Yea, this seems kind of obvious when you consider that it took the UK and US two years to build up the forces and infrastructure for an invasion going the other way, with naval and air dominance, with most of the German army at the time occupied on the other side of Europe fighting the Russians and the people in the territory being invaded sympathetic to the invaders. And progress in the Normandy campaign was still much slower then planned.
It seems ridiculous to think the Germans would have a chance launching a similar invasion more or less on the fly, to hostile territory without control of the Channel and against an undivided British army.
Addressing the other major Axis power, Japan could have won if it had avoided bombing Pearl Harbor - or, if it did, then made sure to knock out the American carriers (wait for them to be in port) and all oil supplies - and avoided invading China. Instead, Japan should have let the Communists and Nationalists fight each other as long as possible, constantly propping up the weaker side, to keep China divided and weak.
Japan overextended itself. It should have limited itself to Taiwan, the Philippines and some of Southeast Asia.
Japan should also have put maximum effort towards developing a nuclear weapon. And built nonflammable houses.
My stock answer to this, when its posted somewhere.
Sea Lion was a political operation, that had gone past its due date. Churchill ended up being the PM and not who the Germans figured would be PM. Sea Lion was the threat of an invasion, rather than an actual invasion, so that it would have been better to sue for peace and avoid a supposed repeat of WW1 and the casualties that GB took.
There is no rational way Japan wins once it attacks Pearl Harbor–the US industrial output eventually crushes Japan no matter how many carriers are sunk. The only possible argument that could be made would be if Japan was able to shock-and-awe the US to the point of immediate capitulation. Once the US decided to fight it was over.
This may well have worked. We have run many wargames and altho much depends on how US politics reacts (certainly much lend lease aid, etc would come from the USA) it could well work.
Also the Imperial Japanese attacking the USSR, even as a feint may cause Stalin to not recall those fresh divisions (with unpurged veteran officers) for the relief of Moscow, etc. This might have allowed the Nazis to get further. That may have caused Stalin to collapse or the government to collapse. Stalin was on the verge of collapse several times.
One historian posited that having the Nazis drive into the Middle East instead of Greece & Yugoslavia may have worked.
Yes, there are tactics that would have caused the Nazis to not have have * lost* the Battle of Britain. But as long as Churchill was PM, they never could have won the Battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe could have gotten air superiority, yes, maybe. An invasion would have been a monumental failure.
Invading China came first, triggering the US sanctions that let the militaristic factions win power and commit Japan to war. If they don’t invade China in the first place there is no Pacific War at all, no reason for one.
You don’t think invading the Philippines puts Japan at war with the US anyway? And, that perimeter does not get them what they went to war to get - rubber (Malaya) and oil (Indonesia).
Not sure which of those is the less feasible. Where do they get the uranium from? If the Germans couldn’t do it in 5 years the Japanese certainly couldn’t do it in 4.
Out of what material do they rebuild, say, 20 million houses, and where do they get it?
And most importantly: what historical allocation of resources do they do without in order to devote effort to those things?
I am reading this thread a whole different way. Most people are assuming the central question is how could the Axis have “won”, i.e. militarily defeated the Allies. To me, the Axis “winning” means “surviving as viable political entities”. The answer is completely dependent on the time at which both Germany and Japan began began making better choices. Many people would say that time passed once Germany launched the invasion of the Soviet Union.
I would tend to agree with this, with one proviso. There are claims (I don’t know whether they’ve been authoritatively confirmed or debunked) that The Soviets tried to do a peace treaty afterwords – specifically to give up the Ukraine in exchange for cessation of hostilities. Supposedly, when the offer came, Hitler bushed it aside, thinking he would be taking Moscow in another few weeks anyway.
If the stories are true, Hitler’s biggest mistake was not taking the offer.
As for Japan, it might have got the oil it needed by attacking British and Dutch forces in the West Pacific and leaving the US alone. I think that after Pearl Harbor, they were doomed.
We certainly had the scientists and the physical resources, and while America threw the kitchen sink at the task, Britons tend to do their best work in sheds.
I disagree. It would have taken decades for purely British scientists to develop the bomb, if at all. The British didnt have the cash to devote to the project, didnt have testing facilities, and it took the British until 1952 to develop an independent bomb even with all the info discovered during the Manhattan Project.
And, of course, during the war, there would have been no place for the British to test a bomb.
I’ve always thought the notion that Allied victory was inevitable to be far too simplistic. (Let’s ignore the especially facile assumption that U.S. would surely have developed atomic weapons first and therewith won the war.)
