OIL, Stalingrad, The Italians and More! Answering 10 uncommon questions about WW2

in a desperate attempt to catch up with my q and a questions which i'm two years behind on i'm going to answer 10 questions today so let's get on with it i'm going to leave the timestamps in the video description so you can skip ahead if you want to see what the questions are or anything like that so let's get on with the first one so the first question comes from william houston he says i just want to know why the germans bombed stalingrad with the luftwaffe to the ground little did they know they'd have

to rebuild it and just to point out i've answered the other two questions that he asked in previous videos so you're assuming here that they actually wanted to rebuild stalingrad but is this really the case did they actually want to do that and the answer is no why well this goes right back into hitler's ideology and his goals for the war in general so i've been over this before in a few videos including the hitler socialism video it doesn't matter whether you agree with that or not the point is if you go to that video

you'll see there's a section on this idea of the laban's realm in the east and essentially hitler believed that germany should be the industrial heartland for this greater reich and that the east would be the labors around the living space this would consist mainly of farmland for the german uh farmers warrior farmers and these would have slavs um as their slaves basically and there would be very few cities there would be the odd german city here or there but most of it would be rural and these cities and farms would be connected by autobahns and

all these autobahns would go to the reich and that's where the industry would be so and the cities so essentially what hitler wants is the east to have a bunch of resources like food oil the mines and stuff like that have all these resources here and then they would all send those resources to the heartland of germany which would produce the industrial goods which those industrial goods will then go to the east so it's farms for industries and industries for farms and this has to do with the idea of the shrinking markets concept and also

this silly idea that if you've got built up areas you cannot produce farms and if you've got loads of farms you cannot produce cities and build a berry it's a silly way of looking at it but that's what hitler believed and so when it comes to the soviet cities he's he starts off as he wants to pursue them he wants to destroy them bomb them uh encircle in leningrad and starve them out uh capture karkov and starve that population out and when it comes to stalingrad he says the same thing on the 2nd of september

he issues an order saying that the civilians are to be evacuated from stalingrad uh the city's to be bombed and not made in an industrial center so he wants to destroy that that's why the luftwaffe went in the first place and those civilians are to be deprived of food and they are to be shipped to the reich it's it's all in his policies this ties into the hunger plan where 30 million soviets are meant to be killed and when the common dance uh of the sixth army reached stalingrad they actually assessed the situation with the

civilian population in the same way and this is an idea of a zero-sum game so the idea is that if there's two people and this guy has then this guy must be deprived and this is fundamental to several ideologies let's not go there but the point is that hitler believed that if the russian people had resources then that would deprive the german people of resources and so the german people must steal from the the russian peoples that's how he perceives it and obviously that's not how it works you can both produce at the same time

and mutually trade and benefit each other but that's not how certain people see the world and that's exactly what hitler saw it as so to answer your question why did they bomb it well they bombed it because they didn't want the city to be a city they wanted to destroy the industrial center of stalingrad and they wanted to kill as many civilians as possible and they thought it would demoralize the soviets and that they would just stream in and take the city anyway don't forget halda said we can take it in 10 days which they

obviously didn't so that's the reason why and you know did they realize that they had to rebuild it no they didn't want to rebuild it that's the whole point edward johnson said i was listening to beaver and wanted to know if the soviets had any chance of victory at stalingrad if they had not been willing to expend their manpower commitment at rajev yes or no so what i think you're trying to get us out or what you're trying to say is that if the soviets hadn't attacked it rajev german manpower wouldn't have been drawn to

rajev and some of it could have gone to stalingrad and had that happen that the german six army or whatever would have been a better position to fight during operation uranus time or maybe even just win the city outright if that's what you mean then no the german sixth army and army group b in general is starved of replacements from july onwards i've been over this in the previous video of stalingrad they are starved in july august september and then they start to get a bit more manpower in uh october november time but it's by

then it's too late now there is a battle over in late july to early august and then there's other ones as well but this doesn't explain why they were the army group b was neglected in the july the whole of july and then august the whole of august and then so on now there's a few reasons that have been proposed one is that halda was an idiot uh the other one is that howler is secretly on the uh german resistance side or whatever possibly we don't we don't know because the archives relating to that topic

