A spin-off of this thread, where I ask if the Soviets could have managed it alone.
Knocking the USSR in a hypothetical is harder than knocking out dear old England so feel free to pick holes, but I’m imagining the crux point would be the Battle of Moscow, the high-water mark of German operations. Let’s assume that the winter is milder - the quagmire freezes, but the temperate and Germans are better prepared, with ample winter equipment provided among the Wehrmacht.
Consequently the German Operation Typhoon is concluded successfully before the end of 1941. Stalin quietly evacuates from the city but is suicided, probably by Beria (who claimed to have knocked him off in 1953, but was no doubt lying). With the capital in Soviet hands, the successor government puts out peace feelers - all land west of the Volga in exchange for a ceasefire and Moscow. Hitler accepts, he has his Lebensraum and he has utterly crushed the Bolsheviks.
1917 is revisited. The Russians are out, but the United States is in. With the Soviets in complete disarray, can we rely on the United States, British Commonwealth, Free French, Free Polish et al. to deliver defeat to the Nazi war machine?
Yes, assuming we are as determined to win as we were in our time line. In the end, it just means that they are still around when nuclear weapons are developed, and Germany gets what Japan got.
That achieved fruition in mid-1945 and only a handful of people knew about it, and of those fewer still were sure that it would work. That’s a long time off from facing a triumphant Germany at the start of 1942…
Anecdotal evidence is that Stalin collapsed, from a stroke, in front of Beria and a few of his henchmen and that Beria watched quietly for a few moments as Stalin writhed on the floor, then moved to the door and locked it from within. So he didn’t exactly “suicide” him, but…
Anyway, could we have beaten Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union knocked out of the war? I actually think, “yes.” The US’s industrial potential was ridiculously huge compared to any of the other combatants. We also had a large pool of manpower and could match any army the Axis put in the field. We would eventually have Ford Motor Companied them to death. I think it would have taken at least twice as long as it actually did. Though, the Manhattan Project might have shortened that time period considerably, as all we would really have had to do to end the war was to kill Hitler.
I also think that conquest and occupation of European Russia wouldn’t have benefited Nazi Germany, not in the short run. The land was amazingly backward and undeveloped outside of the few major cities. There was only a rudimentary transportation infrastructure. And Stalin had deliberately starved to death millions of the peasants who would have been needed (even as slaves) to make the land productive. Exploiting the captured territory would have taken decades, and the Germans didn’t have the manpower to do it. Conquered Russia would have been a burden rather than an asset, especially with continued partisan activity and the threat to the homeland posed by England and the US.
The emphasis on Moscow makes it seem like a head shot. Maybe the case with some nations but the USSR was about 10 time zones across and multi-national.
I mean the UK gov was set to move to Canada and the centre of the empire would have shifted accordingly, but the USSR was a single land mass …
Just can’t see the taking of Moscow as being the end of anything, except the beginning. Those Russians were and are properly fierce.
It is very tricky, even hypothetically, to get the Germans to beat the Soviets to a ceasefire. I figured a decapitation was the best way to do it - it’s simply not plausible to have the Wehrmacht march into Siberia without intervention of alien space bats.
However it’s worth noting that the Moscow government wasn’t the most popular; German invaders were greeted as liberators in places like Ukraine. With the head chopped off the masses of Soviet conscripts might not have been so willing to die for their leaders.
I actually see it much harder to knock England out of the war. As long as the Germans can’t get across the channel, they can’t force England out of the war. And they aren’t going to get across the channel barring intervention from alien space bats. It would also take a lot more than a milder winter for the Germans to defeat the USSR. It’s easy to overplay ‘General Winter’ as having a decisive effect, and while the winter did no favors to the Germans it wasn’t the cause of the failure of Typhoon or the savior of the Soviet Union. When Typhoon was launched Germany was already operating at the edge of a thin logistical tether with an army that had taken serious losses of men and material. By the time the really bad winter weather arrived at the start of December the Wehrmacht had already spent itself trying to reach Moscow; the Soviet counterattack was still going to come regardless of how mild or harsh the winter would be.
That said, a lot depends on when the USSR is hypothetically defeated. The bomb is going to be coming in 1945 so its a matter of the Western Allies not accepting a stalemate with Germany until then, but then again even if a stalemate had been reached and a negotiated peace been made the bomb would be a good reason to start it up again. America wouldn’t have a monopoly on the bomb forever; starting the war back up again would be wiser than waiting for the Nazis to get the bomb as well.
Definitely the US would have won, but it would have been long and costly and it would have made the fight against Japan harder too.
The atomic bombs could end the war sooner, but it’s not a sure thing. How fast can we produce them? We’ve got two countries to drop them on now, and in late 1945 they are probably still very much in the fight conventionally. A lot of German industry is beyond the reach of our bombers because it’s in Eastern Europe. Once they know for sure what an atomic bomb is and does, how fast do Nazi scientists come up with their own and destroy a huge swathe of our invading armies with it?
I suspect that given those uncertainties, Truman would NOT decide to use the bomb and the war would be finished conventionally. The atomic bomb was so effective because it took away Japan’s last hope: that they could bleed us to death on their mainland. Knowing that we didn’t have to do that at all made it all hopeless. A Germany in control of all of Europe east of the Rhine has a different calculation when a couple of cities go up in a mushroom cloud. Get our own bomb, and fast.
