WWII outcome IF the Normandy Invasion failed?

If the June-6-44 Normandy invasion had
failed (for whatever reason), what would
have been the consequence for WWII’s
eventual outcome?

Soviet victory and subsequent domination of
Europe?

Nazi defeat of the Soviets?

A negotiated peace (akin to the Korean war)?

We can only speculate, but it’s interesting
nonetheless.

Same result, but more time required, which may have given the Soviets a bigger chunk of Europe.

In the understatement of the new millennium, the world would be a much different place.

Scholars debate whether Germany had enough military might remaining to press much further than they had already expanded by June 1944. They may have eventually been able to take Britain, but beyond that, maybe not much more. However, they probably would have been able to entrench themselves for the long haul in the areas they had moved into.

This is also about the time that Hitler started flaking out and not listening to his best military minds, so that probably would have still been a factor regardless of the outcome of D-Day.

The U.S. would have eventually been faced with an agonizing decision: Whether to use the A-bomb on Europe (and, perhaps subsequently, on Russia). Think about how THAT would have changed the world.


“I am a news-paper man, damn it! Come to the point with me, sir, or take your business elsewhere!” - T. Herman Zweibel, Publisher, The Onion

I’m certainly no historian, but wouldn’t “The Bomb” have assured pretty much the same outcome? Would we have dropped it on Europeans?
Peace,
mangeorge


Wow, 00, I made it! :slight_smile:

Read Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” for a view of American society had the Japanese and Germans won.


“My hovercraft is full of eels.”

I don’t think that we would have hesitated to use the Bomb against the Germans. We might have used it on a German city rather than a German army in France, of course. Most of the really horrible aspects of the Bomb have to do with radiation sickness and contamination. Neither was understood (or even much considered) prior to the evaluation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war.

The failure of the Normandy landings would have resulted in the Soviets securing more of Europe. How much more would have depended on whether Normandy became a Dieppe/Dunkirk operation where we scrambled hastily to get as many men back to Britain as possible, an Anzio type operation where a small beachhead was savagely attacked and savagely defended to no great purpose for months, or a total fiasco involving the capture of a significant portion of the landing force.

The landings in Southern France could have gone on as scheduled in August, (although they might have been more bitterly opposed), so we could still have had a British/American/French presence on French soil before the Soviets overran all of Germany.

Germany would still have lost the war. It would have taken longer, but NAZI Germany was doomed by the summer of 1944.


Tom~

Germany had no chance to win the war by 1944. The only question at the point was how they were going to lose it. If the Normandy landings had failed, it would have been a race between the Red Army and the Manhattan Project. My best estimate is that the Soviet Union would have taken all of Germany and the Iron Curtain would have been on the Rhine. France, Belgium, and the Netherlands probably would have opted for neutrality (as Austria and Finland did historically). The European memebers of NATO would have been Britain, Norway, Italy, and maybe Greece and Turkey.

If the Normandy landing had failed, the Western Allies would have tried again pretty damn quick. By the way, the Normandy landing is not one of those battles that could have gone either way. The Western Allies had overwhelming superiority and there is no way, barring some wild unforeseeable disaster, that they could have lost. Had the Germans been more ready or luckier, they certainly could have inflicted many more Allied casualties, but I don’t think they could have turned back the landing. Think about it in pro football terms…Normandy wasn’t a 28-27 Allied victory, it was more like 56-3.

I’ll go a little further and say that by the end of 1941 Germany could no longer win the war AND that (as long as we’re getting hypothetical here) the Normandy invasion had slim to no chance of failing. The Allies would have, at the least, established a beachhead (or two). Hitler had been micromanaging his military for a few years by then, and Rommel, with his hands tied tactically by his Fuehrer, and suffering logistically, could not mount a sufficient defense to repel the invaders. It could well have been a less successful landing, and the Allied command was definitely worried, but the incredible force aimed at the Continent could not have been repulsed by the German forces as they stood. By that time they had no air or naval presence in the invasion zone.

The worst outcome would have been less successful landings that slowed the race to Berlin allowing, as others have noted, a greater Russian control of territory at the beginning of the Cold War.

