So we all know the basic gist of the story. Germany begins its military conquest by invading Poland, beating their military rather quickly. England and France declare war on Germany and then its on. We know France fell after Germany rolled past their Maginot Line by going around it, and Germany and England bombed the heck out of each other but weren’t able take out the whole country. I think I’ve read that England was in a bit of a pickle trying to hold off Germany essentially by itself, but Germany had its allies too so that wasn’t a one-on-one fight. And I’ve also heard here and there that Germany at the time had the mightiest war machine available, only eventually surpassed by the US because we were slow to catch up and Germany was busy one two fronts.
But how powerful was Germany by itself vs. some of the stronger Allies that came in later? Suppose Germany fought a war with only the USSR or only the US, with little or no interference from either side, and this was a war of conquest and victory would only be achieved by occupying the other country, would Germany have fared decently or even beaten the US or USSR if they hadn’t been bogged down elsewhere?
Well, without the aid of Great Britain the US would never be able to war against the Germans except at sea. The little matter of the Atlantic Ocean, you see.
Germany could never have conquered and occupied the Soviet Union. Hell, they couldn’t even occupy all of France.
Germany was able to roll over Poland (and Austria) because of it’s massive military advantage. Had it stopped there, dug in and waited for someone to attack it might have been able to hold on for a while… especially since Italy was guarding it’s southern flank. But German invaded North Africa, France, and of course Russia. Given that their only real ally in the end was Japan it’s hard to see how they would have not have been ultimately defeated.
Well in the real war, Germany was beset on several fronts, not to mention overt and covert support of France and England by other nations. I’m talking about just a straight up nation vs. nation fight and everybody’s on the sidelines. America was known to have been a sleeping giant, we have a huge amount of people and resources that were mobilized for great effect, but if Germany had struck first and focused on us, would we have been able to ramp up production quick enough?
As for occupying, let’s say we don’t need a full occupation, the USSR’s simply too big for that. But could Germany have destroyed the Soviet government and installed a puppet regime and effectively rule over the USSR?
I don’t see Germany (or Japan) being able to hit the US hard enough to knock us out. As bad as Pearl Harbor was, it didn’t totally cripple us. How could Germany inflict enough damage?
The supply lines would have been too long and England and France wouldn’t have stood on the sidelines.
I don’t think Germany had the wherewithal to mount a massive invasion of the US… they couldn’t even manage to invade England, which was much closer to them.
Now if Britain had held out through the Battle of Britain but not be in any shape to help the U. S. other than as a staging area, then the U.S. would have had a hard go of it. At least at first. As the American war machine got cranking we would have grown equal to and eventually surpassed anything the Germans could have been able to put together. D-Day probably would have taken another couple of years before we’d have been ready to invade the German north coast. Without a European staging area it would have turned into a sea and air war and a race for the Bomb.
This was essentially the genesis of the bombing campaign and the North African operations - striking back at Germany where we could. Churchill knew that on the continent, alone, the British army (which had left tonnes of its equipment at Dunkirk) could not hope to prevail against the bulk of the Wehrmacht/SS - an extremely formidable opponent with fanatic soldiers and a professional officer corps. Later on Churchill milked the bombing campaign somewhat when Stalin became exasperated about the USSR doing most of the heavy lifting against Germany.
As for the question…against each of the Big Three, alone?
Against Britain, if the USA or USSR hadn’t come into the war (the latter being extremely unlikely; the Nazi ideology demanded it); initial stalemate with large chance of peace favourable to Germany. Britain could not defeat Germany alone, likewise German plans for invasion (the famed Operation Sealion) could never have worked. If Donitz is given the support he needs for the Battle of the Atlantic it is not inconceivable that an island nation, dependant on imports for survival and without the aid of the USA or USSR, could eventually have ousted Churchill and offered terms. The regime originally never considered the British - fellow Aryans and not slavic untermenshen - enemies, rather potential allies, if the British left German affairs on the continent alone and the Germans left the British Empire alone.
Against the USSR: Initial stalemate, high likelihood of Soviet victory. Depends if the USA is offering lend-lease - the Studebakers in particular being vital for Soviet logistics - or not. In any case, there is zero chance of the Reich occupying all of the Soviet Union, it’s simply too vast and the Germans were already struggling with what they had. Even alone the Soviets would likely deliver a death-blow to the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, and the dire winter of '41 to '42 would still grind the German war machine to a halt. Once the Soviets move their industry beyond the Urals German hopes for final victory - their supply lines already stretched - are dashed. The Soviets start pumping out their T-34s and begin a very long, even more bloody push towards Berlin, taking on 15-20% more German forces without the British or Americans on the western front.
