"Stupid WAB question: rare/uncommon?" Topic

Just finished an intereting book on the Allied "failure" (in that shoulda, woulda, coulda done better).
$1.99 USD at Good Will – LOL
link

Anyway, it got me thinking, from a purely military point of view – which was the bigger "lost opportunity?"

Even though elements of many units escaped, the German Army in the West was largely destroyed at Falaise. A tighter encirclement probably wouldn't have changed the campaign outcome – the Allies would still run out of gas on the Rhine as the garrison of the Scheldt estuary weren't involved in Normandy.

Britain losing it's only army in 1940 though…. It is hard to see the British government surviving that. Perhaps not surrender, but an accommodation with "Herr Hitler".

+1 Martin Rapier. Losing the army doesn't necessarily put Britain out of the war, but it would have been a definite possibility.

I'm with Martin and advocate, pretty much. A better win at Falaise might have speeded up an Allied victory. A better German performance at Dunkirk might have changed who won the war.

Just how could the Allies have had "a better victory at Falaise"?
Logistical concerns were already rearing their ugly head.
I'm reminded of what Pickett said when the Lost Causers demanded who he thought were to blame for the loss at Gettysburg. "I think the Yankees had a lot to do with it!" (He could have blamed Lee, like he always believed…)
So, the "failure" to close the Falaise Pocket could also be blamed on the Germans. The Allies were too busy actually fighting the Germans to allocate blame. That would come later.
I am not comparing Lee with Hitler, but one could truthfully blame the German predicament on Hitler. A different topic for a different day.

Play it out on an SPI boardgame, preferably by mail, where you have days to analyze the perfect moves by the Allies per turn. 😄

"Just how could the Allies have had "a better victory at Falaise"?"

To actually close the pocket from the south? Rather than letting the poor old Poles batter against the strongest defences from the north. See e.g. 'Decision in Normandy' by Carlo D'Este.

"Play it out on an SPI boardgame,"

In all the various boardgames I've played covering the 1944 campaign in the west, no-one is stupid enough to put their head in the noose like the Germans actually did. Normally the Germans conduct a fighting retreat across France with an intermediate stop line on the Seine.

Great Battles of WW2 has a large operational scenario featuring the drive from the north, which given the force ratios, is a very tough fight.

I think a big one dealt with Russia. If Germany had gone into Russia as liberators out to destroy Communism and granting independence to the various regions things could have gone quite different.

An American philosophy is to judge things based on perfection, and not reality.
Germany lost ~2000 AFV's and 320,000 troops in Normandy and those that escaped were disorganized and demoralized. I'd call that a pretty good win. The fact that not all were captured shouldn't minimize that victory.

+1 Murvihill

I agree with Martin. The level of devastation in Falais might only have changed mildly by degrees but not necessarily so much in the actual outcome. A long walk back to the Rhine is still a long walk back to the Rhine.

Perhaps a bigger failed opportunity might have been if Clark could have prevented the German retreat rather than seek the publicity of being first into Rome? That would have eliminated most opposition south of the Alps in one go. To have lost an army in Italy in June '44 would have magnified the speed of the ending. Too many losses to replace.

On an even bigger scale is the missed opportunity of the Soviet offensives to drive on Rostov. Forget the local operations at Stalingrad, taking Rostov earlier would have caught multiple armies still in the Caucuses. Makes one wonder if it was more transport logistics related or planning or resources?

Both of those deserve well thought out threads of their own.

Would a different result at Dunkirk really have changed the trajectory of the war? Hitler would still have been on the wrong side of the English Channel; the Royal Navy was still undefeated and; the RAF was still intact and improving. If the British had lost the entire BEF at Dunkirk, there was still a supply of manpower at home and from the Empire. Plus, there was no way that Hitler was going to stop all organized units from getting back to England. Weren't there large evacuations from other ports?

I would think that if the Germans had tried to fight into Dunkirk, they would have suffered significant casualties. Several thousand Tommies with their SMLEs would have taken a lot of Germans with them. I suspect that if Dunkirk had been a worse shambles, the U.S. may have come-up with some provocation to provide more support to Britain.

In reality, hadn't the British written-off most of the BEF and still had plans to oppose any invasion. The evacuation from Dunkirk was a bonus. Getting the men back without their heavy equipment gave the British a mass of men who could not oppose an invasion for months or at least until they were reequipped. The "missed opportunity" at Dunkirk would have perhaps extended the war further and would have worsened the British numbers problems later in the war, however, I do not think that the British would have capitulated, at least not with Churchill in power. Does anyone actually think that the British of the "British Empire" era would have capitulated or even sought a peace agreement if it lost an army in 1940? Britain was the only power that went to war based upon a principal as opposed to having been attacked directly. The British moral character would not have allowed a backing down to Hitler in those circumstances.

I am with the "how much worse could Falaise have been for Germany" wing of the memberships. Like Dunkirk, a large number of unorganized men does not equate to immediate military power. The Germans in Normandy lost some of their best troops and most of their equipment. The squirters from the pocket were irrelevant to Allied operations to the Rhine.

"An American philosophy is to judge things based on perfection"

It's how we get better, Murvihill. "Close enough for government work" doesn't advance you as far as "was there room for improvement?"

And you've shifted the baseline to the entire Normandy Campaign. Germany's first six weeks Fall Gelb was "a pretty good win" too--but a better win might have changed the outcome of the war.

At Falaise, a "better win" might have bagged enough support troops and command staff to make reconstituting the divisions for the Ardennes much more difficult. An only slightly better win might have taken II SS Panzer Corps out of the OOB for Market-Garden.

RP
That was more or less the author's point

I know, Korvessa. I was ranting at Murvihill.

I agree to an extent that attempting to achieve perfection is a strength. But, I've also experienced the bad interpretation of that theory, which is to achieve perfection by removing anything not perfect. What is left may be perfect, but so is Swiss cheese.
We should be able to have lessons learned without diminishing the success of the event.

Re Falaise, unintentionally the allies followed SunTsu 'Leave the enemy a way to escape; otherwise, he will fight you to the end.'

The allies made less mistakes than the Germans and Japanese. Singapore and Malaya generally were not our best work.
Falaise – that was possible due to a German mistake. The Allies did brilliantly by comparison.