1,500 NAZI PLANES BOMB LONDON; INDUSTRY AND SERVICES DAMAGED (9/8/40)

That’s silly. Live your own reHistory fantasy; I can’t stop you.

But Germany was defeated by Pershing in the First World War even after Russia had signed a separate peace deal with the Kaiser, and Germany was doomed to be defeated again in the Second World War by Eisenhower with or without Russia.

Germany couldn’t stop U.S. bombers in the air, and the Germans were losing 14% of their soldiers and 30% of their SS fanatics compared to 3% losses for U.S. Marines and 2% losses for U.S. Army soldiers.

Massed German tanks and superior numbers of mechanized German foot-soldiers were stopped cold at Bastogne, as one example, by U.S. artillery alone (introduction of the revolutionary proximity fuse).

Patton pointed out Germany’s desperate situation in his note of Germans having to use horse-drawn wagons for resupply.

But coming full circle back to this thread, it was Germany’s failure to take Great Britain...due to their failure in the air war...that showed that Germany couldn’t dream of holding Europe from the U.S. later.

We digress greatly and are getting about a year ahead of ourselves. But I will try to quickly address your points.

“If the railroad was the key, then wasn’t the logistical problem in Russia solved at the speed that rail lines could be converted to the narrower European gage? (gauge)”

Yes, to some extent. However, there were also infrastructure problems caused by the Soviet “scorched earth” policy. Coal and water stations, sheds, switches, sidings and most importantly, bridges, were all destroyed by the retreating Soviets. You might claim that the German planners could not have forseen this. Even if the infrastructure had been captured intact, it has to be converted to western european use. It’s more than just lifting one piece of rail, moving it a few inches, and nailing it back to the cross tie. One other aspect though is shipping space. In logistics, the farther you go, the longer a train has to be in service to make one round trip, which reduces delivery capacity. Germany had only so many locomotives and a limited quantity of rolling stock. As the trains require a longer trip, less supplies can be delivered. Winter weather would also prove to be a problem, as locomotives designed to operate in a milder climate would freeze up in Russia. So speed of conversion of the rail net determined some, but not all of the logistic limit, and there were complex issues with that conversion.

“Or, alternatively, the speed at which cargoes could be transferred from narrow gage German rail-cars to the wider Russian cars?”

Anyone who works in the transportation industry will tell you that this is an inherently inefficient means of shipping freight. Every time you have to change freight from one mode of shipping to another costs time, money and man-hours. It’s not a practical means of doing business. Plus, when you take over the Russian trains, you assume the responsibility for maintaining the unfamiliar equipment, including maintenance of all the support infrastructure. Again, not very efficient and a huge undertaking, if the Germans were capable of doing it at all. Even if the Germans assumed they would get the fixed infrastructure intact, the Germans should have assumed that not all of the Russian rolling stock was going to fall into their hands intact. They might take over the rail lines and the sheds; those things are not mobile. Trains are, and as the Russians retreat, they will take their trains with them.

“And were there not rail lines crisscrossing all of western Russia?”

Yes and no. The Russian rail net was not as dense or as pervasive as the western european net. Later developments in the war showed Soviet offensives, particularly in the winter of 1942-1943, were partly designed to free up limited rail lines blocked by German salients. The Soviets struggled under logistic limitations of their rail net just as the Germans did.

“Indeed, I’ve long wondered if the rail line connecting Stalingrad to the west might help explain Hitler’s obsession with fighting the battle there, and nowhere else.
Wouldn’t supplies for Stalingrad go straight to it by rail, then directly into the battle, very little truck transportation needed?”

Stalingrad was a great example of the logistic shoestring that hampered the Germans. I don’t think the rail line attracted Hitler, it was all in the name of the city and allowing himself to be drawn into a poker game, where he and Stalin kept raising the stakes on each other. The stakes being the bodies of their troops piled high on the table in front of them. The rail line to Stalingrad stretched all the way back to Silesia, about 1500 miles or so.

Stalingrad showed how shipping time and transportation turnaround over a long distance reduces logistic support. It was that long thin line that had to provide every gun, bullet, shell, bomb and meal for the 6th Army. It was the lack of capacity of that line that caused the supporting 8th Fliegerkorps to steadily reduce the daily sorties they could fly, eventually resulting in a surrender of air superiority by default. It was that reduced rail capacity that meant that the satellite armies of Romanians, Italians and Hungarians on the flanks of 6th Army, having a lower priority, didn’t get the equipment or supplies they needed. It meant that several panzer divisions slated to form back up mobile support for those satellite armies, didn’t get deployed before the Soviets opened their counter offensive. In fact, had the Germans been able to get those mobile forces in place, and had they been available to immediately counter-attack Soviet thrusts, Stalingrad may have turned out differently.

