Good reading material in here:

[PawBroon]

A small study of the German Invinciblity Myth.

Seeing most of the Threads here there would be takers I'd figure.

It's hosted on the Wargamer site.

Link provided underneath:

http://www.wargamer.com/articles/german_myth_main.asp

Only applicable to CM if at the Operational Level someone put a CD in your drive without telling you which game you'd end up playing.

[Freak]

A good read, thanks.

[Keith]

With regard to the Eastern Front, the fact of the matter is until recently the Western historians only had access to German sources, which tended to emphasize the early German victories from 1941-1942 and gloss over later war defeats. Also the memoirs of the General officers where revisionist, placing all of the blame for failures on Hitler. In addition these memoirs tended to portray the Russian Army as faceless untrained masses, heavily outnumbering the German Army in all situations. It wasn't until historians John Erikson and David Glantz published their works that a more balanced view has come out.

For example, in the Russian winter counter offensive of 1941 the Russians only outnumber the Germans 2:1 in infantry at a few critical points and lesser superiorites in artillery. The Germans maintained armored superiority. Moreover, German intelligence estimated that Stalin had no more reserves so the shock of the Soviet counterattacks was therefore greater. And certainly no one can argue that fighting quality of the Russian army in 1944 was far different from the Russian army in 1941. But many of the older historical accounts do not cover the years 1943-1944 in nearly as much detail as from 1941-1942. Practically 3/4 of Albert Seaton's book on the EF covers 1941-1942.

[ 05-12-2001: Message edited by: Keith ]

[Loki]

That was an interesting article. Thanks for posting it.

[PawBroon]

I merely linked to it Loki.

I am not nor am I claiming posting rights or authorship of that article.

Seeing it was interresting and that the author was worth the few pages his article spans, I just provided the public service.

Funny how a year ago I would never have bother with that fine point and after a year of dwelling in here I have developed some of that PC survival instinct for Board Flaming.

[Tiger]

I don't know, While the article raises an intresting viewpoint,I do not completely agree with his premises. The German army had it's faults, all armies do, something I think the author misses. To say the German high command didn't take into account supplies and the time it took to reach the troops is really shallow thinking. This was a major problem which took alot of operational plannningand every book I've rea this is a major concern for the Germans. No one that I know blames Hitler for everything that went wrong. Mainly just what he meddled in. Sacking all your generals and taking over after the intial Barbarossa invasion did not succeed brilliantly was probably not a real good idea by Hitler to start with (nor would it be for any army). I have a real problem with any article that uses the "German apologists" label in an attempt to deny any argument from others.

All armies had/have their problems; you just have to look for them. In my humble opinion the only people/historians who keep thinking of the Germans in WWII as a "Super-army" are the Allied historians. Maybe they're just looking for reasons to hide their own Army's problems by convieniently using the uber-german myth themselves. Who knows.

There's an intresting article on in the ARMY (US) magazine having to do with the leaders of WWII and their Army Chiefs of Staff and their relationship with each other that was very intresting. I'll try and find it.

-Tiger

[JasonC]

Is it true that the Germans emphasized the operations officer over all other elements of the staff? Yes, to a degree. The Germans had the operations officer integrate all elements in his plans. The commander relied on the operations staff for all implimentation details. The operations staff tasked other elements of the staff, which were subordinate to him rather than equal. This is certainly different from the U.S. system, in which G1 through G4 staff officers were equals in rank, advising their commander.

But part of that is because the US system relied on the commander to integrate elements of the plan or decide in disputes among these staff officers. The model there was technical chiefs reporting to a CEO versed in technical details. This simply was not the function of (line) commanders in the German army. It was the function of their chiefs of staff. Compared to the US system, the line commanders on the German system were fifth wheels, politicians and prima donnas, who were responsible for little in the way of planning. They oversaw such based on prior service as staff officers, but it was no longer their function.

