Given the amount of Russians and other Soviet nationalities who volunteered to fight with the Nazis I’m not so sure things are as cut and dried as that.
I think that is a whole new thread. A very complicated thread, hell one about the Ukraine would be complex enough. IIRC the Soviets had trouble with some of the Partisan groups into the fifties. Would be a very bad place to be a Jew or Communist or Gypsy and not such a great place to be a Slav either.
CAPT
Sea Lion was never going to happen. Not if Germany beat the USSR, not if they sacrificed the prewar expansion of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe to build Plan Z, not if they had waited to start the war until 1945 with the fruit of Plan Z unable to meet the extremely optimistic planned completion date. The Kreigsmarine was absurdly outmatched by the Royal Navy, there’s a very good essay on the problems with the historical Sea Lion here.
Volunteered isn’t such a good choice of words to describe the mass of Osttruppen and Hiwis who fought for the Nazis. The choice was death in a POW cage or ‘volunteering’. From here:
"Mein Fuhrer, I have ze good news, and I have ze bad news.
Ze good news is zat ze Cherman people, zey are determined to fight to ze last man, for ze glory of ze Reich!
Ze bad news is, according to our projections, zat will be in about six weeks."
Regards,
Shodan
Doesn’t sound too much better than what the Red Army offered; fight or get shot by blocking units. Attempt to surrender, your family suffers. If you were in captivity and managed to escape , you were a traitor and subject to SMERSH and NKVD mistreatment, sent to the gulag or used in reformed penal battalions to clear minefields. As Stalin said, in the Soviet Army, it takes more courage to retreat than advance.
Which is mirrored by what the Nazis had to offer their own soldiers; summary execution by SS flying court martialsfor desertion, retreating without orders or ‘exhibiting defeatism’ to make an example for the rest, or being sent to clear minefields in a Penal battalion. Hitler even ordered the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler to remove the Adolf Hitler armband as a mark of disgrace in the end.
The point isn’t which of the two horrific totalitarian regimes was worse, it’s that Soviet citizens weren’t signing up with the Germans out of anti-communist zeal; the vast majority had no choice in the matter and faced genocide as the alternative.
Well, some were - Stalin wasn’t the most popular fella there thanks to starving them to death in the '30s, not surprising they would turn against him. The RLA also had anti-communism as it’s nominal raison d’etre, and the Nazis established a kind of Soviet Vichy test case with collaborators governing. If Stalin died as a result of the Battle of Moscow going the other way it stands to reason that the reign of terror he established to keep his people in check and fighting at gunpoint would suffer quite the setback.
Getting off-topic a bit, though.
Hmm… I had known the Kriegsmarine was at a disadvantage, but I didn’t know it was so severe. There goes that plan 
Even if they didn’t have to divert resources to the east, I still fail to see how the Germans could possibly strengthen the navy within any medium-term period to challenge the British, and given the Battle of Britain, and invasion of France I largely discounted the Luftwaffe as anything beyond guerrilla tactical support.
I also underestimated the sheer ineptitude of those in charge of planning the operation. Lifejackets… good grief.
In my personal opinion yes they could have. It could have taken longer but lets remember the U.S. stopped their advance to allow the Russians to go into Berlin first.
That in my opinion was a grave mistake.
Not true. The United States didn’t give Berlin away because we never had Berlin in the first place. The Soviets were closer to the city and had more troops in the area. If we had been silly enough to try to make it a race, we would have lost it.
After the failure of Market Garden and the losses at the Bulge, Eisenhower mostly went for a land grab, both north and south.
The ‘race for Berlin’: Race to Berlin - Wikipedia
Eisenhower’s concern (and it was a valid one) was that the Germans would fall back to the south. There were reports that the Germans had prepared an “Alpine Redoubt” - a fortified area in the Austrian alps with supply caches already in place. If a significant number of German troops reached this area, they could hold out for another year or more. So Eisenhower sent American troops to the south to cut off any possible retreat of the German armies fighting in northern Germany.
Post-war intelligence shows Eisenhower’s concerns were mostly unjustified. The Alpine Redoubt existed mostly on paper and there were no serious plans for German troops to fall back towards the south. Eisenhower was a military professional and he assumed the Germans would do the smart thing and retreat to more defensible terrain. But Germany was ruled by Hitler, who had lost all touch with military reason by this point and he insisted on every German soldier holding whatever piece of ground he happened to be on.
Ukrainians were motivated more by nationalism than anti-communism, as were troops formed from the Cossacks and Baltic states. Even in these, there was a great deal of conscription rather than volunteerism (which was mind you illegal according to the Hague Conventions that Germany had signed and agreed to abide by).
The Vlasov Army was a very small fraction of the ~1 million former Soviet POWs impressed into the German Army; the great majority of them were either impressed into service or did so to not be one of the 3.3 million prisoners murdered by neglect. Nazi racial policy was to eliminate or reduce to slave servitude the Slavic population to make room for Germans in their lebensraum. But you are right, it’s getting off topic.
Yes, and the Luftwaffe was being tasked with among all the other things it was supposed to do preventing the Royal Navy from operating in the channel, something beyond the capabilities of any air force at the time to say nothing of the Luftwaffe which wasn’t designed, equipped, or trained as an anti-ship force. Just making the Royal Navy pay to operate in the channel wouldn’t be nearly enough, even if the price were steep. Even if the Royal Navy was unwilling to risk its heavy units to Luftwaffe attack for some reason the 30 hours it was going to take the Germans to cross the channel each direction meant they could stay outside of Luftwaffe range during the day and charge into the channel at night when airpower was pretty useless.
