What were the worst Allied mistakes after 1942?
- Thread starter Captain Homicide
- Start date
One suggestion I always liked was to send him off to China to replace Stilwell as commander of US forces and military advisor, later chief-of-staff, to Chiang Kai-shek.
I haven't had a chance to watch that video yet so apologies if it covers it, but one paper I read a few years back argued that it was fuel shortages more than anything which crippled the offensive. They were claiming that the road network was so limited that the follow-on units were effectively creating roadblocks between the lead units and the supply dumps.
'Yep, the Soviets sure proved incompetant in arming and supplying the largest land army in the world over tremendous distances and poor infrastructure. Why, look at how all those hundreds of thousands of artillery pieces, tens of thousands of AFVs, millions of small arms, and so for and so forth, just sat at the end of their factory floors, which themselves were oceanic distances from the frontlines. Look at how the all millions of tons of the lend-lease equipment just piled up on the dockyards, like the Allied aid to the Russian Empire in the First World War. All those good sent over the Pacific route, just wasted for lack of the Soviets ability to organize it's transportation across the Trans-Siberian railway in a timely manner and it's almost 10,000 kilometers of a single railway, 2,000 more kilometers then the distance between the west coast to Tokyo or almost 4,000 kilometers more distance then from New York to Berlin. How such incompetent industrialists and logisticians ever made it to Berlin is certainly a mystery to the age.
I always love it when you reveal you know nothing about a subject. Because if you did, you would know that immediately after the Soviets "ran" (in the same manner in which the Americans "ran" from Vietnam), the Soviets Afghan Communist government (DRA) decisively defeated the Mujahideen at the battle of Jalalabad and continued to beat them right up until their final collapse. This is a considerably better showing then the first battle the South Vietnamese had to fight on their own against the North following American military withdrawal, which they decisively lost and were only stopped from being wiped out in it's aftermath by American air power. This shows the Soviets at least did a much better job equipping, training, and motivating the DRA's forces then the US did the ARVN.
The ultimate problem for the DRA was that it's ability to support said army was entirely dependent on Soviet funding, so when the Soviet Union collapsed, so too did Soviet aid. And when the paychecks stopped coming, their own army switched sides. At least the DRA could motivate it's soldiers to fight for a paycheck. The ARVN couldn't even do that (if not least because frequently the paymaster was cashing the paycheck for himself).
Looked at militarily the Soviets did quite well for themselves in Afghanistan, like the US in Vietnam. Their failing was the same as that as the US in Vietnam: an inability to translate their military victories into something that would politically meaningfully end the conflict (although they did manage to do better then the US did in Vietnam, it still wasn't enough).
You mean the STAVKA whose memoirs often recalled how Stalin would frequently ask insightful questions that radically helped them improve their work in invaluable ways? Who often recalled how all Stalin's abilities at administrative tasks frequently resolved logistical challenges the military men thought insurmountable? That STAVKA?
I'm not sure how fair it is to attribute all or most of the Soviet success to Stalin rather then the people under him and the people under them so to speak.
Bringing him back to CONUS is just not on. He'd start running for President before he hit the gangway.
That's why FDR kept him in Oz. Sending him to ROC in place of Stilwell, or to a command of a latrine in Burma, makes way more sense to me.I've seen a TV doc that suggests fuel & bad roads were the biggest issues, & even had fuel been available, the density & quality of roads moving toward Antwerp, rather than toward/past Sedan, weren't good enough for the amount of traffic the Germans wanted to put on them.
In regards to the Sherman armament I'm kind of a fan of the 60mm high velocity gun the Chileans used on a few dozen of their shermans in the 80s/90s. It's an interesting design capable of either manual (load the shell into the breech and fire) or automatic/ semi automatic (firing automatically from a 3 round clip sort of like old 40mm Bofors guns). Supposedly in tests it was able to easily penetrate T55 frontal armor from long range. Interesting design. I wonder if it was doable with the tech of the WW2 US.
tanks-encyclopedia.com
M-60 Sherman (M-50 with 60mm HVMS Gun) - Tank Encyclopedia
The M-60 Sherman was a Chilean M4 equipped with a new 60 mm High Velocity gun by the Israelis. It was one of the last Sherman in service.
tanks-encyclopedia.com
"Strong"? It's the conjecture that comes out of the evidence that's the problem. He's elevated an intel ride-along to the guiding purpose.
His reasoning is faulty, making incredible leaps to get to his conclusion. He may turn out to be right, IDK, but from what he's shown so far, I don't believe him. The existing explanation, stupidity & vanity by Mountbatten, is much more credible to me. And, IMO, if the goal was to snarf up an Enigma machine, it would've looked more like Bruneval, because Jubilee is insanely overkill for that.
Last edited:
Yeah, while McPherson's initial post was ridiculous in the opposite direction, everything I ever read and heard tells me that while Stalin had some organisational positives* things often happened despite him not because of him.