The model was not the technocratic one of the US army, but a nobility served by functionaries. Staff officers, including chiefs of staff, were technocrats and had the real responsibilites. They were, however, subordinated to a comparative unbusy leisured "nobility" of line officers. To work and plan is a sign of executive responsibility in US society. To work and plan was a sign of lack of leisure and political power in traditional German society - the old nobility did not have to work. The line officers were "vons", selected for breeding and long traditions of public service in their families, especially in the military, which amounted to a certain kind of political reliability. They were not remotely selected for their brains. Instead, staff officers were, and the ablest commanders were those who moved to line command from long stints as staff officers.

So there is a bit of apples to oranges in the comparison. The operations staff was responsible for integrating plans that US commanders integrated. The chief of staff does not really correspond to the role of a US operations staff head; he corresponds to the role of a US commander. So much for the direct organizational difference.

Next, were the Germans bad at integrating intelligence into operational planning? Often yes, but there was one area where they stood out and performed well. The operational surprised that inflicted serious defeats on the Germans are too numerous to avoid the general judgement of inferior military intelligence. Examples are the flank collapse around Stalingrad, misjudging the strength of the Russian position around Kursk, the flank collapse s in the counterattack after that, most of their defenders in France stationed in the Pas de Calais area, being unprepared for several British offensives in the desert, for the Sicily landings, for the south of France landings, and others. They were of course at an enourmous disadvantage because the Allies had broken their codes and not vice versa, but they also ignored numerous signs in most such cases.

The one area of military intelligence where the Germans did well was signals intelligence and especially signals locating work. Triangulating the position of an artillery battery or an HQ by radio intercepts, for example. The effectiveness of their counterbattery artillery work, in particular, was increased by their successes in this area. It went a long way toward redressing the advantage greater control of the skies gave the Allies later in the war. This was obviously a technological success rather than a military planning one, however. They got information that was useful and made use of it, but it did not have a large impact on other aspects of planning.

Were the Germans bad at personnel work? To some degree yes, for several reasons. One was unreality at the level of the high command. Senior officials and generals ordered around troops on the map that no longer existed, or were only a fraction of the size they thought they were, because rational and truthful accounting of bad news was uniformly discouraged in the upper echelons. This make believe aspect of the higher HQs increased during the war. It tended to marginalize those engaged in it, in real military terms, because little they said or did was relevant. But only in times of clear disaster was this screen pierced completely, allowing retrieval efforts based on realistic assessments to be made.

A second and important reason was the political chaos of the regime. It operated fiefdoms under seperated minor princelings, who set up their own empires over personnel as in other matters. The Luftwaffe had a huge ground army, for instance, simply because of the power of Goering. This channeled large elements of quality manpower away from the army, deprived them of proper training, command, and supporting weapons, and thus dissipated power. Note, I am talking about the Luftwaffe field divisions, as well as huge ground support elements, not about the Fallschirmjaegers (who were, in a sense, the picked elite of that manpower diversion). Organization Todt controlled much of the manpower of the economically mobilized late-war regime. The SS ran its own sprawling empire. Nobody cooperated with anyone else beyond the point that the interest of their own organization dictated.

But a third force worked in the other direction - the flexibility of German forces actually in the field. Consolidation of forces was practiced on an entirely utilitarian basis close enough to the front. Replacement battalions were maintained, and comb-out details used for all sorts of needed tasks. Burnt out shells of units were pulled out of the line to rebuild, often for months at a time. Training was kept up even in times when forces were urgently needed at the front, even if the amount of training time declined over the course of the war. When full scale disaster hit in the summer of 1944, personnel in other services and in rear area troops was rationally reassigned to more urgent army duties. The Germans asked way too much of the average soldier, and way too much of the shoe-string ingenuity and resourcefulness of field officers, to patch something together out of what was at hand. But they got rather a lot back from both overtasked groups.

