I’m not convinced of this theory. Roosevelt had opposed Germany from Day One, and despite intense internal opposition, was giving Britain all he could well before Pearl Harbor ignited the mutual declarations of war.
Tactically, that’s a different story. The U.S. wouldn’t have had Britain as a base, and certainly the course of the war should Germany have military control of Britain would be entirely different. But politically, I see no change in the U.S. attitude.
Failure to capture the BEF at Dunkirk and failure to seriously sue for peace with Britain were big mistakes. The Nazis needed to get Britain out of the war, and were not going to be able to cross the Channel, it was just too difficult. Peace was the alternative. It would have neutralized the Brits.
And still the Soviets/Russians are going to eventually crush the Nazis. The path to victory over the USSR was spurned when the Nazis were greeted as liberators by the local Ukrainian and Russian rank and file and they could have easily played that up. Instead they treated them like untermenschen, and the people quickly saw that Nazis were way worse than communists. Had they no Western Front, started in the spring, prepared for winter, and gathered allies along the way, I’d have briefly been a bar of soap. But Nazis gotta nazi, and strategically, that ain’t so hotsie.
Well, let me flesh out the scenario a bit more. Suppose Hitler decided not to invade the Soviet Union in 1941, instead Stalin invades British India through Afghanistan and inspires a mass uprising by Indian communists. Britain then has to fight against the Nazis, the Communists and the Japanese all at the same time, and a far-right government wins the next UK election and sues for peace.
Once Britain is defeated, the British Fascists are in charge and purging their opponents, and Germany has swallowed some of the British colonial possessions, Germany breaks the non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. Then Germany, Italy, Japan and the fascist-controlled European countries all declare war on the Soviet Union, with America staying neutral.
I’m going to divert from the to common “Don’t fuck with Russia” theme. Finish them when you have them on the ropes during Barbarossa. Some argue that delaying Barbarossa to invade Yugoslavia set Germany up for bad weather. That’s a side factor. A great book really looking at the campaign is “Hitler’s Panzers East: World War II Reinterpreted” by R.H.S Stolfi. He does a pretty detailed analysis. Germany’s plan was proceeding to plan with adequate logistics. As planned the Center of Gravity for the attack was Moscow. The operation was proceeding as planned with more than adequate logistics to sustain the rate of supplied they’d been using. Hitler diverted combat power from Army Group Center to
Moscow wasn’t just the political capitol. It was also the rail and communications hub for the western Soviet Union. While the Soviets were beginning to move industrial capacity east, a large chunk of it was still in the west. The only active T-34 plant was still in the vicinity of Moscow. Seizing Moscow would have taken out a lot of the Soviet logistics advantages. It also would have turned the problems of distances on the steppe against what Soviet forces survived while the Germans fell in on urban areas supported by rail line. At worst for the Axis taking Moscow would have marginalize the Soviet Union. With the US not in the war yet a peace agreement might have been possible. It certainly would have been possible to defend with fewer forces than needed for the attack against the Soviet remnants.
Combine ignoring Yugoslavia and following the plan… Soviets are sucking wind with the US not in the war. If they threw in smashing the Brits before they could escape at Dunkirk, it becomes a lonely, lonely war for the US if and when their turn came.
Fortunately Hitler, for all of his strategic risk taking when deciding to act, was pretty risk averse during execution.
That is what my daddy always said and he was an expert on such things as I am not.
Taught in Berlin and New York and Boston.
If Germany had invaded the Soviet Union in the spring instead of the summer, and been very nice to the Ukrainians and other such people and won them over psychologically and defeated the Soviets quickly, and toppled or killed Stalin, and captured the Caucasus oil fields and conscripted millions of willing Ukrainians and Russians (again, assuming Germany was being all nice and “liberating” and appealing to them)…then you *could *have a Wehrmacht with millions more troops and much fuel, ready to conquer and hold all of Europe (except for Britain, etc.)
But that’s a lot of “ands” and “ifs.”
The Enigma machine worked just fine. It was the best practical cryptographic instrument ever devised by man at the time.
The Allied ability to decipher messages sent by Enigma was dependent upon German radio operators being lazy or making errors that led to easily deduced keys, from which the machine’s setting could be calculated. More care and it could not be broken. The Waffen SS did not once have a code broken by the Allies, and they were using the same machine; conversely, the Luftwaffe had its codes broken all the time. Same machine. The only difference was that the Waffen SS was extremely careful about radio discipline, and the Luftwaffe was not.
Nothing the Allies had was better; they just put a lot more effort into cryptanalysis.
The Nazi Lorentz system was far more complex, yet still broken. The Allies had a scrambling system based on a one off recording with two copies so that Churchill and Roosevelt could have telephone calls. I don’t know if today it would be breakable.