are still closed yay so i can't really speculate on that one i just think he's an idiot uh uh the admin side of the german situation is just ridiculous so they'd starve arm group b as a whole and all three of the other arm groups get priority also there's a problem when it comes to the third reich in general the third rank has the manpower but the nazi party hitler there's politics and economics versus spear the whole thing going on over there they're not releasing the manpower to the eastern front which is why in 1941

the german army grows 1942 it shrinks and then in 1943 there's more germans on the eastern front than ever before so what happened in 1942 why did they neglect that and that's to do with the whole situation in the third reich in politics and economics blah blah but in terms of manpower stalingrad to me it's it's an admin issue and it's also a logistical issue and i don't really want to go too deep in that here because i want to leave that to the stalingrass series but in my opinion the reason why army group b

is starved is because the germans or the german logistics was in dire straits especially by the september 1942 so this idea that okay if the if the soviets hadn't attacked to reject this extra manpower could have gone to stalingrad no because the logistics didn't allow it or no because halder messed up or how does staff messed up and i know people are going to get annoyed at this because they think that rajev did actually starve the germans at stalingrad of manpower i think that's too simple of a explanation and i think this is a problem

when it comes to seeing military history as a chess board if you don't there's no logistics in chess there's there's practically no logistics when it comes to hearts of iron iv if you're viewing the eastern front or world war ii or any war without the logistics side of it then yeah of course why didn't why didn't they send troops to um to stalingrad when they could have you know well the reason why is because of logistics why do they send troops to north africa logistics all right why do they land troops in the north pole

logistics right there's logistics is a major part you know the army marches on its stomach well the german army was barely marching because its stomach was in dire straits and so anthony beaver and others are suggesting certain solutions to a problem which great if you take the logistics out of it that makes perfect sense but when you put the logistics in oh no no it doesn't make sense because they can't send more troops to stalingrad if they did that they'd be even in worse problems so but yeah i'll i'll i'll go over this in the

stronghold series very soon scott said the stalingrad series has been amazing so far i was wondering if you could recommend a good book on what was happening south in the caucasus in the summer slash fall of 1942. i see glance wrote a book about the counter-attack out of the caucasus but not the stopping of the axis in 1942 in general histories it is generally hand waved over mumble mumble logistics didn't reach grozny or baku but after the detail about the battles in the don bend and outside stalingrad it seems there is likely more to the

story and the red army likely stopped von kleist it seems he was stopped by early september and what figures i see it seems both sides took around 300 000 casualties in 1942 which is not small and while logistics were likely atrocious for the germans looking at the map they seemed like they would be terrible for the trans caucasus front as well the rail line comes from rostov and vulgar shipping was under fire did the caucasus have sufficient industrial capacity to supply the red army in the area or were they being supplied across the caspian sea

on a map the other side of the caspian sea does not look very developed yes and i'm going to recommend a few different books depending on your circumstances so if you've got a ton of money and you really want to dive super deep into this like the more detail you probably imagine then i'm going to recommend glance which am i going to recommend i'm going to recommend the first two books out of the trilogy which is actually four books and got an appendix so it's a five book four part trilogy on the battle of stalingrad

and i recommend the first two books which go into super amount of detail on the battle of the caucasus as a sort of side note to the main battle of stalingrad and the far black campaign that will give you the most detail you'll ever probably need if you don't want to get the five book four part trilogy uh what you could get is the standalone version uh which has more recently come out alternatively and this might be the easier option uh death of the their marked by uh robert citino the german campaigns of 1942. the

good thing about robert citino is that he he has a really he's kind of like a narrative history a bit like beaver in a sense like you know it's very easy to to read and pick up glance is very much like this regiment did this and then and it's it's can be kind of overwhelming cetino's got that more narrative flow uh satino doesn't go into superman's detail but he he gives it a good chapter i believe yeah he's got a whole chapter coming to a halt the caucasus and stalingrad and he does a good job

