Officer of Engineers

Pearl Harbour - got the US into a bloodlust

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Chimo

yoda9999

I would say Stalingrad in that both sides really really needed to win it. The other battles weren't as crucial. Even if America lost Midway, more aircraft carriers were being built and Japan didn't have enough resources.

Maybe this poll should be separated between Pacific and European theatre?

JAD_333

I had the same thought.

gunnut

I doubt US would be detered if Japan actually won the battle at Leyte. US, by 1944, was cranking at near full capacity. There were endless waves of reinforcements heading into the Pacific. Japan could not afford to lose a decisive battle. The US didn't have a decisive battle. Every single battle was one in a long chain for the US on a very broad front. It was like a rich man playing poker with an average Joe. The rich man can commit the full amount of the average Joe owns, on every hand. Losing one hand doesn't dent the rich man's pocket. Losing a hand will lose the average Joe's game.

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Bluesman

GREAT analogy.

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"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell

dalem

The GMT game Empire of the Sun tries to address the perfect analogy that gunnut gave us by tying political points to certain events. The designer's theory is that if the U.S. suffers enough losses they'd have to sue for peace in the Pacific theater due to public pressure, independent of the assemply line of ships, men, and planes. I don't really buy his premise, but the game is a lot of fun so I don't really care that much.

-dale

gunnut

Thank you both for the endorsement!

I don't buy the premise of that game you're talking about, Dale. That sounds like a game based upon the 60s mentality, and today's political climate. Back in WW2, the American people were quite pissed off and they weren't gonna pull back until the enemy was smashed to bits. Everything in the nation was geared to put our boots in Tokyo and Berlin. Nothing short of total victory would suffice.

deadkenny

I tend to agree that the premise is rather questionable under the circumstances. However, it is a convenient game mechanism to 'keep things moving' and provide for some possibility of 'victory' for the Japanese player - beyond the less than totally satisfying 'get completely crushed more slowly' type of victory condition.

Without either a 'timer' or other 'pressure' for the Americans to take the offensive, they might just 'play it safe' and retreat to the west coast until the entire '100 carrier' fleet, with fleet trains, is ready!

dalem

Yeah. In my opinion a better way would be to simply play the whole thing out and tally the cost of the eventual American/Allied win in the Pacific. If it cost more than X then the Japanese get a "morale victory". Tons of games scale unbalanced scenarios that way.

-dale

JAD_333

You are probably right. And we now have the benefit of hindsight. However, Had the Japanese succeeded at Leyte Guld the war would have been prolonged, but not lost, though at the time the Japanese still held 60% of their conquests and hoped to hold out indefinately. But for the cold feet of one Japanese admiral, the Japanese stood a good chance of holding key positons in the Philippeans from which they could protect their one remaining oil shipping lane to the homeland. But since the battle was not a turning point per se, it was not decisive. It did more or less finish off the Japanese navy, which the Japanese were fully prepared to sacrifice to hold onto Luzon. It was also the largest naval battle of all time, but that is beside the point. Point is yours.

cape_royds

I think the most important battle in the Second World War was the Battle of France in 1940.

That's the battle that really made the Second World War what it was. The whole character of the war derives from it.

If the German attack on France bogged down, WWII becomes a very different war. Perhaps it doesn't become a "world war" at all, but remains a European War.

For example:

--The Battle of the Atlantic only became a major affair after the defeat of the Allies in France. Prior to the debacle of 1940, the naval situation wasn't bad from an Allied perspective. But after winning the Battle of France, the Germans gained valuable strategic bases in the West, while the Allied fleet got stretched thinner after the loss of the French.

--Does the USA become as involved in the affair if Britain's plight is not as desperate?

--Does the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact stay intact, or does Stalin finally do what the Germans claimed he was planning to do? At any rate, it was only after the collapse of the Western allies in France that the Germans could contemplate a war with the USSR.

--The rout of the Western Allies in 1940 certainly encouraged the Japanese to try to exploit the situation to their advantage, viz. the unresisted occupation of Indochina.


But although the Battle of France was the important battle in determing what sort of war WWII became, could it be said to be the most "decisive" battle? After all,

1. The winner of the battle lost the war.
2. The battle did not end the war or even turn the its tide.
3. Was a different outcome even possible? How can something be "decisive" if the outcome is forgone?

#3 is an interesting question. I started a thread a while ago asking whether Gamelin could have made a better plan. Link:

http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/his...l-gamelin.html

But the consensus opinion (with which I don't fully agree) seems to be that the Allied armies in 1940 had no chance of achieving the stalemate they desired, that they were at too great a disadvantage in terms of doctrine, command structure, and morale to not be rapidly defeated etc.


So if the Battle of France was not a "decisive" battle, then what?

Well, from there, I made the following deductions, reasoning mostly from the scale of events:

A. Most decisive theatre: Europe.

B. Most decisive front in that theatre: Russia.

So then it would be a question of which battle on the Russian Front was the most decisive.

Since neither side's forces were largely destroyed at Moscow or Kursk, that basically leaves it down to either Kiev, Stalingrad or "Bagration."

Kiev was the biggest victory of the three, but again the winner of the battle lost the war. It was not "decisive" then, it determining the war's outcome.

