A Nazi Earth-was it ever possible?

Great Debates
41

Two more Bismark class battleships weren’t going to turn the tide even against the Royal Navy, which had 15 battleships and battle cruisers in service at the start of the war and another 6 were commissioned during the war. Constructing them would also have been an enormous waste of steel and man-hours for Germany, diverting production from much more useful items such as tanks and submarines.

I must object to the use of the word ‘obsolete’ to describe battleships during World War II, however. They lost their place as the queens of the seas to the aircraft carrier, but they were far from obsolete and were still capital ships. In the Atlantic, bad weather and long nights further north could severely restrict the usefulness of aircraft carriers. The aircraft carrier HMS Glorious fell to the German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in just such a situation. The Scharnhorst herself met her fate at the guns of a British battleship off of Norway. In the Pacific, night surface actions were very common, happening more frequently than the rare carrier duels. On those occasions when battleships were risked, they could be decisive. Three Japanese battleships were sunk by naval gunfire and torpedoes, and a fourth was so badly crippled that it could not escape from land based airpower come the morning. Battleships also provided a sturdy platform upon which to mount enormous numbers of anti-aircraft guns. They were also undisputed when it came to providing bombardment of shore targets. US forces on Guadalcanal were subjected to a number of bombardments at night by cruisers and destroyers, but the one occasion when Japan was able to run two battleships down The Slot to shell Henderson Field unmolested at night, it was known to the marines and soldiers ashore simply as “The Bombardment.”

Regarding the OP, these two givens alone virtually doom Germany:

  1. That, no matter what Germany does, Japan will bomb Pearl Harbor in late 1941, bringing the US into the war.

  2. That Hitler, being Hitler, will at some point attack Poland(bringing the Western Europeon powers into the war), and later invade Russia.

Germany’s only hope for shutting down the Western Front would be a negotiated peace with the British, which wasn’t likely to happen. The invasion of Russia as it was historically carried out was extremely successful, but even if it was more successful and Moscow and Leningrad fell, a capitulation by the USSR isn’t a given as a result. On its own the invasion of Russia almost certainly doomed Germany to its eventual defeat. The idea of getting Japan to start up a second front against the USSR as mentioned by xtisme has a couple of problems with it. Japan turned south to attack the Dutch East Indies in 1941 in order to secure the oil it needed to continue its ongoing war on China after being cut off by embargo. Turning instead against the USSR would have left Japan with a major oil crisis looming on the horizon. The other problem is that Japan came off very badly in border fighting with the USSR in1939; the conclusion of a US Army college study on it and Japan’s mistakes and deficiencies in the fighting is located here.

42

You can’t believe this. Today’s aircraft carrier groups are supremely protected from attacks underwater, on the water, and above the water. Battleships were sitting ducks. The Yamato? Gone. The Bismark? Gone. The Bismark was crippled by some old Fairy Swordfish. Let’s see how one of those Battleships hangs together after a few waves of dive bombers get through with it. Or hell, if we’ve got to do it the hard way we’ll just wait until they get near any U.S. coastal areas, then hit 'em with a few waves of heavy bombers. In the meantime, submarines would be plinking at them.

And as I said in my other message, the U.S. had SEVEN battleships under construction at this point. The Iowa class battleships were no slouches either. I’m not sure if the Bismark could even go toe-to-toe with an Iowa. The American Battleships had better armor, more guns, were faster, and had better fire control. And had the war gone on, the U.S. could have produced, say, a dozen of them. Or more.

Here’s an interesting link about the relative power of the various WWII Battleships: http://www.peachmountain.com/5star/Other_TheBest.asp

No, it would have crippled the carrier fleet for a few months. The U.S. launched FORTY THREE carriers between 1942 and 1945, and cancelled 10 more because they weren’t needed. The rate at which the U.S. was putting ships in the water, aircraft in the skies, and tanks and vehicles on the ground was simply astounding. And the U.S. could have produced more - production was already being scaled back by 1943 because the outcome of the war was already clear, and even at production peak the U.S. was only expending a small percentage of GDP on the military, while Japan and Germany were spending huge amounts (Japan devoted a whopping 65% of its productive capacity to the military). In addition, the economies of both Japan and Germany were in recession during the war, while the U.S. economy was expanding.

43

Dissonance said:

You’re right. I chose poor language. Battleships weren’t obsolete for a long time after WII. The Missouri did a bang-up job in Gulf I. But the idea that a Bismark-class Battleship could roam the oceans at will destroying everything the U.S. put in its path is not realistic. The suggestion that three Bismark battle groups could lay waste to the entire U.S. Navy even less so.

My feeling is that if a Bismark class battleship attempted to engage a carrier group, it would be destroyed or crippled by air in fairly short order. Look what happened to the Yamato - A carrier group spotted it, launched wave after wave of aircraft against it, and they put 10 torpedos and five bombs into it. Yamato was toast. The same fate would have awaited a Bismark-class battleship group that was foolish enough to try to take on a carrier group.

