Comments by "Not Today" (@nottoday3817) on "Why didn’t Hitler End the War when he Failed to get the OIL of the Caucasus?" video.

  1.  @rbfishcs123  Well, Germany was an industrial nation for almost half a century by the start of WW2 (even more if you count Prussia). So much so that UK, the largest Empire the world has ever seen, was considering them an existential threat in early 1900s. Soo, asking how much industrialisation the Germans did is kinda pointless. The only appropriate answer would be: A LOT. However, industrialization plays only a fraction of the roles in a food crisis. What industrialisation allows for food production is access to machines (tractors, harvesters etc. ) and improved irrigation systems. Something generally called 'mechanised agriculture'. While mechanised agriculture does a good job at helping the farming situation (the lack of it could explain the food/agricultural crisis in late Russian Empire or pre-war Romania -which are generally ignored by historians because they don't fit the 'communists ruined everything' narrative), it's more of a socio-economic benefit rather than a straight up agricultural one (more machines means less need for farmers which means more people can do something else, but you still have limited ammounts of farmland) This clusterfuck of sentences being said, you could summ it up in this: Germany was an industrialised nation, but it really lacked the proper farmland and climate to sustain it's massive population, which means their industrialisation had only a very limited impact on what it could actually do.
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  2.  @russelledwards001  Errm, I believe defacing of Churchil statues with words like 'racist' is widely recorded in the media and on facebook via pictures. So it's not just 'bullshit that's been fed to us'/
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  3.  @jussim.konttinen4981  Well, the point of calling for an unconditional surrender is to make sure your enemy will never be able to strike you again.
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  4.  @andrewblake2254  'they had grown prosperous on it over the centuries' Bangladesh has a bigger population than Russia. Does that mean they have food for everyone, not really? They had land for agriculture, but they did not have enough for autarky and almost always they had to import as well.
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  5. Hitler: 'I declare THE END OF THE WAR' The Allies: 'You cannot just say the end fo the war and be done with it'. Hitler: 'I didn't just say it, I declared it'.
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  6. I think there were some talks before the invasion of Italy and Kursk/Kiev because he was not trusting the intentions of the Allies in the post-war world. (Aka he still thought that the Allies would let USSR bleed out and then strike at them, like it happened in 1917-1919) However he could not consider any form of ceasing hostilities with so many critical areas of USSR under German control. Germany did not want to cede them, obviously, since they needed them as well, and by the time USSR gained them back, well, Germany already lost any potential for an offensive.
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  7. I mean, Romania was defeated in 1944 (I know the official history says we switched sides, but let's be honest, the Soviets almost breached our final defensive lines when an n-th round of negociations finally brought a political solution. Also, the germans in Romania were still fighting after 23.08) And yet Romanias oil production for some raffineries in 1944 exceeded that of 1941, with the air raids and all. And German tank production I believed peaked in 1943. And in 1944 they were also faster to assemble airplanes. And they were hoping to get a new secret factory to build their jet fighters and bombers. One thing most people forget is that with the shrinking of fronts and armies you also get a loss in demand for resources. if you barely have a bunch of tanks that can operate at a given time and only a handful of planes, why would you care about oil?
