Interesting, actually - not to hijack the thread, but how much could the 2016 US military conquer of the 1940s world? Half? Two-thirds?
By 1920 the British empire controlled 25% of the total land area of the planet. I would think the US military could get the whole 1940s world without too much trouble if it wanted to, heck they could probably do that with some effort with the 2016 world as well. We are seriously OP compared to the rest of the world.
And it’s not as if tarmac got patented in 2015…
I could be wrong but doesn’t the air force have tactical teams that can set up landing strips basically anywhere?
Of course, if the whole country got teleported, we’d have an economic collapse of hellish proportions. Just for instance, all those people who work for the overseas McDonald’s franchise and distribution network. No more overseas McDonald’s!
We would have to re-invent our entire economy, and the process would be monstrously dislocating.
On the other hand, we know in advance that overseas McDonald’s franchising is going to be successful, so we get to bypass a lot of guesswork. We also know about all the oil in the near and mid-East, so we could glom Arabia and Iraq before they have any kind of political or economic power.
(We’d also have historical knowledge on our side, and would know things like not to let Japan build the Fukushima reactor, or Italy build the Vajont dam. Anchorage, AK, would have lots of time to prepare for the 1964 earthquake.)
When Japan invaded China in World War II, there was an analogy that Japan was like a swimmer in a swimming pool, in the sense that the swimmer could go anywhere he desired, but couldn’t hold territory meaningfully and that as soon as he moved, the water filled the gap left in his wake, since Japan, despite being technologically superior, was simply vastly outnumbered by China.
So I wonder if we wouldn’t have something similar here in the OP’s hypothetical. The United States’ forces would vastly outclass everything they encountered, but it might be like a swimmer in Europe - if the USA wants to take every inch of Axis territory in Europe. You can go anywhere you want, but don’t have the numbers to hold territory.
By the way, at what point is the USA intervening? At the very outset of war, or at Nazi Germany’s high-water point, when they had taken France and pushed near Moscow?
At the very height of their power.
OK, gotcha.
In that case it would be like the 1991 Gulf War as you mentioned, but on a scale ten times bigger. Assuming availability of all C4ISRT assets like satellites, etc., American airpower would cause the Wehrmacht to cease to be a functional, effective force inside of a month.
India was held by a tiny island off the coast of Europe. As long as you keep all the water in the pool and don’t let anyone else swim it all amounts to the same thing right?
This is why we invented Vietnamization. We’d conquer a big chunk of land, arm the locals, put them in charge of securing the area, and move on. It’s an Imperial technique the Romans mastered, and, in the hypothetical, we’d probably use it to really good effect.
For instance, we’d liberate France, then arm the French with 1960’s weaponry and technology – better than anybody else had, but not equal to our own really good stuff – and turn France loose on those parts of Germany we can’t attend to ourselves. (We’d have already armed up Britain…but, knowing history, not the Soviets.)
In the same way, we wouldn’t have to fight Mao ourselves: just give more concrete support to Chiang.
You know the old joke: “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.” Well: we don’t need to conquer the world; we just need to conquer a bunch of friendly conquerers.
(Sort of a no-holds-barred version of the Cold War. And we’re the only ones with nukes.)
I think I had a typo there or something- clearly I was typing something other than the speed. At any rate, they can’t sustain supersonic speeds, but do have cruising speeds in the 650 mph ballpark (0.85 mach), which only makes the point that much more.
I imagine that in a week or two of high intensity air operations, the modern-day USAF could effectively cripple say… 1943-ish Germany in pretty much every respect, especially if they had accurate wartime or post-war maps to use.
I mean, a small handful of 2000 lb laser-guided Paveway bombs can do what it likely took an entire bomber raid in WWII to accomplish. Things like destroying factories, bridges, railyards, etc… are much more easily and effectively accomplished nowadays. Hell, look at the Thanh Hoa Bridge- some 871 sorties mounted against it with conventional bombing techniques with no success, and the first Paveway raid against it of 14 planes hit it and knocked one end into the river, and the second Paveway raid destroyed it entirely.
That’s the sort of accuracy and destruction we’re talking about. Rather than mounting a raid of 250 B-17 bombers to destroy a small set of targets in a German city, we could hit them with a handful of bombs from a handful of bombers flying faster than the Germans would think possible.
Wouldn’t helicopters and transport planes be vulnerable to the masses of AAA covering Germany, and to some extent even the Luftwaffe? German production totaled 200,000 AAA guns, and 60,000 fighters. Now, at any given time in the war there will only be a small fraction of that along a path leading to Berlin, but as a WAG it’d take tens of thousands of air strikes to clear the path.
That’s on the order of magnitude of the Gulf War air campaign. Could the modern US military sustain an even bigger campaign? How long before we’re at the literal point of running out of bombs and can’t keep up with aircraft maintenance?
