Which WW2 battle was more instrumental in defeating Germany?

MajorMax

Laguna Loire wrote: »

Which battle during World War II do you believe was more instrumental in defeating Nazi Germany, D-Day or Operation Barbarossa? I'm an American and I'm hesitant to say that either side was more instrumental. On one side the Americans liberated France and on the other side the Soviets pushed back the Germans. Arguably, the Soviets reached Berlin first, but if it wasn't for the American-led invasion in Western Europe, the Germans could have focused all of their attention on the Soviet Union and possibly launched a successful counter-offensive. But without Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Union would have been severely weakened, and possibly even defeated. Which battle do you think was more instrumental in defeating Nazi Germany?

Just to clarify a couple of errors on your post
Operation Barbarossa was the code name of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941
The Allies liberated France
The Allied invasion Of Western Europe was British led not American led as Mongomery was overall ground commander until early September when Eisenhower as an officer with no combat or war experience appointed himself Ground commander due in part to the American people at home's indignation that their men were under the command of a British General

Neither of the battles you mention were instrumental. The instrumental battle was either

Operation Uranus (the battle for Stalingrad) Approx 800,000 German and other Axis troops were lost, including the entire German Sixth Army, seriously depleting Axis strength in the east and shattering the myth of the invulnerability of the Wehrmacht

Operation Kutuzov (The Russian counterattack at the Battle of Kursk) Quarter of a Million German casualties
almost 1,000 destroyed tanks and assault guns. The Wehrmacht was never able to assemble such a large well equipped force again

Zhukov & his subordinates Rokossovsky & Vatutin showed themselves masters of the battle of attrition. They broke the back of Germany and the battle for France became a sideshow

Manic Moran

I'd say the Battle of Moscow wasn't instrumental in defeating Germany, but was instrumental in saving the USSR. Stalingrad sucked up ridiculous resources from both sides but really put an end to the idea of defeating Russia, and Kursk is what really started the momentum the other way towards the defeat of Germany.

However, it all does get rather complicated when you take into account issues like lend-lease (would the Russians have done so well without all those Studebaker trucks, radios etc?) and the 'sideshows' which weren't all that sideshowy from certain perspectives: North Africa may be a sideshow from the European War perspective, but keeping the link through Suez to Indian and Pacific Oceans and the oil countries of the Persoan Gulf was no small issue to the British overall.

The reality was neither day or night bombing had any pretence of precision (although the most precise bombing was done by the RAF),

Yes and no. Though the RAF was capable of some high precision in special circumstances (Tirpitz comes to mind), the USAAF was well-known for the Norden bombsight which was of unparalleled accuracy. Plus the fact that the USAAF tended to bomb in the daylight automatically increased accuracy over the British, which tended to drop at night. Much easier to be accurate when you can actually see your target, after all.

NTM

Capt'n Midnight

PatsytheNazi wrote: »

Besides the breaking of the Enigma code, another poor failing of German intelligence (Abwehr) was to identify Britain's use of radar. Though it could partly be blamed as a failing by Goering and the Luftwaffe, they failed to see it's ability as an early warning system and should have tried to destroy the radar stations in the south east of England before launching the rest of the air attacks on Britain. Surprisingly for a country that is a by word for efficiency, the Abwehr certainly were amateurish.

You do realise that Germany used Radar too don't you ?
They had a better user interface than the UK ones, they used two main types, one for long range detection and another with two radars per site to guide night fighters , one for the fighter the other for the target.

Before the war a Zepellin went around the UK siffing the radio spectrum. The Brits just turned off their radars and IIRC they didn't scan that high a frequency.

Yes the Brits had magnetrons vital for high power centimeter radar , but so did the Germans. The Germans didn't use them because the frequency drifted. The Brits worked around this by making the receiver tunable.
(To give you an idea , the US commitee who met the Tizzard misison were surprised when they produced cheap simple devices that could produce 1000 times as much power as the US could.)

The allies were able to mix and match UK and US radar equipment to get a hybrid with better range then either.

