Setanta wrote:
This smacks a great deal of "Battle of Britain" heroic mythololgy. The Royal Navy was a rather significant something "disallowing" an invasion of England. The use of air power, however, might have covered both airborne and seaborne landings--Adolf Galland proved this when as Luftwaffe fighter commander, he managed the protection of Scharnhorst, Gniesenau and Prinz Eugen as they ran the Channel in broad daylight. Who was bombing whom and for what reasons were militarily irrelevant to the fact that absolutely no contingency planning had been finalized for covering an invasion. As Kurt Student's falschirmjaeger proved on Crete, German airborne troops were prepared to make huge sacrifices to take and hold an airhead--but doing so would have required Hitler and Jodl to actually have thoroughly contemplated the ramifications of a possible invasion. To cover the invasion boats from the air required fighters, not bombers, and Hitler was obsessed with bombers and contemptuous of fighter aircraft. He was a devoted and rather clueless follower of Doheny's fantasies about crushing an opponent from the air, breaking the will of the people to fight. Both the heroic couple in Buckingham Palace, and the tough Eastenders of London demonstrated that in fact the opposite is likely to occur, hardening the resolve of the defenders. Hitler ought to have learned this lesson from the bombing of Warsaw, but the fool wasn't out to learn, he thought he knew all about military operations from his extensive service as a messenger boy in the First War.
Galland describes the operation to run the German battlecruisers through the Channel under fighter cover in his war memoir, The First and the Last. For an invasion of England to have worked, the German Navy would have had to go in harm's way with a will. German destroyers proved they were willing to make such a sacrifice in the operaitons off Narvik in 1940. Bismark dispatched Hood so quickly, that it is a reasonable proposition to suggest that the German Navy could have fought the Royal Navy to a standstill, which was all that would have been required.
The RAF were never on the ropes in the manner the Battle of Britain mythology would have us believe. Fighter squadrons in the Midlands, the North, Scotland and Northern Ireland were intact and ready for service. In the Home Counties and Kent and Sussex, the aircraft factories of Hawker and Supermarine were already moving equipment and relocating operations when the Battle of Britain began, assuring the continued manufacture of Hurricanes and Spitfires. The RAF did not even risk that much of its personnel in the campaign--about forty percent of their pilots were Polish (and 40% of aircrew casualties were Polish, as well), and another ten percent were Belgian, French, Dutch and Norwegian, along with Dominion volunteers (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa). It helps the heroic image to suggest that the RAF were near destruction in September, 1940, but it is not a true picture. Neither the nightly area bombing by the Germans, nor the same by the English over German cities, were significantly effective in destroying either the means or the will of their respective enemies to prosecute the war.
Actually if Hitler hadn't switched to bombing cities in retaliation to a bombing of a German city, he would have annihilated the RAF, thus he could have conquered Britain much easier. A plan would have been designed to invade England very fast as the most fortified Fort in the world at Holland was captured by paratroopers in less than a day. I don't know how you believe fighters will do that, but I can certainly see bombers blowing up air bases with bombs. Yes, destroying air bases reduces the air force as one might expect, and if Hitler had only done that he would have been successful. But he wasn't a very patient man, now was he. If Hitler had conquered Britain then the only possible landing stage for the US would have been Iceland, which is very far away, so the war would have took a very different turn.
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Your first contention is complete chimera. That the English and French military establishments were starved is not to be wondered at, both nations had been obliged to release as many men as possible in 1919, to assuage public opinion. In both nations, politicians pandered to public sentiment with talk of disarming from 1918 onward. A great many people in Europe longed for such a circumstance from the end of the First War. The Germans differed because they had bought--hook, line and sinker--the Ludendorf betrayal myth, which contended that the German Army had not been defeated in the field, but had been sold out by politicians and bureaucrats.
That's not true. Germany knew that it was surrounded by enemies, so they knew that if they were to win the war they would have to win it fast. This attempt happened twice, at the Battle of Marne in both 1914 and 1918. Germany was a few miles away from Paris and had it gotten there, they would have won the war. But I don't know why you're bringing this up, it's WWI.
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Part of Hilter's appeal, and a core necessity of his bellicose rhetoric was to be seen as a militarist. When the Allies were obliged to send so many men home in 1919, they unwisely relied upon the Freikorps to "keep the peace" in the Baltic region, and this only convinced the German people all the more that their Army had been invincible, but had been sold out. Hitler rolled into the Rhineland on the heels of the departing French as though he had driven them out; then he effected the aunchluss with Austria, and promised to create a Greater Germany. He was politically committed to this program--neither sound military policy nor intricate strategems ever played a part in his thinking.
