Why did Operation Barbarossa fail?

[Secret Master]

Take the oil? And how would you transport it from the Caucasus? Via a non-existant oil pipeline? Non-existant tankers? Trucks? Overwhelmed rail lines? All you can do is deny Soviets 2/3 of their oil supply.

Leaving aside Zinegata's discussion of this topic, let me ask you this:

If the goal is to gain the oil of the region (per Hitler's personal orders on the subject), then is the entire plan for Case Blue doomed to failure before the first panzer rolls no matter what the outcome is at Stalingrad?

 

[Opanashc]

Leaving aside Zinegata's discussion of this topic, let me ask you this:
If the goal is to gain the oil of the region (per Hitler's personal orders on the subject), then is the entire plan for Case Blue doomed to failure before the first panzer rolls no matter what the outcome is at Stalingrad?

Goal gaining additional oil supply - yes a failure.

 

[Henry IX]

No chance of success. Even if alien space bats vaporise the Red Army there is still a series of issues:

1. The Soviets will sabotage the wells (it took years to restore the wells after the first Gulf War)
2. The Germans have virtually no trained technicians to run the oil fields. Of course they could rely on captured Russians to run them, but that might not go so well...
3. There is no way to transport the oil to Europe. The Russians control (or at least can contest) the Black sea. The Italians cannot enter without Turkish permission - what are the chances of the Turks letting the Italians sail a war fleet through their capital city?
4. When the oil gets to Europe their are not enough refining facilities to turn it into useful products.
5. Once the oil is refined there is not enough transport capacity to get it to Germany.
6. Once the fuel reserves are in Germany they still can't get it to the front lines where is needed in '42 and '43.

All in all the idea of attacking over more than 500km of terrain with minimal infrastructure to capture oil reserves you can't use with armies that are already overstretched and having supply issues is not a sign of strategic genius.

 

[Alias72]

No chance of success. Even if alien space bats vaporise the Red Army there is still a series of issues:

1. The Soviets will sabotage the wells (it took years to restore the wells after the first Gulf War)
2. The Germans have virtually no trained technicians to run the oil fields. Of course they could rely on captured Russians to run them, but that might not go so well...
3. There is no way to transport the oil to Europe. The Russians control (or at least can contest) the Black sea. The Italians cannot enter without Turkish permission - what are the chances of the Turks letting the Italians sail a war fleet through their capital city?
4. When the oil gets to Europe their are not enough refining facilities to turn it into useful products.
5. Once the oil is refined there is not enough transport capacity to get it to Germany.
6. Once the fuel reserves are in Germany they still can't get it to the front lines where is needed in '42 and '43.

All in all the idea of attacking over more than 500km of terrain with minimal infrastructure to capture oil reserves you can't use with armies that are already overstretched and having supply issues is not a sign of strategic genius.

I agree with everything you have said and would like to add that this is true of the entire war. The concept of conquering enough space to create a nation with equal manpower and material as the united states was unachievable. Nazi planning went from small achievable goals like the retaking of danzig through what used to be final goals, like the defeat of France, all the way to the extremes of delusion (the taking of the soviet union and all its natural resources). This escalation of fallacy was a result of fighting towards an unachievable goal. The Nazis needed to succeed in this impossible task to win. And that is why so many people on this forum and elsewhere say they never would have.

 

[Zinegata]

Leaving aside Zinegata's discussion of this topic, let me ask you this:

If the goal is to gain the oil of the region (per Hitler's personal orders on the subject), then is the entire plan for Case Blue doomed to failure before the first panzer rolls no matter what the outcome is at Stalingrad?

Yup, it was doomed because of the unrealistic objectives and the extreme size of the operating theater in comparison to the available forces.

I have to note also: Strictly speaking the Germans had effectively taken Stalingrad; and they had certainly denied the use of it to the Soviets. The Soviets by the end of it only held small beachheads that were incapable of threatening the German positions (until the larger counter-offensive changed the overall balance outside the city); which is why Hitler in fact was bragging that they had effectively choked off the Volga just before the Soviet hammer blow was unleashed.

The idea that the entire campaign could have ended differently if Stalingrad's outcome had ended differently is more a reflection of the tunnel vision suffered by the German Generals in the campaign. They knew that they had dangerously overstretched themselves midway into Case Blue. The news from the Caucasus and the troops staring up the mountains was bad. So they tried to console themselves with the one place they seemed to be making the most progress - Stalingrad itself - where Paulus' forces were in fact steadily gaining ground despite the heavy losses.

In reality, the smart move in retrospect would have been to start pulling out once it was clear that the Caucasus weren't going to be a cakewalk. Instead further forces were committed to the Caucasus which weakened the forces supporting 6th Army at Stalingrad.

As it stood 1st Panzer Army barely evaded being wiped out in the Caucasus along with 6th Army at Stalingrad. All the other forces that were supporting 1st Panzer were destroyed altogether.