of explaining the general situation so he's definitely not skipped over it he's not mumble skipped over it he's actually done a pretty decent job and that's a great book in general probably his best actually so this or them you made the decision there as far as the logistics is concerned yes the german logistics was terrible in the caucasus let's put it that way however the soviet logistics were not as bad as you would imagine and there's a couple of reasons why the british and the soviets had actually conquered iran so you're mentioning the caspian sea

oh you know how can the soviets get ships across the castle and say well hey they were doing that anyway but also they could actually go underneath the caspian sea len lee supplies were also coming up through there into the caucasus so it isn't quite as bad as you would actually imagine at first glance there were several factors as to why they didn't reach baku one it wasn't actually necessary they actually just needed mayokop and grozny and they took mayor copp and they bombed grozny but they didn't take grozny and there's a couple reasons why

one uh the logistics now i know some people want to downplay it no the logistics was a major factor they were struggling and list is saying hey you know he's stretched so thin over a massive area and uh he needs more supplies he needs more manpower and it's a whole thing and hitler's not happy with him he gets rid of this takes over the army so so hitler's commanding an army which is miles away from where he actually is right it's a disaster so there's leadership issues logistics issues and also terrain issues so they get

to the caucasus as in the hills the mountains and then they get bogged down in that obviously pounders aren't going to do so well in the mountains um they also shift forces away from arm group a to army group uh b in on the dawn so they at first they take away fourth panzer army and they do that quite early i think in the august time or late july august they take away fourth panzer army to send it towards stalingrad and then later they take away the romanians they took one romanian army out of the

caucasus and put it on the don front because they needed to and also the soviet resistance as well um it will be incorrect to not mention that so there are several factors here also the weather as well so there are several factors here so it's not just a case of oh it's just logistics and and i don't want to downplay any one of those points which one was the major one you can we can debate that all day but there were several factors as to why the germans didn't take baku and satino going back to

satino again cetino actually says the germans actually came really close to achieving their objectives even though they really shouldn't have come that close to achieving their objectives and uh you know i'll let let you guys read that when you know but i i tend to agree like considering how far they had to go considering their opposition and so on and so forth it's it's surprising how far they actually got so this isn't actually a question but i wanted to point it out because uh i messed up so i want to apologize to armin here arman

asked why did nazi germany declare war in the usa in 1941 i've already done a video on this and what happened was armin asked the question and somebody else asked the question and i just missed almonds question out and didn't put him in the video so i just want to apologize to armin today to say oh i'm sorry i missed you out that was my mistake but as part of armin's question he starts talking about american isolationist politics and the intervention so i'll just read this part everybody knows about american isolationist politics yes they help

with lend lease they impose sanctions on japan they started to patrol atlantic ocean etc but it's not to start war or invade as nazis and japan did it was unrealistic for roosevelt declaring war on nazi germany only because one day he alone wanted it he needed a big reason to declare war but before december 1941 hitler did not give him a reason hitler ordered not to sink american ships and many other orders to as to not provoke the usa well kevin mack has also asked a very similar question now i don't fully understand his first

part here but i'll read it anyway hi tick i'm new to the channel but my question is what was the relationship between the north african campaign with possible emphasis on how us involvement with the british army i don't know what that actually means but he goes on he says also what would happen if rommel and the german divisions in africa were all sent to fight the soviet union not sure if this is covered in another video i'm trying to figure out how u.s involvement assisted the soviet union and the british during the len lease era

of the war before pearl harbor going off his last part here i'm assuming then that the first question he asks here is you know what was the relationship between the north african campaign with possible emphasis on how u.s involvement with the british i don't know what that means but i'm assuming it what he is meant to say was what was relationship between the british and the united states and how much did the united states help the british in the north african campaign if that is the question then that's all related to len lease and this

ties into armin's question because you know how much is the usa involved in the war without actually declaring war because if they're sending len lease to the british and the sending len lease to the soviet union and they're doing all this other stuff are they already in war just not officially in terms of the british in north africa the first len lease to arrive was as far as i'm aware the m3 light tanks the stewarts that arrived just before operation crusader so i've already done operation crusader video you want to go and check that out

