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  • Was Stalingrad stand firm a mistake?

    From Rich Rostrom@21:1/5 to Keith Willshaw on Mon Dec 16 17:40:46 2019
    Keith Willshaw <[email protected]> wrote:

    The basic strategic problem was that if Stalingrad
    was abandoned the armies in the Caucasus could be
    encircled and destroyed.

    Two problems with this:

    First, trying to hold Stalingrad required a major
    relief effort by German forces (Kampfgruppe Hoth),

    Second, the Stalingrad pocket was formed on 23
    November, but Army Group A in the Caucasus did not
    start to withdraw until the beginning of January 1943
    - five weeks later. If instead of insisting on trying
    to hold Stalingrad, Hitler had ordered the troops
    there to break out and retreat, then he could also
    have recognized that Army Group A was dangerously
    exposed and should retreat immediately. That would
    have removed any risk to that force.

    Since in fact he did realize that and order the retreat
    a month before the end of the Stalingrad pocket, it
    seems probable that he would have done so when he ordered
    retreat from Stalingrad.
    --
    Nous sommes dans une pot de chambre, et nous y serons emmerd�s.
    --- General Auguste-Alexandre Ducrot at Sedan, 1870.

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  • From The Horny Goat@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Mon Dec 16 17:14:23 2019
    On Mon, 16 Dec 2019 17:40:46 -0600, Rich Rostrom
    <[email protected]> wrote:

    Two problems with this:

    First, trying to hold Stalingrad required a major
    relief effort by German forces (Kampfgruppe Hoth),

    Second, the Stalingrad pocket was formed on 23
    November, but Army Group A in the Caucasus did not
    start to withdraw until the beginning of January 1943
    - five weeks later. If instead of insisting on trying
    to hold Stalingrad, Hitler had ordered the troops
    there to break out and retreat, then he could also
    have recognized that Army Group A was dangerously
    exposed and should retreat immediately. That would
    have removed any risk to that force.

    Since in fact he did realize that and order the retreat
    a month before the end of the Stalingrad pocket, it
    seems probable that he would have done so when he ordered
    retreat from Stalingrad.

    My reading suggests that most of what few casualties WERE suffered by
    Army Group A (or whatever the force was called by then took place
    during the withdrawal across the Kerch peninsula in the Crimea in Feb
    1942 with MOST of the withdrawal taking place via Rostov during Jan
    1943.

    Thus my suggestion that if those troops had been available either due
    to a stoppages say perhaps half as far as they went in the Caucasus
    (or never having attempted to go there in the first place) they could
    handily have beaten the troops that in OTL closed at Kalach and
    trapped 6th Army.

    Probably it would have been a blood bath similar to Kursk 9 months
    later but this time with the Germans with all the trump cards.
    Obviously NOT losing 6th Army would have made things less of a
    stalemate than OTL's 1943 was but even though the Russians were facing
    a manpower shortage in late 1944 I still don't see Hitler turning
    Moscow and Leningrad into lakes as per his pre 6/22/1941 fantasy.

    (More than likely the net effect is that with a stalemate in the east
    we would have seen a German surrender after Dresden and Berlin or
    wherever Little Boy and Fatman would be used - and no question nukes
    WOULD have been used over Germany if Germany was still fighting when
    nukes were available. The postwar evidence is quite strong on that
    point as the "Germany First" policy would have required first use of
    nukes against them if they were still fighting - whether that would
    also have brought about immediate Japanese surrender is doubtful as
    the Japanese would only have their own diplomats rather than first
    hand evidence as they did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki)

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  • From Rich Rostrom@21:1/5 to Jim Wilkins on Tue Dec 17 17:05:44 2019
    "Jim Wilkins" <[email protected]> wrote:

    Secrets discovered by cryptanalysis needed a credible cover story that
    they had been discovered by other means to keep the enemy from
    changing the code, for example a search plane "happened" to notice and
    be noticed by a located U-boot before it was attacked.

    ULTRA intelligence provided target information for the
    British aircraft at Malta attacking Axis shipping to
    North Africa. However, to protect the source, the air
    command would precede each strike with three search
    missions - one to the known location of the target
    ships, and two to other plausible locations.