LSLguy mentioned incinerating Berlin, but if we’re talking about the modern US military we also have to take into account modern US sensibilities. We’re not going to be doing strategic bombing of civilian center and we’re not going to use nukes. Given our casualty averseness I think our leaders would also be tempted to just put airpower into the fight and make the Brits do all the ground work.
No need to let them keep radio. We could watch their movements faster than they could make them.
Strategic bombing was in its very infancy in WWII and it really wasn’t until the fact-finding teams when in after the war that they started to understand what should be done the next time.
We wouldn’t need to inflict as much damage as they had to against the Nazis. First would be to cripple their oil and fuel facilities and storage and Germany would be entirely screwed. Effectively attack their transportation system and there wouldn’t be anything left to move goods or armies.
The other problem would be the limited number of smart bombs because modern factories just don’t produce enough for that scale of a war, but IMHO, it wouldn’t be necessary. We still have enough “dumb” bombs and without the constraints of worrying about civilian losses, dumb bombs will do.
The war would be over before they started to need replacement arms from factories.
This would have been a bigger factor in '42 than '43 by which time the Kriegsmarine had pretty much been defeated and only a few patrol boats caused any damage to the invasion forces on D-Day. However, it is going to be a big part of my strategy outlined below.
In 1944, Germany was reduced to moving their armor at night because of Allied air supremacy. In this alt-hist, Germany couldn’t move their armor or their armies day or night.
The march from Normandy took almost a year in real history because the front moved slowly and we couldn’t prevent reinforcements from arriving. This would not be the case with modern armed forces fighting against them.
See below.
The only thing I disagree with is this French coast. What’s that?
We own the air, we own the sea, we can pinpoint bombs and naval guns and we have ability to set troops down behind lines. First we attack Antwerp and take the port. We blow the hell out of all their armies and tanks which rush forward while we grab the bridges.
It may even be easier to clear Denmark, then take a port closer to Berlin allowing the logistic lines to be shorter.
The Nazi’s did invent integrated rapid mobility combined arms air, armor, infantry and artillery combat (Blitzkrieg). But they did it 80 years ago.
I feel like we had a similar thread a short time ago. But a Nazi Blitzkrieg would be about as effective against a modern heavy Brigade Combat Team with integrated air support as the Maginot Line was at stopping them in the 40s.
Technology has the effect of compressing time and space on the battlefield. It’s why the Germans were so effective in the early stages of the war. Countries like France and Poland were thinking and operating on WWI timeframes. Weeks and days instead of days and hours. As someone pointed out with the B-1 Lancer, imagine a 1940s army trying to deal with a single aircraft that can be launched from bases beyond their range to respond, is largely immune to their anti-aircraft countermeasures and can destroy an entire regiment in a single bombing run.
Or dealing with a tank that travels twice as fast as yours across country, is largely impervious to your main cannon and can actually fire and hit you from 2.5 miles away, while both tanks are moving at full speed.
Another important factor is we understand Nazi technology.
When you read contemporary accounts of the war you’ll see that while a country may be able to see what an enemy is doing, it’s often very difficult to figure out how they’re doing it.
To give one example, the Germans never really appreciated how much the British were using radar. The Germans understood radar existed and they had radar sets of their own. But the British had built up a radar network and incorporated it into their command structure. The result was that the British could track incoming German bombers and send just the right amount of interceptors to the right locations. Radar made British air defense substantially more effective. But the Germans never realized this and never made any significant attempts to bomb radar stations.
There are hundreds of other examples like this. Things which weren’t clear to the people in the middle of a war encountering them for the first time but which we’ve been studying in history books for decades. We probably have a better understanding of how the German military works than the Germans themselves did during the war. And if we somehow went back and fought those Germans, we could use this knowledge to pinpoint our attacks at the places where they would do the most damage.
We’d also be able to tell the Brits the names of the Cambridge Five.
OTOH; in an alternate Universe, Modern America would be replaced with 1940’s America and the entire world order would collapse as America became a third world country simply due to being 60+ years behind in tech.
Incidentally, what’s the bare minimum of modern non-nuclear technology required to change the outcome of WWII?
Suppose the Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe had a few AC-130 Spectres, with all the ammo and fuel always readily available for them. Would that have turned Stalingrad, Moscow, Leningrad, etc. into German victories?
Maybe one B-52 armed with sensor-fuzed cluster skeet munitions (again, with all the ammo and fuel always readily available, constantly landing and replenishing) would have won Kursk for Germany?
An Imperial Japanese Seawolf-class SSN might have singlehandedly won Midway, etc.
V-22’s and CH-53’s air in-flight refuel capable. No limit to the distance they can travel to drop off troops. We just have to wait for the V-22 numbers to come up a little more.