 

[Turboflex]

Some big mistakes were made in 1941 when Hitler ordered some top line panzer corps way from the Moscow group to the south, then back to the centre. Basically took them out for about a month when they could have been a big help to in either direction. At the end on 1941 Germany didn't capture one of the 3 important centres, Leningrad, Stalingrad/Caucus oil or Moscow

 

[Opanashc]

Some big mistakes were made in 1941 when Hitler ordered some top line panzer corps way from the Moscow group to the south, then back to the centre. Basically took them out for about a month when they could have been a big help to in either direction. At the end on 1941 Germany didn't capture one of the 3 important centres, Leningrad, Stalingrad/Caucus oil or Moscow

Ok, so Germans continue their drive on Moscow, extending their right flank, for a counter-attack from Kiev. Sound familiar? Continuing the drive, extending the flank, counter-attack? Oh wait, that's what happened some 15 month later, with Caucas, left flank and Soviet counter-offensive in operation Uranus.

 

[PanosB3]

Did Barbarossa really get delayed because of Italy attacking Greece or it was due to logistics etc? Recently I saw it was an excuse made up to confront with the failure also due to bad weather conditions it was delayed for 2 weeks, but did it got delayed because of Italy and would those 2 weeks really make a huge difference (not in the end, I mean would they be able to conquer Moscow in those 2 weeks)?

 

[keynes2.0]

I bet that if Germany had kept to the original plan people on the internet would say that if only Germany had pivoted to Greece before invading, they could have had Italian troops at their disposal and would have certainly wont either at Moscow or in North Africa and completely changed the war. Of course to be fair I would probably be scoffing at the idea that Germany would overrun Greece in two weeks by catching them completely unawares after the greeks knew what Germany had done to France.

 

[TheDerpyBeagle]

I remember a quote I read in a book once (I don't remember it exactly) from a German soldier involved in Barbarossa.

"There wasn't the feeling of walking into a defeated nation, as there was in France. The Russians seem to give resistance at every opportunity, no matter how feeble."

I think that about sums it up.

 

[phantomrider]

I remember a quote I read in a book once (I don't remember it exactly) from a German soldier involved in Barbarossa.

"There wasn't the feeling of walking into a defeated nation, as there was in France. The Russians seem to give resistance at every opportunity, no matter how feeble."

I think that about sums it up.

I believe in an earlier post in this series someone was trying to point out that a very important reason for the failure of Barbarossa was the Red Army. It failed to collapse, it kept fighting many times in hopeless situations and its ability to regenerate itself (2 to 3 times the number of divisions the Germans expected it could generate) was superb.. (And it eventually won/beat the Germans).

 

[Alias72]

The red army did more then fail to collapse. It counterattacked at every opportunity and while that may have been devastating to it's fighting strength it also slowed the Germans down until winter arrived.

 

[Dark Jakkaru]

It's no coincidence that the US Army fought Vietnam with the kill rate mindset (that proved disastrously incapable of winning the war) when they and the rest of NATO became so obsessed with the Wermacht fanfiction in the Eastern Front.

Well, that "kill count" relation to Vietnam actually does not encompass the full view of the US military with that war. In fact, if you follow the life of Creighton Abrams on what he wanted to correct, change, or influence the conduct of the war differently during his tenure under Westy and the tangible changes he made when he came to command would show a different picture. Of course, stuff like this has generally be overlooked and continues to be so to this day since the only way Abrams is known is by the tank that bears his namesake. I have no firm idea as to why the Johnson Administration put in charge such an inexperienced person as Westy, who was an airborne commander, for the job and remains to be explained properly in the historical record.

 

[Zinegata]

Did Barbarossa really get delayed because of Italy attacking Greece or it was due to logistics etc? Recently I saw it was an excuse made up to confront with the failure also due to bad weather conditions it was delayed for 2 weeks, but did it got delayed because of Italy and would those 2 weeks really make a huge difference (not in the end, I mean would they be able to conquer Moscow in those 2 weeks)?

Nope. That's Churchill trying to deflect blame from his Greece fiasco.

In reality had the Germans launched their offensive 2 weeks earlier we would be treated to the spectacle of 3,000 German tanks sinking into the mud of the Spring thaw. The Germans had to attack in mid-June because that's when the ground had actually dried out enough to support mechanized offensive operations.

Only Churchill makes the claim that the Greece intervention delayed Barbarossa and therefore saved the Soviet Union. Unfortunately very many historians simply copy-pasted the claim without checking with anyone who knew about the real nature of Eastern Front weather conditions; which is why the myth persists and Churchill's Greece blunder is generally forgiven or forgotten. One could argue that may have been Churchill's entire reason for writing "The Second World War" to begin with.

 

[Manshtein]

First of all, hi to all!
Secondly - all of 14 pages fof this discussion were very entertaining and interesting for me as a citizen of former SU.

BUT the next quote is something... i'm at a loss of words...

