Drugi svetski rat - opsta istorija

[Prospero]

Jedan ne tako mlad tekst, o tome kako je zapravo Royal Navy bila ključna u sprečavanju nemačke invazije u leto/jesen 1940, a ne RAF.

 

 

 

‘The Battle of Britain’ and the Royal Navy
(An edited version of an article placed on RUSI website in 2006.)

Dr Andrew Gordon, Reader in Defence Studies, King’s College London
 

 

In light of some of the coverage of the Battle of Britain on television and in certain daily papers, it is timely to take public issue with the common claim that ‘nothing stood between Britain and Nazi occupation except Fighter Command.’ This is quite untrue. The largest operational naval fleet in the world stood between. Whatever opinions may be held elsewhere about operation SEALION (the vaunted German invasion), it was the German Navy (Kriegsmarine) that was going to have to sign the chit for a logistical, resource, force-protection and seamanship nightmare, and the more they studied the daunting obstacles facing them, the more anxious they became to be let off the hook.

 

There was so much wrong with the materiel and methods available for SEALION, that it is difficult to know where to start.

 

The basic order-of-battle facts are that, having lost ten destroyers in Norway, the Germans now had fewer than ten to protect four beach landing areas. At the beginning of September the Admiralty deployed sixty-seven (plus six cruisers) for immediate response to an invasion alarm. The first warning of the invasion’s sailing would come, it was hoped, from RAF reconnaissance over the assembly ports. But in case – as was likely – the Germans waited until after dark before commencing their 12-hour toil across to England, the Royal Navy had a pool of 700 armed patrol craft (requisitioned motor yachts and trawlers) of whom around 200 were on picket duty “off the north coast of France” every night. So, owing to either the air reconnaissance or the trip-wire patrols, there was a high likelihood that the German invasion armadas would have found British destroyers flotillas between them and their intended landing-beaches when they approached on the morning of their D-Day. As well as torpedoes and guns, each destroyer carried 40 depth-charges filled with 600-800lbs of Amatol (depending on Mk) which would have demolished the tows of wallowing barges packed with soldiers and horses.

 

The second tranche of RN interventions would have been the thirty-four corvettes and sloops, and the MTBs, employed on East Coast and Channel convoy routes. Then, within twenty-four hours of the alert, the cruisers and capital units of the Home Fleet would have started to arrive from the far north and west. 165 minesweepers of varying pedigree were at hand to maintain swept channels. Finally, many of the thirty-five submarines based in home waters would have headed for the Channel to disrupt the shuttling back and forth of barges required by the German build-up for the next ten days.

The RN would have taken casualties – it’s never baulked at that. But to inflict serious losses on it the Luftwaffe would have had to discover capacities it had yet to demonstrate and yet to train for. Off Norway, the Home Fleet had been bombed for days on end, but only two of its destroyers (out of an inventory of over eighty) were sunk. During Dunkirk, many destroyers were damaged by air attack, and for a while the most valuable ones were withdrawn (in the manner of Fighter Command from France), but none of the four sunk by the Luftwaffe were in open water and free to manoeuvre at speed when fatally attacked. In brief, the war so far had provided no evidence that, in extremis, air-power – German or British – was a naval operations show-stopper. In 1940, the Luftwaffe’s Stukas were specialists in Army close-support; the anti-shipping skills which some of them were to train for in the autumn, and which they were to display in the Mediterranean in ‘41 (starting with Fliegerkorps X’s attack on Illustrious in January) cannot be retro-fitted to the previous summer.

 

The ‘Brief Statement of Reasons for Cancellation of Invasion of England’, prepared by the German Naval Historical Staff in 1944, states:
As the preliminary work and preparations proceeded, the exceptional difficulties became more and more obvious. The more forcibly the risks were brought home, the dimmer grew faith in success… just as in Napoleon’s invasion plans in 1805, the fundamental requirement for success was lacking, that is, command of the sea. This lack of superiority at sea was to be compensated for by air superiority. But it was never even possible to destroy enemy sea superiority by use of our own air superiority… The sea area in which we were to operate was dominated by a well prepared opponent who was determined to fight to the utmost of his ability. The greatest difficulty was bound to be that of maintaining the flow of supplies and food. The enemy’s fleet and other means of naval defence had to be considered as a decisive factor. Owing to the weakness of our naval forces there could be no effective guarantee against the enemy breaking into our area of transports, despite our mine barrages on the flanks and despite our air superiority.

