Re: Jingoistic Juices are flowing
Man inna barrel
The Germans being "ill-prepared and making it up as they go along". That is news to me, They were fucking unstoppable in the early stages of WW2.
The above directly contradicts this:
and fighting on too many fronts: e.g. Russia and Africa.
If you read Eric von Manstein's book, 'Lost Victories' - he's very clear about the lack of strategic direction. And it wasn't just down to Hitler being useless - it was also structural. The Germans (Prussians at the time actually) had invented the modern General Staff in the 19th Century. This not only meant formal training for staff officers and therefore much better staff work, but also involved proper peacetime planning and wargaming.
However they didn't go to the next step when they got involved in WWI. The army, navy and airforce commands were separate, and remained so. There was no overall body in charge of strategic direction, such as the Imperial General Staff in Britain. They were all under the nominal command of the Kaiser, and later the President.
When Hitler created OKW (Oberkomando der Wermacht) they weren't really there as an equivalent of an overall joint service body - because Goering was running the Luftwaffe and wasn't going to be told what to do. The Kriegsmarine pretty much ploughed it's own furrough as well. Plus Hitler's leadership style was to set up lots of rival power centres and get them all to compete to please him, not to cooperate with each other.
In effect OKW were Hitler's lapdogs because he could never fully control the leadership of the army. Hence, later in the war you got the bizarre situation that OKW (Oberkommando der Heeres - army HQ) was only really in charge of the army on the Eastern Front and OKW was commanding the army in France facing the Allied invasion - but not even in command of the navy or airforce in France - despite being in nominal charge of all Germany's armed forces.
Leaving the structural problems - you also have the strategic ones. This is partly because Hitler wasn't telling people his long-term plans in advance, so they couldn't be prepped for. But also because Germany wasn't planning to start a war until at least 1941 - some of the Navy's plans were assuming no war before 1944. Hitler had convinced himself that France and Britain would violate their guarantees to Poland, despite the fact that they specifically made them because of not having given them to Czechoslovakia before Munich.
Also Germany didn't have the tanks to invade France in 1939. Hence they chose to take on Poland first and give themselves time to build more and finish the training of more panzer divisions. The plan for the invasion of France, Belgium and Holland was only made in Winter 1939. The army wanted to do soemthing like WWI, it was junior generals like Guderian who persuaded Hitler to overrule them and go for a tank breakthrough on the junction between the French defences and the allied units advancing into Belgium.
There was no plan for the invasion of Norway, that was done at the last minute and bodged. The Germans managed to bodge better/faster, than the Allies, hence they won, but the Kriegsmarine lost about a third of its destroyer force in the process.
There was also no plan for the invasion of Britain. They didn't start serious invasion planning until after defeating France. Because they didn't expect to beat France that quickly - but also because they didn't really have the resources to do it properly anyway.
Basically what happened is that Hitler gambled continuously, always upping the stakes, and from 1936-1941 always rolled 6s. They continually got lucky in close-run things, until they didn't.
If the Nazis had been led by a sane dictator, we would all be Nazis now
If you're sane, you're unlikely to try and conquer the world. But also I don't see how the Germans could have successfully invaded Britain. Even a victory in the Battle of Britain only made an invasion marginally possible - there would have still been a viable RAF in the Midlands and North - and the German invasion forces would have been eventually cut off from supply and destroyed. Not only did the Royal Navy have ships to destroy the invasion fleet, admittedly at heavy casualties from the Luftwaffe, but was also had loads of submarines - that would have turned the Channel into a deathtrap for German supply ships. Particularly as the Germans didn't have the anti-sumbarine technology to match the Royal Navy's either.