No, on the two dates I highlighted, January 1939 and March 1939, France was still at peace. The war clouds were pretty thick by then but the rain wouldn’t actually start falling till September 1st, with the invasion of Poland, prompting France, like Britain, to declare war on Sept 3rd.
Cool. Why do I stand up for the French? They wouldn’t stand up for me, that’s for sure.
Look, cracks about French snootiness and cowardice abound, both in the USA and here in the UK, but the truth is they had far less choice about how to prepare for WW2 than either of our countries. They had a 500-mile land border with Germany (rather than a channel or an ocean to separate them from the 20th century’s most belligerent nation) that they had to defend for ~two decades following WW1. The way they chose to defend it (Maginot Line) looks, with perfect hindsight, wrong, but on top of the Line (a ginormous construction project that swallowed a lot of GDP for many years) they had to keep a standing army of more than 100 divisions at half-strength, and were building tanks and planes in their thousands. All this was a huge drain on their economy, and caused great social unrest (I don’t just mean a few policemen clashing with a few protesters, either). If the USA had rearmed early it might have been at the expense of the New Deal, and caused similar problems.
Yeah, perhaps. I’ve always considered the expansion of the US Army in WW2 under Generals Marshall, McNair, etc (a forty-fold increase in size) to be one of the greatest feats of organisation in history. The small pre-war army might not have been large enough to fight, but precisely because of its small size it was able to pick and choose the best minds (Marshall, McNair, Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, heck even Mark Clark) to develop doctrine (for example the Louisiana Maneuvers was run largely to try out Blitzkrieg).
Your point about being able to supply the allies with better equipment is a good one. The desert war in particular was a mobile war in which tanks played the starring role. (the “Gazala Gallops” happened when one side or the other ran out of tanks and had no choice but to retreat, this happened more than once!) It might have made a difference to the Eighth Army if they’d had Shermans in late 1941 instead of 42.
Looks like they also had some Martin Marylands (and looking at Wikipedia, they apparently ordered more than they got. Production delays and the Neutrality Act got in the way).
Possibly; but the only thing worse than having to learn how to fight a war as you go along is having to unlearn how to fight the previous war as you discover that new weapons have changed what works. To use the example of tanks for instance, up until about 1940 or so anti-tank rifles and man-portable light field artillery were still useful anti-armor weapons because they were intended to take out the relatively lightly armored tanks of the mid 1930s. At least part of the blame for the defeat of France in 1940 is sometimes held to be that the French infantry’s anti-tank weapons were inadequate against the newer German tanks.
There was no invasion component with the Pearl Harbor strike force. I rather imagine the Japanese knew that invading and occupying Hawaii would have been a logistical quagmire.
MHO, absent the US carriers, the Japanese would have spent more time and energy in consolidating their conquests than in expansion (the Midway/Aleutians operation only won approval following the Doolittle raid, which would have been mounted much later if at all). Most likely future thrust would have been down the Solomons — as actually happened — in order to cut off Australia.
As for Europe, Roosevelt’s main concern had been Hitler long before Pearl Harbor, and I doubt that adding carriers to the casualty list would have altered that. Anyway, the battleships were the “pride of the fleet” at the time, and in the public mind they would most likely have remained the most stinging losses.
(And in response to Gregg64’s scenario, I don’t know which is more unlikely: that the Japanese would have left their fleet uncovered, or that Halsey’s single carrier with an inexperienced air group would have been able to take out all six IJN front-line carriers. To be sure, Halsey would have attacked had he known the Japanese location; but I think a far more likely outcome would have been minor damage to the Japanese, while Halsey and his entire command went to sleep with the fishes.)
These are fair points, but I think you mischaracterize the criticism of France. They don’t get teased because they built a wall and thought they could hide behind it. The prime purpose of the Maginot Line was to force the Germans to go around it, which they did. The French and their allies were well prepared to meet them in Belgium. They weren’t as prepared for the push through the Ardennes, but the German advance was slow and the leading elements were spread thin.
Unfortunately, it was only 5 days into the battle before the French started whining to Churchill about how all was lost. 5 days! That’s why they get teased.
Well, five days in, the allied forces in Belgium had been cut off, and by that point, the French had squandered their reserve by moving them all over the place. But the French generals had been traumatized by World War I, and weren’t really in the psychic shape to fight a long war. It’s the old “Army of lions led by rabbits” thing.
Yeah, considering they didn’t even have nukes back then, it’s surprising what a “mutual assured destruction” mentality they had (see the movie “Things to Come” for a good illustration). Apparently they felt that another war = end of civilization. The German Army didn’t cooperate by dying however.
The French have always had a tendency to go their own path. Sort of the equivalent of Apples ‘not invented here’ syndrome. I was positing that IF the US invested in it’s military and in military technology in the early 30’s, then perhaps we’d have actually had stuff worth buying (even though we didn’t, we still had stuff worth buying, obviously, since the French in fact apparently DID buy some air frames from us, at least).