 

Grand Admiral Raeder (head of the Kriegsmarine in 1940) said much the same, in almost the same words, after the war; and had tried to dodge out of the invasion as early as July 11th. The last sentence quoted above appears to mean that, even if the Luftwaffe had won the air battle of Britain, the Kriegsmarine would still not have wanted to attempt SEALION.

 

The same Kriegsmarine document acknowledges that “there was an air of relief among leading [naval] personalities when sufficiently solid grounds were found to warrant postponement and finally cancellation.” And it is obvious that in August-September 1940, the best outcome for the Kriegsmarine would be for the invasion to be cancelled and for someone-else to take the blame. Thanks to Fighter Command’s victory over the Luftwaffe, that is what they got – their get out of jail card. But that is not at all the same thing as there being nobody but the RAF ready, willing and able to defeat Operation SEALION.

 

Whether the air battle was the cause or the occasion for the cancellation of SEALION is therefore a moot point. Hitler’s order on the 17th September to ‘postpone’ the invasion appears directly consequent on the Luftwaffe’s losses of the 15th, held to be the climactic day of the Battle of Britain. But as Ian Kershaw tells us, “Hitler had never been convinced that the German air offensive would successfully lay the basis for the invasion of which he was in any case so sceptical.” And between 10 and 13 September there were signs that Hitler had gone utterly cold on the idea of a landing. On 14 September he then told his commanders that the conditions for 'Operation SEALION' had not been attained. The military chiefs themselves did not believe that a landing at that stage could be successfully carried out. 'I had the impression at this discussion,' wrote Nicolaus von Below many years later, 'that Hitler had given up hope of a successful invasion of England the following spring. In autumn 1940 the great unknown, the fairly improvised crossing over the sea, frightened him. He was unsure.'

 

No doubt the result of the air battle on the 15th assisted this attack of cold feet –– but so too may have the deployment of the Home Fleet southwards from Scapa Flow to Rosyth on the 13th, bringing the heavy ships eight hours closer to the invasion arena.

Further, to launch a laborious and protracted invasion into the equinoctial gales would have been inviting disaster. If, for example, the weather of September 1935 had repeated itself, westerlies of Force 7 and 8 would have set in on the 16th and continued for four days; and any invasion convoys committed to the Channel at that time would have been lost without the RN intervening. The German High Command had actually been warned way back in July that “the weather in the North Sea and Channel during the second half of September is very bad and… the main operation would therefore have to be completed by September 15.” Even without bad weather, the strong tidal currents in the Channel, with which the Germans were unfamiliar, would have pushed many of their invasion formations off-track, perhaps by many miles, and they would have been left trying to decide whether to try to land where they could (the overall plan a shambles) or to waste hours trying to find their intended destinations – all the time helpless, wallowing targets for the Royal Navy.

 

Hitler famously said that he was “a lion on land but a coward at sea”. The pencilled-in date for SEALION kept slipping, but by mid-month Hitler’s mind was diverting to the bombing of London and (covertly) to Russia. To borrow a Napoleonism, he was learning that an elephant cannot easily kill a whale.

The first British conceit about the summer of 1940 is that German planning was a thing of Teutonic rigour and logic. In fact they had no coherent game-plan for prosecuting the war against Britain after the collapse of France, and it took them some time to realise that the war was not over. Then, Goering boasted that he would bring Britain to heel through a campaign of shock and awe, which would include the destruction of the RAF, making an invasion unnecessary. Partly as a Psy-Ops ploy against British morale, Hitler ordered SEALION to be prepared, but executed only as a last resort and if necessary (which logically meant: if Goering failed to fulfil his boast).

 

Local air superiority would have sufficed for invasion, but within Goering’s grand scheme was the desideratum that the Luftwaffe somehow achieve air supremacy over England, from airfields in France. Partly because the other German Services were anxious to raise the ‘air’ bar to an improbable height, the invasion project became illogically linked with this sweeping precondition which, owing to the limited operational range of fighter aircraft, could most plausibly be attained from airfields in England after an invasion. An obvious parallel is the Allies’ invasion of Sicily in ’43: given the distance from fighter bases in Tunisia and Malta, it would have been daft to make air supremacy over the island a condition for invading. Instead, the Allies exploited air superiority over the landing areas until airfields ashore, from which supremacy could be contested, were up and running. Ditto Normandy.

