Could Rommel have been more successful in North Africa if he had bicycle troops? Leaving his infantry behind was what screwed him over in the end and having more mobile infantry sounds like the answer to that.
For that matter, bicycle troops in general would be beneficial to the fuel strapped WW 2 Germany.
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He probably would've lost it quicker, I think. Rommel never had the numbers to hold all the territories he took, especially with the Allies constantly threatening his maritime supply lines. Bikes wouldn't have been able to transport the heavy guns he relied on to break Allied counter-attacks, and sending bike troops on the attack without adequate support would've gotten his forces decimated faster than it was in real life.
Bikes wouldn't have helped on the Eastern Front, either. The main issue was getting supplies from depots in Poland to the frontlines in the Russian interior, past muddy roads, destroyed railways and roving partisan cells. The long trek wrecked a lot of trucks and horses, eventually leading to entire armies being cut off from supplies, like the Sixth Army in Stalingrad. They probably would've fared better if they'd scaled up truck production in 1940-1941... or if they could build Soviet-gauge locomotives and transport them to the front somehow.
Edited by eagleoftheninth on Apr 14th 2019 at 6:56:58 AM
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That's more of an operational level detail. There are two related questions here: could Germany have won the African campaign? And if they had, would that have had any impact on how the war as a whole was fought out?
Africa, of course, was never the top priority for Germany, because Hitler was preparing to invade Russia. This was because of Hitler's belief that Germany needed lebensraum, and only by invading Russia could Germany obtain it. Which is another way of saying that in order for Germany to have had a chance at winning in Africa, they would had to have been led by someone other than Hitler and the Nazi Party (then again, if they had been led by someone else, would they have started the war at all?).
But sure, if Rommel had had the entire industrial capacity of Germany behind him, maybe the British would have been unable to keep up. Hard to say.
But would that have made any difference in the long run? Germany needed natural resources to continue the war, esp food and oil. Libya doesnt have a plethora of either.
Edited by DeMarquis on Apr 15th 2019 at 6:57:31 AM
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If I recall correctly, the North Africa Campaign for the Germans and Italians was to A) cut off the British Suez Canal and thus (further) isolate the British Isles from the rest of the Empire B) make a run for Middle Eastern/North African oil reserves that had been built and explored then and C) secure Italian and Vichy French territories in North Africa from use as a springboard against other positions in the Med.
Mind you most of the North Africa campaign was after Barbarossa started.
The bottom line is that all the alliances set up after WWI were specifically designed to contain Germany, and the Germans knew it. That's one reason for WWII to begin with- the German public's resentment of being treated as the pariah. In a sense they were doomed to start the war, and doomed to lose it. The whole situation is really the fault of the Allies at the end of the first war- they took a punitive approach toward Germany, rather than attempt to integrate them back into the community of nations. The real question is how world history would have been different if the League of Nations had actually been successful.
Edited by DeMarquis on Apr 13th 2019 at 10:03:20 AM
I think there’s a global conspiracy to see who can get the most clicks on the worst lies