My favorite was the plan to rely on Rhine ferries for most of the troop transport, even though they would flounder and sink in anything above Sea State 2 - meaning all the British would even need to do to sink them was have a destroyer traveling at speed pass close enough to catch them in the wash of their wake; they wouldn’t even need to waste ammunition.
Why? The post-war occupation zones had already been decided at Yalta. Berlin was to be within the Soviet occupation zone, with the city itself also divided into occupation zones split between the US, UK, France and the USSR.
In short, using conventional forces, no - or at least not unless we wanted the recent unpleasantness to last longer than it did - or without dropping the atom bomb on certain strategic German cities.
Some fella started a thread about the western Allies getting to Berlin before the Bear, consensus being that it would be pretty pointless. Eisenhower took a lot of flak for his ‘broad front’ strategy, but he did not want to allow the post-war political situation to decide what would be militarily expedient.
WAHAHAHA!
You Amis are a funny people, I grant you that.
Had the Nazi’s achieved a defeat of the Soviet Union before 1942, in the same manner as they had defeated France, including a degree of control over the entire country; I do not believe the US or the Allies would have prevailed in a war, nor do I think anyone could accept the losses resulting from such a conflict, instead I expect a stand off would come about.
Unlike the Japanese, the Nazi’s had aircraft capable of intercepting US bombers such as the B-29 and B-36. Without the worry of a two front war, the Nazi’s would focus on a new generation of weapons to defeat the British islands. Indeed the Nazi’s had decisive technology advantages which could easily have provided them air superiority and potentially intercontinental ballistic missiles before the Allies. The first Nazi jet fighters few in 1941, years before the first atom bomb was tested. Nazi production could be moved east beyond the range of US bombers. Given the extra time and resources to focus their industries on these advances, the Allies ability to deliver an atomic weapon against Nazi jets would be limited; and further even if the allies could do so; one must recall that there were very few atomic weapons made; so even if the Axis lost Berlin they likely would not be stopped. The European island portions of the UK would likely fall prior to the advent of the atom bomb, further hampering the ability to strike Axis dominated Europe.
I submit you would have a technology race on both sides of the Atlantic - the Allies racing to build up jet and rocket technologies as the Nazi’s attempt to acquire a nuclear weapon capability. This would look more like post war Soviet / US than anything else. If the Nazi’s could produce a nuclear weapon before the Allies obtained sufficient numbers of atom bombs and a means to deliver them, you would be faced with the same sort of mutual assured destruction situation you saw in post war US vs the Soviets. A full war at that point being mutual suicide.
An interesting side question would be if Japan could be defeated if the Nazi’s could support them from the east. China would likely have fallen, as well as most of asia.
A renewal of resources and technology from the Nazis may have allowed Japan to better defend itself and then rebuild. If the Axis had Europe, Russia, and Asia under their boot, I’d imagine they would take Africa and the middle east, possibly India if the allies were slow to equal Nazi jet and missile technologies leaving them in control of most of the eastern hemisphere.
The Soviets would not likely have capitulated to Nazi Germany even if Moscow had fallen; Stalin had planned to leave Moscow, but changed his mind and decided to stay. Key Soviet industries had been moved and were unbelievably productive.
The enormous losses sustained by the Soviets drained the Nazi’s to the point of breaking their back. This was a strategic essential to stop the Nazi’s from obtaining oil and other vital resources, while destroying most of their seasoned military. This achievement required enormous loss of life, something we western allies have no way to fathom. We certainly ought to be thankful for the sacrifices the Russian people made. I do not think the Axis powers would have been defeated without those sacrifices. I believe we were far better off in a cold war with the Soviets than with the Axis powers.
I’m going to break the mold here and say…it depends. If the British had folded and made peace, then I don’t think the US could have beaten the Nazis. You have to assume that if Germany won they would have captured all of North Africa, the Middle East and of course Russia, so they would be a continental sized nation with all the resources they needed. Assuming they did so without massive internal rebellions (that’s a big assumption btw) and had some sort of internal stability, it would have been close to impossible for the US to actually attack Germany…and vice versa. I’m sure we would have fought it out at sea, and I’m pretty confident that the US would have eventually beaten the German navy and pretty much controlled the Atlantic. The Med would probably have been a German and their allies stronghold, however, without the Brits.
So, with out the UK in the war (either knocked out or neutral), where would the US stage it’s logistics and invasion force out of? How could we possibly have struck at Europe or even Africa from the US without some place to stage out of? Simply controlling the seas wouldn’t be enough for an invasion of that scope.
I suppose we could have eventually nuked the Germans into submission once we developed the atomic bomb, but I’m not sure how we would have gotten it to the heart of Germany from the US. Nuking some French cities (not even sure that would be feasible to be honest) wouldn’t really force Germany to capitulate…I’d guess it would merely piss them off (and probably cause the French or whoever to move even tighter into their circle of influence and support) and basically jump start their own program. They would be substantially behind us, but there were ahead on the rocket part so it would have probably balanced out.
Now, if the UK would have been fighting on past the defeat of the Soviets you are talking about a different ball game. In that case, I’d go with ‘yes’…between the UK and the US I’d say we could have beaten the Germans. Wouldn’t have been easy, but the Germans would be spread out holding down huge territory that would be fairly hostile towards them (I doubt the Russians would have just meekly surrendered and laid down their arms…they would have been constant rebellions and fighting for years after Moscow fell, especially as brutal as the Germans were).
