WW2 "What if?"

[shooter]

Err, let me clarify: I am not revising history. There is no ambiguity as to who won the two world wars, and the important US role in it, even among the engagements I mention.

Bro i wasnt being personal. I was just stating something separately.

I just see a trend in in general in europe of people discounting the US and making fun of them. "two world wars and one world cup" is a famous saying in the UK. If beating the germans is so important to glorious britain then might as well acknowledge the help the people gave in liberating the european asses from Hitlers clutches.
At least we indians have the distinction of losing the largest soldiers (after russia).
But all these american jokes and making fun of them sometimes gets a bit too much even though like it or not, if not for the US they would all not have the two world wars and neither the world cup.

Wellington got the arch and the school. Nelson got the column and his descendents even today get annual lunch with the monarch. Marlborough got the duchy and blenheim palace. Indians got the India gate and the pillars outside buckingham palace. Anzac got the memorial.

USa got american jokes.

Hollywood and Discovery channel takes great pains to spread this message to everybody anyway.

[nagarifle]

ya USA got the 10% interst rate on the war loans, they got the USA Bases in UK

oh they are overpaid, over sexed and overstayed in the UK

[timmy]

i. Timmy, we must dispute the Bismarck/Baden controversy further, particularly as I now must look deeper into my evidence to support my point. Let's pick it up privately. I am sure my edition of the "Anatomy"writes otherwise, because I stood up when I read this point.

OK, that's good.

ii. Mark, we need a devil's' advocate to further discussions. What happens if everybody agrees? A lot us, though not being "experts", have read enough to have opinions of their own.

It is gracious of you to look at the whole thing this way. After all, what was, was, no matter our opinions of it.

iii. XLtarget, with respect, "ass kicking", "whipping kraut assess" is disappointing and to me carries very Jerry Bruckheimer-ish connotations. I thought we were serious students of history.

You are right -- I apologize for defending an unfortunate, imprecise, and inflammatory choice of words.

[shooter]

oh they are overpaid, over sexed and overstayed in the UK

Well im thankful to their bases. If not for the bases we would have even less shooting grounds.

[winnie_the_pooh]

Some one forgot the Russians when discussing WWII.

While we are discussing what if's how about " What if the Americans had not entered the War (WWII).Would have not the Germans been run over by the Russians eventually?How would Europe have looked then?"

-- Sat Aug 06, 2011 11:23 pm --

Some one forgot the Russians when discussing WWII.

While we are discussing what if's how about " What if the Americans had not entered the War (WWII).Would have not the Germans been run over by the Russians eventually?How would Europe have looked then?"

[timmy]

Winnie, if the USA didn't enter, my take is that the Soviet Union still would have won. There's no doubt that US Lend Lease shortened the war, but when the Red Army stopped the 6th Army in Stalingrad, that was long before Lend Lease was making an impact on the Soviet-German struggle. I think it makes a lot of sense to see parallels in the Soviet-German conflict and the USA-Japan conflict. Everything was a mess for the USN leading up to Midway, coming off of the setback of the Coral Sea. (That setback had a "poison pill" for the Japanese -- the loss of Shokaku and Zuikaku for Midway.)

Regarding my parallel, you may object: "But the US victory was built on intelligence at Midway." This is true, but it was even more built on miscalculations by Yamamoto and the Japanese, which they themselves referred to as "Victory Fever." This had the same effect as Hitler's bungling of the command of the Stalingrad struggle. He thought he knew more than his generals, and rather than accepting their occasional failures along with their often brilliant successes, he insisted that he knew better. Not even Stalin, that paranoid spider, interfered so deeply into everyday decisions of his generals.

Added to this, there is the resource and manufacturing disparity between Germany and the Soviet Union. Yes, Soviet production was terribly hammered at the outset, but Hitler never put Germany's economy on a war footing until Speer was appointed. Every other power, including the USA, got off to a war footing right away. But Germany, which started rearmament in the mid 30s, threw away that lead by not reorganizing the economy.

Another problem was Germany's search for excellence and "secret weapons." When one considers, for instance, the massive amounts of money and scarce resources that Hitler threw into weapons like the V1 and the V2 -- tremendous wastes of effort. Such weapons were never going to win the war. In contrast, the Soviet Union pursued a much more reasonable strategy of sticking with suitable weapons for the job.

