Alternative History and WWII

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m sure most people have heard of Alternative History books, which take the premise of “What if the South won the Civil War?” or “What if Germany won WW2” and roll with it, trying to extrapolate the outcomes.

I’ve never seen one, however, that posed the question, “What if Hitler slipped on a bar of soap in the shower in 1935, hit his head and died, and thus WW2 never happened?”

I grant you I don’t know a whole lot about historical details. It seems to me that technology might not be anywhere near where it is today. I’m not sure the effects on the Cold War, of if WWII wouldn’t have simply happened a few years later, only with the Soviet Union.

Any opinions on this?

2

Well, there may or may not have been a war in europe, but a war in the pacific involving the US would still have happened. It wouldn’t have lasted as long, but might have been more bloody while it lasted, as there would’ve been less time for effective weapons to develope and mature. The Atom bomb might have never been developed (or been developed too late to be used), and that would mean that manpower would have had to substitute for firepower. Japanese casualties in the island campaigns would’ve been about the same, but American casualties would’ve gone way up. An invasion of the Japanese home islands, however, would’ve been bloody in ways I hate to think about. 10’s of millions of casualties. That said, without an European war, England, Austrailia, and New Zealand would’ve been along side in the fight against Japan to some degree or another, and with all the armaments going against Japan, well, I’d say the war would’ve been mostly done about '43 or '44.

The British Empire would likely have stayed intact to some degree, the USSR would’ve mostly stayed a backwater, and may’ve actually been more successful for having done so. Without the widespread desruction of infrastructure, the starvation and loss of life, the USSR would’ve been able to meet most of it’s own needs, and without the paranoid milatarism that the German attack stoked, the USSr would’ve likely not bankrupted itself trying to directly compete with more efficient economies.

The War in Afganistan may still have happened, but it would have lasted longer, and been less bloody in any one particular year. It likely would’ve been a slow bleeding wound in the USSR’s southern flank for decades.

Isreal would likely never have been created.

Italy and France would likely still be the dominant players in North Africa.

China might have become partitioned between Mao’s communists and Sheck’s nationalists, as Mao would’ve had less time to build and train his forces, and less time to consolidate his territorial control.

There’s lots more, but that’s my first, thoughtless stab at it.

3

Legomancer, according to Zhukov (in his book called, I think, Zhukov, Stalin was doing everything he could to avoid war with Germany;—although it’s been several years since I read the book, my impression was that Stalin wanted to avoid war with anyone. So there probably wouldn’t have been a “WW II” with the Soviet Union.

If our 1860-65 war is any guide, invention really takes off because of war. Not so much in WW II but still lots of invention came only because of WW II. On the other hand, while we weren’t concerned about it, 1/2 of the official Soviet position on their Space Program was defence against a potential asteroid (they had had a big one hit in Siberia in 1908). Defence is a kind of war, whether against a potential asteroid strike or against a human enemy. WE gots LOTS of invention out of our Space Program; the Soviets would probably have just gotten there sooner.

The problem gets REALLY complicated because of the Poles. The nobility system in Poland rejected modern war-making advances (they had a system of alliances with England, France, others). Were there no Hitler, large (but militarily weak) Poland would been sitting, “ripe for the plucking” in Eastern Europe.

Wow! You have brought up a TRULY “knotty” hypothetical situation! While fascism was “on the rise” worldwide, how much of that was due to Hitler and the NAZI party? IMHO, much of it. I suspect that the REAL eye-opening answer to your question might lie, of all places, in Japan. Worldwide! (Whew! What a thought!!)

(P.S. It is not widely said but there are the concepts of “robustness” and “continuity” in the Alternative Histories theory. That means that if this or that alternative was likely, that the effects from that alternative reverberate [like a struck percussion instrument] throughout “nearby” alternatives. In practical terms, if my “Japan” thesis is right, we—in the here-and-now—should see significant Japanese influences on worldwide matters. We do.)