 

German leaders were thus unfocused and irrational about the linkages between the air-campaign and a mooted invasion; and they were hopelessly disunited. Goering remained dismissive of SEALION and never bothered to attend a planning meeting, possibly because the project anticipated the Luftwaffe’s failure to defeat Britain single-handedly.

 

Long before the air battle started, Dowding understood that defence against invasion was going to be a joint business, as his famous letter of 16th May, calling for Fighter Command to be withdrawn from France demonstrates. The conditions he specified were: “…if an adequate fighter force is kept in this country, if the fleet remains in being , and if Home Forces are suitably organised…” This seminal letter is commonly quoted by Battle of Britain celebrants, but the words underlined here by me, and the bit about the Army, never seem to get mentioned.

 

A most telling piece of evidence, and one whose implications cannot be for ever evaded, is the War Cabinet’s despatch in mid-August of an armoured brigade with “nearly half our best available tanks” to fight the Italians in North Africa. This seemingly bizarre decision must have been permitted by one of two possible ‘home defence’ assumptions:
1. either Churchill was already taking for granted a decisive RAF victory in the developing air battle;
2. or he (First Lord of the Admiralty until three months earlier) did not really believe that SEALION would get ashore, irrespective of the air battle.

 

The latter is strongly suggested by a conversation Admiral Sir Charles Forbes had with Churchill shortly after the war. Forbes had been C-in-C Home Fleet in 1940 and had protested at the withdrawal of destroyers from Western Approaches against an eventuality which (in his view) was unlikely to happen. At a Navy Club dinner in 1947 he took Churchill to task, and Winston “told the admiral that ‘He himself had never believed that invasion was possible.’ To which Forbes replied ‘to the effect that he had camouflaged it very well.’”

 

Perceptions of SEALION’s prospects varied between, and within, every Service, British and German, with varying degrees of bias, and none can be validated. In the analysis of Wing Commander H.R. Allen (himself one of The Few):

 

It was seapower that ruled the day in 1940, and fortunately Britain had a sufficiency. The air situation was, of course, important, but by no means fundamental. Without doubt the five hundred or so section, flight and squadron leaders of Fighter Command earned their laurels. But the real victor was the Royal Navy, the Silent Service…

 

In reality, the issues are impossible to apportion categorically. But clearly the Home Fleet, along with Bomber Command, Costal Command, the Army, the weather (worse, that summer, than remembered), Goering’s grandstanding, disunity in the German high command, and the huge practical obstacles facing SEALION all went into the powerful witches’ stew  :ziga: which cursed the project.

 

In summary, the link between the air battle and the non-event of SEALION is much less direct and exclusive than commonly wished by the RAF’s Battle of Britain celebrants. Certainly, Fighter Command added daytime command of the air to the indisputable command of the sea which Britain already possessed, but the airspace over southern England did not thereby become the last court of appeal against invasion. None of the above is new; but the sailors have been silent for too long, and popular understanding of the ‘whole-picture’ needs to be adjusted so that credit for strategic effect may be shared (belatedly) where credit is due.

 

To some extent, there is a parallel with Trafalgar. The Channel Fleet under Nelson’s senior, ‘Billy Blue’ Cornwallis, had been blockading the main French fleet in Brest for months, and to it was expected to fall the task of defeating the invasion. So credible were Cornwallis’s “far distant storm-tossed ships, on which the Grande Armée never looked” (Mahan’s words) that Napoleon had already decamped and turned his elephant east. To assume, as many still do, that if Nelson’s Mediterranean Fleet had failed to defeat Villeneuve’s Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar, the British would soon have been speaking French, is a leap of mythology which vaults over the very existence of the main British naval force. It also makes the security of Britain look a more hand-to-mouth affair than it actually was. In due course, after Trafalgar, the ships of the Channel Fleet dispersed to other duties, their goal-keeping role in deterring invasion unsung and overlooked by popular history, likewise the Home Fleet in 1940. To point out that the public in time of war demands simple, iconic images, painted in primary colours, detracts nothing from the bravery of Nelson and his men, or indeed of the pilots of Fighter Command.