While your comments are absolutely correct, my point remains that they could have accelerated their shift to a total war production footing years before they did. The UK’s a/c production went from 8000 in 1939 to 15,000 in 1940 and to 20,000 in 1941, while Germany went from 8300 in 1939 to 10,800 in 1940 to 12,400 in 1941. The point isn’t the specific numbers, the point is that Germany didn’t put the pedal to the metal until 1943. By 1944, the UK had only managed to grow their aircraft production to 26,500, a 33% increase over 41, while Germany went up to 40,000. Even if we reduce that to 30,000 to account for the shift to single-engine fighters, that still represents about a 140% increase in the same time period. If they had the right policies and personalities in place, they could have been outproducing the British in 1940 and 1941.
While your comments about oil production and pilot training are also true, they are not really relevant to my simple point that German industry could have produced more, earlier in the war, if they had chosen to do so. The OP was asking for possible scenarios that could have lead to an axis victory. A more productive Germany earlier in the war is something that is certainly within the realm of conceivable possibility. If that contributes to a possible scenario in which Germany knocks Great Britain out of the war in 1940, the question of oil shortages would not yet have come to a head during that period.
Regarding the comments on the Repulse, etc., in my hypothetical I specifically mentioned the need for longer-range aircraft with the Me-109s range in mind. There is no technical reason why the Germans could not have had fighter aircraft with a range similar to the Zero in 1940; the Japanese did it. A 600-mile combat range would pretty much cover all of the water around the U.K from continental Europe and Norway. Again postulating the foresight to build and train a land-based naval air arm (I’m thinking of aircraft equivalent to Nells and Bettys and Zeroes), there is no reason to think they would not have some successes against the Royal Navy. In 1940, (and I 'm sure you know this), naval ships did not have the AA firepower and fire control that they had in 1944, and while land-based fighter cover would cause some losses, coordination was still subject to failure (the Repulse and PoW were supposed to have fighter cover that day) and even if air cover was present some of the bombers would get through.
A strategic bombing force is expensive, but this goes back to shifting away from consumer production earlier in the war. That is a large part of what would need to be sacrificed. If Britain could afford to build a strategic bomber force, it was certainly within the means of Germany, especially prior to the invasion of Russia, which is the time period we are discussing regarding the possibility of knocking out the U.K. Naturally, strategic bombing won’t destroy the UK’s manufacturing ability any more than it did Germany’s, but if it knocks just 10% off that 1940 figure, that’s 1500 less aircraft to overcome.
Regarding strategic bombing of Russian industry, well, yeah, Russia is immense. I am sure there would still be some targets for these fictional heavy bombers somewhere. Maybe at some point in this fictional war they get in a position similar to the summer/fall of 1942, and this time they would be able to actually seriously damage oil production in the Baku region(the source of 80% of the USSR’s oil production then).
Your point about Hitler not being under a strict treaty obligation to declare war is Correct. That doesn’t change the fact that he declared war on the U.S. (I believe I read somewhere a long time ago that he did it (quite uncharacteristically) out of a feeling of a kind of moral obligation to his ally, but I wouldn’t stake my life on it.) However, if the UK is out of the war in 1940/early 1941, the US and Germany would not be engaged in an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic when Pearl Harbor happens, and my hypothetical is that if Hitler does not go out of his way to declare war on the U.S., and the U.K is already out of the war, the U.S. probably does not decide to go to war to liberate a defeated Europe in response to the Japanese attack and instead just kicks the shit out of the Japanese because that is all public opinion wants in that case.
By the way, my acknowledging the correctness of what you are saying is not some mere ass-kissing-based deflection technique. You really have an impressive encyclopedic knowledge of this stuff; I have seen you in other threads on this topic.
The Germans never targeted the British radar network in any serious way. They didn’t realize how well developed the British network was. This was a huge advantage for the British - they were able to track German aircraft by radar and sent British planes in the appropriate numbers to the location for interception.
If the Germans had been able to shut down British radar then the RAF, which was already stretched thin, would have had to start flying patrols to look for German planes.
They wouldn’t have been able to spot incoming flights over the Channel so the RAF wouldn’t have been able to set up flights to wait for the Germans. Instead the British wouldn’t have seen the Germans until they arrived over England and, if no patrols sighted them, until they arrived at their targets and began dropping bombs. The RAF would have had to try to get planes in the air to fight as the Germans were starting to head back home. Aerial combat would have been taking place over the Channel and France with the British losing pilots and planes at a rate similar to what the Germans historically experienced over England.
Nor was the early German plan of targeting planes a failure. The British were losing pilots and planes faster than they could replace them. Then the Germans decided to switch priorities and begin bombing cities and industrial targets. That decision probably cost them the campaign. Once the RAF stopped being the target of the German bombing attack, it was able to recover and begin defeating that attack.
One-time pads were known, and AFAIK used, by all parties - they predate even WW1. The principle at work is pretty elementary crypto, the only real hurdle lies in finding ways to generate truly random keys which even today is a non-trivial problem - the Allies employed batteries of secretaries fishing bingo balls out of hats, and even that was not totally random. SIGSALY, the audio scrambling system you refer to, is an application of the exact same principle.
They’re still the most secure, nigh unbreakable way to send messages today.
