-
Notice regarding image hosts and attachments. See here.
Could Germany have won WW2?
- Thread starter nightrider1470
- Start date
Soldato
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2012
- Posts
- 8,438
And as we all know they really pressed that advantage to gain an unassailable position of dominance in the pacific.
Especially considering at the time the US considered the Japanese as allies whereas they were under no illusion with Germany and had been providing resource to fight them. The Atlantic was in a very different state to the Pacific.
Didn't turn out well for the Japanese at all, despite that nasty surprise attack of theirs.
If Germany had turned its attention to the US and Canada you can pretty much bet the Russians, who had interests in Europe, would have taken advantage of the situation while Germany was weak at home as it would have had to shift vast numbers of men and machinery half-way across the globe. At the start of WW2 Germany had no real navy let alone the aircraft carriers and transport ships required to mount an invasion of North America (they struggled to prepare for a potential amphibious assault on the UK never mind the US). The level of industry and preparedness for such an invasion would be vast, take a long time and the US would know about it months in advance giving them plenty of time to build up their own military and industrially the US would have been vastly favoured in such a fight.
The US was poorly prepared, poorly trained and lacking sufficient experience to fight a real war at the start of that era but everything else leaned in their favour and to mount an unassailable assault against them would have required the combined might of the British and Germany empires so as to blockade them and overwhelm their ability to defend themselves.
The US was poorly prepared, poorly trained and lacking sufficient experience to fight a real war at the start of that era but everything else leaned in their favour and to mount an unassailable assault against them would have required the combined might of the British and Germany empires so as to blockade them and overwhelm their ability to defend themselves.
In what way was greed the thing that prevented Germany from winning WW2?
At the beginning of the war, Germany had a completely unsustainable economy, inadequate resources for a sustained war, inadequate industrial capacity for a sustained war and an inadequate number of potential soldiers for a sustained war. They could only have won if they won utterly in a very short period of time or (and this was probably the plan) defeated some enemies very quickly, negotiated a non-aggression pact of some kind with the others and attacked them later after building up their resources and industry from the land they took in the first wave of attacks.
Firstly, the resources situation. Germany was desperately short of food as a result of breaking its own economy in order to build up its military as much as it did as quickly as it did. The food situation might have been reversible by using mainland Europe after conquering it. Maybe mainland Europe would have supplied enough after being conquered. Maybe. Oil was a definite hard stop. There was nowhere near enough in Europe. Even after stealing the stockpiles of every conquered country in Europe and maximising output from the exploitable oil fields in Europe, Germany had enough oil to fully wage war until mid to late 1941 and then only if it stifled its own manufacturing capability. Which it needed.
Secondly, the "pretend a non-aggression pact to buy time to build up and attack them later" idea. Three main targets for that - Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. No, no and "yes, great idea!" Only that was also actually "no" because Stalin already knew Hitler intended to invade the Soviet Union (he'd said so in Mein Kampf) and was lying in order to buy himself time to build up enough to invade Germany instead. Those three people all knew Hitler was as trustworthy as a bridge made out of plasticine and his word meant nothing. Even "peace in our time" Chamberlain ordered increased preparation for war after signing that treaty with Hitler.
Yeah ultimately for food and oil to sustain a war Germany had to push into eastern Europe hard (either military invasion or treaty) - Hungary (agriculture), Romania, Ukraine and other Russian sources of oil - without those they weren't going anywhere long term.
That's not true. In summer of 1941 USSR alone had a larger military force than Germany. Soviets had way more tanks. Had better tanks - T34 and heavy tanks, while Germany had only light and medium tanks. Because of the Treaty of Versailles Germany didn't have a reserve of trained man, unlike the Soviets. As part of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pakt and earlier agreements the USSR had access to almost all German military tech (there were training camps for German soldiers and officers in USSR, testing poligons for German military hardware). German logistics was a lot worse than French at the start of WW2, they were lucky to capture a huge number of French trucks that were very useful later on the eastern front.
Germany didn't have much chances against a coalition of USSR, USA and Britain. The Allies had way bigger population, industrial production, way more resources (agriculture land, oil, metal ores). With the flight of Jewish scientists from Germany the Allies had also better academics. If Germany had increased it's military production after the Battle of France, recruited more men into the army and taken Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Rostov, Crimea in 1941 maybe they could've taken USSR out of the war and start using the Caucasus oil in 1942. Still they would have been nuked in the summer of 1945.
The scary thing about WW2 is if you look at almost any alternative outcome there is rather nasty potential for nuclear repercussions on a much worse scale - if Russia had pushed on and taken large amounts of Europe and set themselves up against the US there is a high likelihood things would have eventually progressed to a full on nuclear exchange between them as the US wasn't the only one with an advancing atomic program and the perspective on nuclear weapons that we have today was yet to be a thing.
Meanwhile Germany was not far off turning the V2 into a crude but functional ICBM though it is a bit hit and miss if they'd have accomplished a nuclear capability any time soon to go with it in that era while the US would have had to make a choice between Japan or Germany as they had limited ability to produce nuclear weapons and it would probably have been months to a couple of years later before they could repeat the bombings on Japan.
Many alternative timelines would probably have culminated in the first use of nuclear weapons circa 1950 and on a much larger scale.