The main reason for the French defeat was that their training and tactics sucked. They tried to divide up their armored forces into penny packets tied to their infantry, instead of concentrating them. Once they got strategically surprised they were never able to really get back on their feet, and their morale was never able to recover. Part of that was strategic, but a lot of it was tactical, and a great deal of it was that their army was a weak instrument, poorly trained, even if their equipment was superior to much of what the Germans had. The Germans used what they had better than the French and the allies (Brits and later Russians and certainly the US) did in the early stages of the war.
The thing is, I’m not French bashing, calling them surrender monkeys or anything of the sort. My point was simply that the French didn’t and even today don’t buy most of their hardware from the outside…or at least that was the impression I always got (you’ve obviously demonstrated that at least some of what I THOUGHT was true wasn’t).
But I wasn’t saying anything about French snootiness or cowardice (which is inaccurate). Their army was poorly trained and poorly prepared for WWII from a personnel perspective (they had some pretty good hardware, some of the best pre-war actually, and they had massive fortifications). Their REAL problem was with their general staff, who were fixated on fighting the last war, and who were unwilling to even consider some of the innovative thinking being published in other countries concerning tactics throughout the 20’s and 30’s (especially by the Brits and Germans before the war clouds started to close in). They spent their budge on THINGS, instead of on training PEOPLE, which, in the end, doomed them to defeat, when the enemy didn’t follow their concept of how the battles would play out. If they had trained their troops and built their morale then even the strategic surprise they suffered my not have necessarily meant they would lose.
That’s true, though the spending might have helped get us out of the Depression sooner, too. I’m not sure how it would have actually played out…just threw it out there as a ‘what if’ of a ‘slight alteration’ that might have changed the course of WWII. Personally, I think that had we increased our defense budget for non-Navy spending, and focused on training and tactics, we would have been in a much better position to help and support the allies down the line…and probably would have entered the war sooner than we did, which might have changed the European part of the conflict at least (whether for good or ill I’m not sure).
Or if we didn’t develop the Sherman, and instead developed something along the lines of what Christie WANTED to develop…a quick, agile tank with decent armor (sloped) but with a lot of maneuverability…something like the Russian BT-2 that Christie built for the Russians in 1932. They would have been under gunned by the standards of later in the war, but they would have been a match for the Panzer II’s and III’s that Germany started the war with…and we would have already had them in production, with lessons being learned once the war started, which means we would have been in as good a position as anyone else to start upgrading or changing designs by the time things started to pick up.
The point is to get SOMETHING into production and then into battle, so that you aren’t starting pretty much from scratch and then playing catchup…which is what we did. A lot of the flaws that the Sherman had weren’t obvious until they were tested in battle, and by the time we really got into full production it was already 1942, and improvements and fixes take time. If the Sherman had been in production in 1939, however, then by '42 we’d have had the data and experience to be producing something a hell of a lot better…maybe something like the M26. The biggest thing, however, is that we’d have had a bigger core of trained soldiers, and more opportunity (in theory at least) to have TRAINED…and by doing so, to have worked out more tactics for using these new weapons. Having actual tanks to test and play with the Army may have been in a better position once war came. Same on the Army Air Corps side of things…having a larger budget and more air planes to play with would have lead to more trained personnel, and may have lead to more innovation.
It may not have, too…it may have put the US in a worst position once war came. Which is also in line with the OP…a little change (the US increasing it’s non-Naval defense budget by, say, 1%) causing a worse outcome for the allies due to the US being in worst shape or with worse preparedness when the war kicked off. Maybe there would have been more economic problems, which would have lead to a backlash by the American people against all things military, which might have made us even more isolationist, which might have lead to the US being even more reluctant to enter the European side of the war and focus more on Japan only. Or, maybe the US would have been less isolationist, and more willing to push back on Japan and Germany, taking a more aggressive stance, and bringing us in at the onset…or, maybe a more aggressive US would have dissuaded the Japanese from considering their adventure at Pearl Harbor and remaining neutral towards the US, and the US being able to focus strictly on Germany.
Small change that alters the course of WWII. Either way, I think the US focusing more resources on it’s military early in the 30’s would have had SOME change, positive or negative, on the course of WWII.
I never had the impression that the average Poilu was particularly badly trained, nor that they were lacking in courage or spirit.
What I got from the 1940 fighting in France is that the French generals were badly outclassed by their German counterparts- they had no notion of what Blitzkrieg really was, and were essentially expecting to fight World War I over again.
So here’s another “What if?”:
What if Weygand and Gamelin had been killed in some freak accident in spring 1940, and a younger officer like say de Gaulle had become head of the high command- one who had read Liddell-Hart and Guderian, and knew what to expect?
Could the French Army have successfully stopped the Germans?
