The USSR bore 4/5th of the fight anyway - minimum.
Key point is the USSR and the British Empire together meant Germany had to source everything from within, inc oil - without Britain the back door was wide open.
For reasons already mentioned I don’t really think Germany could outright totally conquer and defeat the USSR even without being at war with Britain during Barbarossa.
Without any lend-lease or support from any allies, I do think it unlikely the Soviets could have rolled into Berlin. At that point we’re already so far from history it’s hard for me to guess what the movements would be, both Hitler and Stalin were dictators and dictators who show weakness or capitulate often lose their position of power. So the problem they would have is both Hitler and Stalin probably aren’t prone to any offer of negotiated peace.
I could imagine the Germans/Soviets basically being in a “death roll” for many years, basically totally destroying their economies. Russia had more resources and people, so it’s possible it would eventually win the war of attrition, but it’s also true in any counteroffensive Russia has a lot of territory to move through and a lot of land to hold. I think maybe what would happen is eventually forces within Germany and the USSR oust both Hitler and Stalin and some form of negotiated peace occurs.
This would probably be bad for history, though, because it would leave the Nazis in power in Germany and you’d have a multipolar Cold War instead of a bipolar one, with Germany holding large portions of Europe and the Soviets probably ending up with a lot of their original territory back if not some of Eastern Europe too.
Of course the point remains if the UK for some reason sought / accepted peace, I don’t know why they wouldn’t try to attack and liberate France or even wage war against Italy or Germany in the Mediterranean once they saw how bad the war with the Soviets was going. As has been stated Britain had almost always sought to make sure no continental hegemon would ever arise, as a true master of the continent could marshal enough resources to eventually overcome the natural defences that had kept Great Britain (and Ireland) safe from continental invasion for centuries.
I think given what the Soviets were willing to sacrifice, yes. I don’t think it was a rational choice for the Soviet Union to keep fighting. What France did was rational. If France hadn’t surrendered but had fought to the end, how many lives would they have lost? Much more than they did.
The Battle of Moscow was the first battle that the Germans ever lost in the Second World War. If you’re willing to sacrifice 8.5 million soldiers and 27 million lives total to win a war, that doesn’t mean that an increase of these numbers by 50% is going to mean that they’re going to surrender. It literally means fight until victory or death, death meaning the collective annihilation of their nation and its people.
The thing that’s scary about this is that nuclear war for a country that’s willing to accept 27 million deaths and countless more wounded to win a war isn’t much worse. I think the experiences of the Eastern front were much scarier than nuclear war. There’s nothing more frightening than tanks rolling over and running you over, artillery exploding around you and blowing you into bits, and all of the elements of “conventional warfare.” A nuclear exchange, if you have an underground shelter and food/shelter stocked up, is very much survivable…since most nuclear weapons, including ICBMs, are airburst bombs whose blast wave isn’t strong enough to penetrate the ground very deep, although it will destroy everything above it. If a nation were to accept nuclear warfare as inevitable, by creating a mass underground infrastructure and lifestyle that’s accessible on demand and is well stocked, nuclear weapons have a limit on the damage they can do. It’s similar to the artillery barrages of the First World War in that if you’re deep underground, the bombs can’t get there. And once the nukes run out, the last nation willing to fight is the one that’s going to win…and it’s pretty damn obvious that in spite of the Soviet Union’s weakening economy, defeating the Soviets in an all out war and getting them to surrender…you can just see Stalin laughing.
The Soviet Union’s war effort in the Second World War was superhuman. Only God could have defeated them.
Animals could be bred and slauuuuuughtered…
At the risk of continuing this tangent, have you ever heard of radiation? The eastern front was probably the most horrifying event in the annals of human history, but at least when it was over it was over.
How many times did UK take back a declaration of war after losing a great many soldiers or equipment (men and weapons for 10 divisions in your scenario)? Losing all the BEF’s equipment from the evacuation was bad enough. My WAG is Britain will re-arm and re-man its army for an eventual invasion of the mainland.
After Dunkirk, the British army had enough equipment and weapons to arm only 3 divisions for defense against an invasion. That was sometime June 1940. By September, British factories had cranked out enough weapons to arm 16 divisions. Do you think they’ll use those 16 divisions to just keep an eye out for a German invasion? Course not.
Agree. Supposedly it was Stalin who said “…a million deaths is a statistic.”
In fairness, I’ll point out that the tanks and artillery aren’t that scary, either, if you’re in a deep underground shelter with food stocked up.
