Germans - lets take our instructors and form a fantastic Division - Panzer Lehr. No way that can go wrong
Everybody else - ??????????????????????????
The Forge of Weyland
- Thread starter Astrodragon
- Start date
Germans - lets take our instructors and form a fantastic Division - Panzer Lehr. No way that can go wrong
Everybody else - ??????????????????????????
It is not a particularly blinkered strategy if one assumes that Germany can't win a prolonged war so marshalling all resources at the decisive point even at significant long term costs can make sense. If the training pipeline is critical for a long term war, someone fucked up at the grand strategic level where no level of operational brilliance will fundamentally matter.
It absolutely makes sense in German terms. The point is a short war and so much of the whole organisation is geared around this. You don't need elaborate forward maintenance organisations, you can ship the kit back for a factory refurb. So build whole tanks not spares for tanks.
Which is great until you don't win.
Well be fair its not Germany alone The Japanese do it, the Italians do it, its 40s fashion, like hats.
That map does a really good job of showing how the breakthrough at Moerdijk/Dordrecht completely wrecked the Dutch defensive plan - the panzers were inside "Fortress Holland" before the Water Line was even manned. As it stands, TTL the Dutch have a decent chance of forting up on the Water Line and holding for at least a few weeks - though if France goes down they're going end up being crushed by sheer weight. Could cause some interesting developments down the line - the British are going to have the fun choice between supporting the Dutch and abandoning them, and running convoys into Rotterdam will be a fun game, especially if the Germans get air/naval bases on the Belgian coast.
At Hannut, the Germans have proved tactically superior but the French have managed to hold things together. The big question here is how many of their tanks - especially the precious but temperamental Somua S-35s - will be runners the next day and how many of the breakdowns they can fix. March attrition was a terrible problem for armoured units in 1940. I suspect that quite a few tanks have been abandoned in the various withdrawals and the Germans are going to claim the battlefield. If Prioux is unlucky, he's going to end up with most of his surviving tanks in desperate need of maintenance just as the full-retreat order arrives.
And as others have noted, this is all just a sideshow to what happens further south.
At Hannut, the Germans have proved tactically superior but the French have managed to hold things together. The big question here is how many of their tanks - especially the precious but temperamental Somua S-35s - will be runners the next day and how many of the breakdowns they can fix. March attrition was a terrible problem for armoured units in 1940. I suspect that quite a few tanks have been abandoned in the various withdrawals and the Germans are going to claim the battlefield. If Prioux is unlucky, he's going to end up with most of his surviving tanks in desperate need of maintenance just as the full-retreat order arrives.
And as others have noted, this is all just a sideshow to what happens further south.
Precisely, a grand strategic failure that makes everything down stream of that choice a set of bad choices with the hope that lower levels of operational art excellence can reverse the fundamental folly.....
Donald Reaver
Donor
It seems likely if France still falls Holland will seek the best peace possible rather than fight to the last. Perhaps the big difference will be how many troops flee to England to fight on before the surrender.
Deleted member 94680
FWIW with heavier losses in the Netherlands I’m not sure Crete can happen. Loss of transport aircraft and pilots aside, the fallschirmjager regiments themselves have been gutted. OTL they took some losses but gained experience and battle knowledge. ITTL they will have far fewer experienced parachutists and the ability to carry off something like Mercury will be heavily impacted.
If Chamberlain falls and Churchill replaces him, Churchill will try to run supplies & troops into Holland I figure - especially if France has surrendered. He had a plan for holding the Brittany peninsula in the original timeline cooking until the replacement French government signed the Bordeaux armistice and nixed that, and he strikes me as desperate at that point in the original timeline war to try and keep a foothold on the continent somewhere.
Errolwi
Monthly Donor
And there would also have to be a similar sequence of events where the Germans thought that Crete was lightly defended (so take-able on the bounce) rather than defended with under-equipped and unlucky troops. An airborne attempt on Crete is by no means a given in an ATL with more than minor differences in the Med theatre.
Donald Reaver
Donor
The problem with that he needs agreement from the Dutch, I doubt they want to be a bridgehead under bombardment.
Churchill became PM as OTL, nothing changed to affect that
It isn't just a foothold. It contains one of the biggest ports in the world at the time (Rotterdam) and a bridgehead across the Rhine. That's a dagger pointed right at the heart of Germany, not just a "foothold".
The Germans can afford to leave it on the back burner until the Battle of France is over, but there is absolutely no way they can accept it after that.
allanpcameron
Donor
You still have to face the problem of the Luftwaffe's air raid on Rotterdam which had a bad effect on Dutch resistance. Obviously if they're secure behind their lines it might make them feel less hopeless, but I think the terror bombing of the civilian population could well have the same consequence of making them capitulate earlier than the time they might otherwise hold out.
Allan
Allan
I'm not so sure about that. Much heavier bombing, for much longer periods, didn't induce British, German, Italian or Japanese civilians to want to surrender. If you think the war is already lost then those raids can add to the pressure for peace. "Why are we suffering theses raids when we've clearly lost?" and I think the Dutch decision was as much about that as anything else. But as long as they think they might win then I'd be reluctant to say the Dutch population will behave that much differently from anyone else.
This of course is the key point. The infrastructure that makes it possible to even think about the plan, the port of Rotterdam, is the reason Germany will throw everything at it.
If the Battle of France is lost, then the best thing is to get out of there as fast as possible because it can only end one way. But if the French manage to stop the panzers and exhaust Germany's limited supplies, then things get interesting. The Germans can't leave the redoubt alone for the reasons pdf27 states, but they might not be able to pull forces from the French front without giving France an opening to counter-attack.
Or, of course, it could do the opposite!
Hasn't happened yet anyway
Or of course Goering might offer to have the LW deal with it and not bother with those men on foot.