Could an alliance of Poland and Czechoslovakia stop Nazi Germany?

So I think this is a pretty complex question. While and have a point. But that second post brings up an important point, the border fortifications were in the Sudetenland that got ceded before the war, without those the Czechs are boned.

Better question: How would germany effectively defeat such a power or effectively hold poland?

So what was WW2 about anyway

Italian-Japanese-German alliance wanted more ground. Others didn't want to give up ground.
Japan and Germany did a lot of genocide so others didn't like them that much.

Also, Germany was very much butthurt it lost round 1. Therefore it secretly geared up for round 2.

very true.

France has it's own interests first in war.
hell,
look at their stance in the cold war: they were thinking about turning commie if the situation got bad enough.
they sure as hell weren't going to help Poland, since no official alliance between them was signed.

During the first partition, absolutly. Germany would be rekt.

After that, hell no.

The third republic didnt exactly have its shit together.

>But for whatever reason, they just didn't.

Because they'd just experienced WWI, where an entire generation of young men was scarred and ravaged. War had not existed on that scale before, so France didn't want to engage in another one. They focused on defensive measures (The maginot line etc) and diplomacy rather than proactive ones. It's hard to overstate just how much WWI fucked up people's perception of what war was and how little most people wanted another one.

Wehraboos get out.

>Because they'd just experienced WWI
And unlike the British, who were sending their soldiers across the Channel and were scared to death of Zeppelins scattering a few bombs around London, or the Americans, who sent their soldiers off to have a fun war adventure at the tail end of things, France was where the First World War was fought. They got the worst of it, and knew they would again in another large-scale conflict.

exactly this. Poland FUCKED Czechoslovakia and the west also blamed them at the time. For some Polish-Czech alliance you need to have a viable Intermarium pact or something; and that goes wayyyy back.

How is this Veeky Forums? OP didn't even put in the bare minimum of effort in framing it around a game.

This. Also Piłsudski was quite a shitty leader - he blocked the expansion of polish armoured forces because he thought that tanks are just "expensive toys with no future"

If the Germans hadn't gotten the Sudetenland without a fight? Absolutely.

>and the west also blamed them at the time

Poland or Czechoslovakia?

>What is wargaming?

Would the manpower and capital lost in the war against POLAND STRONK be a fair price to pay to prevent operation Barbarossa? I feel like Nazis pissed away more resources in Russia than they would have in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

There's far more to that.

Since his Death Pilsudzki is worshippped here as exemplar Patriot and Man of State.

Consider the following:

1. Pilsudzki took part in WW1, and was one (of many) people to build baseline for polish force in Hungary. But he fought on losers' side, but that's totally negligible for people here.

2. He wasn't part of Versaile delegation (which consisted of Paderewski (future president) and Dmowski (Ultra right-wing nationalist politician, but he had a point). This delegation, and their political efforts made Poland a country post WW1. Not few soldiers of Pilsudzki.

3. Then we have Russian civil War, shortly into it War on Ukraine and afterwards: 1920's Bolschevik-Poland War. Pilsudzki did nothing to stop reds there, since they promised to accept our existence as a country (only to eat us soon after estabilishing themselves) so he did little to help Contr-revolution.
When shit hit the fan on Ukraine (there were pro-Tzar armies, Reds, Ukrainian folks-insurgency led by anarchists, Cossacks revolution and One Lord knows who else fighting, what did Pilsudzki order? To help combatants fighting Bolscheviks?

NOPE. Pilsudzki sends out polish army to take Kiev and Lwow, literally increasing chaos thousand times.
Then Reds finally win their War, and decide to march West. Mere news and Vanguard of Red Army closing in makes our Glorious undefeated army run away, leaving everything behind.
Then our army, under P's command, loses every single skrimish against Red Army until they reach the Warsaw. Let's not forget what Red Army was: unorganised, feral crowd with terribly outdated equipment, and little to no true combat experience ( Guess where most officers and army from WWI went? Right, either died then, or joined pro-Tzar armies), low morale, and not working chain of command.