An illustration of this is the tank: The German Tiger and King Tiger tanks are often looked at as the best tanks of the war. If war was like a boxing match, or it was conducted according to the rules of David and Goliath, where conflict between representative champions determined the outcome, then German Tigers were the right choice. However, the Soviet T-34 was a better tank in that it was good enough, reliable (something that couldn't be said for Tigers) and very importantly, could be made in large numbers. The Americans used the same strategy with the Sherman tank, a machine much inferior to the T-34.

Both the Germans and the Soviets saw their air forces as adjuncts to the ground forces -- they were tactical, not strategic like the British and American air forces. The Stuka was obsolescent when the war began. It quickly faded from the scene in the West, but in the East, it performed miracles. However, it was by far surpassed by the Soviet Il-2 Stormovik. In the wide spaces of the steppes where tanks and maneuver were the way of war, "tank busters" and tactical ground support counted for a lot more than the fighter duels of the Battle of Britain.

The Soviet system took a huge blow at the outset of the war, continued to have huge setbacks throughout the war, and spent lives prodigiously. (Here, I will note that a lot of their shock troops were comprised of other peoples -- you may not be aware of this: we know that the largest allied army was fielded by the Soviet Union, and the second largest by the USA. So, who fielded the third largest army? It depends on how you figure a national army. If you consider the "British Army" to include all Empire forces, like Indian, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, etc, then Britain had the third largest army. However, if the British Army is reckoned as forces just from Great Britain alone, then the third largest force was fielded by Poland, and Britain is in fourth place. In the West, Polish units were much less numerous than those who fought as units in the Red Army. These Polish troops were used as shock troops -- cannon fodder -- as Stalin fought two wars at the same time here.)

It is not surprising that the Soviets were so bungling and inefficient -- their system of government was essentially a government of goons, just like the Germans. I see both the Nazi party and the Bolsheviks as being little different at the outset than groups like the Taliban -- small groups of kooky ideologues who managed to seize power and set up ramshackle regimes of ignorance, corruption, violence, and personality cults. In the end, for all of its faults, the Soviet model proved to make fewer critical mistakes than the Nazi one, and was more efficient. With greater resources, the Soviets were able to recover from many early round losses and knockdowns and deliver the knockout blows in the end.

Whether or not the USA enters, I don't see that result changing in nature, though it may differ in detail. One such detail might be that, rather than patriotic Frenchmen calling each other "citizen," they probably would have been calling each other "comrade" instead, and Trotsky's dream of the Red Army camping on the shores of the English Channel could well have been realized. Now, that's a chilling thought.

This part of alternative history is interesting, because again, it hinges on the confused mind of Hitler: This scenario has a strong likelihood if Hitler didn't declare war on the USA in the wake of Pearl Harbor. The public's focus would have remained on Japan, and absent Hitler's bungling (or, at least, this example of his bungling), US entry into the European War is quite questionable.

So here, I will throw another alternative history tidbit in the mix: What if the Japanese bypass the Philippines and forget messing with Pearl Harbor and leave the USA alone altogether, and simply grab the Dutch East Indies for themselves? What if they choose to stick with fighting China and the British, and pin Britain into a two front war without US help? That, too, has some realistic aspects, because without the provocation of Pearl Harbor, the regular joe on the street in the USA didn't want to fight anybody. FDR saw the implications of Nazi domination of Europe, but the public wasn't buying. Likewise, the Japanese weren't on anyone's list of favorites, but nobody was interested in fighting a war over anything before Pearl Harbor.

[Bespoke]

We should not ignore there was internal opposition on both sides allied front and the Germans.

Hitler was planning a major change in his staff with more hardliners and was considering operation Sea Lion from scratch. The U.S had a growing Nazi influence and Britain was almost on its knees financially and morally it would have been a different story if major Jewish banking families did not jump in the right time to finance the allied front.The International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank created in 1944 and we are still suffering the consequences.

[nagarifle]

Hitler had a systems where a two different agency were against each other and where in many cases working separately on the same project.
were given the same task, what i mean is that there was two services were working to out do each other on the same projects that would have doubled the cost. and created mistrust, one being the Intel service under Admiral C and one under the SS. (each spying on the other)

a general mistrust between the army and the SS, would and did not help in the war effect.

[timmy]

Hitler had a systems where a two different agency were against each other and where in many cases working separately on the same project.

I agree. This system has been used by many leaders, like Louis XIV, however Hitler's basis for using it rested on the Darwinian notion of "survival of the fittest." He believed that, if he turned his minions loose, they would struggle amongst themselves for power and the "best man" would be the one who emerged victorious. I have heard of one instance where a party member wrote to him, asking for an appointment to a leadership position. Hitler refused to appoint the man, indicating that if the man actually had the backing and respect of the party membership as he claimed, he should simply seize power.

