Could the Allies have won WWII in Europe if the US had stayed truly neutral?

[BrightNShiny]

@Quartz

America only stays neutral if there’s no war in the East, so Britain can call upon masses of troops from India and other parts of the Empire. Further, it had a safe haven in Canada. .

While anything is possible in an alternate timeline, I find the idea that the British could have relied on masses of troops from India to be implausible, unless you are suggesting that the British could have withdrawn their own troops. The Congress Party was against Indian involvement in the war, and several non-Congress elements were gearing up to use the war to declare Indian independence (although haphazardly and ineffectually).

The British could have offered payment to join up to the Indians (since many Indians were dirt poor, it would have been a viable route). But any attempt at mass forced-conscription would have resulted in an immediate declaration of independence followed by complete chaos on the subcontinent, IMO.

[magnusblitz]

I know the question has a European bent, but I’m wondering… say that not only does the US remain neutral in the European theatre, but also that Pearl Harbor never happens, and the Japanese never overtly attack any American interests in the Pacific (in other words, I’m trying to eliminate the scenario where the European powers are fighting each other and the US and Japan are fighting their own separate war, which some posters have posited).

I know that Japan was much more interested in conquering eastern and southern Asia, but would they have given any aid to Germany if they hadn’t been busy fighting the US? I suppose possibilities include direct aid (actually sending over money, supplies or troops to the European battles) or indirect aid (such as attacking Russia head-on on the Asian side and possibly diverting resources).

[Magiver]

@The_Second_Stone

I’ve got to offer my respectful disagreement on the Holocaust denial with respect to the UK. The Soviets lost one-quarter of their population.

Not to make light of their losses but the Soviet Union lost closer to 1 in 7 people total.

There was a lot of collusion between the Soviet Union and Germany before the war so if Hitler had not invaded Russia then the resources needed to defeat GB would have been enormous. The technological advances alone could have made it possible without any land invasion using nothing but rockets and bombers. They had developed a stealth jet bomber capable of evading British RADAR so it was just a matter of attack, retreat, and resupply. By conquering every country in Europe Hitler acquired all the production assets each of those countries had. With the conquest of countries came an unlimited supply of slaves which gave Hitler a tremendous labor advantage.

What GB brought to the war was Winston Churchill who was able to marshal political will where it did not exists and buy time for the sons of daughters of the empire to unite. If not for him, England would have fallen, and the United States (far from a world power) would not have mobilized. With the mobilization came the atomic bomb which we would not have developed were it not for the political change from isolationism to an industrial engine of war production. Hitler’s supply of slaves was met by sheer numbers of North American production capable of producing one B-24 Liberator an hour from a single factory.

Between the political marshaling of forces and a much wiser use of people and material Great Britain held the fort where no other nation could have. Her engineering prowess gave us a tremendous edge in aviation design and code breaking techniques which led to the development of world class aircraft and computerized code breaking machines.

I don’t think one side of the Atlantic would have survived without the other.

[The_Second_Stone]

Japan had been oil embargoed by the US, which was an exporter. Japan had no oil at home, yet an extensive empire. The Philippines, a US possession at the time, were in the way of south east Asian supplies of oil. Japan’s top priority was having its “own” oil resources without a major US naval base between Japan and the supply, meaning the Philippines. Unless the Japanese abandoned their goal, which was entirely contrary to their self-sufficiency ideology, war the with the US was certain. When was not.

[The_Second_Stone]

@Magiver

Not to make light of their losses but the Soviet Union lost closer to 1 in 7 people total.

I must be including Stalin’s purges in my mind. 1 in 7 is still horrific.

I don’t think that the Nazis could have crossed the English Channel in 1941 in force anything like D-Day was in 1944. Without air superiority, which the Nazis were losing, a Nazi landing force was doomed because the British Navy could still make resupply impossible.