The German People knew their armies weren't invincible, and the only reason Hitler put troops back in the Rhineland was to intimidate Britain and France, because he wanted them to attack.
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Which leads us to your second point. The "Sudeten" Germans had never been part of Germany, and had always been residents of Bohemia. There had been some noise about uniting them with Germany in Paris in 1919, but it was quickly brushed aside, and the German-speaking population of Czechoslovakia quickly came to appreciate living in a relative prosperous and stable country as they looked at the chaos of Germany in the 1920's. The very term "Sudentenland" is a politically manufactured term which only came into being at the end of the First War.
Again this was Hitler's attempt to throw Europe at war again, something which neither Britain nor France wanted to do after the destruction of WWI.
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That Stalin considered war with Germany inevitable is not to be doubted. That he had "been preparing" for such a war is hardly supported by the evidence, however. He was in 1939 fighting both the Finns and the Japanese, and the Red Army was in a shambles at the command level due to the purges. I am quite well aware of the origins of Josef Dugashvilli.
Unfortunately for that theory, Stalin was preparing even before the Non-Aggression Pact was signed, even though to no avail. It would not make any sense for someone who is expected to invade you for you not to prepare. That's like saying you're exposing yourself with the knowledge that you will be struck.
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Your remarks suggest that the American Navy was destroyed at Pearl Harbor and had to be rebuilt. Given that we are discussing Hitler, who had no clue about naval operations, and did his best to avoid the subject, your remark is rather a non sequitur. It is also as naive as the contention the the RAF faced destruction in the Battle of Britain. The great tragedy of Pearl Harbor was the loss of life. The old battleships which were attacked were quickly replaced because they were 20 to 30 years old, and new construction had already begun to replace them. The Japanese missed the American carriers altogether, and that was their eventual downfall. In fact, so much naval shipping had been diverted to the Atlantic by December, 1941, that Kimmel was constantly complaining to King that his best assets were being taken from him, and that he was increasingly unprepared to face the Japanese. Nevertheless, he immediately began planning for a response after the Japanese attack, but none of his plans were carried forward when he was relieved. Roosevelt and King still had their eyes on Europe, even after the Pearl Harbor attack.
Thank you for the history lesson.
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As i have written elsewhere in these fora, the Japanese attack on Hawaii deserves to be understood as one of the greatest military coups in naval history. They put together and executed one of the finest operations in the history of naval warfare. But Yamamoto, who was responsible for the attack, had no illusions. He simply wished to eliminate the American threat to the flank of the Imperial Navy's Southern Operation, and he had no illusions that the effect would only be temporary. His contemporaries did not understand this, and apparently, neither do you.
If you had actually read some history instead of looking up facts, you would know that whenever a Japan attacks a country it sneaks attacks it as it did in the Russo-Japanese war when it was becoming an Imperialistic nation. Apparently you do not understand this so you make up statements like Japan was just messing around with the US at Pearl Harbor.
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Once again, you have made a completely false statement, and apparently a statement from authority, an authority no better than that you have written it. Anyone who doubts that the Japanese and the Russians concluded an armistice in 1939 is free to look it up, in a library or online, whereupon they will discover the truth of my contention. The Germans arrived before Moscow in October, 1941. The battle for Stalingrad did not begin until September, 1942. The two events are unrelated, and took place more than a thousand miles apart. I'm sure Von Paulus would have liked to have had 300,000 troops in his Sixth Army, but at full strength (which the army was not), he would have barely had half that number. Did you make up the part about the saavy spy in Japan, or did you read that online somewhere? Perhaps in a novel?
Hmm an armistice doesn't pop anywhere, perhaps you should enlighten me on some of the sources you copy paste your info from so maybe I can see what bs you read. In fact the spy's name is Richard Sorge (1895-1944) And you're free to look him up in the Internet. He was a German journalist who spied for Russia. While working for a newspaper in Japan, he learned that Japan planned to attack Asia in 1941, rather than Russia. This was vital information to Russia, leaving her troops free to fight Germany.
Maybe you should actually read what happened instead of saying Russia had armistices with Japan in WWII. Japan had been disappointed by not being able to attack Russia simultaneously, thus it turned its attention at Asia in 1941 as reported by a spy. I don't know which novel you read but by 1943 Japan was occupied with the US. In fact you should stop copy+pasting facts from the net and actually focus on what's being discussed, because if you haven't noticed no one actually responds to what you have to say as most of the time it's being disconnect with the subject. If you actually read some history from a book, you would know that the German 6th army, supposedly the best was in fact at about 600,000, half of which were captured and the other dead. If you actually bothered to review what you read you might find out that that army was encircled by Russian troops.
