Quote:
Originally Posted by Jon Oso
Here's the deal. Hitler fucked up the end of his campaign with his two front attack...
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True. Germany had never won a two front war and both he and his generals knew it.
Thing is, Hitler was in a hurry and he allowed his impatience to convince him that this time would be different.
His haste, which became more and more of a factor from mid 1938 on, is what really did him in.
Hitler was convinced that he would die young and he felt he was running out of time. His premonition was correct btw. By 1944 he was suffering from both heart disease and Parkinson's. Even had everything gone his way it's unlikely that he would have lived much beyond 1945.
This impatience caused him to deviate from his own prewar timetable and to start rushing things.
In the 1930's the British and the French were bending over backwards to appease him. If after the Munich Agreement, Hitler had gone slower on his subsequent demands - and most importantly had he not broken that same agreement by seizing the Czech speaking parts of Czechoslovakia - he would have gotten the German speaking areas of Poland a couple of years later. The British told him as much at the time, albeit in strict confidence.
Had the Poles then refused Hitler's demands, which they almost certainly would have, Germany would have attacked Poland while Britain and France stayed on the sidelines.
With Poland gone, and Britain and France still neutral, Hitler's entire army would have found itself poised on the Russian border.
And that's when the real "fun" would have begun.
Haste makes waste.