Hang on, Lawrence. We can look back at the Normandy invasion as a certain win. But at the time it was still anyone’s guess.
Remember, Eisenhower had a letter ready to be published if the effort failed.

For the Normandy invasion to have failed would have required misfortune on a supernatural scale.

Assuming Hitler made a deal with the god Posidon and all 175,000 men meant to land that day were drowned, Eisenhower would still have a reserve of a million or more men in England. Once Ike resolved the problem of Olympian interference he would have the manpower for an immediate reattempt. Replacement of the watercraft would take a couple of weeks.

There’s a misconception that it took the allies until June, 1944 to prepare for D-Day. This isn’t true. The manpower and equiptment needed for the invasion of France was available soon after the liberation of Africa (early '43), however the weather wouldn’t be cooperative until June '43. The Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine had already been sufficiantly reduced for a landing. If not for the ill-advised (and totally unnecessary) venture in Italy, the allies could have invaded France at that time. Because of the stalemate in Italy, the allies had to wait for the next favorable weather window; June 1944.

When the Battle of Normandy ended after 80 days, the allies had suffered 210,000 casualties, more than the total that landed on D-Day.

To counter Lawrence’s football analogy, I’ve always been a believer in the “on any given Sunday” school. The US and Uk did have an overwhelming strategic advantage by the summer of 1944 but that doesn’t mean that they always had operational superiority. If the weather had been worse or the Germans had reacted better, I feel a defeat at Normandy was well within the realm of possibility. And I feel a decisive defeat at Normandy would have precluded another cross channel invasion in 1944.

<font face=“westminster” size=4> If Germany had used it’s large store of chemical weapons, Normandy could have had a VERY different outcome.

As for the silly idea that the US would not have dropped the Bomb on Germany; remember DRESDEN? The massive firebombing of a civilian area with NO strategic value whatsoever? The civilian casualities from that raid compare very easily to those from Hiroshima & Nagasaki. No; there would have been no such hesitation on the part of the Allied High Command.

Germany would have recieved additional firebomb raids, leading up to atomic attack.

However, the advance of the Red Army would have slowed, due to the freeing up of additional troops & equipment that would not have been needed to fight in France.</font>


“Show me a sane man, and I will cure him for you.”----Jung

Lawrence wrote:

But Britain and the US did not have anything like a ‘overwhelming’ superiority in Europe. In fact, both the US and Britain suffered crippling manpower shortages in the European theater that led to Britain disbanding divisions for use as replacement drafts. The US did not have to go that far but did engage in a extensive retraining program in order to sustain its combat divisions. By late 1944, the US Army in Europe was short three division’s worth of combat infantry. By 1945, all available US divisions were deployed and the US even deployed divisions from the US to Europe before completing training. Throughout 1944 and 1945, the US and British armies had approximately a 1.2 to 1 superiority in manpower.

Actually, Germany had a bigger army in France until three or four months after Normandy. The trick for the Allies was preventing Germany from concentrating that against the Normandy lodgement. They pulled it off, but it was not a sure thing.

And it is unlikely that the Allies would have been able to mount another invasion in the aftermath of failure at Normandy anytime soon. The Americans troops were not present in the UK, they were training in the US.

Take a look at Richard Mansoor’s “The GI Offensive in Europe” and Russell Weigely’s “Eisenhower’s Lieutenants” for more information on the GI manpower crisis and the logistical constraints that the Allies labored under. It was a damn close run campaign.

Andrew Warinner

beatle wrote:

The question was not whether the Allies could establish a beachhead in Western Europe (because they certainly could at a place of their choosing) but whether that beachhead could be sustained, the German army defeated and driven back into Germany.

The planners of Normandy greatly feared that the Normandy beachhead would constricted to the Normandy beaches and the Cotentin peninsula. If Germany could pin with a minimum of troops the British and US armies to a restricted beachhead and take advantage of the easily defensible Normandy bocage, Germany might regain the strategic initiative. Germany would then have two strategic options: stay on the defensive in France and redeploy the troops to the East and try to secure a decisive victory there (much as they did in WWI) or go on the defensive in the East and concentrate on destroying the British and US armies in France.