Combined with the bizarre liking that Hitler had for the Brits and the deep hatred he had for the Communists and Slavs in general, he was going to turn his attention eastward. When Hitler declared war on the US, only then did Churchill and Stalin realize that they could actually prosecute and win the war on favorable terms. Churchill supposedly said he knew they would win at that moment. Stalin supposedly told someone that if you compared steel output for the US and Germany that the outcome was clear. To me it is not that clear that the supplies can get to the UK and USSR. Even without the wolf packs of U-boats, you still have to build fleets upon fleets of non-existent ships get the goods there. Who could have anticipated Henry J. Kaiser’s shipbuilding methods?

In the decade prior to 1940, America’s shipyards launched only 23 ships. In the five years after 1940, American shipyards launched 4,600 ships. San Francisco Bay Area shipbuilders produced almost 45 percent of all the cargo shipping tonnage and 20 percent of warship tonnage built in the entire country during World War II. The war lasted 1,365 days. In that span of time Bay Area shipyards built 1,400 vessels–a ship a day, on average.

http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wwIIbayarea/shipbuilding.HTM

Go Rosie!

[Jim_s_Son]

@Chefguy

Hitler was an insane megalomaniac who thought (like all of his ilk) that he was infallible, that most of his generals were incompetent cowards, and that he needed to personally direct troop activity from Berlin despite inadequate fuel, supplies, and fresh troops. Had the generals been running the war, Germany may well have won. As it was, Rommel and the others were hamstrung at every turn, both by Hitler and Mussolini (when Rommel was in Africa). Germany lost the war in large part because of a long series of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

America entered the war full of bluster and bravado, assuming that its armies would roll over the Germans and Italians in no time. Instead, the troops were undertrained, under-supplied, and untested in combat except for some old warhorses from WWI like Patton. The American army lost far more battles than it won, and seriously bad strategic decisions were made that allowed the German army to recoup and return for the Battle of the Bulge. Had it not been for Hitler’s incredibly poor decision-making abilities, reliance on non-existent “secret weapons”, and the collapse of German industrial complex from RAF bombing, they might well have pushed the allied forces back to the coast.

Eventually, strength of numbers from two fronts overwhelmed the Wermacht, which was exhausted and in disarray after the war of attrition with Russia. The allies probably could have won the war without the USA, but it would likely have taken far longer. Remember: the British army was also exhausted, and the will of the British people to send another generation to its death in another trench war was just not there. The USSR, in the absence of the eventual successful addition of American manpower to allied forces, would eventually have rolled over Germany and likely claimed the entire territory as its own.

What battles are you talking about? Pretty much the only battle the American army lost to the Germans was its first, the Battle of Kasserine Pass in February, 1943. After that, it was always the Americans (and Allies) advancing and the Germans retreating. I very much doubt there was too much blustering: people had seen two years of newsreel footage of the Germans winning in Poland, France, Norway, Russia as far as Moscow and Leningrad. The Germans had a brief advance at the Battle of the Bulge but couldn’t overwhelm the Americans at the key crossroads town of Bastogne and one month after it started, the lines returned to what they were and the Germans had lost almost 100,000 men and 700 tanks.

[Teacake]

This thread is very interesting, in that you all seem to know much more about it than I do, but no-one so far in the discussions of who would have had the bomb first or what the USA’s motivations were for assisting the UK, seems to have mentioned the Tizard Mission. Any thoughts?

[Sailboat]

@MichaelEmouse

What if they hadn’t lost two months helping the Italians in Greece (therefore giving two more months of good weather)

They didn’t lose two months of good weather for attacking Russia. Maybe the weather was good in Britain and Western Europe, but as I mentioned above, the spring rasputitsa, when the frozen ground melted and didn’t drain, turning the earth into impassable mud, lasted longer than usual in 1941, and the ground couldn’t bear tanks until the second or third week in June. The word rasputitsa supposedly means “roadlessness.”

The German offensive depended on armored forces and wheeled transport (although a surprising amount of that wheeled transport was horse-drawn, it still had wheels) and they simply could not have started significantly earlier. I know it’s been taught – it may be a fiction of British wartime propaganda? – that Greece, Yugoslavia, North Africa, or some other sideshow “delayed” Operation Barbarossa, but the attack on Russia was the centerpiece of Hitler’s long-term strategy for lebensraum and it’s not credible he would have said “oooh, Greece!” and delayed the big show.

