No one here has mentioned the nuclear option. I’ve always played with the scenario of “what if Hitler (and other key German leaders, possibly) had precise knowledge of the original future?”
Note that whatever technology or god-like manipulation changes their knowledge, it also changes their minds so that they are rational enough to apply their new knowledge properly.
The question then is how much knowledge do you have to give them, and how many of the German leaders have to be reprogrammed?
It seems obvious that if one of their top nuclear scientists suddenly had a eureka moment, where he knew exactly how to build a fission bomb using an efficient design, that would change everything. If Germany had opened up their invasion of Russia with 50 kiloton nukes on Moscow, Stalingrad, and a dozen other cities, it would have gone very differently indeed. (I’m assuming that history is changed in 1935 or so, giving them years to get their atomic weapons ready)
I’ve heard that Germany was bankrupt by 1941 and had to attack something to remain solvent somewhat, is this true? Putting the ideological and political theories aside.
They had no reasonably safe way to get a bomb to its territories. By the summer of 1945 the USA had only produced 3 bombs. Could the UK risk shipping one to a far flung territory? They eventually tested their bombs in Australia, but Australia too was in a war zone.
True, but let us say the Battle of Midway was like the Battle of the Coral Sea- a tactical win for the IJN, and strategic win for the USA. Or even a straight loss for the uSA- this just delays the war by no more than a year, tops.
Yes, it has come out recently that Admiral Canaris, the head of German Intelligence, actually advised Franco to not ally with the Nazis as Hitler was nutso and they were gonna lose.
I think that once all three are Allies, the war is over. It took British steadfastness, American manufacturing and Russian manpower to win. With only two of those on the Allied side, the Axis wight have won.
I recently read an alternative history where the Japanese followed up the Pearl Harbor raid with an invasion and occupation. I suspect that would have effected quite a few more battles until the US war factory really got cranked up.
What if after Dunkirk, the Reich had offered peace terms with the UK? Of course, there would have been a trust issue with Hitler still leading Germany.
Or what if, during the Normandy invasion, Hitler had released the armor reserves he had ordered to wait to oppose an invasion of the Pas de Calais, where most of the German wise money said an invasion was most likely?
Oh, and on a slight tangent, wasn’t the pre-landing barrage from the battleships, cruisers, etc supposed to level the German defenses on the invasion beaches? It seems to me they missed the defenses on Omaha beach. Was it more effective at the other 4 invasion beaches?
The territory would have been Canada, most likely, and yes, there was a safe(ish) way to get a bomb across the Atlantic. RMS Queen Elizabeth, and her sister ship Queen Mary were used as troop transports, and they were so fast they didn’t need escorts - not that much could keep up with them anyway. Queen Elizabeth alone transported about 750,000 troops during the war, both across the Atlantic and also from Australia.
Canada and Australia have vast deposits of uranium. Whether that was known at the time I do not know.
It wasn’t a “decision”, it was his entire point of getting into the war in the first place. If Hitler is running Germany then they attack the USSR, there is no way that doesn’t happen.
As sure a thing as there ever was in warfare. I’ve seen it described in military histories as a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.
And a staggeringly inefficient government, bureaucracy and economy, which wasted what resources they had to hand. Pouring more resources into the far end of a leaky pipe doesn’t get you more out the other end, just bigger leaks. They squandered so much of what they did have on weapons that could never have helped in any larger sense, like rockets, jets, battleships, and so on.
Never going to happen, see the above - Russia (or at least the land it was on) was why there was a war in the first place.
What did Turkey have that would have turned the tide? Why could they not have got it via trade, as they did with Swedish iron ore?
But not defeated. The RN and RAF are virtually untouched at this point.
The USSR alone would have defeated Germany, in almost any combination of circumstances.
They did, and had a less determined man than Churchill been there it was not out of the question. Hell, had King Edward not abdicated it could still have happened. All this means is the USSR defeats Germany alone.
Then all those panzers and men get killed a little earlier, that’s all. Anything visible that strays within range of a 18" naval shell is dead, simple as that. One just has to land near a Tiger or Panther to flip it over and render it useless, it doesn’t even have to hit it.
All the beaches had access to equivalent naval and air support.
The difference was more due to the quality of the defending troops, and to some extent the terrain. Also the US refused to use the specially modified tanks the British had for clearing mines, obstacles, flamethrowers etc.
Turkey was the main supplier of chromite ore to Germany, which is needed in the production of steel. But being chummier with Turkey would not have made them send any more. Once Hungary fell to the USSR Germany was cut off.
Omaha had the heaviest defenses of all the D-Day beaches and pre-attack barrages have rarely been as good as the artillerists would hope. This has been true for much of the history of artillery. The pre-attacks bombardments were better at Utah.
Yes, they could have gotten their hands on Uranium, though probably not in the same quantities on the same timeline. Plutonium exists in nature but not in concentrations suitable for mining, instead it is created using a breeder reactor (with Uranium as the raw material).
