I am of the opinion that Nazi Germany would have won the war if Rundstedt pushed at Dunkirk. Without those troops I believe the Battle of Britain would be lost, Spain would join the Axis and invade Gibraltar, the Allied positions in the Mediterranean would wither and die, then Britain negotiates peace and Russia suddenly finds herself surrounded by enemies.
The Nazis mentality was that Britain and the US were natural allies and would team up against the Bolshevik menace.
The Confederacy never had a chance, not with the Union blockade. Davis’s only hope at actual independence was through foreign support, and the whole slavery thing already put the Confederacy at ideological odds with Britain and France. The blockade killed any hope of an economic alliance. Meanwhile Mexico was too busy defaulting on loans from its own civil war to offer any assistance.
On the civil War, yeah usually wars back then were over in maybe a year or so or less with just a few major battles. The later Franco-Prussian war in 1874 for example, only lasted about 9 months.
So the south thought that a few early quick victories (which they had at Bull Run) and the union would give up.
I dont have an exact cite but as I understand it, sometime in 43 or 44 some German resistance groups (which included high members of the German military like Rommel) had sent out some messages to the western allies looking for support if they replaced Hitler.
I don’t think that the OP (or this thread for that matter) has accurately considered how close the South actually came to winning the war. If it wasn’t for Lincoln, the North very well could have given up on the war, and allowed the South to secede. As has accurately been pointed out, the South didn’t have to defeat the North, they just had to not lose and outlast the North. They could have accomplished that, and there were times when it appeared it might be the case.
The South couldn’t have won the war. They could have made the North lose, but that’s not the same thing. If the North had lost, then within a generation, North America would have had no polity larger than a city, between Canada and Mexico.
If it weren’t for Lincoln, South Carolina would have never tried to leave the Union, so the war would never have happened in the first place.
And I believe the closest they came to DC was looking across the Potomac and saying “There it is. Do you think that army heading right for us is going to occupy Arlington for the entirety of the war? Ouch, I’ve been shot.”
Yeah, the Valkyrie guys had the same idea (and might even be the people you’re talking about). The thing is, they weren’t good guys even though they planned on offing Hitler. They were still Nazis, who still wanted lebensraum and to kill lots and lots of Slavs. The peace terms they were seeking with the Allies were along the lines of a white peace allowing them to keep much if not all of the land they’d seized, oh and betraying Stalin of course, all in exchange for… something ? I’m sure ? I mean it’s not like they were doing much damage to Britain at this point. Even the submarine warfare was quickly going pear-shaped thanks to advances in huff duff and sonar.
So, yeah, even if they had succeeded in killing Hitler Churchill ; De Gaulle & al. would probably have told them to go fuck themselves with a rusty saw.
The South not losing the war is exactly the same thing as winning the war from a strategic level. The South didn’t have any military aspirations in the North. They merely wanted to left alone.
If Lincoln had just let the Confederacy leave the union without a fight in 1861 would the Confederacy attacked the North? Of course not. That is all the evidence you need that the North losing equals the South winning.
(On the world stage an inexact comparison is the US/Korea cold war. Korea doesn’t want to defeat the US militarily. They just want to exist. Survival as a state is victory.)
So what? What does that have to do with the Confederacy wanting to secede and survive intact, with or without a fight?
What does that have to do with the survival of the South?
Again, I think you’re missing the point. As our fiend Clausewitz would point out, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” When politics failed the Confederacy, they chose to risk war to further their aims. Lincoln took them up on their challenge. But Lincoln was untested and an unknown in 1861. His predecessor, James Buchanan would certainly have given in to the Confederacy, or may have made a halfhearted attempt at best. There were draft riots in the North, Senior Army leadership was poor early on with defeat after defeat. They had real hopes that the North would not see the war to a successful conclusion.
Now if the question was could the Confederacy have militarily defeated the North though invasion and occupation? I’d completely agree with you. But victory by the Confederacy was surviving as a nation. They didn’t need to defeat the North to do that. They just needed the North to quit. And in 1861, there is evidence that could happen.
They never came close, but I don’t think they tried all that hard either. Gettysburg is the closest, and that wasn’t all that close. As you know, the vast majority of the war as fought in the South.
a) Negotiated peaceful secession of the original Confederacy (the Deep South). Union politics complicated by conflicting factors: antislavery forces now a clear majority, but remaining slave holding states can threaten to leave to join the Confederacy. War delayed until conflicts over who gets to expand into which parts of the West.
b) War begins in Virginia between pro-Union and pro-secession groups.
c) Deep south confederacy collapses while middle states make up their minds.
The South didn’t have military aspiration in the North, but they did aspire to take the west, and Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. I’m sure if the North didn’t intervene, the South would have eventually started a war with the US, and the rest of its neighbors.
I think the Confederacy could have defeated the United States in the same sense that Vietnam did so. The Confederacy was never in a position to force the United States to give up but they could have dragged out the war long enough that eventually the United States would have decided the continuing to fight was no longer worth the effort.
I don’t think Lincoln would have ever quit like this. But if the general public had become unhappy enough with the ongoing war then someone else would have been elected President in 1864 or 1868.
By “losing” the Battle of Britain I mean Britain would negotiate peace. With the loss of Norway, the Low Countries, France, British Somaliland, and half of Egypt, Churchill had to work hard to keep Britain in the war. The only major British victory was… the British invasion of Iceland? At that point Britain was practically fighting the Axis on its own - Russia and the U.S. had yet to enter the war. If Churchill had also lost a good chunk of the French forces and virtually the entire British Expeditionary Force, I think the Blitz in the fall of '40 would have turned public opinion against him. Then Viscount Halifax could negotiate peace with Germany, which is “losing” the Battle of Britain in my book.
That’s probably not true. The same politicians who said they would secede if Lincoln was elected also said they would secede if Douglas was elected. They considered both men a threat to slavery.
Granted, this is hypothetical. Douglas didn’t win the election so we can’t say for certain that the secessionists would have followed through the same way they did when Lincoln was elected. But they did secede after Lincoln’s election so I think it’s reasonable to say their similar threat about Douglas was serious.
I’m seeing a significant amount of distance between these two posts.
First off, Rommel was probably never part of any conspiracy. The evidence is that he may have been aware that some conspiracies existed. But he never joined any of them.
Second, there’s a big difference between an anti-Hitler group sending a message asking for some support (which they did) and offering terms for a post-Hitler peace treaty (which they did not). The anti-Hitler groups were not in contact with the allied governments. They were talking to Allied military intelligence (the equivalent of some CIA agents). These allied agents did send some assistance (“You want to kill Hitler? Cool, here’s some explosives.”) but they were not in a position to make any political agreements.
Third, most of the anti-Hitler conspiracy members were not motivated by a belated awareness that Hitler was evil and the war was wrong. They were worried that Hitler was going to lose the war and everything Germany had gained. They wanted to stop the war so they could keep everything they currently had before the allies took it all away from them.