"Dumbest" attack?

The Soviet attack on the Seelow Heights.

Heinrici delaying Zhukov for a good three days how embarrassing for Zhukov.

[ 10. February 2006, 06:31 PM: Message edited by: Richard42 ]

 

I beg to differ, on June 28 a week after Barbarossa started the Wehrmacht had advanced 200 miles into Russia and captured Minsk.15 Russian divisions are surrounded, and later surrender.

July 15. Smolensk is taken, and another 300,000 Russian soldiers with it.

The German's are experiencing a new kind of warfare. The Russians seem content to trade 10 Russian lives for 1 German. They continually mount reckless counter-attacks. These wasteful attacks have an unnerving effect on the Wehrmarcht.

August 19. German troops under von Leeb surround Leningrad in the north

September 19. Hitler's drive south nets the city of Kiev. 650,000 Russian soldiers are captured, the largest number ever, in any war.

From about '43 it goes backwards for the Germans, but they were very successful in the intial stages.It wasn't Hitler's wisest decision but it was definitely not the dumbest!

 

In defense of my choice.

The Germans did achieve a lot in Operation Barbarossa. They killed and captured many Russians and they occupied huge expanses of Russia.

They could never conquer Russia.

The Russian mentality was not like the mentality of the European countries that had fallen to the blitzkrieg. Their leader was not going to see a fasciast in control. The ideology was to far apart. Stalin would have rather seen every Russian citizen dead. As much as Hitler might have wanted to take Stalin up on that, the German industrial machine was not used to the full capacity needed to have even a slim chance at beating the Russians. The Germans came to Russia expecting the wrong things, they came under-supplied, they came unable to properly prosecute a winter war in a winter country, and they came thinking that if they killed ten Russians for every German they would win. They were wrong on all counts.

That makes it a bad decision. Think what they could have done in 1941 with that many troops in other places in Europe. They could have taken Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Balkans, Greece and just about anything they didn't have to assault amphibiously or supply by air. Bad decision, big mistake.

 

Napoleon's nightmare shared by Hitler.

You've come up with some extremely good points althought I still maintain that Russia was not the dumbest campaign.

I would say the airborne invasion of Crete was a big mess-up for Germany.

 

Why? What reasons?

 

Bigiceman, welcome to the Good Side of the Force

 

See? This is the selective memory style fostered by the conventional view of the war. This reminds me of Guderian's memoirs, all fine and dandy with lots of detail when the going gets good, but then absolute amnesia when the winter of 1942 sets in and afterwards. Same with von Manstein's memoirs.

As the other side's histories were hard to find in the west, and besides they belonged to the ideological enemy, they were discounted and all we were fed were the rosy-tinted views through German lenses.

Read the article I suggested today elsewhere, American Perspectives on Eastern Front Operations in WW II. Oh, just to be sure, this is by an American author, not a Russian.

 

Crete was the scene of the largest German Airborne operation of the war, and the first time in history that an island had been taken by airborne assault. Afterwards, Crete was dubbed the graveyard of the Fallschirmjager (German Parachutists); they suffered nearly 4000 killed and missing in the assault. It was also the first time the Germans had encountered stiff partisan activity, with women and even children getting involved in the battle. The XI Fliegerkorps was responsible for ferrying the paratroops to Crete using 500 JU-52's and 70 DFS-230 light assault gliders, all together 8100 men were dropped on to Crete, 1860 men at Maleme, 2460 men at Hania, 1380 men at Rethymno and 2360 men at Iraclion.

http://www.explorecrete.com/preveli/battle-of-crete.html

 

Although agreeing that Crete was a pyrrhic victory for the Germans, I'm not entirely convinced that is was dumb before the event, even though it certainly was afterward.

The Germans misjudged the reaction of the local populace ( sounds familiar... ) and the way things worked out, Crete became a strategic backwater. Not sure that these problems would have been too apparent when the decision was taken to attack.

