Which WW2 battle was more instrumental in defeating Germany?

Lol

 

I will continue care about many things.

 

Bonjour les amis, je suis de retour de vacances et comme promis je vous donne les références exactes des ouvrages relatant le comportement des troupes alliées lors du Débarquement :
-Jean-Claude Valla "La France Sous Les Bombes Américaines, 1942-1945" Les cahiers libres d'histoire -La libraire nationale (2002)

-J. Robert Lilly : "Rape and American Soldiers in The European Theater of Operations During World War II, 1942-1945" (2003)

Enfin un petit film de propagande vichyste sur les bombardements anglo-américains :
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6ymve_bombardements-anglo-americains-sur_news

 

merci cest interessant

 

Avec plaisir...
Une autre référence très sérieuse : Eddy Florentin "Quand Les Alliés Bombardaient La France" (Perrin-2008), l'auteur montre que les bombardements intensifs et non ciblés sur la France n'ont guère endommagé les installations militaires mais ont détruits des centaines de villages et causèrent de nombreuses victimes innocentes...

 

Gets my vote. Enemy at the Gates is a great book (nothing like the film).

 

If I had only the two battles to choose from I would say D-Day because barbarossa standing alone was not determental to Germany. The biggest reason Germany slipped up was going into Russia at all. He already had an agreement with Stalin so that her could bring guns and supplies through russsian railroads. Then Hitler turned on him, I still do not understand that. If you take only the amount of deaths that happen just on the eastern front it was the biggest loss of life in war ever, on record. Stalin was so paranoid he did not even believe the attack was happening while it was happening. He did not even trust his advisors at the beginning of the conflict. Remember the Soviets did not sign the war treaty to protect their soldiers from war crimes, which means there were absolutely no holds bared on the eatern front. There are still to this day in arts of Russia fields scattered with dead remains from that conflict.
Anyway that's my rant.

 

Where is Stalingrad?

 

In Russia.Its on the way to the oil resources of the Caucasus the Germans were trying to get hold of.

 

+1

 

While I think Stalingrad is a really important battle that might have turned the tide, I dare say that the Battle of Moscow was the most important, simply because The Soviet Union would have fallen apart without Moscow, that had at the time become a major transportation hub, not to mention the morale crunch.

While Napoleon went for Moscow and failed, he was given the suggestion to go to the Ukraine instead, he refused. However Hitler gambled fully on the Ukraine at the start of the war, calling it the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, he was right, but the delay of moving around units cost him the battle of Moscow and in the end the war.

 

Um ... is that what they teach in America? As I recall there were five beaches. Two were British, two were American, and one was Canadian. So how does that make it American-led?

And the supporting naval firepower ... I think that mostly came from the Royal Navy's Home Fleet, didn't it?

This Operation Overlord thing was something of a joint venture, really.

As for your poll question ... it's kinda difficult to answer ... because Operation barbarossa was the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Was that what you actually meant? Or were you trying to compare Overlord with Operation Bagration, the Eastern Front offensive of 1944??

Anyway, Barbarossa failed only because of one thing ... the British operations in and off Crete.

Churchill has had to put up with a LOT of criticism over his decisions in teh Greece and Crete campaigns.

BUT ... recently declassified material from Station X shows that:

1. Ultra had put us in possession of the full operational plan for Operation Barbarossa, but we couldn't let on

2. Churchill knew that the Germans knew that the operational timetable was tight ... two weeks' delay could be critical. They HAD to be in Moscow before the weather turned ...

3. Churchill also knew that several critical units were committed in Greece, and that his best chance of helping Russia was to keep them there for long enough that the Barbarossa start date had to be put back by two weeks or more

4. That is what the whole Crete cmapaign was about ... and Churchill would have been prepared to sacrifice the whole of the Mediteranean fleet and every single troop involved if this was the price he had to pay to buy Stalin those two critical weeks

5. In the event we only lost about half the Mediterranean fleet ... and we DID delay Barbarossa by two weeks as a result of the Crete campaign ... and the Germans did fail to make it to Moscow before the weather turned. And Churchill considered it cheap at the price

Therefore, if any battle was absolutely crucial to the outcome of the war ... it was teh battle for Crete.


Even more critical, however, was the battel that never was fought but should have been.

When Mussolini brought Italy into the war in June 1940, he sent a couple of divisions over the border into France where they did ... not alot.

What if he had, instead, sent a couple of brigades (or even a couple of battalions ... it would have been enough at the time) to seize Malta?

Result ... the British position in the Mediterranean would have crumbled ... the Germans would have gained access to the middle eastern oil fields ... the summer 1942 offensive in Russia could have focussed on Moscow rather than diverting (disastrously) into the Caucasus in search of oil ... the Desert War would not have turned into a huge drain on the German war effort (bear in mind that at one time the British bomber squadrons in Malta were sinking 75% of all the supplis sent to Rommel) ... Rommel himself would have been available to join Guderian in Russia ...

Yeah - the failure to seize Malta when it was theirs for the taking was one of the biggest Axis errors of the war!

 

70 Years Ago, December 1941: Turning Point of World War II

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28059

 

Exactly ... the the consequences of the two weeks' delay in teh start of Operation Barbarossa as a result of the Crete campaign ...

 

As said, Germany not winning a blitzkrieg victory in the Barbarossa campaign meant Germany had no chance of "winning" the war. They possibly could've instituted an elastic mechanized defense on the eastern front to try to wear the Soviets to attrition(What Manstein tried to adopt but was overruled), but yeah, victory was not going to happen. Even by the summer of 1942 during Case Blue, the summer offense to Stalingrad/Caucuses, logistics alone were already becoming a nightmare in terms of fuel shortages.

Perhaps Germany's real defeat was it not going to a full war time economy right off the bat. Germany substantially increased production of both tanks and planes in 1943 and 1944 despite allied bombing. There's a joke the Luftaffe never ran out of planes, it just ran out of gas and pilots.

 

The day the USA took the beaches was the end for germany. They saw alot get killed, But more coming and killing them and advancing forward.

The ardens forest was one of the toughest battles and once they broke that, Both sides knew where it was heading.

It was the nazi's vs everyone and they had to look over their shoulder consistently for front attacks and combined attacks which lead to obtaining more ground and POW's.

There are alot of things that come into play on how we were successful. Like your country supporting your soldiers and guys with balls ready to fight.
One thing i do know for sure, The USA has bailed out the pussies in france almost a half a dozen times now. They run their mouth and then run away. My grandfather fought in the bulge and out of everything he was around, He said the nazi's had more balls then the french, The nazi's at least took a side and stuck to it. To each their own.....

 

I did not answer the poll, as the Barbarossa operation does not belong there. The Koursk battle really destroyed Hitler's last chance. Remember that 80% of all german soldiers who died during WW2 died on the eastern front. It's really the Soviet Union that defeated the Nazis, with only some help from the Anglo-Americans. The Soviet Union would have defeated the Nazis even without D-Day.

 

Not D-Day
Without the Eastern Front we'd be speaking German today.
The entire Soviet offensive was what decided the European Theater.

 

the invasion of the soviet union was really the beginning of the end. all those supreme divisions wasted to surround moscow and stalingrad only to be stuckin the ice and snow then to be surrounded and defeated. but when the americans entered the war, that was the coup de grace.

 

I'm even not to try asking to poll, 'cause it's too difficult. I cannot say D-Day or Barbarossa Operation was more instrumental to defeating Nazi, I can say that they both were greatest in the whole WWII history, I think. But in Eastern Front not Stalingrad was the point of countdown, but the Kursk battle was. 1943 was a point of countdown and with a common fronts, Eastern and Western, we won this war.