If nothing his primary goals weren't always aligned with doing stuff in the most efficient way, but more generally in doing it in a way that most protected his position. And even if he didn't go out his way to fuck things up deliberately he created and sponsored an organisational system that would tolerate subject fuck ups subject to other criteria being met. e.g the purges of the army corp,
*I understand he was quite good at delegating , (if just to keep himself above reproach), but he was also quite keen on setting people against each other and rewarding the victor ala Hitler.
Last edited:
Stalin conquering eastern Poland as part of Molotov Ribbentrop also severely weakened the Soviet military position early in Barbossa. Having the new border that was to be defended 150 miles west of the pre war Soviet border caused a lot of problems. It meant that the pre war Soviet defensive lines were abandoned and partially dismantled and the new defensive line in pre war Poland had barely begun construction and was largely non existent in the summer of 1941. That meant that large portions of the Red Armies formations were destroyed far from home and the defense of the western Soviet Union was pretty jury rigged after the Germans easily overran the Soviet Unions new Polish territories. The fact that pre war Poland used standard gauge while the Soviets used Russian Gauge meant Soviet logistics were more difficult while supplying the forces in pre war Poland while Germanies were easier. Basically the same problem the Germans themselves ran into when they invaded the pre war Soviet Union.
Of course even without the annexation of Poland the Soviets would have had a lot of problems. But when you combine the lack of border defenses, the massive expansion of the Red Army immediately pro war (meaning a lot of units were nominally existent but not really up to snuff yet and more or less a hollow frame full of poorly trained and inexperienced draftees), and the purges all contributed to the disastrous performance of the Soviet military in the early war.
Dan Reilly The Great
Banned
Task Force Baum; of the over three hundred men who left for the operation, only 35 returned. It stands as a testament to the hubris, ego, and vanity of General Patton and feels more like something that idiot MacArthur would have come up with.
True enough,
although TBF a lot of that is down to timing*. In abstract it makes sense tactically and politically for Stalin to grab himself a buffer of new territory against Hitler (Hitler is going to gobble up what ever bit of Poland Stalin doesn't anyway). Plus you have the extra resources, and while yes I take your point about defences etc that still ultimately another 150 miles the German have to go through to get to Moscow and playing 'keep-away' is a big part of any Russian plan.
*although that also done to choices being made, Stalin could have prioritised the fortification on his new border. But then really in a WW2/blitzkrieg context any possible defences that would have made that much difference would have to have been pretty damn amazing and thus less likely to exist anyway in any likely timeline. (and this is also true of the original Soviet position pre-Polish invasion). Plus those borders are long, weather we're talking pre-Polish invasion or post Polish invasion, I think the German, are getting in no matter what, and it's going to take a very ready red army indeed to avoid teh early encirclement they suffered
Last edited:
Setting up a daring raid to save your son from a Nazi Prison camp far behind enemy lines seems like something out of a bad techno thriller.
marathag
Banned
Like abandoning And Dismantling the decent pre-war Stalin Line defensive works along the old border, and haphazardly doing a new Line along the new Border with Greater Germany, that turned out to be speedbumps
I mean like someone else said earlier I doubt considering the state of the Red Army at the time it would have been able to stop the Germans on the Stalin line. But it might have bled them more effectively slowing them down allowing the Red Army to stop the Nazi's further west then OTL and limiting the damage the Nazi's did to the Soviet Unions civilian populace and economic resources.
You mean at a time where even leaders ousted in vicious power struggles and near-coups were sent into retirement instead of shot, and de-stalinization resulted in Stalin being dunked on as a matter of course STAVKA had to praise Stalin or face death? Does your knowledge of the Soviet Union and its evolution over time consist purely of caricature, or do you think 1938 sums up its entire history?
Chastise showed the utter failure of the bomber offensive overall. The politicians managed to force Harris to attack a target which actually affected German 'war-making potential' (Ruhr industry) and the initial attack was actually successful, but Harris failed to follow up that attack, and to reinforce success, with more conventional raids on the dams, and the Germans were allowed to rebuild and get everything back up and running with little problem.
(The Western Allies don't seem to have been the only ones to fail to follow through on an attack, to reinforce success; the Germans seem to have been guilty of thinking 'job done, next target' in raids on the UK as well, instead of really pushing the metaphorical knife home and twisting it when they got onto a successful thing.)
The bomber offensive of the Western Allies may have helped the Russians in and of itself by diverting German resources away from their front, but it seems to have all too often been mistaken in terms of selecting targets which would not only divert resources, but reduce German effectiveness when it came to carrying on fighting, thus either shortening the war or at least reducing Allied casualties.
That a western allied bomber offensive effort was carried out was probably not a mistake, but the way it was executed seems to have been one colossal one.
TL;DR version: In theory the Western Allied bomber offensive could have been a great (edit: Military) idea; the execution ended up utterly stupid, and results/effect (in terms of bringing the war to a successful end) should have been much greater.
Last edited:
Huge mistake, taking Rome rather than following orders and cutting off Kesselring's forces and ending the Italian campaign a year early.
