Germany’s surrender in ww2

The Second World War was a global conflict that occurred between the years of 1939 and 1945. Two military alliances, the Allies, which were led by the Soviet Union, the United States of America, and Great Britain, and the Axis powers, which were led by Italy, Germany, and Japan, were formed. Other than the great powers mentioned, a vast majority of countries took part in this war. There were more than 100 million people from over 30 countries who served in the armed forces during World War II. There was little distinction between civilian and military resources, as the major participants in the war committed their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capacities to the war effort. Aircraft were crucial to the war effort, as they allowed for the strategic bombing of population centres and the use of the world's only two nuclear weapons. 70 million to 85 million people, mostly civilians, lost their lives during World War II, making it the deadliest conflict in human history. Genocides (including the Holocaust), famine, mass murder, and disease all contributed to the deaths of tens of millions of people.

During World War II, Germany tried some very well-thought-out strategies, but they were all in vain, and Germany was forced to wave the white flag and admit defeat.

The Battle of Stalingrad.

After months of fierce fighting and heavy casualties, German forces surrendered at Stalingrad on the Volga, with only about 91,000 surviving soldiers.

In mid-November 1942, Soviet forces launched a counteroffensive against the Germans stationed at Stalingrad. They quickly surrounded an entire German army of over 220,000 soldiers. After months of fierce fighting and heavy casualties, the surviving German forces—roughly 91,000 soldiers—surrendered in February 1943. Following the victory at Stalingrad, the Soviet army remained on the offensive, liberating nearly all of Russia and eastern Belorussia during 1943. The battle for Stalingrad was a decisive psychological turning point, bringing an end to a string of German victories in the summer of 1942 and kicking off the long retreat westward. But Germany was unable to defeat the Soviet Union, which, along with the United Kingdom and the United States, took the initiative from Germany. In May 1945, Germany became embroiled in a long war that eventually led to its defeat.

Consider yourself a soldier in the 6th Army on November 19th, 1942, and you learn that the Red Army is carrying out "Operation Uranus" to plunge the Romanian army that was protecting the 6th Army's flanks, of which you are a part. The Romanians have cut you off, and your army is now surrounded in the Stalingrad area. Your leader, Adolf Hitler, forbids you from breaking through, instead sending supplies via air support, but each supply was intercepted by the Soviets (Red-Army). You and your 220,000 soldiers fought a fierce battle while being surrounded by limited supplies. After months of fighting, the 6th army is reduced to 91,000 soldiers after exhausting its ammunition and food supplies, and you wave the white flag, becoming Hitler's first field army to surrender a battle.

U-Boat wolf pack tactic

German U-boats (submarines) dominated the seas, capable of patrolling coastlines or launching wolf pack hunting attacks. In terms of the latter, Rudeltaktik (wolf pack tactics) was a strategy used to attack transportation convoy systems. During World War I, the British used convoy systems, which required groups of ships to sail side by side under the protection of escorted warships. It prevented WWI German U-boat attacks at the time because they could no longer corner isolated ships and would be met with fire from the accompanying warships.

The wolf pack strategy was devised to eliminate this defence mechanism. Wolf packs were created by Admiral Karl Dönitz and consisted of 8–20 submarines. The attack on a convoy was postponed until all U-boats were present to launch an organised attack on the enemy. The "shadower" was the pack's leader, and their main responsibility was to stay out of sight of the enemy by submerging during the night and re-emerging during the night. When enough U-boats converged on the convoy, the "shadower" would signal an attack during the night. Due to the sheer number of submarines, the spontaneous attacks coming from all directions, and the increased technological development of U-boats, which made them undetectable and essentially invisible, the Allied forces found it difficult to respond to this tactic.

When confronted with U-boats in the Atlantic, British forces were closer to defeat than at any other time during WWII. Over 2,700 ships, accounting for roughly 70% of all allied shipping losses in all theatres of war. The deciphering of Enigma codes enabled British forces to pinpoint German U-boat locations, resulting in the defeat of German U-boats and victories in the Atlantic.

Enigma(crypto messages)

Without a doubt, cryptography (the art and study of solving and decrypting secret codes) was critical at the end of WWII. The decoding of Japanese and German military and diplomatic communications was critical to the Allies in halting Axis territorial gains and gaining an advantage in the war.

The German Enigma was a major cryptographic challenge for the Allied forces. The Enigma, which resembled a typewriter in shape and form, was capable of producing highly encrypted messages by using wheels that scrambled typed messages. To decrypt the message, the receiving operator would need to set their Enigma with the same wheel that was used to encrypt it. When a transmission was received, Nazi receiving operators were given "codebooks," which allowed them to enter the correct decryption key.

As Germany's troops advanced swiftly and relentlessly across the Western front using Blitzkrieg tactics, it was the Allied force's mission to intercept and decrypt their intelligence. The Cipher Bureau in Poland obtained a German Enigma machine in 1932. This information was shared by the Bureau with both British and French forces in order to devise code-breaking strategies. One of these strategies was the establishment of a code and cypher school in Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, England. Various mathematicians and problem-solving experts were brought in to decrypt German military codes. While Polish mathematicians had learned how to decipher Enigma messages, they soon realised that Nazi forces were changing the cypher system on a daily basis. German codes had become unreadable by 1942.

Alan Turing, a mathematician, was one influential figure who managed to turn the tide of war. Turing invented and developed a variety of machines and tactics for intercepting Axis intelligence. The Bombe, an electromechanical device that significantly reduced the work required of code-breakers, was one of his inventions. Another example was Banburismus's cryptanalytic process. In order to infer the likely setting the Nazis coded on their machines, the Banburismus process used sequential conditional probability. Turing directed Allied naval forces away from U-boats while working in Hut 8, a section of the Code and Cipher School that focused on decrypting Kriegsmarine (Naval) messages, leading to Allied victory in the Battle of the Atlantic in 1945. Other theatres of war, including the Soviet Union and parts of Southeast Asia, used cryptographic tactics as well.