Sherman’s March to the Sea in November 1864 was a gutsy and innovative means of resolving this dilemma. Having captured Atlanta, he knew he was at the end of a very long fragile single rail track that stretched all the way back to Louisville. The track required a lot of protection from Confederate raiders and Sherman knew it wasn’t secure. So, in a flash of brilliance, he decided to “live off the land” and head for Savannah. He sent all trains and General Thomas’ troops back up to Chattanooga, tearing up the track behind them as they went. Sherman then disappeared into the Georgia countryside, planning on coming out at Savannah where the U.S. Navy could resupply him.

“Point is, if Hitler’s logistical planners assumed the Russian railroads would be available, that might explain their overly optimistic expectations.”

My point is that Hitler’s planners had to completely ignore logistics in making their plans. Very foolish, considering that logistics is the basic foundation of every military endeavor and a highly trained military staff ought to know it.

Couple of quick observations.

Germany was doomed to be defeated again in the Second World War by Eisenhower with or without Russia.

Perhaps, but it would have taken a lot longer and would have meant that atomic weapons would have found their first use on German cities instead of in Japan. If the Soviets had sued for peace it would have freed up a large number of divisions to fortify the Atlantic Wall. That being the case then I think Hitler would have been in a position to counter attack the Normandy forces without worrying or caring if it was a diversion because he could do it while still having Calais completely fortified with reserves at the ready. He also would have been able to better support the Mediterranean operations if he wished, which could have changed that theater as well. This would have been different than when the German divisions were freed up in the First World War in that the Nazis already had the western front secured on the continent, and of course the changes in warfare in general between the two wars make utilization of these units more effective.

One of the hardest aspects of this war for me will take place next year when the Soviets get attacked. Even knowing the results I find it very difficult to root for the Soviet Union in any fashion. It is a hold over from growing up in the Cold War I guess.

Another point is that Patton may have pointed out that the Germans had to use horse drawn wagons for resupply, but the fact of the matter was that they did that from the beginning. The concept that the Wehrmacht was this new mobilized force is a complete myth and they in fact used twice as many horses in the Second World War than Germany did in WWI. Not only did Germany use them for their logistics, but they often had to use horse for things like artillery pieces and troop movements. The question becomes was it really a bad thing in the grand scheme of things. With horse-drawn logistics the Germans rushed from Poland to the outskirts of Moscow in less than 6 months. The U.S. Army rushed across France only to become bogged down because they couldn't keep up with the supply needs of a completely motorized Army. (Basically I have given you my thesis question and I am taking donations if you wish to help me get the National Archive rolls I need to answer that question)** j/k.

I'll be more than happy to update you on this aspect of the war as I really dig deep into it.

I agree that Stalingrad was more symbolic than strategic. Hitler was very much into symbolism. Think of all those parades which try to rewrite history and Hitler’s attempts to liken the Nazis to the Teutonic Knights. All symbolism to make them seem larger than life. The prospect of taking the city which bares his enemy’s name was just too much to resist and therefore became an obsession.

I also agree that logistics was just not sufficiently looked at going in by the German planners which is really almost unforgivable from a military perspective.

"We digress greatly and are getting about a year ahead of ourselves"

We don't disagree in the least, and we are today talking about basic mistakes of German war planners during the summer & fall of 1940.
So we are not so terribly far off-topic. ;-)

I was merely asking whether Russian railroads coulda, shoulda, woulda overcome German long range logistics problems -- at least in the minds of German war planners?

Your answer is that Russians took care to destroy as many facilities -- especially bridges -- as possible.

This begs the question: once those facilities were reconstructed, did the Germans then have effective logistical support for the Russian front?

You seem to answer "no, especially during the Russian winter when German equipment was not suited for excessive cold."

But remember, by the time of Stalingrad, the Germans had more than a year to work on Russian infrastructure -- and this work included the laying of a double rail line to Sevastopol for Von Manstein's Schwerer Gustav guns. Indeed, Gustav's sister, Dora, was even used briefly at Stalingrad.

Point is, Germans were experts at rail transportation.
So I question whether serious bottlenecks in Russia were the real cause of their problems.

Consider the situation at Stalingrad -- the experts said von Paulus' army needed 800 tons per day of supplies, of which the Luftwaffe claimed it could supply barely 100 tons, and in the end could not do even that.

Well, if the average rail-car carried 50 tons, then for 800 tons, we are talking about one train per day with maybe 16 carloads of supplies. But if the average car carried only 25 tons, now you'd need 32 carloads per daily train.

Could this be a serious problem for Germany -- which had tens of thousands of railroad engines and hundreds of thousands of rail-cars traveling every day in the Reich? I doubt it.

