Interesting animation of German invasion of Soviet Union…

@jim010:

Good analysis. +1 to you.

Had the Germans had these, though, it would be hard to say what they would match up against.  Britain and France would have ships to counter these.  Instead of being an answer to the Deutschland class, they would have had to have built answers to the more powerful Mackensens.  The KGV very likely would have had 15 guns rather than 14s.Â

Very hard to figure out what France and Britain would have responded with.  And in turn, whatever the French did would influence the Italians.  My guess is you would have seen a much more aggressive battleship race between the major powers.  The super battleships planed by everyone probably would have materialized sooner.

Well said.

@abworsham4

I think there are two possible problems with this strategy:

Firstly, whilst it would have been indeed much easier to produce, could Germany have produced enough of them to match Soviet production with Western Allied bombing and fighting in North Africa and later in France and Italy? At least Germany would have a qualitative advantage due to crew training.

Secondly, could Germany hypothetically had enough manpower to equip those tanks? I admit this is a lesser problem, as I would favour having one tank than 3-6 infantrymen.

@221B:

I had to vote other as I think a good proximity fuse ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze )could have made a tremendous difference in the naval battles the Japanese lost.  It certainly made a difference for the Americans.

There is no doubt that Japanese Anti Aircraft were the poorest of the major nations of WW2. Only Rabaul had any success in air defense, and this was due to the massive amount of Allied bombing missions on that target and the practice the Japanese gunners gained. Rabaul would claim 500 aircraft, mostly singing engine bombers.

The Japanese would use several warship superstructures that were sunk to create " flak towers".

The allies who cleared the sky’s of the south pacific of Japanese planes and bombed at will anything desired dreadful hated missions to bomb Rabaul.

@Imperious:

For a few days, then we clobbered them. Italy not so much.

The terrain of ITALY is very difficult do not forget…  AND  the forces deployed there were serverly short of supplies and new troops due to the build up for OverLord.

Where can I buy a pair of U-Boots?

@finnman:

@gnasape:

Looks like an episode of “Deadliest Warrior” on Spike TV!  Someone should contact them about doing this.

Best show ever, The SS just fought the veit cong.

Good show, not great show. Had the show had this face off ( Marine Raiders vs Waffen SS) it could hold the title: great show.

I haven’t gotten to “Day of Battle” yet, I am just finishing up “An Army at Dawn.”  With the template he uses, he gathers a lot of personal journal entries and witness accounts. So I think it would be fair to say that there will be a high probability that he will shed some light on Italian battle plans he may have had.  I know he goes in depth about Operation Husky which would be a given. Even if there is not that much substantial info about that specific topic, I would still suggest buying and reading the books.  Its probably one of the best historical war narratives I have ever read.

No, The back half of russia is much like Alaska, a frozen wasteland. It would take them forever to get troops north of manchuria, and supplying them would be nearly impossible. There werent any natural resource up there so the japanese had no interest in “capturing” (if you can even call it that) north russia. It would be smarter to send troops into china or inda, where the resources were.