The losses Germany incurred in terms of veteran soldiers, tanks, and aircraft would ensure that they never regained initiative on the Eastern Front again. It represented the most predictable, boring, and unimaginative attack the Wehrmacht had launched during the war and it ended, as it should have, in a complete defeat of Army Group Central. Kursk drives deep to the heart of the problems of the Wehrmacht in 1943. In terms of one battle that deserves the spotlight in these failures is Kursk. Though these mistakes had varying levels of importance in Germany's ultimate defeat, I think it underpins the fact that even the best run armies make a tremendous number of errors in the field. In terms of strict military strategy, the Germans made some very costly mistakes in Crete, Stalingrad, Norway, and North Africa.
The lack of cold weather gear and the German's lack of oversight in preparing their vehicles for winter warfare was another glaring mistake.
Russia would have required soldiers to remain in the field and conduct operations. Even if Germany believed it would be in Moscow by late fall, controlling the countryside in W. Others have pointed out the mistakes the Germans made regarding Barbarossa and their supplies and equipment, but had the operation kicked off on schedule (about a month and a half before it actually began), the Wehrmacht would have had a good chance of being in Moscow before the worst of the winter hit.Īs a sub-point, the Wehrmacht's total lack of preparedness for the winter is another confounding mistake. While the Balkans did net the Germans a reliable source of oil, attempting to squeeze an invasion of the Balkans and Operation Barbarossa into the same summer was a gigantic mistake. As someone else pointed out, had Hitler not declared war on the US in the wake of Pearl Harbor, it's highly unlikely that Roosevelt would have had the support of Congress to declare on Germany, which would have seriously curtailed US involvement in Europe.
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