redcoat,

He absolutely did!!! and u being from England im surprised u dont know this. Ask around ull be surprised.

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler

Where did you get that from Sloniksp?
Didn't sound right to me either I'm afraid.
I recalled the quote as a diary entry relating to Pearl Harbour as well. It would perhaps be odd for him to use the same rather significant phrase twice... but then he was quite an odd man.

Cheers,
Adam.

van poop,

I know the pearl harbor phrase that you are referring to. There was a documentary on the russian channel about WW2 and many people were interviewed including german soldiers, colonels and even members of churchills cabinet. That quote was taken from that program. I wish i could find more about it though, havent been lucky enough yet.


But i totally understand your skepticism.......


The original quote where Churchill got it from was from Bismark who told Wilhelm that Germany could not fight a 2 front war.

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler

If German hadn't invaded Soviets . Hmm . Yes WWII would have taken place even when they hadn't . They basically(im not saying they did,but basically it was the cause) started it with Molotov-Rippentrop pact. Imo German invading to Soviet couldn't been prevented . Sooner or later it would have happened . So i don't know .

I'm unsure that is correct. From Ellis's study of WWII military production & strategy 'Brute Force' Table 41 gives the following numbers:

Aircraft Production.......Germany.........Britian
Combat Models
1939..........................1,476.............3, 161
1940..........................6,201.............7, 771
1941..........................7,624...........11,7 32

From Table 42. Front Line Combat Aircraft

...............................Germany.........Bri tian
September 1939.........2,916.............1,660
August 1940...............3,015.............2,913

What these tables show is that Britan had in Britian parity in aircraft at the start of the Battle of Britian, and that its production outstripped Germanys.

A second factor is in pilot training. In the summer of 1940 the RAF reorganized its training program to produce properly trained fighter pilots in just a few months. The Luftwaffe continued to used its prewar methods that produced a well rounded 'airman' over the course of nearly a year. And, the graduates of its schools required additional training after arriving at their combat unit. The result was the RAF was able to replace lost pilots at a higher rate than the Luftwaffe.

Third the RAF had its famous Fighter Command that systematically provided a superior method for attacking enemy aircraft over Britian. The combination of command doctrine, communications, radio intellegence, and radar & visual observers led to a far more effcient use of British aircraft and pilots than the German methods for organizing attacks.

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The key to the viability of Sea Lion is aircraft range and ships. The Luftwaffe did not break England in a full scale attack. If they are supporting an invasion fleet, they must protect the fleet and fight for air superiority.

On the ships front, there simply wasn't the military ships to move enough troops to force an amphibious assualt. The Germans must draft most of their merchant marines to pull Sea Lion off. Remember Overlord when the Allies hit the Germans with eight divisions within the space of 12 hours? German assault waves would be in far less impressive numbers.

If all goes increditably and incredulously well, then the Germans would have a weak beacheahd thinnly supported by aircraft. The RAF themselves, assuming the likely event that they lost air superiority, could fall back in land and operate from bases out of German fighter range to strafe the beachhead.

The German logistics situation would remain precarious as their imaginary Atlantic fleet was anything but safe from the RN. So fuel, ammo, spare parts and reinforcements would come in piecemeal. Now, the British Army had been busy since Dunkirk and they would be waiting.

Not a plan that was going to work.

In July 1940, Doenitz and his subs accounted for 500,000 tons of shipping. He firmly believed that, if he could sink 750,000 tons in a month, Britain would be forced to surrender. The British had a similar notion, but they put the figure at 600,000 tons.

At the peak of the subs in 1941, I believe more than 700,000 tons were sunk in a single month. And this was with Hitler's buildup for the Eastern Front. Without the buildup occurring so quickly, maybe enough subs could be given to Doenitz.

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"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

Laced sea power, yes, but they still had their trusty U-Boat which substantially weakened Allied navy forces, especially England and the SU.

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WW2 knowledge: (Compared to users on this forum) Low

Greets
-Ne0

Care to quantify that? I strongly suspect that when all is added up the U-boats sunk or damaged only a very small fraction of allied warships.

Indeed U-boat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
states that u-boats sunk 175 warships and in return 743 U-boats were sunk.

