There is a saying that nobody is indispensable and I wonder if that is true. I was watching the movie the intimidation game about Alan Turing and Bletchley Park and it got me thinking. I was curious if the folks at Bletchley park especially Professor Turing had been taken out in an air raid or some how taken out before they could solve enigma if the war could have/ would have gone the other way.
The obv. case is Churchill - the situation in the summer of 1940 was pretty hopeless.
Unless the trajectory of the war took a different path, namely a path that did not include invading the USSR, I’d say no one person’s death would reverse the outcome of the war.
Hitler?
Killing Stalin in the middle of (not before) Barbarossa.
I’d say any of the big three: Churchill, Roosevelt, or Stalin.
Churchill: He was the main force for Britain to keep fighting in 1940 when most people felt it was time to negotiate terms with Germany.
Roosevelt: He was willing and able to defy widespread isolationist sentiment and build up America’s military forces and send military support to the UK and Soviet Union before America entered the war.
Stalin: Unquestionably, a ruthless and brutal dictator. But he was able to focus all of the resources in the Soviet Union into the war and drive his people to keep fighting.
It would have to be during and not before because Stalin managed to willfully ignore all sorts of intelligence communicating a German invasion was impending.
I’m not convinced even Stalin’s death would have reversed the ultimate outcome even if it occurred during Barbarossa. I mean wasn’t the winning game plan pretty much Russia’s traditional go-to grand strategy? You know, conduct a fighting withdrawal trading space for time and await the arrival of General Winter and major reinforcements from the east. That didn’t really require any particular strategic planning brilliance from Papa Joe, although I suppose the morale crush might have been greater if all the early Soviet defeats coincided with his death.
I’m with you on this one.
The way that WWII is taught in American history classes is that we teamed up with England and a few other minor players and defeated the Nazis. Meanwhile, the Russians kept them a bit busy on the other side of things.
The way the Russians learn it, WWII was basically Germany vs. Russia with this tiny little side mess involving America, England, etc. on the other side.
Everyone has their own patriotic view that is distorted by history, of course, but if you take an objective look at it, the Russian viewpoint is probably a bit closer to what actually happened than the American viewpoint.
The US lost about 400,000 men in the war. Great Britain lost pretty close to the same amount. Together, that’s a lot of men, somewhere around 800,000 or so. The Russians lost somewhere between 10 and 15 times that amount, or 8 million to 12 million men or so, depending on whose numbers you use. Germany lost around 4 to 5 million.
After Barbarossa, you could have probably removed the US and Great Britain from the war completely and Germany still would have lost.
I’m not so sure that would have worked. Once you start Barbarossa, you’ve got a nearly endless supply of pissed off Russians. Stalin certainly ruled with an iron fist, and if you take out that kind of dictator you generally don’t have someone waiting in the wings to take his place (whenever there was anyone strong enough to be a threat, Stalin tended to make them just “disappear”). Chaos would have certainly been the immediate result after Stalin’s death. But at some point the Russians will get reorganized, and Russia is just freaking huge. Once they do get reorganized, wave after wave of men, tanks, guns, etc. just go pouring over the border.
There’s no possible happy ending there for Germany after that.
I understand the Russians cleared a mine field by marching guys through it.
After the summer of 1940 there might not have been a war.
I’m with you.
With competent leadership, they might have won.
But with competent leadership, they might never have started the war. And they wouldn’t have had the Holocaust and Jewish scientists would be revered and science would flourish and men (German men!) might have landed on the moon in 1952. And we’d have space stations and supersonic jetliners. Or supersonic dirigibles. Oh well.
About the only person and situation I can think of where a timely death might have turned things for the Nazis, is if Churchill had been killed in May 1940.
Things were looking grim, and others in the government (including Lord Halifax) were interested in negotiating a peace that would have left Germany in control of Europe. With Churchill dead such a settlement was more likely. Then if Hitler had been able to throw greater military might against the Soviet Union, Germany might have won that confrontation.
But that’s multiple coulds and ifs. The Soviets had way more resources than Hitler figured, in his dream of a collapse of the “whole rotten system”.
I also doubt any single codebreaker was essential to winning the war.
Eisenhower and Churchill might disagree with you. Churchill told the king It is thanks to the secret weapon (the ULTRA decrypts) of General Menzies, put into use on all the fronts, that we won the war!"
Eisenhower described Ultra as having been “decisive” to Allied victory.
Estimates say that breaking enigma shortened the war by 2 to 4 years and it’s unclear who would have won otherwise.
Turing almost singlehandedly designed the machine, with some help from the polish research and development who had designed a similar machine for a much simpler version of enigma, that produced the daily cipher keys for the Germans. It was so successful that they had to actually hold back from revealing all they were learning in fear that the Germans would realize what had happened.
The truth is that the UK has not been able to feed its populous from domestic farming for over a hundred years and the island would have starved had the code not been broken.
I hope it got you thinking about calling it The Imitation Game ! 
Hitler maybe. His incompetence and arrogance made the war harder than it needed to be for the Nazis.
I’ll say Churchill. It was not a sure thing that he’d become PM, nor that he would be able to keep Britain in the war. Without Britain, no US, no US, no Lend Lease, and Germany fights the USSR eins zu eins.
Historian Max Hastings in a recently published book gives due credit to Ultra, but thinks the value of military intelligence has been overstated.
“Intelligence gathering is inherently wasteful,”(according to Hastings)*. “Perhaps one-thousandth of 1 percent of material garnered from secret sources by all the belligerents in World War II contributed to changing battlefield outcomes.”…In “The Imitation Game,” Alan Turing is the lone-wolf genius who invents an Enigma-killer, barely tolerating his colleagues at Bletchley Park, where Britain’s best and brightest were feverishly trying to break German codes. Actually, the Ultra program that cracked Enigma was a vast collaborative effort with a cast of hundreds who drew on the earlier work of Polish mathematicians.
Another myth trumpets that Ultra turned German signal traffic into an open book throughout the war. Not so, Hastings counters. As late as the fall of 1944, Bletchley’s wonder boys and girls managed to read only between 15 percent and 24 percent of Wehrmacht communications. What’s more: “Many decodes of all kinds were achieved too slowly to influence events on the battlefield.”*
Yeah, that makes sense. Bad mouth intelligence gathering as useless. Sure.
Of course such a small percentage of the traffic influenced events, because there is always a fairly high volume of traffic and much of it, while secret, only plays a small part.
It may not necessarily be directly “changing battlefield outcomes” that you know where a certain Panzer division is, or that you know how many operational planes are in a unit at a location for examples, but it still has an influence on the war.
I thought that breaking enigma let the Allies know where German submarines were, and sink them.
You don’t win wars by having your own people die.
The Allied contribution to defeating Germany was enormous and without them the Soviets probably lose; at best the war drags on years longer and the USSR falls apart.
People forget Germany defeated Russia in a war in 1917. It can be done.