[secator553]

My points are:
in Europe: Battle of Stalingrad
in Pacific: August Storm

[Jarlaxle]

The Germans could not have sucessfully invaded the British Isles. They simply did not have the means to do so. It would have been an unmitigated catastrophe and resulted in the utter annihilation of whatever troops attempted to do so. They didn't have the landing craft (they were planning to cross the Channel on river barges, hazardous enough without opposition), they didn't have the training, and they simply didn't have the naval forces to cover a landing.

Also remember: the British had poison gas and were planning to use it on an invasion.

[William_H_Dougherty]

Err... I have a lot of respect for these authors, especially Anthony Beevor, but I think the question you have to ask yourselves, is in what year, in what month, did a German victory become unlikely.

At what point do the German War aims become unrealistic?

I would argue at the conclusion of the Battle of Moscow, just as Germany declares war on the United States.

While Germany would go on to win victories in Russia the following spring and summer, and against the allies in Africa, the Wehrmacht never recovered from the loses of this time, losing a high percentage of their veterans, and essentialy having blowed the country's entire war reserves of oil and supplies on Operation Barbarossa.

Notice Case Blau, the summer offensive of the following year that concluded with the Battle of Stalingrad. Seriously, just look at it on a map and compare it with the Fall Gelb (invasion of France), or Fall Weiss (invasion of Poland) or Operation Barbarossa (invasion of the Soviet Union). Look at the Order of Battle.

It is a significantly lower scale offensive, Germany pretty much rolled everything on a quick and decisive defeat of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, and when this failed to transpire the retention Hitler's "Greater Germany" became very unlikely.

Again, I'm not saying it would have been impossible for Germany to win the war after this, just that December 1941 was a spectacular defeat for the Heer from which it never really recovered.

- WHD

[cowofzot]

They did capture huge amounts of petrol,( 4.7 million barrels), & supplies after launching Barbarossa & gained enormous material wealth from Donetz basin, forests of Riga & as well millions of slave laborers. Nickel mine at Petsamo is 2nd largest in the world. Hint, Tigers & 262's needed Nickel.
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=78524

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_deposits_of_Finland




In a postwar interrogation, Hans Kolbe, a U.S. spy in the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin, offered this assessment: "The German need to obtain Soviet oil was deemed the primary reason for the attack. Since the Soviet deliveries were insufficient to satisfy German needs for bringing the war [in the west] to a conclusion, the only recourse appeared to be the seizure and exploitation by the Germans of the oil resources of the Soviet Union."








As the war progressed, Germany was forced to reduce or no longer use certain critical alloy materials in the production of armor plate, such as nickel, tungsten, molybdenum, and manganese; this did result in lower impact resistance levels compared to earlier armor.[49] Manganese from mines in the Ukraine ceased when the German Army lost control of this territory in February 1944. Allied bombers struck the Knabe mine in Norway and stopped a key source of molybdenum; other supplies from Finland and Japan were also cut off. The loss of molybdenum, and its replacement with other substitutes to maintain hardness, as well as a general loss of quality control resulted in an increased brittleness in German armor plate, which developed a tendency to fracture when struck with a shell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_tank

[Thompson_NCL]

The Battle of Britain marked a turning point in the war for sure, although perhaps not the most significant. Why? Because it marked the end of the German ascendancy in the West. The British "held the line" so to speak, and as a result forced Germany to continue to fight a war on two fronts. Obviously it's open to debate as to whether Britains defeat in the air would have changed the overall course of the war, but that is immaterial. The point is that the BoB marked the end of Germanys advance on the Western front.

That said, I agree that Stalingrad marked the major turning point of the war, as not only did it result in Germanys defeat in the east, but it also corresponds with a string of Allied victories in North Africa which led to the invasion of Italy.

[Cookie Monster]

"Every battle is won, before it is even fought."

Stalingrad seems for me important turning point in the Western theatre (Battle of Midway for the Pacific theatre). But when applying Sun Tzu's maxim, it seems Germany had already lost when it started the war. It did continue along the pre-war conditions for it's advantage, when it decided to go to war against the UK and France it wasn't decisive enough to finish the allied forces at Dunkirk, it opened a second front before concluding it's first front, it entered into Russia without consideration for long term interests, it was obsessed with the extermination of unwanted civilians which drained the resources needed for military objectives, etc.

[I Killed Keynes]

I think that trying to figure out one turning point is to oversimplify ww2. It is not a work of fiction whose literary elements can be analised by a bunch of school kids, its an unplanned, anarchic binge of violence. That being said there are a few things that shaped it. The US getting involved in the war certainly aided the allies, the Battle of Britain really gave Germany its first taste of defeat as well as forcing it to fight a war on two fronts. Italy losing in North Africa and Greece took them out of the picture...also their failure in Greece led to Germany having to get involved there, which led to Crete, which delayed Germany from dealing with Russia, a delay that may or may not have proved fatal in retrospect, and then, of course, there was stalingrad. I think it is a combination of all of these things that turned the tide, and without one the others might not have happened. War is not simple enough, particularly a war as complex as world war two, to only have one defining moment.

[Igor Antunov]

There is no single defining battle or moment, but there are a string of defining events, stalingrad and everything that came after in the east secured germany's doom. They could not even stop the soviets or fight them to a stalemate after that, let alone turn back the tide. Their fate was sealed.

Japans fate was sealed when it instigated war with the US, then the soviets cleared out japans major colonial possesion (manchuria) and it was over. 1 million japanese troops in mainland asia put out of commission during august storm and thus it's profitable manchuria holdings kaput, it's major cities firebombed and nuked, it was game over.