June 6th 1944.

Ennui said:
D-Day and Operation Overlord are synecdochic for the entirety of World War II. If D-Day had failed, which it easily could have, it would strike a crippling and potentially fatal blow to the war effort as a whole. Also, even if America was still free by now given a Nazi victory in Europe, all of you Europeans definitely wouldn't be. A lot of you probably wouldn't exist either because of the eugenics programs the Third Reich would have inevitably implemented throughout the portion of the world that they controlled. The Soviet army would have been annihilated if the European theater had gone more in Germany's favor because Hitler could have committed a lot more military resources to the Eastern front if he wasn't so tied up trying to stop the rest of the Allies from breaking Germany. It's a goddamn miracle that the Soviets prevailed in the first place.

...

Hell, what am I thinking. If D-Day had failed the world would be just fine, the deaths of tens of thousands of American, British, Canadian, and Australian servicemen were for naught. Too bad no-one told those poor shits. I bet Hitler was actually a pretty stand-up gent once you got to know him.
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Totally, unbelievably, utterly wrong.
The invasion of Soviet Russia is universally regarded as Hitler's biggest mistake. Not only did the Russians have more men to throw at Germany than they knew what to do with, they had a massive geographic advantage - If history taught us one thing, it is that Russia is notoriously hard to keep control over. If the Russians don't do you in, the winters will.

I honestly can't imagine where you'd think of that.

Hell, going on a tangent it's unlikely that Britain would be as threatened as you make out - Germany scrapped all plans to invade Britain after the RAF proved that they would be unable to gain air superiority.

Yes, the US played a significant role in the western front but it by no measure ensured victory.

Not that i'm in any way trying to undermine the importance of D-Day, i'm on a tangent here.
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Oh my dear lol. They shot the other team after the round had ended, just like in the game!

Anyway I think it's fair to say that D-Day was actually (and perversely) far more important to the fate of post-war Europe than it was to victory or defeat in the actual war itself.
 
Llama said:
Totally, unbelievably, utterly wrong.
The invasion of Soviet Russia is universally regarded as Hitler's biggest mistake. Not only did the Russians have more men to throw at Germany than they knew what to do with, they had a massive geographic advantage - If history taught us one thing, it is that Russia is notoriously hard to keep control over. If the Russians don't do you in, the winters will.

I honestly can't imagine where you'd think of that.

Hell, going on a tangent it's unlikely that Britain would be as threatened as you make out - Germany scrapped all plans to invade Britain after the RAF proved that they would be unable to gain air superiority.

Yes, the US played a significant role in the western front but it by no measure ensured victory.
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Pfft. Yes, invading Russia is widely regarded as Hitler's fatal mistake, but that's because they somehow WON. Despite the cold winter and all that, the fact remains still that the Soviet Union won against all odds - the Nazis decimated the **** out of their population, had far superior resources, and while the Soviets had more manpower the Nazis were several magnitudes better trained and equipped. If it had been any country other than Russia which is probably the most hardcore badass and enduring country in the world, the Nazis would have steamrolled them. The only reason Russia won, besides sheer luck and the winter, is because Stalin didn't give a shit and sent millions of Russian dudes to certain death to overwhelm them with numbers.

Feel free to argue with my WWII history professor about this.
 
Ennui said:
Pfft. Yes, invading Russia is widely regarded as Hitler's fatal mistake, but that's because they somehow WON. Despite the cold winter and all that, the fact remains still that the Soviet Union won against all odds - the Nazis decimated the **** out of their population, had far superior resources, and while the Soviets had more manpower the Nazis were several magnitudes better trained and equipped. If it had been any country other than Russia which is probably the most hardcore badass and enduring country in the world, the Nazis would have steamrolled them. The only reason Russia won, besides sheer luck and the winter, is because Stalin didn't give a shit and sent millions of Russian dudes to certain death to overwhelm them with numbers.

Feel free to argue with my WWII history professor about this.
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Is it just me or did you repeat exactly what he said back to him and then tell him he's wrong.
 
Consider the timing of the thing. By the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, the eastern tables had turned against Germany. That battle was all over by February '43, more than a year before D-Day.
 
