Is this a new concept “bottled up” submarines.
Firstly the idea of a Nazi-Soviet permanent alliance is stupid, given that the entire point of Nazism is lebensraum in the east. You might as well ask: would a Nazi-USA alliance have won?
However I think that a Nazi-soviet war Machine stretching from Normandy to valdivostock would find a way to knock Britain out. Divert all resources to filling the Atlantic with uboats, and filling the skies above Britain with aeroplanes… I think Britain can be knocked out.
Remember axis d-day is quite different - London is a short way over unremarkable terrain from the south coast.
:dubious: No, it’s a pretty old concept. Older than the submarine itself, actually. The Kattegatt and Skaggerak, which form the outlet of the Baltic to the North Sea, were extensively mined during WW2. A lot of them are still there.
The Bosporus - the Black Sea’s outlet to the Sea of Marmara, and eventually the Aegean Sea, was closed to the ships of belligerents during WW2. Presumably, in the instance of an actual Nazi-Soviet alliance, Turkey would acquiesce to the passage of subs from the Black Sea Fleet.
Ironically, that’s exactly what the last thread I did on alternative history was. 
You seem to be missing the point of discussions about alternative history. Notice in the OP I said it was pretty much unlikely to the point of being impossible?
Maybe, though in order to actually invade the British Isles they would have to basically wipe out both the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, and I don’t think it’s as simply as just diverting resources into U-boats and aircraft. It’s like saying Napoleon could have easily conquered the UK…if only he could figure out how to get his troops across the English Channel. Also, I seriously doubt that the Axis (basically the Germans) would have concentrated solely on the invasion…there were other things they would have wanted to go after. After all, in the end what good would invading the British Isles have done for Germany? Not like it’s resource rich on it’s own. You have to look at it from a costs to benefits perspective and while there is some benefits to invading the home islands, it’s going to be hideously costly. Better to try and knock them out and have them sue for peace, especially a peace on German terms this time. Perhaps force the UK to give up all it’s African territories and maybe let India go.
The point of alternative history is to understand history better by changing a contingent event or two. A Nazi soviet alliance means completely changing Nazi ideology, and is therefore pointless.
You should then leave the thread, unsubscribe and take your valuable insights to a more worthy discussion then.
An agreement between the Nazis and the Soviets in 1939 was a historical reality. Why is it impossible to imagine an agreement between the Nazis and the Soviets in 1940? If an Aryan supremacist like Hitler could make an alliance with the Japanese, he could have made one with Stalin. If an communist like Stalin could make an alliance with British and American capitalists, he could have made one with the Germans. Hitler and Stalin were both ruthless dictators who took whatever position they thought would best benefit them without regards for the ideological contradictions - and reverse that position when they felt the circumstances had changed.
I can’t assume it happens (Stalin joins the Nazis) because it’s fundamentally re-writing history and the pretexts of that history. Hitler hated communists, and both Stalin and Hitler were territorial and, to different degrees, had designs on expansion.
I just go back to what would have happened had Hitler been disciplined enough not to attack Russia?
But Nazis competed with Communists domestically and the Nazis were obsessed with eliminating them. They were a competing political power until Hitler and the Nazis started mass murdering their political enemies. That sort of alliance would have made Hitler uneasy. The agreement that the Soviets had was not to get involved in stopping Germany provided that Germany did not attack it in return.
All good points, but that isn’t what the OP wanted us to discuss, was it? If you don’t like the premise don’t play, right?
One issue with this that I have is assuming that Germany gets the atomic bomb in late 1945, and that there is a significant gap in American atomic bombs 2 and 3. It was my understanding (willing to be proven wrong) that the Germans weren’t all that close to getting the bomb, and that Americans could have had additional bombs ready within a week or so. If those are correct, I think the allies would have had a fair amount of atomic bombs for quite a while before the Axis did, and I think that would, or could change the outcome.
Assuming it all goes as the video says, would Hitler then attack the Soviet Union after Britain negotiates an armistice? I can’t decide.
Herr Schickelgruber’s health was not good, either mental or physical, so maybe he dies or retires and then whoever takes over afterwards concentrates on consolidating the empire, or he continues on as Fuehrer and does the same stupid thing, just later.
Regards,
Shodan
Interesting thread! See Len Deighton’s excellent counterfactual novel SS-GB, which has the UK under Nazi occupation, and Hitler and Stalin still BFFs in November 1941 (Barbarossa never happened). They’re so chummy that the Nazis allow the Soviets to ceremonially exhume Karl Marx’s remains from Highgate Cemetery in London to rebury him in Moscow. It, um, does not go well.
“'Cause he’s once, twice, three times an aggressor…”
The Allies would certainly miss that oil over the long term.