44
  1. Hitler gets the Sudentenland, and Chamberlain says that there will be “Peace in our time.” The Jews are abused, but not massacred, and Hitler has not yet really started up his killing machine (had the killing of the Japan holds Korea, Taiwan, and goodly chunk of mainland China in its grip, a year after its bloody Rape of Nanjing.

Tensions in Europe and East Asia are high, very high. But did a World War necessarily have to follow? No.

So, with due respect to the OP, I think the far more likelier thing was Hitler and Tojo behaving a little better and not getting their asses handed to them.

We always associate, rightly, Hitler with the worst of his depredations (The Holocaust and starting WWII), but the fact remains that, in 1938, he was an evil dictator (Night of Long Knives in 1934, Nuremburg Laws in 1935, etc.), but not really yet a world-class evildoer as Stalin already had become.

Had he woken up on a different side of the bed one morning, he might have stopped with the Anschluss and called it a day. Then he could have continued to tinker with the economy (rather successfully, as it happened), gradually reduced his Juden rhetoric, and ended as a Franco, rather than as Satan himself.

So with Tojo. Japan was a great military success in 1938, and, despite the Massacre of recent years, the Tokyo Olympics were scheduled for 1940 (cancelled because of the War in Europe). Japan probably could have partitioned the Pacific with the US and continued to build its economy, which was getting stronger all the time. Having lived for 7 years in Japan, I wonder what the country would be like today, had it not been totally destroyed in the War.

But Hitler and Tojo were stupid, evil idiots. A little less stupid, or a little less evil, and the world today might be very different.

45

I realize this post has been mostly covered, but some of this stuff is ridiculous.

**

Wiped out? Do you think these are some sort of 1920’s style death rays? Those types of arms fired once an hour and didn’t have especially detonating shells because the speed of the launch required a lot of fortification of the shells where high explosive filler was normally used.

Those guns were irrelevant, even if they were put into use. The worst that could happen would be that they’d be able to blow random chunks of dirt around in random fields.

**

Now this is just absurd. What do you think the Bismark was, some sort of super ship? Any US Iowa class battleship would be a favorite to win head to head with a Bismark class ship - and considering the US Navy had quite a few of them, totally ignoring carriers and such, this statement is just absurd.

**

What? Do you think war is like the board game risk where you can attack across oceans if you own adjacent land masses? A cross atlantic and pacific major attack like that would’ve easily been the greatest undertaking in the history of warfare - it’s not some minor challenge. Neither Germany or Japan had any chance whatsoever of landing on the continental US in force.

**

They’re not going to know where it is, or have the tools required to destroy it if they did.

Purely statistical, eh? Hmm.

46

The rest of your post is good, Sam, but this part simply isn’t true. Not even close. The US wasn’t even the leading producer of tanks in WW2 - USSR edged them out by a bit… a little more than a bit if you classify assault guns and other vehicles as tanks. But 1942 was a low production year for the US, so it certainly wasn’t the case for that year.

47

Also, all posts regarding German missile or jet defenses are pretty much irrelevant. The strategic air campaign didn’t have all that much of an impact on the war - certainly not enough to change the war fundamentally.

Really, the effect of drawing more fighters to the western front where they couldn’t be used to the east was more productive than the actual damage caused by the bombers.

The reason why the common perception of WW2 was that strategic bombing was a war winner was because that’s all the west did for a few years, essentially. And so we play up the role it played in the war.

Check out the US strategic bombing survey for starters.

This is also why ideas of using German strategic bombers to change the outcome of the war are pretty irrelevant.

48

Woops, forgot to add - the Germans were years and years behind where we thought they were on the development of the atomic bomb - I don’t know the technical details, but I’ve heard they were going in complete the wrong direction in some regard. So it’s not likely they’re going to get it anywhere near 1945.

49

I’ll check the tank thing again. This may be one of those memes stuck in my head from some reading somewhere.

As for the nuclear bomb, the Germans didn’t even have a reactor yet, and I don’t think they were that close to one. After the U.S. got a reactor running, it was three years before they could build a bomb. So Germany was probably at least five years or maybe more from getting the Bomb.

50
  1. They had a partial answer to the guidance problem…the A9 was to be piloted.

Ostensibly, it wasn’t a suicide craft, as it would have had an ejection seat. However, this would mean the pilot would be ejecting at around Mach 1+, at low altitude, over an area that you just droped a nuke on. If you’re lucky, and the bailout alone didn’t kill you, you might land in the Atlantic.

