70TH ANNIVERSARY DISCUSSION (6) THE ALTMARK INCIDENT

Today is the 100th anniversary of the launch of the British battlecruiser HMS Hood, the Royal Navy’s largest warship during the interwar period, sunk by the Bismarck in 1941, and (much later) the inspiration for the A&A 1941 Allied battleship sculpt.  The BBC story…

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-45270946

…mentions that Hood’s round-the-world cruise in 1923-1924 included a stopover in Canada; I’ve attached below a photo of Hood anchored off Quebec City, with the easily-recognized Chateau Frontenac Hotel (site of the 1943 Quebec Conference involving Churchill, Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister King) in the background.
HMS Hood Quebec City 19 August-2 September 1924.jpg

Part of the problem that the US Navy ran into when it went to war was that – like many military forces before or since – it had to learn some things for itself before it believed them.  The British had over two years of experience fighting the Battle of the Atlantic at that point, but the Americans didn’t feel that they needed any advice from them on the matter.  It didn’t help that Admiral Ernest J. King was an Anglophobe, in addition to having a generally abrasive personality.  (His wife reputedly once said: “Ernie is the most even-tempered man I’ve ever met.  He’s always in a foul mood.”)  As a result, the Americans made mistakes in their early ASW methods of operations which could have been avoided.  In fairness, the US Army had similar learning-curve problems in North Africa, notably at Kasserine Pass if I remember correctly.

Good post. However, I would like to make a correction. During WWII, Winston Churchill (later joined by FDR) imposed a food blockade on Germany. The Hunger Plan was the Nazi government’s effort to deal with the resulting food crisis. The Hunger Plan involved the starvation of captured Soviet cities; so that the food which would otherwise have fed those cities could instead be used to prevent starvation elsewhere in the Reich.

The plan had never been to starve Soviet POWs. Those POWs were conscripted to work in German weapons factories. Everyone, from Hitler on down, recognized those POWs were an essential component of Germany’s war machine. That is why Hitler ordered the POWs to be fed.

However, the Reich lacked the manpower necessary to cordon off captured Soviet cities from the Soviet countryside. Due to the lack of that manpower, the Nazis were unable to prevent food from flowing from the captured Soviet countryside to captured Soviet cities. The Hunger Plan mostly failed: the planned starvation in captured Soviet cities mostly did not occur. That failure didn’t result in fewer deaths. Just different deaths than those the Nazi government had envisioned with their Hunger Plan. Due to the failure of the Hunger Plan, the man tasked with feeding the Soviet POWs didn’t have the food he needed to carry out the order Hitler had given to him: the order to feed the Soviet POWs. Because it was physically impossible for that man to carry out his orders, millions of Soviet POWs starved to death while in German captivity.

The Nazi leadership had deep-seated fears about Germany’s food situation. One of the reasons Hitler wanted lebensraum was so that Germany could physically feed itself, even if Britain imposed a food blockade. (As it did in WWI, and as Churchill again did in WWII.) The two most vital resources Hitler required from the western Soviet Union were food and petroleum. For Barbarossa to have been successful from the Nazi perspective, Germany needed to capture a considerable portion of Soviet oilfields, and a considerable portion of Soviet farmland.

To address your question of what Hitler should have done differently: he should have placed von Manstein in charge of Barbarossa in its entirety. Doing so would have resulted in a far greater level of success. Moscow and Leningrad almost certainly would have fallen in 1941, paving the way for additional German successes in 1942.

Note that the typical Allied excuse for terror bombings and mass aerial exterminations of German and Japanese civilians was that such actions might “shorten the war” and “save the lives of Allied servicemen.” Had FDR cooperated with the German generals who’d wanted to overthrow Hitler, he could have shortened the war in Europe by two years, and saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Allied servicemen. FDR was not interested in shortening the war, or in saving the lives of Allied servicemen (black ants). Nor was he interested in preventing Soviet hegemony in the postwar world (which the German generals’ plan might also have accomplished).

No. They needed Hitler alive to guarantee victory, to kill him would result in some smarter leader taking over and extending the war. Thats why they didn’t kill him in 1940. Read your History. Heydrich was killed because he was too dangerous. Same reason they didn’t kill Goering. They just had to bomb the nearest Shakey’s Buffet, but they didn’t. That fat idiot was the best weapon the Allies had. And Carpet Bombing is not “extermination”. Gets the facts straight. Hitler destroyed Rotterdam for nothing as well as many other cities by bombing.

It is pretty obvious that if UK bombed Russia, then Russia had no other choice than to declare war against UK, and the only way Russia could stop the air raids was to occupy Iran, where the UK airfields were. So yes, the War would have taken a different path

@Herr:

The Soviet Union indeed intended to spread communism all around the world, but whether that would necessarily have implied a military invasion of central Europe in the 1940’s, is not certain. Their approach varied quite a bit, from inciting revolutions of the “working class” in other countries, to promoting wars between “bourgeois” powers, to actual war.

Also, if I remember correctly, Lenin’s death was followed by a power struggle in the USSR between the Trotsky faction, which wanted to pursue an agenda of internationalist communism, and the Stalin faction, which wanted to focus on communism at home (or whatever the phrase was).  The Trotsky faction lost, with Trotsky himself eventually going into exile and ultimately being assassinated.

Yes Marc, but in that case UK and France could just as well accepted the proposal from the Sovjet Foreign minister Litvinov and marched into Germany in 1933 to arrest Hitler. After all, Hitler did threat to attack USSR in his book Mein Kampf, so nobody could say they didn’t know. It looks like the capitalist Brits hated the commies so much, they wanted Germany to grow strong and kill the commies. So no, I don’t think the Brits or the French would have done anything to prevent the war from starting. It had to be prevented by someone else, like the Terminator coming to 1936 by accident, and mistaking Hitler for John Connor

One of the links in the article…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/pressure-exerted-by-a-scorpion-tank/17.html

…mentions the interesting factoid that a ballerina standing on one point exerts more ground pressure than a tank because, even though she exerts a lot less force, that force is concentrated on much smaller area of ground.  This would have made an interesting (though clumsy) WWII Soviet propaganda slogan: “Our heroic Bolshoi ballerinas exert more ground pressure than a Fascist Tiger tank!”