At what point did German defeat in WW2 become inevitable?

[Mr. Harley]

Reference how the Nazis acted when they occupied an area (versus the Wehrmacht) here is a study from 1952 by the US army). It confirms what the posters have been discussing about how garrisoning the Soviet Union would have eaten up German personnel.

https://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/books/WWII/20240/20-240c.htm

Reference logistics, it's not just supplies. You have the problem, and I just lost the link, of the huge variation in vehicle models that the Germans had. One example - of course it's going to be extreme - given was a Panzer Grenadier division, in 1944 I believe, that had 96 different vehicles. Both the US and Soviets had many fewer types, and also tried to guarantee standardization between models whenever possible. The German logistical system for spare parts had become a nightmare.

The supply side of logistics was a major problem. The article I took that from was published from a symposium at the US War College (I love half-price books, a really nice used book chain in Ohio and some other states). The Nazis and Japanese both tened to view logistics as the realm for second-string generals, with the result that many of the combat generals had minimal experience with the actual workings and limitations of logistics.

The US between the wars had been the opposite - no matter who you were, you got rotated into almost every staff position. Thus most US Generals had familiarity with training, logistics, and sometimes even construction as well as command. I once read an interesting commentary that critisized Rommel for making poor use of what he received logistically. It was by a Brit, and it was an interesting viewpoint. He apparently had it well documented, and the gist of it was that Rommel really didn't do that good a job stretching the supplies he received. Of course it was a comparison to the British desert comanders before the US supplies kicked in, so there was a little bias there.

Reference the Nazi pause during the invasion of France - look at the maps. www.onwar.com/maps/wwii/blitz/ It's been well documented they had to pause because tanks and other vehicles were simply wearing out. If the French and British armies had not already been routed, that could have been a disaster. In fact one of the things the German tank commanders commented on that they wanted, in 1944, were tanks that could keep running after 100 kilometeres like the Americans. The victory against the French meant that the Wehrmacht did not examine seriously the major problems that had cropped up. If those had been dealt with, then the Russian Campain of 1941 may have gone differently.

[David Floyd]

DS,

The Second Panzer Corp and the SS Panzer Division Liebstandarde Adolph Hitler were police units? Dang hommie! I don't want to be caught loitering in your neighborhood if that's what you call the police! Actually of the units posted in Yugoslavia in mid-1943 ten of the division were armored, standard infantry or mountain.

Yes, but 2nd SS Panzer Corps and the Liebstandarde were not tied down in 1944 by partisans, but by Hitler's need to repress the revolt of the Slovaks. Was it overkill? Yes, it was, but it did get the job done.

[Mr. Harley]

The obsolescence of the Stuka has been commented on by mulitple writers, here's one example from www.vectorsite.net/avstuka.html. It had virtually no combat survivability by 1940 except under cases of total air supremecy.

* During the invasion of France in May 1940, the Stuka proved as terrifying as it had in Poland, helping to bring about the quick collapse of French resistance. However, this was the high tide of the Stuka. During the Battle of Britain over the summer of 1940, the Ju-87 proved far too vulnerable to British Royal Air Force (RAF) fighters. One out of five Stukas was shot down and the type was withdrawn from the effort on 19 August 1940. There had been a faction in the Luftwaffe that had recognized even before the outbreak of war that the Stuka was an obsolescent aircraft and likely to suffer heavily in the face of effective air opposition. Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, had sided with the advocated of the Stuka, but now the beliefs of the doubters were starting to prove justified. The writing was on the wall for the Ju-87, but its career was far from over.

[Straybow]

Yeah, like I said, Stuka was a pure ground attack craft, useless and defenseless against other aircraft. That isn't a problem when it is used in its intended role.

[Alexander's Horse]

Originally posted by techumseh


At the time of the Normandy landings, the Yugoslav partisans were holding down more German divisions than 2 Allied armies in Italy.

The units in Yugoslavia were seriously understrength and mostly second rate, some recruited locally.

The same was true in France.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Straybow
Yeah, like I said, Stuka was a pure ground attack craft, useless and defenseless against other aircraft. That isn't a problem when it is used in its intended role.

When you have air supremacy it isn't a problem. When you don't it's a big problem. For the Germans the big problem started after Poland.

[Mr. Harley]

Look at the two successful compatriots of the Stuka - the Sturmovik and the Dauntless. Both had much better survivability in a situation of contested air superiority, IMHO (which means I'm not bothering to look up some links right now).

