What was the biggest mistake made during WWII?

[youtalkfunny]

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I think the Germans really screwed up by not detecting the spies operating out of Stalag 13. They had tunnels everywhere, they had a coffee pot that doubled as a radio, and they left the prison camp to execute missions whenever they liked. How is that possible?

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That William Holden is a very crafty fellow.

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That was Stalag 17. Sheesh.

I wonder how many young'uns here have no idea what I mean by tunnels, coffee pot/radio, and ladder under the bunkbeds?

Oh yeah, one more thing:

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I dont really know that much about it, but am really enjoying the thread.

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[adsman]

Some interesting replies in this thread.

Here are the biggest mistakes as I see them.

Axis; Not supplying Rommel with the extra panzer division that he desperately needed to take Egypt in early 1942. If Rommel had taken Egypt the Germans would have gained complete control of the Mediteranean, (no more English naval bases, apart from Malta which would have been quickly dealt with), but more importantly they would have gotten control of the Middle East oil fields. One of the major reasons that Germany lost the war was a lack of oil. The German air force was effectively disbanded in 1944 as they had no more aviation fuel.

The second Axis mistake can be blamed on good old Mussolini. By invading Greece in early 1941 and getting in a lot of bother, he forced Hitler to come to his help. Hitler had to send divisions which were preparing for the attack on the Soviet Union. This delayed the invasion of Russia by six weeks. Which was just the amount of time they needed to get into Moscow.

One Allied mistake has already been mentioned - Yalta. The second major cock-up was Singapore. This British naval base was the key to South-East Asia. The attacking Japanese army was outnumbered and having a hard time when the British commander lost his nerve and surrendered, thus handing control of the Dutch East Indies with their rubber plantations to Japan. If Singapore had held, the Pacific War would have been greatly reduced.

[Exsubmariner]

Such a good thread. I'm sorry I was out of circulation and missed it.

[Cyrus]

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I am going to have to go with the mass gassing of the Jews. That really turned a number of people against Hitler who otherwise might have turned more of a blind eye to things.

[/ QUOTE ]This doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The holocaust was not widely known to the world.

Besides, the western (Christian) world was not immune to a certain prejudice against Jews. I mean, if you were to tell the western folks that the war was waged to save Jews, I don't know...

[Cyrus]

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If Hitler didn't have a man-crush on obliterating Stalingrad and Leningrad, the German army would've been in Moscow before the first winter and the invasion would have undoubtedly been a success.

[/ QUOTE ] The Germans found themselves at the nearest point to Moscow only in December 1941. Winter had already set in, and harshly. Perhaps if the Germans had concetrated in taking Moscow, they'd have succeeded. That's a maybe. But would this spell the end of the Soviet Union as a worthy military power? It is highly doubtful, seeing that a significant part of the industrial infrastructure of the USSR was beyond the Urals.

One thing that might have happened is that Stalin might have sued for peace. (There is evidence that Stalin was becoming desperate at the pace and extent of German successes.) But would his ideological mortal enemy have agreed to a peace? Very doubt ful, since Hitler had started a war against military logic and on ideological grounds.

Therefore, the strength of the USSR, combined with the strength of the western powers, being superior to the strength of Germany, would almost certainly decide the war, irrespective of the initial (and impressive) German successes. A simple matter of power (im)balance.

As Winston Churchill put it, as soon as the USA entered the war the same month that the Germans were outside Moscow : "The war is won. All we need to do is properly apply our strength".

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Fighting the Soviet Union was inevitable.

[/ QUOTE ]No, it wasn't. Or, at least, it shouldn't have been. Why re-stage the Napoleonic catastrophy?

"Those that the gods want to punish, they render stupid first". --Ancient Greek proverb. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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The fact that Barbarossa had a huge surprise effect even shows that it was a well-timed decision.

[/ QUOTE ]It was a coup that nearly succeeded, on account of the weaknesses of the Soviet system. However, the Germans never included those weaknesses in their plans, on account of ideology. For instance, it has been documented that large parts of the Ukraine welcomed the Germans initially as liberators from the hardhips they were enduring under communist rule. But the Germans had plans and orders to treat the Slavs as sub-humans. Very soon, the Ukraine turned wholeheartedly against the German invader and, by default, pro-Soviet.

But the initial successes of Barbarossa should not lead us to "Short-Term Results Oriented Thinking".