According to the Manhattan Project wiki page there were 4 major Uranium sites known at the time: Colorado, Northern Canada, Czechoslovakia (occupied by Germany), and the Belgian Congo (flooded). Additionally, there was closed a Uranium mine in the UK (I don’t know whether it was totally depleted or just uneconomical).
It was also entirely unavoidable. The entire point of the war for Hitler was to invade Russia to seize lebensraum in the East for the deutschvolk. He had been spelling this out explicitly for pretty much his entire political life.
It would not have mattered. If the US had lost horribly at Midway, losing every single carrier while not scratching any of the Japanese ones, the US would have achieved parity in carrier in aircraft carriers by September 1943 and a 2 to 1 advantage in carrier air power by mid 1944. There’s a site here that goes into depth on just how badly mismatched Japan was with the US economically, and posits just such a reverse Midway scenario. The results:
The USSR stopped the Germans on their own. Lend-lease aid to the USSR did not even start until November 1941, and the last gasp of Operation Typhoon came grinding to a halt by the beginning of December. The Soviet counteroffensive was already underway and the Germans in retreat when Pearl Harbor was bombed.
It could never have happened. Japan did not have the tankers or merchants to support such an operation; they were already overstretching themselves with their historical opening moves in WW2. Oahu was heavily garrisoned, with two entire triangular infantry divisions on the island, and the coastal artillery batteries protecting the island were very formidable, ranging up to 16" naval rifles and would have torn an invasion fleet to shreds.
It might have been ultimately unavoidable, but it might have been delayed, until for instance, England was knocked out altogether. There is also the possibility that Germany might have accepted a peace treaty with Stalin after taking Ukraine.
No, not even close. In fact without either GB or the USA the outcome was doubtful. Just the USSR, all alone, no massive aid from the USA, no need for the Nazis to keep forces behind in France, Italy, etc? Over in months.
The USA used 16" shells, not 18. And they could only clear maybe 15 miles in, and they had limited ammo. If the Panzers had been set free, D-Day may have failed. Mind you, that’s by no means the end of the war- unless Stalin collapses.
A failed counter offensive (wiki):* “For the first time since June 1941, Soviet forces had stopped the Germans and driven them back. This resulted in Stalin becoming overconfident and deciding to further expand the offensive. On 5 January 1942, during a meeting in the Kremlin, Stalin announced that he was planning a general spring counteroffensive, which would be staged simultaneously near Moscow, Leningrad and in southern Russia. This plan was accepted over Zhukov’s objections.[86] Low Red Army reserves and Wehrmacht tactical skill led to a bloody stalemate near Rzhev, known as the “Rzhev meat grinder”, and to a string of Red Army defeats, such as the Second Battle of Kharkov, the failed attempt at elimination of the Demyansk pocket, and the encirclement of General Vlasov’s army near Leningrad in a failed attempt to lift the siege of the city. Ultimately, these failures would lead to a successful German offensive in the south and to the Battle of Stalingrad.”
*
The Battle of Stalingrad went on unto February 1943, by which time the Lend lease program was in full swing:
*In total, the US deliveries through Lend-Lease amounted to $11 billion in materials: over 400,000 jeeps and trucks; 12,000 armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks, about 1,386[25] of which were M3 Lees and 4,102 M4 Shermans);[26] 11,400 aircraft (4,719 of which were Bell P-39 Airacobras)[27] and 1.75 million tons of food.[28]
Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For comparison, a total of 22 million tons landed in Europe to supply American forces from January 1942 to May 1945. It has been estimated that American deliveries to the USSR through the Persian Corridor alone were sufficient, by US Army standards, to maintain sixty combat divisions in the line.[29][30]
The United States gave to the Soviet Union from October 1, 1941 to May 31, 1945 the following: 427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil), 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc.), 1,900 steam locomotives, 66 Diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars.*
The wonderful T34 is of little use if it has no fuel and the crew has no food.
Joseph Stalin, during the Tehran Conference in 1943, acknowledged publicly the importance of American efforts during a dinner at the conference: “Without American production the United Nations [the Allies] could never have won the war.”
Note also that Germany held back about 100 Divisions to guard other fronts. If those had been available, it would have increased the Forces for Barbarossa by half again.
What on earth are you talking about? German offensive operations came to a complete halt, they were put on the defensive along the entire length of the Eastern front and they lost a great deal of territory, men, and material during the winter of '41/42. Yes, Stalin was overambitious in expanding the counteroffensive to encompass the entire length of the front rather than concentrating it in smaller sectors and ultimately diluted it, but on what objective metric can you possibly call the winter '41/42 counteroffensive a ‘failure’? They didn’t drive the Germans back to Berlin? As can clearly be seen on a map of the Eastern front from 5 December 1941 to 5 May 1942 Germany lost a great deal of ground in the Army Group Center sector and any threat to Moscow was removed.
