From: fester@island.COM (Mike Fester)
Subject: Re: German Invasion of the Balkans, 1941
Keywords: ww2, balkans, greece, yugoslavia
Organization: /usr/local/rn/organization
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 20:45:31 GMT

In article <1jl3hiINNrom@manuel.anu.edu.au> dxb105@huxley.anu.edu.au (David Bofinger) writes:

>I have in fact heard of the Ploesti raids, my understanding is that they got cut
>up pretty badly. I'm still assuming they were based in southern Italy, until
>someone tellls me otherwise. That would be out of fighter range, right? From
>northern Greece the fighters would have been able to cover the raids. Also, the
>raids could have started in 1941, not 1943.

According to my tailgunner instructor, they inflicted and received heavy 
damage. Flak inflicted the vast majority of the damage, and Mustangs were
along for at least most of the raids. In any event, production at the facility
went up continuously until capture by the allies was imminent.

>>>> Unless Greece and Yugoslavia had
>>>> delusions about taking on the Wehrmacht at that stage of the war, they would
>>>> have been better off making [the Swedish] kind of arrangement with Hitler.
>
>This might have been wise on their part, on the other hand if you're going to do
>this you don't invite the British army to land, and you don't have pro-allied
>coups in response to the old government's decision to ally with Germany.
>
>>> You're saying Greece and Yugoslavia could have agreed to let the Germans send
>>> supplies and troops through their territory to ... where? Can anyone suggest
>>> a strategic use Germany could have put access to Greece and Yugoslavia to?
>>> Other than conquering them of course. :-) [A few trivial suggestions deleted.]
>
>> Uh, excuse me, but if the Germans HAD such a 'strategic use', why was it not in
>> the plans until Itlay's attack?
>
>Read what I wrote again, I said that I could see no strategic use to which Germany
>could put access to Greece and Yugoslavia. Hence the absence of such a reason in
>German plans before Italy's attack is explained.

Which basically means that Germany had no real quarrel with Greece. Greece could
have asked Hitler to call off Mussilini, or let him know they would not take
part in any actions against Germany. Most likely, they would have been left
alone. At this point, still no demonstrable reason to get involved in the 
big war (on the part of the Greeks). And no reason for the Germans to get
involved.

>> And aren't you contradicting yourself here? You
>> say there is no strategic use for Greece in this paragraph, and above you claim
>> it makes a great launching point to attack Ploesti.
>
>It is quite a good launching pad to bomb Ploesti. Hence the German desire to keep
>the British out of Greece and Yugoslavia. And if the Germans had wanted to bomb
>Ploesti, it would have been a great place to gain access to. :-)
>
>> In any case, you have essentially agreed in this paragraph that Hitler would
>> have had no real reason to attack Greece.
>
>I don't know, I read what I write and it all seems comprehensible. :-) I said that
>permission from Greece for Germany to move troops through it would be useless to
>Germany. (Except it might make conquest easier.) Basically because Greece is a
>peninsula, nowhere else to go but back the way you came.

And what possible advantage would there be to Greece for attacking Germany?

>List of reasons for Hitler to invade Greece and Yugoslavia, in no particular order.
>
>  1. To save his personal friend Mussolini from complete debacle.

Apparantly the deciding factor.

>  2. To assure Germany of chromium supplies in case the unpredictable Turks cut
>     them off.

wouldn't the conquest of Southern Russia do the same?

>  3. To safeguard Ploesti, and South-Eastern Europe in general, from British air
>     raids.

Didn't work. At least, Ploesti was bombed from bases outside of Greece.

>  4. The elimination of three-quarters of a million soldiers working for countries
>     that had just signed military agreements with his enemy (in the case of
>     Greece, actually inviting British troops into the country). In my opinion,
>     these armies would sooner or later have begun to act in a manner inimical to
>      axis interests.

Again, why? When precisely did the Greeks invite the British in? After the
attack by Italy, right?

>  5. An example to others in the Balkan region to encourage loyalty (Yugoslavia
>     had basically reneged on a deal with Germany after a coup).

?? Was Yugoslavia any easier to handle after that?

>  6. If he waited, it would get much harder. Greece's armies were misplaced,
>     the Italian army was looking ill and wasn't going to get better, Yugoslavia
>     was in a post-coup state of confusion, the new government still trying to
>     assert control, the army not mobilised properly and loyalties in doubt.

Good reason for the Yugoslavians to stay out of the fray as well, if given the
chance, no?

>  7. Convincing the Rumanians, Hungarians, etc. to go to Russia while their
>     hereditary enemies (in the Balkans, anyone within 500 km is an hereditary
>     enemy) were allying with the British would be tricky, to say the least.

As opposed to fighting their heriditary (and pressing) enemies, the Russians?

>  8. The delay in Barbarossa would get him a month's raw materials from Russia.
>     This acts to slightly reduce the effect of 2., below.

As pointed out numerous times, not likely to be a factor, since the operation
had been planned to proceed at an earlier date, without any intended action
in the Balkans.

