@Lightwizard,
You bring up a point i've made again and again in the many, many Hitler threads we've had here (i just don't understand the obsession people have with this putz). Hitler was a net liability to the German war effort. His only skill was as a politician, and a gutter politician at that. He correctly assessed Chamberlain's lack of balls, but that was the beginning and the end of his successful military prognostication. He was right that the western Allies would not attack him while he attacked Poland, because Chamberlain lacked the will. Daladier, on the other hand, knew the score. When crowds at the airport cheered him on his return from Munich in 1938, he turned to his aid and said
<<O, les cons>>, meaning "Oh, the turds" (i.e., shitheads). Daladier told Chamberlain to his face that he had doomed Europe to another war.
The war which opened against France in the west in 1940 was only possible because Hitler correctly assessed Chamberlain's lack of will. In September of 1939, only ten divisions guarded Germany's western border--an attack by England and France then would have been devastating for Germany, and might well have saved Poland, which was the point of their alliance in the first place. Chamberlain was finally moved to fight when Germany invaded Norway, and most people miss the fact that Hitler's campaign against Norway lost Germany more than it gained. The purpose was to secure a route for Swedish iron ore and copper ore, through Narvik. Of course, it was necessary to garrison Norway for the remainder of the war. It also meant that the ore shipments sailed down the Norwegian coast into the North Sea, and English aircraft and submarines preyed upon them, something which would have been much more difficult if they had come south across the Baltic. All to save the higher cost for ore if the Swedes had been obliged to ship it south to the Baltic. What most observers have missed is not only that ships carrying ore were exposed to attack sailing from Narvik to the Kiel ship canal, but that the Kriegsmarine lost so heavily fighting the Royal Navy in the Narvik campaign. They lost ten destroyers, which was half of their destroyer force, and four others were damaged--the Royal Navy lost one destroyer, and had four others damaged. The Royal Navy could afford loses that high (but did not suffer them), the Kriegsmarine could not. The Kriegsmarine destroyer forces were gutted in Norway.
Hitler's insistence that Paulus not surrender the Sixth Army at Stalingrad doomed thousands of German soldiers to death, and thousands more to prison camps, which many did not survive. Three quarters of a million German and German allied soldiers were killed or wounded, and almost 100,000 made prisoner. Soviet losses were over a million in killed, wounded and captured. The Soviet Union could afford losses like that, Germany could not. The battle for Stalingrad was largely a symbolic fight, anyway--it was not essential to any German campaign then underway, nor any subsequent German campaign.
Hitler also insisted that German forces in North Africa would neither surrender nor be evacuated. At the time, the Allies did not yet have air superiority in the Med, and the Italian Navy was still a credible threat. The Germans in North Africa could still have been evacuated. In
The Rommel Papers, Rommel referred to Tunisia as the largest self-supporting prisoner of war camp in history.
When the Allies invaded France, one of the ruses they employed was to use radio traffic in England to make the Germans believe that Normandy was a feint, and that they intended to land in the Pas de Calais, arguably the most heavily defended coast line in history. The 15th Army, which defended the Pas de Calais, was superior in numbers and equipment to the 7th Army in Normandy. Looking at the bombing patterns from Eisenhower's "Transportation Plan," Rommel correctly predicted that the landings would take place in Normandy, and that it would be the main effort. Rommel called for armored divisions to be stationed immediately behind the beaches, in order to throw the Allies back into the sea before they got a foothold. Hitler and von Rundstedt wanted to hold their armored divisions in the interior of France for a massive armored battle on the plains of France. Hitler believed that the Allies would virtually commit suicide by attempting a head-on attack against the Pad de Calais because that was what he wanted to believe.
Rommel predicted, accurately, that with Allied air superiority (something he never doubted would occur), German forces would never make the approach march, and that armored division held in the interior would be largely destroyed before they could engage. Once again, events proved him right. Rommel's old Afrika Korps division, the 21st Panzer, was strung out along the road leading to Caen on the day of the invasion. The lead elements were within a few miles of the city, the furthest elements were a scant 20 kilometers away. It took the 21st three days to assemble on the ridges south of Caen, and they lost 54 tanks in June and July, receiving 17 replacements. Plans to launch a counter attack against the invasion forces in concert with SS panzer units were scrapped when the divisional staff were wiped out in an air attack.
The 6th FS brigade (FS=Fallschirmjäger, which is to say, paratroops) were in Brittany, about 60 kilometers from the Cotentin peninsula where the Americans had landed and where the 101st Airborne and the 82nd Airborne were attempting to "hold the door open" for the troops from Utah beach. They lost almost all of their motorized and horse-drawn transport on the first day. What remained had to move at night, and in June in France, the nights are very short. In the end, four FS regiments had to walk from Brittany to Normandy, mostly at night or in the dusk before dawn or sunset, and it took them six days. The German SS panzer and panzergrenadier units which fought in Normandy suffered very heavy losses in getting to the battle area. The SS panzer and panzergrenadier divisions and regular panzer and panzergrenadier divisions which were held in the interior were blown to hell before they could ever engage with the Americans, and ended up constantly falling back from one prepared defensive position to another. Hitler and von Rundstedt's great panzer battle never took place.
Rommel was correct about Allied air superiority. In all of France, the Luftwaffe flew 160 sorties on June 6, 1944, and all but two of those were flown against a diversion in the south of France. The Allies flew 14,827 sorties in France that day, most of the over the invasion beaches and the countryside behind them.
Hitler was the among the best military assets the Allies had in Europe.
