Would Germany and Japan have won if the US did NOT enter WWII?

Great Debates
1

Over in this thread I perpetrated a pretty bad hijack that got into this question. So, to explore it further I thought I’d start this thread.

It is my contention that Hitler and Tojo would have prevailed in their aims had the US not finally entered the war. Others seem to feel that while it may have been harder Britain, France and Russia would have ultimately defeated Germany. Given that there really wasn’t anyone else in the Pacific to fight the Japanese I don’t think anyone was seriously contending that Japan could have been stopped without US involvement. Maybe Australia but I don’t think they had the resources to go toe-to-toe with the Japanese and Russia was busy with Germany. Still, I’ll include Japan here as well for completeness.

For the sake of argument assume the US continued with its lend-lease programs but never sent any military forces of its own to fight either side.

2

Germany and Japan would have won. All the best cars and electronics would come from Germany or Japan. They would make our military to defend their countries. They would have better living standards than the average American, have a much lower crime rate, better mass transportation, and their workers would get much more vacation. Some of the best baseball players would come from Japan. Japan would own much of Hawaii, California, and the west coast. Their students would be better than ours. The office of US president would be a mockery, and our government a mess.

Hey, who did win?

3

What were their aims? Imperialism, world domination? If they’d tried to invade North America, the US would certainly have entered the war anyway.

Would Japan have solidified its control of Asia? I think so. Would Germany have successfully invaded Britain? Maybe, maybe not. (They undoubtedly would have without lend-lease–I’m glad you excepted that). The Axis was still fighting a two-front war, and Stalin was clearly not afraid of fighting a war of attrition in Russia.

I don’t find it unreasonable that new borders would have stabilized within a few years had the US not entered the war, without the defeat of Britain or the USSR. But I cannot conceive of any way Europe would have been reclaimed from the Axis without the US.

4

And the US president would be a total buffoon, who runs a puppet gvmnt for Germany and Japan. Britain would suffer, also. Their agriculture system would collapse, leaving them with no livestock to eat. Russia and China would be poor, starving countries. They would be forced to convert to capitalism as Communism was gradually defeated.

5

The Allies could have “won” even if the U.S. hadn’t intervened. The cost would have been incredible, though. The French were defeated and wouldn’t have been a major threat to the Germans until the tide of war changed and allowed the French to organize a new army to help fight the Germans back to the border. The Russians would have stopped the German advance and started pushing them back across Europe, but it would have taken an extra year or two to build the aircraft and tanks and train the troops they needed for such a big fight. The Germans would then have had to pull more and more troops from the occupied countries and throw them against the Russians, giving the occupied people a little breathing space to start their own attacks. Eventually the Germans would be pushed back into Germany and be forced to sue for peace (a complete defeat would probably have been too difficult to accomplish). Their complete withdrawal from Western Europe would have to be through treaty instead of battle since there wouldn’t have been the needed strength to push the Germans that far back unless they agreed to it.

At the start of the war Japan feared “waking a sleeping giant” in the U.S., but they also feared the Russians. The Russians have the resources to fight long protracted wars, the Japanese cannot do that with their available natural resources and population. After their initial conquests in the Pacific they were spread pretty thin. They were already fighting a war of attrition in China, another nation with massive reserves (mostly of population) that can be used to make the fight incredibly costly for the Japanese. The Russians were also looking longingly at some of the land held by Japan. When they deemed the Japanese weak enough from their fight with the Chinese, British Navy, and Australia (and surrounding countries) they would have attacked. The Japanese surrender at the end of WWII is only partly due to the nuclear bombing, the Japanese had been asking the Russians to act as a neutral party in negotiating a peace with the U.S. that would allow them to protect the Emperor but the U.S. dropped one atomic bomb, the Russians declared war on Japan, then the U.S. dropped the other atomic bomb - all in less than one week. The Russian declaration of war was the final nail in their coffin and forced the surrender. Without U.S. involvement the same would have been true, only Japan would have kept a sizeable navy at the end of the war.

6

Technology is the wildcard here, and the Germans had a clear edge in jet aircraft. This was one technology, like the atom bomb, that had the potential to radically change the outcome of the war, and the Germans were well ahead of the British in this area. Fortunately for all of us, the Me 262 entered the war too late to do much harm. But take the US out of the equation and you have a longer war, and the chance for this fighter to be refined (it did have limitations) and enter significant production. Had this happened the Germans would have had complete air superiority. And had they shared this technology with the Japanese… well, you get the picture.

