Barbarossa Alternate History

Allright, by this I mean that they take a more indirect approach by swinging around the cities.

The point is, while staying out of city fighting will help, the fact is those cities have to be taken. Otherwise, the Red Army retires into them, and you are trapped between hammer and anvil when the USSR regroups behind the Urals and counterattacks.

The downside to this strategy (from the Heer's perspective) is this involves sacrificing their strategic mobility for street fighting *cough* Stalingrad *cough* while the red Army reforms behind the Urals. Either way, a no win scenario. Leaving out the insane directive hitler begins to issue (and by that I include many of his mre successful gambles; most of them were ludicrous on the face of it).

Also, here is the facepalm

I think they mean the picture of Patrick Stewart doing it. But that works.

And as for this, I still don't have everything done yet. Its still a work in progress

Let us help.
 
Barbarrosa is indeed a fascinating material for any historical speculation. It was the moment that defined the outcome of WWII, and because of that the kind of world we live on. IMHO, the germans could have won, and it requires no ASB nor is it any kind of naziwank exercise. It is just thinking about how close things were. No need for ASB weapons or personality changes.
In the summer of 41, the germans could and did defeat all soviet armies that faced them. They took great cities: Minsk, Kiev, Smolensk. Moscow and its industrial area (up to Tuzla and Gorki) could have fallen too if the germans did not diverse troops to Ukraine. And then (Leningrad would follow soon) the germans had a real chance to win the war. Of course, we would never know if those troops in Kiev would have been able to attack the german's exposed flank or not. But the USSR was not invencible. it's not as simple as comparing population and resources. In the first month of Barbarrosa, a lot of those inputs changed sides.
 
Perfection isn’t necessary, but some sort of reality based situation is.

Alternate history, at least as it is presented in this forum, isn’t some fantasy with rifles that never need to be reloaded or tanks that run without fuel. Luck will only take you so far, certainly not far enough to take Moscow before the winter. A review of the first four months of the Heer offensive into the USSR reveals that it could hardly have gone better than IOTL.

Tanks have a speed limit, as do trucks; more importantly the same is true for horses and men on foot. While the average person thinks of the Reich offensives as being a series of lightning strikes identical to those seen in 1991 or 2003 across the Iraqi desert, reality is something quite different. The Wehrmacht moved at the speed of a walking horse, not the speed of a truck on paved roads. An advance of 100 miles by spearheads was possible, but those units then had to wait for horse drawn wagon of fuel, ammo and food to catch up. The overwhelming majority of the Heer’s artillery was horse drawn, with prime movers only being used for the heaviest guns. Tanks of the era themselves were less than totally reliable, and frequently in need of maintenance.

I will not go into any sort of depth on tactics, but leaving cities full of enemy troops across your supply lines, especially when operating with a semi-mechanized logistical train, with heavy dependence on draught animals, is, frankly, insane.

If you want to make things happen just because it seems cool, go for it, but put it in the ASB forum. If you put it here, expect LOTS of hard questions to be asked, something that may well turn you off to the entire process (which would be unfortunate) and will do little to build your reputation as a contributor.

And don't forget the deplorable state of Russian roads (or to be more precise, the lack of roads).
 
Barbarrosa is indeed a fascinating material for any historical speculation. It was the moment that defined the outcome of WWII, and because of that the kind of world we live on. IMHO, the germans could have won, and it requires no ASB nor is it any kind of naziwank exercise. It is just thinking about how close things were. No need for ASB weapons or personality changes.
In the summer of 41, the germans could and did defeat all soviet armies that faced them. They took great cities: Minsk, Kiev, Smolensk. Moscow and its industrial area (up to Tuzla and Gorki) could have fallen too if the germans did not diverse troops to Ukraine. And then (Leningrad would follow soon) the germans had a real chance to win the war. Of course, we would never know if those troops in Kiev would have been able to attack the german's exposed flank or not. But the USSR was not invencible. it's not as simple as comparing population and resources. In the first month of Barbarrosa, a lot of those inputs changed sides.

Isn't this a cliche? I mean the part where Hitler doesn't divert his troops to Ukraine?
 
Isn't this a cliche? I mean the part where Hitler doesn't divert his troops to Ukraine?

Well, it's an historical fact he did. And that many generals (Guderian, for example) were against it. Most people i've read agree that Moscow would have fallen if there had not been such diversion of forces. Other say that was a smart decision, as Hitler obtained one of the greatests victories in modern warfare in Kiev (about 600.000 soviet casualties or POW's). We'll never know if the USSR would have survived Moscow's fall, but defintely there is the posibility it would have been a decisive blow. After the failed Thyphoon, there are few things germans could have done to avoid defeat.
 
But I think Rundstedt had enough forces to encircle the Russians already. I am in support of the former.

Hitler was obssesed with cauldron battles.
 
I would like to see an ATL where Barbarossa succeeds. If the Germans ignore Kiev and attack onwards several hundred miles further to Moscow, leaving 600,000 Russian troops 100 miles south of their line of supply...
Hitler needs to sell all the gold in Europe, buy a million trucks, and send them to his armies. Then he will win. Also, he has to do this without making Stalin nervous by signing a peace with the British. I'm not saying this isn't possible, I'm just saying that it's going to be hard.
Maybe only 100,000 trucks? He builds a truck factory instead of a navy? His subs didn't win him the war in OTL, though they did more than the rest of his navy.
 
A German seizeure of Moscow in '41 would have won them the war. The Communists had centralized everything to the point where Moscow was the rail, road and communication hub for the whole country. Neither Leningrad nor Kiev could have been supplied if the Germans held Moscow.

When I lived in Russia if I wanted to call the next town my call went to Moscow, 5 time zones away, and then back. This is just an illustration of just how much Stalin had gotten the reins of everything into his hands in Moscow. So if Moscow falls, Leningrad falls and the Germans advance to sever the rail lines that are carrying American Lend-Lease supplies from Archangalsk. Now supplies have to go either through Iran or across Siberia after possibly running a Japanese gauntlet across the Pacific after December.

Without Lend-Lease, the Soviets had no chance. Their industry produced huge quantities of a certain, limited number of items. For others, they were almost completely dependent on the US. Without Lend-Lease they would have little mechanized transport. More to the point, they would have starved, since the US sent enough food to feed every member of the Soviet military 3 (US-sized) meals a day, every day of the entire war.

Without those rail lines, the Soviets would never have been able to move their factories to Siberia nor begun their vaunted production.

Stalin was a fragile person, filled with fears (hence his paranoia). He went into an intense crisis when Moscow was threatened. He would certainly have thrown in the towel if it had fallen and accepted the rule of Siberia plus whatever crumbs Hitler threw his way.

On the plus side, Hitler would not have enacted the Holochaust since, no longer surrounded, Germany would have been able to deport the Jews (which was their original plan). He probably would have sent them all to Stalin, since the Jews and the Communists were all mixed together in his thinking (he used to talk about "Judeo-Communism") and Stalin would probably have welcomed the millions of new slaves.
 
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