Was Barbarossa Doomed from the start?

I've come around to the idea that Moscow instead of Kiev was the better option.


I understand the German generals themselves, around August '41, wanted to go after Moscow. But didn't Glantz say that wouldn't have been the right decision, because of masses of Russian troops on the flank of Army Group Center?
 

Deleted member 1487

I understand the German generals themselves, around August '41, wanted to go after Moscow. But didn't Glantz say that wouldn't have been the right decision, because of masses of Russian troops on the flank of Army Group Center?
I disagree with Glantz's take for a variety of reasons, which I don't have time to get into now. If I get some time later I'll either back fill this post to explain or respond to any new messages.
 

elkarlo

Banned
A slower campaign would have worked imho. Stopping in late October to form a defensive line and shore up logistics. Attack again in late spring and push the line forwards . Set up a defensive line again for winter and rinse repeat.
Ittl Germany tried to.ein it all in one year and the gamble didn't pay off.
 
The Axis powers "could" have managed to just barely scrap by a victory. It would have been an immensely costly one (both manpower and equipment) and require the Soviets to blunder at every step of the way with zero room for error or missteps on the axis's side, but I believe it's not a totally impossible feat as some others here will claim.
 
Not from the start.. But it was doomed when it became a war of extermination and idiological idocy.. Oo that name has stains name on it . Destroy! Cue meat grinder

Instead of just bombing and going around and taking time on the city.

Leningrad . Hey can we actually take the city or not ?

The ussr was big. Wasting men and time when yiu need to achieve objectives doomed things
 

Deleted member 1487

A slower campaign would have worked imho. Stopping in late October to form a defensive line and shore up logistics. Attack again in late spring and push the line forwards . Set up a defensive line again for winter and rinse repeat.
Ittl Germany tried to.ein it all in one year and the gamble didn't pay off.
That's even too late to avoid the mess of a long, grinding campaign. Pushing the line forward in spring after giving the Soviets 8-9 months to prepare is going to be...tough shall we say. Moscow wouldn't be nearly as poorly defended as it was in October 1941. By May 1942 the Soviets would be geared up for a stout defense of their capital with a lot of reserves.
In 1941 the Germans would have had to move on Moscow before October due to the weather, which means leaving Kiev to wither on the vine and pushing on after Smolensk, when defenses were at their least prepared.
 
In 1941 the Germans would have had to move on Moscow before October due to the weather, which means leaving Kiev to wither on the vine and pushing on after Smolensk, when defenses were at their least prepared.

what would be the goal of Group South? are you speculating they would bypass Kiev as well?
 
The Spanish Armada plan was for a fleet that had been built in the previous six years, by a country that had only maintained naval forces in the Mediterranean, to be sent to the Channel and defeat an English fleet that had weapons with greater range. Then an army based in Flanders would cross to England in small boats. For this to work, not only did they need perfect weather when weather forecasting was more unreliable than now, they needed radio to coordinate with the army and navy, so it depended on technology that didn't exist. Note that the Spanish Armada actually came close, the fleet got up the Channel to the appointed rendevous point and the army actually started embarking, and this was an operation that really was technically not possible given the technology at the time.

The Armada *could* have succeeded, but only if the English don't mount much of a defense.

I mean, it *was* poorly commanded by Medina-Sidonia; his instructions were too inflexible, failed to take account of all the difficulties of Channel conditions, coordinating with Parma, etc. But the patent inferiority of his ship designs, gunnery, and seamanship, or the slowness of Parma would not matter so much if there hadn't been that English fleet (as we know it) to deploy their advantages in the first place. You can't beat something, even a crap something, with nothing.

How would this work? Well, imagine Elizabeth just loses her nerve and flees the country. Or refuses to authorize deployment of the fleet in timely fashion. These are not so far fetched as some may realize.

I mention this because it happens to provide an analog for Hitler's thinking: He thought Soviet will would collapse in the first campaigning season. "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.” Yes, he underestimated raw Soviet warmaking potential, too; but he really does seem to have been banking on a Soviet collapse.
 

Deleted member 1487

what would be the goal of Group South? are you speculating they would bypass Kiev as well?
Not, they were held up on the Dnieper and would tie down Soviet forces in Ukraine, while elements of AG-Center would screen them from the north as they had been doing to that point. Also with Guderian's push to Roslavl he would have both disrupted and wiped out large forces in that direction that would have been a threat, so it leaves the Soviet forces with little to effectively stop AG-Center forces. The large concentrations of troops in Ukraine and Kiev weren't in a position to actively threaten AG-Center due to how many Axis forces they had to deal with already and their own state of disorganization, material deficit, and lack of trained troops.
AG-South would continue to press into Ukraine, but their advance would be limited, which BTW would actually help improve their supply situation compared to OTL when they got badly overextended during Kiev and had to take 5,000 trucks from AG-Center before Typhoon.