Defence of Warsaw was orgnised by generals like Rozwadowski (main leader), Sikorski, Haller, with help of West.

You need more than a few dumb slavic thieves and a bunch of prostitutes to defeat a germanic nation

But Pilsudzki declared it is a failure and it is all for nothing. He demanded his dismissing from Prime Minister. Was declined, which didn't stop him from running away to Czechoslovakian border, but he signed up the plan.

Fun fact is: In years to come Rozwadowski died "misterious" death (poison in coffee, probably), and rest of generals from the battle were mortal enemies of pro-P camp, and their careers were ruined. Aforementioned Dmowski, Versaile participant, was also their mortal enemy.

One thing I forgot to mention was what Pilsudzki was exactly specialising at during WWI: robbing post-offices, trains, being confirmed Hungarian agent.

Post Warsaw Battle history is quite plain: few years after, Pilsudzki has overthrown (quite unorganised and paralysed, as a matter of fct) parliament, estabilished Authocracy, and ruled as Half-God. He eliminated most of political and military opponents one way or the other, and instead turned country into grange for his "meek but faithful" supporters. Post his death those Meek&Faithful were tasked with actual ruling this shithole. Ended bad.

These idiots runned away from Poland two days into WWII... But managed to hypnotize nation into belief that we're actual Empire...

Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Franco, etc could have been most bloodthirsty dictators pre WWII, buit none had such a great propaganda machine as Pilsudzki, who to this day is worshipped as Man of State in each household here. I am not even joking.

The real question is what would have happened if Poland had conceded to Germany's diplomatic efforts regarding Danzig, and joined with Germany in the antikomitern pact that Hitler tried to forge to stand against Soviet Union?

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Oh I know about this. I was born im Denmark but I'm living in Poland for few years now because family and stuff. This country is weird as fuck - every time I'm visiting Katowice it feels like Silesians are the only reasonable people here and the rest of the country is hating them for not fapping to old stories about glorious Poland.

>tfw no Little Entente
>tfw no France-Little Entente doubleteam against Germany with possibly Britain joining in
>tfw the entire French strategy was doing nothing and just building a giant wall that didn't even cover the entire border because Belgium would throw a hissyfit over it
>FUCKING
>BELGIUM

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Theoretically, yes. Czechoslovakia and Poland had more than enough to stymie Germany in 1938. At the time, France also really, really wanted to go to war to assist the Czechs (In 1939, French intelligence vastly overestimated the amount of divisions the Germans would commit, which was why they remained in Belgium outside of the Saar offensive; in 1938, French intelligence underestimated what the Germans had available and were thus very willing to go onto the offense).

Practically politically? No. Poland and Czechoslovakia had bad blood almost from the moment they gained their independence, starting with the Polish-Czechoslovakian war in 1919. The Czechs and Poles both laid claims to part of Silesia, and this was only resolved grudgingly through the League of Nations, a decision that did not entirely please either party. One of the two nations would have to make significant concessions to the other in order years in advance for any sort of friendship or alliance to occur; given the nationalist tone of the Polish government and the democratic nature of Czechoslovakia, it would have been political suicide for Pilduski or Beneš to realistically make such a concession. So the bad blood wold continue well until even after the second world war.

tl;dr On paper, yes, especially given that France in 1938 was willing to fight. Political realities meant that in reality this was almost impossible.

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wargaming this moment in history is a thing. it's available in several of our threads....

oh, not at all. just for the 1939 bit

one has to look closely to realize the German army of 1940 was a fully upgraded machine with new recruits, far more PzIII's and IV's, new improvised gun carriers and the new idea of using the 88 as an AT gun.

Barbarossa would have been held off a bit, not stopped.

