What was the biggest mistake made during WWII?

[ChipWrecked]

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate military production centers, set in valleys ringed by mountains that helped reflect the shock back onto the target. The targets were carefully chosen. I have no problem there.

Kyoto was specifically spared bombing by the Allies because of its cultural significance.

Western Allies: appeasing Stalin by agreeing to the division of Europe, thus setting the stage for WWIII, the Cold War. What leverage did Uncle Joe have if Roosevelt and Churchill had told him to go [censored] in his hat?

Axis: Pretty much what Once and Future King said, and I never thought I would ever agree with him. Had Hitler concentrated on bombing the English production centers in the North, rather than terrifying civilians in London, he might have been able to take the British Isles depriving the Allies of their invasion base.

[Mason Malmuth]

Hi shaundeeb:

I think you can argue the opposite. Atomic bombs would have developed anyway and the prior usuage has alerted the world to their destructive power and horror making many countries reluctant to use them again.

Best wishes,
mason

[MrMon]

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Western Allies: appeasing Stalin by agreeing to the division of Europe, thus setting the stage for WWIII, the Cold War. What leverage did Uncle Joe have if Roosevelt and Churchill had told him to go [censored] in his hat?


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Only the battle-hardened Russian Army, which was quite a bit larger than the U.S. and British Armies in Europe.

[Utah]

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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.

[/ QUOTE ]Interesting. I am curious as to why the Germans would declare war at that point. There must have been a strategic reason, even if greatly flawed.

[suzzer99]

More threads like this please. [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img]

[ChipWrecked]

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Western Allies: appeasing Stalin by agreeing to the division of Europe, thus setting the stage for WWIII, the Cold War. What leverage did Uncle Joe have if Roosevelt and Churchill had told him to go [censored] in his hat?


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Only the battle-hardened Russian Army, which was quite a bit larger than the U.S. and British Armies in Europe.

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And had already suffered over ten million in losses. How far would they have come if the Western Allies hadn't stopped their eastward push at the Elbe and waited for the Russians to take Berlin?

[Duke]

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Japan tried to surrender both before the first bomb and before the second, America ignored them because they needed to test their new weaponery.


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Do you have a source for this ridiculous statement? I'm pretty sure the US made it clear from the getgo that only unconditional surrender would be accepted and the feelers the Japanese sent out prior to/after Hiroshima had conditions that were unacceptable.

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Just what I recall from taking high school history, I think the first surrender didn't meet America's demands but the one after Hiroshima was unconditional and American still dropped the second bomb. I'll check wikipedia.

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Well at least you'll get straightened out now. I'm guessing that your high school history teacher had some agendas and/or political affiliations that would induce them to make up some stuff.

Though I guess a kid might have a tough time seeing that a conditional surrender negotiation is virtually always a ploy to buy time and strike harder. It's a tactic, not a peace making gesture. Japan wasn't a happy go lucky empire at that point in history.

I actually wonder if things would have changed if they told them exactly what they were going to do (maybe in the leaflets dropped pre-Hiroshima). I doubt they'd have believed the claims any more than the threats that were given.

~D

[Cyrus]

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My candidate would be Germany declaring war on the United States the day after Pearl Harbor.

[/ QUOTE ]Interesting. I am curious as to why the Germans would declare war at that point. There must have been a strategic reason, even if greatly flawed.

[/ QUOTE ]"In the spring of 1940, Germany overran Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and France with ridiculous ease. ... Only Britain was left at war with Germany, under a coalition of all national forces, headed by Winston Churchill, based on a total refusal to come to any kind of terms with Hitler. ... For practical purposes, the war in Europe was over. Even if Germany could not invade Britain because of the dual obstacle of the sea and the Royal Air Force, there was no foreseeable war in which Britian could return to the Continent, let alone defeat Germany" pp.38-39

"The war was revived by Hitler's invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941, the decisive date in Second World War; an invasion so senseless -for it committed Germany to a war in two fronts- that Stalin would simply not believe that Hitler would contemplate it." p.39

"Once the Russian war had not been dcided within three months, as Hitler had expected, Germany was lost, since it was neither equipped for now could sustain a long war. In spite of its triumphs, it had, and produced, far fewer aircraft and tanks than even Britain and Russia without the USA." [emphasis added] p.40

"But for Pearl Harbour, and Hitler's declaration of war, the USA would almost certainly have continued to stay out of theSecond World War. It is not clear under what circumstances it could have come in." p. 151

"Winston Churchill was right when he confidently claimed after Pearl Harbor [on 7 December 1941] that victory by 'the proper application of overwhelming force' was certain". p.42

"The decisions to invade Russia and to declare war against the USA decided the result of the Second World War." p.41

All the above are from Eric Hobsbawm's marvelous "Age Of Extremes", Abacus, 1995.

* * *

So, it looks to me rather like a tie, whereby each mistake alone would have probably decided the course of war (adversely) for Germany. Still, I'd pick Hitler's Russian folly over his American folly, if only by a bit.

