Quote:
Originally Posted by redcoat
North Africa was an unimportant sideshow for Germany, but due to Rommel's success's it led to Germany diverting valuable resources from the battle on the Eastern front at a time when the battle was still in the balance, and eventually led to Germany suffering a defeat of Stalingrad proportions.
|
I don't mean to sound confrontational, but this is complete nonsense. You are basically making two points here, both of which are quite erroneous:
1. You are saying that the German involvement in North Africa was just a sideshow that had no strategic value to Germany. The opposite is actually true, in that it was a vital necessity to the Germans to deny the Allies a victory in North Africa, and could have proved a decisive blow against the British had they gone farther and deployed enough force and supplies to actually evict the British from North Africa. With the Allies in control of North Africa there was no way to prevent them from invading Italy and the southern coast of France, which in the event they did to devastating (for Germany) effect. And if the Axis had been able to seize the Suez canal from Britain that would have limited the Allies' axis to the Mediterranean to just the strait of Gibraltar. It would also have given the Axis access to the oil fields of the Middle East, which would have vastly affected their operations in all theaters for the rest of the war.
2. You also state that the forces employed in North Africa are somehow linked to the failure of the campaign against the Soviets. Again this is completely in error for two reasons. First, the forces employed, namely two understrength panzer divisions with less than 18,000 troops, were a drop in the bucket compared to the forces employed in Barbarossa (nearly three million troops). They would have made absolutely no difference there, however another two divisions from the Eastern Front deployed instead in North Africa in 1942 could have tipped the scales enough to permit Rommel to push all the way through the Middle East to open a second front against the Soviets in their most critical weak spot: their southern oil fields. As to the second point, the main reason Barbarossa failed was not inadequate forces but the idiotic way in which Hitler continually interfered in the operational decision making of his generals.