De Gaulle might have insisted on keeping a mobile reserve available, which could have been used to meet the German armor streaming out from the Ardennes. Ultimately, though, I think France’s lack of airpower would have eventually doomed them. Perhaps if France had done a better job of resisting the British might have committed some of their airpower they had decided to keep in reserve (in anticipation of a French loss and a future German attack, which is what ended up happening).
Most of the First World War on the Western Front was fought on French soil, and of all the belligerents of World War I, the only countries that lost a larger percentage of their population in war deaths, were Serbia, the Ottomans, and Rumania.
A few more :[ol]
[li]During the Battle of Britain, the Germans use nerve gas. At the time, they were the only country with it. Nobody else had even heard of the stuff. It would have been the equivalent of having the A-bomb.[/li][li]A naval one : in July 1940, after France had surrendered, the British Admiralty was very afraid about the French Navy falling into the hands of the Axis. As a preemptive strike, they sailed to North Africa and demanded that the French fleet followed them to Alexandria to be interned. The French refused, and a significant portions of their ships were sunk, creating a profound resentment against England. What if the resentment went deeper and France decided to join the Axis against their backstabbing former ally ? [/li][li]In 1942, after Torch, the French fleet in Toulon scuttled itself to prevent to fall into the hands of the Germans. What if it had sailed instead to join the Allies in North Africa ?[/li] In spring 1941, the British stopped their attack against the Italians in North Africa to send troops to the aid of Greece. Suppose they had decided they could help the Greeks better by kicking the Italians out of Africa, before the arrival of the Afrika Korps ?[/ol]
They get gassed right back - which is precisely why they didn’t use any kind of gas in the first place.
Hard to say, but I don’t see anything significant coming of it. The military and economic resources available to Vichy France were negligible, even more so once the Allies picked off all their overseas possessions (eg Syria). And the Germans occupy Vichy the next year in any case.
By this time Allied Naval power was so overwhelming, the addition of a few more ships would have made no discernible difference.
Churchill did that in order to demonstrate that the British were willing to support anyone fighting the Germans and Italians, which in turn (arguably) encouraged the activities of partisans in all the occupied countries. Certainly it turned out very badly in this case, but did accomplish one thing - it eviscerated the German paratroopers in Crete. Absent that you’d imagine they would have been used against Malta; had that fallen then possession of Libya wouldn’t be worth much.
No-one at the time knew that carriers were the only ship that mattered in this theatre of war, and that battleships were virtually obsolete there. While disheartening, the loss of 3 carriers at the start would have delayed the American victory at worst - recall they had 4 more carriers in the Altantic at the time. They built 14 new CVs, 9 CVLs and 122 CVEs during the war.
As said elsewhere the Japanese had brought no troops so an invasion was not on the cards. In any case, recall that the purpose of the attack was to so damage the US Navy that the US would make peace rather than fight; occupying actual US territory would have made certain that no peace was possible…
They would have been gassed with mustard gas, which they already knew how to protect themselves against. Sarin and Tabun, the Allies didn’t even know it existed. How do you protect yourselves against something that kill your people and you don’t know what it is ? Think. They bomb an airfield with a combination of regular HE and nerve gas. Your damage control crews goes in to fight the fires / fill in the runways and they suddenly start to drop like flies. What do you do ? Or naval bases and cities are attacked in the same fashion. What would be the impact on the morale of the population.
Let see, a fleet, combined with the Italian one, to interdict the Med, lots of infantry cannon fodder, Mediterranean bases (Tunisia is closer to the Italian mainland than Libya, so shorter sea routes) and I doubt that in 1940 the Brits would have been able to do much against Syria/Lebanon. Heck the Italians and the French might have decided to plan a pincer attack against Egypt. Plus, with France as an ally, the garrison requirements of France would have been less, hence more free troops for the Germans.
Let see again. Escorts for the Med convoys, freeing more ships for the battle of the Atlantic. More willing French cooperation in North Africa.
Why capture Malta if you don’t need it to protect your lines of supply for Libya ? From the start, Hitler was not really interested in the African campaign. However your argument has some truth in it. It just means that the Germans Fallshirmjager force will be castrated by jumping on the Soviet oilfields the following year.
This brings to mind another factor: while Yamamoto appreciated the value and impact of naval aviation, IJN strategy was oriented toward the “decisive battle” à la Trafalgar — and especially Tsushima — where the ships of the line form up and pound away at each other until one side is victorious and rules the waves. Given that orientation, the primary target at Pearl would still be the battle line. I’m sure that many of the Japanese pilots had instructions to hit the carriers first if they were in port, but the main objective was to neutralize the battleships.
(The “decisive battle” orientation was certainly also present in the upper echelons of the USN at the time of Pearl Harbor; but unlike the Japanese — who were still trying to force the DB in 1944, albeit with planes rather than battleships — the US adapted quickly because they had to.)
After the defeat at Stalingrad, a group of German officers decides to do away with Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler. Army soldiers surround the “Wolf’s lair”, and the Nazi hierarchy are shot to death.
Would the allies accept a German bid for a ceasefire and negotiated peace?
