Germany to Africa, how?

@Karl7:

Why wouldn’t that have worked?  How big was the Brit garrison?  I am assuming no more than a couple thousand?

Infantry
In late 1939 the pre-war garrison was reinforced up to an infantry division (commanded by Major General Sir Sanford John Palairet Scobell).[13] The original infantry garrison, plus the three brigades that reinforced the island’s regular British Army were title 1, 2, 3, and 4 Brigades; but were subsequently renumbered in 1943 as follows:[14]

231 Infantry Brigade – assigned to the Southern Sector under Brig L H Cox. HQ Southern Infantry Brigade at Luqa. Its infantry battalions were:
2nd Battalion The Devonshire Regiment
1st Battalion The Hampshire Regiment
1st Battalion The Dorsetshire Regiment
2nd Battalion The King’s Own Malta Regiment
3rd Battalion The King’s Own Malta Regiment
232 Infantry Brigade – assigned to the Northern Sector under Brig W H Oxley. HQ Northern Infantry Brigade at Melita Hotel Attard next to San Anton Gardens. Its infantry battalions were:
2nd Battalion, Royal Irish Fusiliers
8th Battalion, King’s Own Royal Regiment (Lancaster)
8th Battalion, Manchester Regiment[15]
233 Infantry Brigade – formed on 30 July 1941; assigned to the Central Sector under Brig I De La Bere. Its infantry battalions were:
11th Battalion The Lancashire Fusiliers
2nd Battalion The Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment[16]
10th Battalion The King’s Own Malta Regiment
234 Infantry Brigade – assigned to the Western sector under Brig F Brittorous. Its infantry battalions were:
4th Battalion The Royal East Kent Regiment (The Buffs)
1st Battalion The Durham Light Infantry
1st Battalion The Cheshire Regiment

Malta Forces

16th Fortress Company
24th Fortress Company
173rd Tunnel Company
2 Works Company
127th Bomb Disposal Section
128th Bomb Disposal Section
Malta Command Signals, Royal Signals
8 Special Wireless Squadron
Royal Army Medical Corps
39 General Hospital RAMC
45 General Hospital RAMC
90 General Hospital RAMC
15 Field Ambulance RAMC
161 Field Ambulance RAMC
69 Field Security Section Intelligence Corps
226 Provost Company Royal Military Police
Royal Army Service Corps[23]
32 Company RASC (MT)
Malta Supply Depot RASC
Water Transport Company RASC

Other:

Libya would have been lost, BUT (and this is a MAJOR but) Russia would have faced more German heat, earlier. Enough to take one of Leningrad, Stalingrad, or Moscow?

Not sure.

Enough to make a difference?

Definitely.

would it not be better keeping producing Panzer III and IV and keep on developing new Support Tanks etc like Hummel, Nashorn, Wirbelwind, kugelblitz etc.?…It would have been far better to satisfy the needs of the troops instead of longing for bigger tanks.
The Panzer IV was maybe not equal to all the counterparts of the allied tanks but further development of panzer III and IV´s and increasing production of it would be better in the long run!..E series might have been better and easier in production but it is not guaranteed that it would satisfy the need!
I dare even to say that a 5cm gun for panzer III series and a 7,5-cm-KwK 40 L/43 for the Panzer IV´s would have made a big diffrence!
In the end the Panzer IV was the backbone of all Panzerdivisions to the end of the war…

And Rome was conquered by barbarian hordes…  Just because a society is more sophisticated doesn’t mean it can’t be conquered by a less sophisticated one.

@calvinhobbesliker:

How did Poland provoke the Germans into attacking?

they didn’t, they just were in between…

@ABWorsham:

Should the Italians and Germans occupied Tunisia in 1941? This would have given more airfields to attack Malta bound convoys, provided more ports for shipping, ports that were closer to the Apennine Peninsula. The addition of these ports would forced the British to hunt for shipping west of Malta, which could have helped ease the stress on Tripoli and Benghazi convoys.

Those might have proved to be advantages to the Axis, but they might have come at the cost of negative consequences that would have offset them.  Tunisia was a Vichy-controlled territory at the time.  If the Axis had invaded Tunisia, the Vichy regime would likely have regarded this as a breach of the 1940 armistice terms with Germany, and would probably have reacted in ways Germany would not have liked.  Remember that when the Allies invaded North Africa, Germany occupied the “unoccupied” Vichy-controlled southern part of France, to which France responded with the scuttle of its fleet at Toulon to keep it out of German hands.  France might have done the same thing if the Axis had walked into Tunisia in 1941, and might even have jumped to the Allied side entirely.  So the cost-benefit analysis of an Axis invasion of Tunisia involves some tricky might-have-beens.

