Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

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His plan certainly was to, and his generals told him it would happen.

Operation Sealion (the German invasion of Britain) was planned for September 1940[1]. The German invasion of Russia[2] commenced June 1941.

Note that Orwell was writing this in March 1940, before it was clear that Britain would win the Battle of Britain (the airwar that was supposed to destroy the British airforce in preparation for invasion) and Germany would be unable to invade. His whole quote is worth reading:

Probably, in Hitler’s own mind, the Russo-German Pact represents no more than an alteration of time-table. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with the implied intention of smashing England afterwards. Now, as it has turned out, England has got to be dealt with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed of the two. But Russia’s turn will come when England is out of the picture—that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees it. Whether it will turn out that way is of course a different question.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion_(wargame)

They war gamed Sea Lion with actual Nazis around at the time.

Britain did not in fact "win" the Battle of Britain. It ended with a hard-fought draw, where Germany had needed a clear win before invasion.

The hard-fought draw was just hard enough.

By its end, Russia was massing its troops at the border with Germany, by all appearances preparatory to its own invasion. That is why its cities were almost undefended when the German tanks rolled past them, cutting their supply lines.

> Britain did not in fact "win" the Battle of Britain. It ended with a hard-fought draw, where Germany had needed a clear win before invasion.

What a weird take!

In what possible way is the stopping of the enemies goals interpreted as anything except a win?

That's like saying "X tried to invade Y, but Y threw than back. So it was a draw"

> By its end, Russia was massing its troops at the border with Germany, by all appearances preparatory to its own invasion.

It's almost certian that Stalin did not intend to attack Germany in 1941, and no evidence at all that Hitler thought he was planning to attack[1]. The opposing theory is based on Viktor Suvorov's book in the 1980s, but it isn't widely supported.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_offensive_plans_controv...

England was beaten bloody. Germany lost, in total, well under a month's later production of warplanes, remarkably few per sortie. Its capacity to wage war was wholly undiminished. Germany could have continued as long as they cared to, but England was much closer to its limit than is widely recognized.

Much of the history of the war has had to be rewritten since Soviet records became available in the '90s. That has not penetrated far even yet.

"No Simple Victory" by Norman Davies goes some way in that direction. Aside from Atlantic naval operations, the western war was nearly a sideshow.

Russian mobile forces massed at the border needs explanation if not preparatory for invasion.

> England was beaten bloody. Germany lost, in total, well under a month's later production of warplanes, remarkably few per sortie. Its capacity to wage war was wholly undiminished. Germany could have continued as long as they cared to, but England was much closer to its limit than is widely recognized.

England was already beaten bloody before the Battle of Britain.

> Germany could have continued as long as they cared to, but England was much closer to its limit than is widely recognized

I think it's very widely recognized that England had been at the limit, but by the end of the Battle of Britain they had proven they could obtain resupply from the US and Germany couldn't stop enough convoys.

> Germany lost, in total, well under a month's later production of warplanes, remarkably few per sortie. Its capacity to wage war was wholly undiminished. Germany could have continued as long as they cared to

No one is arguing Britain won the war then, just that specific battle.

> Aside from Atlantic naval operations, the western war was nearly a sideshow.

I think most people who've read about the war in Europe would acknowledge this - at least between 1941 and 1944.

There were no exceptionally unusual Russian mobile forces massed along the Soviet/Reich-occupied border during 1941. In fact, Stalin pulled a number of forces back from the very border itself while a transition was being made between the partly abandoned Stalin Line and the (further west) newly developed but still unfinished Molotov Line of border defenses. Almost everything Stalin did in mid 1941 before June 22 reeked of two things: A heavy application of desperate appeasement towards Hitler and secondly, a lackluster defense preparation that was a pragmatic minimum whose absence would be too much to justify even by appeasement standards.

It's amazing how much Viktor Suvorov's completely discredited book and its arguments still carry weight with many people today. There was NO serious Soviet invasion plan of what Germany controlled in 1941, only hypothetical scenario planning and poorly designed plans for near future offensive power. The one thing the USSR was doing right however, as part of a more general strategy was gearing up a massive rearmament and war production program. This had been in progress since even before 1939 but only really picked up steam in the early 1940s.

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