How Hitler Lost the War

If you can't bother to at least give us summary, why do you bother? How likely do you think it is that people are gonna want to go look at that stuff?

Hitler lost the war through his own military hubris. He was militarily incompetent, and thought he was militarily brilliant, and therefore interferred far more than any other national leader, leading to tragic consequences for the German nation. I could go on for pages with examples--but why bother when you don't even bother to lay out an outline of the material you're touting?

Thanks.


It shows that Hitler had a limited war mindset. He was shocked by Britain and France declaring war. The invasion of Poland was just to grab land. It shows that Hitler did not plan a European war. He was forced into it. He halted many military moves that speeled failure to victory. He was a filure in every aspect of his life as he was rejected by all the German institutions. Politics was the only path open. His angry speeches resonated with the German people who were also angry so this propelled him to extraordinary heights. It shows the need to see who should enter politics. The major mistakes were not to continue the Battle of Britain as the Britsh had exhausted themselves and if the Luftwaffe had kept on raiding the British air forces it would have succeeded.

Look after the Pearl Harbor attack the Japanese at once requested that Hitler declare war on the US.

The silly fool did so without getting the Japanese in turn to declare war on the USSR!!!!!!!

That allowed the Russians and the Japanese to agree not to attack each other and free up a massive amount of Russian troops facing the Japanese to be move by railroads to the German/Russian front when they was most needed.

This is so hopelessly wrong, i hardly know where to start, but i'll give it a shot. I guess i will have to go on for pages.

It shows that Hitler had a limited war mindset.

Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, Belgium, France, Denmark, Norway, Yugoslavia, Greece, Tunisia, Lybia, Egypt and the Soviet Union. Do you consider that to have been a limited plan?

He was shocked by Britain and France declaring war. The invasion of Poland was just to grab land. It shows that Hitler did not plan a European war. He was forced into it.

This reeks of Neo-Nazi apologetics. Hitler left ten divisions on his western border to hold off a Franco-British invasion, because he knew that invading Poland would bring a declaration of war from those two countries. With the army he had sent into Poland, that left him no reserve at all. Invading Poland was a prelude to the plan he laid out in Mein Kampf, in which he said that Germany should seize the Ukraine in order to get "living room." He most certainly did plan a European war, and was arrogant enough to think that he could win it.

He halted many military moves that speeled failure to victory.

Considering that he invaded the Soviet Union, this is just ludicrous. His problem was, simply, that he bit off more than he could chew.

He was a filure in every aspect of his life as he was rejected by all the German institutions. Politics was the only path open. His angry speeches resonated with the German people who were also angry so this propelled him to extraordinary heights.

There were two major political myths which arose in Germany before anyone had ever heard of Hitler. Those were the Versailles Diktat myth and the Stab in the Back myth. Hitler exploited those certainly, and that was clever politics because of the resentments and shame of the Germans--but that passage ignores Hitler's one great talent (just about his only talent), and that was gutter politics. He correctly judged Neville Chamberlain's spinelessness (it's just amazig to think that he was the son of Joe Chamberlain), and he correctly judged that the Franco-British army would not attempt the invasion of Germany in response to the invasion of Poland. That was about the last time he was right about anything in the war, and that was the judgment of a clever gutter politician, not a military man.

The major mistakes were not to continue the Battle of Britain as the Britsh had exhausted themselves and if the Luftwaffe had kept on raiding the British air forces it would have succeeded.

That was a mistake, certainly, but it is not necessarily the most important (invading the Soviet Union was his prime f*ck-up). But whoever wrote that is deluded by the popular British myth of the so-called Battle of Britain. The fighters who opposed the daylight raieds in the fall of 1940 were part of the fighter group responsible for Kent, Surrey, Sussex and the Home Counties. There were many, many more fighters and pilots available, but they were, rightly, kept in their areas of responsibility--the West Country and Wales, the Midlands (those boys saw a lot of action), the North and Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Whoever wrote this bought into the Battle of Britian myth and watches too many movies. Even in the area in which this air campaign was fought, where the factories for Supermarine and Hawker were located, the Brits didn't rely solelyon their own resources. Oh sure, the Spitfires and Hurricanes were delivered before the paint was dry, but theyused Norwegian, Belgian, French and Polish pilots as well as their own. In fact, the Poles were 40% of the pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain, and they were 40% of the pilots shot down and killed, too. Daylight raids were costing the Luftwaffe too much, and it is doubtful if they could have continued it for very long, nevermind the fact that the RAF had four times as many planes and pilots to rotate into the campaign area if they were forced to it. Churchill's "never was so much by so many to so few" was just an example of what a brilliant public speaker he was--it was nowhere near the truth.