 

All that having been said, the air Battle of Britain, and the marvelous rhetoric which Churchill wove around it, very likely saved Britain in a less direct way: by helping to persuade neutral America that we were worth backing. With our engineering industries diverted from exporting to war production, we were fast running out of the gold and dollar reserves with which to buy food and raw materials. By November the coffers would be empty. Unglamorous as it sounds, balance-of-payments meltdown was the real, if invisible, danger in late 1940, and Churchill’s real gamble. If Congress had not solved Britain’s 'dollar problem' in early ‘41 by passing the Lend-Lease Bill, we would soon have had to make peace or starve. A succession of events – the 'Deliverance of Dunkirk’, the sinking of the French fleet, the 'Battle of Britain', the Blitz, the Fleet Air Arm’s attack on Taranto, our military support for Greece – combined to tip the American scales in favour of Lend-Lease. Of this list, the air Battle of Britain presented the most powerful image: the first positive, media-visible, strategic-scale rebuff of Hitler’s armed forces. An ambient fleet-in-being victory could not possibly have had such an impact on its own.

 

 

Inače mnogo volim da čitam Gordona, skoro sam završio The Rules of the Game, odlična i kao istoriografija, i kao vojna studija i stilski/narativno.

[namenski]

....o tome kako je zapravo Royal Navy bila ključna u sprečavanju nemačke invazije u leto/jesen 1940, a ne RAF.

 

Kad je to uopste bilo sporno?

[čekmeže]

Cela invazija je bila nerealna, sve se to malo dramatizuje. RAF je dobio priznanja jer je zaista imao neku bitku i pobedio, RN nije morala ni da se cima.

[Prospero]

^^ Pa dobro, nije sporno tebi, u javnom sećanju je ostalo dominantno osećanje da je "never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few".

[namenski]

Nemam ja s tim nikakve veze, a javno (o)secanje je malo onako sporna naprava.

Takozvana Bitka za Britaniju je uz sva posleratna sminkanja bila - a o tome nije bilo spora ni tada, a koliko znam ni sada, ukljucujuci ondasnje planere na obe strane - borba za prevlast u vazduhu iznad podrucja moguce invazije, dakle juzna Engleska, Kanal, obala Francuske, deo oko Kalea najvise.

Znalo se i onda, a bogami i sada da bez ostvarene prevlasti u vazduhu od tog posla, mislim na invaziju, nema nista, bas kao sto se znalo da ce glavni teret odbijanja iste da padne na RN: nemacko planiranje, barem onaj deo koji se moze uzeti za ozbiljan, je - uprosceno receno - bilo spremno da se zadovolji nekom vrstom vazdusnog kisobrana iznad uskog podrucja, trake izmedju Kalea i Dovera kojom bi, kako su se nadali, uspeli da se provuku bez opasnosti da ih RN u tome spreci.

Sam sastav RAF-a u to vreme, prioriteti pre svega, ne ostavlja nikakvu sumnju u to: RAF je tih dana skoro iskljucivo lovacka organizacija koja ima zadatak da ne dozvoli Nemcima postizanje prevlasti u vazduhu.

Da je na RAF-u bilo da sprecava invaziju, prioriteti i organizacija bi bili malo drugaciji jer se invazione snage ne napadaju lovcima, a sama Bitka za Britaniju je, onako kako se kasnije odvijala, eskalirala u onolikoj meri u kolikoj je sama invazija bivala sve vise nemoguca.

Ukratko, jos jedan od nemackih uobicajenih WW2 vazduhoplovnih pucnjeva u prazno: sto se same invazije tice i stvaranja uslova za njeno izvodjenje, za Nemce je stvar bila gotova jos negde krajem avgusta, a sva kasnija drndanja iznad Britanije bila su u klasi onih Geringovih staljingradskih 500 tona.

[čekmeže]

Da li su uopšte postojali iole ozbiljni planovi invazije pre nego što je pala Francuska? Izgleda mi da je cilj više bio da se Engleska maximalno oslabi pa da se onda na miru raščisti sa starim saveznikom.

[namenski]

I jesu i nisu: stara prica o kontinentalnom neshvatanju slozenosti poduhvata kao sto je prekomorsko iskrcavanje.

Nemci jesu bili iznenadjeni brzinom kojom su olupali Francusku i invazija se namestila kao prirodan i nuzan sledeci korak.