It was the weather. In Russia, it’s almost always the weather.

@Chefguy

Hitler was an insane megalomaniac who thought (like all of his ilk) that he was infallible, that most of his generals were incompetent cowards, and that he needed to personally direct troop activity

Well, up and until France fell, he was right. Years of brinksmanship and overly bold decisions by Hitler had been rewarded with almost unbroken success. He’d learned that his impulses and ruthlessness were almost always rewarded. It didn’t last, but he’d gotten pretty far on that formula and his main error was in not unlearning the false lessons it had taught him. That failure, of course, was probably due to being an insane megalomaniac. But in persisting, he was behaving in some ways not unlike a sports team that’s falling behind but whose coach insists “we just have to keep doing what’s worked for us, and concentrate on the fundamentals,” instead of radically revising strategy.

@Chefguy

The American army lost far more battles than it won

You mean “at first.” Yes, Kasserine Pass and the Bocage battles were (foreseeable) disasters, and the entire Italian campaign played into German hands (although one can legitimately point to a failure to advance from the invasion beachheads, the mistake was principally in fighting in Italy at all). Other than those instances, what specific “lost” battles are you referring to?

@Chefguy

the collapse of German industrial complex from RAF bombing, they might well have pushed the allied forces back to the coast.

Wasn’t the RAF concentrating almost entirely on night area bombing of “built up” areas (a euphemism for worker housing) – that is, killing civilians? It was the Americans who tried so hard to bomb factories and physical plant.

[Ludovic]

@Sailboat

(although one can legitimately point to a failure to advance from the invasion beachheads, the mistake was principally in fighting in Italy at all).

I would agree if the personnel situation had been around parity since our supply lines were longer and there is overhead in supporting a new front of operations. But opening a front in Italy helped extend the lines of battle, causing the Germans to peel off divisions to square off against Allied divisions, and the allies had more men than the Axis. Speaking of which, invading Italy helped the Allies neutralize Italy.

[Chefguy]

@Sailboat

You mean “at first.” Yes, Kasserine Pass and the Bocage battles were (foreseeable) disasters, and the entire Italian campaign played into German hands (although one can legitimately point to a failure to advance from the invasion beachheads, the mistake was principally in fighting in Italy at all). Other than those instances, what specific “lost” battles are you referring to?

Thanks for finishing the sentence. I was assuming that since this statement followed the comments about America entering the war as a large, bumbling mob, that it was implied. Obviously, after getting their noses bloodied a few times, and after the horror of Omaha Beach, the Americans were seasoned combat troops.

Wasn’t the RAF concentrating almost entirely on night area bombing of “builup” areas (a euphemism for worker housing) – that is, killing civilians? It was the Americans who tried so hard to bomb factories and physical plant.

True enough, and criticism was high against Air Marshal “Bomber” Harris for bombing civilians, particularly after holocausts like Dresden. However, the RAF was also instrumental in clearing the Luftwaffe from the skies and in bombing factories early on.

[ralph124c]

I very much doubt that GB and the USSR could have beaten the German without the USA. This is for two reasons:
The USA supplied GB with most of its fuel oil and aviation gasoline. The germans were close to capturing Egypt and closing the Suez canal-that would have been the end of the RAF.
Second: the Red Army rolled to victory on US-built Studebaker and GMC trucks. They laso ate US supplied rations. The russians would never had been able to supply thier huge army groups with out US materiel.
Hitler would probably have negotiated some kind of ceasefire with Russia-that would have enabled him to deal with GB.

[Quartz]

@ralph124c

I very much doubt that GB and the USSR could have beaten the German without the USA. This is for two reasons:
The USA supplied GB with most of its fuel oil and aviation gasoline.

And would have continued to do so, as long as we paid for it. But Britain had plenty of access to fuel. If we ran short of oil, we had plenty of coal from which to make it via the Fischer-Tropsch process, just as the Germans did. And, of course, one of the largest onshore oilfields in Europe is in the U.K. Further, given no war in the Far East, we can import from there.