Probably ultimately something roughly similar to what happened to Mussolini in Italy: Pilsudski is given wide latitude to reign as he pleases, but sooner or later Hitler is going to invade the Soviet Union, and that's not a war that any realistic combination of German allies could win. Hitler could weld Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Spain, and Finland together into some kind of grand anti-Communist pact and it would still lack the resources needed to actually defeat the Soviet Union. The war would be brutal as Hell and probably last for near a decade, but in the end it just won't be enough.

In the inevitable Red March west, Pilduski basically ends up in the same situation that Mussolini did when the Allies invaded Italy: reduced to little more than the Gauleiter of Poland.

M8, you are seriously overestimating the capabilities of the fucking commies.
They weren't some undefeatable monstrosity. They won in the end mostly because of mistakes made by the German advance.

Nope. If Czechoslovakia were given some foreign backing (or at least promise of it) instead of everyone forcing us into the Munich Agreement and subsequent Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren deal, we would become very abrasive obstacle against Reich's progress. But we would not stop it.
By we, I mean Czechs obviosuly, Slovaks are turncoats that would happily go nazi like they did (and like they might go again in very immediate future).

On unrelated note, I seem to have misplaced my Little Tailor of Prague.

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>Slovaks are turncoats that would happily go nazi like they did
>implying siding with nazis is wrong.
Those are some fighting words senpai.

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And I see no realistic reason to think that the same mistakes won't be made. The best time to invade doesn't change, the pace of the advance doesn't change, which means most likely General Winter still comes into play. You can't invade earlier in the year because while you buy yourself a few weeks reprieve from Winter, you have to deal with hip-deep mud from the autumn rains. A crawl through mud is not conducive for blitzkrieg tactics, nor troop morale.

Okay, I take it back, there is a way to pull it off, but it doesn't involve a successful Barbarossa (though this front should be opened up first to basically serve as a distraction)

It involves getting Turkey and preferably also Romania in on the alliance and letting the Regia Marina - at the time the fourth or fifth largest navy in the world - to sail into the Black Sea and open up a completely different front against the Crimean and the Ukraine, which is where the Soviets get most of their oil. The goal of Barbarossa then becomes to link up with this front and then push north. Of course, all this depends upon Italian naval success and subsequent Italian and other anti-Communist ability to land in the Crimean (or even further east) and then expand from there...but the frankly laughable Seelöwe plans do not instill much confidence in the ability of the Germans to plan or carry out a significant amphibious invasion, and I doubt the Italians would be much better.

With no war against the allies (given no war with Poland) the entire nature of the conflict is changed and I do not think that we can make any real estimates on how things would turn out or what resources Hitler would have at his disposal.

The thing is that Hitler badly wants a war against the Soviet Union, and the the same time is on a ticking clock against his own economy imploding due to the Nazi economic model - if war hadn't broken out in 1939, Germany would have been facing severe economic distress in 1940, and I'm not certain if there were any tricks left to pull to stave off Germany's situation on that front.

So it's either war in early 1940 at the latest, or no war at all. Based on all the information I'm aware of about Germany's military abilities in 1940, and adding Poland, Czechoslovakia, Finland, and Romania, you're still not looking at the military power needed to bring down the Soviet Union.

You NEED that second front in the Crimean or the Ukraine to split the Soviet army and directly threaten their oil, so it comes down to German and Italian ability to carry out an amphibious invasion AND bring the Turks on board. Leaving aside my incredulity at the thought of the Germans and Italians being able to pull off the former, how would Hitler do the latter? What can he offer Turkey?

>all this depends upon Italian naval success
So it's a plan doomed from the beginning?

Why were tank guns so dinky and small in WWII?

Because the tanks themselves were tiny.

That's an early war design, user. Would you want to question the firepower an ISU-152 can throw at your position?

Well that's not totally true, the Axis start line is now at the Polish-Soviet border instead of the German-Soviet border halfway into occupied Poland and for everything Barbarossa did wrong it came bloody close to Moscow and the beating heart of Soviet rail links. Though it's is perhaps questionable that they could achieve the same level of operational surprise without the reassurances of the pact but hay Stalin is such an unpredictable element that they might still have.