Hitler's first major mistake was in thinking that because Chamberlain was such a wimp, the English didn't want to fight, and wouldn't fight for the long haul. He was completely ignorant of Churchill's influence and what it would mean when Winston created a National Unity government. It was largely because the English did not roll over and play dead after Dunkirk that he launnched the incredibly stupid daylight campaign against England.

An Italian officer, Giulio Douhet, articulated the concept of winning wars from the air with strategic bombing to cripple your enemies ability to wage war, and to spread terror to sap your enemy's peoples' will to fight. Hitler was a big devotee of the idea. So were a lot of other fools, he wasn't alone. General Carl Spaatz, commander of the Eighth United States Army Air Force (Strategic) and Air Marshall Arthur Harris ("Bomber Harris") of the RAF both thought the ground war was incidental, and that they could defeat Germany through strategic bombing. They refused to take orders from Eisenhower, and Eisenhower was lead to the extremity of offering to resign and go home before Marshall and Churchill forced Spaatz and Harris to take orders from him.

This lead Hitler into all manner of stupidity. Jukers dive bombers continued to be manufactured and sent to the front long after the were obsolete, because Hitler still considered them an effective terror weapon. The one thing they would really have been good for--ground support for the infanty--was something they were almost never used for. Winton rather cleverly began sending bombing misisons to Berlin, and that enraged Hitler, who switched the target from airfields in the south of England to bombing London. Far from sapping the will of the people through terror, it made them angry, and support for Churchill soared. After the big raids in early September, the Luftwaffe simply no longer had the resources for daylight bombing, and they permanently switched to night raids.

Hitler delayed the deployment of the Me262 jet fighter because he wanted a bomber--something the air frame and the small engines couldn't handle. It was available as a fighter in the spring of 1943--but the delay from the futile attempt to turn it into a bomber meant it was not deployed until it was too late for it to make any difference.

Similarly, when the V-1 weapon was ready, Hitler sent it to the coast immediatley--to bomb London. At 700 miles an hour, no fighter could shoot it down, and AA batteries couldn't track and shoot it down, either. If he had used it against the invasion beaches in Normandy, it's appalling inaccuracy wouldn't have mattered--the Bay of the Seine was so choked with shipping, and the beaches so covered with men and equipment that the V-1s couldn't have missed. But Hitler was obsessed with "strategic" targets and terror bombing.

The "Fuhrer principle" which was the application of his political manipulation techniques to the army comand was another bit of insantiy. It so blurred the lines of command, and left authority so unclear that it paralyzed the army at key junctures. On D-Day, von Ruhndstedt knew what time it was, and he ordered the 12th SS Panzergrenadier division and the Panzer Lehrer division to Normandy before dawn on June 6. He then called Jodl and told him what he had done, and asked to have the order confirmed. Jodl told him only Hitler could order the panzers to move, that Hilter was asleep and that he wasn't going to wake him up. Hitler slept until noon. The morning was overcast, and those two divisions would have made a hell of a difference. By late afternoon, when Hilter finally decided to allow them to be commited, the skies had cleared and RAF and 9th USAAF fighters tore up the roads. Those two divisions had to pull off into the woods and wait for dark. In the event, it took them five days to get to the battlefield because of the fighters prowling overhead.

Hitler was an idiot. I've hardly gotten started on the stupidity with which he cirppled the German war effort. But i'll leave it at that for now.

This is wrong, too. The Japanese made no such request, Hitler did it on his own. Not only was Hitler not expecting Japan to declare war on the Soviet Union, the Japanese had concluded a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union in 1941, before the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany. Hitler was fool enough not to need any help with this stupidity.

Sorry you need to google it there is no way it went 700 MPH or anywhere near that and fighters did shot it down all the time and a wall of antiaircraft batteries move to the coast also took a good percent of them down,

As far as hitting a bay they did not do a good job of hitting large cites.

These according to all the surviving high ranking officers who were there with Hitler as they recounted the events. History is written by academicians who were not there.

Those invasion of lands with German populations did not cause any of the Allies to react too much. But it was the invasion of Poland that got the attention of Britain and France. Those present in the documentary are British and German historians and also veterans from both sides.

Okay, to carry on where I left off.

Hitler did not want to attack the British and held off capturing British soldiers at Dunkirk as he held the British in high regard at first. Another mistake was not attacking Moscow. He split the Central Army into two groups, one heading north and the other south. Later he changed his mind but by then winter had set in. Hitler banked on a quick victory in Russia so the German Army was in summer uniforms. They did not fore see the mud in the Russian Siberia and were mired. Of course, then there was the declaration of war with the U.S. that split the German armies fighting in two battle fronts. He relied too much on Goering who was an absolute failure. Hitler failed to mass produce the Messerschmit jet fighters but the time he agreed to it it was too late. Hitler did not trust the scientists so he had no scientific help in the war. This was a very useful documentary as these people describe the decisions made instead of gleaning information from events after the fact.

