Coming out of the ‘are we unfair to Hitler thread’, I’ve been thinking about WW2 even more than usual. The standard time travel trope is to bump of Hitler during WW1 or thereabouts and thereby avoid WW2, at least as we know it. So here’s my thought - Post your proposed slight alteration in the course of WW2 - some decision or plan that goes a different way - and your best guess as to what the outcome would be, and we’ll kick the idea around. Sound good?
I’ll kick off with:
Alteration: Hitler doesn’t declare war on the US after Pearl Harbor. Instead, he repudiates the Japanese alliance.
Upshot: The US is initially drawn into the Pacific War much more aggressively than the European war. Hitler continually attempts to preserve peace with the US, while fighting the British and USSR. US beats Japan after a bloody island-to-island fight without the bomb (cause they went after Japan sooner and harder). Eventually Hitler draws in the US - he just can’t help himself - or else Germany goes down after 2 more years of war with USSR and Britain.
Don’t forget the part that most of Europe is behind the Iron Curtain after WW2 in this scenario. WW2 in Europe was largely over by D-Day as the Soviets were bleeding the Germans dry. The Normandy landings saved Western Europe from Stalin, not Hitler.
My hypothetical - The US finds out of attacks planned on Pearl Harbor in time, and the attack is repelled with only minor damage to the US Pacific Fleet. Obviously, that’s still an act of war, but is the US mood altered? Does the existence of so many battleships (that were actually lost at Pearl) do anything to US strategy? More ship to ship battles and less carrier war?
another hypothetical thats intriguing, what if Operation Barbarossa would have been successful and the Germans managed to take control over russia. This is often presented as a possible WW2 win for Hitler, not having to manage a 2 front war. How could this have altered history? We would probably not have to deal with the Cold war or socialist experimentation in Eastern Europe.
Is this really one of the big “ifs” in WW2 history?
If one Japanese radio operator in early 1942 had been a bit more suspicious about the unencrypted message from Midway island, Our water condensor has broken down, he might have realised the US Navy was setting an ambush for the Japanese task force approaching Midway. The war in the Pacific might have been a lot harder for the US forces if the four Japanese carriers sunk in the battle of Midway had remained afloat, and a HUGE amount harder if the Japanese had been able to turn ambush into counterambush and sink some of the US flattops. (Due to differences in war materiel production, the final outcome of the war would probably have been the same, but this is true for almost all slight alterations I can think of.)
Britain gets the Atom Bomb before Germany and uses it liberally. Many German cities become radioactive rubble. Long-range British bombers nuke Moscow and St Petersburg and the Soviet Union descends into civil war. After the war, Britain pays its war debts to America with atomic bomb technology.
The Spitfire is 6-12 months later going into full production and Fighter Command doesn’t properly use radar. Germany invades England and wins. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and the US opts for a single front war against them.
The other big "if’ about Barbarossa to me is: “What if Hitler had kept faith with the USSR?” He could have fortified the front with USSR, and maintained a state of high readiness, much like the US and West Germany did against the USSR and GDR. At the same time he could have put way more resource into Sealion and potentially successfully invaded Britain. Would have been tough to launch D-Day from Newfoundland.
The US and Germany were already in a state of undeclared war by 1941, we were sinking German U-boats and the U-boats were sinking American ships. We were already sending tremendous amounts of assistance to Britain. Roosevelt was downplaying how much were doing because there was still a lot of isolationist sentiment in the US. Everyone could see that war was inevitable, the question was when.
Hitler declared war on the US after Pearl Harbor because there wasn’t much point in not declaring war, he knew the US was already on the Allied side in everything but name.
And if Hitler hadn’t declared war on the US, Roosevelt would have declared war on Germany within a few weeks, because US shipments to Britain wouldn’t have stopped, and German U-boat attacks wouldn’t have stopped. And so the next ship that got torpedoed by the Germans would have been used as a causus belli.
When WWII started, Roosevelt was inundated with crackpot “miracle weapon” suggestions, some of which were hard to ignore because they came from politically connected nutbars. Case in point: the now legendary effort to strap incendiary bombs on bats, release them so they would roost in Japanese houses and start fires. LeMay did it the old fashioned way, but I digress…
About this time, he got the famous Einstein letter urging development of the atomic bomb. Roosevelt had squat for scientific and tech understanding, and the science was so new and so radical, he brushed it aside. The major emphasis of the letter was the need to catch up and surpass German physicists before they got the bomb, Roosevelt didn’t take it seriously.
However, he happened to be in the loop for a lot of intel from Europe, and just happened to notice that the Germans had embargoed the sale of uranium when they took over Czechoslovakia. He wondered why, since uranium was (at the time) not very valuable and certainly not strategic.
And then the little light bulb over his head went on. He realized that the Germans were serious about this shit, so he had better be as well. If he had not seen that little blop of intel, things would have been a lot different…
I realize that it would not be in Hitler’s nature to back away from a fight. My question is more - if he had be someone who could occasionally look the other way - the way he did with Russia for a while - and kept the US from having an obvious, unequivocal reason for going after Germany, he might have been able to steer the brunt of their war at Japan.
What long-range British bombers? The Lancaster had a maximum range of 2,700 miles; enough to get 1,600 miles to Moscow or St. Petersburg/Leningrad, but not enough to get back. Of course, that’s with a nominal payload; with an early atom bomb on board- 10,000 pounds or thereabouts- they probably would have had three quarters of their normal range.
The Lincoln could do an extra 200 miles, which might have been enough, but it didn’t enter service. Anyway, why would we want to nuke the Soviets? Even when they weren’t fighting the Germans, they weren’t at war with us.
A more likely scenario is Hitler being less anti-Semitic, and not scaring most of the world’s top physicists from Heidelburg University (whence, of course, they went to America). Germany could have developed an A-bomb by 1943.
Yes, but to not give the US an reason to declare war on Germany, they would have to not be torpedoing convoys sending aid to the UK. In other words, the choice is to either to allow the US to send the UK unlimited supplies, or to try to choke the flow of supplies. Allowing the US to act as a co-belligerant is unacceptable, because it means the US can attack you but you can’t do a thing to stop them.
So the germans have to attack the aid convoys to the UK. And if the Germans are attacking US ships, that’s an act of war.
Roosevelt was determined to fight the Germans, he was just waiting for the best time to declare open war. Pearl Harbor was the trigger in real life. But if Hitler hadn’t declared war on the US, there was essentially nothing he could do aside from signing a peace treaty with the UK that would keep the US from declaring war on Germany sooner or very sooner.
How would Germany deliver it? Resources would have meant a very limited number of bombs available to Germany, and Germany had no heavy bomber. Even if it had developed one, the idea of risking one of an incredibly limited number of bombs to a heavy bomber when the Allies had control of the airs seems highly unlikely to me.
The only use I have come up with for an atomic weapon for the Germans from that time onward is blowing Warsaw up from the ground after abandoning it to the Red Army. I don’t see how it could be delivered against an enemy occupied city, or against effectively against the D-Day beachheads.