What Stalingrad, which didn’t occur until a year later and lend lease aid in 1943 has to do with the Soviets stopping the Germans in December 1941 is beyond me. Germany also most certainly did not hold back 100 divisions from Barbarossa on June 22, 1941 to guard other fronts.
“For the first time since June 1941, Soviet forces had stopped the Germans and driven them back. This resulted in Stalin becoming overconfident and deciding to further expand the offensive. On 5 January 1942, during a meeting in the Kremlin, Stalin announced that he was planning a general spring counteroffensive, which would be staged simultaneously near Moscow, Leningrad and in southern Russia. This plan was accepted over Zhukov’s objections.[86] Low Red Army reserves and Wehrmacht tactical skill led to a bloody stalemate near Rzhev, known as the “Rzhev meat grinder”, and to a string of Red Army defeats, such as the Second Battle of Kharkov, the** failed attempt at elimination of the Demyansk pocket, and the encirclement of General Vlasov’s army near Leningrad in a failed attempt to lift the siege of the city. Ultimately, these failures **would lead to a successful German offensive in the south and to the Battle of Stalingrad.”
What if, right at the outset, the Germans had attacked to the East instead of the West. No invasion of Belgium or France, but instead, sweeping through Poland and stopping to gather supplies, then when it was strategically right, an all-out surprise attack on Russia? Some units would probably have to have been held back to defend Germany from an attack by France and/or England, but not nearly as many as would have been required to attack and hold Belgium and France. Could Russia have responded fast enough to prevent the Germans from doing a blitzkreig on them?
They probably would have lost worse than they historically did. The Germans were still in the process of building up their army in 1939. They pretty much threw everything they had (including captured Czech equipment) into the invasion of Poland and after that they needed several months to get ready for the invasion of France. And then after defeating France (and incorporating more captured equipment) Germany needed several months to get ready for their big operation - the invasion of Russia.
If the Germans had tried to invade the Soviet Union first, they would have been doing it with a lot less equipment and a much smaller army (Germany spent months negotiating with Italy, Finland, Hungary, and Romania so they would send their troops to fight alongside the Germans).
And the Soviets would have had some advantages in 1939 they didn’t have in 1941. The original Soviet border had been fortified during the thirties. When the Soviets were given territory in Eastern Europe as part of their deal with the Nazis, they moved their troops forward to the new unfortified border. And while Stalin had killed a lot of military officers in the purge of 1937 to 1938, he would kill a lot more in the second wave of military purges in 1940. So the Red Army in 1939 had a lot more officers than it had in 1941.
Not to mention that the 300,000 men, 3,500 tanks and 500 planes they lost invading Finland would still be available. That said, they probably learned some lessons in that debacle too.
You have got to be joking.:rolleyes: The failure to reduce the Demyansk pocket makes the entire '41/42 winter counteroffensive a failure? Throwing the Germans back a hundred miles from Moscow was a failure? Costing the Germans hundreds of thousands of casualties and forcing them to abandon tanks, artillery, and heavy equipment that couldn’t be moved in the snow during the retreat was a failure because the Demyansk pocket wasn’t reduced? Turning the front lines around Rzhev on its back so that it remained a dangerously exposed salient that tied down a large German force having to defend it in three directions until they finally abandoned it in order to shorten the lines to create reserves needed for the Battle of Kursk in 1943 was a failure because 100,000 German troops were encircled at Demyansk but the pocket wasn’t reduced? By the by, holding it cost them 55,000 of those 100,000 troops, and led Goering to tell Hitler he could supply Stalingrad by air a year later, and we all know how well that turned out.
You really have your dates completely screwed up when you lead off with your list of failures of the '41/42 winter offensive with “a string of Red Army defeats, such as the Second Battle of Kharkov”. Second Kharkov wasn’t part of the '41/42 winter offensive. Second Kharkov lasted from from 12–28 May 1942. Last I checked, May occurs in the spring, which makes sense, since the battle was a collision of the Soviet Spring ‘42 offensive to break out from the Izyum bulge and the German Spring '42 offensive to reduce the Izyum salient once the spring rasputitsa had ended, as the roads become a sea of mud in early spring when the winter snow melts. Saying the Soviet failure at Second Kharkov would lead “to a successful German offensive in the south and to the Battle of Stalingrad” isn’t true for one thing; the reduction of the Izyum bulge was (pardon the pun) just spring cleaning of the front lines in preparation for the German '42 summer offensive which was only to take place on the southern third of the Eastern Front. It’s rather odd that if the Soviet winter counteroffensive was a ‘failure’ that Germany lacked the strength to launch a front-wide offensive in the summer of '42 as they had in '41, and couldn’t even threaten Moscow in the summer of '42 with how far they had been pushed back from it during the winter '41/42 counteroffensive.
I’m still waiting on a cite for these mythical 100 divisions that Germany held back from Barbarossa. Oh, and actually linking to where on wiki you are pulling things from would be nice so more people than just you could look at it.