That's because I believe that a one-front, western-front war for Germany and its allies in Europe (and they had a lot at the time!) would be an extremely hard bargain for the British-American alliance to overcome. If Hitler had kept his cool in 1941 and leave the "ideological" settling of accounts with the bolsheviks for after his final victory in the West, he could have possibly faced off the British-American alliance. An alliance which crucially, to repeat Hobsbawm, had absolutely no military foothold on the Continent. (Only the Russians were in Europe.)

--Cyrus

[Cyrus]

In all this, of course, there is the matter of the race for atomic weapons. The question about who would win the War boils down, conceivably, to who would invent the bomb first - and retain a capacity to use it, of course. (An atom bomb prepared by the Nazis when the Soviets were outside Berlin would've been of little use.)

What can be claimed, with a high degree of certainty, is that the Americans, if they had found themselves without the Soviet Union in the Anti-Nazi camp, would have pursued the Manhattan Project with the same, if not an increased, urgency.

Of course, one could speculate that Hitler's resources would have concentrated more on the research, design and production of new weapons, not having to worry about a second front in Soviet Asia! And we've seen that such weapons were indeed been manufactured and used by the Germans, eg jet airfighters, V-1 & V-2 rockets.

Still, if we accept that the introduction of atomic weaponry on the scene of WWII would decide its outcome, it looks like the USA would have been the first in either scenario, i.e. whether Hitler had chosen to declare war on the USA, or to the USSR. And if the USA had discovered the atomic bomb but were not in war against Germany, it might be conceivable that the American leadership would have found it politically impossible to start atom-bombing Germany in 1945, a nation with which it is not at war.

So, the atomic weaponry factor, even with some of the complications * arising from including it, tilts the balance towards making the declaration of war against the USA Hitler's bigger folly of the two.

--Cyrus

* What kind of war situation, what kind of world would we have in 1945, the year America gets the bomb, if war between Germany and America had not been declared? Germany would be tied to a two-front war but the western front would have been virtually non-existent; Germany had won it there. So Germany would obviously throw everything it had against the bolsheviks (we're in the Russia foly scenario) and could have possibly, if not defeated, at least contained the USSR beyond its European soil, maybe beyond the Urals. And Stalin the arch-pragmatist, a leader without the convictions of a Churchill or a De Gaulle, would have probably sued for peace. (Viz. Hobsbawm, p.40)

[Cyrus]

I comment on Hitler's strategic mistakes that decided World War II elsewhere in this thread. But there is one major tactical blunder that had decisive consequences for the outcome of World War II: the failure of Hitler to finish off the British expeditionary force in 1940 and allow it to escape from Dunkirk.

One has to truly understand the political and cultural situating in western Europe in the 1920s and 30s to see the consequences of a British catastrophe in Dunkirk.

Briefly, the chief factor in the western democracies explicit unwillingness to confront Hitler and Nazi Germany sooner rather than later (appeasement, Munich 1938, etc) was due not to some weird defeatism (a standard claim by ignoramuses, particularly those who are supporters of pre-emptive war in general -- broad hint [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]). Rather it was the overwhelming and still fresh trauma of World War One. I'll cede the floor to Hobsbawm again (p.153): [ QUOTE ]

"Governments, and particularly, the French and the British, had also been indelibly scarred by the Great War. France had emerged from it bled white, and still potentially a smaller and weaker power than a defeated Germany. France was nothing without allies against a revived Germany and the only European countries which had an equal interest in allying with France, Poland and the Habsburg succession states, were plainly too weak for that purpose.
Britain was equally conscious of fundamental weakness. Financially, the British could not afford another war. Strategically, they no longer had a navy capable of simultaneous operating in the three great oceans and the Mediterranean. The problem that really worried them was not what happened in Europe but how to hold together, with patently insufficient forces, a global empire geographically larger than ever before."

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So, a devastating defeat with a large loss of life in Dunkirk would have quite possibly strengthened the "pragmatists' " influence in Britain, to the effect that they would have entertained the idea of agreeing with Hitler with the objective of gettin out of that undesired war with fewer imperial possessions (Germany would want a lot of Africa and Middle East) but intact as a European power, if not a world power still *.

When Hitler stumbled at Dunkirk** he offered his only remaining enemies in Europe, the British, significant, possibly vital breathing space.

--Cyrus

* An outcome highly desirous by Hitler too, as all sources from his intimate circle confirm. Hitler admired the British, in principle, and did not have as his aim to destroy Great Britain nor to take away all its imperial possessions.

** Guderian was first incredulous and then furious when he received orders to halt and divert his panzers. He must've contemplated ignoring the orders under some pretext or other but in the end the professionalism of the German officer must've won out. There is nothing in his memoir suggesting that Guderian would undertake such an "adventure" but since he was a brilliant general and knew that the capabilities of the German Air Force were exaggerated by the likes of Goering, the thought must've been entertained.