If we can take this a step further with a >>hijack<<.
Let us imagine that the bomb plot succeeded and that the Germans made overtures to the western allies to make a separate peace.
All the Germans currently in power, Himmler, Goering etc were arrested and either shot or imprisoned
Let us also bear in mind that the camps were run by the SS and that the ordinary German soldier, seaman, airman or civilian had little or no knowledge of the camps existence.
How feasible is it that the overtures would be accepted, the Germans re-armed and the NEW western allies would then fight against Soviet Russia, even to the gates of Moscow
The Western Allies were not going fight the Soviet Union. Great Britain had just been through hell and was starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and the U.S. did not consider the Soviet Union an enemy. Churchill saw the future, but Roosevelt…no. Even if they did, there is no way U.S. and England would embrace Germany and fight the Soviet Union.
The most extreme realistic scenario, IMO, is that Germany surrendered to the West and allowed the Western Allies in while trying to hold off the Russians (this is not a very relaistic possibility IMO). The Western Allies would still have forced Germany to surrender to the Soviet Union. This would have left the Soviet Union in a more tricky situation in dominating the nations of Eastern Europe. They still would have had quite the influence but not as much as historically.
Germany would have surrendered before it was utterly defeated and the cold war tensions might not have been that strong. In that case, the Allies would have been more intent on making sure Germany NEVER went on wars of aggression again and the results might have made the territory loss/East Germany-West Germany split look mild by comparison.
Perhaps the UK/US would not have “embraced” Germany as in “good old Fritz” but there could have been a sort of…Oh I don’t know, maybe a meeting of minds over the potential threat of Soviet Russia overunning the whole of Western Europe in the future as Churchill imagined they would.
In this case the Western allies would not have made Germany surrender to the Soviets but could quite easily have re-armed them to prevent such a thing.
The next, and logical step, would have been to to turn against Russia.
You also have to remember that the US had the capability of building more nuclear weapons whilst the Russians did not at this stage of the game
Well no. The first atomic bomb was not exploded until almost a year later on 16 July 1945 (the Trinity test). In July 1944 there was no certainty that an atomic bomb could be made to work on any realistic timescale.
With this in mind I am sure the Americans (and the Brits) would have been desparate to keep the Soviet Union on board for the invasion of Japan. In July '44 the battle for Saipan had just ended and the US was learning how hard the Japanese would fight (and die) to defend even a small outlying island.
While possible, I highly, highly, highly doubt it.
I don’t think there is any way the Western Allies would have accepted any sort of militarily viable Germany as any condition to end the war. If the Soviet Union would have acted unbelieveably beligerent saying “ALL EUROPE WILL BE OURS!”…then…ok it could happen. Otherwise, I just don’t think so.
The United Kingdom fought long and hard during World War II and nobody can accuse them of not doing all they could. But every nation eventually runs up against its limits and Britain was approaching them by 1944. At that point they were simply running out of available resources, both economic and human. The British armed forces had become dependant on American logistics in the last year of the war and even so, its numbers were decreasing in the final months of the war because the UK was literally running out of British men who were capable of serving.
That is my basic thinking as well. There was another enemy out there at this point - one that had attacked America and led to the entry into the War in the first place. This enemy was on the ropes, the regular bombing runs on the Japanese mainland from China were starting at roughly this time, but it wasn’t over.
Roosevelt choosing this particular time to make peace with the Germans to fight a bloody, horrific war with the USSR - our allies … to what? … free Poland? …save Romania?..liberate the Baltics?.. seize Moscow? I am not sure that any of this could have been done politically - at least for very long. I am very sure that any of these goals would have cost 100’s of thousands of American lives and almost certainly would have benefited Japan. It is hard for me to see Roosevelt doing this - but I admit it is all “what if” and arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
The mass slaughter on Omaha was less to do with the terrain and more to do with the American command refusing the Brits offers of specialised tanks for the landing(Engineer tanks ,mine clearers ,fascine ,softbeach trackway tanksetc.).
The only tanks the U.S. forces accepted from us were Duplex Drive (Swimmer tanks)which against all advice they launched from ridiculous distances from shore which resulted in most of them sinking with their crews.
The misplaced independance of the American command was directly responsible for many if not most of the casualties incurred.
Pride has its place but that was not the place.
I’m late to this thread, but I hope it’s not too necromantic to add a few comments.
Rickjay, I’m glad you brought up Bagration. Saved me some typing.
Lust4Life, the heck with Model, why not the more-accomplished Manstein? We forget today how instrumental he was in Germany’s Eastern Front successes. It was Manstein who insisted on mobile defense against the Soviet juggernaut, and Hitler’s stand fast orders paralyzing the Wermacht contributed hugely to Bagration’s success.
