Was the Soviet Union beatable?

Grisby's War in the Pacific

What murdered his chances was the ineffective production rates of Germany. Maybe for the first time in history an eastern european country beat Germany at its game: economics.

Several off-topic posts were deleted.

(off topic)
Hello guys, congratulations for the great site, keep up the good work.
(on topic)
In my opinion the Soviet Union was beatable.
If Hitler had the plan to send troops through Finland and attacked from there on the direction Leningrad-Moscow, i think he could cut SU in two by going further south.
Combined with an offensive from the west he could trap almost the whole soviet army.

Only those 40 siberian divisions left from Stalin to guard the manchurian frontier from the japanese will be left.

What do you say?

No, in WWI Russia already had a strong (at least ideologically) movement that opposed the Czar and its involvement in the War, while in WWII most if not all of Stalin's opponents were already dead and the germans didnt even try to portray their war as an Operation Russian Freedom.

That oil would need refineries, and the closest refineries were in Romania I think.

Plus the Caucasus drive never got anywhere, really. Spectacular but undermanned, underfunded, undersupplied. Ended in uber failure.

Germany could have won the war if Heeresgruppe Mitte drove straight along the Moscow highway in the first few weeks of the war directly to Moscow and captured it. Then there would be time for Guderian and Bock's Panzers to turn on Leningrad and Stalingrad and Rostov. However Hitler was stupid and splattered the Panzer divisions all over the place right after the first 2 weeks when Heeresgruppe Mitte was already halfway to Moscow and completed the Minsk and Smolensk encirclments.

K

The way I see it, Germany was strong enough to beat any country, including the USSR. But not all at the same time -

They taught that if they dont attack first, they will all jump on them..
Which ended up happening anyways...
Which brings us to my theory: WW2 whould have occured no matter who attacked first.

Hitler can only be blaimed for loosing the war. That's ALL he can be blaimed for -
not for trying or ""starting"" it.
There are those who tried, won.. and as winners never had to answer questions

There's a really interesting book called "Hitler Options", by a British professor, Kenneth Macksey. In it, there are a number of theories of "counter-factual history"; one of them is really interesting and believable: all 4 Panzer-Gruppen were concentrated in august in an iron fist which stroke in the center sector of the front, then drove north to Vladimir. All that in the back of the remaining Russian frontline, supplied only by Luftwaffe. Seems so daring, but also possible...
Of course, the whole "story" is longer than 30 pages and with many details.

An army this size can never be supplied by air alone. At Stalingrad the 6th Army required 500 tons of supplies daily while Luftwaffe could deliver an average of 117 tons a day. And four panzer armies would require a lot more than the 6th Army.

But also the Luftwaffe of summer 1941 was stronger than 1942/43. Also, the author assumes that only the mobile parts of the armoured divisions would have participated; plus, the supplies would be just fuel and ammo, less food
However, as I said, it is counter-factual history. Nothing could have stopped the rest of the Red Army to mount a counter-attack in the "tankless" sectors of the front.
I am also unsure about Moscow's importance as a knot of communications, other than railways... After all, let's remember how many factories were "translated" eastward with success!
I'll get back with more details of the book if you think necessary.

Well, few things are more compelling than counterfactual history, imo! That book sounds interesting indeed! (I found it on Google, np).

Another book I love in that genre: What If? (Robert Crowley, ed. Putnam, 1999) has the great military historian Robert Keegan outlining "How Hitler Could Have Won the War; The Drive for the Middle East, 1941"

Keegan gives "what if" Hitler had, in summer 1941 chosen to make his major attack into the mideast instead of Russia! He says capture of the oil fields would have meant victory in the long run for a Reich astride the central route to British India and Russia's southern provinces.

(btw, The Brits knew this of course, and so acted to depose the Shah who had been leaning toward the germans. The outcome of THAT history we see still being played out this week!!!)

But who knows? IMO the Germans would have still been overstretched, and Stalin would not have sat still for long.

Oh, I've read that book! Quite nice, indeed - and true words you've spoken, Master Yoda: Stalin would have won ww2 anyway, especially with Anglo-American help! The thing (Suvorov wrote it and I partly agree) is that not all the objectives were reached, also due to Germany's first strike!
One thing which I do NOT understand in Suvorov's theory is like that:
Fact 1: There were two very powerful SU armies at the border of Romania, in offfensive didpositive
Fact 2: Romania crossed that border 11 days after the beginning of the conflict
Fact 3: The Soviets could have blown the German-Romanian attack dispositive to pieces by crossing themselves the Pruth river (as Suvorov implies they were preparing for July 6-th)
Question: Why didn't they invade Romania????? It would have been enough to destroy the oil fields for Hitler's war machine to stop!
I quote from this site:

http://www.worldwar2.ro/operatii/?article=4
Imagine what would have happened in the opposite situation, with the Soviet Army overruning the 11-th German army and the 3-rd and 4-th Romanian...

Not likely to have happened. The 12th and 9th Armies were in danger of being surrounded inside Bessarabia and their chances of reaching the Ploiesti oilfields were null. The Red Army in 1941 was a far cry from that of 1944 in terms of experience, command abilities, equipment etc.

How so? That was the initial plan! And I don't think they would have been surrounded! Maybe outflanked a little, from north - but it would have been enough just to destroy the oilfields like in wwI, and eventually to maintain a frontline in the vicinity for as long as necessary to hamper repairing, producing, transporting etc.
True fact that Red Army in 1941 wasn't that good, but the numeric superiority in ALL fields (men, tanks, planes, guns, ships, whatever) must have compensated somehow - as it eventually happened from 1942 onwards...
But that could be another topic