Word: hitlers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After the war started, even Hitler was surprised at the suddenness of his success. Yet many of his seemingly invincible tanks were very lightly armored and carried no offensive weapons heavier than machine guns. More important, the German war machine depended heavily on imported supplies: Swedish steel, Rumanian oil, South African chromium. The blitzkrieg was in part a response to the fact that a Germany blockaded by Britain did not then have the resources to wage war for more than six months. In addition to his natural gall and guile, though, Hitler had one attribute indispensable to a commander: luck...
...least as important and interesting as the question of what might have stopped Hitler early on is the question of whether he might have emerged victorious. First, by not going to war at all. If, instead of invading Poland, he had limited himself to threats and bullying, he might have achieved his main demands, control of Danzig and freedom of movement through the Polish Corridor. It is possible, of course, that the whole dynamic of Nazism required war, but if Hitler had been able to stop short of that, he would probably have been widely regarded...
Once he had started the war and quickly conquered Poland, most of Scandinavia, the Low Countries and France, Hitler confronted his next great choice: whether to invade England, his last belligerent enemy. It is now known that he seriously planned an invasion in the summer of 1940. And in outlining the future, the German army issued orders that all able-bodied British males between the ages of 17 and 45 were to be interned and shipped to the Continent. The list of people to be arrested by the Gestapo ranged from Bertrand Russell to Chaim Weizmann to Virginia Woolf...
...that Churchill would have even resorted to using poison gas. A number of military historians nonetheless believe that an invasion would have succeeded. "There is an excellent chance that the Germans would have prevailed," says Russell Weigley, Distinguished University Professor at Temple and author of Eisenhower's Lieutenants. "If Hitler had invaded, there is no doubt he would have wiped the floor with us," says Sir Michael Howard, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford and author of The Causes of Wars. "He would have overrun the country...
...major dissenters were the German commanders who feared British naval and aerial supremacy, and that was why Hitler called off the invasion. But the Germans thought Britain was virtually defeated whether Hitler invaded or not, and a number of historians agree. "Even if he didn't invade us, he could have put resources into the war at sea . . . and starved us out," says Howard. "There's very little chance that we would have been able to survive." The strategist B.H. Liddell Hart, in History of the Second World War, applied the term "slow suicide" to Churchill's policy of fighting...