OT History Buffs, I have a ?

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Is this yalls sneaky way of pushing for a history board?

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It is needed

Bc he grew his own pot

A couple of things...

1. Rommel was their best commander. period.
2. The Nazis were a discriminatory people; they looked at the Russians as inferior.
3. The Nazis were kicking Russias arse all over the steppes so there was no need of sending in their ace to mop up a bunch of jokers, in Hitler's view.
4. It wasn't until there was street to street fighting in Stalingrad that the Germans met their demise.
5. Hitler saw the Brits and Americans as the bigger threat and he had Rommel oversee the refortification of defenses in France.

All this said, Hitler had no strategic thought. You'd think that the Germans would make a strategic bomber, but they never did.

Heinz Guderian was one of the finest tank commanders of the war. He got all the way up to the outer suburbs of Moscow.

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So really the real reason Rommel never fought in the East (other than staying by Hitler's side during the invasion of Poland at the start of the war) was simply due to events in first the Mediterranean and later the Western Fronts dictating that he was needed there instead of the East.

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^This.

If Hitler wasn't an egotistical maniac, there wouldn't have been an Eastern front for Rommel to go to.

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If Hitler wasn't an egotistical maniac, there wouldn't have been an Eastern front for Rommel to go to.

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But that's the thing, there was always going to be an Eastern Front. From the very earliest days when Hitler was just a nutjob who staged an absurd coup attempt in Munich, one of the central goals he and the Nazis had was to gain Lebensraum.

soccerfüt

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Darth, you magnificent bastard, I read your book.

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ISWYDT and it was brilliant timing!

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Too bad he diverted resources to quell an uprising in Yugoslavia and to rescue Mussolini from the Greeks.

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Very good point. It was the diversion of resources allocated for the upcoming invasion of the Soviet Union to Balkans that pushed the initial launch date from early May to late June. Had the Germans hit the Soviets when they originally intended they would have found the Soviets in an even worse state of readiness and would have reached Moscow even faster than they did when they invaded in late June. And with Moscow in German hands, the Soviets would have either had to sue for peace or tried to withdraw their remaining forces behind the Ural Mountains and try to continue the fight from there. But then this would have been an exercise in futility due to the following reasons;

1. The earlier launch of Barbarossa would have meant the Soviet defenses would have been even more woefully prepared and thus would have allowed the Germans to advance faster. This means the Soviets probably would not have had time to evacuate so much of their industrial facilities east. Thus, after the fall of Moscow, the Soviets would have had little industrial capacity left to try and support and supply it's armies.

2. With the fall of Moscow, the posts of Murmansk and Archangel would have been isolated not able to hold out. This would have been a disaster the Soviets could not have recovered from due to the fact virtually all supplies from the west to the Soviets came through these two ports. Considering the fact that it was US made boots on the feet of almost all Soviet troops and US made Spam that fed almost all Soviet troops, and it was US made Studebaker trucks that kept Soviet armies mobile, without these staples, the Soviets would not have been able to maintain their armies in the field. They would have been tramping around in the snow barefoot while starving to death.

3. Just as the fall of Moscow would have cut off the northern ports, likewise the Soviets would have been cut off from the oilfields to the South as well. So while their solders would have no shoes, nothing to eat nor any transport, the few vehicles the Soviets did posses would have had empty fuel tanks.

The importance of Moscow was more than just the symbolic fact that it was the capital of the USSR. It's real importance from a military standpoint was the fact it was THE main connecting hub of all river, road, and rail traffic in European Russia. It connected everything. To get really anywhere in European Russia, you had to go through Moscow. In short, if you controlled Moscow, you controlled all of Russia west of the Urals.

When you add everything up, it becomes pretty clear that had the Germans not delayed Barbarossa, the chances that the war would have had a far different outcome becomes highly likely.