First, Hitler’s decision to invade Russia was a severe mistake. He underestimated the strength of Stalin’s military. Avoiding that mistake would have had a huge effect.
Second, the Allies enjoyed great luck. The Battle of Midway was a very close thing. If either their codes were secure or they had better reconaissance during the Battle, Japan would have won that Battle and set back the American cause hugely.
Decryption of Enigma codes was hugely important to Britain, and hardly a sure thing. Without it, German U-boats would have continued to destroy Allied shipping, Rommel’s Afrika Corps would have been properly supplied, etc.
Even the success of the Normandy landings was not a sure thing.
Germany had the resources of Scandinavia, and most of Europe available. They could have sought resources in Southwest Asia by allying either with Russia or Turkey.
Documentaries like this one make the claim that Hitler was winning the Battle of Britain until he switched from targeting RAF bases to targeting London. This he did, supposedly, in anger after Churchill bombed Berlin.
Turkey (to project power toward the Middle East) and Spain (to close the Straits of Gibraltar) were important neutrals Hitler tried unsuccessfully to woo.
More than 300,000 troops escaped from Dunkirk, one of the most amazing stories of the War. Had a substantial number of these been taken prisoner, Britain would have been demoralised.
It’s argued that the combination of U.S., Russia, and the British Empire was too strong not to win. Perhaps, but with better decisions (or luck) Hitler could have avoided or delayed war with Russia, and led Britain to sue for peace. How could even an alliance of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. have defeated the Axis if Britain were neutral?
I don’t consider this ‘luck’. A lot of effort was made to crack those codes. If the US had any luck, they made it themselves. Japanese doctrinal arrogance was a lot of the US’s ‘luck’.
Good reconnaissance is not a fixture of ‘luck’ and knowing the Americans were there wouldn’t have ensured Japanese victory. In fact, even had they completely sunk the US fleet they weren’t capturing Midway. Not with what they brought.
The Japanese fleet had more than their share of ‘luck’ in that battle as well. There were points where they could have lost even more than they lost or lost it earlier.
Furthermore, a total Japanese victory at Midway would have just delayed the inevitable.
If Germany had treated the local population of USSR less harshly they could perhaps had won over substantial numbers. At the greatest extend Germany had control over 80% of the USSA population. Also Stalin did sue for peace with Germany in 1941 and was willing to part with Ukraine. If Germany had accepted at that time things might have looked a lot different.
All it would have done is ensured that the 4 survivors of Kido Butai in question would have been present to be sunk for real during the Battle of the Philippine Sea 2 years later, after all of those Essex class CVs come off the slips. Attrition of their flight groups would still have proceeded apace in the interval, greatly reducing their effectiveness. Maybe the ending of the war gets delayed by 6 months or so. [I was perusing the chapter in Shattered Sword which discussed just this topic the other day.]
The Kriegsmarine would still have to deal with airborne radar & the closing of the Atlantic Gap + numerous escort carriers, as well as improved AS tactics by the surface escorts. Theirs was an obsolete technology, and the XXI’s would have arrived far too late in any event.
There were severe issues with the Italian merchant marine even before the RN started sinking them left and right, which is why Rommel and Co. could only have a relatively small amount of troops down there, often waiting several months for the supplies to build back up. Rommel was operating on a limited timeline, which was destined to end when the Torch landings came along to totally compromise his rear. I don’t think there was much more that he could have done that he didn’t do, until that transpired.
I used to like reading alternate history, until I realized that most of the counterfactuals that I encountered often are completely arbitrary (i.e. pulled out of the author’s nether regions) and highly unlikely to have happened during the timeline in question. There was a huge amount of inertia on the Allied side that, while it had taken quite a while to get going, was going to be very very difficult for the Axis to stem once it did.
A complete loss for the US at Midway would have been a relatively short-term blow. The manufacturing capacity of the US was so far above Japan’s that Japan really had no hope. Read through some of the stats on this page at CombinedFleet.com. During the war Japan produced 17 carriers of all kinds (including smaller “escort” carriers). The US produced 141. In 1944 the US built more aircraft (96,318) than Japan did for the entire war (76,320; total US production for the war was 324,750). The page later discusses a theoretical outcome if Japan had completely won the Battle of Midway. By July 1 1943 (~ 1 year after Midway) the US has more carriers than Japan and on Jan 1 1944 it’s a decisive advantage.