7

If the US had not been prepared to supply material support to the UK then defeat would have been likely, however Hitler did not press home his attack on Britain fully because he did not want to fight on two protracted battle fronts, the Russian one being the other.

I doubt that Germany would have had the chance to settle for peace with Russia, there is no doubt that for both Stalin and Hitler the war on the Eastern front became idealogical and personal too, complete destruction of one by the other had to be the inevitable result.

There may have been the possibility that Russian forces would have swept through Germany to claim a greater share of Eastern Europe than it did.

As for the Japanese campaign, their advance did get near to India but the mainland Asiatic campaign was hardly fought by US forces at all, most of the allied soldiers were Chinese, Indian, Burmese, Australian, British and these drove back the Japanese back in the longest retreat of the war.
That advance started before the US began to master the Japanes in the Pacific.

I’d have thought that the Japanese would have been driven from mainland Asia but I’d doubt that they had the resources to retake the Pacific Islands or Japan so this is where some sort of treaty demarcation would have ocirred.

As for Germany having the Me262, the British had the Gloster Whittle and then the Meteor which were both only just too late to enter WWII combat service and their a-bonb project was not as advanced as had been feared, I’ve seen articles that stated that Germany was quite a long way from a viable device.I think Russia would have overrun them before it could have been deployed.

8

I think the posts here are giving too much credit to Russia. As it was the Germans came damn close to defeating Russia as it was. Stalingrad is what really chewed the Germans up and they nearly prevailed there. Had Germany had access to the 25% or so of its forces used to fight the US and Britain they might have taken Russia.

Either way I’m not sure Russia would have been up for fighting it out with the Japanese even had they defeated the Germans. Without US involvement Russia would have been in even worse shape than it already was at the end of WWII. Remember, with allied help, Russia lost nearly 20 million people…far and away the greatest casualty count of the war (I think Germany came in second with something like 4.5 million lost). At the end of WWII Patton wanted the US to attack Russia. He knew they didn’t stand a chance at that point against the US and figured he could get rid of what he saw (correctly) as a major thorn in the US side in the future.

I think Russia’s declaration of war against Japan in the closing days of WWII was more form than substance. It would have taken Russia months to switch their resources from Europe to the Pacific theater (not least of which was the fact that there was precious little in the way of infrastructure over Japan’s way to move and stage troops).

I don’t really know how the Japanese would have fared in China had the US not entered the war. The Japanes were kicking ass pretty brutally there for awhile (the rape of Nanking to wit) but China is mighty large and may have been too much in the end. The Brits, Burmese and Indians may have started kicking some ass out India’s way but had Britain had to take on Hitler alone they probably would have pulled out of India to defend the home front. Would the Indians, Burmese and Australians been enough on their own? I don’t know.

As for the ME262 part of the problem was Hitler misused this weapon. It should have been used to tackle Allied fighters but Hitler insisted that they go after bombers. Either way it may have been too late for Hitler but that was a close thing. Had the ME262 come into service a few months earlier, in greater numbers and been used properly it might have given Germany a new lease on life.

Also, and my memory is vague here, I thought the Germans had developed a new U-Boat that did not need to surface very often if at all. If my memory is correct this ship, had it come sooner and in greater numbers, would have returned the Wolf Packs to the terror of the Atlantic they once were and again may have given Germany a new lease on life. (I’ll look for cites to this boat if it did indeed exist.)

Of course, without the US involvement, any or all of Germany’s new weapons may have come online in plenty of time. They nearly did it even with their industry getting smashed on a regular basis by Allied bombers. Several more months and Germany might have held all of the cards. Also note that had the US not entered WWII it si doubtful we would have developed the A-Bomb or, at the very least, been a lot slower getting around to its development. While it turned out Germany did lag far behind in a-bomb development than was feared (IIRC their physicists screwed up some calculations that suggested to them such a thing was impossible or at least much harder to build) they still might have beaten us to this weapon as well which would have been an unmitigated disaster.

9

Whack-a-Mole:

Sir, please call William Saffire’s Squad Squad and the Department of Redundancy Department at once, sir.

10

Sorry for the bad grammar cmkeller. Goes to show the dangers of proof reading your own writing. Even after you pointed that out I still missed it on my first re-reading.