So I suspect the real problem was less technical capacity than something else -- perhaps organization & leadership, or the lack thereof.

A separate peace with Russia wouldn’t buy anything for Germany. Sure, they could rush troops back to Normandy in perfect hindsight/foresight under such a scenario, but that peace also means that the massive U.S. resupply of the Soviet Union would have been shifted to the UK, speeding up the timetable for the Normandy invasion.

Moreover, the Germans proved woefully inadequate to stopping the U.S. at sea, in the air, and on the ground...all of which saw massively higher German losses than American...at a time when American manufacturing was vastly outproducing Germany.

What a separate peace with Russia would have done would have been to have sped up the end of the war at the cost of greater American casualties.

There was no possibility for a longer war simply because the U.S. had nukes.

There was no possibility for a different result in the war.

The war could have been shorter.

The war could have been deadlier.

Russia winning or drawing had no influence on the final outcome, but would have influenced the casualty count.

"That’s silly. Live your own reHistory fantasy; I can’t stop you."

I take it that, like most Americans, you know next to nothing about Germany's Easter Front?

The basics are that over 75% of the German military were assigned to, and 75% of German casualties happened on their Easter Front against the Soviet Union.

Had Stalin made a separate peace with Hitler, German forces in France could have been doubled or tripled -- making the Normandy invasion if not impossible, then vastly more difficult.

Keeping Stalin in the fight was a major objective of both Roosevelt and Churchill, and explains much of their otherwise "bizarre" seeming behavior.

I enjoyed the “20 Questions” that the paper had.

Good stuff to read to get the mind-thought back then and even get a re-educated for myself.

I like those questions, too. They have been in the Sunday thread every week since January.

A separate peace with Russia+Germany occurred in the First World War, and Pershing still won it.

Eisenhower was two months away from having nukes when Germany surrendered in the 2nd World War...Russia being in or out of the fight would not have changed the outcome.

In short, we’ve defeated Germany without Russia in the fight, and with Russia in the fight. Both ways.

Same outcome.

To pretend otherwise is to live in a fantasy of a rewritten History.

Sorry, i obviously overlooked them.

Well, I do disagree with you on some of these points, but that that’s OK.

I don’t think that the war would have been shorter. The Nazis would have reopened the supply lines from the Soviets that they had been enjoying even up to 20 June 1941. They also would have gotten access to Soviet industry and designs. I imagine they would have made use of the T-34. With Normandy being one of the sites that the Nazis felt was a potential landing point it doesn’t take much foresight to use some of these free up units to really fortify the coast. Since you are limited on how much you can land at one time this would have made a landing at Normandy a more risky proposition even with all that extra production going to Britain. It more likely would have sunk the island before making a huge impact. The atomic bombs would have been used on Germany but, assuming that Trinity was still a go, there would only had been a maximum of 3 for 1945 and their effects on the German willingness to continue the fight is impossible to determine as is the possibility of all the aircraft being able to get to and drop on their target since the degree of air superiority was not as absolute as it was over Japan.

Overall, I agree the war would have been more deadly for the Americans and British, but I don’t see it being shorter. Both Churchill and Roosevelt felt that it was of vital importance that Russia stay in the fight and I would have to say that they were on the right track on that thought even though I think they felt that way for different reasons. I do wish their successors (Atlee and Truman) would have worked harder to keep the Soviets out of the war with Japan though since by then Stalin was pretty much doing a land grab and that move had a major impact on Asia in the future.

The U.S. had 3 atomic bombs by August, 1945...10 by September, 30, by October, 90 by November, and was on track to produce more than 1,000 nukes per year from 1946 onward.

Also, the U.S. had an ace in the hole: the Pacific Fleet could keep Japan bottled up while B-29s, Marines, and the U.S. Army in the Pacific was retasked to the invasion of Normandy and conquest of Germany.

In short, Japan could be placed onto a back-burner because Tokyo could no longer threaten so much as Hawaii by 1944.

Thus, the U.S. could pull more firepower away from the Pacific into the fight in Europe than Germany could pull away from Russia for said fight.

No matter how WW2 is gamed out, the U.S. wins every time, just like WW1.

Russia in, Russia out...no difference in the final outcome.

None.

Hmmmmm.... well... OK, let's look at your arguments.

Southack: "A separate peace with Russia+Germany occurred in the First World War, and Pershing still won it."

After Russia surrendered in 1917 and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Von Hindenburg moved a portion of Germany's army from Russia to France, which he then used to launch the spring offensives of 1918 -- Operations Michael, Georgette, Blucher-Yorck and Gneiseau.

