Posted by iceburn on 4/2/2003, 12:55 am, in reply to "I spent over two hours summarizing everything here." Absolutely. The Germans were divided. They were fighting the English in Africa and they had to man the Atlantic wall. The Russian army was enormous, and once the Siberian reserves moved in to the fight, Germany was pretty much doomed. Without a leader like Rommel in Africa, and without von Manstein and the other brilliant strategists on the western front, Germany wouldn't have even lasted as long as it did without the United States entering the war. The same goes for the Japanese. The Japanese more than likely would have never conquered all of China. They didn't have the manpower, munitions, resources, etc. They might have been able to hold parts of Manchuria and China for decades, however. Once the Soviets were done with the Germans, I don't believe that Manchuria would have stayed in the hands of the Japanese for much longer. Also, earlier you brought up some thoughts about the build up of the German army vs. a possible buildup by the Iraqi army. The German army was able to take a force of 100,000 and beef it up because of the foresight of Hans von Seeckt, the head of Germany's post World War I army. Von Seeckt trained every officer to be fully able to occupy a rank two to three slots higher when the German army was allowed to rebuild. He also made it possible for the Reichswehr to be ready to expand to seven or eight times its size, a force necessary to defend Germany from invasion. As you can see, this troop count doesn't account for the millions of troops Hitler mobilized for Poland and France, and because of this drastic bloating in size of the German army, most of the German army was ill-equipped and ill-trained at the beginning of hostilities. However, the Germans were able to compensate for this by sprinkling the veteran Reichswehr among the green conscripts and using surprise to overwhelm their enemies in their initial encounters. The Soviet Union was faced with a very similar problem because of Stalin killing off a large percent of his experienced military personnel during the 'Great Purge'. However, when it came down to a slugfest between the Germans and the Russians, the Russians just had way too much resources for the Germans to overcome - a point that has been hotly debated on this board more than once. I believe Tiger and a few others are definitely of the opinion that Russia would have overcome the Germans with or without U.S. entrance into the war or the Lend-Lease program, which legally gave some pretty useful military, domestic, and agricultural trade secrets to the Soviet Union. Anyway, just thought I'd elaborate a bit more on those topics. Thank you for your time, Iceburn
24.196.59.210
: Do you think that without aid from the U.S.
: that Russia would've pushed all the way to
: the German eastern border? Stalingrad to
: Easter Germany - that's a lot of ground to
: cover when your enemy is not divided.
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