Second: the Red Army rolled to victory on US-built Studebaker and GMC trucks. They laso ate US supplied rations. The russians would never had been able to supply thier huge army groups with out US materiel.

For Germany to lose, all Russia needed to do was fight Germany to a standstill. Britain gradually gains command of the air after the Battle of Britain, keeps supplying the resistance movements to keep the Germans from deploying too many troops in the East, then develops the atomic bomb, and that ends matters very quickly.

A possible change would be if the resistance movements got too obnoxious and Hitler ordered the extermination of the West.

[Little_Nemo]

I very much doubt that GB and the USSR could have beaten the German without the USA. This is for two reasons:
The USA supplied GB with most of its fuel oil and aviation gasoline. The germans were close to capturing Egypt and closing the Suez canal-that would have been the end of the RAF.
Second: the Red Army rolled to victory on US-built Studebaker and GMC trucks. They laso ate US supplied rations. The russians would never had been able to supply thier huge army groups with out US materiel.
Hitler would probably have negotiated some kind of ceasefire with Russia-that would have enabled him to deal with GB.

Actually Canada supplied more food to the UK than the United States did. Although most of it was shipped on American transports.

The United States supplied aviation fuel because it made better fuel. The Army Air Corps had insisted on a higher fuel standard in the thirties so American aviation fuel companies had been forced to manufacture a higher grade. When the war came, the better fuel turned out to be a major advantage in air combat so the British and Soviets used American fuel. But the Germans were able to fight throughout the war with the lower grade aviation fuel so it wouldn’t have won the war.

The Soviets used American trucks and ate American rations because we gave them to them. There was nothing high-tech about building trucks or canning food. The Soviets could have done it for themselves if we hadn’t offered. Stalin prefered to concentrate on weapons manufacturing and let us provide logistic support (he probably didn’t want to let us control his supply of weapons). But if it had been necessary, the Soviets could have converted some of their industrial capacity to building trucks.

American logisitics were a huge advantage to the Allied cause but the British and Soviets could have won without it if they had to. It would have made victory more difficult but not impossible.

[Tapioca_Dextrin]

@Quartz

And would have continued to do so, as long as we paid for it. But Britain had plenty of access to fuel. If we ran short of oil, we had plenty of coal from which to make it via the Fischer-Tropsch process, just as the Germans did.

The Germans were also chronically short of fuel for most of the war

And, of course, one of the largest onshore oilfields in Europe is in the U.K.

Are you thinking of Eakring? Pretty small and production didn’t begin until 1943.

If you were thinking of Wytch Farm, it wasn’t discovered until 1973.

Production from the Scottish oil shales was pretty insignificant.

Further, given no war in the Far East, we can import from there.

Import what from the Far East? The US accounted for around 60% of the world’s oil supply, Venezuela around 15%, USSR 10%. Iraq and Persia made up around 5% of the world’s supply. Add the fact that the Suez canal wasn’t used for freight shipping from mid 1940, it’s not a tenable position.

[Sailboat]

@Quartz

keeps supplying the resistance movements to keep the Germans from deploying too many troops in the East

Nitpick: The contribution of resistance movements to defeating Germany, or even to occupying German attention, has been vastly overblown. In Keegan’s The Second World War and in Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-QaedaWar he discusses resistance movements in great detail, and concludes they provided very little material help.

@The Second World War

Among his army of 300 divisions deployed across Europe on 6 June 1944, the last moment in the war when Hitler exercised unchallenged control over the greater part of the territory he had conquered in 1939-1941, fewer than twenty can be identified as committed to internal security duty…

@Intelligence in War

Of the sixty German divisions garrisoning France o the eve of D-day, none was committed to anti- resistance duty. They manned the coast, awaiting Allied invasion, while the maintenance of internal security was left to a scattering of Gestapo units and the French police and militia.

He goes on to make the point that Poland (until the disastrous Warsaw Uprising), the Low Countries, Czechoslovakia, and Scandinavia troubled the Wehrmacht not at all, and the more active resistances in Greece and Yugoslavia spent a great deal of their energy on fratricidal infighting between factions. He sums up military resistance (as distinct form espionage) as brave, honorable, and largely ineffective.