>Now some of these reasons are more important than others. 1. is a minor reason as
>far as grand strategy goes. 2. wouldn't have mattered historically but Hitler
>couldn't be sure. 3. Might not have mattered, the British couldn't have delivered
>particularly vast bomb loads to the refineries, but it was risky. 4. Was of less
>benefit than Hitler probably expected because all the soldiers went into the
>forest and worked for Tito as partisans, but again Hitler couldn't have known that
>would happen. As for 7. maybe he could have done without the Bulgarians et al.
>
>But add them all up and it's a brave decision to ignore a threat like that in the
>flank.
>
>The only real reasons I can see for Hitler not to invade are:
>  1. He has to garrison it. Which reduces the value of argument 7. above.
>  2. It costs him time in Russia. Possibly as much as six weeks, though some
>     people say the thaw was so late that year it would have cost him practically
>     nothing. How much did Hitler think it would cost him? Had he been convinced
>     by this time that his early May timetable was optimistic? How much good would
>     the extra time have done him? Would the Russians have collapsed? Can anyone
>     guess?
>
>Hopefully I can rule off a black line now and call that my case that
>Hitler's invasion of the Balkans was, if not imperative, at least not
>an obviously bad decision. Invading Russia in the first place might be a
>different matter.

None of those reasons, except the first, seem particularly important. It is
a fact that the plans for Barbarossa were made before the Italians got involved
in Greece, and that none of those plans until then had the conquest of Greece
as a priority. 

>Someone being a natural enemy doesn't necessarily mean you want to conquer
>them. It might mean, for instance, that whenever you go around beating up on
>Slavs they declare war on you. In which case Hitler was perfectly correct.

He also mentioned the necessity of neutralizing France before any other
German plans could be carried forward. AS this is in fact what he did, it 
hardly seems he was being insincere in this one case.

>
>Hitler certainly didn't want to fight Britain, he thought the British
>Empire was necessary to his new world order. Initial plans for the invasion
>of France focussed on knocking it out of the war, not conquering it. The
>thrust to Paris was more von Manstein's idea. ("Boot, don't spatter." to
>quote Guderian again.)

Which doesn't at all change that they were in fact attacked, as he claimed
they must have been. In either event, they would have been neutralized.

>> And the US did not declare war on Germany until AFTER Germany declared
>> war on the US.
>
>No, but they gave the allies material aid, and fought an undeclared war
>with the U-boats.

Rather a different thing than sending in armored divisions, troops, planes,
etc.

>>The Germans had a plan for the attack at an earlier date. Your reasoning of
>>Germany needing another month's worth of supplies, then, makes no sense.
>
>It wasn't suggested as a principal reason, just a minor mitigating effect
>of the delay. At least that's the way I read it (who wrote this first?)
>
>> Second, they DID collaborate on several projects, and
>> the Germans in fact provided the Japanese with (among other things) engines
>> for one of its aircraft (at least, they provided all the orignal design
>> which the Japanese used in the Kawasaki Hien.
>
>Was this gratis, or a business arrangement? It makes perfect sense for Hitler
>to do this if he gets paid for it. In any case, cooperation was pretty minor.

??? Takes a lot of $$ or YY to finance trips by submarine around Africa, across
Asia to Japan.

>> Third, if Hitler had taken more of Russia, Japan would not have been
>> pulling "Hitler's bacon out of the "Russian fire"; they would have been
>> piling on an enemy reeling from one attack. 
>
>What it amounts to though is Japan making major changes to its grand strategy
>in order to act for the benefit of Germany. You haven't addressed here the
>most important point, that Japan needed oil and it needed it fast. There were
>two places to get that, America (which meant pulling out of China and being
>a good boy) or the Netherlands East Indies (which might mean war with the US
>and the Commonwealth, though why the Japanese made that compulsory I don't
>know). Invading Siberia just doesn't solve this problem.

If, however, the Russians surrender or are forced to cut a deal, they can get 
oil from Germany (or Russia), who then are able to free large numbers of
troops to deal more effectively with the British in Africa/the Middle East,
thus getting them more oil.

>> Finally, the Germans and Japanese did not like or dislike each other. They 
>> simply had goals that did not collide with each other.
>
>Oh, they disliked each other all right. After the fall of Singapore Hitler
>said that if he weren't at war he would happily send thirty divisions to
>"fight the yellow man" (obviously translated). Like I said, he like the
>British empire, in its place. Their goals didn't collide, but they weren't
>particularly complementary either. So they tended to fight their own lonely
>wars with little cooperation.

He also said, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, "Now we cannot lose!" and in
his euphoria declared war on the US. Strange that he would then gladly fight
"the yellow man" at that point. And he sent German arms for testing to
Japan via submarine, after Singapore. Had he in fact declared war on Japan as
a result of the "treacherous attack" on Pearl Harbor, in support of the US,
it may have been rather difficult to get the US into the European war against
him. After all, he WAS fighting the dreaded Communists.

Mike

Mike
-- 
Disclaimer - These opinions are not so much opinions, as pearls of wisdom. Any-
one disagreeing is obviously either a) a snivelling, whining, mentally-
deficient, weak-willed, inconsequential, namby-pamby tool of some vague but
conveniently defined conspiracy, or b) my wife.