Greatest Mistakes of World War 2

Division you are talking about ,was ordered to return to the Germany for refit and was beeing loaded on trains. Order also stated that all remaining operational wheicles were to be given to the other division. As with all armies division was a bit reluctant to part with their machines and they disabled some wheicles and reported them unusible ( one could easly remove a thyre or track and report vheeicle unusible - same trick was used in YU after the war in order to keep some US planes that were beein scheduled fot transport in the SSSR). It took some time to fix these machines, but they were present in the battle.

 

1. Hitler thought that he was a war genius.

2. Hitler attacking yugoslavia and delaying attack to Rusia. He lost like 14 days so thats why winter got him.

 

I didn't think that the Yugoslavian escapade delayed Barbarossa.
I thought it was a combination of Hitler's insistance on every little detail being perfect & an unusually late & high flooding of the river Bug.

 

More to the point, it took until late June for the Russian landscape to dry out after the spring thaw. The Wehrmacht would become very familiar with Russia's very impressive mud from spring of 1942 onward.

 

Delays in balkan campain was not coused so much by Yugoslavia but more importantly stiff Greek/british ressistance in Greece and consequent landings on Crete and Aegean islands. How ever balcan operations did cost germans some units that had to be used for occupation duties, some planes that were needed later in SSSR as well as some resources and material that could be more visely used in operation Barbarossa.
Most stupid mistake made by Adolf in SSSR was the way the German forces treated population in occupied parts of SSSR. Most Ukrainians, Balts and even Poles ( in areas occupied by soviets) welcomed advancing German forces as liberators from deadly Stalinist regime. German treatment of slavic nations as slaves gave rise to enourmus partisan movement, that disrupted overstreched german communications and took large forces for policing duties. If germans treated occupied Ukranians as humans SSSR would most probably collapse. Everybody in SSSR was sick and tired of Stalins purges, gulags, executions, artificial hungers etc.
As one soviet general later put it:
''We had to choose between two dictators equaly destructive to our nation. We chose the one that could at least speek russian.''

 

Hitler was angry coz yugoslavia didnt joined his pack (with japan and italy) so he wanted revage so he lost a lot of time. That is my theory (and some think the same)

 

As I have already said, IMHO, the biggest mistakes weren't the delay in case "Yugoslavia" or treating the Soviet people badly (they were big mistakes but not the biggest), but delaying attack in Moscow, not to capture Leningrad, not capturing Murmansk or cutting the Murmansk railway (thus preventing the aid from Brits and Yanks) and not forming a significant focus point of the attack (for example in south 1943).

 

the biggist mistake was starting the whole thing in the first place

 

Hear, hear

 

From whose point of view, please?

 

Well yeah, but it's no fun to end the debate like that!

Actually two countries can be "blamed" for starting the war in Europe - Germany under the leadership of mr. Maniac, the Life Space conqueror (or Adolf Schickelgrüber), and the Soviet Union for signing the non-agression treaty in 1939 and thus releashing the hounds.

 

You´re talking about blame and not mistake, Roel. Not the same thing, which you perfectly know.
Those to blame were the (.......) diplomats in Versailles and those who paid for the October Revolution, IMO.

The greatest mistake - maybe Stalin´s underestimating the role of good defence of own territory?

 

a production problem...

just imagine on...
you are the panzerkomander krauze and you are in retreat :bang: , suddenly you see an abandoned truck with 75 mm but as you are in a panther the ammo is for a pz iv and then dont work :angry: even the 2 are of 75 mm
instead the russians had same mm and you can produce 76 mm in urales, moscou, siberia and all the 76 mm are the same, just different explosive charge but same caliber.

the burocracy in assignment of production contracts in germany was incredible and the variety of ammo :smok: make very difficult the supply. :angry:

same case with 88 mm

they dont had an standard, they had special designs... spezial ammo.