For my source i refer you to D Day, Stephen Ambrose, Simon and Schuster, 1994.

However, even if one disputes that, as for hitting the Bay of the Seine and the beaches at Normany, you're talking about an area far larger than metopolitan London, and it was packed with shipping and the beaches covered with troops and material on June 12--the day the V-1s started flying. The point, which it is unsurprising that you missed, is that he used the weapon inappropriately.

I listed quite a few countries there, Talk. Are you alleging that all of them except Poland had ethnic German populations? What are you smokin'?

As wrong as you knowledge of the V-1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Japanese_relations#Japan_entered_World_War_II

Preceding Japan's attack were numerous communiqués between Berlin and Tokyo. The respective ambassadors Ott and Ōshima tried to draft an amendment to the Tripartite Pact, in which Germany, Japan and Italy should pledge each other's allegiance in the case one signatory is attacked by – or attacks – the United States. Although, the protocol was finished in time, it would not be formally signed by Germany until four days after the raid on Pearl Harbor. Also part of the communiqués was another definitive Japanese rejection of any war plans against Russia:

"In case Germany demands that we participate in the war against the Soviet Union, we will respond that we do not intend to join the war for the time being. If this should lead to a situation whereby Germany will delay her entry into the war against the United States, it cannot be helped."[38]
Nevertheless, publicly, the German leadership applauded their new ally[60] and ambassador Ōshima became one of only eight recipients of the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle in Gold, which was awarded by Hitler himself, who reportedly said:

"You gave the right declaration of war. This method is the only proper one. Japan pursued it formerly and it corresponds with his own system, that is, to negotiate as long as possible. But if one sees that the other is interested only in putting one off, in shaming and humiliating one, and is not willing to come to an agreement, then one should strike as hard as possible, and not waste time declaring war."[61]

Hitler declaring war on the United States on 11 December 1941 in the wake of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.Moreover, even with the afore mentioned amendment to the Tripartite Pact not being in force yet, Hitler chose to declare war on the United States and ordered the Reichstag, along with Italy, to do so on 11 December 1941, three days after the United States' declaration of war on the Empire of Japan. His hopes that, despite the previous rejections, Japan would reciprocally attack the Soviet Union after all did not transpire, however, since Japan sticked to its Nanshin strategy of going south, not north, and would continue to maintain an uneasy peace with the Soviet Union until 1945.[62] Nevertheless, Germany's declaration of war further solidified German–Japanese relations and showed Germany's solidarity with Japan, which was now encouraged to cooperate against the British. To some degree, Japan's actions in South-East Asia and the Pacific, like the sinking of the HMS Prince of Wales and the HMS Repulse in addition to the subsequent occupation of the Crown Colonies of Singapore and Hong Kong as well as British Burma, not only stated a tremendous blow to the United Kingdom's war effort, but would preoccupy the Allies, shifting British (including Australian) and American assets away from the Battle of the Atlantic and the North African Campaign against

The first V1 were slow and fast British planes could tip the fins and set them off course. It was the second series V2 rockets that were fast and went high up in the sky and landed wherever as they had no guidance system.

That is covered in the documentary.

The people present were veterans of high rank and historians on both sides not academicians pontificating from far off alluding to all kinds of motives after the fact. There were documentary reels played as well as the veterans described the events. Of course, in one and a hours you are not going to cover every aspect of the war just the main events.

People people the V2 did have as must of a guidance system as the V1 even some of them being guided by feedback from ground radar during it burn period at launch if my memory serve me correctly from reading "The Wizard War" By Dr. Jones the head of technology intelligent for British during the War.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile

http://www.century-of-flight.net/Aviation%20history/evolution%20of%20technology/V-2%20Ballistic%20Missile%20Technology.htm

The third primary technological advance of the A4 was in the area of guidance. Early rockets had no guidance system at all and could be aimed only in a general direction. Later, some simple guidance systems were adopted that directed rockets to pitch over in flight to aim toward a target. But the A4 had to fly a long distance with some degree of accuracy to hit its target, so it required a system for pointing it in the right direction and shutting off the engine once the proper velocity was achieved. This was achieved through the use of what is called an inertial guidance system, a system in which a stabilized platform remains fixed in space regardless of how the vehicle moves around it. This stabilized platform allows for measuring the position or acceleration of the vehicle, since the platform remains pointed in one direction and the changes in the vehicle can be measured compared to the stable platform. In the middle of the rocket exhaust were four vanes that were used to deflect the thrust and steer the rocket based upon commands from the guidance unit. The A4 system was significantly more advanced than previous guidance systems. Still, despite this advanced system, the A4 could hit only a city-sized target from 190 miles (306 kilometres) away.