Andrew Warinner

Ursa Major wrote:

Baloney.

The Allies did not perceive the defeat of the submarine threat until May-June 1943.

The 8th Air Force was forced to give up deep penetration raids in 1943 due to prohibitive losses. The Luftwaffe was not destroyed until the American air forces were able to field long-range escort fighters and embarked on the POINTBLANK offensive against oil supplies which could not and did not take place until 1944.

Furthmore, the defeat of the Luftwaffe is arguably a prerequisite to the execution of the “Transport Plan” that was a critical ingredient in the success of the Normandy invasion.

Andrew Warinner

Bosda:

Dresden most certainly did have strategic value, just not as a position. Dresden was home to a lot of light and medium manufacturing, including ball bearings and railroad components. The factories were small and dispersed throughout the city, partially for the purpose of lessening the damage from a normal bombing raid. The Allied solution was to burn the place down rather than raid it forever and inflict no significant damage on Dresden’s ability to produce war materiel. And let’s not forget that (though this isn’t necessarily a valid reason) a lot of those civilians were available to serve in the German armed forces…

That having been said, I can’t make any certain statements about the outcome of the war with a failed Normandy invasion. I will say, though, that Germany would have been able to hold on very well against the Russians if we didn’t establish a second front in France. The western Allies would have eventually established a European presence, but it would have taken time, during which the Nazis could have successfully pulled out of Russia, and held the Soviets to a stalemate for some time.

More on this topic later – my job is infringing on my posting time. :wink:


–Da Cap’n
“Playin’ solitaire 'til dawn
With a deck of fifty-one.”

D-Day is very important, but it is hard to say exactly how it affected the outcome of the war, other than the length. I guess that it is possible that the allies would have sued for peace if it failed, which was what the German generals wanted.

There are two other times in the war that were more clearly “pivot points” that directly affected the outcome.

  1. If the Battle of Britain was lost (meaning that if the RAF was destroyed), England would have been effectively out of the war (even if Germany couldn’t have invaded it). Without England as a foothold, how would the US have gotten into the war at all? Without a western front, it seems pretty likely that the Germans could have beaten Russia.

  2. The Germans got within 30 miles of Moscow. If they would have taken it, the war in the east would have probably been over. Without the eastern front, it seems pretty likely that the Germans would have easily taken over all of Europe.
    In either of the above cases, it seems that Germany wins the entire war (meaning that it controls all of Europe). It seems that the Japanese would have still lost though, perhaps sooner.

Cap’n, I think you’re underestimating the Soviet Union. By 1944, the USSR had the ability to defeat Germany without any help from the US or Britain. Of course, the US and Britain had the same ability if needed. So Germany was at war on two different fronts and was facing defeat on both of them.

Now granted, politics is a weird thing and it is possible to argue that Germany might have managed to create a situation where either the Soviets or the Western allies would have decided a German defeat was no longer advisable. So it is possible that Germany could have survived the war but it was impossible for it to win.

Nemo, I’m not convinced that the USSR had the ability to defeat Nazi Germany by 1944, nor necessarily did the western Allies. Part of my point is that the two-front war made it a possibility for both groups.

If Germany had defeated Russia (as it could have were it not for atrocious planning by Hitler, and lots of tanks and aircraft from America), the Germans could have concentrated all their attention on the Western front, with Russian munitions to back them up (remember that the AK-47 was developed around this time, from the German-designed Sturmgewehr). Even if we’d made it through Normandy we would have bogged down for certain during the Battle of the Bulge.

Sez me, anyway.

How about if Normandy was part of a two-pronged invasion? Patton had diverted German attention to Calais, to screen the Normandy invasion. What if, after the D-Day landing, we’d sent a large second force to Calais after all, after the Germans had refocused their resources? This scenario allows for the Normandy landing to fail, but for the invasion of Europe to succeed anyway.


–Da Cap’n
“Playin’ solitaire 'til dawn
With a deck of fifty-one.”