How to Refight WW2

[Chlodio]

Hitler's ghost ruminates for 15 years on his mistakes and circa 1960 puts pen to paper in a book entitled "How I Would Do it Differently if I Could Do it All Over Again." In his book, Hitler devotes one chapter to each of his major mistakes. List the chapter titles and include a short, one sentence synopsis of what each chapter is about.

Here's my list to get us started:
Chapter 1 Prewar Preparation - fewer battleships, more submarines and maritime strike aircraft
Chapter 2 The Phony War - very few mistakes here, fewer naval losses in the Norway Campaign would have been nice
Chapter 3 The French Campaign - first big mistake of the war was letting the BEF escape at Dunkirk
Chapter 4 The Battle of Britain - did this even have to be fought? If yes, stick to one strategy
Chapter 5 Keep Developing New Weapons
Chapter 6 North Africa - deploy more airpower to the Mediterranean, capture Malta, sink the Royal Navy
Chapter 7 The Balkans Campaign - finish the job before moving on/ Why capture Crete if you're not going to use it?
Chapter 8 Barbarosa - set realistic objectives and stick to them
Chapter 9 Stalingrad - better to destroy enemy armies than to capture his cities
Chapter 10 Kursk - better to attack sooner rather than let your enemy prepare
Chapter 11 Mobile Defenses are Better Than Fixed Defenses
Chapter 12 The Bombing Campaigns - never lose control of the air
Chapter 13 D-Day - early to bed and early to rise... or the value of delegation
Chapter 14 The Battle of the Bulge - maybe these forces should have been used elsewhere
Chapter 15 The Bunker - the Alps are lovely in the spring

So what are your chapter titles?

 

[Naomasa298]

Moved to Speculative.

 

[zincwarrior]

Chapter 1. Don't get involved in a landwar in Asia...

Chapter 2. Don't annoy people who drink vodka for breakfast.

 

[Naomasa298]

Chapter 3 - Eat more meat, drink more alcohol.

OK, it's not going to win him the ar, but it sure as hell will make losing it more enjoyable.

 

[stevev]

Because of the title of the thread, I'm taking the Allied side. The North African and Italian campaigns were side shows. They weren't hurting Germany nearly as much as the Russians, particularly beginning with the Battle of Stalingrad starting in late 1942. In the same month the Anglo-American landings on the Atlantic coast of Morocco against the FRENCH couldn't have been more peripheral. Really it was more a training exercise for green American troops. Tunisia was a bit harder but still peripheral. Then came Italy which was hard because the geography favored the Germans. It was essentially abandoned after the fall of Rome. It's not clear that before D Day any of this really mattered much. Perhaps if the liberation of France could have been accomplished in 1943, Germany might have been defeated sooner and the Soviets kept out of Eastern Europe.

 

[Kevinmeath]

Error

 

[starman]

Why didn’t it mention put Germany on a full war footing earlier? While I fully agree that u-boat construction should’ve been prioritized, it wasn't that simple, as others have pointed out, because it would’ve alerted Britain that Germany planned to make war on it. I speculated that the Reich could’ve gotten around this problem by pretending to build the subs for foreign customers, supposedly more impressed with German subs than their own.
The Reich should’ve prioritized taking Moscow in ‘41 and if that didn’t work, the Caucasus oil fields in ‘42. Stalingrad should’ve been contained not taken. In addition the Germans should’ve tried to negotiate with Russia in ‘42.

 

[stevev]

Why didn’t it mention put Germany on a full war footing earlier?

If Hitler's ghost had an ounce of rationality, he would have realized the obvious. By engaging both the USSR and US, he could not win. None of the details listed matter. He actually could be said to have won the war in 1940. Britain was not going to defeat Germany alone and Germany was not going to destroy the British Empire. The USSR and the US were brought Into the European War by Hitler's own actions. The only possibility of a German victory would have been to develop the atom bomb first and be in a position to deliver them. Germany was never close to that nor was it Hitler's priority despite his talk of "miracle" weapons.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Stop once you've conquered France. Staying allied to Russia means Britain syands on her own. It took the Allies long enough to get to D-Day and that was with the vast majority of the best German troops having died or tied up in fighting in Russia.

If Germany had started fortifying the French coast in 1940 and beefed up their presence in Italy, the likelihood of a UK/US invasion of mainland Europe would have been greatly diminished.

 

[redcoat]

If Hitler's ghost had an ounce of rationality, he would have realized the obvious. By engaging both the USSR and US, he could not win. None of the details listed matter. He actually could be said to have won the war in 1940. Britain was not going to defeat Germany alone and Germany was not going to destroy the British Empire.

There was a major flaw in his victory, while Britain remained in the war Germany did not have access to certain vital resources, mainly oil. Germany and it's occupied territories were running an oil deficit even with the imports it was getting from Russia.