I’m sure we could. But then there’d be the question of whether we’d have the political will to turn directly on our nominal allies. Especially if our Western allies weren’t willing to take part in the dirty work, and it needed to be our boots on the ground and casualties that were doing it.
Numbers only matter if those numbers are in a particular area that is being attacked. Current Army doctrine states that we do not attack unless we have a numerical superiority of 3 to 1. The question is could those sorts of attacks be sustained? I believe they could.
Imagine if you will.
An U2 or SR-71 does daily overflights of the entirety of Europe, the Nazi’s have nothing that could threaten either plane which fly too high and too fast for any of their AA ability. This gives the Americans the ability to know where enemy forces are and where they are concentrated.
When a target is selected a drone will be launched at night which will put a laser target on precise objectives which are then blown up by supporting aircraft or artillery. The Germans will suddenly find their radios are not working due to EW jamming preventing them from calling in reinforcements. A-10 warthogs ensure that any armored vehicles in range cease to exist.
The camp in chaos they hear the sound of helicopters as Blackhawks drop air assault troops into the area to ensure that anyone who remains is either dead or captured and then they’re all gone before anyone knows what happened.
I think this is based on a misunderstanding of force effectiveness. The ww2 US army had an enormous amount of people doing things that nowadays are either not done, or done by a handful of people. The biggest example would be in the logistics chain, where you might have hundreds of people hauling stuff around by hand and achieving less throughput than one guy driving a 4x4 telehandler. Then all the people transcribing messages by hand, encoding them with a mechanical cipher machine and tapping them into morse code. All the cooks and blanket washers and latrine diggers who are now largely automated. Modern artillery is terrifyingly more efficient than the ww2 equivalent across the board, but not least in how few people are needed to set it up, calculate the firing solutions, and hump the shells about. The whole ‘long frayed supply line’ came about because in ww2 it wasn’t possible to build ports, roads, bridges, depots etc in a few days and then run them with a few hundred people and some machines. Nowadays that’s still a hell of a difficult job, but it’s a LOT easier if you have masses of modern combat engineering and logistics assets, containerisation, etc.
Certainly it would be a challenge finding enough ‘teeth’ troops to cover the battlefields (just as it was in Korea, and Vietnam, and Iraq, and so on) but this time there are plenty of motivated allies available to fill in positions where all that is needed is someone in a uniform holding a rifle. There are an estimated 20-30 MILLION modern military-type rifles in US civilian ownership today, so scaring up spare small arms should be no issue.
The whole Huertgen forest debacle would be an interesting tactical exercise for a modern infantry brigade equipped with thermal imagers, man-portable bunker busting rockets, detailed maps of enemy positions from radar that can penetrate the forest canopy, and modern artillery. Why would they need to indulge in a costly battle of attrition to clear the whole forest when they easily sketch out the most effective route through the terrain, neutralise the relevant enemy positions, and immobilise the rest to prevent them getting up to any mischief? Whenever there is a tricky offensive challenge, the solution will always be “artillery, and attack at night”. Any defensive challenges can be solved by using the radio. Casualties would certainly occur, but disproportionately to the enemy.
Similarly, why would it be in any way relevant how many operational submarines the germans had? The only thing that would matter is how many could get within ww2 torpedo range of a convoy. If there was a single modern warship with the convoy that would be 0, since the ww2 sub would be detected a hundred kilometres away and destroyed with a single shot before it even realised it was approaching a potential target. All the u-boats bumbling around blindly in the ocean hundreds of KMs from the nearest allied transport can keep doing so, they’re just draining the nazi supply chain. So your total need for escort vessels is one per convoy, which could probably be covered using only the spare SSBNs that have no other use now. Bear in mind also that any vessel capable of more than about 14 knots was effectively immune to u-boat interception, so everything belonging to Military Sealift Command can sail completely unescorted, probably every other modern vessel too.
The OP’s contention is a bit on the absurd side. There’s no way that modern-day generals would try to invade 1944 France using merely 18 divisions in total (8 active/10 NG) In a historical context, that’s less US divisions than were on the ground two weeks after D-Day, and the US forces only got larger from there.
18 divisions can’t be everywhere at once, and nor can the USAF- there would still be German units able to get into rear areas and cause havoc and/or perform delaying/flanking attacks if there were only a total of 18 divisions to try and perform the invasion of Europe with.
In other words, they’d be able to utterly crush any German forces they encountered, but they wouldn’t necessarily be able to chase down and crush all the German forces in France, the Low Countries and Germany, and as they moved out of Normandy and across France, their supply lines would be vulnerable with such a relatively small force.