Yes, the Red Army largely failed in presenting a unified defense in 1941 and the first months of the war were particularly disastrous for the unprepared Red Army. But in those 4 million losses are some 2,5 million PoWs and in those tens of thousands of lost aircraft and tanks are broken down vehicles that could not be recovered. Let me be up front about the fact that Barbarossa was a disaster for the Red Army and it suffered immensely from it, but among those 20,000 tanks lost a large portion were broken down tanks that were left to the enemy and an even larger portion were sadly antiquated tank designs from the 1920's (the T-28 was the far and away most common tank in the Red Army in 1941 and it was, even with its' 37mm cannon upgrade, utterly lacking compared to the German designs from the mid-30's). The same is largely true for aircraft, where most VVS aircraft in 1941 were design from the 20's or early 30's and were both utterly antiquated compared to Germany's airforce designed in the mid-30's as well as tragically under-maintained. That's not to say that the numbers aren't awful (because they are), but it puts some perspective on the supposed superiority of Germany, since the Red Army was chiefly equipped with vehicles that were a decade or older, whereas the German vehicles were only half a decade or younger. Many of those Soviet vehicles were not fit for a war in the 40's, which is why they were lost in such great numbers.

My fellow user Gethsemani, i assume you are from Sweden. Imagine for a moment, when on this forum in discussion about, lets say, Vikings, someone will post pictures of horned helmets (Dovakin-style) or in discussion about great Gustav II Adolf suddenly will emerge pictures of Space Marines, what will be your reaction? Ok, it will be at least funny.
But why T-28 (three turreted tank designed in 1930-1932 with main cannon 76,2 mm, 503 tanks were build)?
I suppose you are talking about T-26 (first designed in 1931, last design 1941, 11000 tanks of all mods build, most widespread modification - with 45 mm cannon).
Do you seriously want to compare T-26 with Pz-II or Pz-I (the latter with two machineguns and no canon). Schnelle Heinz wrote about both models, and he doesn't see them fit for frontline combat at all. Neither General Lutz, nor Halder.

If this post provoke any reaction, i may add about Airforce as well.

btw, plz, guys, do not quote or post references to Glantz and Zaloga, they are no better then Gareev and Isaev. The only difference is theirs native language!
sorry, if i'm ofended someone, it's 2015 and everyone is offended by something (c) 9GAG

 

[Gethsemani]

But why T-28 (three turreted tank designed in 1930-1932 with main cannon 76,2 mm, 503 tanks were build)?
I suppose you are talking about T-26 (first designed in 1931, last design 1941, 11000 tanks of all mods build, most widespread modification - with 45 mm cannon).
Do you seriously want to compare T-26 with Pz-II or Pz-I (the latter with two machineguns and no canon). Schnelle Heinz wrote about both models, and he doesn't see them fit for frontline combat at all. Neither General Lutz, nor Halder.

Yes, thank you for pointing out that mistake. Obviously I meant the T-26. While it was far superior to the Panzer I and Panzer II, those had both been relegated away from main combat roles by the Germans and were used mostly in scouting or other auxiliary capacities. The Panzer 3 and Panzer 4 were both far superior to the T-26 however and those were the main combat tanks used by Germany. The BT-7 was their equal and the T-34 their superior, but the bulk of Soviet tank forces in the summer of '41 were made up of the T-26 and it was obsolete, even with its 1941-upgrades.

 

[MGL 86]

I see who is offended here. Former Soviet citizen offended so hard, had to rant about Vikings, space marines, ww2 historians. Even he had to teach us who to quote. Then finished his post by how everyone is offended by something in 2015.

Sorry if this post offends you. This is 2015.

 

[D Inqu]

Do you seriously want to compare T-26 with Pz-II or Pz-I

No, that would be silly, as neither the Pz-II or Pz-I were main combat tanks in 1941. It was the role filled by mostly Pz-III, 35/38 (t), Pz IV, and some captured French armor. But, really, even the Pz-II as they were in 1941 were better than T-26.

btw, plz, guys, do not quote or post references to Glantz and Zaloga, they are no better then Gareev and Isaev.

Right. The two best known western experts are apparently no good because you don't like their opinions, so you make an ad-hominem against them. Great debating skills.

 

[Secret Master]

Goal gaining additional oil supply - yes a failure.

Yup, it was doomed because of the unrealistic objectives and the extreme size of the operating theater in comparison to the available forces.

Then whether or not we can agree on the value of Stalingrad proper as a target, we agree on the uselessness of the campaign in general.

Since the historical Case Blue was insane and doomed to failure, I guess that my ideal Case Blue would be a tactical retreats using sucker ploys to lure the Red Army into encirclements in the Ukraine. It's bound to turn out better for the 6th Army than the historical outcome.

 

[Gethsemani]

Then whether or not we can agree on the value of Stalingrad proper as a target, we agree on the uselessness of the campaign in general.

Since the historical Case Blue was insane and doomed to failure, I guess that my ideal Case Blue would be a tactical retreats using sucker ploys to lure the Red Army into encirclements in the Ukraine. It's bound to turn out better for the 6th Army than the historical outcome.

A proper assault on the Northern Front with the intention of capturing Leningrad and Murmansk would also have been viable. It would have cut the USSR off from their British lend-lease aid and would have been a great psychological blow, especially if Sevastopol, Leningrad and Murmansk all fell in the same year. It would also have shortened the German front line in the North and thus freed up a significant number of divisions.