The problem is that they’re very time consuming to use, or were back in 1940 (both encrypting and decrypting take time and calculations - with a computer it’s instantaneous of course), and each sheet being one-time means the system cannot be used for regular conversations or messages - since the pads must be created and distributed to both parties well in advance of the message being sent ; and the pad is then rendered useless ; and they can only be used for one communication. So using this method faithfully for, e.g. every message sent by a submarine over the course of a 6 week mission at sea would have meant installing a frigging library aboard. *And *the sub could only have sent messages back to base but not coordinate with other submarines unless packing even more sets of pads, one per other sub in the area… Seven kinds of impractical.
Enigma ? Same principle (it’s basically a dynamic one-time-pad generator, only very not random), but no bigger than a typewriter, can be used for each and every type of message addressed to anybody so long as they know the initial positions of the rotors, and as long as you don’t send too many messages with the same initial settings it’s pretty secure. The Naval Cypher using 4 rotors instead of 3, coupled with increased communication discipline, proved uncrackable for example. That’s why capturing one so they could examine the wiring of said fourth rotor was such a big deal.
My point is that if Britain is out of the war when Pearl Harbor happens, I don’t think the U.S. goes to war to liberate a defeated Europe when Pearl Harbor is attacked, and I am assuming Hitler does not declare war at that point either. Roosevelt wanted to assist Britain as you rightly point out, but if her defeat is a done deal before Pearl Harbor, I think the public is satisfied with just Japan’s scalp and has already started to accept a Nazi-occupied Europe.
I’ve argued this point before but I don’t think the possibility of invasion was as hopeless as you do. Yes, the British had a huge naval superiority - but they didn’t keep the Royal Navy on post in the channel.
In order to defeat a cross-channel invasion fleet, the Royal Navy would have had to know when the fleet was leaving port and send the British fleet down from Scotland in time to intercept it. Keep in mind the Germans were able to launch a successful amphibious invasion of Norway without the Royal Navy catching them at sea. The Germans needed to only cross a tenth of the distance to reach England.
And even if the Royal Navy had shown up at the right hour, would it have won? The Germans would have massed submarines, minefields, and air attacks in the twenty mile wide bottleneck at the Dover Strait. The British wouldn’t be able to evade or fight back - they needed to reach the channel. So they would have had to sail straight through this gauntlet to reach the invasion fleet. The Royal Navy may have committed itself to dying in the channel but dying might have been all the fleet did.
Procedures were part of it. But usage was also a factor. The SS was mostly a land force - it transmitted a lot less of its communications by radio. Same thing with the army. The bulk of their coded communications went over telephone lines which the allies could not intercept.
This is why you usually see the most code breaking success against air units, naval units, and diplomatic services. They transmitted a lot more messages for enemy code breakers to intercept and work on.
I would think a case could be made for just the opposite. Imagine a scenario where the Nazis prevent Dunkirk, develop V2 rockets in late '40, and start dropping them on London. The Brits have little hope in taking out the launch sites and, with little prospect for winning, sue for peace.
One thing that we haven’t discussed is how Britain’s capitulation (if we pretended it happens by early '41) frees up Germany’s North African forces. How might it have affected Barbarossa if most of the Afrika Korps (and Rommel) are thrown into the Eastern Front in '41?
but the radar stations were very difficult to bomb accurately and quick to repair (and we all know how poor ww2 strategic bombing accuracy was)
If my memory serves me correctly , production increased all through 1940 and the planes available to the RAF increased as well apart from perhaps a plateau during the heat of August. Goering thought he was denuding the RAF but never really was.
As for pilots? they were a critical supply at all times but Germany were always going to lose more due to geography.
I think the Africa campaign was always a needless distraction for the Axis.
Just a quick addendum to this point, my memory wasn’t far off, the figures onthis page appear broadly accurate and correspond to my memory of them. (see the tables at the bottom of the page)
Production was as planned during June/July/August and the number of actual combat aircraft actually available to use increased through this period to a peak in late August and then held steady pretty for the rest of the year. Again, this was as much a testament to the slick system of repair and redeployment as it was to production.
I’m not a military man but I guess this is just a logical extension of “an army marches on its stomach”
The loss of North Africa meant that the entire Southern Flank of Europe was opened up to Allied attack. As happened. The Axis error was not realising that fact until it was too late and then deciding that they would commit a Panzer Army plus to the area.
Novelty Bobble, I don’t think numbers tell the entire tale. One of the main things about the BoB/Blitz (and post war least talked about) was the refusal of the RAF to come out and fight in force. Dowding kept more than half of his force out of action at any given time. The Germans switched to attacking urban areas, in the hope that this would draw the RAF out in force to defend their cities, but these being British, the most cold hearted bastards God has ever suffered to walk the earth (
:D), they decided that their airforce was more important than civilians. And it was the right decision. Cause when the Germans came out to face the (admittedly much largerO Allied onslaught in 1943-1944, they were plastered.
Was a land invasion of Russia feasible then with the technology of the time? Hell, is it feasible with modern technology? This is a country which, by and large, is mostly barren tundra - muddy and sticky in summer, frigid in winter. You can’t take tanks over that, and establishing supply lines is almost impossible.