I'm not saying that Hitler made a good decision with Operation Barbarossa, I'm saying that the odds were against Russia to begin with. Llama made it seem like Russia's victory was a no-brainer, when in fact that was far from the truth. In my opinion the Soviet Union's victory is the true reason that WWII was won by the Allies rather than the Axis, and their victory was extremely unlikely given the resources and training of either side. Russia may have had the home front advantage but that didn't help them much until the German advance was stalled at Stalingrad. The only reason the Russians won is like I said before because they're goddamn crazy and sacrificed about a third of their population to do so. Of course that was in their best interest since Hitler would have exterminated them otherwise (and the German army was already in the process of doing so in the area they had taken).

I do admit to being wrong about D-Day having much impact on the Eastern front, I got my dates mixed up. Still I think if D-Day had failed Hitler would have been able to stall and probably eventually turn around the Russian advance towards Germany.
 
Ennui said:
I'm not saying that Hitler made a good decision with Operation Barbarossa, I'm saying that the odds were against Russia to begin with. Llama made it seem like Russia's victory was a no-brainer, when in fact that was far from the truth. In my opinion the Soviet Union's victory is the true reason that WWII was won by the Allies rather than the Axis, and their victory was extremely unlikely given the resources and training of either side. Russia may have had the home front advantage but that didn't help them much until the German advance was stalled at Stalingrad. The only reason the Russians won is like I said before because they're goddamn crazy and sacrificed about a third of their population to do so. Of course that was in their best interest since Hitler would have exterminated them otherwise (and the German army was already in the process of doing so in the area they had taken).

I do admit to being wrong about D-Day having much impact on the Eastern front, I got my dates mixed up. Still I think if D-Day had failed Hitler would have been able to stall and probably eventually turn around the Russian advance towards Germany.
Click to expand...

A quick look at some economic figures shows how slim Germany'ss odds were the whole time. They tried to deliver a knockout blow to a country with more resources, more industry, more land, and more manpower than them.

Take a look at the military production numbers here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II

Soviet Union
92 595 armoured vehicles (75 mm and up)
516 648 artillery pieces
200 300 mortars
1 477 400 machine guns

Germany
37 794 armoured vehicles (75 mm and up)
159 147 artillery pieces
73 484 mortars
674 280 machine guns

The fact of the matter is that while blitzkrieg spearhead doctrines were extraordinarily successful against small European nations with good roads that were a few hundred miles across and could be annexed in a month or two when the panzers entered the capital, it was doomed to failure against the huge size of the Soviet Union that simply stretched their supply lines and an ethnic hatred that forced them to garrison every road and railway against partisans. By 1942 Germany didn't have the crude oil supplies or refining capacity to fuel its armoured and motorized divisions or the trucks to deliver those supplies deep into the Soviet Union or enough free troops to protect those trucks.

The battle of Stalingrad wasn't about Stalingrad, it was just a diversion on the drive to Baku, the world's largest oilfields in the Caucuses. Hitler needed that oil to fuel every aspect of his Wehrmacht.

Japan would have been no use to Germany in fighting the Soviet Union. There were no significant resource centres or industrial cities in the East. Vladivlastock was the only port of any significance, and the Soviet navy was already a non entity. A Japanese invasion force from the East would have to march over a thousand miles of frozen and mountainous wasteland before it could even hope to gain sight of any significant targets. Meanwhile Japan was already busy with Mao's communists in Northern China and the remenants of the nationalist not to mention war with the Allies in the Pacific.

The fact that Germany was as successful as it was is mostly attributable to the terrible Soviet leadership. Stalin purged all of his experienced officers in the years leading up to the war and ignored every warning he had about operation Barbarossa including very specific transmissions from Communist spies within the German high command.

P.S. Russia didn't exist during WW2

P.S.S. If you play enough Hearts of Iron 2, you will have an encyclopedic knowledge of WWII key resource producing areas, historical dates, models of tanks, aircraft, and ships, their strengths and weaknesses, political leaders, land, naval, and air doctrines of all of the major nations, the military brass, their history, their dates, and which leaders are the best in which theatres, what the climate and terrain is like at different times of the year in different theatres, and most importantly, how to defeat the Soviet Union.
 
You see, and this is why I miss the WWII shows on Discovery. Nowadays, it's just bike building shit and "extreme engineering".
 
There's nothing wrong with extreme engineering. But I do love WWII documentaries as well.
 