Against the USA: Initial stalemate, eventual USA victory. Difficult to see how either power could meaningfully inflict any real damage against each other in the early years. The Americans depended on the ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ of Britain to strike against the Germans - both from the air and in preparations for D-Day, and the Germans had no chance whatsoever of projecting any force onto the United States. If the US was sufficiently committed though with its wealth, brain power and resources, once the Manhattan Project achieves fruition mushroom clouds over the cities of Germany signal American victory. I’m sure sufficient American pressure (probably in the form of $$ - American industrial production and comparative wealth was staggering) could be put on a neutral like Sweden to use an airbase or two.
I started a few threads in GD about whether we could win the war without the Soviets, and vice-versa. As it happened was the best of all possible worlds - the British supplied the time, the Russians supplied the blood, the Americans supplied the money.
At most they could have occupied Western Russia and grounded out an medium-intensity extended counter-insurgency campaign with the Soviets operating a government and industrial base east of the Urals. It might help the Germans cause if they don’t lose their smartest nuclear physicists to the West in the lead up to the War and they have The Bomb to keep the Soviets at bay.
If the Germans hadn’t triggered a ‘Quantum Exodus’ then the character of Nazi Germany - without the Nuremberg Laws of 1933 to trigger said exodus - would be so different as to render further speculation meaningless. As it was, the German atomic project paled in comparison to the United States Manhattan Project, which itself only achieved fruition after Germany lay in ruins.
Even if it had…the Soviet Union was a brutal totalitarian dictatorship willing to accept casualties no western power would ever find acceptable - roughly 13.5% of their 1939 population through the course of the war. Compare this to 0.94% for the UK and 0.32% for the USA. I doubt even a German effort with the bomb would have given much pause to the USSR.
I think the issue of the war with Russia is a particular case of idiotic ideology leading to a lost opportunity.
Had the Germans invaded Russia as liberators, and treated the Russian people as allies against Stalin and his regime, IMHO they would have won the war and would have had a forever grateful friend in the Russians.
My evidence for this is two fold: the historical data show that during the Soviet “terror”, the population of Russia were desperate for the Germans to invade and save them from their communist overlords. (See the book “Bloodlands” by Timothy Snyder)
With the WWII invasion, the initial response the Russians had to the invasion was to greet the Germans as liberators. It was only when the Germans initiated their policy of extermination that the Russian population turned against them.
Good points Grateful-UnDead, I pointed out a few of the German efforts at such in the linked thread above. However Hitler was a mass-murdering fuckhead (as many historians have said) and could not abide the thought of slavic sub-humans in German uniform.
Having said that the Germans did use…local resources when it suited them. Vlasov’s army is a prime example, as are the ‘Hiwi’ Hilfswilliger Russians put into supporting roles. Politically there were White Russians who aligned with the Germans for anti-Commie reasons, ethnically Cossacks joined up with them to oppose Stalin (only for the British to hand them back to him to end their days in Gulags) and Ukrainians who despised the Soviet system for…well, deliberately starving them to death in the 1930s. This collaboration had a dark undertone as some of the Nazi’s most brutal concentration camp guards were Ukrainian.
Even leaving aside the hilariously far behind German atomic program, now I’m wondering…what if the Nazis had “gone chemical”? At least in a stand-up, 1-on-1 fight?
Now, there are a few reasons why Germany didn’t use their chemical stocks, including the 12,000 tons (!) of the state of the art Tabun nerve agent produced after 1942—fear of retaliation, including a fear that the allies already had nerve gas; maybe Hitler being afraid of gas; a host of other sensible reasons—but as long as we’re what-ifing already…?
A US-German war is too speculative for my head; and I can only suppose that against the UK, they’d want to try to knock out the capability for British retaliation in kind…which they’d failed to do in real life, and succeeding at that might have made escalating to chemical weapons unneccesary, anyway. I dunno.
But against the Soviets? 'Also don’t know—aside from the war turning uglier, that’s still over 150 million-plus pissed off Russians.
Hell, I’d be just as curious at seeing the possible Allied retaliation avenues, even pre-Bomb. The US and Britain had Anthrax bioweapon programs during the war, and there are even (unproven) allegations that the Soviets had used Tularemia in combat.
Snyder makes the point that the German’s were seen as liberators in the Baltic states, Eastern Poland and Ukraine, not Russia as a whole. He also shows how German strategy went from extermination through starvation initially to trying to use the conquered populations as a labour source later on. Your main argument still stands though I’d change ‘Russia’ and ‘Russians’ to something more accurate.
