Germany beats the USSR, what’s the plan for the USA?
Pearl Harbor gets attacked, Germany declares war on the US. Point of divergence: Germany, capturing Moscow, puts Stalin’s head on a pike.
Hitler still has a declared war on the USA. What does he do next? I’ll assume he had no realistic plans for a trans-Atlantic invasion, but he can’t just ignore this new enemy.
Better yet, what do we do? No point in mobilizing everything to fight a hopeless European war with Britain. And we’re not getting on that continent in a D-Day scenario without the Eastern Front.
Do both Hitler and FDR go “We can’t really fight each other, should we just cancel this declaration?”
Even if Germany sacks Moscow, they’d still have a hell of a time trying to control the entirety of the USSR. Is the German army going to advance all the way to the Pacific Coast? Remember, Japan and Russia had a non-aggression pact at the time, and Japan seemed pretty intent on honoring it because they were busy fighting elsewhere. Even in occupied USSR there would be a “Soviet Resistance” at least as big as the French one. Even the eastern front doesn’t go away, it just moves a bit further east.
Of course, this doesn’t really answer your question. I don’t think Nazi Germany ever really had a plan for attacking the US. I think their reasoning for declaring war on us was to embroil us in Europe in the hopes that it would wear us thin between them and Japan/the Pacific.
Such a cold war is a scary thing to think about. All those German scientists and engineers never end up in the USSR/USA. What might that imply for the space race and computer development, etc?
How quickly is the USSR defeated? We could take this alternate history as “operation Barbarossa is a success”, i.e. the earliest possible USSR defeat. The Germans were surrounding Leningrad and approaching Moscow in December 1941. In the alternate history we can grant that Germans continue their gains, and capture Moscow to get a in early 1942.
Without a surrender the Germans would still have to commit a large number of resources to capture the Ural industrial base and secure the vast new conquered territory. Germany still has to defeat the 58 divisions of reinforcing troops from Russia’s east. The effort would be comparable the the resources that in reality were thrown at the Eastern front to keep a newly mobilized Russia at bay. In this scenario Germany would still commit most of their effort to the Eastern front, though they might be able to shift a greater number of troops to defeat the allies in North Africa. So perhaps Germany is victorious on all fronts by 1943, but that leads to a stalemate. Remember that the US and UK production have both ramped up production, so any of the forces that were (in reality) used to invade Italy and eventually Northern France are instead stuck sitting in the UK. That should be more than enough to prevent a German invasion. Germany can probably rebuild their navy enough to secure their coasts, but not enough to seriously challenge the Allied navy in the Atlantic. Thus, stalemate.
If you want to be even more wildly optimistic on Hitler’s behalf, you could imagine a scenario where Moscow falls in early 1942 and the remaining Russian forces surrender. With a friendly “Vichy Russia” to the East, Germany might even be able to move enough troops to the West to conceivably invade the UK. Even in the best of cases (for Germany) that would be a long hard battle. Britain might be defeated by 1943 or 1944, leading to a similar stalemate.
In either case the US still defeats Japan (possibly even sooner by shifting resources from Europe to the Pacific). Then, a US-German cold war.
How damaging would a Soviet Resistance have been? The French Resistance was quite an impactful operation. The Soviets would have had not only the anger that they were being occupied, but also that they were dealing with the evil fascist Nazis that they had been taught to hate. Do you think “former” soldiers may have been pressed into near-suicidal sabotage missions?
Why do you assume the United States needed an Eastern front to fight in Europe? Obviously, fighting Germany without a Soviet front would have been a lot more difficult but the War Department had made plans for fighting Germany with just American resources after a hypothetical Soviet and British defeat.
This is kind of an understatement. The French Resistance movement didn’t have a major impact on the Nazis up until the run up to D Day. The Soviet partisans did have a major impact. However, the Nazi policies were significantly different in the East and the West. The policy was never to govern the East, as it was in the West, but instead massively depopulate it.