It is on the subject of supplies, though, where the article writer has the strongest case. The German supply system during the war was abysmal by western standards. It turned more on property rights to equipment, and horse-trading between units, than on any rational system. The black market across occupied Europe was enourmous. Huge portions of the QM corps were engaged in the systematic looting of occupied areas and personally enriching themselves. The army issued several kinds of its own money, and hyper-inflated each kind.

Huge operations were planned and put into execution on such dubious assumptions as supplying entire panzer corps with captured fuel. Some units had many artillery tubes but no ammo for the types they had, others abundant access to ammo for standard types but non-standard tubes. These snafus were expected to get sorted out by not much more than horse-trading between units. Units horded overstocks of equipment to trade for types they were lacking. This sort of chaos, made worse by proliferation of types (one infantry division in Normandy had only 100 trucks, of over 50 different makes), by Allied interdiction, by bombing of oil production and the rail net, could only lead to intermittent catastrophes in the field. And it did, with whole tank battalions abandoned in retreats for lack of fuel, the men escaping on foot; whole divisions sometimes froze without adequate clothing, shelter, or fuel. The army used more horses in its supply network in WW II than it had in WW I. Half of all supplies sent to North Africa were sunk before they arrived, and the rest exhibited many cases of senselessness; DAK often lived hand to mouth from captured stores.

There was little that was rational about it. They relied on a relatively efficient rail system, when not disrupted by bombing, tac air, or partisans; on planned TOEs that were more like ration rights to equipment than actual totals seen in the field (outside of favored units like the SS panzer divisions, and to a lesser degree other mobile troops); on organized grab by QMs. Operations officers undoubtedly failed to properly integrate supply considerations into their plans. But that is because the entire supply situation was a nearly hopeless, tangled mess, patched together with bailing wire and scraps of string; who could count on it?

Do wargames often underrate the very real weaknesses of the German army in WW II because these things are downplayed? Yes, and supply considerations especially. Most operational gamers have no idea how tight vehicle fuel and artillery ammo were for the average German commander, especially in late war, for example. Anywhere but a railhead or before a major offensive, and sometimes even then. The Germans had an elaborate classification of infantry formations from motorised to mobile to semi-mobile to garrison, but few gamers understand what those distinctions mean, or see game systems that bring them home. "Mobile", for instance, meant "possessed enough trucks to move all of its heavy weapons and artillery at once, by road". It was by no means the ordinary classification. Most infantry divisions relied on horse transport for some portion of their artillery, to say nothing of the infantry, which walked as a matter of course. (A lucky few had bicycles).

However, one place where I slightly take issue with an implicit, allowed claim on the part of the article writer, is his notion that the Germans did excel at operations, in the limited sense of which maneuver units were to go where on the map, when. They did in the early war, clearly. They occasionally did in particular operations later one - Kesselring in Italy, some of Rommel's actions in North Africa, the Kharkov counterattack early in 1943, a few others on the eastern front, limited in scale. But frankly, in the second half of the war the Germans were "outplayed" at the operational level, in precisely this sense of the term, as well.

Some of which was because of high command failings and silly orders, signs of desperation or gambling, some was because of intelligence failures or inadequate supplies or manpower. A fair portion of the remainder, though, was just plain poor "play" - failure to keep adequate reserves and a tendency to overcommit the armor to frontages too soon, systematic underestimation of enemy capabilities with expensive consequences, fighting in the wrong places for prestige objectives. The Germans lost heavily in pocket after pocket in the late war, with millions of PWs, not a sign of operational virtuousity on its face. Almost every large-scale counterattack from mid 43 on was an expensive disaster, and you can count on the fingers of the hands (one for each front, east or west) the number of large-scale Allied operations from mid-war on that failed outright, because of successful German defensive operations.