I happen to come from Silesian voyevodship, not the one with silesian movement very active tho. That the country is weird as hell is a fact. Problem with silezians is that, while they have some kind of separate identity, their own semi-language, they drink to other sentiment: times when Silezia was actual separate Germanic Duchy. But it was back in medieval times, and realistically no one takes them seriously, even most of Silezians.

And about people, there're some ok, there're some major dicks, and some weirdos, kinda like everywhere but to worse extreme. Politics, society and history here are completely fucked up, and I made a rule to not discuss them.

Well, yes and no. The Soviet Black Sea Fleet throughout all of WWII consisted of 1 battleship, 6 cruisers, 19 destroyers, 84 torpedo boats, 44 submarines, 2 gunboats, and 18 minelayers; while the Regia Marina in 1939 the Regia Marina has 4 battleships, 19 cruisers, 56 destroyers, 70 torpedo boats, 122 submarines, and 73 torpedo motorboats - so it's already a superior force (and during the war they'd build a further 3 battleships, 4 cruisers, 7 destroyers, 50 submarines, 47 corvettes, and 420 torpedo motorboats and other miscellaneous ships).

So there's no question that the Regia Marina can turn the Black Sea into an Italian lake. The question is whether or not the Italians can turn that into a successful amphibious invasion, and that's what I doubt.

Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy, has serious claim to being the most meticulously planned and prepared for wartime operation in history, and it still nearly failed at several points and stalled due to lack of supplies after 90 days.

So I just can't see the Italians putting any significant numbers of boots on the ground or, more importantly, keeping them supplied.

Reaching Moscow isn't a huge problem, there's a lot of ways the Germans could have achieved that. The queston is their ability to actually take Moscow.

If the Germans couldn't take Stalingrad, I don't see how they can possibly hope to take a city with nearly five times the population, ten times the size, and a far larger industrial capacity.

This is a good point in both regards. Consider the Germans lost 10,000 dead and 30,000 wounded in Poland and 27,000 dead and 111,000 in France, which could have been avoided in this scenario (at least for now). After 1941 the Germans had a large number of somewhat understaffed divisions, so this would be more important than it might otherwise seem.
This also counts for hardware such as armour, aircraft and trucks. I don't have any numbers for it, though.
In a more ideal scenario the Japanese would keep pressure on the Soviet far east too, whether directly or whether by military posturing. The less Soviet siberian units that get to the west, the better.

There really isn't anything the Japanese could do that they weren't already doing. Silver lining: no war against France and Britain means that the French and British can commit more forces against the inevitable Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia, so the Anglo-Franco-American war against Japan will be over sooner. Unless the Japanese decide to not attack the Philippines and Pearl. I can see them leaving out Pearl, but I can't think of a good reason for them to bypass the Philippines.

>>implying siding with nazis is wrong
I mean they lost so it was objectively the wrong choice that resulted in their eventual reabsorbtion into Czechoslovakia and the loss of Carpatho-Ukraine.

Very true, though I'm sure the Japanese could, if they were willing to pay another string of stupid defeats, have kept the Soviets tied up at least for a year or so.

But to what benefit? What the Japanese need is oil, and they're not going to find it in the Soviet Far East, which is all but bereft of accessible oil in the 1940s.

I mean just being able to cripple Soviet logistics by turning their capital and all it's rail links to rubble could lead to some very panicked and harmful decisions.

I think it's a hard call really, if a proper rout sets in off the back of operational surprise I think they've got a chance but the Soviets need to panic and start making horrible mistakes or start stabbing each other as they think the ship's going down.

Big gun means heavier and more cramped turret that takes longer to turn, and can get caught on things the crew can't really see. If your current gun can hit and penetrate, making it bigger is counterproductive.

Sorry that was for

Your opinnions is very uneducated. During battle for Moscov, whole nearby industry was already transported and set up beyong Ural mountains. Moscov was but a symbol to defend.