4

Missed something on preview. This:

Should’ve read:
"That said, without an European war, England, Austrailia, and New Zealand would’ve been along side in the fight against Japan to some greater degree or another…

Sorry about that. The ANZAC forces were some of the toughest SOBs around and should never be slighted.

5

One of the reasons being that Stalin had executed half his military leaders in the purges. The other half were, of course, in the Gulag.

6

Command and Conquer: Red Alert is based entirely on this premise. Unfortunately, it is a badly scripted video game.

I agree that the Soviets were relatively content in their isolation in the 1930s. However, the German rebound was pretty high as it was. By 1935, the warm and fuzzy part of the message the Nazis were preaching–national pride, public and economic reconstruction in the aftermath of long depression, and stimulation of the economy by rebuilding the armed forces–was already well under way.

There were lots of other Nazis who would have been happy to have taken Hitler’s place, Hermann Goering foremost among them, in my opinion. Furthermore, fascism was on the rise throughout eastern and southern Europe. By 1935, Italian colonial expansion was already dangerously close to sparking violence between Italy, France, and England. Spain, Rummania, and Hungary all had fascist contingents which were advocating governmental overthrow.

It seems to me that by 1935 a clash of some sort was approaching certainty. After that year, all of Europe began to quietly arm themselves for the conflict they all saw coming.

7

I’m not so sure. Japan started the war counting on both America and Britain to be tied up fighting Germany. The war presented a unique “window of opportunity,” they thought, and Tojo was urging “Strike now! We will never have a chance like this again.”

That feeling of urgency would be absent without a war going on in Europe. The naval faction would have had a bloody fit on being presented with a plan that required Japan to fight the Royal Navy and the U.S. Navy simultaneously. I think Yamamoto and Nagano would have allied with Kunoye’s faction and insisted on temporizing.

I agree with everything else you predicted.

What actually happens in Germany? Who succeeds Hitler? Goering is my guess, but maybe Goebbels or Himmler would have had a shot at it? I think the Nazis would have held onto power; the most likely alternative would have been a military coup, and since the Reichswehr had been pretty well placated by that time due to Hitler’s gracious removal of Roehm and the SA, I don’t think a coup would have been attempted.

Would India still have achieved independence?

8

Please don’t take the situation I stated too literally; my ignorance of history is showing there. All I meant was, basically, what if there were no Hitler, and as a result, no WWII?

9

Now, in '30’s and early '40’s, the Japanese were running amuck in Asia, and China was an US ally. In '40 and '41, we (the US) were choking the Japanese economy to death with freezes on oil, rubber, and scrap iron, among other things. The Army in Japan was the senior service, and politically far stronger than the Navy. The Army wanted war, and sooner or later, they’d have got it. The fascistic/milataristic attitudes of the Japanese Gov’t, and it’s determination to carve a “co-prosperity sphere” put Japan squarely on a collision course with the US in that some of the islands Japan needed to secure it’s ‘border’ were American possesions, and because the Japanese desperately needed the resources held by western nations. It may or may not have started when it did, nor maybe not with the sneak attack at Pearl, but it would’ve happened. Just shift the war up or down the time line a bit. As for fighting combined US-UK-ANZAC, well, Japan would’ve just needed to wait until something distracting boiled-up in Europe, and then struck.

10

**

I think you overestimate the cohesiveness and unanimity of the Japanese government in using war to obtain their co-prosperity sphere. Let me quote to you from some of the Japanese Cabinet meetings. First, on Oct. 12, 1941.

Even after Konoye’s resignation and Tojo’s ascension to Prime Minister, there was still no unanimity in the Japanese government about going to war. Witness this Cabinet meeting of November 1.

As you can see, there was a great deal of dissension within the Cabinet about launching an attack. Your depiction of the Japanese Army as hell-bent-for-leather on going to war is perfectly accurate, as their representatives’ contributions to the meetings show. But if Nagano and Navy had stuck by Konoye in the first meeting, or by Togo in the second, it is not at all clear to me that the Army could have forced a war policy through. The Army could bring down the government pretty well at will, but could not necessarily force the new government to do its bidding.

