They had a lot more than that - they claimed to have made 80,000 tanks during WW2 and probably did. Their main tank (T34) was designed specifically for mass production. It had flaws, but it also had overwhelming numbers and a huge advantage in production speed. Hitler's statement might well have been literally true. The USSR was churning out tanks like no-one else. The T34 was also designed for conditions in Russia, especially in winter, and the German tanks weren't. Even when the German tanks were categorically superior (which later models definitely were), they couldn't come close to matching numbers. 10 donkeys are stronger than 1 horse.
How vital for great Britain was America WW2?
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They had a lot more than that - they claimed to have made 80,000 tanks during WW2 and probably did. Their main tank (T34) was designed specifically for mass production. It had flaws, but it also had overwhelming numbers and a huge advantage in production speed. Hitler's statement might well have been literally true. The USSR was churning out tanks like no-one else. The T34 was also designed for conditions in Russia, especially in winter, and the German tanks weren't. Even when the German tanks were categorically superior (which later models definitely were), they couldn't come close to matching numbers. 10 donkeys are stronger than 1 horse.
Soldato
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German also had issues fueling it's tanks, synthetic production and imports from Romania couldn't keep up with demand placed on it by the army and air force. Had German captured the oil fields and refinaries in Grozney just and avoided Starlingrad altogether the outcome may have been different as the Soviet's wouldn't have been able to keep its mechanised units running for much more then a year after that.
Americas biggest role towards us was in fleecing/supplying us before they entered the war and then helping us to liberate western Europe, had they not entered the war with boots on ground Europe would have probably been annexed by the Soviet Union (or stayed Nazi controlled). I don't think we were ever at any risk of being conquered thanks to the English channel and our navy.
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In regard to the Russian invasion it didn't help apparently that Russian rail tracks were a different size to German, so the Germans had to retrofit their trains. Obviously not a quick process. Russia is just too big though, such huge supply lines to protect. Still, it is impressive what Germany managed to achieve with very little help.
Had Russia captured Europe, I can't say I would fancy having them as a neighbour. Of course the US couldn't let them have Europe either.
Had Russia captured Europe, I can't say I would fancy having them as a neighbour. Of course the US couldn't let them have Europe either.
I think that the Military History Visualized channel does a very good job of explaining many parts of WW2, with an emphasis on the German side. They've done a video on Operation Sealion. I'll link rather than embed so that there's no chance of this thread being moved into the video thread.
The Germans were over-extended, had not planned to invade the UK (Hitler expected the UK to seek a peace agreement), was not set up to invade the UK in terms of either army or navy and, maybe the biggest factor, was utterly unprepared for a large scale opposed landing. It's never a good idea to do an opposed landing anyway, but if it's your least bad choice you need the right planning, the right equipment and overwhelming force. If you're going to be opposed by air and by sea before you even reach the target and then opposed from land as you're doing the landing, it's going to go very badly. People even strongly avoided opposed landings back in the days when there were no air forces, in situations where there wasn't an opposing navy and when the only ranged weapons were bows. Opposed landings are a really good way to get your army slaughtered. An opposed landing against a warned and prepared enemy with air superiority, massive naval superiority, long range shore defences and a lot of soldiers with guns ready, when you don't even have a single landing craft and most of your troop transport ships are barges would be madness. Even Hitler wasn't that loopy.
Hence their only chance really would have been if they could keep up the momentum leading upto Dunkirk, decisively take air supremacy while we were struggling with the loss of equipment at Dunkirk - once the programs like the production of the Besal got underway and/or supplies from the US started rolling in to replace weaponry it was all uphill for any German invasion from there.
Can't remember if it was this video
Pretty sure Stalingrad was a big turning point, major loss for the German's. How would the German's administer countries in the long term that they had conquered. Infighting and changes in leadership would lead to uprisings or did he plan to exterminate all people or enslave them etc. But as said your only as strong as your resources and we had to import pretty much all raw materials including oil and food so it would just be a waiting game until we ran out, defending the Atlantic shipping route was a key point. In some way the battle of the u-boats decided it all.