German memoires often point to overwhelming odds in these cases, but map studies do not bear out that as cause until quite late, and the overall odds were not steep until the opening of the front in France. The Germans did face high odds by the late war, but it was because a high portion of their army was destroyed in the field. Subtraction does that to odds ratios. It magnifies any initial odds edge, if the more numerous side does not lose men and equipment in the ratio of his initial strength or more. Thus, start with 200 vs. 100 as a result of production, and let the first lose 100 to the second's 75, and the odds ratio will move from 2:1 to 4:1. Because the loss ratio (4:3 in that example) was less than the initial odds ratio (2:1), the effect of losses is to increase the ratio still further, and more so the higher the overall loss rate.

The Germans lost the majority of Army Group South twice over, of Army Group Center once, of OB West twice (to Falaise, and again post-Bulge), of 1/4 of a million men in the fall of North Africa. These were enourmous defeats, in the west accompanied by huge numbers of PWs. To pretend they were all victories in disguise because of supposed Allied losses is simply poppycock. In the west, the haul of prisoners alone was larger than all western Allied losses. In the east, overall military losses were only 2-3 times for the Russians and most of that disparity came in 1941 alone, in the huge losses of the first 6 months. After 1942 losses in the east were about even, and those even losses combined with a superiority in production down until 1944, led to huge German losses of men and terrain in the field, and thus both odds ratios and a front line moving progressively in favor of the Russians. If that isn't defeat it sure waddles and quacks like one.

My take on the article and the overall subject, for what it is worth.

[harpooner]

holy CRAP. get a life ya flamin' grognard

[harpooner]

"The operational surprised that inflicted serious..."

PROOFREAD YOUR POSTS you wanker.

Jeeze..the level of literacy among the youth these days.. *sigh*

[offtaskagain]

A good read for this topic is "Hitler's Panzers East". I can't remember the author, but it's not biased towards either side. He points out the often missed fact that by late July-August, Army Group Center outnumbered the Russians facing them and still failed Moscow. It goes into great detail about the decisions behind taking the pocket in Ukraine rather than pushing to Moscow. He concludes the Germans lost the war in the fall of '41.

[harpooner]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by panzerwerfer42:

A good read for this topic is "Hitler's Panzers East". I can't remember the author, but it's not biased towards either side. He points out the often missed fact that by late July-August, Army Group Center outnumbered the Russians facing them and still failed Moscow. It goes into great detail about the decisions behind taking the pocket in Ukraine rather than pushing to Moscow. He concludes the Germans lost the war in the fall of '41.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I agree. ANd while Jason C is astute to point out the operational inflexibilty of the overall German design, it needs to be pointed out that this was an intrinsic aspect of the Nazi regime.

Hitler had his fingers in the pie. He was no general. The generalship of the Wehrmacht was better left to the real generals, like Guderian and Manstein and Rommel. The worst decision of the war may have been Hitler's command to Guderian to turn south to help with the encirclement of the Russian Ukrainian Army Group near Kiev. That's where the war was lost. This article doesn't come out and say it, but it is there between the lines.

German operational inflexibility came from the top down. It was much like the "garbage in garbage-out" concept that we are familiar with from our Vietnam War experience. Kill the messenger. No one wants to be the bearer of bad tidings. So, losses get transmogrified into "attritional victories".

It leads to misinformed leadership and an operational hubris which is ultimately self-defeating.

JasonC is astute to point out the importance of the attrition which the "victories" in France and North Africa and the Balkans caused. Therein lie the seeds which grew into the failure on the Easter Front.

[Tiger]

Would taking Moscow have won the war for the Germans? I doubt it. Hitler had decided not to be obsessed with taking the Soviet capital to avoid the same fate as Napoleon. Didn't work though. Had the Germans taken Moscow the Soviets would have simply moved further East, which they had already made plans to do. Not focusing on Moscow was probably the wisest thing that Hitler agreed on. Had any Western European country suffered the casualties that the Soviets did in Barbarossa they surely would have capitulated. I think a major mistake the Germans made was assuming this is what would happen. Faced with another dictator: Stalin, Hitler failed to see that the Soviet leader would be as ruthless (more so?) as himself.

