After Crete Hitler said he'd never order another airborne

>>1435107
Dictators who only served as grunts in the last war were not military geniuses.

More news at 8.

>>1435116

Was Hitler that intent on micromanaging in 1941? I thought it came later, after the winter of '42 in Russia.

* micromanaging as in overruling the advice from other more experienced officers.

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But was there any successful airborne operation during the rest of the war?

>>1435107
Crete was a disaster for more reasons than "just" being huge airborne operation.

They lacked sufficient weaponry they could take with them while jumping, they lacked artillery, their parachutes were really fucking shitty and injuries were very likely to happen when landing(I think one well known boxer got pretty fucked up there because of how shit it was), they lacked support vehicles, had no support from "ordinary" ground forces etc.

Compare it to Operation Market Garden which was also a disaster and a failure on top of it but you've had decent amount of support vehicles, even light tanks and artillery landing with paras in gliders, soldiers having their primary weapon with them and the entire plan stressing the temporary role of their drop - they weren't supposed to conquer the Netherlands by themselves, just take over few bridges. Now it was a disaster for several reasons(they didn't have enough airplanes to drop all their troops at once, they failed to notice deployment of some armoured divisions in the area, some of their "key" equipment was lost, delays for the ground troops happened, weather went to shit etc. etc.) but as long as the drop went as planned they ended up doing pretty decent work, only in Arnhem there were huge problems since the beginning.

So it was more of 1940 Fallschirmjaegers in Belgium(relatively small deployments with specific missions meant to support ground forces) than Crete.

Hitler was not terribly clever.

>>1435107
The Fallschrimjaegers suffered 60% + casualties and were combat ineffective for sometime afterwards. Hitler thought that this operation proved that airborne infantry was disproved as effective. The British realized the mistakes that plagued the Fallschrimjaegers on Crete, i.e poor support equipment, terrible LZ's, etc. Coincidentally if the Germans had taken Mlta instead they could've kicked the Royal Navy out of the Mediterranean which would've helped the Axis tremendously in Africa. All in all Crete was a disaster all around.

>>1435168
>But was there any successful airborne operation during the rest of the war?

The Germans used them successfully in taking the Netherlands.

Then there is D-Day.

>>1436811
>Coincidentally if the Germans had taken Mlta instead they could've kicked the Royal Navy out of the Mediterranean
The Mediterranean Fleet was based out of Alexandria you retard.