@SuperbattleshipYamato hard to argue against any of this really. The IJN was so far gone by this point in the war that there’s not really much they could have done to salvage their situation one way or another. The bit about the allies not having many LSTs in general is something I never knew before though.
What if
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@aequitas:
The Allies didn’t pull off Overlord all by them self, it was an inside job.
We all know that.Either you’ve lost it, or you are insisting that the German Army “let” the Americans and the British into France.
Sources please (yes, multiple sources from different places/people), or I’m just going to assume that you’re straight up trolling.
-Midnight_Reaper
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@aequitas:
The Allies didn’t pull off Overlord all by them self, it was an inside job.
We all know that.Either you’ve lost it, or you are insisting that the German Army “let” the Americans and the British into France.
Sources please (yes, multiple sources from different places/people), or I’m just going to assume that you’re straight up trolling.
-Midnight_Reaper
I will not provide a single extra source except the sources that are allready given.
Just use your common sense for a minute and tell me/us that D-day happend exactly as History tells us it happend.
If you don’t have a shadow of a doubt.
Then we agree to disagree.Ask your self these Q: why said Eisenhower that casualties were more then the expected?
- Check out Hans Speidel biography
- Check out Dolchstosslegende
There are many more but you need to dig for yourself and have the courage to ask the right questions.
Do you Honestly think each single German soldier was a pro Nazi or Nazi at all?
Do you really think that the Allies could have done the job on d-day by them selfs? -
D-Day was June 1944. So was Bagration. By that time the Russians had already beat them at Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and a hundred other places.
The USSR defeated Nazi Germany. They would have won with or without the UK or USA.
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@aequitas:
The Allies didn’t pull off Overlord all by them self, it was an inside job.
“The Allies didn’t pull off Overlord all by them self, it was an inside job” is a little vague, and I’m having trouble understanding precisely what this is meant to imply. “Inside job” presumably refers to the German side, and probably more specifically to senior political and/or military leadership of Nazi Germany, which is what I’m going to assume; if you mean somthing else, could you clarify what you’re refering to?
If the theory being proposed here is that the success or failure of the D-Day invasion depended entirely, or even to a significant degree, on conspiratorial machinations by anti-Nazi elements within Germany itself, I have trouble buying that argument. Were there such anti-Nazi elements within Germany itself? Of course there were, and that’s no secret; to pick just the most famous example, the almost-successful plot of July 20, 1944, to assassinate Hitler and stage a coup d’etat has been the subject of many books and movies (including a 2008 one starring Tom Cruise, for goodness sake). And it’s likewise no secret that the German units manning the Atlantic Wall on D-Day included foreign conscripts of dubious quality or loyalty; as I recall, Cornelius Ryan mentions this in his book The Longest Day, which came out in the late 1950s. There’s also nothing improbable about the notion that, on D-Day itself, there some German officers and some German soldiers who privately hoped that the Allied landings would be successful and who, perhaps, even tried to gum up the German response in minor ways that weren’t too obvious (in order to avoid detection and, most likely, summary trial and execution). It’s quite a stretch, however, to extrapolate these things into the theory (if that’s what’s being implied) that they were the decisive factors in the ultimate success of Overlord – or even further, the theory that Overlord was primarily a German anti-Nazi operation rather than an Allied military operation. In my opinion, the most significant contributions made by the Germans to the success of D-Day were the contributions they made through various strategic and tactical errors, compounded by such factors as (for example) the dysfunctional command structure which prevented German’s panzer reserves from being released without the express authorization of Hitler.
The “Dolchstosslegende” mentioned in your later post, by the way, is very puzzling because it has nothing to do with D-Day or even with WWII. It’s a reference to the post-WWI German popular theory (Hitler was quite fond of it) that Germany wasn’t really defeated militarily in WWI, but rather was “stabbed in the back” by traitorous senior German politicians. And note that “Dolchstosslegende” translates as “back-stab legend”, which is in line with the conventional view that this is a mythological interpretation of why Germany lost WWI.
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I suppose that the real battle in the trenches is between those of us who have taken the time to validate an earnest and self-explanatory flow of narrative history based on actual events and facts
And those who think that whatever they make up based on reading a few, general articles about something counts as history.
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Guys stop feeding the troll, anyone who even remotely takes themselves serious about WWII wouldn’t argue those dumb points about Overlord.
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Everybody should cool down.
Maybe ya’ll should reread the Headline of this Topic? :?Looks like some of you are really quick with judging someone.