it's fine that was november time you know this is late 1941 this is just before uh pearl harbor so the first len leafs was arriving at this point the americans seem to be pushing for a war or moving america towards the war they've got len lease being signed so they're directly involved in that sense i need to do a video on the british economy but i would say that len lease kind of keeps britain in the war uh britain basically was bankrupt in 1941 so the united states basically keeps them propped up so there's that

obviously they're sending support to the soviet union there's lots of trucks minerals you name it they've also got the atlantic convoys the usa is becoming not antagonistic but it it's keeping germany in an ever smaller bottle again this goes back to the idea i brought up in the previous video on you know why did germany declare war on the united states or why did hitler do it this is where hitler's like hey we're already at war you know america just we just haven't signed the dotted line in terms of fighting it we're already fighting it

and to some extent that that i think is is correct the united states was certainly on the side of the british by late 1941 and uh was being antagonistic towards germany would it would it have war have been declared had pearl harbor not happened probably not i think hitler probably would have waited until something had happened but the point is you know to say that america was neutral in 1941 prior to pearl harbor i would say no because len lease is proof of that i'll unleash his proof that america was not neutral and then kevin

said about well what would happen if rommel and the german divisions in africa were all sent to fight in the soviet union not a lot uh even assuming that they could have supplied them not a lot three divisions it's neither here nor there when it comes to eastern front let's be honest would it have impacted the north african campaign yes the italians would have been thrown out of libya very quickly it would also strengthen the british position which may have influenced roosevelt to come closer to the british because in the early part of the war

churchill was trying to get roosevelt on his side this kind of undermines the argument that they read it together as a grand conspiracy church was having to show roosevelt no no no we will fight for france okay we're the only ones here now we'll fight in north africa look at us doing really well during operation compass uh oh yeah we'll send troops into greece oh we'll send because we've failed there we'll send troops to uh crete and then when we fail there we'll we'll we'll hold on to jabrook because we can't do much else he's

trying to persuade the americans that the british are standing firm and not just trying to peace out which they kind of were trying to do but then they didn't but that's another story so if the british had knocked out libya early on and proven to the americans hey you know britain can win our campaign uh in north africa because rommel had gone to the soviet union let's say well that would have been a quite a significant victory and uh it would have been interesting to see what would have happened with operation torch but as far

as i'm concerned rommel three divisions in or more in the soviet union wouldn't have really done much we've now got three oil related questions starting with john weatherby i have been a little curious about the idea as to if germany might have had a chance if they captured more oil in 1942 did germany have the refining capacity to use the oil did the fields also have refining capacity while i've agreed on the concept i have also asked myself if germany had the capacity to refine the crude if they had captured it while i can find

some sources on oil i haven't found much on the actual refining capacity so germany itself did have enough refining capacity but that's germany itself so they would have had to ship the oil from the caucasus to germany which was a nightmare in itself now there were some refineries in the soviet union the north caucasian refineries had an annual throughput of 19 million tons and were easier to destroy and harder to rebuild than the oil fields so yes both mayorkop and grozny had oil refineries as did baku so capturing them intact would have been the best

option for the germans but they would have still had to ship a lot of the oil back to germany to use it and to prani talks about this i'm gonna guys i'm gonna i keep saying this you guys need to read to prani i wish he'd write a book um so that i could just recommend that but he hasn't done as far as i'm aware so just read the pdfs that you can find online of teproni's works uh they will set you straight when it comes to the oil situation mr kim has said hello tick

enjoying your videos as usual i know you discussed this a bit in your video the main reason why germany lost world war ii oil but can you go into more detail on the possibility of a german campaign into the middle east military historian bevan alexander seems to think that the germans could have gotten middle eastern oil and you mentioned the difficulties of getting the oil back to germany but what would the axis have had to do if they had planned this from the beginning for example could the italian navy defeat the royal navy in the

mediterranean after france fell of course this would be a very different war from the actual world war ii but i was curious if this was even a possibility okay so let's just assume that they somehow conquer the middle east via north africa let's just go with that yes they would have made difficulties getting that oil from the middle east to germany to refine it there were some refineries in the middle east and i believe there was one in egypt and a couple in palestine area i think so that yeah in theory they could have taken