 

I wonder if the decision of the German's to use the airborne troops to take Crete was influenced in any way like the Supreme Headquarters European Armed Forces (SHEAF) decision to use airborne troops for Operation Market-Garden? The idea being that if we have them we might as well use them for something?

 

Here is another idea for us to consider, how about something from the Pacific theater of operations.

Would the mission that they tried to send the Yamato on be dumber than what we have been talking about in Europe? Let's send out an un-escorted battlewagon to beach itself on Saipan and act as a heavy weapons platform till it gets blown away. It never even got close.

 

That may have been a factor - to be honest it's a few years since I read about Crete so can't remember - but also, the Germans weren't really geared-up for seaborne invasion.

 

I think I recall the Germans had plans to take Cyprus and Malta as well in the next phase so this was just part of the bigger plan and Crete the beginning. However Hitler was totally frightened of the losses in Crete and said they´d never be used again.

One cannot deny though that after having "created" the troops Kurt Student probably was pushing to get to show how effective they were?


http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERstudent.htm

"Student was involved with Hitler in planning Operation Sealion but eventually plans to drop parachute units in England and Northern Ireland were abandoned. So also were plans to carry out an airborne invasion of Gibraltar after General Francisco Franco refused to allow support troops to go across Spain."

A bit in the same line with Arnhem....?

 

From the Pacific theatre of operations I would go for Peleliu, terrible waste.

 

Narvik for the Germans was costly. Loosing the Blucher to a shore torpedo battery? Where was the recon/suppression?
Half their destroyers (10) as well.
One of 4 decent heavy cruisers. I know Seydlitz was never completed (or even laid down?), but Prinz Eugen & Hipper were.

 

Hitler's order to deny the retreat and regrouping of the sixth panzer army at Stalingrad was quite a foolish move on his part. Alot of good soldiers died because he thought he was a brilliant military commander.

I don't recall the code name of the operation but there was a raid in Oran on some Vichy controlled port the night before operation Torch that was a complete failiure and resulted in the lives of many men.

 

With a heavy heart I must offer the Battle for Hurtgen Forest.
The Germans were delighted that the Americans wanted to throw their weight into an attack against dug-in troops in a forest where the American preponderance of artillery and command of the air would be of little value. Also, delighting the Germans was that the Hurtgen Forest was of little military value and, if lost to the Americans, could be flooded since the Germans held flood control dams above the level of the forest. It was a battle that the Germans really couldn't lose. But don't tell that to General Bradley or General Hodges. Their regrettable stubborness and unwillingness to realistically assess the engagement would reap a bloody harvest from the American high school classes of 1942, 1943 and 1944. The fight cost the 9th and 2nd Armored divisions 80% of their front-line troops. It was worse for the 28th division. Overall in the Hurtgen, the 28th suffered 6,184 combat casualties, plus 738 cases of trench foot and 620 battle fatigue cases. Those figures meant that virtually every front-line soldier was a casualty. The 28th Division had essentially been wiped out.
The 2nd Rangers fared no better with 90% casualties after weeks of unbelievably brutal fighting.
After the war, German General Rolf van Gersdorff commented, "I have engaged in the long campaigns in Russia as well as other fronts and I believe the fighting in the Hurtgen was the heaviest I have ever witnessed."
The battle lasted ninety days and involved nine American Divisions and their supporting units. More than 24,000 Americans lost their lives and there were another 9,000 casualties from trench foot, disease and combat exhaustion. So ended the battle for the Hurtgen Forest.
Heartbreaking.

 

The occupation of the Agean islands...And leaving the Raf ground crew to their own devices...Germans had a good fishing trip.

 

OPeration MArket Garden was one of the worst planned operations of the war. INtel was wrong, commcation between america and britsh was horrabble as well and they went in to deep and not wide enough there were lucky they didnt get sourrounded

 

The British at Arnhem did.