As to the ‘uber’ submarine I mentioned in my previous post I found this bit about it:

Here’s a more detailed link about the Walter type U-Boat: http://www.uboat.net/types/walter_hist.htm

Had the Germans gotten the thing to work and in service the Allies would have been back to square one in the U-Boat war and started watching ships being sunk left and right again (IIRC by the end of the war duty on a U-Boat was practically a death sentence since the Allies had gotten quite adept at hunting them).

11

Well, if the US didn’t get involved, it could be that Russia would have ultimately prevailed against Germany. But, would that have been any better? Imagine all of Europe except Britain and Ireland in the Warsaw pact. Without the experience of WWII, and watching the progress from a distance, the US would have become extremely isolationist. Without the military buildup and seasoning of WWII, America would have been much more timid about challenging the Russian overlords of Europe.

So, Europe would have ended up pretty much enslaved, probably worse than what really happened, since the Russians wouldn’t really care about what the rest of the world thought…there really wouldn’t be a “rest of the world” except the US.

Perhaps Japan and Russia would have fought…but that would be after Russia’s triumph in Europe. Japan would probably eventually lose China to Mao. India would have gone independent, to become a Russian puppet state, at least for a while.

Over in the Americas, the success of the Russians sparks communist insurgencies everywhere throughout Latin America. The US stays out. Pretty soon the only free countries left in the world are the US, Canada, and Britain. When nuclear weapons are developed, who knows what might happen? Not a very happy world scenario.

12

It seems to me that ultimately Russia alone would have forced Germany to a negotiated settlement with Germany the master of Eastern and Central Europe. With Russia fully occupied in Europe and the European colonial powers either occupied by Germany or fully engage with the problem of fending off German conquest, Japan would have expanded its territorial occupation throughout East and South Asia and the Western Pacific, including Australia. The catcher is figuring out a state of affairs in which the US would have quietly stood by and let this happen.

13

The fact that Japan attacked the US implies that they thought they’d lose if the US stayed out of the war. By that time, the US was neutral in name only. They were suppliying the Allies with money and materiel, and hiding behind their shield of neutrality. If the US had remained neutral, it may well have helped the Allies. After all, having a superpower being on your side while at the same time being safe from attack is a huge asset. Similarly, if China had declared war on the US during Korea war, that probably would have actually helped the US.

Lemur866

And Spain! Don’t forget Spain. Or Switzerland.

14

I believe the Axis would have won.The Germans already had a missile system(V2 Rockets)operational.They had also made serious steps toward the manufacture of nuclear weapons.The weapons production facility,in Norway,was sabotaged by British MI5 agents,but with Germany having only to contend with Britain on that front,they could have made the facility operational again.They would also export weapons and materiel to their Axis allies,the Finnish,to fight the Russians,and eased the pressure on themselves long enough to develop a missile delivered nuclear threat.At that point,world domination would be theirs.
Game,Set,Match!

15

As I see it, Germany and Russia would probably have fought each other to a standstill. Without massive American support, Britain could never have launched a successful air-sea invasion of mainland Europe, and America could never have offered sufficient support from behind a shield of neutrality. This would have freed up a lot of resources which would have given Hitler the edge he needed on the eastern front. (Patton scared the peanut butter out of Hitler.) Germany would have kept most of the land it conquered in Europe, and Nazi Germany would still be in business today. The Holocaust would be largely forgotten. I doubt that the Japanese would have joined Germany in the war against Russia, as they were still smarting from the ass-kicking Russia gave them in 1939.

This is the most likely scenario (as I see it) and might well have been the course of world history if Hitler hadn’t been such a damn fool as to declare war on the U.S.A. when he didn’t have to. I have no idea how things would have gone in Asia and the Pacific. Perhaps the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would somehow have drawn the U.S. into the European war anyway.

However, Russia and Germany would never have been good neighbors, so it’s entirely likely that another war would have broken out between them by 1960 or 1970.

16

TheRyan:

I thought the deal wasn’t necessarily that Japan thought they would lose if the US stayed out of the war. Rather, they expected the US to eventually be forced to join the war (once Japan started going after American interest like the Phillipines), except without taking any sort of huge material losses. Even though the US got lucky (Purple-based knowledge conspiracies aside) and saved its carriers, the war would have been quite different if the States had started out with an extra fistful of battleships.

So it wasn’t that Japan would lose if the US stayed out of the war; instead, they knew the US would join, and wanted to get off on the right foot, so to speak.

17

There have been many mentions of Germany’s technological advances during the war. However without the U.S. in the war Germany would have had little initial need to develop these weapons, at least at fast as they did. The British did have the Gloster Meteor in service during the war but used their high speed for chasing down V-1 “Buzz Bombs.” The aircraft were banned from use over occupied territory for fear of the technology falling into German hands, although the Germans were more advanced in every aspect of jet technology except for metallurgy.