release and had a little bit of oil but they would have had to ship it back to germany and this then goes well in order to do that you need the mediterranean and then you need a fleet in the mediterranean and you need ships in the mediterranean that could run this and that's where you get to the italian navy and also the merchant fleet so here's the problem with the italian navy for most of the war they were sat in their docks and the reason why is because there wasn't enough oil and the reason there

wasn't enough oil was because germany didn't have enough oil and attack italy didn't have enough oil and so what ended up happening in the italian fleet sat in dark and got blown up by the british and so they they weren't able to it now imagine okay instead of the germans going east which was the ultimate goal anyway let's imagine they said okay we're not going to go east we're going to send what oil we've got to the italian navy who are going to help us and the merchant fleet and help us in north africa well

it would have certainly helped would it have been enough for the for ronald to get to egypt and then to the middle east the problem with the idea of sending more supplies or divisions to north africa is that the capacity of the ports on the north african coast do not allow this so even if they had a fleet that had enough oil to actually operate which they didn't they wouldn't be able to offload the supplies onto the coast the capacity of the libyan ports to unload cargo and to refuel ships was limited tripoli the largest

port and often the only one open to the axis could handle only 45 000 tons a month and was far from the front benghazi maximum capacity 2 700 tons a month and to brook 2 000 tons a month often were unavailable or their capacity was reduced by allied attacks getting material overland to the front burned up much fuel the small capacity of the african ports limited the size of the convoys instead of running a relatively few large convoys the most efficient method in terms of convoy defense the italians had to send many small ones which

was wasteful of escorts and fuel the italians initially used truly massive escort forces including cruisers but a looming fuel shortage forced them to drop this and then also would there have been enough oil for the ships to then allow the oil to collect the oil from the middle east to then ship it to germany to then refine it capturing and exploiting the oil fields of the middle east was not a simple matter the logistical obstacles for german military forces were immense possibly insurmountable without concurrent attacks from egypt turkey and the caucasus capturing the oil fields

would only lead to new problems extracting transporting and refining middle eastern oil would require massive expenditures of capital and resources not to mention long-term peace and security during which the local oil infrastructure could be built or as the case may be rebuilt germany's resources would be stretched to the limit simply trying to restore production in the caucasus and it made no sense to fritter away resources in iraq or iran especially since doing so would not decisively alter the strategic calculus in germany's favor by knocking britain out of the war besides the difficulty in bringing the

oil to consumers in europe via pipelines and tankers middle eastern crude oil was sour high in sulfur and processing it would require special measures during refining again this is way too much what would have been more ideal would have been taking the caucasus the germans had enough problems logistically through the railroads between germany and italy that there were shortages of coal for the italians so you can imagine how bad the situation would have been if they had to add more uh trains to the lines in order to get the oil that italy is shipped to

itself up to germany to be refined and then sent back to italy and then also the rest of it's a nightmare and also this would have broadcast broadcasted to the world oh by the way we're in the middle east now we definitely don't want the caucasus soil or anything right stalin is obviously going to react to that i think what would have been an easier option would have been going through turkey that would have been an easier option however we rolled that out before so to be honest i don't think this was even an option

mario says i read a book by andrew roberts called storm of war where he basically says that germany could have won the war by taking three basic measures one instead of attacking russia frontally finished the british in north africa and the middle east securing middle eastern oil and attacking the caucasus from the south thus going straight for the kill as far as the russian campaign is concerned two coordinating their actions with the japanese offering them the whole of the ussr east of the orals three concealing his intentions regarding the jews until total victory so germany

will keep the lead in science and technology by avoiding the exodus of his best minds to the usa incidentally this is the same basic premise pursued by stephen fry to write his novel making history i can spot a few of the mistakes in that logic especially regarding tiny japan taking over gigantic landmass of asian ussr but i also find the other two points rather intriguing would you like to look into that i mean they were struggling to keep rommel supplied as it was that's why when they failed to take to brooke rommel couldn't go anywhere

and that's why he had to take the the port to brooke in 1942 it's also why his second offensive broke down i need to do this this is why i need to do more videos on the north african campaign maybe i need to take a break from stalingrad to do that uh-oh and you know i just don't think it's realistic i think what happened in reality is more realistic that going towards the caucasus makes more sense to me than going to the middle east and then also it misses out on the food situation there's a

