What if Germany had thrown its entire fleet against the Dunkirk evacuation flotilla? The British fleet would surely have sunk the German one. But probably not before the BEF was completely destroyed.
Would the loss of morale have forced Britain out of the war? Would Germany’s loss of its fleet early in the war have repercussions?
Fleet? They didnt need their fleet. Just panzers.
As I mentioned in another thread, there’s a school of thought that states that Hitler let the Brits leave Dunkirk, because he still felt they could become allies.
But you have to separate the willingness of Germans to surrender from the willingness of Hitler to surrender. As long as Hitler was around and had supporters like the Nazi Party and the SS to back him up, Germany was going to keep fighting. Not only for whatever irrational vision he had but also because of the rational awareness that he and the other top people would be executed at the war’s end. For Hitler, every month he prolonged the war was another month he got to stay alive and he was willing to sacrifice a million Germans for that month.
The surrender scenario I mentioned above had Hitler and the other fanatics killed in the battle for Germany. That’s what would have created an opening for a surrender to the allies.
The agreement was the none of them would make a deal with Germany where Germany would stop fighting with one of them while it kept fighting with someone else. The scenario I described wasn’t like that; Germany would have been surrendering completely but negotiating who the surrender was made to.
I have the impression that Russia keeping the countries it had “liberated” was a surprise to the Allies. They may not have wished to fight the Russians.
Everyone thinks things are so inevitable. They always are in retrospect.
If D-Day had been a miserable failure of course the war would have proceeded VERY differently. It is commonly assumed Germany in June 1944 had all its army out East and just a skeleton crew in France; in fact the force opposing Overlord was enormous, fifty divisions, mostly of high quality and at full strength; there were more divisions on the Eastern Front but many were “divisions” only in an organizational sense. Germany knew an invasion was coming and had significantly stiffened things up.
A complete failure on D-Day would have allowed the transfer of a lot of troops back to the Eastern Front, and they absolutely would have been transferred. Instead, the exact opposite happened; when it was apparent to Germany that things were going badly in Normandy, they began moving even more troops from the Soviet front to France, which is of course precisely what the Allies and Soviets had hoped would happen.
A stronger Germany army in July 1944 on the Eastern Front might have made Bagration go differently; it’s unlikely it would have been a German victory because the Soviets has successfully flummoxed the Germans as to where they were attacking, but German counterattacks might have been vastly more successful, and the complete catastrophe that Bagration turned out to be for the Germans might not have been a complete catastrophe.
Of course, where that PROBABLY leads us is the Allies using nuclear weapons on Germany in August 1945.
The key thing is of course that** it was extraordinarily unlikely D-Day could ever have failed.** The invasion was one of the best prepared military operations in the history military operations, maybe THE best. It’s worth noting that even with a lot of things going wrong on June 6 - bombardments missing their targets, troops landing miles from where they should have been, paratroopers scattered to the four winds - the invasion was still a big success and there was at no point any serious chance the Allies weren’t going to be dug in like a tick. The Allies had total air and naval supremacy and overwhelming numbers. The very reaosn they waited as long as they did was to leave nothing to chance, so that things could go wrong and they’d still get a foothold, and that’s what happened.
Aside from Stalin’s nagging, was there any real reason the Allies had to launch D-Day in June 1944? Delaying it a year or two could have enabled the Germans and Soviets to really bleed it out against each other; why not ***let ***Hitler have his one-front war for a longer time. By the time D-Day did come in 1945 it could just be easy mop-up all the way to Berlin and beyond.
War is costly. Costly in both treasure and blood. The population and the men in uniform are making great sacrifices. There is only so long that can be maintained. Additionally, for the Americans, they didn’t know how long it was going to take to defeat the Japanese. So delaying victory in the European theater delays victory in the Pacific. The war can’t go on forever.
Read RickJay’s excellent post above yours. The Soviets rightfully needed the other allies to open a second major front to suck off troops from the Eastern Front and allow the Soviets to fight a more dispersed German army. Stalin wasn’t insisting on this for his health, nor because he wanted the other Allies there for the kill…quite the opposite. He NEEDED the US and UK (and the other allies) to take the pressure off because Russian casualties were horrific in terms of both blood and treasure. If he thought that they could do it all themselves he wouldn’t have been insisting on the US and UK and others invading Western Europe since it would have been a lot better from the Soviets perspective (and certainly Stalin’s) to have Russia liberate all of Germany and the rest of Western Europe. Think of what the post-war would have been like then.