Comments by "John Burns" (@johnburns4017) on "Why Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union failed | John Mearsheimer and Lex Fridman" video.

  1. The imminent concern of Germany was to get resources to fend off the coming air war with Britain. Hence the attack on the USSR. An aid to taking the British empire out of the war. Wages of Destruction. Prof Adam Tooze: Planning for Barbarossa. Tooze Page 454: "Critical stores would be reserved above all for the main strike force of 33 tank and motorised infantry divisions. If the battle extended much beyond the first months of the attack, the fighting power of the rest of the German army would dwindle rapidly." "Fundamentally the Wehrmacht was a "poor army". The fast striking motorised element of the German army in 1941 consisted of only 33 divisions of 130. Three-quarters of the German army continued to rely on more traditional means of traction: foot and horse. The German army in 1941 invaded the Soviet Union with somewhere between 600,000 and 740,000 horses. The horses were not for riding. They were for moving guns, ammunition and supplies." "The vast majority of Germany's soldiers marched into Russia, as they had in France, on foot." "But to imagine a fully motorised Wehrmacht, poised for an attack on the Soviet Union is a fantasy of the Cold War, not a realistic vision of the possibilities of 1941. To be more specific, it is an American fantasy. The Anglo-American invasion force of 1944 was the only military force in WW2 to fully conform to the modern model of a motorised army." Page 455: "the chronic shortage of fuel and rubber" "the fuel shortage of 1941 was so expected to be so severe that the Wehrmacht was seriously considering demotorisation as a way of reducing its dependency on scarce oil." "Everything therefore depended on the assumption that the Red Army would crack under the impact of the first decisive blow." Page 456: "a new Soviet industrial base to the east of the Urals, which had the capacity to sustain a population of at least 40 million people." "Soviet industrial capacity was clearly very substantial." "Franz Halder recorded Hitler's ruminations about the Soviets' immense stock of tanks and aircraft." Reading further Tooze gives the misgivings of the German generals of the invasion. All were negative. Page 460: "As late as the Spring of 1941, the Foreign Ministry was still opposing the coming war, preferring to continue the alliance with the Soviet Union against the British Empire." "If the shock of the initial assault does not destroy Stalin's regime, it was evident in February 1941 that the Third Reich would find itself facing a strategic disaster." Page 452: "the Germans had already conscripted virtually all their prime manpower. By contrast, the Red Army could call up millions of reservists." Why did Germany invade the USSR in a rushed ill-conceived plan? Page 431: "the strongest arguments for rushing to conquer the Soviet Union in 1941 were precisely the growing shortage of grain and the need to knock Britain out of the war before it could pose a serious air threat." "Meanwhile, the rest of the German military-industrialised complex began to gird itself for the aerial confrontation with Britain and America." Germany rushed to invade the Soviet Union, with an ill-equipped army with no reserves in anticipation of a massive air war with Britain and the USA, hoping they could win the Soviet war within weeks. The coming air war: Roosevelt promised 50,000 plane per year production in May 1940, of which a substantial amount would be in the RAF. Germany could not compete with the level of aircraft at the UKs disposal. Whether the planes had US and UK pilots or just UK pilots they were coming Germany's way. And the only way they could really get at each other was by air. Germany feared mass bombing, which came - the bomber in the late 1930s was perceived as a war winning weapon. The Germans knew the lead time for aircraft was 18 months from order to delivery. That meant in late 1941/early 1942, these planes would be starting to come into service in great numbers. Germany needed the resources of the east to compete. If the population was too big they would eliminate the population - the precedence was the American move to the west expanding the USA, taking lands from the natives population and Mexican and eliminating the population. War Production: Keegan, World War Two, chapter War Production: - Germany was third behind the USA, then the UK in GDP, in 1939. Germany = UK in capital goods production in 1939. - UK economy grows 60% during WW2. - Hitler says to Guderian, re: USSR, "had I known they had so many tanks as that, I would have thought twice before invading" Tooze, Preface, xxiii: Combined GDP of the UK and France exceeded Germany & Italy by 60%. - page 454: "It was poor because of the incomplete industrial and economic development of Germany". Before the war the Soviet defence industry was in a state of permanent technological reorganisation as new models of aircraft, tanks, and other weapons were introduced and old ones phased out at dizzying rate. The USSR had access to oil and more natural resources and far more men. Making their ability to produce far greater than Germany, which actually happened.
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  2. In both campaigns [France & Barbarossa], the Germans gambled on achieving decisive success in the opening phases of the assault. Anything less spelled disaster. ...If the Blitzkrieg's belt broke the whole movement stopped. The Germans thought they had formulated a version of Blitzkrieg in France that was a sure-fire success. They used this in the USSR, just scaling up forces. They did not have the intelligence to assess properly, that the reason for their success was allied incompetence not anything brilliant they did. Wages of Destruction - Adam Tooze, Page 380: _because it involved such a concentrated use of force, Manstein's plan was a one-shot affair. If the initial assault had failed, and it could have failed in many ways, the Wehrmacht as an offensive force would have been spent. The gamble paid off. But contrary to appearances, the Germans had not discovered a patent recipe for military miracles. The overwhelming success of May 1940, resulting in the defeat of a major European military power in a matter of weeks, was not a repeatable outcome.
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