Bernd 04/19/2021 (Mon) 01:13:34 No.43336 del
>>43330
I like how he thinks on broad geographical terms, but he leaves some things out when reaching his conclusions.
>Since there is little need for the Germans to cross the Volga, the "road" from Europe to Siberia goes through another gullet in the Ural between Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg) and Chelyabinsk, and the front gets narrowed down from ~2000 km to 500, then entering Siberia further down to 200-300 kms
There might be have been no industry or population of worth on the left side of the Volga, but there were still railways >>29203 >>29204 from which the Red Army could mass troops and threaten the Heer's advance. Narrowing down excessively would just produce a long and vulnerable salient, some advance on the left bank would be necessarily, if only to secure the right flank. Possibly an advance to the north of this region, too, as there are also railways threatening the left flank. Though this point is moot if just taking the Moscow-Kazan-Stalingrad triangle knocks out the Soviet warfighting capacity.

>>43331
>During 1942 summer the Germans should have aim their strike against the above described Soviet crisis-area, to knock them out from the war. But instead they pushed toward the south and opened the Caucasus front. This he did not understand, he wonders about the rationale, did not see the reason behind the decision.
It could be understood as depriving the crisis area of a critical raw material input (oil) and thus an indirect attack.

>Then he expected a Soviet counter-attack from their power triangle towards west, the marshes. This he considers as a strategically decisive move, tearing the German lines in two, and from that place the Red Army could have annihilate the overly opened (like a fan) southern part, leaving the whole South East Europe ripe to conquest. But this did not happen either. The Soviet struck south-west from the power base onto the weaker Romanian, Italian, and Hungarian armies (in fact they started with the 2nd Hungarian army at Voronezh, on 1943 January 13, as discussed on this board elsewhere). No matter how impressive was the success, he considered this a tactical victory, without strategic importance - which the Soviet leadership has to correct if they want to achieve more.
The Soviets did stage massive attacks in the central portion of the front in 1942, but they failed. It's understandable Szálasi didn't have sufficiently detailed frontline information to note this.