Operation Herkules

Operation Herkules was the planned German and Italian invasion of Malta in 1942. The Axis planned to use paratrooper divisions and rely heavily on the Luftwaffe.

Could such a plan ever be carried out successfully by the Axis? Would this cause any butterflies if Malta is captured?
 
I don't know if this was possible. Lets just assume it is. From Malta the Axis can dominate the Med. When Malta is captured the Royal Navy won't be able to disrupt supplies headed for North Africa. This will make things easier for the Africa corps. Rommel might have more succes. Germany will eventually lose the war though.
 

HJ Tulp

Donor
The bottleneck of the Italian/German supply efforts to North Africa wasn't the Med, it was the fact that the Italian holdings in North Africa could only transport a certain nummer of supplies.
 
The bottleneck of the Italian/German supply efforts to North Africa wasn't the Med, it was the fact that the Italian holdings in North Africa could only transport a certain nummer of supplies.

I agree. IIRC it was port capacity that was the primary problem; if additional supplies had arrived, they'd have resulted in the ships waiting longer to unload. Also, another problem is getting equipment from teh available ports to the front line. There was a railway from Alexandria to El Alamein, supplies coming the other way have to use trucks and there weren't enough to go around. There was a reason why all the German offensives stopped at roughly the same place.

Remember that allied supplies came around the Cape anyway, they're not subject to interdiction

So, upshoot is fighting in North Africa gets a bit harder, that's all. No great sweeping advances with ubergeneral Rommel (grotesquely over-rated as he is) winning the war single handed. That just isn't on the cards.
 
Am I the only one that finds it ironic that while oil was one of the major resource headaches for the Axis they were literally standing on major amounts of it in Libya without knowing it. Move the date of oil discovery from the 1950s to the '30s and things could get interesting
 
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