MOVED: Could Germany have won WWII if the Halocaust never Happened?

Leaving the Philippines wasn’t a “strategy” by MacArthur; he was ordered to leave by Roosevelt.  It should also be noted that MacArthur’s handling of the opening phases of the Philippines campaign was sloppy; as I recall, he was caught unprepared by the Japanese invasion, even though by the time it started he had already heard about the raid on Pearl Harbor.

Good post. However, I would like to make a correction. During WWII, Winston Churchill (later joined by FDR) imposed a food blockade on Germany. The Hunger Plan was the Nazi government’s effort to deal with the resulting food crisis. The Hunger Plan involved the starvation of captured Soviet cities; so that the food which would otherwise have fed those cities could instead be used to prevent starvation elsewhere in the Reich.

The plan had never been to starve Soviet POWs. Those POWs were conscripted to work in German weapons factories. Everyone, from Hitler on down, recognized those POWs were an essential component of Germany’s war machine. That is why Hitler ordered the POWs to be fed.

However, the Reich lacked the manpower necessary to cordon off captured Soviet cities from the Soviet countryside. Due to the lack of that manpower, the Nazis were unable to prevent food from flowing from the captured Soviet countryside to captured Soviet cities. The Hunger Plan mostly failed: the planned starvation in captured Soviet cities mostly did not occur. That failure didn’t result in fewer deaths. Just different deaths than those the Nazi government had envisioned with their Hunger Plan. Due to the failure of the Hunger Plan, the man tasked with feeding the Soviet POWs didn’t have the food he needed to carry out the order Hitler had given to him: the order to feed the Soviet POWs. Because it was physically impossible for that man to carry out his orders, millions of Soviet POWs starved to death while in German captivity.

The Nazi leadership had deep-seated fears about Germany’s food situation. One of the reasons Hitler wanted lebensraum was so that Germany could physically feed itself, even if Britain imposed a food blockade. (As it did in WWI, and as Churchill again did in WWII.) The two most vital resources Hitler required from the western Soviet Union were food and petroleum. For Barbarossa to have been successful from the Nazi perspective, Germany needed to capture a considerable portion of Soviet oilfields, and a considerable portion of Soviet farmland.

To address your question of what Hitler should have done differently: he should have placed von Manstein in charge of Barbarossa in its entirety. Doing so would have resulted in a far greater level of success. Moscow and Leningrad almost certainly would have fallen in 1941, paving the way for additional German successes in 1942.

Thanks Marc. Exactly right. Wi try and paste and post in the right place, although I suspect Worsham will see it here.
Was at work when I posted and my head was in the wrong place, obviously.

Read “world war 2 behind closed doors” by laurence rees

There was a secret part in the treaty between the french, british and poles which the brits and the french promised military assistance against a German attack not a Soviet attack and remember they did not help in the war between the poles in the soviets in late 1910’s and early 1920’s but instead suggested the curzon line (which the Molotov-Ribbentrop line basicly followed)

Also the soviets at Tehran were more interested in soviet post war borders than they were in actually winning the war and remember in 1943 this was not a certainty. They wanted to keep there pre 1941 gains.

This is just a brief overview of some othe parts of the book I suggest you read it. It is very good.

The brits and the french could have attacked the siegfried line before the germans finished it and probably would have been succesful and because they did not co-operate with the Belgium people (I don’t know the correct word) and the dutch because the later two did not want to appear co-operating with the allies because at that time they were neutral. The Germans had a brilliant strategy in attacking (the aaa territory North West Europe) and then following nit up with the tank drive through the ardennes they cut of the Elite French and British troops from the rest of the army. They shouldn’t have allowed Dunkirk and should have forced the British and French into the sea and this would come back to haunt them.

@strategic:

I may would have been a proponent of continuing the war to Moscow to obliterate Stalin after 1945, so communism would be nothing but a fad and dead.

If I remember correctly, the USSR had something like 300 divisions in Eastern Europe at the time of the Potsdam Conference – a rather large figure compared to what the Anglo-Americans had in Western Europe.  I doubt the Americans and the British could have beaten those kinds of numbers.  I also don’t imagine that a radical move like expending one of America’s rare and priceless A-bombs on Moscow would have done anything other than get those 300 veteran Soviet divisions (who had just helped whip the Wehrmacht) really, really angry at them.  The US and the UK being democracies, they would have also found it a trifle hard to convince their war-weary voters and servicemen to start a whole new war against the country which had just helped them defeat Nazi Germany, and which was getting ready to help them finish off militarist Japan.

At any rate, if you exclude Cuba and China and North Korea, Communism today is in fact pretty much a dying fad…espcially when you consider the amount of free-market capitalism with which China has been flirting for the past decade or so.

I like them all actually…each theater of war had its own atmosphere…

The Eastern Front:  Genocide on a grand scale…the greatest tank battles of the war (KURSK, KHARKOV)  and Operation Barbarossa…the ultimate attack plan…and of course Stalingrad…the ultimate turning point of the war

The Western Front: From the greatest evacuation in history (Dunkirk) to the greatest invasion in history (Normandy) to the greatest gamble in history (Bulge)…nothing like fighting on the Western Front

The North African Front:  Nothing like watching a Desert Fox claim victory wherever he went…ultimate battles such as Tobruk, Kasserine Pass, and El Alamein…and how British General Montgomery finally showed his brilliance…

The Mediterranean Front:  The drive under Europe’s soft underbelly…Sicilly, Salerno, Anzio…the great Italian Campaign and the word PATTON becomes a household name…

The Battle of the Atlantic:  U-boats, BISMARCK, SCHARNHORST, Convoy PQ-17, Operation Torch…need i say more?

The Pacific Theater:  Pearl Harbor, Midway, the Solomons, Leyte, to name a few basically the greatest naval war in history…

The China-Burma-India Theater:  The Burma road must stay open…the Flying Tigers and China’s plight against the Japanese…the most intense fighting in the Pacific War

I know u only wanted a favorite,but where to choose…

BTW…LETS GIVE OUR THANKS TO THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO FOUGHT AND GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THESE THEATERS OF WAR…FOR WITHOUT THEM…WE WOULDN’T BE ABLE TO CHOOSE OUR FAVORITES

yea, like I’ve got 1,100 bucks…not including the bbs and batteries, ect.

http://www.wwiiguns.com/index.php

They got all kinds of awsome stuff here, airsoft and even those cap firing. Basicaly there mock shells with a cap on each one, when fired, it gives off smoke, flying catrages, and looks real. But still too expensive for me…that is if someone wanted to loan some money over  :wink: