It really did not matter what was decided as I recall; Sorge was still there and made sure the Russians knew the plan.
He cant be everywhere hes got to mess up sooner or later.
It really did not matter what was decided as I recall; Sorge was still there and made sure the Russians knew the plan.
Toppling Churchill is fair game; but who is going to replace him? Clement Atlee? Anthony Eden? The foremost dove in the UK at the time, Lord Halifax, would have no real chance of returning to power, seeing as how he's now in the United States bumbling negotiations.
The obvious problem is that no real peace deal with Hitler can ever be made, because he'd simply break it as he saw fit to do so.
Nothing stops Stalin from sending children out to fight, or old men.
Indeed, I see Stalin drafting women to fight the war, perhaps not en masse, but piecemeal. You are correct that this can't go on forever, and this is likely to exacerbate damage to Soviet society, but I think Stalin can still wring out a couple years of crappy manpower while keeping his war economy on third gear.
The point about Valkurie is that the German Army was definitely not that capable of launching a coup against Hitler.
What makes a 20 Kt nuclear attack any worse than what happened to Hamburg?
The Soviet Union took about four years even with reading all of the USA's Internal Communications. Throw in that Heisenberg either was incredibly sloppy or outright sabotaging the program and you have a clear reasoning why Germany couldn't get the bomb before 1950.
The problem with gassing English cities is that the UK can then respond with gas attacks against cities AND troop emplacements. Given the situation in the skies of Europe, adding in chemical weapons is going to screw Germany far worse than the English. See what happens when Defoilants start killing crops in Germany and Europe and when German Cities start receiving giant yellow clouds as visitors.
Germany can make the threat, but we also know that Churchill would have used chemical weapons on the invasion beaches if the UK was invaded. Clearly, Chemical Weapons, although horrifying, are not grounds to end the war. And their usage is liking to cause great harm to many Britons and mass death to millions of Germans. That is not MAD; in the case of Germany it's being forced to counter a new type of warfare they didn't supply for and cope with. Of course, once again, the USA is in no real danger of anything--and so it can make thousands of liters of chemical agents and turn Germany lime green. This is clearly a bad move for the Reich.
And I remind you, Zod, that Salerno means that Italy has tried to take itself out of the war--I would not want to be Italian in this scenario, as this probably means Hitler just decided that Venice is now a German city. The Italian community in the United States is suddenly turning very hawkish...
I respect that a counterfactual failure at Salerno and Normandy would be very painful--but this would be happening at the same time as Leyte Gulf and the Liberation of the Phillipines, so its hardly like the US or UK could claim to be losing the war. Look at 1971 for an example of what a strong anti-war movement looks like, and Vietnam was a conflict that raged for over a decade. And Vietnam was a war the United States bungled into with no clear plan over a now discredited political theory.
One more point: Stalin is almost certainly going to wreck his war economy before negotiating for peace--he really doesn't have a darn clue how to run a country.
All in all, Germany could buy another year with this strategy and the Soviets could start really running out of steam. But all this would mean is the US Air Force demolishes Germany from the skies before moving in.
A Downfall-Analogue 1946 D-Day in Europe is almost certainly going to succeed--Germany has no answers to nuclear weapons used against Troop Concentrations and that's going to be the start of the campaign that ends the war. Hopefully, the Wehrmacht gets lucky enough to kill Hitler before a 1947-8 overland offensive literally breaks' Germany's ability to fight through nuclear weapons.
I ereally have to ask why everyone thinks the "backhand blow" strategy of the Germans would work. Like, what's the evidence for it?
Zod: we have departed farther and farther from the OP. Playing with the invasion of Sicily involves changing the actions of the Italian government; none of this has anything to do with the decision taken by the Wehrmacht and Hitler in 1943.
While the Backhand blow can make the Soviets pay, I think they'd wise up to these tactics and not get beaten too badly.
Oh, they will... eventually. But since Soviet generals did not show any real aptitude to defend themselves against such tactics in 1942-43, .
You mean, when they won loads of battles.
I guess my objection to this is Operation Bagration.
No, when the Germans counteroffensives surprised them and crushed them in the Second and Third Battle of Kharkov.
Bagration would not have been nowhere as successful for the Soviets and even more important, nowhere as crippling for the Germans if they had not been committed to static defense to an insane degree, and already greately weakened by previous lost battles where they had used the same losing tactic, as well as by the costly failure of Zitadelle.
Anyway, in the TL I envisage, the Soviet peak effort that IOTL was Operation Bagration still occurs, and manages to win them substantial territory (the Red Army reconquers half of Belarus and Eastern Ukraine), but since Germans use smart tactics, they avoid the crippling losses of Bagration and the Soviets pay an heinous butcher bill for their gains.
ITTL, Soviet war effort is still a definite success in a defensive sense, since it manages to repel Germans attempt to conquest and expel the Wehrmacht from Soviet soil. However, the effort exausts Russian resources, so they fail to conquer Axis countries.
Crushed them so badly the Soviets drove them out of the Ukraine a couple of months later.
Classic naziwank here btw, the use of overdone cliched adjectives like "crushed."
They won a battle against a much overextended opponent. Who then regrouped and counter attacked decisively within weeks.
This really misunderstands what has actually happened to the two war machines over the preceeding two years. The Germans have been systematically hollowed out, short of replacements, short of equipment and with increasingly underequipped formations outside key areas. If the Germans try to be "flexible" during Bagration they will be a rabble wandering through the wilderness because they LACK MOBILITY.
You are talking about the backhandblow early 1943, I am talking of the superbackhandblow proposed by Von Manstein in the summer of 1943.Not everybody believes that. Those who do, probably also believe Manstein's memoirs according to which, when he launched OTL's actual backhand blow, the Soviets outnumbered the Germans 6:1, and 8:1 on his own frontage. Those who do believe Manstein don't know, or prefer to ignore, that when Manstein wrote that, nobody could check; the Soviets were buttoned up, and the German records themselves, captured by the Western Allies, were still classified. Then, years after those shining memoirs, it turned out that both the Soviet and the German records provide slightly different numbers: 1.5:1 on the whole front and 2:1 in front of Manstein.
Make no mistake, the OTL backhand blow was a fine piece of work; doing that in 1:2 numerical inferiority is no small feat. Yet playing it up is not going to make that much of a difference.
You are talking about the backhandblow early 1943, I am talking of the superbackhandblow proposed by Von Manstein in the summer of 1943.
basically Armygroup south is to absorb the Soviet offensive inflicting losses and then falling back, 4th panzerarmee is held in reserve close to Dnepr and when the Russian offensive has lost its momentum advance and envelop and crush the Sovjet southern armies against the Black Sea.