was because the majority of Rommel's forces were Italians, whose army quality was subpar. If at least some of the German forces lost on the East were placed there instead, they would've performed much better.
William Brooks
>If at least some of the German forces lost on the East were placed there instead, they would've performed much better.
He couldn't even supply the forces he had. Putting more in just means they run out of food and fuel faster; the place had no railroads, shitty roads, and terrible port capacity even when the British weren't raiding the Italian convoys (They did this constantly), and trying to conduct hundreds of kilometer long offensives by railroad in the fucking desert where your trucks fall apart all the time is basically impossible. It's a minor miracle he got as far as he did, and every kilometer he pushes on, his own forces weaken and the British strengthen. Even without a Russian front, a loss in North Africa is a question of when, not if.
Angel Torres
whoops you're right meant to say 1,250
Landon Jackson
You're right, increasing the army size was not an option, but the change in the composition of the army was. The superior German tanks and personnel would serve the Axis forces there better than the less familiar to Rommel and less competent Italians. Then, assuming the capture of Alexandria, the supply problems would have been alleviated, at which point the increase in the strike force size could've become a more realistic option.
Ryder Ward
The German forces also used up far more supplies; a German division consumed roughly 350 tons of supply a day. dtic.mil
If you want 7 German divisons (Replacing the forces Italy had wholesale with Germans), that comes out to 2,450 tons a day, or 73,500 a month. Considering that Tripoli only had a capacity of 45,000 tons a month dtic.mil
>Then, assuming the capture of Alexandria,
Why are you assuming this will happen? Look up the siege of Tobruk, and how it ended in ignominous failure after operation Crusader.
>the supply problems would have been alleviated
Why would they? Now you're trying to ship your supply convoys through British raiders only far away from your air umbrella based in Sicily. And of course, the British, if they were ever in a position to lose Alexandria by some bizarre occurrence, would blow up all the docks before pulling out, like they did with places like Benghazi when they retreated in the face of Sonnenblume.