"The Black Monk" wrote in message
om...
"John Mullen" wrote in message
...


Yep, there still wasnt any oil in Siberia and that was the limiting
factor
for Japan.

Accepted. I still think it's an interesting thought experiment to
imagine
what happens if Germany and Japan get their act together and do some
proper
joint planning either before or even during the war. The Panama Canal
comes
to mind.

John

I think that Germany would only have had a chance if it had done what
Spengler envisioned it should do - become the leader of Europe. Had
Germany attacked the USSR with the motive of liberating its captive
peoples - through establishing friendly semi-puppet republics as was
done following Russia's collapse during World War I - it is likely
that Moscow would have fallen. And if I recall correctly, Stalin
would have been ready to offer terms had Moscow been taken.
Intelligent, not fanatic, leadership would have accepted such terms,
which would have meant the gain of the Baltics, Ukraine, and probably
the Caucuses. Had the Germans been statesmen they would not have had
to contend with resistence in eastern Europe, indeed they would
probably have had several 100,000 more allied troops. It is likely
that even within Russia some friendly troops cpuld be had. Not
Vlasov's sullen war criminals, but free cossacks from the Don, Terek
or Kuban fighting willingly against their oppresors. If the Germans
had wanted to make the war into a crusade for Europe (naturally at the
expense of a few unfortunates - the French and Poles) they would have
stood a chance of winning. Instead, of course, Hitler's war was a
crusade only for his grotesque and evil ideology, as bad as if not
worse than the Bolshevism he fought. In this world, the British
would not have held onto the middle east with its oil, and the world
would have been a much different place for the past fifty years.

This alternative strategy is not as far-fetched as it seems. Elements
in the Wehrmacht were outraged at the Nazi mistreatment of Eastern
Europeans, and even within the Nazi party there was for example
Rosenberg, an ethnic German from Estonia, who envisioned an allied
puppet Ukraine stretching from "Lviv to Saratov" (there as an
interesting article about this in the Ukrainian Weekly a year or so
ago).

Unfortunately, rather than statesmen Germany was led by madmen.
Hitler's racial theories prevented him from making Germany a leader of
Europe in the manner that America would later be. As Spengler
predicted in 1936, Hitler's sick reich didn't last 10 years.

BM


this has been said a thousand times before in a hundred books . the truth is
if they were reasonable thoughtful men they wouldn't have been nazies .