Profile of AvNY

What CoH3 needs to change from co2:

- New commander system, more similar to vCoH. need fewer useless abilities and copies. Less is more.

While I agree wholeheartedly, I believe it just won't happen. Because : DLC:

But because of DLC commanders need to be less relevant. The more relevant they are the more likely they will include, whether by design or by accident, balance breaking abilities or synergies.

nice work.

you have the SU-76 but no Marders? (c. 3,000 Marders)

HITLER. COULD. NOT. WIN.

There are no permutations or combinations that would have worked. Germans were not ubermen in combat. Their generals, while more prepared for the war than others in the beginning, were not all Frederick the Great reincarnated, German technology and engineering was not ahead of everyone else, and more important than all of that, German industry was not close to large enough to withstand those of its opponents and there were no master plans to expand it.

Even after they had subsumed the industries of Czechoslovakia, and knocked that of France out of the war, they were at best a match for the UK and the Soviets (each taken separately) and well behind the US.

Even given time they could not have built up an army and air force that could compete against any two of these and also built up a Kreigsmarine that could challenge the British let alone the combined naval forces of the allies without the US.

There is no way to know for sure, but there are powerful arguments that the way things played out was possibly about as good as the Germans could have hoped to manage. They hit their opponents by surprise and when they were weakest. While they would have been stronger given time, so would the opponents.

(It is possible that maybe if they kept peace with France they could have gone after Russia, but of course they always were afraid for their western front, so I am not sure that NOT attacking France was a possibility, at least not in their minds.)

In a nutshell:

- Started war too early, the Wehrmacht was still developing by the time the invasion of Poland happened. The majority of the tank force was stop-gap training tanks like the early Panzer IIs. The Wehrmacht should have been properly built up and then tested in a minor brushfire conflict in a faraway land nobody cares about.

From there, Hitler had 2 options for conquest. Go take France and piss off the western world or go take the SU with very little other enemies.

- Invade Soviet Union. Don't dick around at Stalingrad.
OR
- Invade France and in the battle of Britain, Hitler shouldn't have focused so heavily on terror and civilian targets and instead should have focused on military targets only. During the BoB, tons of radar stations and airfields were left untouched because Hitler wanted to focus on civilian population centers to break their will to fight. remove the threat first, little corporal.

- The Kriegsmarine was neglected. It should have been built up before any major war efforts were made. Naval landings, bombardments, and the protection of shipping lanes hurt Germany A LOT.

- Then there's a bunch of late war REALLY bad mistakes but you could fill a book with those.

People miss a huge point regarding Hitler. He had a political genius when it came to military matters. By the time of Barbarossa he had "recaptured" the Sudetenland, "conquered" Austria and Czechoslovakia, and defeated the Poles, Dutch, Norwegians and the French in relatively no time. The French! At that time in living memory the Germans had just failed in a 4 year struggle to do that and here it was done in weeks. Why shouldn't they be able to defeat the Russians? The Russians had always been the weaker of Germany's opponents, and were particularly weak at the time of Barbarossa.

I don't say this as a fan of Hitler. But people should not sell him short as a strategist even if he was not a good tactician nor the best choice for choosing weapon systems.

Remember, today we blame Hitler because the generals who wrote their memoirs (usually to their own benefit) blamed Hitler while too often not giving him credit for the things he did accomplish. And they too seldom take blame for tht hings that were their fault.

The Germans concentrate on tactical arts. The US on logistical arts. Each does so as a consequence of their respective histories. The Germans look to Frederik the Great and his accomplishments while in the US there was the combination of making West Point in part an engineering/logistical school both to help justify its existence prior to the Mexican and Civil wars, and to take into account the stupendous distances and size of the US.

Today we think maybe had the Germans captured all of Moscow perhaps they might have defeated the USSR. But they didn't know that then and we still don't know it today. It was also probably impossible regardless of any tactical changes regarding Barbarossa. After all, they lost even though everything essentially went according to plane. They made the inroads they expected and defeated the western armies to the degree they expected, if not more so. They accomplished Hitlers "kicking in the door". But the whole house didn't come down.

I don't think he could have taken the UK really. The British decisively won the Battle of Britain, and they had a way larger navy than the Nazi's did.

UK is covered from all sides by ocean, and then even if they made it inland. When was the last successful invasion of the UK island? 1032? Something like that.

Some country's, purely due to geography, are a lot easier to invade and take over than others. I would argue that both Russia (due to it's sheer size, and inhospitable weather patterns) and UK, were countries that were damn near impossible to invade, successfully anyways.

You are pretty on point. There was simply NO WAY Germany could invade the UK. FIrst of all, they couldn't win the Battle of Britain regardless of their tactics. The British were outproducing the Germans in aircraft. Second, the Germans had no amphibious landing doctrine or experience. Amphibious landings are complicated. The British and Americans had been practicing them and refining them for decades prior even to WW2 and they still knew they weren't ready to invade until a few years of preparation had been made.

And finally there is the Royal Navy. At the time of Operation Sea Lion the KriegsMarine had 3 cruisers and a handful of destroyers. The British, between the HOme Fleet and the Med. Fleet had that many capital ships alone, not to mention a couple of aircraft carriers, a dozen cruisers and a couple dozen destroyers. Do you know what a destroyer alone can do to a flotilla of river barges pulled by river tugs moving at 5 knots in the English Channel? (because that was the composition of the force the Germans were going to use.)