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Everyone in the thread knows why it wouldn’t have happened. Again, that’s not the point of this discussion. Most alternative history discussions start with a deviation from history that is unlikely…if it were likely then history probably would have followed that course. In the last discussion, there was really no way for the US to join with Germany and the Entente alliance, but it was still interesting to discuss it. In this case, there is no way Germany doesn’t invade Russia…it was their goal all along, after all. But this is alternative history, so we are assuming some fundamental change in attitude, or an alternative history Hitler who doesn’t have his goal set on taking Russia.
As I said to nicky, if you can’t wrap your head around this then it’s best to just head out for better discussions.
It’s hard to say what would happen down the road. You obviously watched the video linked in the OP, and one of the things discussed there is that the Red Army of our time isn’t going to re-materialize in this alternative history since the circumstanced of it’s creation never happened. Instead, the author of the video posits that the Russian army is the clusterfuck it was during the winter war, but on a grander scale. They do invade into Afghanistan and Iran as well as Northern China, but they don’t do particularly well (think Italian Army in the Greece or North Africa campaigns). This could have the effect of lessening Stalin’s grip on power, especially if there was a lot of wide spread unhappiness over these military actions. Remember, instead of being the one invaded, with their backs to the wall fighting for their lives, in this alternative they are the aggressors, invading other countries…and at a time before they had really reorganized after Stalin’s purges of the military, when they still had a lot of political officers in charge (many of who were weeded out by natural selection during the German invasion in our timeline).
ETA: That was my long, rambling way of saying that if Germany DID want to consider invasion in the post WWII timeline, assuming the UK signs an armistice and the US also signs a peace treaty then it’s more than possible they could do so, and perhaps succeed. The Soviets would have a lot of their armed forces holding down territory they captured in the Middle East and China, and they might be fairly demoralized at this point too. They wouldn’t have had the large injection of goods from the US…they might have had it from Germany instead, perhaps becoming dependent on that as well.
If Germany did invade the USSR after an armistice, I wonder what the US would do. Help Stalin? Sit back and let them exhaust each other? Foment rebellion in the conquered territories? Wait until Germany bogs down, and then attack Italy?
Plus, it is one thing to conquer territory, but what do you do with it then? I suppose they could use India for slave labor, but can you produce military supplies with them?
Hitler was a great politician but a lousy general. It is practically guaranteed he would do something stupid, probably several somethings. I am told that he might have gotten Ukraine on his side when he invaded, but treated them like the scum he thought they were. He isn’t going to treat the people he conquers any better. Maybe it would work out if Hitler dies shortly after the armistice is signed. Then somebody takes over and says, “OK we’ve got Lebensraum - let’s try and leben in it”.
I can’t see Goering, Goebbels, or Himmler doing that.
Regards,
Shodan
I can’t see the US becoming Russia’s ally after the war. Most likely we’d sit back and laugh, or perhaps with the UK try and take advantage of the situation by fanning unrest in the Middle East (always a great plan :p). It’s possible that the Chinese Republic would still be a going thing in central China, and we might have been supporting them all along, so might transition to more help in pushing the Russians out of the area. It would depend on the war with Japan wound down…did the US beat the Japanese and reclaim a bunch of the pacific territories, or was there a stalemate with Japan holding a large chunk of the pacific rim and South East Asia. What happened in India? What the US would do in the event of an eventual falling out between Russia and Germany post war would hinge on those things.
One of Hitler’s other most-longstanding principles was the sanctity of the German people and the promise to reclaim all German territory everywhere and rebuild a Greater Germany.
And what did Hitler do when he decided an alliance with Mussolini would be useful? He agreed to let Mussolini “Italianize” the South Tyrol. This was a former Austrian territory where ninety percent of the population was German speaking. Hitler looked the other way while Mussolini kicked all of the Germans out and resettled the area with Italian speakers.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
I am assuming that Japan still attacks Pearl Harbor, and the US does most of the heavy lifting in the Pacific and sends its military and other supplies to Britain instead of the USSR. It still winds up as a stalemate in Europe, but the US was always going to win in the Pacific, with or without the Bomb. Then after the equivalent of the Battle of Midway, the US progresses much more slowly across the Pacific because they are divided in their attention, but still wind up defeating Japan.
And I still think that atomic weapons are a game-changer. We would just use them to start the war against Germany and the USSR, not the end of the war with Japan.
Regards,
Shodan
I seem to remember being told that when the Nazis attacked the USSR, Stalin initially went to ground in his dacha, and when the desperate Politburo went to see him for some sort of direction on what to do next, he thought they had come to shoot him. His paranoia could turn against himself.
Didn’t Germany and Japan have a treaty declaring that if one was attacked, the other would come to the defense?
Was there any plan for the GB government to relocate to Canada?