Comments on: He didn’t want to give up his summer conquests, ephemeral as they were

By: Bomag

Bomag — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 18:22:34 +0000

The suggestion here is that a mobile, opportunistic defense could have been maintained much longer against the Red army.

Manstein had success at Kharkov. Kursk was an attack against a well prepared defense.

By: Cassander

Cassander — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 17:29:11 +0000

Putting aside that Manstein’s memoirs aren’t reliable, what armies could have been used to do this? There simply weren’t any. The zgermans advanced more than 1000 km at the start of the campaign, and Stalingrad was almost 1000 km further. The Germans simply did not have the ability to maintain armies that far away, nor did they they have spare mobile troops that they could use to encircle the huge Soviet forces that were in the region. Hell, they tried and failed to even penetrate, after much rest and recuperation, at Kursk only a few months later. Operation Uranus was launched on November 19th, and had encircled the 6th Army in less than a week. There was no tie to assemble massive armies to relive the 6th Army, even had Hitler decided to do so instantly and the armies had been available.

As for Soviet industrial capacity, that wasn’t the deciding factor; western Allied support was. The Soviet Union almost certainly would have collapsed without it, just from shortages of food, if nothing else. And even if they hadn’t, the West supplied the USSR with basically all of its trucks, rolling stock, high-test aviation fuel, a huge share of its explosives and aluminum, and countless other essential types of war material. All the T-34s in the world are useless if you don’t have trucks to supply them.

By: Dan Kurt

Dan Kurt — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 22:05:08 +0000

RE: “The best Hitler could have come up with after he invaded the Soviet Union was a negotiated settlement.” Lu An Li

The war should have ended in 1941 with The Soviet Union collapsing. Hitler threw away the victory that was within his grasp at the end of July, 1941. Read: Hitler’s Panzers East: World War II Reinterpreted by Stolfi, R. H. S.Read for free at Archive.org or buy used from Amazon, etc. https://archive.org/details/hitlerspanzersea00stol/page/n5/mode/2up

Stolfi is dead but while alive but was a mechanical engineer and a Stanford Ph.D. (Modern History) and was fluent in German so he could read primary sources. Stolfi taught for decades at the Naval Post Graduate School. I believe he obtained the rank of Col. in the Marine Corps.

Hitler’s Panzers East is an amazing book as it is succinct, well organized, clearly written without jargon or equivocation, and is data driven to back up his assertions.

By: Lu An Li

Lu An Li — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 09:22:53 +0000

The best Hitler could have come up with after he invaded the Soviet Union was a negotiated settlement. Nothing more than that. Soviet manpower and industrial capacity geared up for was was too great.

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 21:54:11 +0000

Depressing.