The real loosers in the radar war were the Japanese due to poor funding and too much splitting of resources. The interesting point here is that the standard high gain antenna is a Yagi-Uda named after the Japanese inventers so it's not as if they couldn't have done a lot better had they organised better. If you want higher gain you more or less have to use a large dish and if you wondered what a Yagi-Uda looks like ? It's your typical TV aerial

dpe

Manic Moran wrote: »

Yes and no. Though the RAF was capable of some high precision in special circumstances (Tirpitz comes to mind), the USAAF was well-known for the Norden bombsight which was of unparalleled accuracy. Plus the fact that the USAAF tended to bomb in the daylight automatically increased accuracy over the British, which tended to drop at night. Much easier to be accurate when you can actually see your target, after all.

NTM

That was my point. The RAF gave up precision bombing fairly early on because the losses were too high and accuracy too low, so area bombing became a necessity simply because there were very few options open to the British to "take the war to the enemy". When the Americans came along, they insisted precision bombing was feasible, even though all the evidence was to the contrary. The difference between the Americans and the British was that Americans kept up the fiction for a lot longer (whilst ironically in the Pacific there was no pretence about precision bombing right from the start).

My point about the RAF doing the most precise bombing was valid; they did, on specialist operations (the Dambuster raid, the prison at Amiens etc.)

PatsytheNazi

Manic Moran wrote: »

Yes and no. Though the RAF was capable of some high precision in special circumstances (Tirpitz comes to mind), the USAAF was well-known for the Norden bombsight which was of unparalleled accuracy. Plus the fact that the USAAF tended to bomb in the daylight automatically increased accuracy over the British, which tended to drop at night. Much easier to be accurate when you can actually see your target, after all.

NTM

Yes Manic, but dpm doesn't seem to understand this as per post #22 regarding the USAAF and the RAF -" reality was neither day or night bombing had any pretence of precision (although the most precise bombing was done by the RAF), "

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=73002638&postcount=22

PatsytheNazi

dpe wrote: »

That was my point. The RAF gave up precision bombing fairly early on because the losses were too high and accuracy too low,

The RAF couldn't give up precision bombing as they were about as imprecise as you could get as per their own Butt report " about only one in three bombers got within even 5 miles of the target."

area bombing became a necessity simply because there were very few options open to the British to "take the war to the enemy".

' Area bombing ' -a euphemism for at best dropping the bombs on empty feilds, at worst the mass murder of totally innocent civilians in Hamburg, Dresden etc

When the Americans came along, they insisted precision bombing was feasible, even though all the evidence was to the contrary. The difference between the Americans and the British was that Americans kept up the fiction for a lot longer (whilst ironically in the Pacific there was no pretence about precision bombing right from the start).

My point about the RAF doing the most precise bombing was valid; they did, on specialist operations (the Dambuster raid, the prison at Amiens etc.)

There was nothing fictional whatsoever about the Americans and precision bombing, at the time the USAAF would have been the most precise airforce, to quote Manic " the USAAF was well-known for the Norden bombsight which was of unparalleled accuracy".

Sure the RAF had the odd precision bomb raid such as the Dambuster raid ( which managed to kill 1,600 civilans, many of them forced labour from occupied countries), but that was the exception, not the rule.

jonniebgood1

PatsytheNazi wrote: »

' Area bombing ' -a euphemism for at best dropping the bombs on empty feilds, at worst the mass murder of totally innocent civilians in Hamburg, Dresden etc

Whether factory workers in hamburg are classed as "totally innocent" is a matter of opinon. The Max hastings book which you referenced earlier in this thread has a large collection of opinion on the morals of this tactic (chapter 5-the coming of area bombing). The first attempt at area bombing in this type of scale was the blitz carried out by the Luftwaffe so the RAF response was predictable. German author and winner of the Nobel prize for literature Gunter grass summarises this as follows