-Tiger

[ 05-13-2001: Message edited by: Tiger ]

[JasonC]

"surprised" should be surprises, obviously. One d instead of an s. They are right next to each other you know. That is called a typo.

Proofread 'em yourself. You are lucky you get 'em at all. Now go sit on your "handle", please - thank you.

Incidentally, I am flattered to be considered a "youth".

LOL.

[harpooner]

No offense intended Sir Jason.

I may have been tipping back a few too many champagne glasses today.

Keep up the good work, old man.

[JasonC]

Originally posted by Tiger:

[QB]

"Would taking Moscow have won the war for the Germans? I doubt it."

Correct. That is the staple myth of the apostles of mobile warfare, and so much horseradish. The Russians would much rather have had the million men in the Kiev pocket than the city. Closing the pocket was very much the right thing to do, and taking the city - even if it would have been the alternate result, which is by no means obvious with the forces that defended later plus a million more men at large - would not have had anything like the same scale of effect.

The origin of the story is Guderian, who wanted to blame the general staff for the failure of the campaign. And who was forever insisting, as his acolytes do to this day, that running off into the endless expanse of the enemy rear will bring certain victory, while destroying the enemy forces supposedly won't.

It did not work that way in France - the turn was to the channel ports to kill the army in Belgium, not to Paris, and the odds that allowed did the rest. In fact, no one can point to any time when it did work that way. Later breakthroughs that made a point of running for the rear instead of destroying enemy forces in pockets, usually led to tanks out of gas and often their total loss.

And it is doubtful the logistical situation at Smolensk would have allowed all of AG center to participate at the earlier date anyway. It is basically just stuffing got up by Guderian to put the failure on anything but Typhoon.

As for the "anyone else would have capitulated" line, I think it is woefully off target. The French mebe. No one else. The idea that is was because Stalin was a dictator I find laughable; if there were one place the Russians were vunerable in those days it was on the score of their political leadership.

The reason for the dramatic and powerful Russian response had nothing to do with Stalin, who was quaking in his boots and wondering how he could buy Hitler off 3 days after the invasion. It was the Russian people first, and the army second.

And the frightfulness deliberately got up by the Germans at least as much. So far from "ruthlessness" being an *advantage*, it was the primary drawback the Germans had. Nothing recruited people faster. Nothing brought everyone behind the dubious government, which everyone knew had failed to forsee or do anything effective about the attack, faster. In White Russia and the Ukraine tens of thousands were originally ready to join against Stalin - until they got a pleasant look at German "ruthlessness".

Why are so many people so quick to assume that anything disgusting, low, and mean is somehow strong and likely to be successful? It is nowhere the case in other aspects of politics, or life generally.

The Germans came in with explicit orders that no soldier was to be punished for anything he did in Russian, and with flying machinegun squads who shot a million people by the end of the first 6 months. They told the Russians they would be reduced to slavery long enough to build fair cities for their new masters and then would be exterminated. They starved a million prisoners to death by simply leaving them unfeed in barbed wire stockades.

The entirely predictable result is that the Russians jumped through their anatomy, knowing it was victory or death. Meanwhile, the Germans arrogantly disdained to mobilize their economy for another 18 months. There was never a clearer case to prove that pride and cruelty are the worst policy - the first a form of blindness and unilateral disarmament, the second the greatest recruiter and motivator of enemies imaginable.

Then later people try to pretend it was because they didn't hang a left - LOL. Or because the other guys were "more ruthless". Or because the west provided all the money and arms and attrition elsewhere. The German lost because they didn't have enough at first, acted stupidly and underestimated their enemy at the level not of operations but strategy (politics, cruelty, no mobilization, etc), and the Russians fought magnificantly.

