One of the commonest scenarios in alternate-history fiction is the idea of alternate endings to World War II: Hitler wins; we go on and defeat the Soviet Union; the Manhattan Project fails and we invade Japan; etc.
Contrast this to the real-world scenario: Hitler defeats Poland, Norway, and France; Britain holds firm; Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; Hitler invades the Soviet Union; Russia recoils, holds firm, and fights their way back across the Ukraine, White Russia, and Poland; the U.S. takes and holds Guadalcanal, and starts island hopping towards Japan; the U.S. and Britain invade French North Africa, then Sicily and Italy, followed by the Normandy Invasion and the defeat of Germany; Japan is pressed back to its homeland, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki produce the coup de grace that ends the war.
This was principally the result of the Churchill/Roosevelt/Combined Chiefs of Staff strategy of Europe first, and the ending of the African menace before invading Western Europe, while leaving the Soviets to carry the brunt of the land war until we could build up the forces for a successful Overlord.
My question for discussion and debate is: What other strategies could practically have been undertaken that would have resulted in an Allied win? What might have been done differently, on a broad scale? Assume the necessities of build-up of materiel, warcraft, and weaponry that did actually constrain the Allies, but devise different places or ways of implementing them.
If I had been Warlord for the Allied Powers, I wouldn’t have invaded Italy. Strategically, the entire Italian campaign was a huge diversion of Allied resources that went nowhere and delayed the cross-channel invasion for a year. It was mostly carried out for political reasons.
A campaign through Greece into the Balkans would have been pretty fierce fighting, but it would have removed both the threat to Mid-East oil and the reality of Balkan oil sooner, as well as placing more of Eastern Europe outside the Soviet sphere once the shooting stopped. It would have been subject to German interdiction from Italy, but a strong campaign to neutralize the Luftwaffe might have limited that threat, considerably.
OTOH, I’m not sure that Stalin would have actually “permitted” that decision, specifically because it would have put U.S. and U.K. forces in proximity to his.
The other consideration would be whether the Communist elements of the resistance in France and Italy were considered too great a threat to be ignored that close to Britain.
Where would you have stopped the Med campaign then? Would you still have taken N Africa?
If you complete N Africa, and then do not take on Italy, all your fleets in the Med are pinned down defending N Africa. You still can’t use those fleets or troops to invade Atlantic France, and you don’t have enough long range air cover to invade Med France.
So you say, OK, I will not commit troops to knocking out Vichy and Italian colonies in N Africa. All supplies go to Britain proper. Well wait, what about the hundreds of Shermans that were planned to go to Egypt? Do you send those?
I would conquer North Africa and maybe Sicily. But landing on the Italian mainland wasn’t worth the cost.
As for defending the Med, I’d pull most of the fleet out. Sending troops to North Africa was a bad idea for the Axis in 1940. If they were dumb enough to try it again in 1943, I’d welcome it. Any Axis forces in North Africa would be lost.
The whole point of the war was to defeat Germany. And Germany was never going to be defeated in Africa, Italy, Scandinavia, or the Balkans.
If you really wanted to defeat Germany, why not send the in the French Army and the BEF into action the day after Hitler rolled the Panzers into Poland? Virtually the whole German army was in the East, with very little to defend an attack from the West? The war could have been over in a month.
I’m not arguing against your strategy or anything, but I don’t think that can be said with any confidence, because how many other times have people said it, in only to be proven wrong?
It is extremely doubtful that the Allies could have done a cross-Channel invasion successfully in 1943. For a start the Luftwaffe had not yet been defeated. Nor did they yet have anything like the number of landing craft required. Given that, what else could you do in 1943? Stalin is, not unreasonably, demanding a second front. Remember Italy didn’t have to be as much of a stalemate as it was, the Allies were basically too chicken to take advantage of the long exposed sea-flanks there as well as they did in North Africa and Sicily (until Anzio, which was far too little too late).
IMO the single thing the Allies could most easily have done better is the Battle of the Atlantic. They had forgotten critical things since WWI - it is pointless trying to hunt U-boats down in the open ocean; put the transports in convoys and make the U-boats come to you.
