Re: What battle would be the decisive battle of WW2?

Bay Man wrote:
"David H Thornley" <david@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:c6WdnboDKrDtQMPUnZ2dnUVZ_szinZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Precisely. The British and French realized that the only way out of
their problems was victory, and they were making long-range plans.

What was clear was that the Battle of France was not "the battle that
brings about a turning point in the conflict".

In which case no battle of WWII was. I'm not sure any single battle
made so much of a change in WWII.

Before the Battle of France, there was the prospect of Britain and
France defeating Germany without involving the Soviet Union. There
was an actual prospect of freeing Poland. After the Battle of France,
there was essentially no prospect of Eastern Europe surviving the
war with any sort of democracy or independence.

If it wasn't a turning point, I don't know what battle in history was.

Before the battle the
USA had opened up its industry to France and UK.

Basically, the USA was being neutral. This meant that the vast US
industrial establishment was available on market terms. It wasn't
until after the Battle of France that the US started heading away
from strict neutrality, as defined by the appropriate Hague
conventions.

The German victory did not open up US industry to the UK, that door was
already open, so the battle of France was not a "turning point". If the
battle opened up US industry to the UK then it would be in consideration
for being decisive.

It opened up non-neutral US action. I believe the first strictly non-
neutral act was the provision of the fifty lousy destroyers, as being
clearly in violation of the Hague convention on Rights and Duties of
Neutrals in Naval Warfare. (The convention forbade supplying warships
to belligerents, and said nothing about the quality of the warships.)

In other words, darn near nothing changed before the Battle of France.
US industry was open for British and French purposes before the war,
and after war was declared Roosevelt managed to relax the stupid US
Neutrality Acts enough to be a true neutral, although it was obvious
whose side the US was neutral on.

It was after the Battle of France that the US started seriously
considering how to supply the Brits when they ran out of dollars,
and started to increase the size of the US army dramatically.

France and the UK, who were allied, already had enough forces to attack
Germany. The combined forces of France, Germany, Holland and Belgium
was far superior to Germany.

You could toss the forces of Portugal and Turkey in there as well, and
make as much sense.

Belgium and the Netherlands were not Allies before the German attack on
them. They were not going to become Allies. Without being attacked by
the Germans, they were just sitting there on the best attack routes into
Germany.

It's misleading to count them into the total defenses, even, since they
operated independently and largely ineffectually until it was Too Late.
Had the Belgians maintained relatively small forces in the Ardennes, it
would have made a difference. However, the Ardennes was a thoroughly
unimportant part of Belgium to the Belgians, and so it was not defended.
The Dutch army was nothing more than a short diversion.

The defense was almost all French and British. Any attack would have
been even more so.

Adam Tooze, Wages of Destruction.
Page 371. The German army 2.439 tanks, while the French were as an army
were far more motorised with 3,254 tanks. Dutch, Belgian, UK & French
tanks in total was 4,200 tanks.

Dutch and Belgian tanks were few in number and ineffectual. It should
be noted that most French tanks were far less useful than the German
tanks, being very slow and lacking radios. The majority of French
tanks lacked guns useful against enemy tanks, with the R.35s in
particular mostly mounting a 37mm infantry gun of no use against
armor, rather than a 37mm high-velocity gun.

The BEF was a fully motorised army, no
horses were used to tow guns or supplies, unlike the German army, which
mainly horse drawn.

Useful, but hardly decisive. The German infantry divisions showed that
they could attack and maneuver well, despite their reliance on horses.

"the majority of the German tanks sent into battle
in 1940, were inferior to the their French, British and Belgian
counterparts".

Inferior in some respects, by no means all.

Tanks are harmless. Several years ago, I walked right up to a M1A1,
and it did absolutely nothing to me. I was perfectly safe.

Tanks operated by men are quite dangerous, which means that the
effectiveness of a tank depends on its mobility (definite German
advantage), guns (Allied advantage, although by not nearly as much
as gun caliber would suggest), armor (Allied advantage), and the
efficiency with which the tank crew could use the mobility and
guns (great German advantage over French tanks, perhaps less so
over British).

Tank formations depend on their equipment (perhaps some Allied
advantage), their doctrine (tremendous German advantage), and
command/control/communications (tremendous German advantage).

Page 372, "The Luftwaffe was rated at 3.578 combat aircraft in May 1940,
compared to a total Allied strength of 4,469".

The French had serious problems with maintaining their aircraft, and
most of them were inferior to their German equivalents.

Page 372, "German success cannot be attributed to overwhelming
superiority in the industrial equipment of modern warfare".

Certainly not, but the Allies didn't have an overwhelming superiority.
The Germans had good equipment, in adequate numbers, with good
training and excellent doctrine.

They also had a devastating strategic plan.

Page 373, "In retrospect, it suited neither the Allies nor the Germans
to expose the amazingly haphazard course through which the Wehrmacht had
arrived at its most brilliant military success.

Which was attacking through a woefully weak section of the French line,
and exploiting. It doesn't necessarily seem like a good idea to say
"We lost because we had an incompetent supreme commander," even when
true.

The myth of the
Blitzkrieg suited the British and French because it provided an
explanation other than military incompetence for their pitiful defeat.

Except that this was a blitzkrieg, one of the best examples in
history. That was due to German doctrinal superiority, and the
superiority of their equipment in fitting in with their doctrine.
Comparatively, the French had built a whole lot of tanks without
having a good idea as to how to use them for mobile warfare, and
the British were somewhere in between.

But whereas it suited the Allies to stress the alleged superiority of
German equipment, Germany's own propaganda viewed the Blitzkrieg in less
materialistic terms."

In some ways, the German equipment was superior. German aircraft were
generally better than anything they faced in the Battle of France (the
British were unwilling to commit the excellent Spitfire at any distance
from their own shores). German tanks had their advantages and
disadvantages, and were prepared to fight in ways that exploited their
advantages and didn't expose their disadvantages all that much.
German artillery was at least as good as anything they faced, although
this was less important than it might have been, due to superb ground
support.

However, the decisive differences were:

1. The Germans had a reasonably good doctrine for mobile warfare. It
wasn't perfect, but it was a lot closer than anybody else's (the only
real competitor being the then-defunct Soviet Deep Battle ideas, and
their proponents had been executed and/or disgraced by 1940).

It's hard to blame the Allies for having unrealistic ideas, when
nobody really knew what would happen, although it's arguable that
the rapid buildup of the German army favored the young radicals like
Guderian, as opposed to, say, de Gaulle in the French army. Fuller,
in the British Army, had managed to come up with a fairly bad doctrine,
whether by bad thinking or bad luck.

2. The Germans had a strategic plan that worked wonderfully against
the Allied deployment.

This is easier to fix the blame for. The French deployment sucked.
It left a large weak spot, without reserves behind, right where the
main German attack was aimed. The French needed to at least get
some reserves behind the center, at least the army that had been
tasked to try to establish contact with the Dutch before the Dutch
made it clear they weren't interested. There were other things
they could do, rather than leave class "B" reserve divisions
thinly spread right in front of the Panzerkorps.

--
David H. Thornley | If you want my opinion, ask.
david@xxxxxxxxxxxx | If you don't, flee.
http://www.thornley.net/~thornley/david/ | O-

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