Of course in addition to that I would have also said not to launch the August offensive on Leningrad and instead keep AG-North's 4th Panzer Army free to support AG-Center.
 
It is pretty much doomed, particularly with Generalplan Ost. The Russians have no reason to quit if they are going to be exterminated anyways. You might as well go down fighting and take the bastards with you. For Germany to succeed it would need to conduct a textbook perfect plan with the Soviets continually screwing up. Did they make mistakes ? Yes, but that is true with every army. If they don't screw up in areas they did OTL they will screw up somewhere else. Screwing up is given in war.
 
It's probably been asked numerous times, but was there any even slight chance that a German invasion of Russia could've succeeded? It just seems that regardless of the amount of early victories the Wehrmacht can score against the Russians, the Red Army can simply pull back, regroup, and counterattack.

My current understanding is that Barbarossa was doomed. The German army was not built for the kind of war that was best suited to defeating the Soviets, the plan had un-achievable goals (as in, different laws of physics are required). Even without Generalplan Ost and the wehrmacht being encouraged to commit atrocities by the Nazis, lots of young men fighting for their lives in an impoverished and alien land is going to result in alot of atrocities.

What might happen is that Barbarossa may fail, but the Soviet Union is also destroyed as an organized opponent. If you had a second PoD that kept the US out of the war somehow, then this could lead to a Nazi victory. But the Nazis can't get the resources they wanted in the time they wanted by trying to conquer European Russia.

fasquardon
 

Marc

Donor
The consensus seems to be that this scenario really does fall into ASB, or a 5 sigma event (if success was due to chance happenings and repeated 3.5 million times then the desired result would happen. Once).
Sometimes, supposings are just magical thinking.
 
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Had Hitler been willing to at least postpone the implementation of GP Ost on Ukrainians, then Barbarossa could have suceeded. With many more Ukrainians than OTL fighting against the Red Army, doing spy work and supporting the Reich's logistics, Germany could win by summer '42.
 
Of course in addition to that I would have also said not to launch the August offensive on Leningrad and instead keep AG-North's 4th Panzer Army free to support AG-Center.

can understand the point on Kiev, but it seems Leningrad opens possibilities, even if Moscow attempt fails?

was AGS too weak to contribute to Typhoon? if, as you suggest, their advance slowed? and battle of Kiev had been postponed.
 

Deleted member 1487

can understand the point on Kiev, but it seems Leningrad opens possibilities, even if Moscow attempt fails?

was AGS too weak to contribute to Typhoon? if, as you suggest, their advance slowed? and battle of Kiev had been postponed.
The problem was one of dispersion due to the steady erosion of German combat power as the invasion went on. Leningrad certainly offered operational and strategic options, but the center of Soviet power remained Moscow especially due to the communications and rail convergence on the city as well as it having about 10% of the entire nation's industry in part due to the large deposits of iron and coal nearby; that last point also meant that it was the regional hub for electrical generation, as they brought the hydroplant on line at the reservoir nearby.

AGS certainly had too much going on itself to participate in Typhoon, it was advancing to the Donbas, Rostov, and Kharkov. Plus they had the worst logistic situation of any of the army groups once across the Dniester. They were better off tying down Soviet forces on the Dniester and not being a logistical drain on AG-Center, as well as pulling them in to help deal with Soviet forces in Ukraine.
 
As historically conceived? Yes. Barbarossa was built around poor intelligence on the strength of the Soviets, particularly on the scale of their reserves, and wishful thinking based on a campaign plan that had mortgaged Germany's entire future on a war that would be over in 1941 and so made any suggestion of one that might stretch into 1942 and beyond unacceptable.