In some of my other posts on this forum, I’ve described how even in 1940 (when the U.S. was still technically at peace with Germany), it had devoted a significant amount of industrial potential toward winning the air war against Germany; with plans to considerably expand the effort over the next several years. America’s strongest single asset was her industrial potential, as Hitler clearly understood. But that potential was going to be increasingly turned against Germany, whether the U.S. was technically at war or not.

Hitler’s plan to counter this was to expand Germany’s industrial output over the short-term, so that he could at least keep pace with the air war over Germany in the long haul. His method of expanding Germany’s output included industrialization and conquest. The industrialization aspect of his plan meant that instead of putting everything he had into weapons output for 1941 or 1942–in a massive effort to crush the Soviet Union–he had to divide his nation’s economic activity between short-term military production and long-term output increases. The result of all that industrial investment was that Germany increased its aircraft output from 16,000 planes per year in 1941 to over 40,000 planes per year by 1944. It also increased its military production in other categories, such as tanks and V2 rockets.

In late 1941, Hitler knew that his window of opportunity to win the war was relatively slim; and that 1942 would be critical. Germany had to win a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in that year, both to take pressure off its eastern front, and to provide it with the raw materials and manpower it needed to hold its own in the air war over the long haul. Hitler believed that the overwhelming majority of America’s naval strength would be needed in the Pacific to counter the Japanese; at least until the end of 1943. That gave him what he believed was a two year window with which he could sink the American Lend-Lease Aid pouring into Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Sinking those ships would increase Germany’s chances of obtaining the victory over the Soviet Union it desperately needed.

However, the Japanese Navy proved less adept than Hitler had hoped. The Battle of Midway occurred six months after Pearl Harbor. That battle took the naval pressure off the U.S. in the Pacific, and allowed it to focus more of its efforts on convoy protection in the Atlantic. More generally, the failure of the Japanese military meant that Japan would be far less successful in taking military pressure off of Germany than Hitler had hoped.

In 1942, the Soviet Union outproduced Germany 3:1 - 4:1 in tanks, artillery, and other land combat categories, and even 2:1 in military aircraft. It also fielded a much larger army than Germany. Thus evaporated Hitler’s hope of a decisive victory on his eastern front.

Had Hitler not declared war against the U.S., large amounts of American Lend-Lease aid would still have flowed to his enemies in Europe. Over the long-term, he still would have needed to devote a significant portion of his military production to defending German skies and German cities against American-made bombers. He would have lost out on the Second Happy Time (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Happy_Time ), which would have resulted in a stronger Soviet war effort for 1942. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have had to deal with the U.S. invasion of Algeria in 1942, its invasion of Sicily and Italy in 1943, or the Normandy invasion of '44. It’s easy to say in hindsight that the harm of the American invasions exceeded the benefit of sinking that Lend-Lease shipping in '42. But that distinction was less obvious at the time.

@marine36:

But you see, Roosevelt wanted war with Germany, to help his buddy Stalin, so it would have happened eventually.

And I do believe the Tommies whipped Rommel all by there lonesome at El Alamean, though it is doubtful such success would have lasted once he got back to Tunisia and was reinforced.

The 6th Army. Yes, it was a significant number of men. A quarter of a million Germans is nothing to sneeze at! Personally, I don’t think moral is a factor in modern warfare, at least it isnt in the Corp, but you may be right there as well. It is reasonable to assume that the German soldiers are different from U.S. Marines, and are still affected by moral.

Rampant behavior of rape and murder? I am certain SS divisions maintained their dicipline in Russia, it was not until after the fighting had ended in an area and the soldiers had moved on than Himmler would move in with his death squads. The men of the SS where fine soldiers, do not label all of them barbarians for the actions of Himmler. Perhaps you have information that proves otherwise? Well, despite Himmler’s ruthless treatment of Russians, many Russians still did side with the Germans.

the SS were bastards, the waffen-SS were just foreigners. Can understand them a bit: who doesn’t hate RUSSIAN communists?