Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "John Mearsheimer - Why Adolf Hitler Couldn't Conquer the Soviet Union" video.

  1. Much like the Japanese taking on the USA. Don't look at the odds of success. Look at the near-certain decline of both Germany and Japan - in THEIR eyes - if Western Europe and the USA kept tightening their grip on world trade and keeping them encircled. Germany feel this keenly after the Treaty of Versailles, and Japan, an island nation, felt even more vulnerable to supply chain issues, being dependent for almost everything but labor on trading partners. People forget (or never learn) just how "free trade" worked in the centuries leading up to the 20th Century. Japan was dragged into world trade on terms very favorable to Europe and the USA in the 19th Century, after centuries of one Asian nation after another falling to Western powers. We don't like to talk about the Opium Wars, but the Chinese sure haven't forgotten! Neither country wanted to be at the mercy of USA/Europe. To them, autarchy (self-sufficiency) was the goal. More than just a goal, they saw it as a necessity, if they were to preserve their national sovereignty in the face of such obvious scoundrels as the French, British, and other European colonial powers, who always saw and treated Germany like a 2nd-class country, and did everything they could to lock up trade partners and trade routes before the Germans ever had much of a navy. TIKHistory has a great, in-depth study of Barbarossa. Even at the very beginning, Russian forces were HUGE. They were just deployed to the east, out of fear of Japan's apparently unstoppable westward expansion. Siberia had (and has) vast quantities of oil, timber and minerals that Stalin naturally believed the Japanese naturally lusted for. Compounding that error was the terrible railroads (built by socialists, i.e., slave labor) connecting them to Moscow. I don't think the Germans had much/any idea of the buildup that was taking place to the east of the Ural Mountains. I don't think they had any idea of the USSR's true industrial capacity or - something that surprised every critic of Bolshevism - the insane courage of the Eastern European and Russian people when it came to defending the motherland. Hitler gave every Soviet citizen someone they hated more than they hated Stalin. In my opinion, the Nazis' biggest mistake wasn't splitting their forces in Barbarossa. Their biggest mistake was not having a plan for conquering England and carrying it out. They could have made Dunkirk a meat grinder and kept the BEF from escaping at Dunkirk if they had pushed themselves as hard in that effort as they later did many times over on the Eastern Front. Their best chance may have been to make the main push towards Stalingrad and the Caucasus. They still could have made considerable gains in the North with a relative small fraction of what they eventually committed, there. If their goal weren't Moscow, but were just to push the front lines maybe a third or half of the way to Moscow, and then set up to fight defensively in the North. I think they could've inflicted heavy losses on the Soviets with light losses of their own for quite some time, if they had attacked with 1/4 or 1/2 as many men and machines in the North and just thrown everything else at Ukraine and the Caucasus. There's a slim chance they could've held on to enough territory long enough to get the oil, iron, and food they needed. Their mixed strategy put immense pressure on the Soviets, but even if they had taken Moscow, I just don't see an answer to the torrent of men, armor and munitions that would've kept flowing over (and through?) the Urals from the east. No matter which way they went, their disdain for those they conquered really hurt them. Welcomed as liberators in Eastern Europe, which had had quite enough of Russian-style Bolshevism, the occupation of Europe and Eastern Europe went much as Napoleon's occupation of Spain in the early 1800s. Any unguarded convoy. Any messenger. Any anything. It took a full regiment to guarantee their arrival at their destination. It wasn't enough that they had long supply lines, but they had to guard every inch of them, 24/7/365.
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  2. The Germans definitely had their plans of genocide. People don't talk as much about the many pogroms the Soviets executed against ethnic groups in their own borders. Jews, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Poles, Ukrainians, ... Such is the way of empire, be it east, west, north, or south, throughout history and probably before. But ALL of those people pulled for the Soviets once they got a taste of Nazi rule.
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  3. I think maybe the effect of Stalin's purges is oversold. I don't know how much research on these matters that Mearsheimer has done since old Soviet records became available after the fall of the USSR. The Red Army has serious deficiencies before Stalin came along. There was a serious shortage of officers with any idea of how to fight, and a severe shortage of good non-commissioned officers. It turned out that most of the officers who were purged showed up again, later, in either the same role, a diminished role, or in some cases, ended up promoted, by the time the dust settled. But Stalin still faced a dire shortage of military leadership at the start of the war. I just think that the purges weren't as big a factor as they were made out to be.
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