The thread on turning points in WWII got me to thinking…what would have happened if some things had gone differently?
For example…what would have happened if Hitler had not attacked the Soviet Union and had tried to invade England by sea after Dunkirk? If a land invasion of England was succesful, it would have denied a staging area for the Normandy invasion.
What if the Germans had developed the atomic bomb late in the war…or waited until they had it before invading the Soviet Union? Would the United States intervene on the Soviets behalf at that point? Or would the cold war against a nuclear Germany with the resources of the former Soviet Union still be ongoing?
Would the United States have been able to subdue Japan and a Germany that didn’t have an eastern front to worry about?
Could Stalin have been convinced to invade Germany in a preemptive strike?
Would the Germans have been interested in taking on the United States on a global scale like the Soviets were?
Another interesting point, what if the plot to kill Hitler had succeeded and the Allies found themselves fighting a brilliant German general staff without the Fuehrer around to fuck things up for them?
Evil OneThe invasion of Britain would have been a turkey-shoot. Britain controlled (just barely in the summer of 1940 but undisputed if not unchallenged thereafter) the skies over the South Coast and also the seas.
Evil Captor I’d suggest that at that point it was too late. That said, the GGS might well have negotiated a surrender based on staving off the Soviet threat.
I’ve seen argument in the past to the effect that Stalin was preparing for an ultimate showdown with the Nazis. And it’s been widely reported that Hitler held out some hope of attaining a peaceful settlement with Britain. Lebensraum had long been Hitler’s goal, and he’d always said the new living space would have to come from the east. That would all argue that the Eastern Front was an eventuality for Germany early on.
By the time of the 1944 bomb attempt on Hitler’s life, it was too late for Germany to do anything but hope to reach a separate peace with the Western Allies, and possibly join them in a fight with the Soviets.
But if the November 1939 attempt, very early in the war, had succeeded, it would have likely been a vastly different conflict.
If Britian was conquered, I don’t think you would’ve seen much ground fighting between Germany and the US. Without Britian to use as a base, I don’t think the US could easily get to Europe and I don’t think the Germans had the amphibious capability to invade the US. Though I could be wrong.
With its biggest ally out of the war, I daresay the U.S. would probably have sued for peace with the Axis, or just wound up fighting the Japanese. And that’s assuming Pearl Harbor happened.
Bodyguard of Lies is an excellent book that goes into great detail about the treason of very high ranking German officers, and the attempts on Hitler’s life by them. You’re right that most of them wanted to sue for peace once Hitler was dead and the major Nazis removed from power. The problem was that some of them wanted to be able to keep some of the gains Hitler had made, like parts of Chechoslovakia and Poland, which would have been a sticking point for the Allies.
I was amazed at how many attempts had been made on Hitler. There were many more than just the July 20, 1944 bomb. A bomb was planted on his plane, but didn’t go off, because the acid that was supposed to eat the wire to trigger the fuse (pre-electronics age) froze when the pilot climbed above a storm. Someone volunteered to model a new army trenchcoat for Hitler and just blow up everyone in the room, but the modeling session never came off. Someone volunteered to just shoot him from a crowd in a small hall, but got put far back, and right next to an SS officer, who probably would have mucked up the shot, which would have revealed the plot with no good effect, so the shot was never taken.
Somewhat ironically, although the OSS and MI6 came up with assassination plots against Hitler, they were vetoed at the high political levels, because it was believed that with Hitler in charge, eventually the Germans would have to lose. He had shown that while he had been very crafty and insightful on a political level before and just after the war started, he wasn’t really a great general, and did things like insist on glorious last stands and trying to be strong everywhere instead of being reasonable about what was defendable.
Yes, they were tight on landing craft, and, of course, they were never able to attain air supremacy.
If the November 1939 plot on Hitler’s life had succeeded (the bomb in the beer hall), with a freshly started war apparently going well, the German Generals might have been tempted to carry on. They likely would’ve had the ME-262 a lot earlier.
And suppose the IJN had figured out how to use submarines. They could have made our Pacific campaign much tougher.
[list=1]
[li]Chemical weapons used in Europe during World War 2. Aircraft dropping chemical or tactical biowarfare agents against civvie populations.[/li][li]At one point, I believe in 1936, Hitler came down with pneumonia. He nearly died. If he had, what then? Would his cronies have torn Germany apart? Would there have been a Holocaust? Would the War have confined itsself to fighting in the East, against the Communists?[/li][li]Japan offers to leave part of China, & attack Russia if they can keep Manchuniko (sp?) their puppet kingdom on the mainland. If accepted, there is no reason for war with the US.[/li][li]France *does not * build the Maiginot (sp?) Line, and instead invests heavily in a very modern Air Force. Now, they can hit the Germans hard. What then?[/li][li]Turkey, a WW1 ally of Germany, enters the war on the Axis side.[/li][li]Spain, a Facsist state, enters the war as an Axis force. Britain loses Gibralter, & access to the Mediterranean is lost.[/li][/list=1]
Yes. They had bugger all amphibious ability, and would have had to use conventional transports to get most troops and materiel across the channel. This would have required the landings be mostly uncontested to prevent a complete bloodbath.