The diversion of a tiny amount of airpower from Bomber Command to Coastal Command (maybe as few as 2 squadrons) would have closed the gap and defeated the U-boats a year earlier than historically, saving thousands of lives and putting more men and supplies in England earlier, so for instance Torch and Husky could have happened months earlier.
Let me flesh this out a bit – because it is in fact precisely the strategy the British wanted to use and in all the alternate Universes of Roman Empires that never fell and Hitlers ruling the world until the 70’s – THIS one (it seems to me) really almost did happen. In fact, the plan was for all of the Allied Armies to “link up” (in some manner) and to drive from the East together. Churchill, if he was senior partner calling the shots in the alliance almost certainly would have done this – for the strategic/resources reasons listed above. Also to echo though, Churchill believed that it set up a post-War Europe that was co-occupied by all the Armies – not on an east-west “axis” and would prevent a Stalin Iron Curtain style land grab.
Roosevelt was against it. As he told Churchill Geometry taught him the shortest point between two points was a straight line and he favored the French scenario. The war was won this way - so I don’t fault FDR … but it intriguing to think what might have been
How’s this for an idea - build a number of HMS Habbakuk style aircraft carriers out of pykrete, and use these to immediatly begin firebombing Japan, without bothering with the island hopping campaign?
Err - there is also the fact that this would take you straight through some truly crappy terrain while struggling with a very long logistics train unsupported by any decent infrastructure. The allies were struggling to supply their forces in northern europe in 44-45, despite being in countries with developed transport infrastructure only a few hundred kilometres from the UK’s ports. A battle group on the end of a supply chain that goes from the US and UK to Alexandria, then across the med to a fishing village in greece before heading on a goat trail through the mountains for several hundred km would be hard pressed to stay fed and clothed, never mind overcoming the Wermacht. Kesselring ground the Allied offensive to a halt in Italy, he’d have been as happy as a pig in straw defending Greece/Balkans/Hungary.
The oil argument makes a lot of sense, but could probably be more cheaply destroyed by building up bomber capability on Sicily or Crete. Oil availability was not really an issue for the Allies, denying it to the Axis was.
I’d be inclined to agree that the whole Italian adventure was a replay of the Dardanelles on a grand scale, and that applying the lessons learned about U-boats would have made a big difference.
Bundling into western Germany at the start would probably have made a huge difference to the course of the war, even if it had not defeated Germany. France was not really rigged up for an offensive war, and the Germans might have delayed matters until they could redeploy out of Poland, particularly since the Soviets would have been glad to scoop up even more Polish territory. One could even come up with a scenario where Germany wins the war in the west, but is chastened enough to refrain from tackling Russia across Soviet Poland and instead settles down to enjoy the spoils of victory. Not good.
I would say that there are no key points of inflexion since those are earlier than the outbreak of war (Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia), but substantial differences could have been achieved by a less cack-handed response to the Japanese (F- for the Brits in particular) and a more focused approach to the issue of the 44 assault on Europe. However I’m doubtful whether this would have cut the length of the war appreciably.
As a thought experiment, what would the Allies have done differently if you sent them back a truckload of history books? Most likely avoid a bunch of tactical and strategic blunders, but instead commit new ones. In particular, trying to limit Stalins post-war influence might place the whole enterprise at risk.
The Japanese have plenty of first-line aircraft at least equal to if not superior to what the Allies have.
The have a large number of well-trained pilots, many with combat experience in China.
At this stage of the war, aviation fuel is not a problem for them.
Japan has the best battle fleet in the Pacific.
All this had changed by the time the fire raids started in earnest.
Now I’ll throw this one out…
The Luftwaffe’s Gen. Walther Weaver doesn’t die in 1936. An advocate of the heavy bomber, he convinces Hitler to build a strategic bomber fleet along the lines of the RAF Bomber Command.
The German bomber fleet now has the tonnage to really plaster Great Britain. The factories that the Soviets relocated are now in range of the Luftwaffe, or they are moved even further back increasing the difficulty of getting the materiel to the front.
The problem is that strategic bombing is actually a form of attrition warfare; maintaining a bombing campaign had an immense cost in trained manpower and economic resources. Germany couldn’t afford to match its economic base aginst any of the Allied powers.
