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Well said here. People often overlook the economic aspect of the war.
Couldn't the Germans have taken Gibraltar relatively easily though? A little more arm twisting of Franco and a few divisions might've done it. Malta also wasn't out of their reach. Even the Suez was not impossible if they had given Afrka Corps more men and supplies. That wouldn't knock the UK out of the war but would significantly diminish their industrial capacity.
Economic war was the British way. They knew how to wage such wars using their large navy. That is how the small country off the north west coast of Europe ended up with the largest empire ever seen. The sanctions and blockade of the USA in the war of 1812 forced the US to eagerly negotiate for peace at terms favourable to the British. The US economy was shattered. The British were highly effective in WW2 in economic warfare.
If German troops entered Spain, British forces would have moved into most of Andalusia and taken parts of Spanish Morocco, backed up by a large navy. They would not sit on the Rock waiting. The Royal Navy would have taken the Canary islands. Then land battles on Spanish territory. That was Franco's fear. No, the Germans could not have taken Gibraltar easily, if at all.
Nazi Germany was going to invade, conquer, and occupy a large island off the south east coast of Africa when they couldn't even mount an invasion across the English Channel at Britain?
All so that Japan would have submarine bases from which they could use their inferior submarines (as compared to the Germans and Americans) to harass British shipping in the Indian Ocean, stopping the British from moving war materials and supplies from their colonies in Asia to Europe and North Africa.
Really?
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan didn't coordinate their efforts and had widely divergent war goals. Nazi Germany was looking to expand into a Greater German Reich that reached to the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, at the expense of the Soviet Union. Imperial Japan was seeking a decisive victory against the United States, humiliating enough to the Americans so that they would sue for peace, leaving Japan with the oil and rubber resources of conquered Southeast Asia to support their ongoing expansionist war against China.
Point of fact, Soviet cargo ships used to regularly carry American Lend-Lease supplies through the waters of the Japanese home islands unmolested. Supplies being sent to support the fighting in Europe was welcomed by the Imperial Japanese government. It meant less supplies and war materials being used against the Japanese military forces. I've got a pretty good guess that if the British sought to send massive amounts of war materials from India to Europe instead of to Burma, then the Japanese would be in total support of such activity.
The sanctions and blockade of the USA in the war of 1812 forced the US to eagerly negotiate for peace at terms favourable to the British. The US economy was shattered.
No. Just...no.
The peace enacted at the end of the War of 1812 didn't favor anyone. No land changed hands and the British still kept their policy of impressing US sailors into the British Navy.
The American merchant fleet was all but destroyed, and American dominance in that sector was eliminated, but that only affected the New England states. The rest of the US, which grew and exported agricultural products, and didn't care one whit whether their exports were carried by ships from Boston or from Liverpool. The elimination of the vast US mercantile fleet forced New England to industrialize, with the result that the United States eventually became (for about a century) a vast industrial colossus on the international stage.
What forced a peace was the realization by both sides of the futility of the land war along the Great Lakes (where no land was captured - Canadian militia had no interest in fighting in Ohio and Kentucky militia had no interest in fighting in Ontario. More importantly the costs of continuing the war was weighing heavily on British merchants. The British Navy was very effective at capturing (and selling for prize money) the ships belonging to American merchants. But the US Navy and the American privateers were just as effective at doing the same to British shipping. And Britain relied on its merchant fleet much more than the US did.
You still cannot read properly. Go back and read it again.
The Japanese long range I-400 submarines were excellent. Their type 95 torpedo was about the best. The surface ship long lance long range was without peers.
You are very confused with little idea of the Big Picture.
Last edited by Dave Davis; 03-15-2022 at 07:33 AM..
The peace enacted at the end of the War of 1812 didn't favor anyone.
It favoured the British who got the better deal as they were winning and ended up the victors. They dictated the terms. The British won. Britain's economic war decimated the US economy. Britain's aim was to evict the invaders of Canada. They did. Britain had no desires on US territory. The US aim was to subjugate Canada - they failed.