The U.S targeted Germany and wanted to defeat Nazi Germany.
And at the same time American families and wealth helped Adolf Hitler to come to power and probably this western influence pushed him eastwards towards the Soviets.
I think the lands in France, Benelux, Spain and Italy, and Germany are enough to provide food.
North Sea and Norway have oil.
Caporegime
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 37,798
- Location
- block 16, cell 12
Had Britain fallen, then yes I think they could.
Without having to split on an eastern/western front line, without Lancaster, b17 bombing raids (b17s flew from Britain) and by taking over the British navy ( at least some if it would have joined to fight Russia).
You could argue in hindsight that the failure to crush the Dunkirk evacuation and the failure to instantly press on with a landing party into a wholly underprepared Britain was the pivotal moment.
Without having to split on an eastern/western front line, without Lancaster, b17 bombing raids (b17s flew from Britain) and by taking over the British navy ( at least some if it would have joined to fight Russia).
You could argue in hindsight that the failure to crush the Dunkirk evacuation and the failure to instantly press on with a landing party into a wholly underprepared Britain was the pivotal moment.
No, all those countries were importing food and feed from South America. The only country in Europe that had a big surplus of food production was Ukraine.
Soldato
- Joined
- 13 Apr 2013
- Posts
- 15,121
- Location
- La France
Low-level carpet bombing using incendiary munitions was extremely effective against the Japanese cities and towns due almost all the building being timber framed, often with lacquered paper walls.
Remember that Nagasaki and Hiroshima were chosen primarily because the US 7th Air Force hadn’t already turned them to cinders.
Hitler didn't want a world war. In fact I am a tiny bit surprised that Churchill did not accept his offer of peace in 1940. But anyway, once an all out war happened then Germany was going to lose. The war awoke the American industrial machine which Hitler massively underestimated. Germany was in fact nowhere near an atomic bomb. Somewhat unlike Hitler, this was an area they were only half-heatedly interested in. The general feeling is that his opinion of the atomic bomb was the same as the UK's, that it was plausible but it demanded too many resources in both materials and manpower to achieve - it was a long-term project. Their heavy water based reactor was a joke. Had Churchill known how primitive it was they doubtless would have paid less attention to destroying Norwegian assets. I guess he couldn't take that risk. But no bones here even if the reactor they had created was tiny. They had no way to manufacture materials for a uranium bomb and not a clue about a plutonium bomb. It would have required a huge leap in knowledge and absolutely massive investment that Germany simply didn't have. Few countries did at the time.
Permabanned
- Joined
- 11 Feb 2011
- Posts
- 2,138
I sometimes wonder if Hitler had not had declared war on the USA that this could have drastically altered the outcome of WW2.
>> Remember that Nagasaki and Hiroshima were chosen primarily because the US 7th Air Force hadn’t already turned them to cinders.
I believe I read somewhere US air force saved those cities from conventional bombing to better demonstrate the power of the nukes.
I believe I read somewhere US air force saved those cities from conventional bombing to better demonstrate the power of the nukes.
Caporegime
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 37,798
- Location
- block 16, cell 12
The US was heavily lending both supplies and resources to the UK and to an extent Russia.
As I said, had the UK fallen very early things would have been very different indeed.
Have. They didn't have back then though. North Sea oil was only really available from the 70s.
Maybe they could be today, but were they in 1940? I don't think so. Food can't wait for development.
Which wasn't accessible in 1940. There was no north sea oil infrastructure in 1940. Even if it could have been built in 1940 (and I think it couldn't have been - deep water oil extraction is a different kettle of fish to what existed in 1940) that would take time Germany didn't have once the war had started.
It's a thought, but I don't think it would drastically altered the outcome of WW2. Roosevelt understood that the USA was going to be at war with Nazi Germany and it was only a matter of when. Unsurprisingly, he wanted it to be fought somewhere other than in the USA and with powerful allies. He knew that meant starting sooner rather than later. The sticking point was widespread popular support in the USA for isolationism, but Roosevelt was already planning the war well before the USA officially declared war on Germany and the USA was already sort of involved in the war before it was officially involved in the war. Granted, initially the USA charged the UK a lot for help. That part often gets overlooked. But at that stage it wasn't viable in terms of domestic politics for Roosevelt to do otherwise and it quickly changed. The USA was actively involved in fighting a war against Germany months before the official declaration of war, although some of that was officially whitewashed for a little while. The first USA soldiers deployed to Britain, for example, (6 months before Germany declared war on the USA) were officially described as "technicians" because that was a useful lie at the time. Greenland was occupied by the USA even earlier, although the USA forces doing so were (at least officially) the USA coast guard rather than the USA military. Iceland was occupied by openly acknowledged USA military forces (replacing British and Canadian soldiers deployed elsewhere) in July 1941, still 5 months before Germany declared war on the USA. The fighting between German and USA military forces started 3 months before Germany declared war on the USA and the the first deaths in combat of USA military came a few weeks later. Roosevelt acknowledged the new policy to the USA public before Germany declared war on the USA, after a USA ship openly flying the USA flag was attacked by a German submarine. Still well before Germany declared war on the USA.
So I think it wouldn't have drastically changed the outcome of the war if Germany hadn't declared war on the USA.