In modern times, many countries managed to capture Moscov. Napoleon did, Poland did. It never ever hindered Russian ability to fight back. Moscov itself is worthless. Russians even would burn it down themselves, when knowing they can't hold it.

Just for the purpose of discussing optimistic war planning, user. If we're considering a more rainbow unified anti-cominterm alliance works without function, I'm sure we can take the liberty to assume the Japanese would suddenly be in for this, if even for a bit.

I must admit I wasn't aware that the transfer of industry beyond the Urals was done by then.

So you are right my opinions 'are' very uneducated.

Oh yeah sure let's see how well the war of manuever would go against the sudeten line.

>They weren't some undefeatable monstrosity. They won in the end mostly because of mistakes made by the German advance.
Germany took it's best shot. The soviets practically leaned over, lifted their chin, and went "Hit me", and the Nazis couldn't knock them out. In a world where there's no M-R pact, the army's going to be in a better state, and mistakes they made in the advance won't get made, because there won't be much of an advance before the front stabilises and they start grinding back.

Wouldn't happen. Nazi racial doctrine considered the slavic Poles to be as much subhuman scum as the slavs further east. Any plan that assumes the Nazi party isn't made of idiotic racists is doomed to fail; they're always going to assume the soviet union is a weak and cowardly place harrowed by bolshevism and their primitive slavic nature, they're always going to treat poles with casual brutality because they think they're worth less, and so on.

They need to have a reason, however. There is an obvious benefit for Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Finland to ally with Germany against the Soviets, and Italy would come along to play to because Mussolini needed a strong European ally and after the invasion of Ethiopia Hitler was the only one willing to be that ally.

But Japan gains nothing from antagonizing the Soviets. By 1940 they're already stuck in an unwinnable scenario that's going to inevitably lead to checkmate and they KNOW it, they're not going to intentionally make things worse, especially not after Lake Khasan and Khalkhin Gol in 1938 and 1939, respectively.

On the European front, as well, I've yet to be told why the Turks would allow the Italians to move the better part of their entire fleet through the Dardanelles unmolested, in order to open up a Black Sea front against the Soviets. What is Hitler or Mussolini going to offer them?

(Frankly I find it more likely that the Italians or the Germans simply demand access and, if denied, declare war and invade Turkey).

You know that Poland helped Germans with land-grab and sold Czechoslovakia over Zaolzie, a tiny piece of land, which Czechs first occupied when Poland was busy fighting Soviets in the 1920. So the glorious Polish leaders in their bold stupidity decided the wisest thing to do is holding grudges over that and joined Hitler with Czechoslovakia take-over.

Also, the fuck this thread even has to do with Veeky Forums?

Pre-1938, yes

1935 Wehrmacht report said the Poles could reach Berlin if they attacked first.

Fuck, forgot to remove the trip

/thread

Because the powerplants were shit and at the time tanks were envisioned to be a fast cavalry replacement, so they needed to pack light.

Ask Czechoslovakia how it worked for them when they've ceded only a piece of their land. Wait, let me correct that. When Great Britain and France ceded their land without asking anyone in Czechoslovakia.
Either way, the conclusion was the same - piece by piece the country was taken.

And Poland was HIGHLY dependent on the coal export via the railway connection from Silesia region to Gdynia (counter-part to Danzig), to the point where it generated 20% of Polish national income. So giving shore to Germans would be fucking suicidal even without them invading (for whatever reason)

The Scars of WWI are still carved into France to this day - and Farmers keep hitting unexploded shells (both HE and Gas) and getting killed every year - The First World War is STILL causing casualties.

That's like RL Saper Game!

You don't even have to pirate windows for that!

It's is fucking incredible that people still feel the need to roll out "But what if we just kept appeasing Hitler forever?"

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Well, on the bright side, sooner or later it's just going to be impossible, since Hitler's end goal was always war with the Soviet Union. There is no reasonable circumstance where that is a winnable fight for Germany.