 

The intire idea that the luftwaffe did not try harder and that the leaders stood by and let a great victory trun away mabe Hitler was over confident mabe he underestemated the allies, but the RAF hade control over the air whitch makes no sense. (correct me if i'm wrong) but around 400-500,000 french,belgian,britsh,polish and others got away to the safty of briton where they could fight again

adressing the Battle of briton the germans where winning in the begining when they bombed more air fields oil depots and other military targets instead of going agains cities. also when you shot down the bristh pilote he flew back to his own country on the germans side you fall right in to a group of farms with shot gun's also the geramen fighters couldn't be the there as long.

Un like the US or briton the germans trusted there ideas to just one busness rather then the americans who let any thing trun any thing out
plus that the americans turned out then 64,000 sherman tanks thats more then ever german Tank,Halftrack, and aartillary peice turned out in the intire war.

-Luke-

 

TD,
Please take into account that non-English speakers discuss here too.
Some of your entries are totally unintelligible, at least for me.
I don´t know what the others think.

 

A mistake on the Western Allies part in the North West Europe campaign would be appointing and then not replacing General John C H Lee as the officer in overall charge of the supply effort for the Allies - Everything I have heard about him has been universally bad.

 

Izaak, I am English and to be honest I struggle with some of TD's posts as well, far more than most of the non-native English speakers.

I do not understand the point he is trying to make with the Battle of Britain. The Germans were more than able to make up their pilot losses and made no specific attacks against Oil Installations that I'm aware of. Arguably the RAF was on the brink of collapse at one point, the German decision to switch to bombing London certainly lessened the pressure on Fighter Command in Kent but there were many reasonably rested Squadrons outside of Kent and South London that were available for commitment if necessary.

As for the 1/2 million figure of foreign combatants, I can't comment beyond the fact that certainly not all of that figure were fighter pilots, in fact not even close to that figure found their way into the RAF as a whole.

If the Germans trusted their ideas to one business, how come the Bf109 was in combat (Fuel permitting) towards the end of the war along side the Me262, Me163, Fw190, Me410, Me110 and those are just regular day-fighters!

The Germans indulged in a huge, unnecessary and wasteful duplication of effort, the mistake was declaring war on the US in the first place which placed the world's most powerful industrial nation against them.

 

Could be taking about Dunkirk but only 300, 000 were rescued.

 

Maybe I´ll be repeating myself or somebody, but the absolute greatest mistake was Hitler´s decision to destroy Poland. Which is to say - to start the whole thing in the first place.
With Poland in place, there would be no war in the west, nor in the east.
Germany would have had no common borders with USSR, which would have made a surprize attack of Stalin on Germany impossible.
Stalin was orchestrating things in such a way, as to get the world war going, because it was the only chance to spread communism - his principal aim in political life and the principal aim of the communist system in general.

And Hitler would have gone into history books as a great leader who was able to, with peaceful means, to unite (practically) all ethnic Germans in one great state and give Germany the role in world politics it deserved. There was of course the question of persecution of German Jews but, without any war, Hitler would probably not have held for so long as Fuhrer and a more human system would possibly have emerged.

 

OK, but it has also been said that the German economy under the Nazis was living on borrowed time and the only things that really saved it was plunder, slave labour and the conditions (particularly exchange rates) imposed on the occupied territories.

Without the continuation of this expansion Germany would rapidly run out of funds and far from being a great leader Hitler may well have gone down in history as the man that bankrupted Germany.

I have to stress that I have no particular grasp of economics, but this is what I have read in some books, and what has been told to me years ago by my History teacher who spent his life studying Nazi Germany.

Secondly the whole issue of Lebensraum was a major part of Nazi ideology, without the goal of Lebensraum in the east and the Struggle of Races, Nazi ideology basically falls apart, no Poland, no Lebensraum, no Struggle.

I guess the Nazis were the possibly the greatest mistake of all!

(No I haven't finished reading the link yet, it is interesting though and I may well revise my opinion after finishing it! )