You still cannot read properly. Go back and read it again.
The Japanese long range I-400 submarines were excellent. Their type 95 torpedo was about the best. The surface ship long lance long range was without peers.
You are very confused with little idea of the Big Picture.
See, that's just it. The Big Picture that you keep going on about exists only in your mind.
The Germans and the Japanese didn't view the war as global, as you keep insisting that they did. Only Roosevelt and Churchill saw the war in global terms, and for good reason.
I just looked up the Japanese I-400 submarine aircraft carrier. There were three built. They weren't the commerce raiders you need them to be. They were designed to attack land targets with their planes - preferably soft American cities or the Panama Canal.
Those who have the big picture in their minds understand _strategy._ The Germans had the Mesopotamia plan. To drop down from the USSR into the Middle East. The British prevented them form circling the Med.
The Germans in WW2 would have been content with capturing the oil fields in the Caucasus.
The Germans certainly supported Arab revolts against the British in the Middle East, but they weren't driving through the Soviet Union with an eye towards descending upon Iraq.
The German army's view was that the ultimate military enemies were Britain and the USA. The army anticipated that after victory against the USSR it would struggle to assert itself against the rival claims of the Luftwaffe and the navy.
As an alternative to the air and naval war, the German army's staff devised a variety of operations through which it might strike at the British Empire in Western Asia. Once the Soviets had been defeated, powerful armored columns would be launched into the Middle East and northern India from bases in Libya, Turkey and the Caucasus.
German generals dreamed of a vast fleet of 36 Panzer divisions, 15,000 strong. An internal planning document produced by the army in May 1941 called for the production of almost 40,000 tanks and 130,000 half-tracks over the next three years. Tank production by the end of the war exceeded the quantities specified in the army's Mesopotamian plan. This increase in production was only possible because the German army's post-Barbarossa planning was not a paper exercise.
In 1941 hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks were poured into the tank industry. In Kassel, Henschel & Sohn added almost a hundred thousand square meters of new floor space. A gigantic new plant, the Nibelungen works, was opened an Sankt Valentin, Austria, and two new factories, Vomag at Plauen and the Maschinenfabrik Niedersachsen, were converted to tank production. 1941 saw an important shift in technological terms. Germany finally abandoned large-scale production of obsolete light tanks and concentrated all available production on the medium tank designs that were to see the Wehrmacht thru to the summer of 1943.
The Germans instigated the uprising in Iraq, put down by the British.
Turkey proposed a tripartite alliance against German expansion between Turkey, the USSR and Britain. They proposed to attack Germany if they invaded Romania. Britain gave guarantees to Poland and Romania. After the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact such an alliance became unworkable. The British proposed to Turkey a bilateral treaty but Turkey replied that without USSR such an alliance is worthless.
Germany strived to win Turkey into their alliance exerting pressure on her which backfired. The Germans refused to ship the weapons purchased by Turkey from German plants returning the paid money. Turkey was outraged, so the British brought Turkey on her side by shipping similar weapons to Turkey for free. So, if the USSR fell, Turkey was in line for at least an attempted partial German occupation to get armies in positions of spingboarding into the oil fields of the Middle East.
Last edited by Dave Davis; 03-15-2022 at 03:42 PM..
None of which supports your claim that Nazi Germany was going to invade and capture Madagascar so that it could be used by the Japanese Navy as a submarine base against resupplying the British in Europe and North America.
It also doesn't support your claim that the Germany Army was planning to cross the Caucasus mountain range and take Iraq and Persia away from the Allied powers.
At best, you're describing possible scenarios well down the road, not actual war aims. Army staffs around the world devise what-if plans all the time - it doesn't mean that they get carried out. In the 1930's, the US War Department had drawn up plans for the invasion and occupation of Canada if hostilities ever broke out between the United States and the British Empire. That doesn't mean that Franklin Roosevelt ever actually had the conquest of Canada on his mind.
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