I don't know if it is because I know how it ends up turning out in the end but when I watch a documentary on the great war I always think what was Germany thinking going after Russia while also trying to take down Britain as well as declaring war on America... It seems to me like foolishness or, Hitler thought the rest of the world was beyond caring to win yet another war knowing America really had no heart to be in another war so soon after WW I... I always felt like the war could have turned if Germany were losing because of a weapon that was too great to take on being used by Russia or even possibly England however unlikely, Germany needed to be slapped no matter how much you might have felt bad for them losing because of an unknown weapon...
At what point was it to late for Germany to win WW2?
This depends entirely on your point of view: it’s either from the very beginning in 1939, or in 1941 with the failure of the capture of Moscow during operation typhoon.
Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze offers some pretty good reason for this. The economic balance of power was always very much against Germany once war broke out. Even in 1940, the UK and France was outproducing Germany in terms of war materials (i.e in terms of warplanes). Also the Nazis were chronically short on raw material and lack the means of importing them from oversea sources (To give you some idea of how bad this was, Germany was almost out of bombs following the invasion of Poland) whereas the Allies had the resources of the entire colonial empire to draw on. Meaning that any real war of attrition or long term war was going to result in German defeat.
So what the Germans needed to do is not to wait for a war of production to occur, but to push forward with the conquest of new territories as fast as possible in order to secure new resources and to knock out opponents before they can translate their economic potential into military power.
To this end, daring Blitzkrieg attacks were the optimal strategy, as shown in the invasion of Poland, France and the first 6 month of the invasion of Soviet Union. The Germans also enjoyed very good luck (i.e much of the French airforce was grounded for maintenance during the first phase of the invasion of France), and very very bad planning on the part of the Allies (i.e during the invasion of France the French rushed armored divisions into Belgium, walking right into a German encirclement) that made it very successful during the first stage of the war.
However, the problem with this strategy was that it depended very much on momentum, the moment when a conquest is stalled or failed, the house of cards starts to collapse because the war turns from a rapid war of maneuver and encirclement into a slow war of grinding attrition and production. I cannot stress how important this is because Germany’s opponents to both the east and the west was growing stronger faster than it was. There was therefore, a limited window of opportunity to launch a successful invasion. Delaying the invasion of the Soviet Union by a year for instance, would have meant the Red Army recovers more from Stalin’s purges and fix the problems it was shown to have during the Winter war with Finland which drastically decreases German chance of success.
As an aside, the invasion of the British isles was never a serious option for the Germans with any possibility of success.
And a stalled conquest is exactly what happened in 1941, the German failure to capture Moscow when it invaded the Soviet Union. German forces stalled in front of Moscow in December 1941 and subsequent Soviet counter attacks drove it from the gates of the Soviet capital. By failing to do so, it failed to knock out the Soviet out of the war and was therefore forced into a war of production. The declaration of war on the US in 1941 after Pearl harbor did not help in that regard.
Thereafter, despite retaining control of most of Europe, the Nazis was unable to mobilize the full extent of industry because Europe lacked natural resources to do so. The chronic shortage of oil, Bauxite among other materials mean that many factories in occupied territory lie idle. There are a lot of myth regarding the fact that Germany did not go on war economy until it was too late while in reality the truth was that Germany was -unable- to mobilize the full economic potential of its occupied territories.
By Paul Kennedy’s calculation, the US alone possessed over 50% of overall war-making powers (industry, manpower etc) in the world in 1941, combined with Soviet and British production, it was only a matter of time until Germany was grinded down by superior economic power. For a while, Germany retained an advantage in being the most experienced of the combatants with the best quality army, but that started to disappear as the Red Army started to gain more experience and Germany’s best divisions was destroyed on the Eastern front. It was able to achieve important tactical success on all fronts (i.e 3rd Kharkov, Kasserine Pass), but those were never enough to change the balance of power int he war. The rest is, as we say, history, as the allies defeated Germany and occupied it.
Had the Germans taken Moscow in 1941, it would have captured an important center of transportation, it would have dislocated the Soviet planning bureaucracy which made its economy work, and most importantly it might have caused a political collapse within the Communist party of the Soviet Union, which might have destroyed the Soviet war effort. Once it occupied enough of the Soviet Union, it might have being able to acquire enough natural resources to mobilize the industry of Europe and transfer enough divisions to the west to prevent an Anglo-American landing. But even that is a pretty long shot because chances are the Soviet Union will not collapse following the loss of Moscow.
The Nazi regime was pretty inefficient and there was a lot of stuff they could have done better (i.e rationalize the production process instead of having an ad-hoc allocation of raw material among its industries), but none of it as enough to fundamentally alter the economic balance of power.
No comments:
Post a Comment