I agree to some extent. Normally from a strategic perspective putting an extra 150 miles of someone elses territory before your's when your fighting a defensive war is a good thing. Similarly expanding the Red Army also makes sense and if the the Soviets had had more time they could have smoothed the wrinkles out. But the purges plus too rapid expansion combined made things much worse then they needed to be. Thanks to the purges far too many officers and those with technical knowledge that modern warfare needs (such as say experienced mechanics) being either dead or in prison meant that a lot of the new formations were even more hollow and incapable then they needed to be based on the rapid expansion. The purges also meant that even those who hadn't been killed, tortured, or imprisoned were too terrified of the prospect of the former to take initiative or disobey moronic orders like the "Do absolutely nothing proactive and don't fight back" that happened in the first few days of the war. Having a military/society where each officer and soldier is slightly less terrified of having their family raped and murdered if they disobey moronic orders or take iniative might lead to less of the pointless losses that destroyed a large part of the Soviet military in the early days of the invasion.
That won't preclude all of the OTL destruction of barbossa but it might lead to substantially fewer casualties among the Soviet military and populace. Maybe the Germans are stopped in Belarus or the Ukraine versus Staligrad and the gates of Moscow itself. Less of the Soviet Union occupied means that the OTL immense suffering that Soviet citizens behind German Lines will be lessened. Less cities anilated or starved into oblivion. Similarly less Soviet industry and economic resources captured or destroyed by the Germans might mean less starvation in the rest of the Soviet Union and more arms and munitions for the Soviet military earlier. Hopefully they could more quickly build up the mechanized/armor/motorized forces similar to Soviet forces later in the war instead of having to stop the Germans with blood like they did early in the war.
Less of the SU occupied also means that the Soviets can make more effective use of the manpower/resources they have. In OTL 500K Soviet reservists were captured when the Germans ovveran their homes before they could be mobilized. While Soviet reservists of the time were of pretty uneven quality that's still hopefully a couple hundred thousand more semi trained soldiers.
Chastise showed no such thing. What Chastise did, very clearly, demonstrate the shocking lack of vision that Air Marshall Harris possessed and the remarkable potential that Bomber Command had to perform seemingly impossible tasks when given the chance. What prevented Chastise from being even more successful was Harris' steadfast refusal give up any more of "his" Lancaster production and his fairly idiotic refusal to hit the reconstruction of the dams with conventional bombing, or even with Mosquitoes. All Harris wanted was to burn German workers out of their homes (with far less strategic reason than the vastly more successful USAAF raids over Japan).
The problems with target selection you mention were mainly, nearly exclusively in fact, due to Harris' rather singular focus and his passion for proving the air power alone could win the war by destroying the German population's morale. The AAF 8th and 9th and to a degree 12th Air Forces were fairly well focused on striking strategic military targets. There were technical and material limitations that reduced the effectiveness of the AAF campaign related to bombing accuracy, lack of long range escorts early in the war, and in the early phases of the deep penetration strikes, an insufficient number of available aircraft to overwhelm the reconstruction capabilities of the Reich. As the focus of the U.S. strategic effort moved increasingly to POL targets and the outright destruction of the Luftwaffe in hammer and anvil efforts it went from much more successful to outstanding successful (Bomber Command had demonstrated just how successfully to could strike oil targets as early as 1941, Harris simply refused to follow even direct orders to stop "dehousing" efforts in order to actually strike POL throughout the war).
Could the CBO have been better? Absolutely. The AAF senior leadership's sustained belief that unescorted bombers could fight through to deep targets is a terrific example, as was the decision, prior to Doolittle being placed into operational command, to shackle escorts to close support of the bomber boxes rather than using them as hunter ranging ahead and on the flanks of the bomber stream. I have beaten up Harris sufficiently in this and previous posts that further highlighting the failing of Bomber Command would be gilding the lily.
Coulsdon Eagle
Monthly Donor
To agree with the ursine one, Harris continuing Bomber Command's Battle of Berlin late '43 / early '44. Virtually ignored orders from the Air Staff to continue throwing away aircraft & crews, especially when sending the attacks direct to Berlin (to allow the Stirlings & Halifax II & V to take part was understandable, not so when Lancasters, Halifax III & Mosquitoes) which meant the bomber stream was under attack from over the North Sea, all the way to target, and all the way back, especially allowing NJG-1 in Holland to pick them off on the return.
This shows you have zero idea what you are talking about. Most of these memoirs were written during the period of destalinization, when badmouthing Stalin and laying all the faults of the Soviet Union at his feet was in vogue. As such there was no risk of that happening. Indeed, rather the opposite: the memoir writers were encouraged to bad mouth Stalin and they did indeed lay a bunch of mistakes at his feet (many fairly, but a few not)... but tellingly, they also noted a host of positive qualities (at least, when it came to running a war) and their discussions about him rarely ever lost an underlying tone of respect for his abilities as a leader.
So no, not that STAVKA.
Oh, I don’t attribute “all or most” of Soviet success to Stalin. But the reality of his record as a war leader is far more mixed and nuanced then McPherson is proclaiming. Like much of the Soviet leadership, he learned his trade quite effectively (if at a steep cost) as the war progressed and in the late-war repeatedly managed to impress both Soviet and Western military leaders with his strategic insights. He was never much for operations and tactics, that he learned to largely delegate, but when it came to strategy he became very good indeed.
Last edited: