Strategic withdrawal before Bagration

  • Thread starter Deleted member 1487
  • Start date
I can see a withdrawal to the Berezina, especially after DDay and before the Soviets attack. Avoiding the big encirclements between Minsk and OTL front means many general officers are still around as well as the soldiers (instead of being paraded in the streets of Moscow).

Maybe we can keep the Polish Home army from triggering their uprising if the Soviets are kept a little further away from Warsaw with all the post war butterflies of that if the home army waited to January 1945 to revolt.

Is there enough extra reserves created to keep the 6th army from being encircled in Romania and allowing it to withdraw?
 
This only makes sense if you're playing for time to get a better deal from the western allies.

You have to know the Russians want blood so you hope to build a wall strong enough to hold them off so the British/Canadian/American forces make it Berlin first.

Shorter supply lines for the Germans, longer ones for the Russians, can't see a problem with that. Dragging the war out to a later date in 1945 maybe?

Hitler would hopefully be dead to allow all of this to happen. You might want to halt the genocide as well.
 
I was more asking about the military implications for the rest of the conflict in the East. Here AG-North isn't cut off in the aftermath of the offensive at Courland and the front line is much more well manned thanks to pulling back in an ordered manner (plus of course 400k extra men), while the Soviets now lack friendly partisans to attack German supply lines and provide intel, while German supply lines are shortened and the Soviet ones are longer while having to deal with scorched earth destruction.

It's a crap shoot but I don't believe the odds are in the Germans favor. If by pulling back and re organizing the Germans can achieve a more favorable loss rate against the Soviets than they were able to historically and keep them out of Germany longer than they were historically able to then the Germans would gain some benefit from this.

I have my doubts that the Germans could pull the bulk of their front line infantry forces back in good order without the Soviets figuring out what was going on and defeating the Germans in detail as they leave their defensive positions. The bigger the rear guard forces the Germans have to leave behind then the less attractive this option is going to be.
 
This leads to Finland dropping out earlier (and that sucked up a lot of Russian fighting power with 189K casualties before Finland capitulating).

Unlike the Romanians or Italians, Finland never capitulated in OTL. They signed a truce that did not include Soviet occupation.

In TTL scenario with the Germans gone from Estonian coast already in July the Finns might very well be forced to capitulate, since the Germans are in no position to support them like in OTL when the Soviet strategic offensive begins in the Karelian Isthmus in June 1944.

With Finland knocked out of the war three weeks after 6th of June 1944 as the Soviets originally planned, the submarines of the Soviet Baltic Fleet will now be free to break out to the Baltic and wreak havoc to the German naval supply lines much earlier than in OTL. Simultaneously the German forces in Lappland will be forced to withdraw towards Norway much faster than in OTL, and the combined effect of Soviet submarines in the Baltic and Soviet offensive to Lappland will mean that the nickel production of Petsamo mines will not be able to supply the German war industry as long as OTL.
 
I don't think a withdrawal would help that much, since it would leave the Baltic states exposed. Others ways I can think of helping the Germans would be allowing units to retreat before their encircled and an extremely successful Operation Doppelkopf that that turns into a counter offensive which encircles the 6th Guard Army and maybe a few other Soviet units, and links Army Groups North and Center back together. To do this have some Soviet commanders/generals make mistakes (eveyone does it, right?) and have the Germans get really, really lucky.

I think that would tie up the Soviets a bit longer as they would have to continue fighting the Germans in Latvia and Estonia. Just an idea, though, and I'm no military expert.
 
Top