Comments by "" (@obsidianjane4413) on "Was Barbarossa delayed by Yugoslavia?" video.

  1. Yugoslavia, Greece, Africa. Mussolini was what we call a "delay fish". Without the overt German invasion, Its much more likely that Yugoslavia would have descended into a civil war fueled by three sides, German, USSR and UK (Churchill). Basically what actually happened, but without Wehrmacht as "referee". The bigger factor were the German divisions tied down in occupation of the Balkans and Greece that were absent from the Ost Front for the entire war, not just the first campaign season. The German problem was they couldn't kill the Red Army and get around them fast enough, not that they didn't start fast enough.
    7
  2. Meh. They would have just been early model Pz. IIIs an IVs. ;)
    3
  3. The problem is that the diversion of consumables (fuel, ammo, food) didn't stop when the invasion "ended". The Germans then had to occupy the country and fight a presentient insurgency for the rest of the war.
    2
  4. Uh... Operation Lustre wasn't an invasion, unless you count Greek dithering in the face of impending doom. No because Germany invaded Yugoslavia in response to the May coup, not the war in Greece. Germany invaded Greece to support Mussolini and to prevent the region from being used as a base to bomb Romanian oil fields.
    2
  5.  @markaxworthy2508  The Italians were quite busy in Libya at the time and its troops were not particularly enthusiastic about the whole adventure. It is very possible that a renewed Greek offensive with British support would have succeeded, and turned the whole thing into a disaster that could have threatened the Fascist regime. This is a major factor in the German invasion. The Germans won the war on maneuver not attrition.
    2
  6. Probably not. It took the Red Army two years to its crap together. Also, deploying for exercises does not mean they would be deployed properly and well, they had major systemic defects.
    2
  7. The entire Mediterranean theatre was a major distraction and drain on resources that Hitler wanted to focus on Barbarossa. The occupation of Southern Europe and the N. African campaign didn't just soak up hundreds of thousands of men, but took up (and lost) a lot of their logistical capacity, that was already not Germany's strong point.
    1
  8. Well, Stalin was still busy getting paybacks for his humiliation of 1920. Likewise the rest of Eastern Europe was still raw from the chaos if various civil and territorial wars post WWI. Also the Red Army was a devastated mess from Stalin's purges, full of troops terrified into passivity led by militarily incompetent but politically loyal (to Stalin) hacks. See: the Winter War. Mussolini's machinations were all part of his delusion of Neo Romanità. Which he had already pursuing during the 30's. Pretty much all of this was a culmination of the failure of the Triple Entente to reestablish political stability in Europe and it would have required better men to have delayed or reduced the war. They might have even avoided it altogether if the better angels of their nature had been on their game.
    1
  9. Plus Hitler's mad-on against the Soviets. He probably would have insisted on Barbarossa even if the French and English were still in the fight on the continent.
    1
  10. Pretty much. Very likely Yugoslavia would have collapsed into a civil war with very little provocation. The Germans only needed to make sure that the British or Soviet backed sides didn't gain an upper hand. So it would have been a miserable non-factor in the war.
    1