I think the US used some of those Ussr bases for their bombing raids also.
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Could Germany have won WW2?
- Thread starter nightrider1470
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I think the US used some of those Ussr bases for their bombing raids also.
Let’s be fair, it’s all conjecture, none of us can say with any certainty whether or not Germany could have won WW2, we can all say, “If Hitler hadn’t done this”, and “If Churchill had done that”, “If Japan had thought about who they were taking on in 1941”, “If Italy had been a tougher German ally.”
You may as well say, “If my aunt had testicles, she’d be my uncle.”
Oh, and it’s not important, but Hitler didn’t have a “race”, he was Chancellor of Germany, and Germans were, and are, Caucasian I’d guess, although you may have meant his alleged ‘Master Race’.
Iirc Germany was on totally the wrong track with its nuclear weapons program.
Ironically because of the Jewish scientists who fled
The weird thing about Germany in WW2 is how they thought they could take on everyone. You read the timeline on the war and it reads like a bad Civilization game AI. Just war with everyone with no regard for likelihood of success.
If they've focused on a single front at a time they'd have stomped probably.
If they've focused on a single front at a time they'd have stomped probably.
yeah thats what I meant, they were deployed in other places, so the navy at hand was inadequate rather than the force as a whole. They had commitments elsewhere such as the Atlantic and the middle east. At this point they did not yet get new ships from america.
They didnt need to sail round the royal navy, it wasnt sat parked up in the english channel.
The african campaign showed germans could move tanks over water if needed.
Planes > Ships. Proven multiple times in the war, a famous one is when churchill sent a couple of warships to defend british interests in to the pacific only to be shocked shortly later when japanese planes sunk them both. Aircraft carriers marked a navy's dominance at end of WW2 not battleships and destroyers. The thing with the english channel it is very small, so bombing british ships from land launched dive bombers is not much of a problem, germany wouldnt even need a sea force to destroy a british fleet in the english channel.
Normandy invasion worked as by then the luftwaffe was all but dead with allied air supremacy so the ships had no worries of attacks from the air in the channel.
The dunkirk evacuation had notable warship losses.
I dont disagree one bit about the chemical weapons, the british probably would have had no morals fighting for the homeland, but once used against germany they probably would have used them back and from the air. The germans had chemical weapons as well.
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Agreed.
Something else people seem to be neglecting is the amount of time and resources it would've taken to get the Germans in a position for an amphibious assault on this scale, let alone an opposed one. They didn't have amphibious troops, or like you say landing craft. So they would have to design, test them then build them in large numbers, but that would've diverted materials away from other priorities, such as U-boats, which in turn would've made it easier for the Royal Navy convoying materials across the Atlantic.
Then once the Germans have built enough landing craft and cobbled together enough Rhine barges then they've got to train in amphibious landings, and opposed landings at that. That would take time and there would be casualties not just from training, but from night attacks from Royal Navy Costal Forces, one such incident that happened to the allies, during Exercise Tiger resulting in the deaths of 700+ Americans.
Then they've got to Marshall the landing forces in staging areas for the crossing, which would take time and give the British plenty of notice, (and if Britain was at risk of invasion you bet every ship they could recall would be in home waters by the time the Germans started departing for the invasion). then they've got to start crossing the channel, this would've happened over night, which would've given the British plenty of time to get Royal Navy ships into the area to attack. We're not just talking about the mgb's of Costal Forces attacking, but ships destroyers & cruisers getting amongst the landing craft, something like a Leander Class cruiser steaming at 25+ knots is going to flatten any Rhine barges it would hit. Obviously the RN would've taken casualties, but they weren't defenceless, they would've been manoeuvring at speed and returning fire, and be carrying out damage control when hit.
I think the Germans would've been massacred before any of them hit the beaches.
No, definitely not. This big Slavic empire has historically guaranteed the existence of smaller Slavic nations, for example even now the Russian Federation is in a military union with Serbia.
There were Russo-Turkish wars which liberated the Balkan peninsula.
What about other developing nations like India, China or the African continent? These people have disgusting habits...
Russia isn't and has never been a global problem.
Problem is this is based a lot around how things actually turned out - not so much if the Germans had significant air superiority and brought forward/invested into stuff like the JU87C and anti-shipping munitions which with the events of the actual war were a sideline to the Germans but had they won the air superiority and an invasion was a serious consideration there is no reason why they couldn't or wouldn't have put more resources into these areas that were slightly more of a focus in 1942-43 with convoy interdiction but much less of a pressing consideration earlier in the war.
Assumedly the Germans would have used a campaign leading upto such an invasion to drive the RN away from the area they'd be using to cross with their aircraft also acting as force multipliers for what capacity the Kriegsmarine had - they wouldn't have been able to engage and defeat the RN in battle but they certainly could have denied them from operating in an area. Followed up by waves of bombers to soften up defences where they planned to land - the disadvantage being both sides would know weeks in advance exactly where the landings would be so the Germans would have had to commit the equivalent of the resources put into operation Barbarossa to stand any chance of weathering opposed landings.
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Even if Germany had significant air superiority and had developed planes and munitions designed for attacking ships, they couldn't have done anything about it unless they had conquered, held and used a large part of southwestern USSR. Which would have required defeating the USSR entirely (in order to hold and use that area). That had to be done first so that Germany could have enough food and oil to maintain its ability to wage war, let alone expand its ability to do so.
If that had happened...why bother rushing an invasion of Britain? That scenario would have moved the passing of time to Germany's favour, with ample resources to expand industrial capacity greatly and develop more advanced military equipment and build and fuel far larger quantities of the high end military kit they were already capable of making. In fact, why bother invading at all? Germany could have built up its fleet and air force to overwhelming levels and blockaded Britain until it surrendered. Even if that took years, why care? In that scenario, Britain isn't a threat.