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That's pretty much how I see it after Stalingrad it was game over. WW2 was essentially the first war for oil. Germany's u-boats were trying to strangle Great Britain from having basic resources and German generals overlooked the importance of southern Russia (the oil region) and instead thought capturing Moscow would have forced the Soviet Union to surrender (despite the previous evidence showing Russian's would have kept fighting a-la Napoleon invasion).
They had air superiority for two weeks until Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to stop bombing airfields and attack London. The weather was good. There was still no invasion. Because the Royal Navy would have made it suicide. Even if half the fleet was sunk, the invasion would be destroyed, and there could be only one chance. As others have stated, Sealion had to look convincing, but only enough to get the British to the negotiating table. Hitler thought of Britain as a minor diversion in his plans to invade Russia.
As for the original question, without America Britain would not be defeated, but could not re-invade Europe either. The Russians would have rolled on to the coast.
That would have been a factor, but even if they had done that (which they couldn't have done*) they still wouldn't have had a chance because of the Royal Navy. Many of the RN ships were a bit dated at that time, but they had plenty of guns and it doesn't take much of a naval gun to sink an unarmoured and unarmed barge.
Not long before, Germany made opposed landings against Norway and Denmark. Those countries had a far weaker army, navy and air force than the UK, not much prepared defences and no warning. The Germans still took massive losses doing it, despite having surprise, air superiority and naval superiority. Maybe "supremacy" would be a better word for the extreme disparity in power. Despite those things, the German navy alone lost 38 ships. Opposed landings are a bloody affair, especially when you don't even have landing craft (which hadn't been invented at that time, so nobody had them). Even if the RAF completely disappeared somehow and the UK forgot how to make planes and there wasn't a single working gun in the UK, invading Britain still wouldn't have stood a chance unless the Royal Navy disappeared as well.
Here's the known count of the operational navy ships that would be involved, assuming that Germany put every available naval ship they had at the time into the invasion:
Kriegsmarine: 3 cruisers, 4 destroyers. And a load of unarmoured, unarmed barges full of soldiers. Some of which didn't even have an engine (they were towed). Some of which would probably have been sunk by the sea itself, because that is not a safe stretch of water by a long chalk.
British Home Fleet (i.e. ships already in the area): 5 capital ships, 1 aircraft carrier, 11 cruisers, 8 destroyers.
British Meditteranean Fleet (i.e. close enough to get there quickly): 7 capital ships, 2 aircraft carriers, 7 cruisers, 30 destroyers.
The threat seemed real coming on the heels of Germany overrunning most of Europe in weeks, but it was a convincing facade with nothing behind it. None of the German high command thought it was even vaguely close to being possible. If I recall correctly, the German naval commander said that trying it would be being like feeding meat into a mincer. I'm sure the British military would have been sickened by slaughtering so many German soldiers in a one-sided massacre, but I'm also sure they would have done it if they had to.
* The momentum was already too much and the command structure was crap. Units were all over the place, supply lines weren't there, in many cases high ranking officers making overall decisions didn't even know where some units were and conflicting orders were given due to the flaky command structure, ignorance of what was where and political infighting (particularly between commanders of different branches of the military). They'd taken a huge bite - they needed to chew it before taking another.
Hence why it is unlikely even without US aid we'd have been over-run, despite the losses nearer to home we still had significant forces around the globe that could have been pulled in.
The issue was also that instead of heading straight for Moscow, thought that it will be a walk as it was up to that moment, so the army was split to three directions. One part head for Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) one for Moscow and the other to Stalingrand.
Also the Caucasus oilfields were easier for the taking from south had they supported Rommel with a two proper divisions not a botched one, to clear N Africa.
But the major fact for losing the war was that the German wartime production during WWII was less than half that of WWI and only managed to get over that half threshold after June 1944, and maintain it to Feb 1945. (even during the heaviest of the bombardments)
Might seem surprising but is the truth.
The book Inside the third Reich by Speer (the german armaments minister) is a great read to see the history from the other side, and understand WWII bit better.