Germany in the end became their own worst enemy. Hitler was addicted to drugs; the military’s leadership were mostly Hitler cronies without much ability; military procurement was based on party affiliation, not on ability; more and more of the wermacht was made up of impressed troops from occupied territories which forced more German divisions to act as a buffer preventing retreat of the front line (increasingly non-German) forces. Germany would eventually have fallen apart from within.

18

There’s sort of an urban legend about an event that happened at the end of WW II, which no one’s mentioned yet. Supposedly, (and I don’t have time to go surfing for a cite or I would) a German U-boat was carrying nuclear material to Japan, as the Japanese had worked out the kinks of building an atomic bomb and just needed some more nuclear material before they could use it, when Germany surrended. The U-boat commander, instead of continuing on to Japan to deliver the material, beat a path to the nearest US port and turned everything over to us.

I have no doubt that had the US not entered the war, the Allies would probably have lost the war. The Germans had some amazing engineers (Read German Secret Weapons of the Second World War by Ian V. Hogg for as near a complete run down of German weapons as you’ll get outside of government documents. The Nazi’s had smart bombs and stealth bombers in service during the war. And you thought they were new during the Persian Gulf War!) and even with Hitler’s inept running of things, they would have beat the Allies down, albeit over a much longer period of time. Of course, we would have seen a collapse of the Nazi state, eventually, but let’s face it, Communism lasted in the USSR for 70 years, so the Nazi state probably would have made it that far.

19

I don’t really see how Germany could have ‘won’ in Europe in the sense that they could have defeated the Soviets and successfully invaded Britain. The problem for Britain and the US (in the war or out) was that mainland western Europe would have been either Fascist or Communist. Remember, the reason why Europe was the priority over the Pacific (once the US was declared war upon) was the threat of Communist Russia usurping Fascist Germany. (i.e. the second front, when it came, was a land grab).

Many posters have spoken about the technological edge Germany may have developed but it is important to remember that in almost every case Britain was on the same track. Also, the Battle of the Atlantic had been won with the aid of new technologies like sonar, radar and better Naval, Air Force and convoy tactics. Enigma was still providing a distinct advantage and the Royal Navy guarded the Channel with vastly superior resources.

In addition, North Africa (Brits, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, etc) was increasingly secure as was the mid-East, Russia would continue to absorb Germany’s resources and - crucially - have prevented access to the absolutely essential southern oil fields. In many senses, Germany was surrounded and the debilitating effect of limited raw materials would have kicked in at some point. By contrast, both Russia and Britain had almost limitless access to supplies (Russia though its own resources and Britain via the Empire and ‘friendly neutrals’ - the latter, particularly in North and South America).

Certainly Britain and its Allies could not have contemplated a second front without very heavy assistance because it was a stretch to contain Germany from the eastern Med right around to Iceland while at the same time keeping the shipping lanes open and also guarding against invasion (with the Canadians). Not to mention (eventually) fighting the Japanese to a standstill in Burma (British and Indian troops with Chinese and Australian assistance).

Frankly, it was all a bit of an effort to keep so many plates spinning as it was.

The only thing I can say with a fair degree of certainty is that by declaring war on the US after Pearl Harbor, Hitler ensured that mainland western Europe would not fall under Soviet rule (something, I believe, he would have considered to be the ultimate mistake) - whether Hitler had the forethought to know that is an interesting debate in itself.

And if you really thing the Axis could have come up with the Atom bomb, I’d suggest looking at the size and resources committed to the Manhatten Project.

20

Whack:

I don’t. I forget the exact figures, but they’re something on the order of this: before D-Day, the Allies were fighting about 16 Axis divisions; the Russians were fighting and defeating about 180. One Barbarossa gets started, Western involvemant in WWII is almost a sideshow (in the European theater). Without the U.S. involved, I see one of two things happening. 1) Russia signs a separate peace with Germany, allowing Germany to retain control of most of Europe. Assuming the war lasts long enough, whoever develops the Atom bomb first ultimately wins. 2) Russia wins in a big way. They conquer Eastern Europe and Germany. They probably take the Low Countries as well. They’ll take Italy if they can, but Britain might beat them to it. France is probably left to the French. Once that’s done, Russia may or may not, at its whim, decide to take Japanese possesions in mainland Asia.