Ennui said:
Pfft. Yes, invading Russia is widely regarded as Hitler's fatal mistake, but that's because they somehow WON. Despite the cold winter and all that, the fact remains still that the Soviet Union won against all odds - the Nazis decimated the **** out of their population, had far superior resources, and while the Soviets had more manpower the Nazis were several magnitudes better trained and equipped. If it had been any country other than Russia which is probably the most hardcore badass and enduring country in the world, the Nazis would have steamrolled them. The only reason Russia won, besides sheer luck and the winter, is because Stalin didn't give a shit and sent millions of Russian dudes to certain death to overwhelm them with numbers.

Feel free to argue with my WWII history professor about this.
Click to expand...

*Facepalms* Yes, because your history professor has told you something you have to believe him.

How is what you said any different to what I said?

It was a mistake and Germany would have lost precisely because Stalin didn't give a shit about human life. I can't see how you've actually refuted anything I said. You've just told me i'm wrong while acknowledging one of my main points and throwng in an obscure reference to someone you know.

To put it simply: Germany never had a hope in hell. They tried to attack an enemy over a vast area, and were hopelessly outnumbered both in pure troop numbers and in terms of industrial capability.
 
There seems to be a little confusion here right? The initial invasion went very well but it was never seriously going to succeed in the long run. The Wehrmacht simply wasn't capable of conquering the country before the Soviets were going to inevitably regroup and repel them back. The Soviet government was preparing for that shit throughout the entire retreat.

Like Llama said, the troop numbers, the total area of land needed to be captured and the industrial capacity never added up in the long run.
 
Dan said:
Here are the countries that payed the heaviest cost of WW2:
Click to expand...

Probably a result from Russia's military strategy: throw hurls of men at the Germans. Keep throwing hurls of men at the Germans. Throw another hurl of men at the Germans.

We won!

edit: hmm didn't read the second half of the thread. My post is useless :(
 
odd that the battles of ww2 were so well documented yet I'm willing to bet most people couldnt name a single battle from the iraq war (fallujah doesnt count because that was more of a slaughter than a battle)
 
There is no battlefield in asymetric warfare (gotta love that term).
 
CptStern said:
odd that the battles of ww2 were so well documented yet I'm willing to bet most people couldnt name a single battle from the iraq war (fallujah doesnt count because that was more of a slaughter than a battle)
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Go away.
Don't bring Iraq into this for christ sake.
Please people, rise above my level and don't respond.
 
Llama said:
Go away.
Don't bring Iraq into this for christ sake.
Please people, rise above my level and don't respond.
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sheesh, dont get your panties in a bunch. I'm just commenting that ww2 is so detailed uyet we know next to nothing of what happens on the front lines in iraq. unless it's spoonfed by the governemnt. ww2 was well documented because pretty much anyone with a camera could document it.



also this:

Shakermaker said:
There is no battlefield in asymetric warfare (gotta love that term).
Click to expand...
 
Sulkdodds said:
Oh my dear lol. They shot the other team after the round had ended, just like in the game!

Anyway I think it's fair to say that D-Day was actually (and perversely) far more important to the fate of post-war Europe than it was to victory or defeat in the actual war itself.
Click to expand...

Indeed. To me, it's stupid to say that the US won the war. No, the Soviet Union did.

The Western Allies (including USA) made sure that the Soviet Union didn't gobble up the entire continent Hitler-style. Right after betraying my country.

Funny. If they invaded through the Balkans...
 
CptStern said:
ww2 was well documented because pretty much anyone with a camera could document it.
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..and because it spread over dozens of countries and sucked up magnitudes greater manpower, resources, and global attention. It is pretty hard to not document something when nearly half of the world's population is directly involved.
 
jet_porkins said:
Probably a result from Russia's military strategy: throw hurls of men at the Germans. Keep throwing hurls of men at the Germans. Throw another hurl of men at the Germans.

We won!

edit: hmm didn't read the second half of the thread. My post is useless :(
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To be fair the Germans were hurling far more men at the Russians than anywhere else. Both sides used scorched earth on that front too. It was incredibly brutal and bloody on both sides.
 
It's a common misconception. It is true that sometimes Soviets just threw people at the enemy, but that was usually a last resort. Even with all its manpower, the Red Army wasn't a mindless brute.
 
Seeing as we have moved onto the Eastern front for some reason I will share this video I saw earlier.
This was very awesome/disturbing/moving/interesting. And definately gives you a slightly better view of the final days of the war.


