I happen to be reading Hitler's U-Boat War Vol. 1 by Clay Blair at the moment, and here is an interesting passage regarding the desired 300 U-Boats (pg. 100):

Nope, you're wrong here. When Chamberlain resigned in the spring of 1940, the British deliberatly went for Churchill. They wanted to fight on. That Atlee beat Churchill after the war in an election had to do with how both men saw the afterwar period. Chruchill saw the Iron Curtain, Atlee saw demilitarisation and rebuilding society. The voters found the latter a more attractive picture.

You forgot a nail
 

Nail 2b: El Alamein/Operation Torch - the defeat of the Africa Corps (300,000+ men & material lost & captured) and the loss of the battle of the Mediteranean. Invasion of Italy immenent

North Africa was a back water and thanks to that Italian hot head Mussolini who screwed up bought Germany in to the Med, Hitler was too chummy with Mussolini. Hitler should had said you created to mess you get out of it.

Yes you can, D-Day took years of planing, intelligence, miss info fed to Germany, reckon and so on. The Germans believe a few months would do the trick, Hitler was right to call it off. Any how, Hitler plans lay in the Russia and the planning for Barbarossa started in Dec 1940.

His biggest mistake.....opening a front in both the east and the west with two of the biggest manufacturing giants in the world.

Lotsa truth there!:rotfl:He was a suicidal psychopathic god from the very beginning. As such he could not succeed. I agree with everyone who says that had he not made the U-Boat mistake he would have made others, equally fatal. As lots of you have demonstrated, he actually exceeded his human allowance for just one fatal mistake. Unfortunately, it was fatal to a hundred million other humans as well.

@AVGWarhawk looks like the book you cited agrees with my assessment that Stalin would have been as dangerous as Hitler had he not been attacked first. I agree totally. Stalin was probably more evil than Hitler and believed all the Marxist-Leninist claptrap about taking over the world. He would have been much harder to defeat than Hitler, too. Looks like I've got to read that book!

@Steed I agree that Afrika was a sidelight in the war and Rommel had better things to do than play in the sand.

@everyone I am astounded at the knowledge and civility shown in this discussion, which could at any moment have descended into flame wars. SUBSIM really IS different than the nether regions of the Internet. You guys ROCK!:rock:

Mates/Capt. great disscussion *****
 

Learned more about WWII,than I did from dear-O-Dad,& he lived it.:rock:

:yep::yep::yep:
Sun Tzu teaches us the state must be just and keep faith with
the people.

A very interesting discussion. A tip of the hat to you all.

A few points I'd like to hit.
The matter of the number of UBoats at the start of the war. If there were a larger number it could have been more effective, maybe succesful, providing the build up of boats didn't provoke a strong counter-build up of ASW ships. This would be tricky, but England and US both would have had to contend with political budget fights to allocate the funds to do so. The key to a successful military campaign is to apply enough force, at the right place and time. That was what I was referring to about getting a jump ahead of the production/deployment curve of key material, aka ships and men. The fact of history is Germany didn't get a big enough jump ahead to truly catch England flat-footed. They did with France 1940.

The invasion of England greatly depended on air superiority as Germany couldn't counter the English navy with warships. The conduct of the Battle of Britain - the shift to civilian targets - doomed the chance for air superiority. Any German force on English soil would have been cut off as noted by others. True, England was short of tanks and guns, but the German forces would quickly be short of fuel, food, and ammo.

The Russian campaign may have been launched because dictators often have to have an active enemy to maintain control over the people. The English front was stalled. The German people may soon feel that old injustices were avenged and look for a return to normal life. The German army was a political actor and Hitler needed their backing. They needed to be kept occupied and Hitler's eyes turned East. The early success of the Eastern front lead to increasingly broader aim to get it all quick. They spread their forces too thin and their momentum flagged. Then it was Hitler's give no ground attitude that doomed the German army. A few years later Army staff officers attempted an assination.

If Hitler could have waited until tensions flared between US and Japan.... :hmm:

Yes, Stalin was a tyrannt. Hilters/Europes war was really in the East with Russia. The numbers show this. The West was just a thorn in Hilters side. France and Poland were taken easily. Spain and Portugal were neutral. Hilter had no argument with England. England declared war on Germany for fear of attack which came anyway.