    (At least one search mission was needed anyway, to ensure
    that the target actually was there.)

    The extra two missions were to conceal the source from
    Allied personnel. If every strike mission found a target
    with no preliminary search - then everyone in the units
    would figure out that the Allies had advance knowledge.

    Some would fall into enemy hands, be interrogated, and
    perhaps say foolish things about matters that they hadn't
    been briefed and warned on. Others might be transferred
    to other areas where Axis intelligence was operating, and
    "spill the beans" in conversation with civilians.

    One of the great achievements of the war was the work
    of the Special Liaison Units established by Wing
    Commander Winterbotham to deliver ULTRA intelligence
    to operational commanders in the field. Each SLU had
    to make sure that the commander they supplied
    maintained security and carried out cover activities
    as required. Since the commanders far outranked the
    SLU men, this required very delicate managing, but it
    was done successfully.
    --
    Nous sommes dans une pot de chambre, et nous y serons emmerd�s.
    --- General Auguste-Alexandre Ducrot at Sedan, 1870.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From John Dallman@21:1/5 to Wilkins on Sun Jan 9 15:37:00 2022
    In article <qt91fh$h54$[email protected]>, [email protected] (Jim
    Wilkins) wrote:

    Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe plans reached Moscow very quickly,
    sometimes before they arrived at German field units. Only
    operations developed entirely at field headquarters could surprise
    the Soviets.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_spy_ring

    If a German staff officer was the leak source he took the secret to
    the grave. However;

    "In 1981, it was alleged by Anthony Read and David Fisher that Lucy
    was, at its heart, a British Secret Service operation intended to
    get Ultra information to the Soviets in a convincing way
    untraceable to British codebreaking operations against the Germans."

    There is a nearly-plausible hypothesis that the source was Erich
    Fellgiebel, the head of Heer signals from 1938, and Chief Signal Office
    to OKW 1942-44. He was definitely a member of the resistance within the Wehrmacht.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Fellgiebel

    The hypothesis is that he arranged for the Lucy ring to have an Enigma
    machine, plus a legitimate German call-sign and a place on signal
    distribution lists. The operators who sent out signals from OKH and OKW
    only saw cipher texts; the people who encoded the signals didn't see distribution lists.

    The problem with this hypothesis is that "Lucy" would need new Enigma key material regularly. The most plausible way to get it to them during
    wartime would be a leak from the German embassy in Berne.

    John

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  • From John Dallman@21:1/5 to SolomonW on Sun Jan 9 15:37:00 2022
    In article <[email protected]>,
    [email protected] (SolomonW) wrote:

    If say Hitler had ordered the army at Stalingrad to withdraw, the
    German army there would have lost most of its equipment. Many of
    his troops would be lost anyway, many would-be wrecks too sick to
    do any more fighting.

    They might well have lost a lot of equipment, but the men weren't in bad condition at the time of the encirclement. They were by the time of the surrender, but that was a result of several months of very limited
    rations.

    John

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  • From The Horny Goat@21:1/5 to John Dallman on Sun Jan 9 19:53:20 2022
    On Sun, 9 Jan 2022 15:37 +0000 (GMT Standard Time), [email protected]
    (John Dallman) wrote:

    In article <[email protected]>,
    [email protected] (SolomonW) wrote:

    If say Hitler had ordered the army at Stalingrad to withdraw, the
    German army there would have lost most of its equipment. Many of
    his troops would be lost anyway, many would-be wrecks too sick to
    do any more fighting.

    They might well have lost a lot of equipment, but the men weren't in bad >condition at the time of the encirclement. They were by the time of the >surrender, but that was a result of several months of very limited
    rations.

    I agree with Solomon - 6th Army took a lot of time to die and if the
    air supply effort had been spent supplying a retreating army 6th army
    could have gotten back to the new German front line badly damaged but functional.

    I am skeptical that would have helped the Germans much given the type
    of fighting that was 1943 which was all about mobility and not
    infantry attacks against fixed objectives. It probably WOULD have
    meant survival of 100000 or so German soldiers most of whom in OTL
    ended up dying in the Kolyma and similarly "hospitable" places

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