It’s a what if topic.
But if some of you guys are interested in "Was d-day an inside job " , i would go ahead and do some research on Equivalent english reading sources.
I personally have doubts and struggle with the thought about d-day.
But that is simply me.CWO Marc Thank you for being fair and contribute your thoughts to the points i raised in this topic and behaving like a gentlemen.
I would never expect less from you and your knowledge on WWII related topics is allways welcome.Taamvan, you are right.
There is still a those who stand on top of the trench and telling those in the trench:
You won’t find war down there, it is here so come up :wink: :-P -
I know this won’t end debate on the original question - Could the UK and USSR have defeated Germany without the US? - but I’m curious: Has anyone tried playing G40 with the US as a strict neutral, thus taking America out of the war? With modified rules (Allies don’t surrender IPCs & can still purchase units/collect income when their capitals are captured, for example), it might be an interesting exercise.
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In the US and UK historiography The “Dolch/” story is renown as a piece of nationalist apologism and abject denial of the actual conduct of Imperial Germany. To apply it further to the period after the Freikorps is going to sound unusual to anyone who understands the myth, because it essential says that Germany was defeated by seditious forces within, rather than the truth, which is that they were defeated by their own incompetence and folly.
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Could the UK and USSR have defeated Germany without the US?
No. No without the bombers, no without the convoy escorts, no without the moral support, and especially no without the material support we term “Lend Lease”
Has anyone tried playing G40 with the US as a strict neutral, thus taking America out of the war?
This is every game. If you mean America never has a forced entry into the war, then why would it even be depicted, just leave it blank. In that case, the Axis win every game. The dynamics of the game are too structured to make big picture changes like that unless you completely re-imagine the two sides, and if you do that, the dynamics of the movement and the open are ruined because former enemies are next to each other. The USA in the Global game is the lynchpin of the Allied war effort and strategy.
You can switch France to Axis and Italy to Allies, that would work pretty well I think.
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Could the UK and USSR have defeated Germany without the US?
This is every game. If you mean America never has a forced entry into the war, then why would it even be depicted, just leave it blank.
What I’m suggesting is an extension of the Monroe Doctrine: The US remains a strict neutral unless any Axis power attacks a territory (or adjacent sea zone) in the Americas or any American-controlled territory in the Pacific. The US would continue to purchase units, do noncombat movement and collect income, but that’s it. Combined with the previously-mentioned rule mod, that would allow the UK government to flee to Canada when Sea Lion comes and in effect enjoy American protection whilst continuing the fight against the Axis.
Victory conditions might need adjusting, but it could be fun/interesting…or just the quickest game of G40 you’ll ever play. :-D
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Why would they attack it? I don’t think I understand your proposal from the point of view that you have 2 weak and 3 pathetic teams up against 2 strong enemies and 1 weak one so there would no balance in that game or any point in depicting the USA because the only time to attack it would be after you defeat the weak enemies one by one (there is no strong ally at all in your proposal…)
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Actually in G40, since the scale is so far off that you can argue that G40 technically has nothing to do with WWII that if you removed the US from game play, it would be very easy for Italy and Germany to gain naval supremacy over the Allies.
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Why would they attack it? I don’t think I understand your proposal from the point of view that you have 2 weak and 3 pathetic teams up against 2 strong enemies and 1 weak one so there would no balance in that game or any point in depicting the USA because the only time to attack it would be after you defeat the weak enemies one by one (there is no strong ally at all in your proposal…)
Off the top of my head, the only reason to provoke the US would be to finish off the British, who would (in event of Sea Lion) be operating out of Canada. Like I said, victory conditions would need to be adjusted to give the Allies a fighting chance, but it could be interesting.
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@CWO:
@aequitas:
The Allies didn’t pull off Overlord all by them self, it was an inside job.
“The Allies didn’t pull off Overlord all by them self, it was an inside job” is a little vague, and I’m having trouble understanding precisely what this is meant to imply. “Inside job” presumably refers to the German side, and probably more specifically to senior political and/or military leadership of Nazi Germany, which is what I’m going to assume; if you mean somthing else, could you clarify what you’re refering to?
Correct CWO Marc
@CWO:@aequitas:
The Allies didn’t pull off Overlord all by them self, it was an inside job.
If the theory being proposed here is that the success or failure of the D-Day invasion depended entirely, or even to a significant degree, on conspiratorial machinations by anti-Nazi elements within Germany itself, I have trouble buying that argument.