One of the main goals of all resistance movements seems to have been to retain forces intact so as to be poised to constitute a legitimate government after the German defeat. That’s very critical for the postwar map of Europe and no doubt vitally important to the peoples of the defeated nations in question, but by its very nature, did little to actually bring about German defeat.

[Quartz]

@Sailboat

Nitpick: The contribution of resistance movements to defeating Germany, or even to occupying German attention, has been vastly overblown. In Keegan’s The Second World War and in Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-QaedaWar he discusses resistance movements in great detail, and concludes they provided very little material help.

Yes, but I’m postulating a rather longer war, and with British domination of the air, we can supply the Resistance movements to a much greater extent and they will therefore cause a much greater problem.

[Tapioca_Dextrin]

And how do the British achieve this air superiority? The only long distance fighter the allies had was the Mustang P51D (with the British Merlin engine). Plus, there’s no fuel to fly it.

[Sailboat]

@Quartz

Yes, but I’m postulating a rather longer war, and with British domination of the air, we can supply the Resistance movements to a much greater extent and they will therefore cause a much greater problem.

The problem with the resistance movements wasn’t supply. It was two-fold.

Firstly, as Keegan writes, Churchill formed his romantic conception of resistance during the Boer war, when the Afrikaners maintained a resistance against a British government constrained by at least some moral principles. Against opponents who played by certain rules, the Boers did not have to descend into depravity, and the conflict didn’t get too ugly. Hitler had no restraining principles at all, and was more than willing to use atrocity to deter resistance – see Lidice as the archetypal case. It’s worth noting that Lidice deterred not just the resistance itself, but also deterred the horrified British Special Operations Executive from asking resistance movements to provoke the Germans further. Resistance was always at a disadvantage against an opponent with unlimited appetite for slaughter.

Secondly, resistance movements were distinctly unwilling to waste their lives and risk their contacts merely to harm the Germans, overwhelmingly preferring to lie in waiting for the moment when the Germans were close enough to defeat that resistance action could help, but victory by outside Allied armies was definitely imminent, so the resistance members not be left trapped and isolated to suffer reprisal.

Especially telling is the experience of the Maquisards, who attempted open resistance on the Vercors plateau in July 1944, believing the Normandy forces were nearing breakout. B-17s dropped substantial weapons and supplies to this large force of resistors led by an experienced French military officer. Of course the Allies did NOT break out of Normandy quickly, and the Maquisards were pitilessly wiped out by the German security forces, who then massacred 200 civilians in the village of Vercors in brutish reprisal. This was a large, well-prepared, well-supplied uprising, in defensible country, with thought-to-be-advancing Allied armies nearby. Almost ideal conditions, but a crushing failure with a heartbreaking human cost that occupied almost no German attention at all and did not aid the Allied cause one whit. Further note that they had waited until after D-Day, because their goal (to control liberated France) was not necessarily the Allies’ goal (to defeat the Nazi regime).

In another well-known case, the Polish Home Army’s experience in Warsaw shows that, aside from the danger that vicissitudes of war will prevent regular armies from coming to the aid of a well-timed uprising, there’s also the chance of deliberate betrayal by great powers playing realpolitik with your lives and cause (see also the abandonment of the Kurds in Iraq).

Basically, resistors in occupied areas were not willing to die and suffer their cause being extinguished just because overseas powers wanted to hurt Hitler a little bit…or were too concerned about casualties to risk a direct landing themselves. Nobody in occupied lands wants to die simply to make it easier for your Britain to triumph in the distant future.

[5-HT]

@Tapioca_Dextrin

By 1945, the US managed to make a total of two atomic bombs.

not that it really changes your point, but the US made 3 bombs.

[billfish678]

@5-HT

not that it really changes your point, but the US made 3 bombs.

And there were others that could be ready shortly, IIRC about one a month, give or take, could have been produced not long after. After another year or so even that could have been significantly ramped up.

One must remember, that much of the work in developing the bomb was in figuring out how to do it and the infrastructure to make it possible. ONCE that was in place, it was more more a problem of a running the finally finished assembly line.