  1. The German A-Bomb designs I’ve seen were kind of light—about 2200 lbs, total. Mostly because they were damned crude…no explosives, designed to reach supercritical mass as it was crushed by impact with the ground. I kind of doubt that the thing would have worked at all. Maybe it would have “fizzled.” Maybe.
51

SenorBeef said

It seems like I read somewhere that Russian intelligence knew a lot about the Manhattan Project. I don’t remember if they knew the spacifics or just general details like the US is working on a “superweapon”. The German foreign intelligence service was pretty ineffective though.

But would a neutral USSR share this intelligence with a foreign power?

The problem with all the scenarios that say don’t attack Russia is that attacking Russia was the entire point to the damn war. France and Britian just got in the way.

52

Would the Nazi regime have survived Hitler? I get the impression that being a member of the Nazi hierarchy was like being a senior member of the Mafia-you always had to be on your guard, as somebody was always trying to whack you. According to the late Albert Speer (see “INSIDE THE THIRD REICH”) being a top Nazi wasn’t fun…Hitler had a habit of going off the deep end periodically. But supposing that Nazi Germany had forced Great Britain’s surrender, it is entirely possible that Germany would have dominated Europe for years. However, once Hitler became old and feeble, there would have been a massive power struggle…and who knows what might have emerged. I think the German Army brass would have put an end to the Nazi party-they had every reason to be in fear of their lives, and most of them (the old Prussian aristocracy) despised the Nazis.

53

I can confirm SenorBeef on this. The Oxford Companion to World War II lists 1942 tank production as 24,997 for the US and 24,446 for the USSR. Something to note is that the USSR was able to ramp production up this high the year after having to abandon or evacuate a large part of its industry east of the Urals. More ominous for Germany’s chances of success in World War II is that their 1942 tank production only came to 9,200, which barely edged out the UK’s production that year of 8,611. For Japan, it’s even worse – 1942 was the peak war year for their tank production, and it only amounted to 1,191. Further, except or a few low production run late war models, Japan’s tanks were hopelessly outclassed by those of other combatants, having poor armament and paper thin armor.

54

You’re not listening to my argument. The Iowa class ships didn’t exist at the beginning of the war. The Yamato and Bismarck DID. In 1941 the US Navy was a shadow of it’s future self. It was built after the fact to compete in a war that could not be waged on day 1. The United States could not project it’s Armed Forces in Japan in 1941. It required a massive build up and that meant a larger Navy and a Merchant Marine fleet. If Japan and Germany had combined their Navies they would have wiped out the US Navy .in a sucker punch. That would leave deep-water ports unprotected and vulnerable to attack. Unlike tanks and planes, battle ships, aircraft carriers, and merchant ships need to be built in deep-water ports. My scenario doesn’t require an immediate land war on North American soil. The Axis powers only needed to forestall the US from entering the war. They didn’t need to stop ship production, just delay it. Without ships, the lend/lease act would have been useless in the short term, when England needed it most. There wasn’t a single cargo plane capable of lifting a tank in WW-II.

If you trade the resources and time wasted on invading Russia and use that to perfect an Atomic weapon then the massive manufacturing capacity of the United States would have been rendered useless.

Was that possible. Yes. The same scientists that fled Axis nations to build an Atomic bomb could have been used to create the ultimate WMD of it’s day on behalf of Germany.

55

I think you underestimate the size of the US Navy and the vulnerability of major ports across the US. First cite I pulled up said the pre-war (1939) strength of the US Navy was 15 battleships, 5 carriers, 18 heavy cruisers, and 19 light cruisers. Not nearly what it was at the end of the war - but enough surely to contest the naval power of a handful of German ships run amok.

Even if the navy were neutralized, the axis powers didn’t have the forward bases to effective launch attacks on US ports. When the IJN attacked Pearl Harbor they were at the edge of the carrier group’s range. They could launch a few longer ranged vehicles (some of their larger subs, as they did) to reach the coast - but those weren’t capable of causing any real damage.

Even if they were able to reach the ports, though, land based defenses including shore batteries and lots and lots of land based aircraft would’ve made damaging those ports quite a difficult task.

56

The Iowa’s didn’t exist at the start of WWII, but their younger sisters of the North Carolina and South Dakota classes did. The US navy in 1941 was only a shadow when compared to the massive size it had grown to by 1945. The US Navy slightly outnumbered the Imperial Japanese Navy at the start of the war, and the German Kriegsmarine’s only ability to seriously threaten even the Royal Navy came though U-boats. It was hopelessly outclassed by the Royal Navy on the surface.