No Problem. It is not just something you simply agree to bc it sounds better or easier to justify something.
But forgive me when i say that i have trouble buying that the whole D-Day depended on A.H.s decision wheter or wether not getting the Reserves freed.
The Germans knew precisley an Invasion was to come and where.
Only the exact time when it should happend was known 48hrs before landing.
So the big Q is?
Why in the World would high ranking officers send parts in the opposite direction?
We know from what we’ve been told that they expected it maybe in Pas de Palais, but the Ftr’s had been sent east.
Optical devices were never send to the Artillery stations.
Ammo has been send elsewhere, reconmission Briefings dissapeard and so on….
Nothing of wich the Allies had any influence on. Not even the Resistance wich had German spys in there groups who reported to the 1c’s and the Gestapo…
The list continues… -
Thanks aequitas et veritas for your post which outlines in more detail the various points about D-Day which you feel suggest that its outcome was significantly influenced by German officers who wanted the Allied invasion to succeeed. For whatever it’s worth, here are a few comments on some of those points.
But forgive me when i say that i have trouble buying that the whole D-Day depended on A.H.s decision wheter or wether not getting the Reserves freed. <<
The whole outcome of D-Day didn’t depend on that factor. I mentioned in my previous post that it was a contributing factor, within a context of other strategic and tactical failures, but I wasn’t trying to imply that it was the single decisive factor and I apologize if I somehow gave that impression.
The matter of the Panzer reserves is actually one element of a much larger disagreement that existed within the German high command in the months leading up to D-Day – specifically, a disagreement between the Commander-in-Chief West (von Rundstedt) and Rommel. In von Rundstedt’s opinion, the correct way to handle the anticipated Allied invasion of western Europe was to have a thin defense on the coastline itself, and to keep the bulk of Germany’s forces held back as a mobile reserve. His rationale was it was foolish to deploy most of Germany’s forces on the Atlantic Wall, in static positions, because this violated the principle of concentration of force: regardless of where the Allies landed, only a fraction of Germany’s forces would be in the right place to fight them and the rest of Germany’s forces would be sitting uselessly on the wrong part of the front. The Germans beat the French in the Maginot Line in 1940 for pretty much the same reason. Rommel disagreed with von Rundstedt’s analysis. In Rommel’s opinion, the fatal flaw with the concept of keeping most of Germany’s forces in the rear as mobile reserves, and then sending them to the correct part of the front once the Allies had landed, was that Allied air supremacy would prevent those mobile forces from ever reaching their intended destination: they’d be attacked by day, and forced to travel only at night, which would both slow down their response and cut down their numbers. In Rommel’s opinion, the Allied invasion therefore had to be defeated on the invasion beaches themselves, head-on.
Hitler ultimately arbitrated the dispute, and he opted for a compromise solution that (like many compromises) ended up being worse than the two options by themselves. The Panzer-reserve restriction was one element of that poor compromise; it wasn’t decisive, but it added one more complication to the German response and it was a complication that Germany would have been better off not having to deal with. In any case, von Rundstedt and Rommel both turned out to be right in their own way. Rommel was right that Allied air supremacy impeded Germany’s mobile response, and von Rundstedt was right that the Atlantic Wall served to disperse Germany’s forces and that it gave the Allies the luxury of attacking the Atlantic Wall at a comparative weak point (Normandy) rather than at its strongest point (the Pas de Calais). And incidentally, even after the D-Day landings, Hitler remained convinced (for about two weeks, as I recall) that Normany was a feint and that the real attack was going to occur at the Pas-de-Calais…so if one is going to argue that a high-ranking Nazi leader can be credited for the success of D-Day, that leader would arguably be Hitler himself.
The Germans knew precisley an Invasion was to come and where.
Only the exact time when it should happend was known 48hrs before landing. <<There are interesting parallels between the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor…including, a bit oddly, the fact that both operations were the subject of big-budget motion pictures produced by Elmo Williams (The Longest Day and Tora Tora Tora). Both movies devote a good deal of time (and dramatic tension) to the fact that the intelligence services of Germany (in the case of D-Day) and the U.S. (in the case of Pearl Harbor) had picked up information strongly suggesting an imminent attack. In the case of D-Day, it was (most significantly) the two-part Verlaine poem broadcast by the BBC to the French Resistance to indicate that the invasion was going to occur in 48 hours. In the case of D-Day, it was (most significantly) the 14-part telegram to the Japanese ambassador telling him to deliver to the U. S State department Japan’s final response at precisely such-and-such an hour on such-and-such a date, and telling him to destroy the code books and cypher machines and the Japanese embassy in Washington.
