i have read that german high command had made plans for an invasion of french levant(modern day israel, palestine, syria, jordan, parts of turkey, and parts of saudi arabia). these plans would be executed if hitler decided not to carry out operation barbarossa. what do you think would have happened if germany had carried out this plan instead of operation barbarossa both in the short term and the long term?
If Germany had captured Middle Eastern oil, than the world would be a very different place toaday. From the French Levant, the Germans could have immediatley captured the Caucausas oil fields and Russia might have been forced to surrender.
on the history channel they talked about arabs negotiating with the germans to form an alliance. had the germans conquered the are and allied with the arabs what would have happened and what would the world be like today?
If Germany had the Arabs oil than the war would have been far longer and far bloodier, Germany would probably still be defeated though, only because of the huge industrial prowess of the Soviet Union and the US, in 1942 alone the Reds were producing about 600 t 34s a month!
Germany could not have taken and held the Middle East. They would have needed a land route which means Turkey. The Turks would have bogged them down in their mountains for years while the Allied navies would have made their lives hell. Once the Allies were strong enough in North Africa, they would have trapped the Germans in the area. Moving on to the Soviet oil fields would have been a death nail. The Soviets would have reinforced the area and then launched offensives west against eastern and central Europe. The German forces that would have been needed to repel these attacks would be bogged down in the Middle East. With the Allies coming up from Egypt, Germany would have to face ground armies from both the Soviet Union and the Allies in the East. Wouldn't have done anything except waste more German lives and resources. Interesting scenario, though.
Middle Eastern Oil was largely undeveloped during WWII, there was so little there (beyond access to the IO through the Gulf Of Arabia) that there would be little seeming reason to attack.
Next to the stupidigy of leaving Great Britain unconquered or defacto armisticed ("We have what we came for, we let you leave Dunkirk, take that as a sign..."), failure to invade Turkey was probably the single greatest stupidity of the German war effort (dumb mistake #3 would be failure to concentrate and leave alone the Wolf Packs to do their job).
Turkey is NOT entirely mountainous, but rather a series of largely open stepped plains and hills. Certainly nothing worse than what had already been encountered in the Ardenne precursor to the French campaign or would be again in Southern Russia and Finland.
Capturing Alexandria (and thus denying the British access to the Suez) also makes a lot more sense from the 'green end' of the Mediterranean, given Germany had put so much effort into evicting the Brits from Greece and Crete.
Certainly, so long as Malta, The Rock and Tobruk remained British strongholds there was no secure logistical means to support a desert war and ultimately never would be.
Given you don't send tanks to climb Mt. Elbrus and the oil fields of the Crimea would have been torched long before the Germans could have broken through to them reached them anyway, a sea based attack in a largely sealable closed bay makes a great deal more sense so that if there was a single flaw in Hitler's plans it was that he _chose_ to ally himself with the Italians.
As has been said many a time by none less than Winning Winnie himself: "Oh well, we were stuck with them last time..."
Yet had the Germans not seen some progogandist necessity of Axis superiority inherent to bailing the Italians out of their Balkans tiffle, Barbarossa would have happened in May or June and the Russians would have lost Moscow and probably capitulated to beyond the Urals before winter. Good or bad, this would have almost assuredly spelled the end of Stalin and Communism and more importantly would have drawn forces away from the Crimea.
Had the Italians not been equally a spent force vs. Waverly and Co's British Army in Africa, there would have been no reason to support their dreams of a renewed Roman Empire as a function of owning the dustbowl that was Libya.
IOW: About the only hope the Germans had for winning WWII after BOB, (especially if there had been SERIOUS consideration to followon linkups with the Japanese: "I'll lock down the Brits in India, you give me an Eastern-Eastern front") was to in fact continue their successses in dominating the Aegean and Eastern Med via attacks into Palestine to deny the British the maritime trade by which The Empire supported their own war effort.
Whether this could have prevented U.S. entry into the battle and thus staved off the nuclear question is open to consideration but it certainly would have retrograded the timelines by which certain key events of the war happened only AFTER Pearl Harbor.
In particular, it is critical to keep in mind that we never attempted to prosecute an invasion by which we were not only 2,500 miles from the nearest friendly territory. But also operating under effective, multi-axis, landbased airpower while ourselves suffering from a relative paucity of carrier assets to counter a bathtub enclosed war. In this, STAYING EAST would have also made any attacks overland through the desert an entirely Allied proposition which the Germans and particularly Rommel could have harrassed at their leisure before shortstoping with nothing more than mines and artillery 100 miles from Alex.
As indeed El Alamein proved to be the Afrika Korps own overreach.
The Turks were master diplomats. But it would have meant nothing had the Germans not been strategic idiots. It basically comes down to nothing more or less than that.
