The ww2 was much different to napoleonics…
The complete railroad in russia runs over moscow so for example if you want to send oil to leningrad via rail they had to send it over moscow there where no other mayor railroads (strange but true).
So if the wehrmacht took moscow the war was not over for russia but they could at least kiss northern russia goodbye as well and after that a german blitz to the caucasus wouldnt be to hard to come by.
So all in all yes the war could be won over moscow.
For the French angle, I recommend reading Strange Defeat (I think that’s it), which was written by a member of the French Army. He discusses the paralysis that seized high ranking military officials at that time. His belief is that the French could have at least put up a good fight, but that confusion and indecisiveness prevented them from mobilizing their forces and producing a true counter-attack or even strong defense.
Hence the modern obsession with manouver war and “getting inside the enemies decision cycle”. Blizkreig (yes I know the German army did not call it this!) was war on a new tempo and succeded perfectly in imobilizing most of the French high command. That French officer can argue what he likes, but the fact was the Germans used a tactic designed to paralyse the enemies ability to react, and the French army did exactly this. Nothing in the French mindset enabled them to react to this sort of war, so saying “if we had…” is pointless. Certainly in raw numbers of men and material the French were equal or superior to the Germans.
So all in all yes the war could be won over moscow.
True up until a point. The real problem was the Americans supplying massive amounts of material to the Russians. The Russians would have folded without the logistical support. America supplied railroad track (and the trains to go on it) equivilant to more than the entire Russian railroad production between 1928 and 1939 (source is John Keegan’s essential “The Second World War”… should you wish to read one book on the war then this is the one I recommend). The Russian system was, to a large extent, created during the war, so it is possible that the loss of Moscow would not have ended the Russian war.
The general reply to the original question was “anti-communism and craziness”. What might’ve happened if they hadn’t declared war? Well, Stalin, being a pretty good strategist (history doesn’t remember him as such, but his encirclement around Stalingrad basically saved the city), would’ve undoubtedly been just spending all his money on production. Being a control economy - not to mention the whole having-a-massively-huge-land-area - would’ve meant that Russia, given enough time, would’ve easily out-produced even the stretched-out German Empire of the time.
Hitler needed to take Russia out first, because even if there was no war, he still needed to keep forces defending that frontier. There was no love lost between Hitler and Stalin, and their personal relationship (and hatred) is probably one of the single largest two-person relationship in terms of its effect on history. Both controlled their countries to a degree unheard of nowadays (except in places like Cuba). Both had extraordinarily different ideologies. Both were almost certainly clinically insane. Hitler couldn’t abide that there was another extremely powerful force on his border, and so the “buffer zone” strategy took hold.
What might be a more interesting question is, what would happen to history if Russia was formed as a collection of much smaller states? Napoleon would’ve had a much greater chance of success, among other things. Russia’s vast land area, right on the border of a bunch of smaller warring states, has stabilized the region too many times to count.
To the original post:
Yes, Hitler’s hatred of communism, desire for Lebensraum in the east, belief that communism was a Jewish conspiracy (of course, what wasn’t a Jewish conspiracy to the Nazis), and probably equally important, the belief that the Soviet Union was a rotten house that would collapse with a swift kick to the front door (almost exactly this language seems to show up in German pre-war discussions - the idea that a hard rap would bring the whole structure down in six weeks or some similarly quick time frame).
On a meta level, remember the importance of the “national will” to the Nazis. There was a genuine belief that the will was of supreme importance. “Corrupt” organizations and nations, regardless of logistical issues and manpower, could be overcome by the will of the German nation.
I figured it was a given that Germany would invade Russia at some point. I always believed that the delay caused by helping Italy in Greece was the tipping point.
Did Germany have to declare war on the United States after Pearl Harbor?
Nope. England (and Roosevelt) both breathed sighs of relief when Hitler did, which was probably the stupidest move he ever made. Churchill’s great fear–that there would be two great, unconnected wars being waged simultaneously–never came to pass due to Adolph’s idiocy.
But of course, war would have been declared if Japan and Germany had smirked and pointed “He did it!” War had been declared years ago and it just took one of them to pull the trigger.
After Pearl Harbor, it’s unlikely that war between Germany and the U.S. could have been avoided. Hitler assumed as much, and so declared war.
There’s a famous Churchill quote,
On the night of Pearl Harbor, he said later, ‘‘I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.’’
That’s not entirely true. When the Soviets occupied eastern Poland under the terms of the secret Soviet-Nazi pact, it was pretty much assumed in the west that the Soviets and Nazis were allies, unlikely as that seemed. While they couldn’t do much about Poland and the Baltic states, the French and British were organizing aid and preparing troops to send to Finland in the spring of 1940, which was too late when the Finnish/Soviet winter war finally went the Soviets way.
Didn’t the Finns welcome the Nazis out of fear or hatred of the Soviets? I’m pretty sure I remember an early scenario in original Squad Leader that was basically Russians vs. either Nazis + Finns or vs. Finns with German equipment.
Of course vague memories of a 30 year old game are hardly authoritative :)
True, but “organizing aid and preparing troops” (especially troops that never arrive) is not the same as declaring war on the Soviets, which by rights they should have done. The Allies had guaranteed Polish independence and pledged to defend her should the Nazi’s invade; that self-same guarantee both logically and morally should have been applied to Soviet aggression but wasn’t, for purely pragmatic reasons.