He does believe, however, that the Allied bombing of German cities was criminal because it had no military objectives. ''We started the first air raids of this kind,'' he said, ''killing a city, with Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. Rotterdam, Coventry, Liverpool and London followed. Then it was done to us. What we started came back to us. But both are war crimes.''http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/08/books/still-intrigued-history-s-shadows-gunter-grass-worries-about-effects-war-then.html?pagewanted=3&src=pm

Capt'n Midnight

PatsytheNazi wrote: »

the USAAF was well-known for the Norden bombsight which was of unparalleled accuracy".

it was accurate.
but only if you were flying straight and level

a lot of they hype about it was PR


if you were avoiding flack it was a lot less accurate

getz

PatsytheNazi wrote: »

The RAF couldn't give up precision bombing as they were about as imprecise as you could get as per their own Butt report " about only one in three bombers got within even 5 miles of the target."

' Area bombing ' -a euphemism for at best dropping the bombs on empty feilds, at worst the mass murder of totally innocent civilians in Hamburg, Dresden etc


There was nothing fictional whatsoever about the Americans and precision bombing, at the time the USAAF would have been the most precise airforce, to quote Manic " the USAAF was well-known for the Norden bombsight which was of unparalleled accuracy".

Sure the RAF had the odd precision bomb raid such as the Dambuster raid ( which managed to kill 1,600 civilans, many of them forced labour from occupied countries), but that was the exception, not the rule.

you certainly believe that germany during the last war were the victims,and the british were the bad boys,you do realise that belfast [your city] and its people were hitlers target ?over 1000 killed by the natzi[your hero]. hitlers intension was to bomb the british into submission,www.u.tvblitz/.

dpe

PatsytheNazi wrote: »

The RAF couldn't give up precision bombing as they were about as imprecise as you could get as per their own Butt report " about only one in three bombers got within even 5 miles of the target."

It doesn't mean they didn't try it. And by the standards of 1940/41 (when they were still even doing some daylight bombing) they were no more or less accurate than other airforces, the problem was that without fighter escorts the losses of aircraft and crews were unacceptable.

PatsytheNazi wrote: »

' Area bombing ' -a euphemism for at best dropping the bombs on empty feilds, at worst the mass murder of totally innocent civilians in Hamburg, Dresden etc

Cry me a river. The RAF was returning the favour. And I said, strategically the UK had little or no other means of taking the war to the Germans. I happen to think the morality of area bombing stinks, but I'm looking at 1940s conditions through a 21st century lens. I certainly don't think Area bombing was justified after D-Day (when Harris kept trying to get invasion bombing switched back to the city attacks), but before D-Day its a harder call. As for the Americans, more accurate still doesn't mean accurate. The Americans did not carry out precision raids. They claimed to, but that was PR for the masses back home. The big difference between the British and Americans was always that the British simply couldn't afford to dress up their tactical limitations. American crews did 30 missions, RAF crews carried on flying until they died, got captured or got promoted.

PatsytheNazi wrote: »

There was nothing fictional whatsoever about the Americans and precision bombing, at the time the USAAF would have been the most precise airforce, to quote Manic " the USAAF was well-known for the Norden bombsight which was of unparalleled accuracy".

"Unparalleled" by 1940s standards, which actually means "not very accurate at all". Genuinely accurate bombing on any significant scale was a myth in the military (any military) until probably the late 60s/early 70s and even then tended to be used for specific specialist needs like anti-radar attacks. The point where the majority of bombing became "precision" wasn't until Gulf War I.

PatsytheNazi wrote: »

Sure the RAF had the odd precision bomb raid such as the Dambuster raid ( which managed to kill 1,600 civilans, many of them forced labour from occupied countries), but that was the exception, not the rule.

I'm pretty sure I said the same thing. And unfortunately, killing foreign forced labour was an occupational hazard; blame the Germans for that (e.g. all the slave labour used on the V2 programme).

Reekwind

rokossovsky wrote: »

Operation Begration crushed the German war machine...