Even if the Kriegsmarine had 2 additional Bismarck class battleships and a pair of aircraft carriers thrown in for good measure, they still would have been hopelessly outnumbered by just the Royal Navy on its own. Japan did attempt a sucker punch at Pearl Harbor, and put most of the Pacific fleet’s battleships in dry dock for years. The US was able to go on the counteroffensive at Guadalcanal 8 months later. There’s a link here positing the outcome of a reverse Battle of Midway where Japan loses no carriers and the US loses all of theirs. Even with that outcome, the results are that:

Japan lacked the ability to project power at the US West coast in WWII, it simply didn’t have the lift capacity in its own merchant fleet. Its historical opening moves in the war stretched its cargo and long range refueling capacity to the limit. One major lesson of strategic bombing in WWII was that it was extremely hard to do long term damage to economic infrastructure with the technology of the day. German production in all armament categories continued to rise up until the last year of the war despite massive bombing by strategic bombers on a scale that Germany and Japan were never capable of. Destroying the US ability to launch naval vessels in enormous quantities would have required invading and capturing the ports in the US themselves, something Japan was flatly incapable of doing, much less Germany.

A few problems here: one is that it assumes that Russia will sit on its hands while Germany denudes itself by pouring resources into an unproven technology in favor of conventional forces. Another is that Hitler was obsessed with defeating Russian in order to secure Lebensraum in the east for the Aryan people. Yet another is that it was that it was the same obsession with racial superiority that drove scientist to flee Germany that drove Hitler to launch the war in the first place.

57

I’m annoyed that I was not able to post last night and let Sam know his figures were faulty about tank production. Anyway, Soviet tank prduction in 1942 was larger than American tank prodcution or very close to it. Note that the bulk of Soviet tank production in 1942 was the T-34 which was much better than most other tanks in the world at the time.

As for battleships, the comment about three german battleships destroying the United States Navy is simply stupid. Ask the British or Japanese navies what happens when you send capital ships into enemy territory without air cover. Not to mention that if battleships did for some reason become dominant again, the US would have started producing Montana class battleships which would have made short work of theBismarck.

Being from the United States, I was raised on the "rah rah, US production won the war "rhetoric and believed it until I started studying it in depth. Realize that 75% of German casualties were suffered on the Eastern Front. While Russie paid a massive price for that victory, they literally destroyed the German Army. Between Stalingrad and Kursk, the German army died. While American supply of all wheel drive trucks helped keep the Soviet offensives moving in 44-45, I believe the Red Army would have won the war regardless.

People have commented about Germany waiting longer to invade Russia in order to strengthen their forces and/or supply system. I think this has a few serious faults, mainly that the Red Army was also building up during this time and with additional time might have kept the Germans from penetrating as deeply as they originally did. Perhaps, but its just speculation and really based on nothing more than production figures. Stalin certainly wasn’t a fool and realized that eventually Germany and Russia would be at war.

When discussing Sealion, I’m not convinced that the Germans would have had to defeat the RAF and Royal Navy before invading. Perhaps by concentrating air power on a small area of the English Channel to gain air superiority and allow an invasion to take place, Germany could have defeated Britian.

58

The system being what it is currently, I haven’t been able to find it in a search now, but I recall a thread many months ago where Eolbo linked to a post-war study that fairly well laid to rest the notion that Sealion (the German invasion of the UK in 1940) was even remotely possible. Perhaps if he sees this he could fid the link, but suffice it to say that the UK’s position in airpower during the Battle of Britain was not nearly as desperate as it is sometimes portrayed, and Germany’s ability to provide sealift amounted largely to Rhine-ferries which were barely seaworthy in the English Channel, and would have been easily devastated by the British fleet, even if they lacked air superiority by daylight.

59

Sorry, another few random points I forgot to address:

Sea Lion wouldn’t have worked. Germany did not have the naval lift capacity to invade Britain, simple as that. Even if the entire Royal Navy and RAF were destroyed, Germany still couldn’t lift enough troops to make a succesful invasion. Sure, there was a plan to do so - but it involved lots of river barges to land a small amount of troops at a time - which would’ve been easily quashed.

Regarding Germany waiting to invade Russia - 1941 was a great time to attack Russia. They were suffering the effects of the 30s purges and just very recently started to adapt better, modern tactics, and come up with quite competant equipment designs. A few more years and they’d be up in production, and officers would’ve become competant, trained in modern warfare.

The real problem with the invasion was that it started way too late, in late June. Had it started in May, as planned, it’s quite likely Germany would’ve forced a Russian surrender. They were very, very close as it is - another month or two and it would’ve been almost certain. But Germany had to bail the Italians out in Greece. Launching on time in 1941 would’ve been much more succesful than waiting a few years.

60

If it had started in May it also might have resulted in the total destruction of the German forces on the Eastern Front. The winter would have been just as bad but German forces would have been even futher from their supply bases. The Germans supply system can’t be overlooked when discussing the Eastern Front. Figthing for Moscow might have resulted in a Stalingrad type defeat in 41 instead of 42.

As it was, the Germans barely held the front together at the end of 1941. The Russian offensive in December came close to breaking Army Group Center.
Even if you change some variables like the invasion date, some things remain the same such as the difference in rail gauges, the lack of roads, the autumn rains and the blizzards.