Yes, the Sturmovik was not a dive bomber, but it fulfilled the equivalent function on the Eastern front of being the primary tactical aircraft. Oh, heck, here's some data I just looked up. http://users.belgacom.net/aircraft/e...69.html#204549 - included at the end of the post.

These are all 1939-1940 models. However, the pure stats don't actually detail everything. The Stuka is a largely unarmored radiator-cooled engine. Not good. It makes you vulnerable to almost any hit on the radiator system, which is that big undersling intake at the front of the aircraft. Even a .30 calibre ground based machine gun can shoot this sucker down.

The Sturmovk, while also liquid cooled, has almost everything vital armored. Yes, they got shot down in appalling numbers. They were able to operate successfully even in cases where the Germans had Air Superiority. Plus, due to the arrangement of the armor, it was one of the safest aircraft, for pilot survivability, in the air.

The Dauntless whose stats looking largely similiar to the Stuka, has two major advantages. First it could use drop tanks, extending it's range. The tactical orientation of the Luftwaffe, combined with the suspicions of the Japanese and lack of interest on the German's part (Goering and Udet - look at my commentary earlier) meant that the Naziswere very late coming to that technology.

In addition the Dauntless had a radial engine. The Americans, due to the way engine development had been funded, started the war with the best radial engines, and that continued throughout. Some of the successful German radial engines were in fact copies/improvement on those. The radial engine can take a direct hit and keep running. It has the most survivability of any aviation engine ever designed, due to both the air-cooling and it's ability to keep running with multiple pistons damaged.

This is why simply "reading statisitics" can be very deadly to understanding the finer points to victory and defeat. I started off that way many years ago, but often it is the personalities, internal processes (the US Navy probably had the best design bureaus in the world), tactics, operations, and strategy. That's why I commented about the Nazis, or the Hitler state. It hijacked the German government due to one not-so-small loophole (government by decree in case of an emergency) and permitted a group of morons to hijack the apparatus of the state. The allies could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory - look at Stalin destroying his upper command structure in 1939 - but it was their's to lose, not Hitler's to gain.




JU-87B Stuka
Various
Crew: 2
Span: 13.80 meters
Length: 11.10 meters
Height: 3.90 meters
Wing surface: 31.90 sq m.
Wing load: 133 kg/sq m
Weight empty: 2 750 kg
Weight loaded: 4 250 kg


Propulsion
Engine: Junkers Jumo 211Da
Power (total): 1 200 HP
Specific power: 282 HP / ton
Maximum speed: 390 kph
Service ceiling: 8 000 meters
Range: 600 km
Armament
1 MG 15 machine gun
2 MG 17 machine guns
1 250 kg (551-lbs) bomb
4 50 kg (110-lbs) bombs

The bomb load could be altered according to the mission. If the plane carried a 500 kg bomb instead of the 250 kg one, it took no lighter bombs

Il-2 'Sturmovik'
Miscellaneous
Crew: 1
Span: 14.64 meters
Length: 11.60 meters
Height: 3.39 meters
Wing surface: 38.51 sq m.
Wing load: 139 kg/sq m
Weight empty: 3 800 kg
Weight loaded: 5 335 kg

Propulsion
Power (total): 1 300 HP
Specific power: 244 HP / tonne
Maximum speed: 450 kph

Range: 755 km
1 Mikulin AM-38 engine (1 300 HP)
Production
First flight: Saturday October 12, 1940

Armament
400 kg of bombs
2 x 20mm ShVAK guns
2 x 7.62mm ShKAS machine guns

SBD 'Dauntless'
Various
Crew: 2
Span: 12.65 meters
Length: 10.06 meters
Height: 3.94 meters
Weight empty: 2 970 kg
Weight loaded: 4 320 kg


Propulsion
Engine: Wright R-1820-32 'Cyclone'
Power (total): 1 000 HP
Specific power: 231 HP / ton
Maximum speed: 406 kph
Initial climb: 457 m/min.
Service ceiling: 7 400 meters
Range: 730 km
Production
From: at the end of 1940
Quantity: 57 examples


Armament
1 .50 Browning M2 machine gun
1 .30 Browning M2 machine gun
1 454 kg (1000-lbs) bomb
2 45 kg (100-lbs) bombs

[Alexander's Horse]

Comparisons of military machines from the early part of the war with those from later aren't very good. Its like comparing apples and oranges.

The stuka was a devastating ground attack weapon up until about 1943. Its major strength was accuracy, which also made it very effective against shipping. Early in the war, 1939 to 40, it had a terror role and did as much damage spreading chaos and fear with its air siren i.e. paralysing ground transport/refugee columns/demoralising enemy troops.