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  8. I mean all of Hitlers plans being implemented in reality seem to defy logic. Spanish Civil War: Hey, we just got rid of Versailles, let's display our military might by intervening in another country south of France (our traditional enemy). Sure the powers that previously anihilated us for doing that will have no problem with that. And they didn't. Some say they might have even helped a little. Austria: Ok, ok. I have this wonderful ideea. Let's invade another country (Austria). Surely the Allies would say nothing about it. And they didn't A few months later: Czechoslovakia looks kinda nice. And they have an alliance with USSR and France. Let's attack them. France betrays USSR and Czechoslovakia and together with England hand crucial areas of Czech industry to Germany. And Poland later invades Czechoslovakia as well. 1939: Hm... I think we don't have more time to gear up our military, but I have a feeling we have enough. Let's move all of our military force into Poland, a country having a military alliance with UK and France. Surely those nations on the total other end of our country are going to do nothing. France invades Germany, advances a few hundred miles, turns around. 1940: I have an ideea. We'll invade Norway. We'll send our most powerful battleships (and the only ones we actually have) togeher with troop transports on a literal parade in front of the Home Fleet (which alone outnumbered the Germany Navy) to capture a port at the end of the world. The Brits see the ships and do nothing until it's too late. And they also lose a carrier to the German battleships. (Take that carrier superiority lol- take it as a joke, I know the story and why it ended like that) France: I have an ideea. France. They have the most powerful tanks around. They have amazing artillery pieces and quite numerous. They also have the support of UK with some amazing tanks and good aviation. We might also have to deal with Belgium which has a nasty fort. And there's the issue with the Maginot line. LET'S GO STRAIGHT AT THEM, we can use a forrest to cover us. The Belgian fort falls in a matter of hours. The French spot the tanks in the Ardennen forrests, do nothing about them. The Maginot Line was so effective that nobody bothered to fight it, France fell in a matter of months. The luck of that man in early war and before was insane. Heck I could even add more: Crete in 1941 and then, for Barbarossa, Finland and Romania, 2 nations that Hitler dismembered in favour of other countries (USSR, Hungary, Bulgaria) ended up being his strategic allies
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  9. As far as I remember, the initial conception of Barbarossa was Hitlers doing, since it's rooted even in Mein Kampf (Go for Ukraine and Caucasus), but Halder and Paulus wanted to strike for Moskow first in an attempt to repeat the scenario in France: Threaten the capital and collapse the morale, forcing the enemy to accepting anything you say.
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  10. Well, Japan was an empire and they had an empire. So there you go: Monarchy. Autocratic monarchy to be more precise. (Isn't that basic knowledge) As for how the decision making apparatus of the Japanese empire went, oh it's a bloody mess because it suffered like 2-3 tectonic shifts between 1936 and 1941 and another one in the summer of 1945.
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  11. 1. Stalin already had 'half of Europe in his hands'. It was the issue of how many countries could UK and USA get their hands on. 2. They still needed the Soviets to wage war on Japan after the end of the war in Europe.
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  12. ' they’ll all be put before the wall and shot' Actually, he knew he was not going to be shot. When he realised only death penalty was awaiting for him, he protested being hanged 'like a common criminal' demanding to be shot instead
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  13. Another thing to be noted, secondary sources are not necessarily 'worse' compared to primary sources depending on what you can classify. For example, one could say diaries, letters or memoirs are primary sources because they can come from people who had 'hands on' experience of the frontline or perhaps were written right on the frontline. Meanwhile a book by, let's say, Glantz, is clearly a secondary source. However, one has to remember, everything we have, every book or record is written by humans, so it could be faulty. (God, I study aviation engineering and despite mountains of legislation we often hear about 'doctored' record keeping). For a practical example, a soldier fighting in Barbaraossa could complain that he's been fighting 'hordes of russians', simply because he was fighting for many days straight. However, a secondary source, looking at the broader picture, clearly shows that the Soviets were outnumbered at the start of Barbarossa, meaning it was actually hordes of Germans fighting the Soviets.
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  14. I need to get up in the morning (3am right now), so if you want to expand my points, give a message in like 12 hours from now. The effectiveness of air superiority is to this day contested. Yes, it brings a massive advantage, especially when it comes to gathering intelligence on the enemy, but their effect is more one of morale than kill effectiveness. Tanks are more reliable and easier to maintain. Not going into fuel consumption because that's a whole new can of worms. Tank destroyers are extraordinary for defence or infantry support (that's why most of them were attached along infantry). But for offensives you need proper tanks which can rotate their turrets and use gun depression in a much more effective way in order to have a better reaction time.
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