So would there be follow-on 1944 US Army divisions landing in the weeks after D-Day, or are we assuming we’re raising new units of 2016 draftees armed with 2016 weapons to flesh out the forces invading Europe, and that they’re being transported 75 years into the past via some kind of magical mechanism?
Exactly. Let’s grant that the modern US spearhead manages to steam roll halfway to Berlin in a few weeks. Even if many German divisions are utterly annihilated along the way, there will still be many hundred mile flanks threatened by several more German divisions. How sparsely can you deploy US forces along the flanks? How much can you rely on air interdiction to stop them? Sure, you can bomb any concentration of attacking armor. What if the German commanders manage to adopt guerilla tactics with 100,000 riflemen?
3-1 is not a strict numerical personnel ratio. It takes into account all the stuff we’ve been talking about, like drones and smart bombs. So 900 American infantry in armored vehicles + 30 attack Helicopters + 5 remotely piloted drones vs 1000 WWII-equipped Germans may well count as a “3-1 ratio” in terms of combat ability. (I’m making all these numbers up to illustrate the point.)
I remember when this was discussed on USENET in a thread called USA 2002 ISOT 1942 - since USENET is hard to search these days, I was able to find this archive http://www.changingthetimes.net/samples/asb/isot_american_2002.htm of the original discussion.
Some interesting discussions in this thread. A few points that occur to me:
(1) There are no GPS satellites in 1943. Presumably all of our extremely precise guided weapons would function at something less than maximal efficiency without it (although I’m sure our military has plans in place for what to do if GPS satellites are destroyed, so they won’t be totally helpless)
(2) It’s hard to imagine that an immediate priority wouldn’t be to do something about the holocaust… although it’s not totally clear what that something should be. Starting with the continental USA being transported back to 1943 (and does that count carrier groups that are currently deployed overseas?), what’s the quickest and most effective way to get the nazis to stop the gas chambers? Some combination of a quick and overwhelming display of military might along with diplomatic approaches through Switzerland?
(3) There’s also the fascinating cultural question of the parts of the existing 1943-era US military that are overseas when the event happens, and how we attempt to integrate them back into “modern” American society.
John Birmingham’s Axis of Time series is a somewhat related series of alternate history books, although it’s not the entire current US military, it’s a smallish number of near-future military vessels, mainly US, but also some allies, and they end up right in the middle of the battle of Midway.
As I understand it, some CAS platforms, such as the AC-130 Spectre, can essentially kill unlimited numbers of exposed enemy personnel, ammunition permitting. So in situations where the Wehrmacht troops were out in the open or visible to night vision, they’d be slaughtered.
Question: Could a Modern Abrams tank run on 1944 diesel fuel?
I’m sure the M1’s multi-fuel tank turbine can handle 1944-era diesel fuel. The bigger question is whether it can run effectively on gasoline, which is what the US Army of 1944 ran on almost exclusively.
And as to MaxTheVool’s first point- there are lots of non-GPS precision-guided munitions still in use- laser guided, millimeter wave radar guided, infrared guided, etc… Plus if nothing else, the bombsights in modern planes are WAY better than the old Norden bombsights of WWII, so something like a B-52 could probably just fly higher and faster than German fighters could deal with, and drop more bombs more accurately than B-17s, even if they adapted the B-52 to carry 1944-era bombs.
Very likely yes. The turbine is multi-fuel capable. I’m just not sure what the difference would be in fuel standards. If it was particularly dirty with sediment that plugged up the fuel filters that could be an issue. IME the turbine does not like it when the fuel flow gets restricted from dirty fuel filters.
ETA - gasoline and aviation fuel are part of that multi-fuel capability.
I should have googled the single fuel concept that I thought about referencing before I posted. One issue identified before I strapped up my tanker boots.
I didn’t consider waxing since the diesel I operated with already had the “fix.” The Abrams does not like clogged fuel filters part is right. The turbine is thirsty.
I think the AC-130 may actually be one of the least useful pieces of modern hardware. During the day, it’ll be a sitting duck for all the flak companies and battalions that accompany any infantry division. It would be more useful at night, but still not invulnerable, since its position will be pretty clear any time it fires.
The quickest way to do something about the Holocaust would be to bomb the railroads to the camps with some of those precision-guided bombs. Perhaps the next step would be drone strikes on guard barracks, though I imagine the drones would be pretty vulnerable to flak; were there AA troops around the camps?