The German operations order for Barbarossa was carried out to the letter. The Russian army was destroyed inside European Russia before it could withdraw to the interior, and a forward line was established deep enough in the country to prevent even the idea of air attack on German territory. The Russians just had a new army as big as the old one on the new line.

The operation went as planned, very closely, in the overall results achieved. It still was not decisive. It was not fitted into a strategy adequate to defeat a power such as Russia, which would have started with mobilization and would have avoided recruiting enemies in the occupied territory.

The political ends sought by the invasion were not compatible with the strategy needed to win the war. The political ends beat strategy. Not mobilizing - that was a political end, avoiding disruption of German civilian life. Underestimating the Russians - that was a political doctrine. Acting with cruelty - that was purely political.

Once they made those mistakes, things got worse rather than better. In the first ~16 months, at least the operations were soundly conceived (though not supply or economy or the overall strategy). After that they weren't. Occasionally brilliant, often competent, but blatantly wrong-headed enough times to lose essentially all of army group south, twice in two years.

The Germans had good soldiers, and good field-level officers, and good doctrine when they actually abided by it (which was not often enough once on the defensive), and by the second half of the war they had good equipment too. They lacked strategy, command, logistics, intelligence work, and economic planning. Strange to say they are generally lauded for all but the logistics, when they had rings run around them, overall, in those categories.

[PawBroon]

Errr, did I created one of those Grog Threads?

Now I feel like Dr Frankenstein.

And not even the Mel Brooks one...

So what say you, if we frogs had stayed in Russia so long as to have been invaded by the germans in 41, could Napoleon have handle it?

Inquiring minds want to know!

[Tiger]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>As for the "anyone else would have capitulated" line, I think it is woefully off target. The French mebe(sic). No one else.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I think any normal :western "democratic-type" country would have capitulated after suffering over 3 million casualties in such a short time and considering the pyschological effect of the Nazi invader who had until Barbarossa run rough-shod over europe pretty easily. 3 million is alot of your male population to lose so quickly. The political and social ramifications, which often get ignored, of trying to continue after taking such horrible losses would lead to capitulation by any "western" european country, even the USA. It has to do with political ramifications based on the social system more than anything else.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>The idea that is was because Stalin was a dictator I find laughable; if there were one place the Russians were vunerable in those days it was on the score of their political leadership.

The reason for the dramatic and powerful Russian response had nothing to do with Stalin, who was quaking in his boots and wondering how he could buy Hitler off 3 days after the invasion. It was the Russian people first, and the army second. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I find this pretty funny. Stalin relegated to having no effect in WWII? This is like saying Hitler had no effect on the invasion of Russia.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Nothing recruited people faster. Nothing brought everyone behind the dubious government, which everyone knew had failed to forsee or do anything effective about the attack, faster. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

everyone in Russia "knew" that Stalin and his cronies had done nothing to prevent/do anything about the German attack? They must have had a working internet back then we didn't know about. Most information took time to get relayed to anywhere but the city centers and even this information was controlled by the communists. I agree that the Nazi's refusal to recruit the aide of the local anti-Stalin-anti-Russian populace was major stupidity. German army officers remarked upon this even in France when the "brownshirts playing soldier" came in after and terrorized the local populations, making their jobs harder.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>The Germans came in with explicit orders that no soldier was to be punished for anything he did in Russian<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Complete and utter non-sense. The German army was a professional insitution with its own laws and punishments for crimes by soldiers. Depicting the German Army as a mob of red-neck hillbillies rampaging throughout the countryside with no martial laws is ludicris thinking.

The Commisar Order: not fully enforced by all commanders/units.

Did looting occur? Certainly. Every army throughout history does this. Whether it's labled "requistioning" or "looting" does not matter.

