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Originally Posted by fakekidpoker
Had Hitler played the long game he could have won... The africa front...really just should not have happened.
With the extra tanks I see Leningrad falling for sure...separate peace is possible. US/UK shake their fist for awhile but then decide it pointless and make peace.
Hitler actually was one of the primary reasons that Germany had the early successes it did and ultimately a primary reason that Germany lost. Hitler was a great politician, but just a god-awful military strategist. Fortunately for the Allies, Hitler was so entrenched in power and so convinced of his own genius that nobody could hope to override his bad decisions.
Hitler was politically smart. He knew that the French, despite the raw numbers of soldiers? Was no longer truly a great power. He also was well aware that the British were not entirely unsympathetic to German ambitions to revise the Versailles treaty and to incorporate territories inhabited by ethnic Germans. Hitler used this knowledge to effect political Union with Austria and to get France and Britain to agree to his annexation of the Sudentenland. Of course this only convinced Hitler of his genius and that was reinforced when he annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia without repercussions.
With that in mind, once he invaded Poland and France and Britain declared war, Hitler was convinced that he knew how to win and that only a direct invasion of his enemies homelands was the method to do so. Again he was reinforced in this by the defeat of France. He became convinced that direct frontal action with no conception of retreat was the way to go. His attempt to control the airspace over Britain and the English Channel was obviously in preparation for an invasion of Britain. This was a mistake on his part. BritainÂ’s power was derived from its imperial holdings Morris than from its homeland. Defeating Britain really amounted to cutting off the homeland from the empire; no invasion of Britain was necessary.
He also started to implement his wacky ideological ideas, most notably the idea of invading his partner in crime in Poland - the Soviet Union. That was another mistake. A frontal assault on a thousand mile linear front had no real hope of long term success. There was an indirect way.
That leads me to Africa. Africa was a sideshow in HitlerÂ’s mind, but it need not have been. It could have actually been a war-winning campaign. This is especially true had Hitler not made one more incredible blunder - declaring war against the US after JapanÂ’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Had Hitler maintained a threat of direct Barbarossa-type invasion, but shunted most of the WermachtÂ’s resources to North Africa (and forgone sideshows like Yugoslavia and Crete), he likely could have pushed right through Egypt and into the Middle East. Not only would that have cut Britain off from the oil fields in the Mid East and allowed Germany to exploit them, it would have provided a threat of pushing all the way into Britains most valuable imperial possession -India. With the oil from Arabia cut off and India threatened, he probably could have forced Britain to negotiate a peace treaty on favorable terms to Germany.
Having eliminated Britain (and without the eventual threat of US intervention) he then could have focused on the Soviets. It seems difficult to believe that they could have held off a two pronged invasion through both Eastern Europe and simulateously through the Caucus region by the former Afrika Korps, especially considering how close the Germans actually came to pulling it off in actual fact, with a single invasion front and divided resources.