Could Adolf Hitler have won the war if he had not made tactical mistakes?

Answer 1

He made both tactical and strategic mistakes. The tactical mistakes were mostly made after Germany was losing the war, due to the strategic mistakes. As Germany was forced onto the defensive Hitler refused to let his generals maneuver. They, knowing what they were doing, wanted to be able to use their armor and motorised transport to shift forces around, pull back and regroup and counterattack. Hitler, having a foolish and simplistic idea of warfare, declared, "From where once the German soldier plants his foot, he never withdraws!" Thus the German troops were often forced to stand and die in place when they could have been withdrawn to fight another day. Germany's first big mistake was not taking Dunkirk when they had the British army surrounded. The place could have been captured but it was not and the British army escaped. Thus they were able to fight again. Had Britain had no army, even a beaten one with no artillery or heavy equipment, they might have had much less fighting spirit during the Battle of Britain. Germany's next mistake was in the Battle of Britain. They began by attacking the British airfields. Although the British planes and pilots were superior to the Germans in many respects, the steady attrition of the airfileds was steadily making it harder and harder for them to keep their planes flying and get them in the air. At a point when the RAF was within two to three weeks of being knocked out altogether, Hitler suddenly ordered terror bombings of London and other cities. Although that caused great damage, it allowed the RAF to fix its airfields, recover its strength, and continue shooting down lots of German planes. Eventually Hitler gave up and stopped trying to defeat on invade Britain. He began preparing to invade Russia instead. That was his third big mistake. If he had defeated Britain, or at least made peace with her, before attacking Russia then he would have had significantly more force to put into the Russian campaign. As it was, large numbers of troops and planes which could have been used in Russia were tied down defending and occupying Western Europe. Once he invaded Russia his next mistake was insisting on doing everything at once. He wanted to take Leningrad and Moscow and Stalingrad and the Caucuses oil fields. There simply were not enough troops and supplies to do it all at once. Hitler was so utterly besotted with his idea of German superiority that he could not accept the idea that anything he ordered done could not be done. Thus he absolutely refused to listen to anyone who ever tried to tell him that something could not be done. And he wasted hundreds of thousands, if not millions of troops in doomed defenses of places that could have been abandoned. And we should be very thankful that he did because that made defeating Germany much easier. If he had defeated England before attacking Russia, and concentrated his forces to achieve strategic objectives in Russia, he could concievably have defeated Russia before December of 1941. Under those circumstances, the United States might not even have bothered to go to war with Germany. If we had, it would have been far more difficult to defeat them. Michael Montagne