Strategy
D-Day 1943 – A Roundup II
Operation ROUNDUP While the Germans retreated toward the Dnieper, Mountbatten and his staff finalised their plans for the cross-Channel assault, now scheduled for early September. Mountbatten’s plan called for two widely separated landings, Patton’s 1st Army near Dieppe and Montgomery’s near Dunkirk. The two armies would expand their beachhead; drive on Paris, then on toward Germany, cutting off any German…
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Nivelle’s failure
Nivelle’s failure was no greater than that of others, indeed rather less. He took more ground than Joffre did in his offensives or than Haig did at Arras. But Nivelle had promised more. Instead, he had carried the exhausted French army beyond breaking point. (A.J.P. Taylor) Perhaps the most surprising…
The Biggest Mistakes in World War II
The alternative decisions which could dramatically change the course of the war. This essay explores some of the greatest decision making mistakes of World War II. It does not discuss miraculous alternative history events such as “what if Hitler had a heart attack”, only reasonable and realistic alternative decisions which…
Panzer Production Costs
As a stopgap measure pending the Panthers’ design, production, and delivery, Guderian’s commission had recommended upgrading the army’s assault guns. About 120 of the Model IIIF with a 75mm L/43 had entered service in 1942, prefiguring the assault gun’s development from an infantry support vehicle into a tank destroyer. As…
Lend-Lease Redux I
The Western Allies began supporting the Soviet Union with a wide variety of military equipment beginning in November 1941. Among the items supplied were many tanks and other types of armoured fighting vehicles. Although the countries that comprised the Western Allies found the Communist ideology as distasteful as the Nazis’…
Lend-Lease Redux II
The USA, Britain and Canada supplied 22,800 armoured vehicles to the USSR during World War II. Of these, 1981 were lost at sea on the hazardous Arctic convoys to Murmansk. The shipments that did arrive were the equivalent of 16 per cent of Soviet tank production, 12 per cent of…
The Road to Rome
By late spring 1943, the Americans and British and their Commonwealth and colonial Allies had won the war in North Africa. The opening of a Second Front in northwest Europe was still a distant possibility, and the victory in Africa left the Allies in the Mediterranean with a choice of…