Good link for understanding Japans war plans before 1941

“Did Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Germany and Italy really have to declare war on the USA with the news of the attack?”

The best way to answer this IMO is to listen to Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States speech with subtitles. In effect, the US was already conducting war against Germany, attacking or reporting German merchant and warship positions to Allies. So, despite Hitler’s repeated efforts before and throughout WW2, Hitler reluctantly declared war to show support of his greatest ally, Japan, but also because United States would have soon declared war on Euro-Axis and Germany had had enough of US’ underhanded ways.

Germany had essentially two options here. 1) Capture the city quickly, before the defenses could be built up. 2) Capture it via siege.

I don’t think that creating an urban combat situation, in which Germany attempted to capture the city street by street, would have been viable. In typical combat situations German soldiers had a 3:1 or 4:1 advantage in combat effectiveness over their Soviet counterparts. But in urban, street-to-street fighting the ratio was about 1:1. Germany could not afford anything even remotely approaching that 1:1 ratio, which is why something other than street-to-street fighting was necessary.

Von Manstein wrote that during the Barbarossa operation of '41 there had been a perfectly good opportunity to take Leningrad. But that this was wasted, allowing the Soviets to fortify it.

The other option would have been to do a better job of putting it under siege. This would have entailed tightening the cordon around the city, preventing just about anything from making it through. I think there was a case when Germany attempted exactly that. However, at the same time the Soviets were attempting to break the siege, so each side’s offensive encountered the other’s. From a tactical view there may have been more Germany could have done. But I think the real problem was strategic: the Soviet Union had too much military strength. A discussion on how to address that problem is probably outside the scope of this thread.

@Wicked:

Don’t forget, unlike France or Norway surrender was no survivable option for the Russian population. Hitler made very clear quite early that he considered them “subhuman” and GeStaPo and SS did their deadly job in notorious german thouroughness in Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. So I’m not sure if taking the capital would have ended the war in Russia - perhaps the regular war, but not the need for massive amount of troops there. I’m pretty sure the long term need and lack of administrational staff and police for this vast area with millions of deads causing disobeyance and riots would have been more than a pain in the a… for the Reich.
The Nazi dictature based on nationalism including/featuring hatred towards Jews and Slaws, denunciation and a powerful police - that wouldn’t have worked there. But on second thought, they might have been able to get some russians to help and give some incentives like surviving a month longer… It would have been hell on earth.

In the end Hitler had not enough of his beloved true blood Germans to realize his megalomaniac ideas - you don’t make many friends by hating them constitutionally.

An important part of German planning for the postwar period included the intention of forcibly relocating 30 - 50 million Poles eastward, to make room for German expansion. Had the Allied food blockade still been in effect, the deaths of large numbers of Poles along the way would have been considered an acceptable way of relieving pressure on Germany’s food supply; thereby preventing the starvation of an equal number of non-Poles.

During the war, the combination of the Allied food blockade and Stalin’s scorched earth tactics made it impossible for Germany to feed all the people within the lands it had conquered from the Soviet Union. The physical impossibility of Germany feeding those people proved a boon for Soviet propagandists; who took advantage of the situation by claiming that Germany planned to starve or kill all the people of the conquered Soviet Union. Soviet propagandists were not normally considered a highly reliable source of information. In this instance, however, the fact that large numbers of people in German-occupied portions of the Soviet Union were actually starving seemed to lend a hint of credibility to these claims.

As the war in Europe became increasingly less favorable for Germany, large numbers of Soviet civilians fled west into Germany. The westward flight of many Soviet civilians demonstrates that not all Soviet citizens believed Soviet wartime propaganda.

The Battle of Britain….

@CWO:

Intereting hypothetical question.  One amusing aspect is the idea of Hitler, with his long track record of breaking treaties and of attacking other countries without warning, expressing shock over Japanese treachery – though I guess it’s not unimaginable, since the same track record basically shows that he was quite capable of changing his foreign policies in any way that he felt served his interests at any given time.  And relations between Germany and Japan were not always cordial.  For instance, Germany supposedly expressed shock over the Rape of Nanking and offered itself as a mediator between China (with whom I think it had a degree of military advisory relations) and Japan.  And Japan was highly annoyed when Germany signed the August 1939 nonaggression pact with Japan’s old enemy, Russia.

Even taking Hitler’s impulsive and erratic nature into account, however, it’s pretty hard to fathom why he’d declare war on Japan in December 1941.  The two countries were partners under the Tripartite Pact, whose bottom line was, frankly, that Germany and Japan agreed to stay out of each other’s way as each nation pursued its expansionist policies on opposite sides of the globe.  A war between the two countries, even if it had been declared, would have been virtually impossible to wage since German and Japan were separated from each other by vast stretches of land (notably the USSR, which was unfriendly to both countries) and ocean.

It’s even harder to fathom why Hitler would offer support to the US in December 1941, since the Americans were actively supporting its enemy Great Britain.  I can understand Britain’s wartime partnership with the USSR against Germany, on the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, but Hitler’s support of the US would have been a case of “the friend of my enemy is my friend”, which makes no sense.

Just for argument’s sake, however, I’d guess that if Hitler had inexplicably offered to the US a wartime alliance against Japan, the Americans wouldn’t have accepted it.  Nazi Germany was, to put it mildly, neither liked nor trusted by the Roosevelt administration, and its reaction would probably have been to treat a partnership proposal from Hitler like the offer of a bottle of poison.

it’s pretty hard to fathom why he’d declare war on Japan in December 1941.