The key thing that put the Navy on Tojo’s side was the oil embargo, which faced them with an 18-month supply of oil. But that oil embargo did not occur until Japan occupied French Indochina. Indochina was a target of opportunity presented by the war in Europe; it is not clear that Japan would have attacked an undistracted, unconquered France.

That is one way it could have worked out. But times and governments change. In the interim, an isolationist American president could have been elected willing to sell out Asia to the Japanese (especially if Japan was seen as a strong counterbalance to the Communist Soviet Union). Or the Army could have lost its dominant hold on Japanese government, discredited by its continuing lack of success in “liquidating the Chinese incident.” A U.S.-Japanese war would still have been possible, yes, but I do not admit that it was guaranteed.

11

Danimal, I’ve always known that the cabinet was divided. The senior Navy officials were mostly opposed to war with the US, but they were pretty much hemmed-in by the Army, and once war became inevitable, they turned their best efforts to winning, as any good warrior should. To the rest of the world, the cabinet presented united front. Your quotes from the cabinet meetings are fascinating. Where’d you find them? I think I could lose a couple of days reading that stuff…

Anyway, while yes, It could have turned out otherwise, I think, in the ballance, that it would have been war. The second meeting quote seems to be to be far less about avoiding war, and much more about ensuring the war chosen was winnable. The Army had far more clout, and in the end, the Navy danced the Army’s tune. French Indo-China was always on the target list, and the Japanese would have taken it in almost any scenario that I can think of, resulting in the embargo that finally pushed the ballance towards war.

For now, and for what it’s worth, those are my current best guesses.

12

You might want to check out “The Rising Sun” by the late John Toland. It is a history of the war from the Japanese point of view, and he quotes a lot of Japanese archival material. He talks a bunch about the political machinations in the Japanese government leading up to Pearl Harbor as well.

13

The quotes appear on pages 542-43 and 551 of The Illustrated World War II Encyclopedia, vol. 4, ISBN 0-87475-520-4. The “encyclopedia” (really a 24-volume history), was edited by Brig. Peter Young, but based on an original text by Lt. Col. Eddy Bauer. Unfortunately, I do not recall any other excerpts from Japanese cabinet meetings in the book.

The text attributes the meeting transcripts to Marcel Giuglaris, Le Japon perd la Guerre du Pacifique de Pearl harbour a Hiroshima, Paris: A. Fayard, 1958, though no page numbers are given. I’ve never read Giuglaris, but I’m guessing you probably have to know French to read his book.

True enough. Togo obviously knows he’s fighting a losing battle; you can sense how desperate he is when he says “2,600 years of Japanese history cannot be dismissed so glibly” - giving up on logic, he makes a blind appeal to emotion hoping it will sway the fanatical militarists around him. Kaya clearly has his doubts, but is unwilling to side with Togo openly. Everybody else is clearly decided on a war policy. And while the Navy had been sitting on the fence in the first meeting, it has now sent in Nagano to side openly with the Army.

I still have my doubts that Nagano, Ito and Shimada would be up there pitching a war policy had Nelson, Rodney, King George V, Ark Royal, and the other heavy hitters of the Royal Navy been free to team up with the U.S. Navy to take on the Combined Fleet, as would have been the case had Britain been at peace.

Of course, all this depends on the assumption that, absent Hitler, there would have been no war in Europe. That may not be so. The Nazis would have retained power, I think, and while their foreign policy would probably be radically altered (there really weren’t any other high-ranking Nazis so bold and rash as Hitler) it would still have been unlikely to be peaceful.

14

Well, Japan was in the process, even before '35, of building a world-class fleet, including monstrously powerful battleships and a large, modern carrier fleet. In fact, had peace lasted another year or so, the Japanese technical advantages at the begining of the war might well have been more pronounced. Certainly the Japanese had a larger carrier fleet than the Brittish, and were smart enough to try to achieve an engagement in detail, taking each nation’s fleet in isolation. Japanese doctrine was certainly capable of taking and sinking the Repulse and Prince of Wales. I’m not sure they’d have been intimdated for long.

