Strategic mistakes that cost Hitler the Second World War

London, Aug. 3 (ANI): Hitler's Nazi Germany was proving to be an unstoppable force in the early days of the Second World War, but the dictator made a series of strategic mistakes which resulted in his defeat, a new book has claimed. In his new book The Storm Of War, English Historian Andrew Roberts points out that Hitler should have settled matters with Britain before invading Russia during Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941.

Hitler should have swept Britain out of Egypt and Palestine with a mere fraction of the three million Nazi troops, the Daily Express quotes Roberts, as saying. Taking Cairo would have opened up the prospects of capturing the virtually undefended oilfields of Iran and Iraq, expelling the Royal Navy from Alexandria and attacking British India from the north-west while its ally Japan threatened her from the north-east, Roberts writes. Hitler could then have invaded Russia in his own time with his Army Group South moving only a few hundred miles from Iraq to Stalingrad.

The second grave mistake, Roberts points out, was declaring war on the "uninvadable United States" within six months of the decision to attack Russia.

The lack of close military co-ordination between Berlin and Tokyo resulted in Japanese attacking the Pearl Harbor, and Germany going ahead with Barbarossa, he writes.

Hitler ought to have dissolved the alliance with Japan, that had hitherto done little for him, after Pearl Harbor, and dismissed his foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop for his ludicrous misreading of America's capabilities and intentions, Roberts opines.

With Britain effectively neutralised, and America fully committed in the Pacific fighting Japan, only then should Operation Barbarossa have been put into effect, with Germany fighting on one front rather than the suicidal two, he says.Putting Lebensraum (the supposed need for Aryan "living space") and ethnic cleansing at the bottom of the agenda- the Germans ought to have striven to make allies of the Greater Russian subject peoples against their Bolshevik oppressors, Robert writes. (ANI)