I don’t want to speak for Gargantua. But it’s possible that the goal of this declaration of war would be for Germany to distance itself as much as possible from Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack. The underlying objective would be to make the political climate in America less favorable for going to war against Germany.

Nazi Germany was, to put it mildly, neither liked nor trusted by the Roosevelt administration, and
its reaction would probably have been to treat a partnership proposal from Hitler like the offer of a bottle of poison.

The goal of Stalin’s foreign policy was to foster war between Germany and the Western democracies. Stalin hoped to achieve this goal by promoting “anti-fascism.” The Soviet Union would stay neutral in this hoped-for war. This war would weaken both Germany and the Western democracies. Ideally it would be like WWI, and bleed both sides white. That war would set the stage for Soviet expansion westward into Europe. The first stage would be at the expense of Germany and Eastern Europe. The second state would be at the expense of France and possibly other Western democracies.

FDR was extremely eager to embrace the pro-Soviet, anti-fascist foreign policy Stalin envisioned for Western democracies. I don’t see anything Hitler could have done to change that. He didn’t begin to have the kind of penetration into the FDR administration Stalin had. Nor was there any readily available way for him to achieve that penetration. FDR hated Nazis and other Germans, but was very intrigued by communism and by Stalin. It was this mindset which allowed a number of outright communists to achieve positions of great influence in his administration, while anyone with right wing views was either excluded entirely or eased out of any real policy-setting role.

But FDR did not work in a vacuum. Had it been up to him, the United States would have declared war on Germany back in the '30s. The fact it did not do so was because due to strong isolationist forces. While FDR and his allies in the media were working diligently to weaken those forces, even by December 1941 they were still strong. Had Germany declared war on Japan in December '41, it would have been a clear, simple statement. Even FDR and his allies would have found it difficult to distort that statement into something which made war with Germany seem necessary.

By the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, the American pro-war faction had built up too much political momentum for a German declaration of war against Japan to stop them. Sooner or later, the pro-war faction would succeed at getting America into the war; much like it had succeeded in WWI. Even over the short-term, the pro-war faction would still have been able to send large quantities of weapons to Stalin and the Soviet Union, as well as to Britain.

Let’s say that declaring war against Japan would have bought Germany two years of nominal peace with America. While Germany would still have had to deal with large numbers of American made weapons during that two year period, at least it wouldn’t have had to face American soldiers. That two year grace period would have allowed Germany to concentrate more of its military force on its eastern front, instead of having to use as much strength defending against potential or actual Anglo-American invasions elsewhere. (Though they would still have had to defend against the Anglo half of that threat.)

That concentration of force against the Soviet Union would undoubtedly led to a more favorable situation on Germany’s eastern front. More victories, more Soviet soldiers captured, more conquered Soviet land. But I do not think that this alone would have been sufficient for Germany to win the war in the east. In the absence of other factors helping Germany, the German objective on the eastern front should (in this scenario) have been to grab what land it could in the western U.S.S.R., including at least some of the Caucasus oilfields, and then negotiate peace with Stalin. The more successful Germany was on its eastern front, the more presumptively likely Stalin would have been to negotiate an end to hostilities.

This peace treaty would by no means have represented the end of the war. It would merely indicate Germany had survived the first phase of the challenges ahead of it.

Lol yes Gar. “So the Germans can march in the shade”

Read “world war 2 behind closed doors” by laurence rees

There was a secret part in the treaty between the french, british and poles which the brits and the french promised military assistance against a German attack not a Soviet attack and remember they did not help in the war between the poles in the soviets in late 1910’s and early 1920’s but instead suggested the curzon line (which the Molotov-Ribbentrop line basicly followed)

Also the soviets at Tehran were more interested in soviet post war borders than they were in actually winning the war and remember in 1943 this was not a certainty. They wanted to keep there pre 1941 gains.

This is just a brief overview of some othe parts of the book I suggest you read it. It is very good.

The brits and the french could have attacked the siegfried line before the germans finished it and probably would have been succesful and because they did not co-operate with the Belgium people (I don’t know the correct word) and the dutch because the later two did not want to appear co-operating with the allies because at that time they were neutral. The Germans had a brilliant strategy in attacking (the aaa territory North West Europe) and then following nit up with the tank drive through the ardennes they cut of the Elite French and British troops from the rest of the army. They shouldn’t have allowed Dunkirk and should have forced the British and French into the sea and this would come back to haunt them.

@SilverBullet:

yeah, if germany never attacked russia, england woulda fell, hitler just didnt have the patience to wait england out and had 2 use all his pretty toys and the only target left for his tanks was russia. and germany still had a small chance to win even after they attacked russia, but lets face it, hitler wasnt a general and he made mistakes that say, rommel or other generals wouldnt have made.

Its not that easy, Germany did not have the Oil, Raw Materials, and Food Stuffs to sustain itself for a long war.  Russia had sufficent quantities of all 3.  Germany invaded Russia when it did cause of economic neccesity.  Also, cause of the massive industrial/military advancements in the Soviet Union after the disaster in Finand, if Germany waited another year or 2, the Russian military would of been strong enough to handle Germany’s.