Its survivability in air combat was not good compared to later armoured aircraft but that was not uncommon for early war aircraft - the zero was similarly weak. However unlike the zero dogfighting was not its primary task and the stuka could evade air patrols much better than bombers. The decision in 1940 that stukas should avoid air combat prolonged its effective life.

Once the allies air superiority reached saturation however, the stuka's days were over.

[Mr. Harley]

AH - that's why I chose the 1940 variants of the Dauntless and Sturmovik. That is only one year into the war, and their respective countries are not even at war yet. The data is for the 1939 Stuka, and it and the Sturmovik started design work only one year apart The Dauntless first flew in July 1938, the same year as the Stuka . All three of these aircraft dated from 1938-1939, just the decision to put them into mass production differed because neither the US nor the Soviet Union are at war at the time.

The Dauntless was easily as accurate as the Stuka. The Sturmovik may have been less so, but the decision to deploy it with cannons made it even more useful in the context it was deployed. Both were more survivable, due to the added armor in the Sturmovick's case, or the use of a radial engine in the Dauntless case.

However, that's not my primary point. You make mine for me. By 1943 the Nazis should have had a new dive bomber being deployed. Fixed wheels for pities sake! They also should have been replacing the ME109 (Galland's opinion, not mine). This is to a large degree due to Goering and Udet, plus injudicious meddling by Hitler himself. Technical interference by the Nazi heirarchy, which held technical competence in contempt, almost always caused a f**k up. You can find me some isolated exceptions - France 1940 and the attempted deployment of a 50MM gun on the PZIII prior to Barbarossa - but in general whenever they meddled the screwed it up.

Remember, the Nazis were relying on the older scientists and engineers. Once they took over enrollment in the gymnasiums in those fields was cut roughly in half, and many industrialists complained about the lack of graduates interfering with their efforts. Plus favored industrialists got the design awards, if at times they did not have the best work. They got them due to connections.

I still stand by my premise, WW2 was the allies to lose, not the Nazis to win. The common mistake so many make in these hypothetical scenarios is to let the Nazis redo their mistakes (it plageus advocates of the Confederates in the US Civil War, also) but not the other side. In certain cases defeat is inevitable, as in Japan versus the United States. With the Nazis you can come up with plausible scenarios, but they require the Nazis not to act like, well, Nazis. The person who posted about shooting Hitler earlier in the thread has the most practical solution - I would choose sometime after the absorbtion of the Sudenten land and prior to Barbarossa. Then that invasion can be stopped, and I suspect that the Brits may be willing to negotiate.

[Alexander's Horse]

I said summer of 1942 for inevitable defeat. To be more precise, when Hitler took personal command of the army, as well as some commands in Russia below that level, it was all over red rover.

With Hitler in charge of the army and Goering in charge of the air force, Germany didn't stand a chance.

[David Floyd]

But even without that, German defeat was absolutely inevitable once the US entered the war.

[Ted Striker]

Yeah but fixed wheels looked cooler!

Very informative post shawn.

[Alexander's Horse]

Originally posted by David Floyd
But even without that, German defeat was absolutely inevitable once the US entered the war.

Not really. Defeating Russia was the key. Either that or avoiding war in the East and defeating Britain.

You can wargame either scenario with any number of military sims. If Germany wins in the East they can keep the Western allies at bay quite easily.

The joker is nukes, which Germany may or may not have developed. In either case the most likely outcome is negotiated settlement leaving Germany dominant in Europe i.e. they win.

[Sikander]

It's interesting that the U.S. never really bought into the idea of a air support bomber during the war. Sure, there was the A-20 and its variants and some medium bomber variants like the A-26 but these never really hit full stride in deployment. Fortunately the fighter-bomber concept was successful.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Alexander's Horse


Not really. Defeating Russia was the key. Either that or avoiding war in the East and defeating Britain.

You can wargame either scenario with any number of military sims. If Germany wins in the East they can keep the Western allies at bay quite easily.

The joker is nukes, which Germany may or may not have developed. In either case the most likely outcome is negotiated settlement leaving Germany dominant in Europe i.e. they win.

It depends on the relative will to continue the war. The U.S. never hit its peak potential of forces during the war, and was already gearing down during the last year or so. Assuming that Germany could have for the most part won the war against the Soviets in 1942, they will have already hit their peak or very nearly so, and would have enormous territories to control. If the Anglo-Allies had the will to continue then I think they prevail in time. Germany had no offensive capability to take them out and was unlikely to develop one no matter how long the war dragged on. The question then becomes: Can the Anglo-Allies develop a powerful enough land force to defeat the Germans?