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The Germans faced huge casualties when they invaded Crete and that might explain why they did not invade Malta. However, did the Italians have the capabilities of an amphibian assault and an airborne assault on Malta? I have never been to Malta and the few pictures and videos I have seen don't depict any beaches suited for an amphibian assault.
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Do you know if the Italians military had enough of airplanes for an airborne operation of that size? It seems an amphibious operations wouldn't work. Even, though. airborne forces need to get support from other parts of their military (navy, air force, army) |
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It would have come down to who had the better capacity to resupply their forces, the Axis had the shorter more protected lines while the allies had the greater capacity. Quote:
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On paper the Italian Navy was more than a match for the Royal Navy in the Mediteranean, the problem was that much like most of the Italian armed forces during WW2 they didn't want to fight.
Had the Italians actually gone to war things would have been vastly different for the Axis. |
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This thread has turned into a "what if" speculations. I like it when there is not really a right or wrong answer to any of the pondering that occur in threads like this. I am glad to see the forum is somewhat waking up.
One event that might have changed the course of history is the lack of coordination between Germany and Japan. If Japan had been able to "fix" the Soviet forces in the East. It might have "helped" the Germans to capture Moscow. However, I doubt the Russian has quit fighting with the fall of Moscow. The Russians had adopted to the new situation and acted on it |
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Lets ignore realities of previous Japanese/Russian skirmishes that ended in the Japanese getting their butts kicked and assume a Japanese assault on Russia was successful they would have multiple hundreds of kilometres of frozen tundra to get through just to capture anything useful, if you think the Russian Front was miserable from a German point of view I cant imagine how bad invading Siberia would have been from a Japanese perspective. Now to jump back to some facts. Of the 14 Eastern divisions transfered West between August and December 1941, two were under strength cavalry divisions, 3 were Tank/Mechanised divisions that had only been formed in April 1941, the rest were Rifle Divisions of which three arrived in August and September and were sent to 11th Army defending the southern approaches to Leningrad or 7th Army defending the far north against the Finns. Only six rifle divisions arrived in October and only four of these went to any Army that could be even remotely linked to defending Moscow against Army Group Centre. Over all their combat performance was regarded as "average". |
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