Between the remaining two, Stalingrad and "Bagration," I choose Stalingrad.

While "Bagration" I think was more destructive of Axis forces, Stalingrad not only has the "tide turning" aspect, but it was also fought by the Soviets without the aid of an active Second Front.

leib10

Although the men and materiel lost by the Germans at Stalingrad was grievous and the effect on morale was devastating, it was a blow they could've recovered from.

By comparison, Bagration caused the essential destruction of an entire Army Group, the Germans losing about a fourth of their total Eastern Front strength in just a few weeks. It also cut off Heeresgruppe Nord, resulting in the eventual formation of the Courland pocket, where that army group met its end. Heeresgruppe Sud was forced into Rumania and Hungary, where they engaged in a steady retreat into Czechoslovakia, Austria, and southern Germany until the bitter end.

Bagration was, by the numbers game, probably the single greatest defeat of the Wehrmacht. It broke the back of the Wehrmacht in the east permanently.

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"The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world. So wake up, Mr. Freeman. Wake up and smell the ashes." G-Man

JBG

For me, there are two Midway and Stalingrad ( though Alamein occurred at aboout the same time as Stalingrad ) as there we see the battles that show the definite turning of the tide.

Given the parameters of the question, it is hard however to avoid subjectivism.

Jonathan

deadkenny

I agree that the result of the ‘Battle of France’ was both a surprising result at the time and critical to the ‘course’ of WWII, if not the outcome of WWII.


Some very interesting discussion points here. No doubt the Atlantic bases in France gave the Germans a big advantage in the Battle of the Atlantic that they wouldn’t otherwise have had. However, I believe that the battle would still have been fought, with the u-boats trying to damage the Allies’ merchant shipping, just as they did in WWI.

Regarding the US entry, I believe Roosevelt still wants to help the Allies and certainly a Japanese attack on the US facilitates that. But does the US agree to a ‘Europe First’ strategy if the Allies are still holding a front in France? For that matter, does Japan attack the US at all in that context?

Another good point regarding the Soviet Union. If Germany is ‘bogged down’ fighting in France, one can probably assume that Stalin would at least be more aggressively asserting his claims in Scandinavia and the Balkans, if not actually ‘stabbing Germany in the back’.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that the Allies had ‘no chance’ of achieving a stalemate / attritional battle. I would say it is likely that they would have collapsed eventually – but that it might well have taken much longer and been much more costly for the Germans. The French were prepared / trained / equipped to fight a WWI style attritional battle. The longer they can ‘force’ that style of fighting, the longer they have a chance to fight the Germans on more or less ‘even’ terms. The problem is that they were incapable of handling a German armoured breakout, once it occurred. Further, keep in mind that once the French had completed their mobilization they were pretty much at the max manpower level they could maintain. However, the Germans had much greater manpower reserves, as they were continuing to expand their forces even into 1940. So, if an attritional battle had manifested itself for some period, it would have had the net effect of weakening the French relatively more than the Germans, making an eventual breakthrough increasingly likely over time. I remain of the opinion that the Germans would have broken through sooner or later, one way or the other. At that point, it’s all over as the French could not have reacted quickly enough to ‘seal’ any major breakthrough.

In terms of material losses, agreed that Bagration was worse for the Germans than Stalingrad. However, when considering the ‘decisiveness’ of the battle, one has to consider the position each side was in prior to and after the battle. Bagration, along with the breakout from Normandy, were 2 of the final nails in Germany’s coffin, but to mix metaphors, the Germans already had one foot in the grave prior to those battles. German strategy for ‘victory’ in ’44 was based on first crushing the Allied landing in France and then concentrating everything on a major defeat of the Russians. So really, by failing to recognize Normandy as THE landing, and therefore failing to release the forces necessary to crush it, Hitler had already lost his only chance to ‘win’ in ’44 by mid-June


Interesting that El Alamein gets most of the ‘press’ as far as being the ‘turning point’ in the west, which is compared to Stalingrad which is considered the ‘turning point’ in the east. However, the Axis defeat in Tunisia was actually much more decisive in terms of what was lost. Rommel’s ‘Afrika Korps’ was so small by the time of the defeat at El Alamein that the Germans could have afforded to lose the entire force and hardly notice it whereas the losses in Tunisia were comparable to what was lost at Stalingrad.

Grim

It is really hard for me to say it is this battle or that. But I feel there is one that has yet to be mentioned that was of great importance. July 10, 1940 to Oct 31, 1940 The Battle of Britain during which England lost 915 aircraft (1 in 3 of its air crews) and Germany lost 1733 of 4200 Aircraft. The objective of this battle was to destroy the British RAF so Operation Sealion the German invasion of England could commence totally free of aerial threat. Hitler was also aware of the importance of Operation Sealion and said "This operation is dictated by the necessity to eliminate Great Britain as a base from which the war against Germany can be fought." OH how right he was! The failure of his Air Campaign in the Battle of Britain prevented his invasion plans from ever seeing the other side of the Channel. The loss of the Battle of Britain and total fizzle of Operation Sealion was the first to fall of a long line of dominoes. This one battle forced Hitler to keep vital troops in western Europe when they were desperately needed on the Eastern Front.