food crisis in the reich in 1940 41 and 42 and the germans need to conquer the ukraine to get that food to the right so if they'd gone through the middle east there's not a lot of food in the middle east and so that would have been a major issue for the germans in 1941 42 so again this is you know focusing on one thing you're missing out on other things and i think going east would have made more sense you're right cooperating with the japanese to take imagine the japanese taking the whole of siberia

it's just it's just not going to happen and then concealing his intentions regarding the jews until total victory and they also i'm going to add on to here as well let's say the ukrainians and the other slavic peoples let's just imagine you know because this is what people do they imagine oh yeah if if germany hadn't had this annihilation policy and had walked into the east and had said hey we're going to you know liberate the peoples of the east from the soviet terror yeah in theory these uh let's say jews and and ukrainians would

have been happy with the germans and it would have been they would have helped the germans and there wouldn't have been uh as much of a reason for the soviet union to keep fighting so on and so forth great in theory but it has massive massive problems first would hitler got elected but let's not go there secondly hitler what hitler has done essentially is created a ideology at the very least what it does is unifies the german people gives them a common enemy and then justifies that war at least for them okay so the way

that hitler paints the war is that it's a war of veltan sharon's the which is war of uh belgium xiaolong means world view so it's a war between two world views so the the idea is that hitler's got his world view which is the aryan or the nordic world view and he's going to fight and strike and take out the jewish worldview and so he's fighting this ideological war to against this entire ideology and worldview and so that's what he's doing and as part of this he needs or he thinks he needs to wipe out

the jews enslave the slavs and you know destroy the cities and so the last thing he wants to do is you know go in pretending to light them all because the whole point of the war is to strike and destroy those people and that that civilization built on that veltan xiaomi supposedly i'm not saying the common soldier necessarily gets all of this or understands all of this but what i'm saying is that the german generals the high command so and so they understand this title says this you know this is a war of ideology this

is a war veltenshaw lungs we're going east the doubts expressed correspond to the soldierly conception of chivalrous warfare we are dealing here with the destruction of a world view therefore i approve the measures and support them so if you take that away what you left with no war right he has no reason to unite the german people and go east that was his whole point of his ideology this is where i think historians are going wrong that again the focus so much from the military stuff they're sticking to tanks and they're not looking at the

ideology the politics the economics the sociology they're not doing that and this is why i'm trying to say no no i'm not going to just stick to tanks we're going to look at all this other stuff too war eagle said hey tick i hope you're well i just want to get your take on the classic docu-series the world war narrated by laurence olivier it obviously doesn't go super deep into any specific battles or statistical data but i'm curious to hear what you think about it i find it very entertaining and have watched the series at

least three or four times assuming you've watched it do you find it to be accurate sensationalist your general opinion anyway thanks for the awesome videos war eagle out as an old classic documentary for its time it was brilliant and there's several reasons why we'll get into that a second but what i really like about it is the intro um where the it has a picture of somebody and then it burns it away and there's another one behind it and it like goes through that and as the music playing i really like that i like the

general concept it gives a nice little overview as far as i'm concerned it's a if you've no idea about world war ii and you're living in the past like 1990s or something it's it's great it's a good introduction to world war two but you know as you've pointed out okay doesn't go into any depth at all it doesn't talk about specific battles too much it doesn't talk about statistical data it's out of date and so yeah it's got great narration yeah it's got good you know visuals in sense of it's showing you all the old

footage it's a good introduction that's about it beyond that it's kind of poor and to be honest it's not just this it's it's all the tv documentaries the issue with tv documentaries or anything on tv the main problem is that they have to play it super safe and that's the way that youtube's going as well unfortunately you have to play things super safe you cannot say something that you know annoys people if i came out and said i don't know something ridiculous like gavin of the 82nd airborne was the reason why operation market got unfailed