I agree, especially considering most of the Russian soldiers didn’t particularly want to fight, but they were afraid of the consequences if they didn’t because of Stalin’s stranglehold on Russia, and his masterful propaganda. Without Stalin’s charisma and intimidation, without order 227, how many Russians would have volunteered, and fought to the death?
I think the important point to consider about America is Normandy, and the events leading up to it. If the Germans had received reinforcements from the now-closed Eastern front, would Normandy have succeeded? If so, would the Bulge? Would Market Garden have been even worse, or even attempted? 1941-1943 didn’t have much going on of great importance in the West, it was mostly recovery from the initial blitzkrieg and the blitz on Britain, while the Germans moved supplies to the east in preparation for Barbarossa. Without that operation going forward, how many more battles for Britain would we have seen? Would Unternehmen Seelöwe have gone ahead? If so, and if Germany did win, where would our staging area have been? Ireland? New York? How vulnerable would our supply lines and troop transports have been in the Atlantic, if we had to send part of the Pacific fleet to protect them? How would it have affected our war on Japan? Most of the questions depend heavily on exactly how and when Russia exits the war, as opposed to the state of Germany at the time.
A long time; their bomb program was both far behind and off track as I recall. Although IIRC the Allies didn’t know that, so they’d probably be making decisions under the theory that the Nazis might be right behind them.
It’s a shame, really, that the world was spared the delicious irony of the Nazis being wiped off the map by a weapon invented, at least in part, by Jewish scientists.
The recently captured German atomic weapon developers were astonished when they were told about the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. They knew they were about ten years away from developing a working atomic bomb and they had assumed the Americans were behind them.
That said, the Manhattan Project alone was not a war winner. Japan surrendered in 1945 after two atomic attacks but that’s because they were already losing the war. If Germany in 1945 had an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, they weren’t going to give it all up just because a couple of cities were blown up.
True, but then again after seeing Berlin (or Köln, Hamburg, the Ruhr or whichever would have been picked by the Allies as a spot for an impromptu physics demonstration) the higher ups, assuming they wouldn’t have just surrendered on the spot, might have diverted funding and manpower from silly Wunderwaffen back into the rocket & nukes program. Humongous tanks are cool and all, but on an obliterated city per buck they just don’t compare with a nuclear tipped V2.
I would question just how fast the Bomb would reach the Western front though, and how feasible it would have been to drop it en masse in the first place in that alternate timeline: first there’s the matter of production of the bomb itself, which was pretty slow going ; second without the Soviet air force to obliterate it the Luftwaffe might have been a more tangible obstacle against strategic bombing, particularly once the Me-262 hit the field. One hopes that a nuclear bombing or two would have clued the Führer in re: using those against fucking bombers (which they would have murdered wholesale) rather than as dogfighters, at least.
Besides, yeah, what Little Nemo said - nukes are scary and all but they were not an instant win button either, not back then. The conventional bombing runs on Dresden wrecked the place just as hard as The Bomb did Hiroshima, just took a little more doing is all. We aren’t talking '80s era MIRVs that could obliterate all of Poland in one go.
Now, all of that being said, I still daresay the US could/would have ground Germany down eventually, provided y’all kept at it and not called it quits midway through for political reasons, war fatigue or whatever.
It’s kind of like Ricky Gervaise’s joke about the Falklands War, and how it was akin to holding a midget at arm’s length and kicking him in the nuts repeatedly. What I mean is that the US had the means to attack Germany’s production centres, at least as long as England’s in the game as a staging point, but the reverse never was true and Germany didn’t have the naval presence (or building facilities) to ever make it true. Even with England knocked out, you’d still have a home base in North Africa, plus after Japan’s defeat I could see the Pacific Fleet crossing the Indian Ocean and staging more landings somewhere around Arabia to solidify that front.
And from then on just build B-29s until Nazi-controlled Europe is one big crater, nukes or no nukes ; and grind forward one obliterated mile at a time. Sucks for the civilians, though (but then, it kinda already sucked, didn’t it ?)
I suspect that a surrendered USSR very quickly turns into a negotiated peace.
Option one; Germany keeps the East and does a Versailles on Britain, France and Co. Round three in twenty.
Option two; Germany keeps the East and makes a monetary union for Europe to keep the peace. They attempted this in WWI with a customs union for Allies and the conquered East (The First World War, Hugh Strachan p.262 ISBN 0-7432-3959-8), IIRC they did this in WWII as well.
And if you thought the Nazis were snazzy dressers (in an evil chic kind of way), wait till you see the psychedelic, neo-Napoleonic Ligue Revanchiste of the 1960s !
I can only imagine what our movie villains would have looked like? I suspect Star Wars would have been a very different movie, fashion wise. Death Star officers in a powder blue uniform and a jaunty cap.
Let’s get this straight, I see cold war propaganda has left deep and lasting roots. The Soviet conscripts were not “fighting for their leaders”. Or out of fear. The fought because if they did not, it would be curtains for then, their families, their nation and their people. It was a genocidal war and the Russians, Ukranians, Balts and other assorted nationalities were fighting for their very existence as a peoples. While the Nazis retained the war aims that they did, it is very unlikely that there would be any ket up in resistance.
