In which World War 2 army you should have fought?

@CWO:

@Narvik:

I spent some of my military service up there in the 80ties, and cant belive how Churchill in 1940 would think it was even remotely possible to walk 50 000 Brits over the mountain with no skies and no supply and no winter gear.

Churchill had a track record of cooking up grandiose flanking operations that looked impressive on maps but which were of dubious practical value, and a bad habit of giving a completely inadequate amount of thought to their operational and logistical details.  Gallipoli in WWI is the most notorious example, and the 1940 British invasion of Norway had many of the same problems: it was planned too quickly and too superficially, and like Gallipoli it was based on the premise that an amphibious invasion can be improvised by basically just loading a bunch of troops onto standard Royal Navy warships and throwing them at an enemy coastline.  As the Americans eventually learned in the Pacific, successful amphibious operations require months of careful planning and training, lots of specialized equipment, and close inter-service cooperation.  So it doesn’t surprise me that Churchill wouldn’t have bothered considering the practicality of marching several divisions of British troops through Norway’s mountains, in winter, with no special training or equipment.  Another place where he made this mistake was Italy, which was another of his pet flanking operation concepts.  His argument that Italy was the “soft underbelly of the crocodile” falls apart when you look at a topographical map of the Italian peninsula: it’s ideal country for a defender because it basically consists of narrow coastal plains (defilades in military parlance) flanking a rugged mountainous interior.  And to (literally) top it all off: where would the invading Allies have ended up if they had managed to fight all the way up to the top of the Italian boot?  In the Alps.

I think you make some very good points.

But the invasion of Africa was to secure Britains fuel links to the middle east.
Also I believe his intention was to invade Greece.

I do believe that in some ways the invasion of Greece would make some sense
as it could help with the Russians more readily once the fronts meet up.
Also a third of Germany’s oil comes from the Romanian town (or city) of Polesti

@wittmann:

Worsham: I noticed it was today in 1920 that Polish troops under General Rydz-Smigly held a victory parade up the main road in Kiev, celebrating their 7th May capture of the city.
Their tenure of Kiev only lasted a few weeks.

After studying this conflict, you can get a better understanding of the Soviet willingness to divide Poland with Germany.

@morrel:

russia didn’t border Czechoslovakia so direct support would have been through air power or invasion of someone else most likely         This was prior to the winter war with finland    I wonder how effective russian help would have been?

Russia didn’t border Spain either, but that didn’t stop them from sending a lot of tanks and planes to support the Republicans. But as in Finland, the russian help was not very effective. The russian “political officers” spent more time in purging western commies that had joined the International Brigade, than to fight the fascists. And unlike the Germans, the russian officers never learned any lesson in Spain.

Without Canada (and the commonwealth),  England would have lost the war.
Simple as that.

A more realistic distance is over 800 statute miles.

Zero had a range of 1,600 miles, so yes thats consistent with Sakai’s account over Java.

Also, they had over 400 Zeros in active service by July 1940.

Just noticed the German West losses I gave earlier is for  Sept 1939 to April 1945. It includes the 1940 losses, an extra 156,556.

**Heer Losses in the Polish, Norwegian, French, and Balkan Campaigns
(Organizationsabteilung d. Gen,Stb. d. OKH. 6 Feb 45, NARA T78, R414, F3226-3227

Losses in the Feldheer**
……KIA…WIA…MIA…Total
Poland …8,082…27,278…5,029…40,389
Norway …1,166…1,548 …1,091…3,805
France… 27,650…115,299…13,607… 156,556
Balkans…1,593…4,845…644…7,082
Total …38,491…148,970…20,371 …207,832

So the claims made in the Third Army  book are even further off!

@balungaloaf:

without US aid assistance via lend lease, without the allied strategic bombing campaign tying up much of the luftwaffe and anti air defenses, and without the threat of invasion keeping millions of german soldiers in europe, the soviets would have been smashed before they could ever set up a counter attack.  if moscow was taken, the people would give up on their communist overlords and capitulate.

You alluded to the pressure the U.S. and Britain put on Germany; and I fully agree that pressure was immense. Even in 1940–before the U.S. was technically at war–its industrial production created profound implications for the balance of power in Europe. With massive numbers of American aircraft being produced and sent to Britain, Germany had to either a) find a way to keep pace, industrially, with the U.S. and Britain combined, or b) watch its cities and people be destroyed by waves of British and American bombers. The invasion of the Soviet Union was largely precipitated by the desire to allow Germany to attain the raw materials and industrial capacity to achieve outcome A.

However, keeping pace with the production capacity of the U.S. and Britain also required Germany to invest heavily in its own production facilities. That investment diverted effort from what would have been immediately useful production against the Soviet Union. During 1942, the Soviets out-produced the Germans 3:1 or even 4:1 in all major land categories of production, and even out-produced the Germans 2:1 in planes.

Prior to launching Operation Barbarossa, the German military staff had incorrectly believed that the Soviet Army consisted of 200 divisions. Divisions which had fought very poorly in the Soviets’ 1940 invasion of Finland. In the spring of 1941, the German Army consisted of 150 divisions; 100 of which were used for the invasion of the Soviet Union. But in the months after the invasion, the Soviets were quickly able to expand the size of their army to about 600 divisions. Given the imbalance of sheer numbers, it is very unlikely Germany could have prevailed in a war against the Soviet Union even despite its military’s advantage on a man-for-man basis.