The following thread shows some details on the number of British DDs available and includes sinkings:
Axis History Forum • View topic - Royal Navy Destroyers
This one has similar info on battleships and battlecruisers:
Axis History Forum • View topic - Royal Navy Battleships
and this one for cruisers:
Axis History Forum • View topic - RN Cruiser availability

Maybe Russia would have been allied with Japan, Germany and Italy. That wouldn't have been too good.
Bob

It's not so clear cut; the Germans had to consistently sink 750,000 NET tons a month for at least six months to have any chance of starving out Britain. They never even came close to this figure.

In fact, between September, 1939, and December, 1941, the amount of British-controlled shipping was consistently increasing due to new construction, charters of neutral shipping, and captures of Axis-owned ships. On the outbreak of war in September, 1939, Britain controlled a total of 17,784,000 tons of shipping. By the end of December, 1941, Britain controlled 20,693,000 tons of shipping; an increase of 16%. (Blair, "Hitler's U-Boat War", Vol.1, page 99.)

By the beginning of 1942, the US and British merchant ship construction programs were ramping up and generating a situation where sinking rates by U-boats very often resulted in net increases of available Allied shipping. The U-boats, with or without the invasion of the Soviet Union, never had a chance of winning the war for Germany.

Not really. During WW II, submarines, in general, proved singularly ineffective against warships, and German U-boats never made much of a dent in Allied naval power. They sank some escort vessels, a few cruisers, and a handful of poorly handled aircraft carriers, but they never threatened Allied domination of the Atlantic.

The Soviet Navy was relatively weak, not aggressively deployed, and never a significant factor in the European war, so it's difficult to argue that German U-boats played any role in diminishing it's power.

I don't know about no airforce... The RAF managed to defeat the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, and Germany threw 4 thousand planes at England.

The air force was pretty good, and maintained air superiority throughout the rest of the war in the west.

No, the RAF did not have air supremacy in the West after the Battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe was still superior in the West and as an overall force after the BOB. The Germans lost the skies in the West front in 1943.

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Oops, I completely disregarded the time between 1941 and 1943

I agree, the luftwaffe were much stronger in that gap, but the RAF would put up a good fight if Britain were attacked again!

Nazi Germany wuolde have wone ww2! There wuolde be no seconde front fore thee Germans!
Thee second front doomed nazi germany.

there is much evidence that the ussr were 10 days away from launching their own invasion of germany when barbarossa beat them to it

If you are thinking of that discredited book Icebreaker I would say the bulk of the real evidence actually shows the opposite. Stalin was certain that Hitler wasn't such a "fool" as to open a second front without making peace or defeating the British before attacking the Soviet. Stalin was almost in denial when the reports started coming in, so he was far from launching his own invasion, he was in fact doing the opposite.

While there are some neo-Nazi sites (ihr.org for example) which dearly love Icebreaker by Suvorov, the bulk of the more academic historians reject it, and its supposition. The neo-Nazis embrace the idea since it makes Hitler appear to be "only defending Germany from the god-less Communist hoards"! These next statements aren’t all my own, I read them elsewhere; that said it (Icebreaker) flies in the fact of numerous truths, i.e.:

Marxist Theory:

In traditional Marxist theory, militarism is normally seen as a form of social control and a component of imperialism, delaying the emergence of a class-conscious international working class or proletariat. The activities of the Communist International in the period preceding the First World War show clearly that Communist parties and the political Left in general were opponents of militarism. Once the first communist regime took political power in the Russian Revolution and survived the Russian Civil War, a major line of debate in the USSR during the 1920s was how the world's first socialist state should relate to other nations.

The view of Trotsky was that a communist revolution could succeed only by continuous revolutionary activity in other nation-states. The notion of socialism surviving in a single nation-state was considered ridiculous and self-contradictory. The remaining capitalist powers would swiftly move to crush the USSR (the experience of western intervention on behalf of the Whites in the civil war was not forgotten). Since the bourgeois nations would be more powerful, they would probably succeed in destroying socialism. However, if the working classes of these countries could understand that a war of conquest in support of capitalism was not in their class interests, they would not support such a war and socialism would survive through the process of revolution abroad.

Stalin, on the other hand, argued that 'socialism in one country' was feasible if properly managed. His subsequent program of militarizing the whole Soviet economy was simultaneously a means of maintaining his totalitarian power and ensuring the survival of the Soviet state without regard to the internal politics of other nations.

It is important to note that Stalin's approach flew in the face of most Marxist thought up till that point, but that neither the Trotskyist view nor the Stalinist view can be reconciled with Suvorov's thesis. Neither approach envisioned the use of conventional armed forces to wage an aggressive "first strike" war.