"flaws" doesn't even begin to describe it, the greatest threat to a T34 wasn't a Tiger, or a Panzerfaust (shoulder mounted high explosive anti-tank rocket launcher), it was molotov cocktails because the average T34 at the height of the production rush had panel gaps so big you could fit your hand through them and a bloke with a petrol bomb could kill the entire crew if he got close enough. There are great stories of one of the battles around a tank factory involving unpainted and unfinished T34s driving out the back door straight into the battle guns blazing
In retrospect your "10 donkeys are stronger than 1 horse" analogy is a perfect summary of WW2 in general. It started with decent well built French and Czechoslovakian tanks being swarmed by greater numbers of garbage German tanks. And it ended with Tigers, Panthers and King Tigers being swarmed and defeated by greater numbers of garbage allied tanks. It's almost bizarre that German would end up making itself a prime target for Blitzkrieg by forgetting what brought it to the party in the first place.
It wasn't just limited to tanks either, I'm sure being on the best warship on the planet was of great comfort to the crew of the Bismark while it was being sunk by the inferior ships that had crippled/surrounded it lol.
"flaws" doesn't even begin to describe it, the greatest threat to a T34 wasn't a Tiger, or a Panzerfaust (shoulder mounted high explosive anti-tank rocket launcher), it was molotov cocktails because the average T34 at the height of the production rush had panel gaps so big you could fit your hand through them and a bloke with a petrol bomb could kill the entire crew if he got close enough. There are great stories of one of the battles around a tank factory involving unpainted and unfinished T34s driving out the back door straight into the battle guns blazing
I think those stories are probably true.
There is another aspect to it, though. When the T34 was first produced, it was a very good tank. When well made with its intended specifications and at the time of first production, it was an excellent tank with few flaws and was clearly superior to the German tanks it faced. There's a story, quite possibly true, of a single T34 being hit 23 times by German tanks and anti-tank weapons in one battle and with no effect. It was an impassable obstacle blocking the way. Attacks from the weapons of that time mostly just deflected off the heavily sloped armour of the T34 and did no damage. With those weapons, only the tracks were vulnerable.
Those T34s were carefully made to a careful design by skilled people taking as much time as was needed to do the job very well. When the focus shifted to rate of production, the design was changed a number of times to make it simpler and quicker to build, the people making them were almost all unskilled at the job because they were anyone and everyone who was available, build quality was emphatically defined as being of no importance and the only thing that mattered was production rate. I've read that the pins holding the tracks on in later T34s weren't even fixed in place and so worked loose as the tracks moved. The solution was to weld a sloped chunk of metal onto the side of the tank to push any loose pins back into place as they came round. That saved a bit of time on making the tank. Also, the Germans had very rapidly developed far better anti-tank weapons (including other tanks) so even a well built T34 to original design would have been inferior by then.
In search of the wunderwaffen.
I think it's less bizarre than it seems with hindsight. Tanks are the example that seems the weirdest because (as you point out) it's such an obvious thing over such a short period of time, but that was part of the general approach of seeking major technological superiority in weapons. I think that part of that was political, driven by a combination of a desire to project the image of the Reich as being a superior system with superior people and a belief that it was. I also think that part of it was a realistic assessment of industrial capacity - Germany in WW2 couldn't match its enemies in volume, so its only chance was in having as big an advantage as possible in technology and quality. Arguably impossible to do when their enemies were very capable of rapid development of weapons technology themselves, but I think that with a bit of a closer look it wasn't obviously wrong and silly to enough of an extent to be almost bizarre. Looking back at the results afterwards (especially with tanks - how could they have put themselves in exactly the position of the people they'd defeated just a few years before and not realise it was a bad idea?) makes it look more bizarre than it was, I think.
There is a similar story about one of the older Russian tanks.
You might be thinking of a kv-2. A single one held off something stupid like an entire Nazi brigade.
Battle of rasanei I think it was.
Yeah I'm trying to find the info on it - I remember they held off an entire brigade single handedly until it was finally destroyed after like a day of constantly being shot at. But I can't find the video I watched on it.