Thanks for those links guys, they are of real interest, when you see these pics, it really hits home the sheer scale of the war doesn't it?
Hard to belive that Europe was ablaze for all those years.
That truely was a collosal clash between the Soviets and the Germans, Do you think the Germans would have won if there was Just the one front? And a quick follow up to that, Were the Russians running out of manpower by the wars end? I often wonder just how close the Soviets came to getting low on enough soldiers etc.
The Soviets weren't even close to running out of manpower. What they were low on was coordination and the capability for low-level decision making and planning. Germany -could- have beaten the Soviets, yes. There were a few major mistakes that they made on the Eastern Front, and elsewhere, that sealed Germany's fate. Hitler was his own worst enemy ...
1. Citadel was launched too late. By waiting for significant numbers of Panthers to arrive, the Soviets were able to prepare much more thoroughly. This was a pretty late-stage event, though. By this point in the game there wasn't much that they could have done to keep from losing.
2. The Germans were greeted as liberators through much of the conquered Soviet territories. They squandered this, by treating the populace like ****, to the point where the Soviets were the lesser of two evils.
3. When the invasion of the Soviet Union started, there were too many goals. There should have been only
one goal: Moscow. Stalin's purges had removed virtually all capacity for independent thought in the Red Army, and had the central command structure in Moscow been decapitated, there would have been very difficult - if not completely impossible - for the Soviets to recover.
4. Not conquering Malta. By leaving Malta in British hands, the resupply of British forces in North Africa was never able to be cut off, while British air and naval units based in Malta were able to operate against German supply lines.
5. Making friends with Japan. Yes, Japan tied up a lot of Britain's assets, but it also got the US into the war. If US involvement could have been prevented, or even delayed until late '42/early '43, combined with #4 (taking out Malta), it's unlikely that Operation Torch could have been successfully pulled off, and without North Africa as a jumping-off point, no campaign in Italy would have been possible, and it would not have been necessary to pull forces away from the Eastern Front to fight in Italy.
There's plenty more stuff that could have been done differently ... but what it all boils down to is that, yes, it would have been entirely possible for Germany to win the war, hands down. It might even have been possible if they were fighting only on two fronts - Italy / East Front or France / East Front. The combination of all three, however, was just a killer.
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