The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #92687   Message #1778875
Posted By: Little Hawk
08-Jul-06 - 09:46 AM
Thread Name: BS: The British who fought for Hitler
Subject: RE: BS: The British who fought for Hitler
You're again quite correct, Teribus, Hitler's war with Russia was absolutely inevitable, given Hitler's peculiar personal philosophy, and you are also correct regarding the Med being considered (by the Germans) to be an Italian theatre of war until their defeat in North Africa and Greece.

Hitler clearly was not expecting a conflict in the West to erupt when he attacked Poland...and the whole rest of his misadventures stemmed from that decision, since it triggered an unexpected (from his point of view) declaration of war by both the UK and France. Major screwup for the Germans! (and for the Poles, needless to say...well, and for the French too, as it turned out...)

I'm simply saying that if I had been commanding German forces following that turn of events, and following the fall of France, I would have indefinitely shelved all ideas of fighting Russia, and would have concentrated on fighting the UK effectively...and that would have involved really 3 major efforts:

1. continually threaten to invade the UK to tie up the majority of their forces in a defensive posture (this was done for a while, but not for too long)
2. relentlessly attack merchant shipping supplying the UK (this was most definitely done)
3. Go all out to take the entire Med, North Africa, and the Middle East and spare no resource to do it. If not involved in a war with Russia, I believe the Axis could quite readily have accomplished this in 1941-42.

And LEAVE the Russians alone!

I'm saying that that's what I would have done, if faced with a major war in the West. I'm not saying Hitler would have ever done it.

I agree that with Hitler in charge of Germany there was no way that that would ever happen, because he was determined to attack Russia some time before 1944, as you say, regardless of what else was going on. He was a man who could always blithely ignore reality when it didn't suit his personal obsesssions...

And that's why he got into that foolish war to begin with and ended up dead in a bunker in Berlin.