Interesting conversation.

15

I’m thinking about the rise of fascism in the U.S. and Britain. Germany’s aggression forced many in those countries to renounce their political affiliations (although IIRC companies like IBM still assisted); Nazi atrocities sealed the deal after the war, and the specter of fascism has fortunately never recovered in much of the world.

I agree that another war was pretty much inevitable in both theaters, but if the war were delayed pro-nazi sentiment might well have grown substantially in the delay. Certainly Britain would not have been attacked if the fascists had taken power. If Britain were not attacked, there is a very good chance that the U.S. would never have entered the war, especially considering that in the OP scenario the threat from Japan wouldn’t necessarily have occurred simultaneously. Both might well have become allies of Germany.

Would the Holocaust have happened without Hitler?

16

I think, custard dragon, that it was more the SS chief, H. Himmler, who was the prime motivator against the Jews, homosexuals, mental “defectives”, etc. Since it was Hitler who was the truly-great “democratic” force (in the mode of, say, the ancient Athenian democratic-dictator, Pericles), I’m not at all sure that the NAZI party could have hung on until its police-state (SS+Gestapo) was firmly entrenched. My guess is that not only would the genocide have fizzled, but that the entire NAZI movement would have fizzled (then been replaced) too. (Danimal, for one, disagrees with this assessment, it seems from his earlier post, though.)

I may be wrong but there wasn’t much in the Pacific that the U.S. owned that the Japanese wanted. Some tactically important islands—but important only if there were war against the U.S. It is very possible to think of Japan “bypassing” war with the U.S. (in the strategic sense), at least during the 1940’s.

Most people forget that war-sentiment in the U.S. was not very high, at all. In fact, without something like the attack on Pearl, war-sentiment in the U.S. was pretty low. (This is historically the case in the U.S., which was founded on the notion of “defence” rather than offence. It took the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine to get us into war with Spain. And so forth in our history.)

Finally, I remember reading a book (whose title I can’t remember) by an American reporter who stayed behind in Germany, even after the European war (Germany vs. France; Germany vs. England) got going. He said, (somewhat surprisingly considering the news-films of all those cheering German citizens at Hitler’s rallies), that war-sentiment in Germany was VERY LOW—far too many memories of the WW I disaster, I suppose—and support of the in-power NAZI party was not much higher. Even among the German Army, it has been reported in many places, war-sentiment remained low until after the fall of France.

(P.S. Those quotes from the Japanese councils are truly fascinating!)

17

I’ll agree that had the Japanese wanted to avoid war the the US, it’d have been easy for themm to have done so, but barring really convincing evidence to the contrary, I’m pretty sure it’d have come to happen, for all the reasons discussed above. The low-level of war sentiment in the US played into the Japanese plans, I’m sure. All told, at the begining of the war, signals intelligence aside, the Japanese had far better knowlege of our capabilities and intentions than we had of theirs.

18

Well, the thing that makes me think that the Nazis would have maintained power is that there wasn’t anybody left to oppose them. The hypothetical has Hitler dying in 1935, after the Night of the Long Knives had eliminated the SA leadership, and the SPD and KPD leadership was already dead, exiled, or in Dachau. Everybody else, like the Catholic Center Party, had voted themselves out of existence, and the Nazi-controlled Reichstag had already outlawed the formation of new political parties. Where’s the opposition going to come from?

The only way I can see the Nazis losing power is if the Nazi party itself disintegrates into feuding factions over who’s going to succeed Hitler, and the Reichswehr (Army) steps in to take control.

19

Y’all ned to read Harry Turtledove’s short story, * The Last Article*, about Nazi occcupied India.

Great job they did repressin’ Ghandi.

20

Or, while we’re at it, SS GB, about a Nazi-occupied England. Not in line with the OP, but an interesting perspective, none-the-less.