nausea said:
North africa was crucial because UK alone could not do shit vs germany, closing the suez canal HMMMMMMMMMMMMMM big win
hitler did not want any competitor in europe, he righteously was sure to be able to deal with european enemies alone
the soft underbelly would have been an issue anyway because greece and uk were already side by side
the whole normandy and sicily thing was already cold war, what do you think?
Germany certainly wanted the Middle East for the oil and to kick out the British and French from there. Suez was cruicial for supplies with Japan and Madagascar. It's just that Libya was in a bad position for a two-front war once the Vichy French in North Africa defected to the Free French after Operation Torch. It would seem that there was less chance of the soft underbelly with the Allies invading from Greece or the Middle East, rather than Tunisia. It was just a short hop to Sicily and the toe.
Had the Germans Stalingrad/Caucasus front succeeded, they would have linked up with Axis troops in the Middle East, had Egypt fallen. Of course, the Allies were smart enough to invade and occupy Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran in 1941, thereby securing the Middle East's oil, mostly before Germany's crusade against bolshevism started. It seems like the Axis should have helped the Vichy French keep hold of Syria and Lebanon for a good toehold in the Middle East.
I do think for a time there was an 'early Cold War' race to Berlin, from 1943 to early 1945. Until the Yalta conference when the Soviets were given carte blanche to rape their way to the Reichstag and set up 'buffer' states. Sadly for eastern Europe, the success of the Western Front had stalled at the German borders 5-6 months after D-Day and it took a few months to break into the Ruhr, by that time the Soviets had taken inter-war Poland and the Balkans, consigning them to decades of misery. It seems that D-Day couldn't have happened any earlier due to the failure of the Dieppe raid in 1942 and Churchill was prioritizing the capture of north Africa first, to the chagrin of the Americans who thought they were being used to make the British Empire stronger. Any invasion of northern France required the Germans to be on the ropes in the east. Northern France was 'lightly defended' by D-Day. With an invasion from southern France as well, the Germans were forced to retreat to the Fatherland to avoid the large pincer capturing them all.
The unnecessary firebombing of Dresden was supposedly to be a warning to the Soviets not to go any further west than agreed. I think it was at the Potsdam Conference after the war that Stalin lamented that Tsar Alexander got to Paris. This should have proved that the West could never have trusted the Soviets. The Americans should have nuked them before 1949. Instead the world was stuck in a nuclear stalemate until Reagan's military spending bankrupted the Soviets who were trying to keep up, while Gorbachev was letting the USSR break-up by lifting the political repression brought in by the bolshevik regime in the first place. At least the Cold War ended without going hot, but there's another one brewing now between the West and Putin and also red China playing the long game.