There’s lost of possible things to consider here - were Britain to stay in the war, you’d see an increase in the scale of the bombing campaign, though you’d also see more resources available for defense. More likely though is Churchill/another British Prime Minister coming to terms with Hitler, and a significantly quicker defeat for Japan.
Those plans wouldn’t have amounted to much. The Pacific was full of islands to hop between. The Atlantic is not. There was no way US forces could have staged an invasion of the European mainland from the Azores and Iceland.
If Germany had taken the USSR, the effort involved in occupying Russia would have taxed Germany’s war assets excessively. I doubt there would have been enough Nazi’s to cover all of Europe.
Aircraft carriers will cross the Atlantic just as easily as the Pacific. The Army Air Corps had bombers that could fly missions across the Atlantic and back. There were troops that sailed across the Atlantic for Operation Torch.
But Hitler never really grasped how to properly use his scientists. So we’d still be ahead of the game organizationally. And the Jewish ones would still try to come here.
Sure, but the carriers that went to SE Asia had British holdings nearby to refuel and resupply from- Australia and so forth. Assuming Britain was out of the war, there was nowhere for them to go in the Atlantic except back to the Americas.
The vast majority of German forces (and the better units at that) were on the Eastern front. The US and Britain only faced a fraction of Germany’s war machine. If they were able to redeploy significant numbers of troops west it would have been more than a lot more difficult for the US and Britain. I doubt we’d ever have gotten a toehold in Europe via something like Normandy.
I doubt too that Germany could have successfully invaded Great Britain. Consider what it took to pull off the invasion at Normandy. I do not think Germany had anywhere near that kind of sealift capacity.
In the end the atomic bomb is the trump card here. IIRC the US intended to bomb Germany first anyway. As it happened they lost before the bomb was ready so Japan got it. I suspect the conflict would have stabilized and the US/Britain would wait for the Bomb to be available and that would be the end of it (probably). After a few nukes the question becomes whether Germany would surrender unconditionally or seek to maintain Hitler in office and try to keep some of their conquests.
My guess is that neither a continuing war nor a Russian surrender was likely in the event of extraordinary German success (i.e. spectacularly better than historical). What would likely have happened is that the Russians would have sued for peace, and reset the new USSR borders somewhere to the east of Moscow, probably near the Urals, for defensive reasons.
Obviously, a frontier that long with a recently beaten enemy would need significant resources to garrison, but I suspect that due to the size, it would be a variation on the old Roman limitanei / comitatenses model, with garrison infantry units in frontier fortifications, and then some mobile forces (panzer/panzergrenadier divisions) held back in reserve far from the border.
I’m not sure what level of manpower we’re talking about… let’s say 3/4 of the invading force worth. That frees up a Panzer army, and a lot of infantry.
The real question is in light of those situations, would Roosevelt/Churchill have gone with the “Europe First” strategy, or would we possibly have simply contained Germany, and gone after Japan first?
I think strategic bombing would have been ramped up even more, with B-29s showing up in Europe in 1944, due to the longer range, higher speed and larger bomb load vs. B-17s and B-24s.
I think that it’s absolutely certain that nuclear weapons would have been used against a Germany not on the brink of collapse in summer 1945. At that point, we’d have used as many of the bombs as we could as fast as we could produce them (roughly 7 more bombs by the end of October 1945) - on Japan and Germany until both surrendered.
Germany could not totally defeat the USSR. They would’ve retreated behind the Urals and continued to fight. It would’ve been similar to the situation in the West where Germany couldn’t beat the UK.
A “Vichy Russia” wouldn’t happen because Hitler wouldn’t allow Slavs such a thing. Remember the Ukrainians welcomed him at first as a liberator, but quickly started a resistance movement.
If you look at WWII, you can see Lend Lease is what won the war. The USA simply out produced everyone else and shared it with their allies. By the end of the war the US industrial production was greater than the rest of the world combined. Yes, the USA was just that strong.