Well, they could probably have overpowered Britain one-on-one, as it was in dire straits economically even before the war. However heavy bombers were not the real issue. Lack of escort fighters was what crippled the bombing effort over Britain, and would have also have prevented any meaningful long-distance effort against Russia. If the Germans had had something with the capability of the p47 or P51 to deploy alongside their Ju88s during 1940 and had focused on hitting airfields and related production facilities, it would have been lights out for the RAF, followed shortly afterwards by the obliteration of key military facilities in england and then invasion.
Just trying to follow your plan here… So Operation Torch goes on as scheduled. Germans and Italians mopped up in Libya. (You can’t invade Sicily, as you are not set up to do that until mid '43, when you hope to begin your invasion of France.)
So immediately completing operations in North Africa (Mar '43), you begin pulling troops, tanks, and fleets out of the Med in April of 43. Meanwhile, Germany is placing German troops and Tigers in Italy to defend Italy, and the Italian fleet is still mostly whole. Another really big benfit to the Axis is that they would be able to continue to use the Rumanian oil fields through most of the war (they were successfully bombed from Allied bases in Italy in '44.)
Here is where we say “Hmm, am I crazy Hitler, or am I someone who wants to win the war?” I would see it as extremely possible that North Africa might be invaded in mid '43 if all British fleets and troops were pulled out, which they would have to be to stage a French invasion in 43. This leaves Suez open to conquest, which gives Germany access to Mid East Oil fields, slows reinforcement of the South Asian Campaign, and the possibility of Germany disrupting the Lend Lease route to Russia through Iran. Undefended land can fall mighty fast to motorized units, and in Africa with fleet supply lines the Axis would not outrun their supply lines as they did in Russia.
If Axis can take Suez, they can bottleneck Gibraltar and turn the Med into their own lake. This would have enormous benefit to them as far as freeing up troops. Defend all of Italy, the Balkans, and southern France vs constantly bombard Gibraltar and defend the west coast of Morrocco?
OK, you say. I’ll leave SOME troops and fleets in Africa to slow down any German attempt. Now you are trying to invade western France with only some of the troops available in '43. A partially successfull invasion with less than overwhelming numbers in '43 would have been disastrous to the Allies. Easily boxed in, hard to resupply, and a ready target.
This scenario has always intrigued me, in part because it so very nearly happened. Fighter Command was really smarting during the Battle of Britain at the point when the Luftwaffe shifted focus from hitting RAF assets to the London Blitz. However, I’ve always had a hard time seeing how the invasion part was supposed to come off. Reducing the RAF to nothing doesn’t do anything to increase Germany’s sealift capacity, and I just can’t see how they’d have supported any significant troop levels across the Channel. Some raids intended to bring Churchill to the negotiating table? Possible. Sustained invasion? I just can’t see how.
The Italian fleet hadn’t been whole since the attack on Taranto in 1940. And a German build-up in Italy would have benefitted an Allied attack in France.
It’s the middle of 1943. The Germans have already lost the Battle of Stalingrad and are in the middle of losing the Battle of Kursk. The Americans and the British have landed in France, which in 1943 hadn’t been fortified for a defensive battle.
And Germany’s going to invade North Africa? That would be right around the time when the Field Marshals say, “wow, he really is crazy” and shoot Hitler.
The Italians by 42 had rebuilt two of the three damaged battleships. The only reason they didn’t see much use was because they didn’t want them to get smooshed in a conflict with the British. If the British pulled out of the Med, the Italian fleet could have been put to good use transporting troops. German buildup in Italy is historic, so doesn’t take any extra troops from French lines.
You are making unproven judgements about the ability of the US and British to invade France in '43. Could units really be pulled from the Med, planned, and trained in their new plan, fast enough to make a decent invasion before rough winter seas would make them wait? Would they really have enough landing craft, air support, and tanks? America put out a huge amount of production in '43, but it couldn’t get to Britain until the end of '43 and early '44.
In addition, The N Africa and Italian campaigns drew large numbers of Axis forces to garrison Italy and southern France. If, in May 43 the British and Americans begin to abandon the Med to provide men and materiel to invade northern France, a huge number of German and Italian units are freed up to do something, either reinforce France or go campaigning to get more oil. Heck, if the Med is vacated, it might be Mussolini’s salvation! Hitler would only have to lend a new Africa Korps and Italy would be rejuvenated with easy victories over hollow enemies.