If the Battle of Britain had been won by the Luftwaffe, it might have been possible for German air superiority to have kept the Royal Navy from shredding the invasion fleet, but all in all, Operation Sea Lion was a complete shambles. It’s difficult to see how it could have been successful, even if events had swung far more to Germany’s favour than they in fact did.
Why would you say this? Are you referring to the much-bandied about story about Hitler demanding the Me-262 be made into a bomber? In fact, this only involved slapping hard points onto the wings, and I do believe development of the fighter version wasn’t really impaired. I’m not sure the 262 could have ever made a huge impact - critical shortages of necessary alloys made the Junkers Jumo engine horribly unreliable and high maintenance. There was hardly any fuel for them. And by the time they were put into service, Germany’s pilot corps had lost most of its experienced members. The 262 required more training than its piston-engined stablemates, such as the extremely potent Fw190 D-9 and the Me109 G and K variants, and the pilots being sent up in the latter were already being slaughtered for lack of experience.
WWII was a war of attrition. What made a difference, in the end, was not technology, or tactics, or strategy, but two things, and two things only - industrial capacity and manpower reserves. Germany was horribly inferior to the Allies in both categories, and its only chance at winning was to score very quick victories and negotiate a peace from a position of strength. This would have required rational leaders. However, rational leaders wouldn’t have started the war, so that’s kind of moot. While I have no wish to minimize the most titanic military struggle the world has ever seen, I think it simple truth that Germany had, from the onset, less chance of victory in WWII than did the Confederacy in the American Civil War. (Unless, I suppose, they had traded Heisenberg and two first round draft picks for Oppenheimer and a physicist to be named later prior to the war, and had developed nukes early enough to build and deploy them.)
The nuclear question is what interests me most of all. What would have happened had Nazi Germany demonstrated a nuclear bomb? Would a cold war with the Germans developed or would the conflict have dragged on?
Even before I saw Evil One’s last post, my comment was going to be that this is the least likely of scenarios. German physicists had posited that it was a long-shot and the logistical difficulties meant that serious planning was never even started.
Look at the scale of the U.S. effort (with two paths taken for refining uranium) and the distribution across the country and you’ll see the type of effort required. Not just was it an enormous logistical undertaking but it was a highly risky path.
Other scenarios are much more interesting:
what if the Japanese had attacked throughout Southeast Asia without attacking Pearl Harbor, delaying U.S. entry into the war.
what if Hitler had not declared war on the U.S., delaying its entry into the European theater?
what if either Germany or Japan realized the extent to which their codes were being compromised?
what if the United States had not developed the atomic bomb and had invaded Japan?
The much bandied about tale was probably lurking in my mind, along with a memory, which I’ve not confirmed with any research this eveninng, that early in the war most new weapon development was put on hold as the nazi leadership felt things were going swimmingly enough that resources did not need to be allocated to that R&D. I doubt that applied to the ME-262, but I don’t know off the top of my head.
That’s a minor point. My greater point, that I failed to make clear, was that had Hitler been whacked in November of '39 (I don’t recall what of the Nazi hierarchy was with him. Goehring, Goebbels?), the General Staff might have prosecuted the war far differently and more effectively without being micromanaged by Hitler. At that point they were at war with Britain, France and Belgium. They were still pals with Russia, having just given her a chunk of Poland. Suppose Albert Speer had risen to a leadership position after the bomb?
They might have overrun continental western Europe and eventually made some peace with Britain before, or without, starting a war with Russia.
Here’s an interesting thought: Germany reins in Japan, and so the United States remains out of the war. Without the United States’ entry in the war, Britian squats defensively while Germany attacks Russia. Maybe Britian makes peace with Germany and, as the war wears on, the U.S. enters on the side of the Axis to help fight the evils of communism.
How does Germany rein in Japan? She had two factions in her military, one wanting to go north, the other south, who were rarin’ to go. And, relations with th U.S. were severely strained, over China primarily. The Germans would have to have given them something.
Perhaps soon-to-be-former western European colonies in Southeast Asia? How would the U.S. have reacted to that?
Actually, it was Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand with whom Germany was at war in November 1939. Belgium didn’t get swept up in it until the end of the “phony” war towards the end of Spring, 1940.
Hey, Read The Man in the High Castle by the master, Philip K. Dick!
The alternate scenario is that FDR was assassinated before becoming president, meaning that the US was still in the throes of the depression and in no position to do anything until it was far too late. Germany gets the East coast, Japan the West, Italy gets screwed, and noone wants the midwest… There is a constant power struggle between Germany and Japan, with plots and counter plots continuing for decades after the subdual of the Allies…
The Japanese are obsessed with prewar american pop-culture trinkets…
And an author is writing a way-out alternate history novel in which an obscure politician named FDR was never shot, became president, and the Allies won…
All you will even need to satisfy your “what-if” bug for quite a while, I’ll wager. (but maybe you’d rather hammer out your own theories, actually based on military and economic twists, or some such nonsense, losers )