I'm assuming here that Germany put its resources into an assault on Britain rather than into Barbarossa.
I'm not sure what the timeline of relations with the Soviet Union was like and/or disposition - as if the USSR saw Germany committing most of its military might towards the UK it might see that as a vulnerability and a temptation to mount their own offensive against the German homeland (amongst other things Stalin was aware that Hitler had in mind a potential invasion of the Soviet Union) - which might be another reason no invasion of Britain was seriously attempted as German command might have been aware that would leave them vulnerable to a potential attack from the USSR.
Theoretically if that had invaded and won Britain that would have opened up for them our oil and other supplies of resources from the Middle East (and to a lesser extent other parts of Africa, etc.) which were substantial though didn't compare to some of the other sources for fuel and also potentially gave them our global strategic position - though they'd have had to expand their own navy really to leverage that.
The area the Luftwaffe would have to deny the RN from operating from would be huge, especially when it came to marshalling the landing craft before the assault. How long would it take the Rhine barges to get into position to make the crossing, if the RN can get destroyers & cruisers into the middle of them during the night time then they would cause havoc. Also if it came to an invasion the UK then would the RN possibly be kamikaze'ing ships like the Revenge class battleships, into the fight, like the IJN tried with the Yamato? Plus the RAF would never have been completely destroyed so they could be attempting to keep the Luftwaffe from concentrating fully on the RN.
Getting enough landing craft built would also have been at a cost to other priorities, factories would've slowed the speed at which vehicles could be built, shipyards would have to have been requisitioned that were building U-boats etc.
Then there's the political situation, if Germany was to try and invade Britain, the US & Russia would've known about the plans for months, planning, building & training for that kind of operation would take months, maybe into 2 or more years since the Germans lacked any amphibious forces to start with. Would that have drawn the US into the war earlier, also what about the Russians, would they have seen it as a chance to get the drop on Germany, as they knew the Germans had designs on Russia.
That makes sense in a modern perspective, but there was a crucial difference in c1940. The middle east produced very little oil at that time and there was no efficient way to get it to Europe. 70% of the entire world's oil supply in 1940 came from the USA. Almost all of the rest came from the USSR and Venezuela. The amount from the middle east was negligable and there wasn't any infrastructure to either extract it or move it in bulk to Europe. Britain's oil supply at that time was bought from the USA, which wouldn't have been an option for Germany even without the RN blockade. The USA wasn't at war with Germany at that time, but they weren't going to help them.
That ties in with the point you make about the USSR. Had Germany put its resources into an assault of Britain rather than into Barbarossa then even if it had succeeded Germany would have been finished. Their oil stockpile would been gone, their oil production would have been inadequate even to sustain their economy let alone wage war, replace the military equipment lost in the attack on Britain and build more to hold their conquered land. They wouldn't have been able to feed even just Germans let alone the people in the lands they had conquered. The USSR, on the other hand, had plenty of food and enough oil to wage war and a functioning economy, including a functioning industry to manufacture war equipment en masse...and Stalin knew Hitler had in mind a potential invasion of the USSR. I think it would have been very unlikely that Stalin would have given Hitler enough time to develop the middle east oil production facilities, even assuming that Germany could have survived long enough to do so with famine and a collapsing economy. Stalin might even have been able to spin it as liberation - "People of Europe, starving under an incompetent and brutal tyrant, we bring you food and freedom!" Even if in this hypothetical situation Stalin somehow didn't realise Nazi Germany was a threat, I think he'd have done it anyway to gain more power. The USSR was very expansionist and Stalin always wanted more power. Faced with the chance of conquering the whole of Europe and probably at least some of the lands that were part of European empires at the time, I think he would have seized it with both hands.
While it paled compared to the US's output going by https://www.quora.com/Where-did-Britain-get-fuel-from-during-WWII it wasn't insignificant - Iran alone was ramping up output and providing twice as much to the UK alone as Germany was getting from its external suppliers. It was only the war dragging on that reduced output and ability to ship oil from that region post 1940. While Britain's use of the oil was mostly in that region so saving the need to ship it home Germany needed far lower levels than the UK to maintain their fighting capability making sufficient bulk shipment from that region a more realistic proposition for them - though ideally they'd have wanted to increase it significantly to deal with the USSR.
I suspect that was a large factor in German command thinking in going after Russia as in a war of attrition those Soviet oil fields and production facilities would have been a formidable advantage for the USSR even if Germany was managing to ship every drop of ME oil home in bulk.
Agreed on that point - as I posted above Stalin was well aware Hitler had invading the USSR in his mind and with so much committed to an invasion of the UK there wouldn't have been a more vulnerable time to strike.
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I don't think they would have beaten the US. It would have been like Russia, but much worse because the US leaders at the time were actually competent.
Plus unlike Russia, there have always been more than enough weapons for everyone in the US. The Germans would be picked off by guerilla warfare when they weren't fighting the millitary.
Plus unlike Russia, there have always been more than enough weapons for everyone in the US. The Germans would be picked off by guerilla warfare when they weren't fighting the millitary.
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Soldato
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Show your working out please
Pearl Harbor "surprise" attack is a great example that the U.S had been vulnerable.
And the Americans were quite lucky, actually:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor
The Russians have very strong spirit - they didn't have technological superiority but the environment and the fighting spirit helped them to turn the history in their favour.
Come on, these are people who eat on one table with the bears from the forest.
These are people whose women carry whole trees on their shoulders.
And the Americans were quite lucky, actually:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor
The Russians have very strong spirit - they didn't have technological superiority but the environment and the fighting spirit helped them to turn the history in their favour.
Come on, these are people who eat on one table with the bears from the forest.
These are people whose women carry whole trees on their shoulders.