To some degree, arguing what’s scarier is like Monty Python’s The Life of Brian:
The Soviets were not “willing” to sacrifice 27 million people; that was forced upon them. It’s silly to suggest that the civilian deaths were somehow a willing sacrifice. Those people were, for the most part, murdered by the Germans behind the front lines in areas lost to the Soviets. The USSR didn’t give them up willingly. For that matter you can’t even say they gave up the soldiers willingly. The common image of the Soviets as just using human waves to win the war is horseshit, but they were badly outclassed in the first months of the war and thereafter were fighting the most horrible war ever fought, agains the most evil, barbaric and homicidal regime in the history of Western civilization. Somewhere between one and three million of their men died in POW camps; one can hardly call that a “willing sacrifice.”
Nonsense. The Soviet war effort was a very human effort, a logical combination of industry, strategy, logistics and tactics that led to a logically concluded result. The question is whether, by subtracting a substantial portion of the Soviet war effort, the result would have been the same.
I suppose it depends how big an engagement something has to be to be called a “battle” but this obviously isn’t true. The Battle of Britain certainly did not turn out well for the Germans. Operation Crusader, a clear British victory, ended before the Battle of Moscow did.
To be nitpicky, even on the Eastern Front the Battle of Rostov ended in a clear Soviet victory and German defeat with the Germans forced to give up the city of Rostov and retreat back to the Mius River while the Battle of Moscow was still ongoing.
The St. Nazaire raid involved only a few hundred on either side but it was more significant than the battle of Moscow.
Could the soviets have repelled them? Absolutely. And they would have. Could they have brought the war to Germany itself and won the siege of Berlin, ending the war? Probably not.
Stalingrad was not some huge final stand against the fascist occupation so much as it was a time killer while the Russians organized their forces across the river. It was ideologically vital, not absolutely critical strategically. The Russians took their time organizing their armies to ensure they could envelope and destroy the German army (as opposed to getting bogged down outside the city), and lining up their artillery. All the reinforcements from the western front would have done, is made Stalingrad even bloodier. Maybe the Nazis would have managed to take Leningrad, but that hardly would have changed anything in the grand scheme of things.
A lot of the hardware they already had - soviet made weapons, soviet made ammo, soviet made Katyushas. Germany was overextended in the logistical sense, simply because the Soviets just melted away and evacuated instead of fighting every chance they got. Even if it ended in a temporary truce while both sides recovered, Russia had more resources available to them without having to garrison recent conquests. The Germans would be establishing fortresses to solidify their rule, while the Russians would have continued industrializing and streamlining the resource harvesting operations, and trying to get logistical support coming in from other oblasts like Kazakhstan, and potentially Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia n large amounts.
I think a far more important question would be if the West could have won the war without Russia.
given the methodology applied at the outset of the war I would say that Russia would have been defeated. Hitler entered the war without the full assets needed to prosecute it. Essentially they conquered the assets of war as they went starting with Czechoslovakia and their tank works. If they started with Russia first that tactic would have reaped tremendous rewards.
IMO the Russians saw it coming and that’s why they moved their production facilities in advance of the German army.
I note the hypotheticals treating Britain as containing elements, as is well-known, who saw no reason to continue war with Germany, if there were another way out. Oddly the hypotheticals seem to stop at the Eastern shores of the Atlantic. In the United States, the equivalent is that there’s no lend-lease. Britain and America sneak around behind Germany’s back even if the Anglo-German treaty forbids it.
Shouldn’t we extend the hypotheticals? No unleashing of “strategic bombing” on the European continent, and Germany satisfies herself with the slow murder policy of ghettoization, not gassing – so that at the top levels (where the fact of the genocide is well known), the perception is not of an evil Germany, but as one of many powers across the Atlantic which we primarily would like to avoid. Sure, Nazis machine-gun a million Jews they can’t herd fast enough into new ghettoes. But that’s “fog of war” stuff, if you’re trying to disbelieve the unbelievable.
For how many people does that make our English cousins and England’s Aryan second cousins the “good guys,” when juxtaposed against the Red Menace? Why do we think that everything stops at not aiding Russia, rather than the U.S. joining Germany in its war on the Bolsheviks? (Or failing that, being the Great Arsenal of Not Communists)
Somebody please tell me I’m being utterly paranoid. But from things I heard from the old folks when I was a young folk, I can actually envision this.
The history of the war against Germany in WW2 is essentially the history of the Eastern Front; everything else is a sideshow. For reasons stated previously, the Barbarossa invasion would have gone as it did anyway - there’s no real chance of Germany taking Moscow in 1941, which means they wouldn’t be able to take the city at all. Without Lend-Lease, the USSR has supply difficulties in the following years, which makes the war drag on a bit, but still ends with complete Soviet victory. Germany still faces the logistical nightmare of occupying enormous tracts of hostile and undeveloped territory, so in time, Germany will just be ground down so far that the USSR is able to take Berlin.