This completely misses the point that there were never 60,000 German fighters at any given point in the war. These statistics are completely misleading as well as meaningless. Well, meaningless is not the right term. “Ludicrous” is probably better.
This is the danger of simply looking up stats in wiki without any understanding of what they mean.
By the summer of '44, the Allies had air superiority over Germany. Germany had only 1,525 fighters in service, total. Worse, they had lost almost all of their experienced pilots and the replacements were under-trained and dying quickly. A 2016 USAF would quickly reduce that number down to damn near zero very, very quickly. The German radar system, navigation beacons and command and control centers would be smoking wreaks.
As far as AAA guns, they would be sitting ducks for modern forces. Only a tiny fraction would be on the potential route, and they would be taken out or avoided.
It’s at least possible, weird though it sounds, that the fastest way to stop the Holocaust would be diplomatic. After all, if we send in the special forces to kill all the guards at Auschwitz, and blow up all the rail depots, and blow up all the people who are organizing everything, then you’re just going to end up with rail cars full of asphyxiating Jews.
On the other hand, there presumably were people in the Nazi government who could stop the holocaust immediately with the stroke of a pen. And people in 1943 weren’t stupid, even Nazis, so it shouldn’t be hard to convince them of the truth of the situation. So combine a massively overwhelming display of unstoppable military power (nuke a few military targets in Germany, but not Berlin, because you need a functioning government to conduct diplomacy with) along with the message of “we know exactly what you’re doing to the Jews. If you stop now instantly and immediately, then maybe we will not nuke every city in Germany, which we could easily do. Maybe.”
The right strategy might be an assassination strike at the very top leadership (I can’t imagine anyone from the 21st century being willing to leave Hitler alive and in power), but leave enough functioning government that the machinery of state is still there… and then show them archival film of what happens when the Soviets invade Berlin, and tell them that only by making peace RIGHT NOW can they avoid that fate.
- The % of combat troops in the US Army in the ETO in 1945 was 39%. In the 1991 Gulf war it was 30% (which is probably more comparable because a relatively conventional war of movement). In Iraq in 2005 (a more static counterinsurgency force) it was 40%. Here’s a study of US Army tooth to tails over many wars:
http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/carl/download/csipubs/mcgrath_op23.pdf
And within combat units there will be fewer trigger pullers now as a %. Part of this is for the same reasons the force now is far more effective in equipment (and just far more effective per person assuming human factors equal). It has more equipment per person (night vision, lower echelon UAS etc, more extensive comms, more vehicles than even the lavishly equipped, by the standards of its day, WWII US Army had, etc), some of the operation and/or care of which is up to people assigned to combat units. We’re going to count that advantage in person for person effectiveness, but have to realize it means fewer infantry bodies in combat units for a given total personnel number, and as given above the % of people in combat units has not gone up since WWII.
- Artillery now is much more efficient, but by what ratio depends a lot on what type of mission it’s trying to perform. The ratio would be higher in situations of reacting rapidly to a maneuvering units of an enemy, including the enemy’s own artillery. The ratio would be less against a well dug in force, including enemy artillery or mortars well dug in favorable locations (like on reverse slopes making it hard for long range flat trajectory counter battery fire to reach them). And there’s nothing revolutionary in the last 70 yrs as far as a give caliber’s effectiveness against field fortifications of a given strength. Now 155mm is the basically uniform caliber of US Army (cannon) artillery, but it was a significant % of the guns then (105mm was more numerous) plus the 1944 Army had heavy artillery (8" and 240mm) which no longer exists. The modern force does have more rocket artillery but that’s mainly about volume under an assumption of maneuver warfare, not taking out dug in opponents.
The ratio of effectiveness of modern to 1944-45 US artillery is almost surely less than the ~8:1 ratio by which the force has shrunk. It’s a smaller peacetime force…this is one of the basic problems with the ‘what if’.
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It’s possible to build roads ports and bridges now in a few days? I don’t think so. If you’re thinking of stuff like floating treadway bridges those were around in WWII. The problem in logistics in France which stopped the US Army on the German border in September 1944, and which was not fully solved by the time the Germans went back on the offensive in December, though it was basically solved by the time the US started moving significantly again in Feb 1945, was that the French rail system had been destroyed, and the Germans held/destroyed all the seaports closer than the Normandy beaches. That problem would be just as intractable for a modern army. Modern armies don’t have a lot more trucks per unit of consumption (expect insofar as lower tooth to tail of modern mobile forces see 1). And the same roads would get worn out just as fast. Nor is road building revolutionarily more productive now. We’re talking the highly mechanized US Army engineering units of 1944, not some army in 1844.