Those German offensives were successful, but only up to a point, and allied lines held -- mainly by the French and Brits, with minor contributions from Americans.

It can be argued the German 1918 offensives failed for three reasons:

They kept too many troops in Russia, sending not enough to the Western Front.
Fresh American troops.
The Germans did not deploy those factors which did eventually win the war for the allies: coordinated combined arms of infantry, artillery, armor and tactical air power.

It was especially this final factor employed by the Brits, which finally punched huge holes in German lines, driving them back and forcing surrender.

Yes, Americans played an important role, but we did not "win the war" all by our lonesomes.

Southack: "Eisenhower was two months away from having nukes when Germany surrendered in the 2nd World War...Russia being in or out of the fight would not have changed the outcome."

Yes, Roosevelt's A-bomb was developed for use against Germany.
But until first tested in July 1945, no one knew for sure if, or how well, it would work.
Certainly FDR had no intentions of waiting until he had the Bomb before invading Europe.

That's why Roosevelt's main strategic goal was to keep Stalin in the war, and so keep 75% of the German military tied down on the Eastern Front.
This made the Normandy landings of June 1944 even conceivable.

Had Stalin made a separate peace with Hitler in, say, 1942, then the war's outcome would certainly have been different, in ways that we can barely imagine today.
For example, suppose the allied landings in France had been met by an alliance of German and Soviet armies?

Southack: "In short, we’ve defeated Germany without Russia in the fight, and with Russia in the fight. Both ways. Same outcome. To pretend otherwise is to live in a fantasy of a rewritten History."

During the First World War, French forces were more than half of the western allied armies. These were not only missing in the Second World War, but many French were forced to work for the German war effort -- indeed most of France was heavily taxed to support Germany.

Had both France and Russia been defeated in the First World War, there was no possible way the US and Britain alone could defeat Germany. The same holds true for the Second World War.

Had Germany defeated both France and Russia by, say, 1942, the result would be surrender or major accommodation by the Brits and defacto Nazi rule over Europe.
This would have proved such US defeatists as Ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy, correct and likely kept America out of Europe. And, with no more war: also no major Manhattan Project.

Finally, remember, a renewed alliance between Stalin and Hitler would have provided Hitler intimate knowledge of US A-Bomb developments -- enough knowledge to allow Germans to have their own A-Bombs ready in time.

In short: things would not have gone well had Stalin made a separate peace, and this was a major concern motivating both Roosevelt and Churchill.

Utter nonsense.

Well-presented and fascinating points - thanks for the mucho informative and interesting post!

I would be very interested in seeing where you got those numbers from. They are very far off.

By June of 1946 the U.S. only had a total nuclear arsenal of 9 atomic weapons. That would include the one core that existed in August of 1945 but did not get used (they didn't have a matched implosion layer for it anyway so even though Stimson recommended that the components for bomb three be sent to Tainan on August 13th, 1945 it still would have been a few weeks to cast and verify an implosion sphere by x-raying it).

The problem was Plutonium production. At Hanford there were 3 production piles. B Pile was problematic mostly because it was the first built and they discovered a side effect of creating the transuranic element Neptunium (which decays up into Pu) was the creation of Xenon-135. It turns out that Xenon-135 has a neutron absorption rate 150 times greater than any other element known at that time. So what B-Pile often did was ramp up, go critical, run for a few days while its operators would have to continually move the rods back to keep it at 100 MW and then it would peter out and die. After a few days enough Xe-135 would decay that they could let B Pile go critical again. D Pile applied corrections that prevented this and F Pile as well (which only started up in February of 1945). All of these piles could never be run at more than 80 percent though because of the high neutron rates were actually damaging to the piles themselves.

Meanwhile in Tennessee, the U-235 separation process, was an even slower prospect. The problem being is that it is more difficult to separate an isotope of a same element than it is to chemically separate elements from each other like what happens with Pu. This made the prospects of mass producing uranium gun design bombs a lot less fruitful.

Here's a picture of a Calutron that I took that was used for U235 seperation. (National Museum of Nuclear Science & History)

Photobucket

At any rate if you could direct me to where you got your numbers from I would be interested in looking at it.

Southack: "Utter nonsense."

Hegewisch Dupa: "Well-presented and fascinating points - thanks for the mucho informative and interesting post!"

Despite the obvious brilliance of Southack's response, I'm more inclined to agree with Hegewisch Dupa. Thanks!

;-)

"(National Museum of Nuclear Science & History)"

At Sandia?

Sort of. It’s no longer on the base, but it is here in Albuquerque. I went there for my birthday this year to get some pictures that will become useful as we get into the development of the atomic bomb. I figured that with my personal history with the our labs both through my own work and my father’s that I had better make an effort to cover these events.