on tv you get thousands of people in the comments telling me i'm wrong oh wait that happened anyway right but the problem the difference is that i've got a backbone unlike these tv corporations uh they don't have this backbone and so they can't just go well you know argue back tell us what we're wrong no that's not ever gonna happen the good thing with youtube or at least the good thing with the conception of youtube youtube itself the cooperation of ruining this uh is the idea that we can have this debate and we can say

something uh maybe at first glance might sound uh insane but then we can have that debate oh yeah actually there's some truth to this or oh no no this is completely insane so guaranteed second airborne uh was the reason why operation marketing unfailed oh that's ridiculous every documentary and book i've ever read says the otherwise i'm like well here's a bunch of sources and here's what actually happened in here let's lay it all out and do the timing oh yeah wait there's something to this you can't do that on tv uh the tva executives want

to play it super safe not rock the boat and so what you get is this watered-down you know i can remember back to the old documentaries where it's talking about uh operation mark garden and all it is is the british landed arnhem the british reach ireland bridge the british are at arnhem bridge the british lose arnhem bridge the british fault is barren bridge right and it's like that what is that that's not that's no information you watch an entire hour and you're like oh wow i learned like three things history lies in the heart of

the debate you need that debate in order to bring out not only the interest in it but also all the details because that's where the devil's in the details right that's where it all comes alive people are complaining right now are stalingrad's way too long you you need to speed up or just skip the get to operation uranus no right no because if you want if you want cat videos if you want five minute history videos there's plenty of channels doing that this channel the idea of this channel predominantly is to give you in-depth history

and then discuss it that's the whole point it is in a sense to be triggering and to be controversial because that will bring out the debate and get people interested and get you guys buying the books i guarantee i have made people buy books i've probably made people buy books in this video right they're probably this one people are like oh i should go to the box store and get this right they have done that because they want to get involved in that debate so as far as i'm concerned if you've never seen anything relating

to world war ii before yeah world of war why not as long as you go more in depth that's that's the key if we'll get that interest first then go more in depth and we've got a couple of questions on the italians guy andrew says hi tick what do you think of the italian performance in the second world war would you rate them as poorly as often perceived i have read some work by james j sadkovich on his topic and he seems to be revising this topic quite well he is not without critique however what

do you think so i've sort of covered this in two previous videos uh operation compass and operation crusader and this is why i need to go more in depth in the uh the north african campaign because the italians play a major role in that and as i've shown in those videos they can be good they can also be really bad so let me um let me just explain this so in operation compass which is probably the best british victory of the war the british absolutely annihilate the italian army in north africa and you might say

well that just proves how poor the italians were no even the british praised the italian artillery the italian artillery stood their ground and fired away right to last second as we were getting destroyed against the british tanks problem is the italian artillery had no guns at all not one gun not a single one that could take out the british matilda tank so the italians had their weaponry was so poor they couldn't take out the british tank and they were stood their ground and fired even though it was completely futile operation they had no chance at

all and yet they stood their ground and died or became prisoners or whatever or fled the battlefield but even the british said they would you know the italian artillery were decent rommel says that the italian infantry uh the actual soldier were decent troops the issue wasn't the italian soldiers it was their officers and their generals we'll come back to that so we have decent infantry we have decent artillery during operation crusader the italians eretti division holds the south so the british come through they have a battle with the italians or a few battles for the

italians in the south the italians actually do really well and even one of their black shirt battalions actually does well in that scenario they're guarding one of the hills and they actually do pretty well in that scenario the their tanks which weren't great let's be honest however for their time they're okay not amazing but they're okay they actually do pretty well the italian iretti division was the armored division so we have goodie it's good soldiers we have good artillery even decent artillery we have decent um armored division at least early war and in some cases

even the black shirt battalions can do pretty well okay so what's the problem well as rommel says it's the officers right oh well they must be because and i've seen this in some of the books where they say well the italian officers and the italian soldiers and the italian mentality they just make poor soldiers right this is where the i don't want to say racism because it's not it's not really racism it's just national nationalism comes into it it's not to do with the italian mentality necessarily and i've been over this before as well so

mussolini enters world war ii [Music] on a bit on a bit of a whim and he basically declares war thinking i'll declare war we'll be at war for a couple of months and then we'll you know the germans will win it and we'll just get some benefits from the peace negotiations that's literally how he decides to enter world war ii he is totally unprepared so what mostly he does is he expands the army without actually expanding it well this is a really bad policy so i've been over this before but just briefly so in a

