It is an interesting question. Suffice it to say it would have likely taken North Africa out of the question altogether. Perhaps even to the extent that operation TORCH against the Vichy would not have materialized. The attack on Russia would have probably come in early May instead of late June and with the extra month and a half of good weather the Soviets may have fallen. There are a hundred different ways it could have played out but one thing is for certain. Italy was one of the best helps to the Allies in the war. They were a drain on the Nazi war machine and were unable to make any significant gains of their own. The first example of this we will see in British Somaliland.
Yet, ‘Bogged Down’ is a misnomer.
Yes, The Germans had to bail the Italians out in Greece, but it was the Pro-Allied Coup in Yugoslavia on Mar 27, 1941, that set Barbarossa back.
Hitler had made an agreement with the Crown Prince of Yugoslavia, that took them out of the game, until the coup.
Cougar
Col. David Glantz, American authority on the Russo-German war, believes that the “delay” to Barbarossa caused by Germany’s involvement in the Balkans is a myth. He states that the winter of 1940-41 had a late thaw, and in most of Western Russia April and May were unusually wet months. In addition, the forces used in the Balkans were relatively minor, and not serious deletions from the German Order of Battle. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, they had a number of infantry divisions held back in Germany as reserves. Those divisions were fed into the front line over time as the front lengthened the farther east the Germans advanced. The fact that those reserves existed at all shows that there was not a serious loss of combat capability to the German Army caused by the Balkan Campaign.
Glantz believes Barbarossa was at most delayed two weeks. And I don’t buy that those two weeks would have gotten the Germans to Moscow before winter. Moscow was beyond the Wehrmacht’s logistic limit regardless of the weather.
The myth of the Barbarossa delay finds its origins in the post-war statements of defeated German generals, who were looking for convenient excuses for the failure of Barbarossa. They conjured up just about every reason except the real one, and that is that Germany simply did not have the time or logistic capacity to destroy the USSR in one summer campaign season. Barbarossa had to be planned as a two-year campaign, with a “winter rest period,” to have had any real chance of complete victory.
Wow...I’m really getting ahead of myself here...