Soviet Diplomacy Under Stalin:

Under Stalin, Soviet foreign policy in the late 1920s through at least 1939 was essentially defensive and very cautious. The USSR sought alliances with western powers, in particular seeking to re-establish the traditional anti-German alliance with France. For a multitude of reasons, these efforts failed. One of the main reasons was that the USSR was considered a pariah state prior to June 22, 1941, and the other European powers were reluctant to enter into any serious negotiation with the Stalin regime. Also, one effect of the Great Purge was that western militaries came to regard the Red Army as a worthless ally. They were thus not eager to reinstate the traditional east-west coalition against Germany.

Prior to the rise of the Nazis, joint military training facilities existed in the USSR, in which German and Soviet soldiers developed nascent versions of the tactics and weapons that would come to prominence in the Second World War. However, these joint endevors occurred during a period when Germany was weak, under the Weimar Republic, and were shut down once the Nazis came to power.

The Soviet view was that as efforts to 'surround' Hitler failed, and as the western powers seemed to allow Nazi expansion in Central Europe (as long as it was not aimed westward), some accommodation had to be reached with Germany in order to buy time. Stalin knew the USSR was not ready to fight Germany, but the massive rearmament and reorganization programs begun in 1939 might begin to bear fruit by 1942. The goal of the Nazi-Soviet nonagression pact was primarily to buy time and space which the USSR could use to prepare for the German invasion they feared was inevitable. The rights of the populations of Central Europe were trampled as a result. This was not, of course, fundamentally different from the Franco-British approach up until Munich.

There is thus nothing in the basically opportunistic diplomatic record to support Suvorov's thesis, and much to contradict it.

The Historical Record:

Suvorov's view that a Soviet invasion of Germany was imminent in 1941 is not shared by the majority of the historian community.

A noteworthy refutation of his thesis is contained in COL David Glantz's work Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War. Glantz views Suvorov's argument as "incredible" on a variety of fronts: 1. Suvorov rejects without examination classified ex-Soviet archival material, and makes highly selective picks from memoirs. There are thus basic methodological problems. 2. Suvorov's thesis is strongly contradicted both by ex-Soviet and German archival material. The facts simply do not bear out any argument that the Red Army was prepared to invade Germany; on the contrary, the appalling lack of readiness, poor training level, and abysmal state of deployments show that the Red Army was unprepared for static defense, much less large-scale offensive operations. A proof for unpreparedness is naturally the combat experience of Red Army throughout 1941. Glantz's conclusion is that "Stalin may well have been an unscrupulous tyrant, but he was not a lunatic".

On the other hand, one may point at certain certain methodological problems concerning Glantz' study, too: it depicted only Red Army's lack of readiness, not comparing it to its enemy's. One can hardly say Germany was ready for war in 1939 (the conscription was re-established 1935 and real tank production began only after the seizure of Czech Skoda factories), but it didn't prevent Hitler from unleashing major military conflict.

Although Suvorov claims that an attack date of July 8, 1941 had been selected, this is contradicted by the overwhelming mass of evidence. There were no stockpiles of the fuel, ammunition, and other stores held in forward areas as would have been needed if an invasion was about to be mounted. Major ground units were dispersed into small garrisons rather than being concentrated at railheads, as they would have been had they been preparing an invasion. Units were not co-located with their own transportation assets, leaving, for example, major artillery units immobile. Air Force aircraft were parked in neat, tightly-packed rows along their airfields rather than dispersed. Over 50% of all Soviet tanks required major maintenance on June 22, 1941. If an invasion were being planned, these maintenance tasks would have been completed. Most Soviet armor units were in the process of re-organizing into new Tank Corps; the German invasion caught these units in the midst of this reorganization. Such a large-scale reorganization is inconsistent with an impending invasion.

And in order to get a better idea of who this fellow is, remember that is his nom d’plume. Victor Suvorov’s real name is Vladimir Rezun. If you look up Rezun, you will find out who we are dealing with here.

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Happy Trails,
Clint.