Did wholesale murder occur? Yes. By every unit? No. The Allies had no qualms about leveling entire French villages using airpower during the Western Invasion. That's called "liberation" though, not murder on a large scale.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>They starved a million prisoners to death by simply leaving them unfeed in barbed wire stockades.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Something the Russians did as well. Only because the Germans did it to them first? I don't think so. There's not much to admire of either people's back then or now. I don't think there's any part of humanity in any time period that does not possess a horrible desire to cause pain and suffering to "those lower than them", classified by race, gender, or anything humanity can think of at the moment to suit their needs. I do not believe there's such a thing as an "enlightened society". All evidence is to the contrary.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>There was never a clearer case to prove that pride and cruelty are the worst policy - the first a form of blindness and unilateral disarmament, the second the greatest recruiter and motivator of enemies imaginable.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Oh absolutely. No one denies the Soviet people were the main force in destroying the Nazi regime, however it was a people led by a murderous, ruthless dicator and his cronies. It's intresting that the success of the Soviets in WW II is being given to the Soviet people, while the defeat of Germany gets placed on their leaders. The old phrase of "the winners write the history books" holds true.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Then later people try to pretend it was because they didn't hang a left - LOL. Or because the other guys were "more ruthless".<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Or that it was due to the Soviet people alone with no regard to politics, social climate, or leadership...you're right, laughable.

I don't think anyone denies the great abilities of the Soviet people in responding to the invader and ultimately defeating the Germans. Not mentioning this does not equate to denial, which seems to be the gist of your post.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Or because the west provided all the money and arms and attrition elsewhere. The German lost because they didn't have enough at first, acted stupidly and underestimated their enemy at the level not of operations but strategy (politics, cruelty, no mobilization, etc), and the Russians fought magnificantly.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

These factors all tied in to create the atmosphere that led to the outcome of the war. Ultimately it is the people who decide things in any war. All else is dressing for the historians to argue over.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>The German operations order for Barbarossa was carried out to the letter.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

...ummm...ok.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>The Russian army was destroyed inside European Russia before it could withdraw to the interior, and a forward line was established deep enough in the country to prevent even the idea of air attack on German territory. The Russians just had a new army as big as the old one on the new line.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

There is some debate on whether the Soviet armies in the west were sacrificed intentionally and that the "real fighting" didn't start until after '41 at this deep line of penetration. Not sure if the soldiers in 41' on either side would think this though.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>The operation went as planned, very closely, in the overall results achieved.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Not entirely correct. As in any operation there's always problems, plans gone awry, meddling from the politicians, etc. True even in Sun Tzu's time!

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>It still was not decisive. It was not fitted into a strategy adequate to defeat a power such as Russia, which would have started with mobilization and would have avoided recruiting enemies in the occupied territory.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Amen brother!

The rest is more or less correct, though I'd mention that's it very easy to sit back 60 years later and second guess and infer from the comfort of our studies and easy-chairs, without being exposed to the social, political, technological and psychological climate of the period.

-Tiger

[FFE]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by JasonC:

Originally posted by Tiger:

"Would taking Moscow have won the war for the Germans? I doubt it."

Correct. That is the staple myth of the apostles of mobile warfare, and so much horseradish.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Here lies a pinnacle observation, for which no truth can be discerned. Pardon me as I barge into your conversation.

The political impact of losing the capital of a Nation has dire exogenous ramifications. Sovereignty becomes questionable if no centralized government exists. The loss of Moscow, as viewed by global states, would indicate a Power loss. And given a referential Power reduction within the Soviet Union, states such as Turkey might be swayed (they were being lobbied) to start aggression. Finland herself might construe from the perceived Power loss an ample justification to press her attack on Leningrad. Japan would not idly sit back as the Soviet frontier was weakened. Territorial conquest of Siberia cannot be ignored. Western European Powers might have ascertained by a hypothetical loss of Moscow as a proverbial, Nail in the Coffin, thus limiting future assitance (i.e. Lend-Lease).

The Realist perspective, which predominated Western Europe prior to WW2, worked against the USSR if Moscow fell to the facists.

[ 05-13-2001: Message edited by: FFE ]