U tom trenutku pocelo je planiranje, a stepen kontinentalnog neshvatanja problema se vidi i u tome sto je cak i jedna tako opasna i profesionalna firma kakav je bio nemacki Generalstab, tome pristupio krajnje amaterski.

Jeste se planiralo, mislim da je cak u nekih mozda najvise mesec dana bilo sanse da se iskoristi inercija i iskrca nesto snaga u Englesku, ali bi to bilo sve: kako je moderni rat dolazio po svoje i kako su se uvidjale neke njegove nuznosti, tako je sama invazija bivala sve manje moguca, a bice i svest Nemaca o tome.

Apsurd je da je jedino nemacka ratna mornarica bila u potpunosti svesna ogranicenja pa i nemogucnosti invazije Engleske.

Svi drugi su bili entuzijasti, Wehrmacht onako, a Luftwaffe se po obicaju zaletela.

[vathra]

Da li su uopšte postojali iole ozbiljni planovi invazije pre nego što je pala Francuska? Izgleda mi da je cilj više bio da se Engleska maximalno oslabi pa da se onda na miru raščisti sa starim saveznikom.

 

Могли су Немци да цртају планове до миле воље, кад просто нису имали чиме да пребаце дивизије преко Канала.

Чак и да јесу успели да их неком магијом пребаце, врло брзо би остали без снабдевања.

 

Просперо,

у оној анализи се аутор задржао само на разарачима, и мало је поменуо крстарице - што је очекивано јер би они обавили највише посла.

У крстарицама и бојним бродовима ситуације је била још неповољнија по Немце. Приде су Британци могли себи да приуште да у крајњем случају пошаљу у самоубилачку мисију неколико старијих бојних бродова, који би лако могли да униште инвазиону флоту.

[Korki]

Немачка је створила нову стратегију поморског ратовања која је развалила Британску морнарицу током периода познатог као Die Glückliche Zeit, Срећна времена, период средина 1940-средина 1941. Нова тактика је била Wolfsrudel(Вучији чопор) и заснивала се на подморицама, чувеним U-Boot, на коју Британска морнарица није имала одговор јер је то био потпуно нови начин ратовања а Британци уопште нису имали бродове за то на почетку.

Немачка је почетком 1939 имала план Z, који је требао да до 1944 омогући паритет на мору, по броју бродова, са Британицма али је убрзо то одбачено јер су неки паметни људи у Kriegsmarine закључили да су подморнице будућност и да су ту  Британци слаби. Они се уопште нису ни трудили да направе паритет са Британцима на површини али погледајте испод површине.

Черчил

 

"...the only thing that ever frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril"

 

Током пар месеци 1940 су потопили неколико стотина британских бродова са малим губицима.

Наравно, сви људи знају за причу око Енигме, то је имало велику улогу да немачке подморнице од 1943 почну масовно да губе битке, али не знају да су Немци разбили британску шифру No. 3 доста раније.

Британија је имала више погинулих на мору од Немаца, када говоримо само о ратним морнарима, а да не говорим о комерцијалним бродовима, где је био масакр и покољ.

Британија није нападнута јер су требали ресурси којих тамо није било-нафта, пре свега. Зато су Немци ишли у Северну Африку и покушали продор према Каспијском мору на Источном фронту. Да су Немци успели да дођу до ресурса који им је највише недостајао за велики рат, нафта, Британце хиљаде круна не би спасло, нарочито са њиховом јадном копненом војском, чему се Руси чудили какво им смеће шаљу на испомоћ крајем 1941. Али на срећу Немци нису дошли до нафте.

Са тиме у вези, једна легендарна подморница

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwc0shJ2aYc

 

PS Американци су Јапанце поразили подморницама.

Edited September 1, 2015 by Korki

[vathra]

Британија није нападнута јер су требали ресурси којих тамо није било-нафта, пре свега. Зато су Немци ишли у Северну Африку и покушали продор према Каспијском мору на Источном фронту. Да су Немци успели да дођу до ресурса који им је највише недостајао за велики рат, нафта, Британце хиљаде круна не би спасло, нарочито са њиховом јадном копненом војском, чему се Руси чудили какво им смеће шаљу на испомоћ крајем 1941. Али на срећу Немци нису дошли до нафте.

 

Корки мајсторе,

немој молим те више да лупаш молим те.