Berlin 1945
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qer7EnAJe4o
 
Mikael Grizzly said:
It's a common misconception. It is true that sometimes Soviets just threw people at the enemy, but that was usually a last resort. Even with all its manpower, the Red Army wasn't a mindless brute.
Click to expand...

This reminds me of a story that my history teacher heard from his professor in college, and then told us.

His professor was a soldier in the Soviet army during the war and was fighting in a battle against the Nazis. The Soviets had about 300 infantry while the Nazis had around 50 or so infantry and 12 tanks (I can't be sure of the exact numbers since I heard this quite a while ago). The Soviets' strategy was to form a column of six rows and send one row charging toward the tanks at a time. He and a friend were in the third row. When they witnessed the first row of men get obliterated and literally torn apart by the tank's gunfire, they decided to take a step back each time a row was called forward. When it reached the last row, they hid in the tall grass and waited for it to end.











They were the only two survivors.





They were later captured and kept as prisoners by their own army for fleeing from battle. On their way to the prison, their group stopped for the night at an abandoned building. The guards got drunk around the fire and that's when he snuck away with another prisoner. He had been separated from his friend I guess. They managed to make their way to America eventually and that's how he got the job as a history professor. He can never return home though or he will be arrested as a war criminal. :(

(on second thought, he's probably dead by now. My teacher is quite old himself, and I guess he heard this story while he was a freshman in college.)
 
The disregard for human life was atrocious.

I always wondered why gas was never used in warfare, especially by the Nazis. I found out that it was because both sides feared use of gas would provoke the other side to use gas and it would escalate. Makes sense.
The gases and nerve agents available to Germany were superior in their time to the allied equivalents (because the bastards did evil but groundbreaking research into that shit), but the Nazis had no idea!
 
CptStern said:
sheesh, dont get your panties in a bunch. I'm just commenting that ww2 is so detailed uyet we know next to nothing of what happens on the front lines in iraq. unless it's spoonfed by the governemnt. ww2 was well documented because pretty much anyone with a camera could document it.



also this:
Click to expand...

:upstare:



heres some cool pics


bundesarchivbild101iiko.jpg

bundesarchivbild101i9sj.jpg

64255142.png

m4m.jpg

194419.jpg

194411.jpg
 
In the interrogation of a nazi officer, the officer told that one tank of them could handle five of the enemies.

But there was always a sixth.
 
Russian tanks weren't half bad actually.
 
The Russians had to rely on flag signals,the Germans had radios in their tanks.
 
Uh, no. All sides had radios, the problem with Soviets was that while German commanders were close to the frontlines (sometimes even ON the frontline), while Soviet were tens, hundreds of kilometers behind friendly lines, which impacted efficency a lot.

And for the record, USSR's tanks were THE best in the world in 1942. Germans couldn't compete - their tanks were, for the most part, last generation designs, many training vehicles that were not to be used in a major war.

Only with the upgunned PzKpfWg IV and the Panther did they have tanks that could go toe-to-toe with Soviet designs. Of course, they couldn't be mass produced on even remotely the same scale as the Soviet ones, but oh well.
 
Didn't a bunch of Germans capture a T-34, study it, and determine that it wouldn't have passed their quality control?
 
T-34s broke down a good bit iirc but when they were working they were very effective.
 
Soviet strategy seemed to revolve around treating men and machines like dice. Throw enough down at the enemy and eventually you'll come up with sixes.
 
Mikael Grizzly said:
Uh, no. All sides had radios, the problem with Soviets was that while German commanders were close to the frontlines (sometimes even ON the frontline), while Soviet were tens, hundreds of kilometers behind friendly lines, which impacted efficency a lot.

And for the record, USSR's tanks were THE best in the world in 1942. Germans couldn't compete - their tanks were, for the most part, last generation designs, many training vehicles that were not to be used in a major war.

Only with the upgunned PzKpfWg IV and the Panther did they have tanks that could go toe-to-toe with Soviet designs. Of course, they couldn't be mass produced on even remotely the same scale as the Soviet ones, but oh well.
Click to expand...

Only command tanks carried radios in their tanks because of shortages in the initial production runs. This was a huge disadvantage against the coordination of the radio equipped German Panzer companies.
 
I knew it...I almost had it right :p

3082594840f9786c47b5.jpg

osp371vk.jpg

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waffensssverige3xv.jpg

swedish volunteers lie dead in the streets of Berlin,I believe from the Viking division which was completely disseminated in the last days of WW2
 
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