I was wondering when Bagration would get a mention. It may not have been as decisive as Moscow, Stalingrad or Kursk but it is, for me, by some distance the most impressive campaign of the war. The scale was just staggering and it achieved what must have seemed like the impossible: the smashing of an entire Army Group in a matter of weeks. Soviet operational art at its finest

Capt'n Midnight

Reekwind wrote: »

Soviet operational art at its finest

For me it was the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation where they blitzkrieged over an army of a million Japanese. It was almost a logistical exercise and showed the capabilities they had developed during the war.

Ellis Dee

Something that was probably not really decisive on the grand scale of things, but nevertheless had a significant influence, was Stalin's invasion of Finland on 30.11.1939. Without a declaration of war, 600,000 Red Army troops supported by 2,000 aircraft launched a massive assault on Finland (a democratic state with a population of 3.8 million). The intention was to reach the capital, Helsinki, within a week. When one general said at a pre-attack briefing that he thought it could take several weeks, Stalin had him taken outside and shot for "defeatism".

They never got to Helsinki. Instead, the "Winter War" lasted 105 days and the Finns lost 23,000 killed, but the Soviets a quarter of a million.

The reason was in part that Stalin had purged his army of the most capable generals and he both underestimated the Finns and waged war inefficiently.

However, he learned from the fiasco and the Red Army set about getting its act together, which it evidently did. Back in Berlin, meanwhile, Hitler looked at the cock up in Finland and thought the Russians were still easy meat.

Wrong, mein Führer!:D

Delancey

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

it was accurate.
but only if you were flying straight and level

a lot of they hype about it was PR


if you were avoiding flack it was a lot less accurate

Correct , its worth reflecting that the Norden despite being fitted on the worlds most sophisticated bomber of the time, the B-29, proved quite incapable of accurate bomb aiming due to the extremely powerful Jet Stream winds over the Japanese home islands.
It was largely because of this poor bombing the USAAF switched to night low level incendiary raids ( the RAF would have called it Area Bombing ).

Capt'n Midnight

Delancey wrote: »

due to the extremely powerful Jet Stream winds over the Japanese home islands.

LOL there was one incident where they noticed the flack was getting a little close as they cruised over the target , turned out that their ground speed was 3mph backwards

PatsytheNazi

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

Whether factory workers in hamburg are classed as "totally innocent" is a matter of opinon. The Max hastings book which you referenced earlier in this thread has a large collection of opinion on the morals of this tactic (chapter 5-the coming of area bombing). The first attempt at area bombing in this type of scale was the blitz carried out by the Luftwaffe so the RAF response was predictable. German author and winner of the Nobel prize for literature Gunter grass summarises this as follows

Well we're getting off topic as I enetered a discussion with dpe regarding the effectiveness of the RAF versus the USAAF in the aerial campaign of WW2. But I'm sure that's an opinion say, Goering or your average Waffen SS member would agree with. For me the innocents killed by indiscriminate bombing of cities, towns and factories was wrong whether it be London, Berlin or Warsaw etc.

shaunandelly

The Battle of Britain.Without Air superiority over the the skies of UK a bridgehead wouldn't have been possible for D-day and the Yanks wouldn't have come to the Party.

PatsytheNazi

dpe wrote: »

It doesn't mean they didn't try it. And by the standards of 1940/41 (when they were still even doing some daylight bombing) they were no more or less accurate than other airforces, the problem was that without fighter escorts the losses of aircraft and crews were unacceptable.

Trying and succeding are two different things. Your the one claiming the RAF were more precise and effective than the daylight raids of the USAAF. Much easier to be accurate when you can actually see your target, after all.

Cry me a river. The RAF was returning the favour. And I said, strategically the UK had little or no other means of taking the war to the Germans. I happen to think the morality of area bombing stinks, but I'm looking at 1940s conditions through a 21st century lens. I certainly don't think Area bombing was justified after D-Day (when Harris kept trying to get invasion bombing switched back to the city attacks), but before D-Day its a harder call. As for the Americans, more accurate still doesn't mean accurate. The Americans did not carry out precision raids. They claimed to, but that was PR for the masses back home. The big difference between the British and Americans was always that the British simply couldn't afford to dress up their tactical limitations. American crews did 30 missions, RAF crews carried on flying until they died, got captured or got promoted.