I’m mentioning these points because they’ve been the source of essentially the same question in both cases:
Did Germany know exactly where and when the Allied invasion of western Europe (which was widely expected and was no secret in and of itself) would take place?
Did the U.S. know that Japan was going to attack Pearl Harbor, and would probably do it at a particular time on a particular date?
The problem in both cases is that a simple yes/no answer isn’t adequate, and that the “simple yes” answer in both cases (and especially as regards Pearl Harbor) forms the basis of conspiracy theories which basically say, “Yes, but senior leaders allowed it to happen anyway because this served their personal or political agendas.” The conventional interpretation is more nuanced, and it goes like this: Yes, some elements within the intelligence community and the military had long suspected that the attack would occur, and yes, information pinpointing the attack did get picked up soon before it happened, but that pinpointing information was “too little, too late” and it didn’t work its way up the chain of command (from the lower-level intelligence officers to the country’s senior leadership) in time to make a difference, and in any case those senior leaders weren’t convinced that the information was real and/or correct and/or urgent.
Moreover, in both cases (as far as the Allied side was concerned with regard to D-Day, and as far as the Japanese side was concerned with regard to Pearl Harbor), both operations were treated with a high consideration for security. The Allies devoted massive resources to deception (Operation Fortitude, for example) and counter-intelligence (taking control of Germany’s spies in Britain, for example) in the two years leading up to D-Day. Germany received all sorts of reports from its agents “identifying” where D-Day would take place…and these reports pretty much all contradicted each other. Fortitude was intended to reinforce Germany’s preconceived notion (always a good strategy in deception work: making the enemy believe what he’s already predisposed to believe) that the Allies would invade in the Pas-de-Calais area, which is in fact where Germany’s strongest forces were on D-Day. Japan, rather than using deception to misdirect an an enemy about where an expected attack would occur, used the strategy of keeping their plans super-secret (such as picking a route to Hawaii far from the normal shipping lanes, and using a freighter to test it out ahead of time) in the hope that the Americans would not suspect that an attack was coming.
In other words: the conventional view is that D-Day and Pearl Harbor succeeded through a combination of good planning and good deception and/or security on the attacking side, plus various errors (including the failure to interpret or use intelligence data properly) on the side that was attacked. The non-conventional view is that D-Day and Pearl Harbor succeeded because of conspiratorial machinations by higher-ups (such as Roosevelt) on the side that was attacked.
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I would like to thank aequitas et veritas for explaining himself more thoroughly (that we might understand what he meant).
I would also like to thank CWO Marc for helping to explain the conventional answer to AeV’s “What If?”.
I would like to apologize to AeV for being harsh in my response. It seemed odd to me and I tried to call it on its oddness. I may wish to be more considerate and understanding of what I read from other’s in the future.
To everybody: Party On!
-Midnight_Reaper
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Apology accepted. You are showing greatness.
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Doubtful. The only two ways I see the war ending without the US are:
1940. Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and Poland, of course, have been conquered. Britain and France (Chamberlain is the PM at this point), sue for peace. Britain and France have to pay reparations (especially heavy reparations for France), and hand over various colonies. Plus, they have to recognize Hitler’s conquests in Europe. Possibly, the French would have to hand back Alsace- Lorraine as well. Hitler would most likely consider this to be avenging the Versailles Treaty. This results in Britain and France becoming second to Germany, but still powers to be reckoned with. Chamberlain wanted peace, so he may have grudgingly accepted Nazi occupied Norway and Holland (unlikely), and the French were desperate to save their homeland. Neither would fight alone, so they’d accept peace. Hitler would then attack the USSR, possibly with Anglo-French support.
Mid-late 1940s.
Sealion has not taken place, and the Germans have attacked the USSR. They wear each other out, but the USSR has a nearly limitless supply of men and resources. It would have been much bloodier, but eventually, the Russians would’ve gotten the upper hand, and the war would play out as it did- except that since the US never got involved in D-Day, the British were too weak to open up a second front, so most of Europe would’ve been liberated by the Russians, and therefore fallen into the Soviet bloc after the war. In fact, NATO and the Western bloc may not have existed at all, since Britain’s voice would have counted for far less in the post-war world, and Stalin would control Europe, effectively.
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