The poor intelligence dogged the Germans from the start and by August of 1941 it was clear to the Germans that their assessments of Soviet strength had been badly, and systemically, off. The Soviets continued to oppose the German invasion despite losses far greater than German intelligence had predicted they possessed and with troops and equipment that had come as complete surprises to the Germans. For example, pre-war estimates put the Soviet tank park at 10,000 vehicles, less than half its actual total. From the start, the Germans knew their intelligence on Soviet strength contained huge gaps and was constructed largely out of inference. It was also continually being revised upward. In August of 1940, when planning for Barbarossa began, the Germans estimated 170 Soviet divisions opposing their invasion. By February of 1941 this number had crept up to 180, but as pre-attack reconnaissance intensified it ballooned to 226 by the time of the invasion in June, as the Germans continually discovered heretofore unknown enemy formations. This level of new discovery clearly indicated the inadequacy of the intelligence but the Germans took their chances and attacked anyway.

Writing in early August, seven weeks into the invasion, OKH chief Franz Halder noted explicitly how badly they had underestimated the Soviets. Despite this awareness, the Germans continued to accept optimistic assessments that this time the Soviets were on their last legs. In September, they underestimated Soviet reserves before launching Operation Typhoon and then in October they overestimated the effect of the initial (admittedly amazing) success they achieved at Vyazma and Briansk in wiping out another half-a-million Soviet soldiers. This led them to conclude that Moscow was now theirs for the taking, and led to a string of poor decisions. German leaders would subsequently point out that the intelligence in October was telling them the Russians were finished but by then they should have known that such intelligence was based on guesses that had already been shown to be regularly wrong.

One of the reasons for this serial wishful thinking by the Germans was because doing otherwise would be admitting defeat, not just of the 1941 campaign, but for Germany and the entire war. By the summer of 1941 the German Reich, for all its size, was a precarious house of cards. Resources were stretched and the Germans needed a quick victory over the Soviets to allow them to demobilize a large chunk of the army, save on ammunition expenditures, and gain the oil necessary for the following naval and air campaign against the UK and USA (which Hitler considered a belligerent long before the official declaration of war). Even as the Panzers were rolling across the Soviet frontier, production was being shifted away from ammunition and tanks for the army, towards aircraft and ships for the following western conflict. In June of 1941 the Germans mortgaged their future on conquering the Soviets by the end of year. Were that not to happen all the subsequent finely balanced plans would collapse in on themselves and the future of the Reich's entire war effort would be placed in lethal jeopardy. As such the Germans were conditioned to grasp at any straw that seemed to offer the possibility of a victory in 1941, no matter how improbable. This conditioning was so bad that it remained the root of a lot of "if only we did X different, it would have worked" in memoir writing after the war, such as taking Moscow before the end of 1941, and endlessly repeated by pop-historians since.
 
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German leaders would subsequently point out that the intelligence in October was telling them the Russians were finished but by then they should have known that such intelligence was based on guesses that had already been shown to be regularly wrong.

It is worth pointing out here that not only were Soviet capacities far greater than those German intelligence detected, the Soviets also managed to mobilize more of their population than the Germans thought possible. So the people writing estimates based on "if the Soviets manage to put in the maximum possible effort" were off by several armies. (I'd be interested to know if other combatants managed to out-perform the German assumptions, and what allowed the Soviets to outperform the Germans in mobilizing their population by so much.)

fasquardon
 

elkarlo

Banned
That's even too late to avoid the mess of a long, grinding campaign. Pushing the line forward in spring after giving the Soviets 8-9 months to prepare is going to be...tough shall we say. Moscow wouldn't be nearly as poorly defended as it was in October 1941. By May 1942 the Soviets would be geared up for a stout defense of their capital with a lot of reserves.
In 1941 the Germans would have had to move on Moscow before October due to the weather, which means leaving Kiev to wither on the vine and pushing on after Smolensk, when defenses were at their least prepared.
I agree , but stopping offensives whenines grow too long would reduce axis losses. The axis had better troops until mid 43, when losses changed that dynamic.
In 42 taking out leningrad, Sevastopol, and then working the Soviets in the south would have been workable. Without missing creep and over extended lines with case blue, it'd make counter attacks much more costly.
 
Operation Barbarossa was Failure in any way

Bad Planned: on wrong assumption on Soviet forces, lack of accurate maps of area
Bad Strategy: get Moscow (Napoleon try that, see what happen to his great Army...)
Bad Logistic: Blitzkrieg force mode much to fast for Logistic to caught up.
Bad Timing: launch delayed, invading Force caught by Winter (Napoleon had that also, see what happen to his great Army...)
Bad Imbalance on Forces: One german had to kill Two soviets, that later turn to one German against Four soviets and Stalin had reserve for 1:6
Bad command error: the little annoying Austrian gave senseless orders, That make soviet easy to retake Stalingrad, win battle of Kursk and annihilate the german Fifth Army
 
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