Dana Mathewson

This is a sketchy look at the facts. The author purports to be an expert, but he does not go into depth on any of his ten ideas. In particular, he does not analyze why Hitler made any of his "mistakes."

But it's still interesting reading. I especially like the idea that the Holocaust is listed as one of Hitler's "mistakes." Yep, I'll agree to that!

http://listverse.com/2017/07/13/top-10-ways-the-nazis-could-have-won-world-war-ii/

A NOTE FROM TIM

I can quibble with a lot of this, Dana, although he makes some good points. The invasion of Russia was indeed a mistake; Hitler should have invaded Britain and when they did launch the attack on Russia they were delayed several months. Had they invaded on schedual they probably would have taken all of European Russia and been able to dig in for the winter. It seems the author fails to understand this.

Hitler did make a mistake in declaring war on the U.S., but he had a reason; he wanted Japanese help with Russia. I don't think the author made that clear.

I think the Holocaust issue is not as big as the author thinks because it certainly was not used to rally people in Britain or America (there was still quite a bit of anti-semitism in both places and, frankly, Fascist ideas were prevalant all over the world at that time.) It was a mistake, for sure, but I think other factors were more important.

Dunkirk. He's right, but I don't know if he understands it. My father had a friend who fought at the Bulge and he told me that the Germans purposely let the British leave to get them to make peace. He was convinced of that, and he got the notion from people who had actually been at Dunkirk. If that was the case it would explain why Hitler never tried to mount an invasion of Britain, and why he bombed heavily (including the cities) but never truly imperiled the islands. He wanted to scare them, not hurt them enough to counter attack. His scheme clearly failed.

The Germans wound up fighting on Three fronts, not two.

There are any number of other mistakes made by Germany during the war; Hitler insisted on fixed fortifications for his V2 rockets, overriding the creator of the system who wanted mobile strike units so the RAF couldn't hit them, for instance. Contrary to popular belief the V2 were causing enormous damage in Britain. Hitler also insisted on pursuing rocket technology rather than nuclear research, and the heavy water experiments they did could not use "Jewish science" so the Germans were forced to take a ridiculous convoluted path to get where America could easily go (using Einstein's work). The author fails to mention this stuff.

In the end I think the Nazis lost because they were evil and arrogant. But so many kids today fail to understand that it was a lot closer of a thing than we realize. It was so close because the West hadn't the stomach for it at first and Hitler did. Sort of like this war with Islam.

DANA REPLIES:

Agreed. And Hitler overrode his generals on the invasion of Russia because he needed Russian oil. England had no strategic resources to justify invasion, and the Luftwaffe had proven to be impotent over England. It would have taken a naval invasion and Hitler didn't have the air power to support it.

As far as tho Holocaust, that wasn't known about till after the war, for the most part.

This "historian" is living in a bubble.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:03 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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