The thing is, one must still look at the global view, even if we’re subtracting British participation in the war against Germany. Italy still wants overseas possessions: their Mediterranean adventures mean war with Britain, which means that either the British-German truce ends as Germany has to support its ally, or that Italy is defeated early: what happens then? Japan’s policy also still leads to war with Britain and the US over resources and Asian territory. Then, either (1) Germany remains neutral towards Britain and the US, which means that Britain has much better logistical capability and available resources for their Asian campaign (no German U-boats preying on shipping, so, for example, Singapore likely doesn’t fall), and that the USA dedicates all its war resources towards fighting Japan, which means Japan is defeated much sooner - or (2) Germany declares war on the UK and USA, which means the Soviets aren’t alone, again.
In all the above cases, France is still occupied and the Free French will be calling for their allies - the UK, USA, and potentially Italy once they’re defeated and Fascist-free - to go to war against Germany. Same with Norway, Denmark, Poland, and others. Even if war is undeclared, there’d certainly be covert support to partisan groups.
I believe there’s no way that the USSR could be knocked out of WWII. The way to do it might be to “liberate” the nations of Eastern Europe when invading, and treating them as friends and equals - but that’s the direct opposite of Nazi war aims, and would defeat the purpose of the war anyway (how can you realistically gain lebensraum for Aryans without genocide?). Alternatively, one could imagine a version of history where Stalin and all the senior Bolsheviks were wiped out, and the Soviet Union descended into chaos - but then we’re speculating an alternate Russian Civil War history, not an alternate WWII history, and anyway, suffering genocide is a great uniter of peoples.
You’re thinking of attitudes towards communism in the 1950s; the 1930s were a different matter. The Roosevelt administration was probably the most left-wing US government possible at the time. Communism was still fashionable among the intelligentsia, and the people who tried to warn of the horrors of Stalinism were dismissed as anti-Soviet propagandists (by pro-Soviet propagandists). The US had unbent enough to finally acknowledge the Soviets as the legitimate government of Russia. And even before Pearl Harbor the main focus of federal surveillance against a foreign-influenced group was the German-American Bundt.
With massive Lend-lease from America, maybe. Assuming Japan stays out, which is likely.
But without aid from outside, the USSR collapses.
So Britain’s at peace for a few months. They now have time to re-orient their troops towards the East. Maybe they still lose the Malayan Campaign and Hong Kong, but now that they’re not busy in Europe, they can pour everything in against Japan. With the entire combined Commonwealth forces fighting in Asia, Japan is defeated sooner. It’s hard to imagine Britain doesn’t re-engage in Europe at that point.
We were investigating a cake?
I think that should be without the “t.” Fair enough, but we’ve just postulated mass and elite British decisions based on a putative separate peace with Germany. So let’s see, we’re already in Roosevelt’s third term by 1940 - but why does he run for a third term without the run-up to war?
On the other hand, where is the recovery-on-steroids we got from being the “arsenal of Democracy,” if no democracies are at war?
And there’s this nice juicy target we had actual troops trying to overthrow a mere generation ago (with the English - or was that just the Brits and the French? I forget. Sort of crucial to this bit of the argument.)
In the scenario specified however, it would seem there are big pressures to arm the Brits to the teeth just in case, but also to extend credit to the Nazis as the war bogs down in Russia (which I believe the consensus says would have happened.)
With the U.S. augmenting rather than opposing Nazi Germany, assuming the Axis remains intact, I don’t think Japan attacks Pearl.
And so on and so on.
I still prefer to think I’m being paranoid, but that’s the trouble with “what ifs.” You guys want to stay tactical, after stipulating the number of dominoes that would fall differently, and then cutting off all the tumbling right there, to focus the speculation on specific logistical or tactical outcomes.
Seems like we’re several projection points from the initial change, where the outcomes would be more wildly divergent (sort of like the bowling ball halfway down the lane when you’ve pushed it an inch to the wrong side on release – it’s going to be off-target by more than an inch.)
If you add up the assets that Germany had (male population of military age, steel production, industrial capacity, etc.), and compare with Russia, Germany loses. The only chance of winning that the Germans had was to capture Moscow in November 1941-Russia might have collapsed politically, and a successor to Stalin might have sued for peace. In a sense, the fact that Germany missed their only opportunity meant that Germany could only lose at a different rate. Hitler should have allowed Ukraine and Byelorussia to set up their own governments, and allied the Reich with them. That was their only chance after missing Moscow.
I assumed he was at least partly talking about the scale of sacrifice, as in 13-14% of the population (compared with the UK figure of 0.94%, and the USA 0.34%).
^ I guess, in modern terms, that translates into 41.5 - 44.5 million dead Americans …