Which is like saying that the fastest fighter plane in the 1940's wasn't fast, as been fast in the 1940's wasn't fast by the following decades standards :rolleyes:

"Unparalleled" by 1940s standards, which actually means "not very accurate at all". Genuinely accurate bombing on any significant scale was a myth in the military (any military) until probably the late 60s/early 70s and even then tended to be used for specific specialist needs like anti-radar attacks. The point where the majority of bombing became "precision" wasn't until Gulf War I.

Given the technology available at the time, the USAAF were more precise than the RAF who by their own self evident admittance "Of those aircraft recorded as attacking their target, only one in three got within 5 miles". Hard to be precise when only one in three of your bombers can get within 5 miles of the target !!

I'm pretty sure I said the same thing. And unfortunately, killing foreign forced labour was an occupational hazard; blame the Germans for that (e.g. all the slave labour used on the V2 programme).

By your logic then killing factories workers in London or Coventry was the fault of the British, the authoirtes should have known they were putting them in harm's way :rolleyes:

Reekwind

PatsytheNazi wrote: »

By your logic then killing factories workers in London or Coventry was the fault of the British, the authoirtes should have known they were putting them in harm's way :rolleyes:

The one thing that can be said for Bomber Harris is that he didn't give a damn about civilian deaths. Which is pretty cold but at least more honest than his modern defenders who somehow make the distinction between of British terror bombing (good) and German terror bombing (bad). Or at least feel that the latter justifies the former

dpe

PatsytheNazi wrote: »

Trying and succeding are two different things. Your the one claiming the RAF were more precise and effective than the daylight raids of the USAAF. Much easier to be accurate when you can actually see your target, after all.

Oh for God's sake; lies damn lies and statistics. I said the RAF were more accurate in certain very specialist circumstances. I also said the RAF and USAAF(C) were bothgenerally inaccurate despite claims that from the Americans they were engaged in precision bombing (when the RAF claimed nothing of the sort).

Look at this way, I could say the Americans were three times as accuarate as the RAF, but if the RAF were only hitting 5% of their targets and the Americans 15%, I would be statistically correct, but they'd both still be innacurate in absolute terms. This is broadly what was happening.

PatsytheNazi wrote: »

By your logic then killing factories workers in London or Coventry was the fault of the British, the authoirtes should have known they were putting them in harm's way :rolleyes:

Its not remotely the same and you know it; UK factory workers weren't coerced, and the UK took more steps than most to protect civilians from air raids, and if the bombing started you could always take your chances and either go in a shelter or leg it. How does that equate to slave labour forced in to places they had no desire to be in, and no way to run?

indioblack

Reekwind wrote: »

The one thing that can be said for Bomber Harris is that he didn't give a damn about civilian deaths. Which is pretty cold but at least more honest than his modern defenders who somehow make the distinction between of British terror bombing (good) and German terror bombing (bad). Or at least feel that the latter justifies the former

Harris was criticised by Churchill after one raid regarding civilian casualties and advised Harris to avoid indiscriminate bombing. Harris refuted the charge - the reality was that it was not indiscriminate - civilians were part of the target.
This tactic has been rightly questioned as to it's morality ever since.
But it's easy to sneer and condemn from a position of safety.
I think aerial bombardment became more brutal because the war became increasingly brutal.
And Harris continued in his belief that the war could be concluded by aerial bombing alone.

Dob74

1. Kursk, largest tankbattle in history
2. Stalingrad, first complete defeat of a German army
3. Counterattack Dec 6 41 at Moscow, Soviets proved that Germans where beatable.
4. Battle of the Bulge, Americans fight German Panzer Armies to a standstill and then pushed them back
5. D-Day opened second front, took pressure off soviets in the east

Air campaign was largely inaffective. Bombing german armies directly would have been more affective.