 

[Korki]

Кључ Немачке победе је био излазак на велика налазишта нафте. Одакле покретати оне силне Панцер дивизије, Луфтвафе и подморнице? То је толико ишло да су у очају правили нафту из угља. Коначни слом Немачке наступа када Савезници бомбардују постројења за производњу вештачке нафте по Немачкој јер више нису имали горива за авионе, тенкове...Ту су још уследила бомбардовања поља по Румунији, то је и нас закачило.

Ово исто за Јапанце важи, када су Амери са подморницама разбуцали конвоје из Ј-И Азије, пре свега Индонезије, према Јапану, једна од последица тога су и Камиказе.

Али је смешно причати како је британска морнарица била суверена на мору 1940-1941 када то није тачно.

Старегија је била да у блицкригу заузму нафтна поља на Блиском истоку и СССР-у и тако себи обезбеде ресурсе а Савезнике одсеку од истих. Циљ Барбаросе и Северно-Афричке кампање је било спајање негде у Ирану.

Edited September 1, 2015 by Korki

[namenski]

 

Sam sastav RAF-a u to vreme, prioriteti pre svega, ne ostavlja nikakvu sumnju u to: RAF je tih dana skoro iskljucivo lovacka organizacija koja ima zadatak da ne dozvoli Nemcima postizanje prevlasti u vazduhu.

 

Interesantno je da se u svim posleratnim hvalospevima Bici za Britaniju i njenom znacaju, RAF-u, nekolicini kojoj duguju mnogi, itd, itd, izgubio, potisnut u stranu, zaboravljen, 1 genije, covek koji je izmislio i zamislio 1 sistem.

 

 

 

Skrajnut i ispletkaren jos dok je formalno trajala Bitka za Britaniju, nemiljenik Cercilov...

[Korki]

Операција Плави

 

Oil mattered to Adolf Hitler.  When he and his senior staff created "Operation Blue," Hitler focused his attention on oil fields located in the southwestern region of the USSR.  He wanted that oil.

We can simplify Hitler's strategy by highlighting two main points:

1.  If the Soviet Army did not have enough fuel, it would collapse.

2.  If Germany's military had access to Soviet oil, it would prosper.

"Operation Blue" was Hitler's plan of attack to capture the Soviet oil fields.  His military would advance on Grozny (in the Caucasus) and Maikop (near the Black Sea).  

Hitler was single-minded in this objective, as we learn from General Paulus (during the Nuremberg war-crimes trial).  On the 1st of June, 1942, Hitler told his High Commanders:

 

 

Hitler's actual plans, to capture the Soviet-controlled oil fields, ended-up in Stalin's hands (although he didn't believe they were real).  We learn more about that incident from the UK's History Learning Site:

 

Operation Blue began on June 22nd 1942, exactly a year to the day of the start of Operation Barbarossa

. However, it was very nearly delayed when an army major was shot down while flying over and surveying the Russian lines. 

He had taken a briefcase with him containing the plans for Operation Blue for that sector and it fell into the hands of Russian troops.  The briefcase was immediately sent to Moscow and its contents studied. 

Stalin decided that its contents were a deliberate ploy to fool the commanders of the Red Army that the attack was going to be in the south when actually it was going to be against Moscow.  Therefore he refused to order the movement of troops away from Moscow to the south.  No one in the Red Army's hierarchy was willing to argue with Stalin.

 

Шта мислите да су се они тек тако тукли око Стаљинграда, због имена? Немојте бити наивни, нафта је кључ.

У ствари, Хитлер је био усамљен у овоме, он је једном приликом рекао да његови генерали уопште не знају зашто је стварно нападнут СССР, а то је пре свега нафта. Хитлер је био луд али не и глуп, он је добро знао како је Немачка пукла у ПСР. Још тада је Немачка хтела нафту у Баку а завршило се британском акцијом у Румунији на урушавања поља која су већ имали.

 

General Ewald von Kleist commanded the First Panzer Army in the region.  After the war, he said:

As we can see on the map, depicted above, Hitler changed strategy by separating his men into two groups.  The UK's History Learning Site tells us more:

The capture of Stalingrad was subsidiary to the main aim.  At the start [of Operation Blue] Stalingrad was no more than a name on the map to us.

He ordered that Army Group South should be divided in two.  Group A was to push for the oilfields of the Caucasus and Maikop before moving on to Baku.  Group B was to engage the Russians in the region west of the River Don.  Therefore the force that was to attack the oilfields was halved in terms of its strength. 