Omaha’s losses were more due to the quality of the German unit garrisoning it than anything else, IMHO. They shot back, accurately and aggressively, despite the awesome spectacle of the invasion.
To keep this sort-of on-topic…the Cruise movie, and some of the memorials I saw described following through the Wiki links, paint Stauffenberg as a hero.
Was he? Sure, we all want to kill Hitler. But my impression is that Stauffenberg wanted to preserve Germany and the German Army more than anything else, and he wanted to keep parts of Poland – effectively, to reverse some of territorial changes brought by the Treaty of Versailles. Since “overturn the Treaty of Versailles!” was essentially the theme that first brought the Nazis to power, it seems like he shared some goals with the Nazis that wouldn’t incline the West to like his proposals.
I’m a little concerned that the movie will try and make a true hero out of him. In my admittedly only partly educated judgment, Stauffenberg was a romantic and a conservative and a traditionalist and a “devil’s advocate” (that last being his wife’s description) but no Oskar Schindler, let alone a Dietrich_Bonhoeffer.
I’m not certain if the following has been addressed so I’ll continue.
If we assume Hitler is killed and the Wehrmacht arrest/imprison/shoot members of the SS and Gestapo together with leading lights of the Nazi hierarchy then what we have is experienced officers running the show.
Generals with a much better grasp of the situation than Hitler had,generals who don’t move non-existant armies around willy nilly.
We have officers who are capable of sensible and logical decisions so far as the running of military operations are concerned, not some loony with a daft moustache who has, by this time, lost all sense of reality.
Officers who realise that the German cause is lost.
Is it not feasible that these same officers would make overtures to the Western allies, make them aware that Uncle Joe was not Mr Nice Guy but was as bad as Hitler if not worse
I dont see this scenario as at all likely. Rommel was in a coma at the time of the assassination attempt against Hitler (his staff car was strafed on 17th July and he received severely head injuries) and was in no condition to take charge of anything. Also I dont see any prospect whatsoever of America accepting a conditional German surrender. Unconditional surrender had been insisted upon by the US, both Britain and the Soviet Union considered it to be imprudent but went along with it to maintain allied solidarity. The idea that Roosevelt would accept conditions but Stalin would not is an exact reversal of the historical position.
Get serious! As a staff officer, von Stauffenbrg KNEW what was happening on the Eastern Front. If he thought the Russians would accept anything less than complete surrender, he was mistaken. I think he thought that Germany could make a deal with the USA and UK-possibly allowing Germany to remain intact (with its WWI borders). But the Russians would NEVER have accepted this. :eek:
I’m another one who doesn’t think that the Western Allies would have countenanced stepping back from the provisions of the Atlantic Charter, which I believe called explicitly for “Unconditional Surrender” as a war goal. The Atlantic Charter was, at the time that it was written more than a bit of a paper tiger, when written and agreed to, but by 1944 it had taken on a life of its own.
AIUI it was a very effective propaganda piece, especially with regards to occupied territories in Europe - it did a lot to influence various resistance groups to trust the Allies, in spite of the prevalence of socialist, or outright communist leanings in many of the resistance groups.
For the Allies to repudiate that, I think it would have cost them a lot of cooperation from the very effective (in terms of distracting German military endevours) partisan campaigns in the Balkans especially.
So, I think that the only reasonable way for the Officer’s plot to actually salvage anything from the ashes (Barring the sort of military turn around that other posters have suggested upthread - defeating Bagration, and pushing the Western Allies back into the Atlantic would have changed the strategic position greatly, and may have been enough to force a change from the provisions of the Atlantic Charter.) would have been to throw themselves to the mercy of the Allies. Which would have had a good deal of humanitarian appeal, I think - simply by obviating the need to have Allied armies grind their way through German to Berlin.
But, in the long run, such a negotiated settlement, I think, may well have been a mistake - consider how much of the Nazi propaganda during the 30’s was based upon the idea that the German Army in WWI had been betrayed by the government when it had surrendered, while the Allies were still mostly outside of German territory. It would have been the same emotional reaction all over again, I believe.
Without the insults of another Treaty of Versailles it’s possible that such a surrender could have happened without sowing the inevitable seeds for another conflict - but I wouldn’t care to bet upon it.
As I said I find it hard to believe myself and am not convinced that it is true .
But your figure for U.S. dead is a guess as is obvious by the varience of your estimate of the figure by 60,000 to 120,000.
More a fudge then a guess, as I cant remember whether the Italian campaign losses were classed as European Theatre or Mediterranean Theatre, so I used a range of roughly between 120,000 to 180,000 (“two or three times” the bomber command losses) derived from the US National Archive figures here. These are 135,576 battle deaths for the European Theatre and another 40,455 for the Mediterranean Theatre. I suspect most of the latter were incurred in Italy and that somewhere around 160,000 US battle deaths occured in “Europe” (including Italy).