Capt'n Midnight

Dob74 wrote: »

4. Battle of the Bulge, Americans fight German Panzer Armies to a standstill and then pushed them bac.

Battle of the Bulge was an all or nothing thow of the dice.

Lets pretend that it was successful and they captured enough fuel to allow them to capture the ports against total air superiority, it would still have made no difference to the Eastern Front.

Reekwind

indioblack wrote: »

I think aerial bombardment became more brutal because the war became increasingly brutal.
And Harris continued in his belief that the war could be concluded by aerial bombing alone.

Isn't there a contradiction there? Harris was convinced of the need for mass terror bombing before the war and he maintained the need for terror bombing until the end of the war. I don't think that events had much to do with the evolution of his thought; or at the least events were interpreted in the light of these preconceptions

jonniebgood1

Reekwind wrote: »

Isn't there a contradiction there? Harris was convinced of the need for mass terror bombing before the war and he maintained the need for terror bombing until the end of the war. I don't think that events had much to do with the evolution of his thought; or at the least events were interpreted in the light of these preconceptions

The was an idea that wars could be won by area bombing only which was common in the 1930's. This is what led to the development of the airforces such as the Luftwaffe. Harris was one of many who believed this.

Reekwind

That's what I'm saying. Harris entered the war, just as the Luftwaffe did, with the expectation that air power alone could win the war. The British bombing campaigns were are product of this doctrine and not a response to some German devilment

Capt'n Midnight

Reekwind wrote: »

Isn't there a contradiction there? Harris was convinced of the need for mass terror bombing before the war and he maintained the need for terror bombing until the end of the war.

This despite all the evidence litterly on his own doorstep of how Londoners pulled together during the Blitz. :rolleyes:


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n16/patrick-wright/dropping-their-eggs/print

Arthur (Bomber) Harris was a squadron leader in the Third Afghan war of 1919, and pioneered the strategy of ‘control without occupation’ in Iraq, which entailed sprinkling fire on straw-roofed huts: ‘within forty-five minutes,’ Harris reported, ‘a full-sized village . . . can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target.’

It wasn't till 44 or 45 that anyone had aircraft large enough and enough of them to wipe out cities and at that stage the outcome of the war wasn't really in question just who got to Berlin first.

PatsytheNazi

dpe wrote: »

Oh for God's sake; lies damn lies and statistics. I said the RAF were more accurate in certain very specialist circumstances. I also said the RAF and USAAF(C) were bothgenerally inaccurate despite claims that from the Americans they were engaged in precision bombing (when the RAF claimed nothing of the sort).

Look at this way, I could say the Americans were three times as accuarate as the RAF, but if the RAF were only hitting 5% of their targets and the Americans 15%, I would be statistically correct, but they'd both still be innacurate in absolute terms. This is broadly what was happening.

Einstein tries to dismiss statistics "Oh for God's sake; lies damn lies and statistics." - and then goes on to produce his own as ' proof ' "if the RAF were only hitting 5% of their targets and the Americans 15%,"

Its not remotely the same and you know it; UK factory workers weren't coerced, and the UK took more steps than most to protect civilians from air raids, and if the bombing started you could always take your chances and either go in a shelter or leg it. How does that equate to slave labour forced in to places they had no desire to be in, and no way to run?

' Yawn ' .....ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

indioblack

Reekwind wrote: »

Isn't there a contradiction there? Harris was convinced of the need for mass terror bombing before the war and he maintained the need for terror bombing until the end of the war. I don't think that events had much to do with the evolution of his thought; or at the least events were interpreted in the light of these preconceptions

Yes, reading further on I take your point.

dpe

PatsytheNazi wrote: »

Einstein tries to dismiss statistics "Oh for God's sake; lies damn lies and statistics." - and then goes on to produce his own as ' proof ' "if the RAF were only hitting 5% of their targets and the Americans 15%,"


' Yawn ' .....ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

No more feeding the troll for me...