A fourth advance was the development of a radio transmission system that could relay information about the missile's performance to the ground. Earlier test missiles used a movie camera to record an oscilloscope, which was a device that projected a wave on a screen indicating the rocket's performance. The film was then retrieved when the rocket splashed down. But because the A4 test flights would cover hundreds of miles and recovery was nearly impossible, the engineers needed a means of "tele-metering" information to a ground station. This development, now referred to as telemetry, became common to all rocket test programs, as well as to many aircraft test programs.

The A4 was 46 feet (14 meters) long and five feet (1.5 meters) in diameter at its thickest spot. Its fins spanned nearly 12 feet (3.7 meters) at the base of the rocket, and it weighed 45,000 pounds (20,412 kilograms). It had a 2,000-pound (907-kilogram) warhead that stayed attached to the rocket throughout flight, and the entire missile crashed down on its target. Its first successful flight was on October 3, 1942.

Thousands of A4/V-2 rockets were fired during the war. After the war ended, many members of the rocket team that developed the A4, including Wernher von Braun, went to the United States or the Soviet Union and assisted in the development of these countries' ballistic missile programs.

Who gives a rat's ass what motives anyone alleges.

You understand nothing about historiography. In the first place, i'm not objecting to the evidence of people who were there--and i also recognize that five people can witness the same event, and produce five different accounts. Historiography is the process of winnowing the evidence to come up with the most reliable account--it is exactly the same as the pocess that prosecutors and defense attorneys go through in examining evidence for a trial.

The claim that Hitler didn't want a European war and was forced into stinks to high heaven of Neo-Nazi apologetics. Hitler was forced into nothing, and went into that war with his eyes open, and intending to start that war. I suspect whoever is responsible for this tripe is a crypto-nazi, someone who is hiding his sentiments.

What amazes me most is how eagerly you want to peddle this horseshit. Are you some kind of secret admirer of the Nazis who wants to claim that they are and were misunderstood, and were the victims of subtle, external manipulation? Get a grip, please.

Once again, Bill, the point is that Hitler misused the resource represented by the V-1, what the technology was exactly and how it functioned is not relevant to that issue. There were more than 4,000 (some sources claim well over 5,000) vessels in the Bay of the Seine. The first V-1s were launched on June 12, 1944. For two and half weeks after the landings on June 6, until the gale of June 23 wrecked the artificial harbors, most of those ships stayed right there (which is why i give a conservative figure of 4,000--most were still needed, but not all the vessels which were used on June 6), in an area about 60 miles long and 15 miles wide.

On the beach, the Allied Expeditionary Force put well over half a million troops into Normandy in the days following the invasion. The beaches were choked with vehicles, equipment and supplies in addition to the troops coming ashore, and the support troops who lived and worked on the beaches. They occupied a space roughly 60 miles long (from the Orne River to Utah Beach) and about five to ten miles deep.

The V-1s didn't need to be accurate to hit that target. It was more or less what the country boys call hitting a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle.

Wandering off into web accounts of the specifications of these rockets is as ludicrous as Talk claiming its all true because there are some witnesses to events interviewed. These are superficial and simplistic statements, including your fixation with the technical descriptions of the rockets.

The V-1 could be stop by the weapons of the days in the air number one and number two the V-1 was so inaccurate that hitting even a wide target was not a given.

They would had been annoying but no matter how used would not had stop the invasion in my opinion.

This is as idiotic as your fixation on the technical aspects of the V rockets. Note the text of the quote you provide:

Japan and Italy should pledge each other's allegiance in the case one signatory is attacked by – or attacks – the United States.

This was not in effect, and Hitler was under no obligation to declare war on the United States, while Japan had already made it clear that they were not going to join the war against the Soviet Union.

Once again, the text of the quote you provide:

Moreover, even with the afore mentioned amendment to the Tripartite Pact not being in force yet, Hitler chose to declare war on the United States and ordered the Reichstag, along with Italy, to do so on 11 December 1941, three days after the United States' declaration of war on the Empire of Japan.

My point stands--Hitler did not need to be abbetted in his stupdity, he could exercise quite well without outside assistance.

It's hilarious, though, to be the object at an attempt at correction by someone like you, who not only is incredibly ignorant, and unable to understand simple, main points of an argument, but someone who can't even write coherently in what one assumes is your native language.