Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Military History not Visualized" channel.

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  22. I'm no historian, but I've run simulations of Operation Barbarossa in a game called "Russian Campaign." And with the benefit of hindsight, you can see quite clearly that the war is strategically over in the Winter of 1941. When Moscow doesn't fall, it's all over for the Nazis. And even if they do take Moscow, and let's assume with light losses, there are vast reserves of men and materièl to the East. With Moscow in hand, the Nazis can then take Leningrad followed by Stalingrad or vice-versa, and then the 3rd city must fall. But how long that would last is anyone's guess. In the game, it is possible to achieve "victory conditions" by seizing Moscow and killing Stalin. But you have to attack by or before the last week of May or first week of June, and your opponent needs to blunder, badly. But even with Moscow in hand, Germany's still more or less in Napoleon's shoes, with very long supply lines and hostile Soviet partisans threatening every inch of those supply lines, much like Napoleon in Spain. I think the Germans very much underestimated the Soviets, based on their intelligence on what the Soviets had on their Western frontier at the outbreak of war. Stalin didn't trust Hitler, but he thought he could at least temporarily focus on the Japanese threat in the Far East (and maybe pick up some territory?), which it turned out were not a very serious or long-lasting threat in that region, despite successes farther South in China and SouthEast Asia. All that being said (maybe half of it true), Rzhev was were more real fighting took place than in the more famous battle for Stalingrad. I think another piece of this is because Army Group South was the only part of the attack that was making any progress after the Nazis were turned back at the gates of Moscow. To all but the men involved, things just appeared static, everywhere but down South.
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