Also the two-army groups were to act independently as opposed to supporting one another.  The Sixth Army under Paulus, the largest formation in Group B, was stripped of the support of the 4th Panzer as this group was ordered to support Group A.

Edited September 1, 2015 by Korki

[Prospero]

Кључ Немачке победе је био излазак на велика налазишта нафте. Одакле покретати оне силне Панцер дивизије, Луфтвафе и подморнице? То је толико ишло да су у очају правили нафту из угља. Коначни слом Немачке наступа када Савезници бомбардују постројења за производњу вештачке нафте по Немачкој јер више нису имали горива за авионе, тенкове...Ту су још уследила бомбардовања поља по Румунији, то је и нас закачило.

Ово исто за Јапанце важи, када су Амери са подморницама разбуцали конвоје из Ј-И Азије, пре свега Индонезије, према Јапану, једна од последица тога су и Камиказе.

Али је смешно причати како је британска морнарица била суверена на мору 1940-1941 када то није тачно.

Старегија је била да у блицкригу заузму нафтна поља на Блиском истоку и СССР-у и тако себи обезбеде ресурсе а Савезнике одсеку од истих. Циљ Барбаросе и Северно-Афричке кампање је било спајање негде у Ирану.

 

Pa dolaziš u kružnu logiku - vodimo rat (jurimo za naftom) da bismo imali resurse da vodimo rat (da dođemo do nafte). Rat je kanda sam sebi cilj, što je besmislica.

 

Ovo za RN i 1940/41 je u suštini netačno, uspela je da održava tanke linije snabdevanja na Mediteranu sve vreme, uspela je da održi snabdevanje Britanije i da onemogući Kriegsmarine da se koliko toliko razmaše; Bismarck je, i pored spektakularnog potapanja Hood-a (a posle Jilanda im je trebalo biti jasno da bojni krstaši nisu baš najsrećniji koncept niti podesni za borbu sa istim ili jačim brodovima) je utepan za nekoliko dana, a Tirpitz ceo rat praktično nije ni omirisao barut već je suvereno vladao 1 celim norveškim fjordom. Drugim rečima, RN nije bila ozbiljno ni izazvana a kamoli da je izgubila efektivnu premoć na moru. Ni gubitak Royal Oak-a, ni Hood-a, ni gubici u Aleksandriji nisu poljuljali RN. Kriegsmarine je posle Bismarcka svedena na podmornički rat sa ograničenim rezultatima uz procentualno najveće gubitke od cele nemačke oružane sile.

 

 

@Vathra

 

Pazi ovo:

 

A particularly interesting take on the topic was a 1974 Kriegspiel held at the Staff College, Camberley. With British and German officers as participants, and an impressive panel of umpires including 1940 veterans Adolf Galland, and Friedrich Ruge, the game supposes that the invasion is launched before the Luftwaffe gain air supremacy. The umpires' unanimous decision was that the Germans would get some troops ashore, but a combination of RAF attacks and stubborn defensive actions and local counterattacks by ground forces delay their advance. Eventually, the Royal Navy destroys the German second echelon in the Channel, condemning the invasion to failure.​

[namenski]

Tirpitz ceo rat praktično nije ni omirisao barut već je suvereno vladao 1 celim norveškim fjordom. 

To je to. Kontinentalac  :D

Tirpitz je ne mrdnuvsi iz tog norveskog fjorda: efektivno ometao, ponekad i sasvim sprecavao snabdevanje SSSR morskim putem, vezivao u svako doba dana i noci najmanje 2 bojna broda Home Fleet plus pripadajuca sita od brodova, inace itekako potrebna na drugim mestima, dugorocno uticao na britansko, pa i svesaveznicko planiranje, u jednom trenutku cak doveo i do angazovanja 1 americkog bojnog broda koji je dosao da se pridruzi Home Fleet...

 

Ne ide to bas tako kad su mornarice i pomorska moc u pitanju  :P , Britanci su uostalom izmislili ono in being...

 

 

Edit: (polu)zezanje na stranu  :), a i kad si pomenuo Bizmarka, njegov izlazak na Atlantik i snage koje su Britanci morali da angazuju su slika relacija kad je pomorska moc u pitanju.

Edited September 1, 2015 by namenski