[Sykes]

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Hi Andrew:

I slightly disagree. My candidate would be Germany declaring war on the United States the day after Pearl Harbor. This meant that the US would immediately start supplying Russia which would give it a chance to survive. If that didn't happen, Germany might have won on both fronts.

best wishes,
Mason

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This was what I was going to post. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

[The once and future king]

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The allies not invading and whiping Russia off the face of the map after the fall of Berlin like Patton wanted to.

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This a joke. The Germans Had 80%+ Plus of there combat power on the East front and after Kursk the Russians just rolled over it like a steamroller. Operation Bagration deystroyed army group centre in a month. In contrast the Western Allies had a hard time progressing against the side show of German forces deplyed in the West and were severly repulsed during the Ardennes offencive.

Add to this the superiority of Russian armour (T-34 >>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;>>>>>>Sherman) and infantry organsiation (SMG squad>>>>>>>>>>>& gt;>rifle squad) and the fact that America is a democracy and thus much more sensitive to casualties.

Yes the Russians were facing a man power shortage, but so were the western allies. If anything we are luky that even Stalin was exhausted by the blood shed and he didnt decide to roll over the western allies with his vast armour and artilery formations.

[MrMon]

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Fighting the Soviet Union was inevitable.


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No, it wasn't. Or, at least, it shouldn't have been. Why re-stage the Napoleonic catastrophy?


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You need to study the war a little more deeply and understand the idea of Lebensraum. All of the Western European campaign was just to clear the decks to fight the Soviet Union and claim Lebensraum. The fact that Germany didn't finish the job meant that the Russian campaign was probably doomed from the start, but nearly succeeded anyway.

Still the definitive single-volume book on WWII:



Any serious student of the war needs to read this book, or you aren't a serious student. Not an easy read, it's a very dense 920 pages plus another 250 pages of bibliography, endnotes and index, it looks at the war from a strategic level and contains a lot of new research.

[Borodog]

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If Roosevelt had not died, you can bet your ass that is exactly what would have happened. Except he would have arranged it so that it appeared that Stalin had attacked us.


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This just simply is not true. Attacking Russia was never an option. You are suggesting to prevent the East from being communist we should have lost many more millions of lives to do this?

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I'm not suggesting this at all. Stop reading what you want to read and start reading what people actually write.

I'm suggesting that Roosevelt's horrible understanding of economics would have driven him to perpetuate the war, just as it drove him to maneuver the United States into it (in both theaters) in the first place. He couldn't very well attack Britain or the recently "liberated" Europe; Japan and (half) of Germany were already under US monetary imperial control. That left The Soviet Union as an easy target for the next holy war to make the world "safe" for democracy. All Roosevelt would have needed was a trumped up pretext to attack, much like he created with Japan and Germany.

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We did not have the atomic bomb until after Germany was defeated. We certainly would have used it on them if we had. You do know that America was desperate to end the war? That's why we were negotiating with Stalin in the first place. I can't believe you would suggest that we should have lost maybe 5 million+ people to defeat communism. First of all we didn't know what the result of communism would be... i.e. from the 50-80s.

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Americans were desperate to end the war; Roosevelt was not. He believed he needed the war to either mitigate or camouflage his Neverending Depression.

And yes, people with an understanding of economics knew exactly what the results of communism would be. Mises explained what the result would be in the early 1920s (and it was perfectly illustrated as Lenin reduced the country to the Stone Age in less than five years during the period of "War Communism", 1917-1921; only a return to limited private property and limited economic calculation using external world market prices saved the Soviet Union from dying in infancy), along with being one of only a handful of economists who correctly predicted the Great Depression.

And not throwing hundreds of millions of people to the depredations of communism is not the same thing as invading the Soviet Union. You act like it's an either-or scenario.

[The once and future king]

Borodog, your hypothesis goes agaisnt the well documented historical record.

Churchill, who as he was a truely great man, could see the threat to Europe of Stalins conquests in the East. He kept urging Rosevelt to allow the western Allies to drive to Berlin and pentrate eastwards as much as possible so that these areas would fall under the influence of the western powers. Rosevelt kept fobbing him of and would never allow Eisenerhower to plan for pentrations into zones markated for soviet occupation, Rosevelt allways seemed utra keen to appease Stalin and believed Stalin whan he said he would allow Poland et al autonomy after the war was over.

There is no evidence whats so ever to suggest that Rosevelt wanted war with Stalin, quite the opposite.