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The Allies (the mainly British/Canadian 21st Army Group in the north and French 1st Army in the US 6th Army Group in the south) held their own large sectors of the 1944-45 western front. There wasn’t some other big Allied army standing around doing nothing. Of course if the US force was shrunk by a large factor the front would be realigned to offset that…but the Allied force as a whole would still have a big problem of greatly reduced numbers, since the US Army was the bulk of the force (49 of 73 Allied divisions in NW Europe in Jan 1945).
The Germans were the ones in the actual case forced to form low quality ‘anyone who can hold a rifle’ units, the volkssturm, which were in general of negligible effectiveness. As would similar Allied units have been. -
That’s grossly optimistic, in case of ‘radar which can pinpoint all the enemy positions’ it’s science fiction. US ISR, night vision and artillery capabilities didn’t prevent costly battles against opposing infantry forces in close or urban terrain in Iraq and Afghanistan, and wouldn’t in this hypothetical case, besides which the opponents would be a highly capable professional army pretty well equipped with its own artillery, and even contact fuses air burst in trees (during the Ardennes fighting the US Army started using radar proximity fuses in land artillery, the Germans not). Nor are minefields found with remote super technology, and in closed terrain there isn’t necessarily a way around them. I’d recommend the Army’s official history volume on the Siegfried Line campaign, including just a lot of the pictures, describing and showing situations and conditions favoring the defense to which there’s been no big tech solution to in the last 70 yrs.
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The only hope to contain the U-boats with comparatively tiny modern naval forces would be if nuclear attack subs could interdict enough of them near their bases. It was well proven in WWII that convoys you couldn’t escort adequately were worse than useless. The WWII Anglo-Americans (a Battle of the Atlantic with just magically transported modern US forces is confusing because so much of the effort was British/Commonwealth) could not run convoys if stripped of their 100’s of oceangoing escorts and 1,000’s of coastal escorts and ASW a/c by 1944 and leave them with little more than a 100 US, British and Canadian ASW ships and similar number of ASW a/c as now exist. And to even get to that number you have to assume the USN carrier and amphib forces stay in port so they don’t need any escorts.
The Battle of the Atlantic would have to change form completely to independent sailing merchant ships and an effort to interdict U-boats on their way to patrol areas, something which accounted for a relatively small % of U-boat losses in the actual war (via mainly British a/c in the Bay of Biscay, to a smaller degree Allied subs there, and mainly US carrier hunter killer groups in mid-Atlantic, but latter depended almost 100% on code breaking info) which required huge escort resources everywhere else. Those resources just don’t exist now, an even much bigger numbers issue than the one with the Army.
I agree in general that the difference with air forces is the phenomenon that modern planes can fly fast enough to basically ignore WWII planes which outnumber them. This was true to an extent even in various WWII situations. The German fighter units in the Western Desert ca. 1941-2 were often hugely outnumbered by the British (and eventually including some USAAF units) Desert Air Force. But they had excellent success because their Bf109F’s could avoid engagements with any of the Allied fighters when they weren’t favorable, they’d just run. Similarly with single 4 plane flights of P-38’s sent against much larger Japanese Army AF units in Western New Guinea and Dutch East Indies ca. 1944: just run from any unfavorable engagement, but pounce when the enemy didn’t see you first.
However, the thing about 1944 bombs points to another issue, and that applies to the ground forces problem too. The modern force is much less robustly supported by a big munitions industry, or one likely to be expanded as quickly. Nor does the modern force have remotely similar ability to replace its equipment losses, and again it’s not plausible to imagine modern ground forces would avoid heavy losses in all cases. It’s ore plausible for a/c assuming the Germans can’t mount effective counter attacks on their bases.
This is somewhat relevant in non-fantasy terms. Modern military forces are short winded and fragile in the sense that they can’t expend huge amounts of munitions without running out fairly soon, nor can they replace equipment losses at anything like the rate WWII ones could by the time all the combatants were fully mobilized industrially (which the Germans were late about, and that was one of their many big problems). IOW it’s indirectly relevant the Germans produced several 10k’s of fighters (and the US around 100k) in comparison to modern air units which if they do suffer heavy losses, that’s it. The industrial base can only replace those losses over years (the Germans had single engine fighters out the wazoo in 1944 despite continuous heavy losses: the shortages were in gasoline and pilots with the first contributing to the second). And is harder to scale it up to where it would be a lot faster.
An SF team could infiltrate Europe pretty easily. Show them the movie, Valkyrie. Have them make sure that the plot succeeds.