>France had ample oppertunity to mobilize an attack
>But for whatever reason, they just didn't.
They did, that's what the Saar offensive was. The question that should be asked is why they retreated so quickly, and why they refused to attack at all in the coming months. The reason is two fold. The first was that French intelligence had a tendency to vastly and inexplicably overestimate the amount of divisions the Germans had available.
>On October 23rd 1939, the French Intelligence agency, the Deuxième Bureau, estimated 70 German divisions on the western front.
>The next day, this was inexplicably increased by twenty to a total of 90 divisions.
>Five days later, on the 29th, reports circulated reinforcing the picture of 90 German divisions, this time supported by 76 more in the rear.
(source: spectrum.library.concordia.ca/977623/1/Parker_MA_F2013.pdf)
The second reason was the the French High Command fundamentally distrusted the ability of the average French conscript, the bulk of the French Army, to conduct offensive operations. The French High Command believed that the conscript required three years of training in order to be able to perform adequately. De Gaulle called for 6. But in 1928, the French conscription period was cut down by the civilian government from three years to one. The resurgence of Nazi Germany later caused them to raise it back to 2 in 1935, but as far as French High Command was concerned, the average conscript was entirely useless.
(source: web.stanford.edu/class/polisci243b/readings/kier.pdf)

Cont'd.

(cont'd)
For the French High Command, the only part of its military capable of offensive operations was the much smaller professional standing army.
The Maginot Line was designed for this purpose; it was designed to allow the allegedly nigh-useless conscripts to hold almost the entirety of the the Franco-German border so that the Standing Army could conduct an offensive war of maneuver in Belgium and the low countries, the inevitable location of the German attack (it was also extremely cheap and politically acceptable even to the center-left, which controlled the civilian government and was responsible for reducing the conscription period in the first place).
(en.booksee.org/book/1179868)

The reason, that the French failed to exploit Germany's weakness was that, in vastly overestimating the strength of the Wehrmacht, Gamelin and the other generals became convinced that they would be committing the only reliable, elite members of its military into a trap in Germany. They were aware that that the Belgian Border was a huge fucking weak spot, and they feared that attacking with the standing army would lead to a second Sedan (ironically, these decisions did lead to a second Sedan) where the cream of the French forces would be isolated and that the defense of France would be left to mere conscripts, without even the benefit of the Maginot Line.
As such, the French standing army prepared to meet the Germans in Belgium, where they hoped Belgian/BEF assistance would allow them to hold the low countries against what they saw as a vastly numerically superior foe.

Of course, to the surprise of the French (and indeed much of the German high command), the Germans managed to punch through in the Ardennes, south of where the French and British expected the attack and war of maneuver would occur, and the exact scenario the French feared occurred; the standing army was encircled, and the conscripts rapidly collapsed.

Ultimately, this was still a great failure and miscalculation on the part of the French/BEF, and their subsequent performance in Fall Gelb and Fall Rot did not do them any further credit.
But to accuse either of Cowardice or Inaction is also equally incorrect. The French did immediately attempt to make an attack almost immediately on the outbreak of war, and their failure to exploit German weakness was not a failure of the moral fiber or a failure of the will, but a failure in intelligence brought along by a combination of hamstringing on the part of the civilian government, and a failure on the part of French Intelligence.

This sort of thread belongs on /k/ and you're going to get way more knowledgeable answers there anyway.

I thought I was in agreement with you fampai.

Britain and France declared war on Germany because they invaded Poland.
The same Poland they sold out to the Soviets.

There is one.
It involves Stalin never getting into power. That's literally Hitler's dream come true, since every other faction was busy with planning instant propagation of the revolution by war. Which means everyone fights Soviets, or rather - Soviets fight with everyone. So Hitler would get his golden goal of alliance with Brits, because they would simply have to ally with him, in a fear of all that industry falling into commie hands.