ThorKhan

JerseyJohn Once again your posts are very interesting to read, even more after your first one on that USA-and-the-world-topic. You seem to have a well reflected opinion on that (as I expected of you after reading many of your posts on other topics ) and I agree with you. But if you were a politician and your posts were a speech, a TV-report in the News would tend to focus on your first statements rather than your following explanations. But statements like that invoke Anti-Americanism all over the world, just because one couldn't hear the full speech. Today's media go too much after sensations, with a tendency to neglect well balanced information. As a result you only see (on TV) people demonstrating against the USA, burning flags and the like. Or Bush said "crusade" in the Iraq context and you could read this in all Newspapers over the world for weeks. And politicians all over the world are asked by reporters what they think of that crusade-statement. Those answers tend be negative towards America and so on. So I think the impression that America and Europe had increasingly unfriendly relations is also caused by the media. But there are no real differences between the people in America and Europe except one: Europe doesn't feel as threatend by Sept. 11th as the USA do. That is the main reason why Europe is against that war, not some sort of Anti-Americanism. Rude statements by Bush and Rumpsfeld didn't help to convince the Europeans but gave the impression that they expected their "vasalls" to follow. Basically most Europeans simply don't think that this war is necessary, but that has nothing to do with Anti-Americanism though it may easily be perceived as such. Even though I don't approve this war as it came to be, I think that a diplomatically more skilled American President could have convinced the UN to officially "allow" this war and thus avoided hostile reactions towards the US by the people in the other Middle Eastern states. The Kosovo-war also wasn't approved by the UN and still there weren't nearly as much hardcore-pacifists as today - because some wars are simply necessary and others are not. If in the long run this war is the starting point for a solution of the problems of the region it will be justified by history. But right now I think it is too early to say it was justified or not because the long term results might be just about anything from a free and democratic (if not in the Western sense) Middle East to a Middle East in chaos with increased terrorist activity. Time will tell...

Really interesting topic! But I don't think that after a russian surrender the Allies would have won the war by an unconditional surrender. A stalemate situation would have been more likly imo. Firstly that russian surrender could only have happened in 41/42 but never in 43. That late it was already obvious that Germany could no longer really win over the Soviet Union but rather achieve a favorable peace at the most (as Manstein writes in his "Lost Victories"). So a peace in 43 wouldn't have allowed for Germany to concentrate all of its forces against the Western Allies because it would always have to be on the guard in the east (much like in 1917). But if Russia had fallen in 41 or maybe in summer 42 it would have been a real victory (and an unconditional surrender I guess). In that case a much larger part of the German troops could have been transfered to the west and to North Africa. So an Allied success in North Africa might not have happened as well as the invasion of "Europe's soft underbelly". Plus the Luftwaffe - without those significant losses in the east - would have been a much harder opponent to the Allied air forces and Allied air superiority might not have been achieved (over continental Europe). Of course that would have prevented any invasion of Europe. But since I also cannot imagine that Germany could have successfully invaded Britain, that would at least mean a much prolonged war. Then it might have been Berlin, Hamburg and mybe other cities that got the "honor" of being wiped of the map by nuclear bombs... But with conventional weapons I think the war would have somehow ended in a stalemate. When you consider that most of Germany's losses of soldiers and resources happened against the Soviet Union from 42 on and that the Soviets on their side took most of the beating (20 million casualties, mostly civilians) that otherwise might have hit Britain by bombing and campaigns beyond Egypt and - to a lesser degree - the US. So in fact I think that after 43 its rather the Soviets who could have won the war without the US and GB than the other way round... [ April 05, 2003, 05:09 PM: Message edited by: ThorKhan ]

JerseyJohn Japan could have taken Indonesia anyway without attacking the USA simultanously. But they didn't because in that case the USA might have gone to war with an intact Pacificfleet. And the Japanese knew that they wouldn't stand a chance then. So they decided to sink the US Pacificfleet first, because they thought this would buy them enough time to conquer all the resources they needed... Panzer39 I don't think that a completed Z-plan would have made Germany really stronger, because it simply didn't have the resources to be land and naval power. With that fleet built there wouldn't have been enough steel for all the Panzers that were needed for a successfull Blitzkrieg. Plus building a huge fleet of battleships and cruisers would have been an investment in the wrong branch of naval warfare as the battleship lost its position as ruler of the seas to the aircraft-carrier. Concerning merchant raiding u-boats were more cost efficient than surface ships... But still it's only a scenario, so why not

The problem with those classifications is that they came into use after the "Dreadnought", which was the first modern battleship, was built by the British around 1904 (?). Early in WWI the first battlecruisers were built. The idea was to build a ship that could sink cruisers, so it had to have heavier artillery than a cruiser. On the other hand it should be able to escape stronger adversaries like battleships. So basically a battlecruiser is a faster than a battleship but has weaker armor. The new battleships like Bismarck, King George V and Missouri, that were built in the 1940ies were fast battleships, so the older battlecruisers like Hood were more or less obsolete (not even taking air force into account) as their advantage was gone. Battlecruisers were never intended to fight battleships and when they did they had a very hard time as already the Skagerrak/Jutland-battle in WWI has proven.