The book is excellent. It really is a culmination of years of study from all noted historians.

Pardon. :huh:

I was always under the impression that France and Britain guaranteed Poland's independents and when Hitler attacked we were at war with Germany.

Last week I found an old dusty paperback novel I had bought way back when I was in school. The historic novel was called 'Hurricats' and related the rocket-catapulted Hawker Hurricanes from Camships in the Atlantic. It was great reading. They were used to counter the 'Scourge of The Atlantic'. No, not u-boats, but the Focke Wulf FW-200 Kondor Maritime/Recon Bomber that sighted convoys for German u-boats. Funny, Churchill would refer that term to a Luftwaffe bomber than to a u-boat.:hmm:

Japan was totally unprepared for the war they threw themselves in. This was most noticable in their navy: prepared for "the final victory" in one huge battle. This was their whole philosophy. Not one part of the Japanese war effort was gear towards a war, but always towards a single battle. As the war progressed, this became even suicidal (Yamato, Kamikazes).

They did not expect to fight long, and did not expect their merchantfleet to become targets in a drawn-out ordeal. Their navy was geared towards large engagements: carriers, battleships and cruisers, but precious few escorts and destroyers capable of ASW.

Convoys were only introduced later in the war, when it was basically too late. By then, they had fewer ships to guard, so setting convoys up with adequate escort was actually easier than in 1941.

Now, had the Japanese been prepared and geared towards a long, drawn-out conflict, not only in their escorting navy, but also on other fronts and tactics, the US fleetboats would have been very hard pressed, and might well have been defeated. Don't forget that the US Silent Service, was, in its early war days, an organisation lacking any form of resolve and performance, burdened by an enormous pre-war bureaucratic machine and geared towards a totally different kind of war: the war alongside other fleetunits engaging other battlefleets. They got exactly the opposite, had to go out as lone hunters, with no help form other units, be it navy, air force or army. On top of that, they also had their torpedoproblems, same as Germany, but including an enormous shortage of them, because they were made by only the Torpedo Directorate in a much too small amount.

In the end, they acquitted themselves very well, but that to a large degree came from a total disregard of Japan to defend it's own supplyforce, simply believing that destruction of that force "just could not happen", their shipbuilding geared towards fightingships, not mules.

If Japan demonstrated ANYTHING in those days, it was that going to war ill-prepared is tantamount to suicide on a national scale. But then, this was also a part of their entire military code...

Now for the German side: I think this has been debated to death, both in a lot of books (mych of which I own), and in this thread and elsewhere on the internet. In the end, the Germans just bit off way more than they could chew.

Some great books to end things and leave port Wilhemshaven:

A Writer at War; Vassili Grossman
Stalin, The court of the Red Tsar; Simon Sebag Montefiore
Silent Victory; Clay Blair jr.
The Second World War in the Far East; H.P. Wilmott

and a good insight of the times leading up to WW2:
Dark Valley, a panorama of the 1930s; Piers Brendon

Yes the situation of Germany has been analyzed forever. I only started the thread because I had never read anyone (and I'm pretty well-read about the war) put forward the idea that the source of Britain's supplies made it apparent than sinking these supplies would bring a player into the war which could not be badly injured by any number of U-Boats. Also the wrinkle of resources wasted on U-Boats which could have been used to build tanks, trucks, trains, supply infastructure and weapons. Only because my viewpoint was so different from all I had read and heard did I bring it up.

Typical of Hitler's scatterbrain approach was the Battle of Britain. Again, he found himself without the right kind of equipment. He didn't have decent bombers and he could only overfly 1/3 of the British territory. In order to eliminate the RAF, Britain first would have to agree to move all its planes to the 1/3 of its territory that the Luftwaffe could hit! Even in that third, German planes could spend no more than 20 to 40 minutes over enemy territory. And as Steed (I think) brought up, German air bases were too far from the French coast.

No, it was a big mistake to attempt to strangle England in the first place. They did not have to fight the British. They could have declared victory after Dunkirk, wished the British well and waited for Stalin's attack. Then it would have been Nazi Germany, England and the US against Stalin.

In the US the isolationist Republicans of the time very well could have kept us out of the war, but Nazi fans like Charles Lindberg would have made a very persuasive case for our entry.