typical infantry division at the beginning of the war you would have three infantry regiments each with three battalions what mussolini does is he gets two of these divisions with three infantry regiments he takes one regiment from each of these right and he takes them and he forms a third division so let me see if i can do this with my fingers probably not so he's now got three divisions right well he hasn't all he's done is just split these divisions open you know move them around now he does add extra artillery and guns and whatever

else so you know he does expand the army slightly but the point is that these three regiment divisions now become two regiment divisions and this has a major impact on the officers and the generals why when you've got three let's say you've got one general in charge of three regiments there's more manpower because there's there's an extra third more manpower you then also have fewer offices right there's one general port for that division so what so let's say there's two divisions right and you've got a general in each that's two generals for two divisions what

happens when you create this third division right you've got now you've got three divisions rather than two you need an extra general where's that general come from the lower ranks so officers who are not capable of leading divisions are being pushed up the ranks quicker because they don't have enough offices there's a shortage of officers now in world war ii this happens to the germans as well the difference is is that the german and it happens to other armies but the germans for example their officers are really experienced they get their experience when they're in

the three regiment divisions and by the time they go down to two regiment divisions they've got a lot of experience so those officers can move up the ranks quicker the italians don't do this the italians start the war by having two regiment divisions and having their officers go through to the higher ranks earlier and this is why they've they're led by is you know lions led by donkeys in a sense they are led poorly as a result of that so it's not because of the entire italian national spirit or the italian mentality or whatever as

the other authors might claim it is in fact mussolini messing up uh and also just military policy they they messed up massively at the beginning of the war their logistics were awful uh because of the oil situation they also had their tanks were poor overall and again this goes back to mussolini not being prepared for war uh their air force is a bit dodgy uh and so you know the italians have got good soldiers but they're giving bad tools and they're led by donkeys because of the policy that mussolini and his generals implemented at the

beginning of the war are the italians bad not necessarily in the right circumstances with the right experience with the right equipment etc they can do pretty well like the erratic division during operation crusader but for the most part no zalman has also said i have just watched your episode on fascism and mussolini fascism defined it leaves me wondering why mussolini wanted to be allied with hitler he must have known about the nazi leadership's contempt for his ideology and that they wouldn't treat italy as their equal yet he seems desperate enough to pass laws he didn't

believe in and bring a village idiot ebola to prominence why was this alliance so valuable to mussolini so i kind of went over some of this in a previous video so i'll get you to watch that after this but essentially mussolini is isolated after the ethiopian crisis so he's no longer in with the west he therefore decides to align himself more with hitler hitler then does really well in france and as the french are capitulating or as they're getting beaten up uh mussolini declares war and takes a little bit of territory in france he wasn't

prepared for war he joined the war thinking that he'll piggyback off the germans and when the germans uh when the western allies peace out he'll get a bit of territory as a result of that so it was just piggybacking off the top of it so he wasn't prepared at all the italians rely on the germans for coal oil everything they need rommel mussolini has to kind of get in favor of hitler to get those resources and equipment and rommel and whatever else he needs in order to do what he wants to do in the war

to have a hope or a chance of actually attaining victory and this is why he's then moving his ideology towards the germans essentially mussolini messed up and had he stayed out the war had he been another franco figure and not gone embroiled in this larger conflict that he wasn't prepared for there's a good chance he probably would have not only survived the war but gone on to you know die of old age in you know the 1970s or something and maybe there would have been a chance of the ideologies of national socialism and fascism not

being sort of morphed into one thing which they're not right there would have been a distinction maybe today instead of you know seeing the nazis and fascists the same thing more people would have been aware oh no there is a difference between the two ideologies maybe you know no idea what would have happened but muslims biggest downfall was his declaration of war 1940 there's no doubt about that and uh yeah so anyway that's 10 questions answered which i'm glad because i'm i will catch up at some point i will catch up to these q a's

but next week is stalingrad fingers crossing it is done in time thanks for watching guys bye for now