Hmm, If Hitler never invaded Russia, I guess NA would have been given more help, Say a proper complete battle force, 3 Pnz Div's, aswel as some motorized/cavalry/infantry divisions, Oh And a 100+ Fighters, NA would have been over in less then 6 months, A year by the time they have the NA, Middle East, Malta, Gibralter, Red Sea under there control, Oh and the West wall that received so little attention would have been very formidable, Persia (Now Iran) Who had close ties with Germany and supported them for a very short time, Would Allie with the Axis, And a posibility or Turkey as well (Dont hold me to it, Just a theory). Italian East Africa may have been re-taken, With possiblities of various battles takeing alce throught out Africa in British colonies. I think the German generals would talk Hitler into building defences in the east for protection against Russia, Other then that i see D-Day not so much happening in 1944, and NA would be completely secured aslong as the Axis hold just 2 Points, Seuz canal and Gibralter, And they could muster more then a 2 million young fit well trained well equipt men to defend against D-Day. And Russia invading Germany in 1942-43.. Possibly, But i delt it will achieve much, There massive numbers proved futile early on in the war, Poor equiptment and poor training, And they will just open up attacks from there flanks via Caucasus's.


Oh and as for SeaLion.. A German invasion force Getting there would be a problem, But once landed if they Got AA units down soon enought, Then i dont see it being to hard, As the British had only 1 Operational division after Dunkirk, They might have saved alot of soilders, ut with out trucks, Jeeps, Motorcycles, Tanks, Artillary, ammo, guns etc, They no good. Matter of fact, Forget who it was, A couple German generals while Dunkirk and France was steal fighing, To airlift in 2 divisions to Britain, Securing a beach head, How ever Hitler turned it down becouse he hoped that Britian would surrender, Really bad mistake by him, Could Have Had The North, West, and South secure of any major threats, Only have Russians in the East.
In short, It could have had us all driving VW's now

I think it is really hard to say what would happen if Germany never invaded the Soviet Union.

Clearly they would easily have the manpower and supplies to defeat the British in North Africa. But after that it is really hard to say what Germany would have done. Would they have tried to conquer all of Africa? They probably would have advanced into the middle east and seized Iraq, Iran, Syria etc. etc.

It would have taken a long time for Germany to establish the sea power it needed to invade Britain but it is possible that they could have forced Britain out of the war by conquering so many of its colonies and bombarding it so much, but it is hard to speculate.

It is very unlikely that Operation Overlord would have ever happened for a few reasons: First, Overlord partly came about because of the urgings of Stalin for the Americans and British to open up another front. Secondly, it is possible that the Allies wouldn't have tried to invade Europe without the other fronts being fought, thinking that they would just not be able to overpower Germany.

Also, if America was not tied up fighting the Germans they would have most likely eliminated Japan much faster.

There is no, nor has there ever been any evidence which shows Stalin's intention for an attack on Germany and certainly not 10 days before Barbarossa, this is the reason why not a single legitimate historian agrees with such a claim. In fact, making such a statement or claim and using "Suvorov's" Icebreaker as a source, has become a sign of ignorance.

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler

This is certainly true.
It's my understanding that Stalin was actually appeasing Hitler at the time in order to buy as much time as possible to build up his military machine to withstand an invasion from Germany. At the time of the German invasion, he was absolutely unprepared which is why Germany advanced so quickly and Stalin was paralyzed with panic.

Bob Guercio

Ditto!

What a great way to start of in this forum!

Welcome!

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler

The War was already in full swing when Barbarossa started. The Germans had already spread across Western Europe by this time.

The success's of Germanys Invasion should be proof enough that Russia was NOT 10 days away from an Invasion of Germany.

Where were the "front line" Invasion divisions? The resistance that the Germans did meet hardly had enough ammo and rifles to fight. Stalin was completely and shockingly caught off guard.

The Russians may of have had an operational plan or an "In Case" scenario for Invasion. However they were far from ready to launch an Invasion across Europe, and attack the Third Reich. Pre Barbarossa strength of the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS were Massive. The German Army in 1939 was the best trained and equipped in the world. The world knew it and so did Stalin.

Except much of the German problems in NA were logistics related. Rommel couldn't get enough supplies across the Med to supply the force he had. Now you are talking about a much larger force going much further (so the consumption of the log units themselves becomes problematic). And if they do take Egypt now they have to defend or attack on 3 fronts in North Africa.\
"not bloody likely" again they just don't have the log structure. Indeed the one in the Mid East and NA makes the one in the Soviet Union look well developed.
I'll agree with that.
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Oh and as for SeaLion.. A German invasion force Getting there would be a problem, But once landed if they Got AA units down soon enought,
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AA units aren't going to do much to the RN. And how are you going to get them and their massive quantities of required ammo across?
Niether correct nor relevant. They rebuilt and reequipped very rapidly.
With what? And how are you going to support them?