He evidently was also quite lazy, sleeping in until very late, taking long walks in the afternoons when he was in his Austrian retreat, watching movies, etc. He apparently took the attitude that many things would take care of themselves.

[xl_target]

iii. XLtarget, with respect, "ass kicking", "whipping kraut assess" is disappointing and to me carries very Jerry Bruckheimer-ish connotations. I thought we were serious students of history.

Hamiclar, nothing personal and no disrespect to you is intended but sometime you just have to call a spade a spade.

In most wars, one side usually wins and the other side gets its ass kicked. That is a fact of life.
I think that if we are to learn from history, we must be given the true facts. Revisionsism and clothing facts in fancy terms to make them more palatable to future generations, does a disservice to the human race as a whole.

[winnie_the_pooh]

Timmy,

My thoughts exactly.For the Germans to be defeated in Europe, American intervention was not required.The Russians would have done that on their own.What the Americans did was to ensure that in many parts of Europe,one totalitarian regime was not replaced by another.Other Europeans were not that lucky.

[xl_target]

Since I asked the question originally, I didn't want to post what I thought was an answer, at least not till a few more people had a chance to weigh in. I also tried to keep it more general without going into too much detail as I didn't want to turn off some of our readers.

I've always been interested in Mil History but mostly concentrated on the European theater till I came to the US. Then I realized something strange. If you read British Authors about WW2, you always get the impression that the British won the war single handed with a little help from their American Cousins. If you read Russian authors exclusviely, you will get the impression that theirs was the toughest, hardest fought front and everyone else rode on their coat-tails. I also study a little bit about Railroads and Industry in the US and came to realize what an incredible effort America made during WW2. The amount of material put forth and transported around the world by American industry was truly staggering. At one time or another during WW2, there were American troops in almost every country in the world. If that kind of effort were to be called for today, I'm afraid that American industry would not be able to duplicate it or deliver it like they did during WW2.
Later, I shifted to studying the Pacific Theater and started reading about (mainly) Air power there. Here I concentrated more on specific battles one at a time, rather than the whole theater. I finally came to the conclusion that Pearl Harbor was a tremendous strategic blunder. Once the US entered the war, the ending was a foregone conclusion. Prior to that, without US help (convoys of food stuffs, arms, ammunition, fuel, ships, vehicles, etc), Britain could concievably have lost the Battle of Britain setting the stage for the invasion of the english English coast (no one doubts the gallantry,courage and success of the RAF in the BoB). By itself, without American supplies and transport, Britain would never have been able to mount Operation Overlord or for that matter, the Italian Campaign, El Alamien, etc, etc. For example look at the ratio of American supplied to British tanks in British Armor units in Africa.

Getting back on topic; the scenarios presented by Life magazine.
To mount a seaborne invasion, you need a certain amount of a Naval capability in addition to numbers of well trained invasion troops. You also need to be able to sustain those troops with adequate equipment and supplies, sometimes for quite a while.


Naval Capabilities

I don't believe either Germany or Japan, either alone or together, could have logistically sustained any kind of long distance campaign like those mentioned, especially in 1942. Think of it this way, Germany was unable to take England, a tiny island (compared to the US) practically in its back yard. This was at a time that the US was physically not in the war yet. What makes anyone think that they could have sustained any kind of campaign against the US mainland? In the Atlantic, apart for the U-Boats, the Kriegsmarine was very ineffective whereas US Navy and Royal Navy ships pretty much went where they wanted to. The German Surface fleet was basically contained by the Royal Navy and apart from a couple of flashes in the pan they were not very effective.

Even with all its might, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) only controlled small parts of the Pacific, mostly around its island bases. After Midway, they were on the defensive in every sea battle. After Yamamoto was assassinated, they seemed to be unable to focus as a fighting force As Timmy mentions, Nagumo was not a Carrier admiral. After the Marianas Campaign, for all practical purposes, they didn't have a Naval Aviation arm left. The IJN couldn't even retake Guadalcanal when it was relatively intact as a service. The Imperial Japanese Army was unable to take India or even gain a foothold on it. The distances they covered there were very small compared to what they would have had to cover in Life magazine plans. Keep in mind that the IJN started the war with 10 carriers, the US with 7 (only three in the Pacific) and RN with 8. By the end of the war the US had built 168 carriers including CVE's and those transferred to the Royal Navy. The IJN never effectively fielded any more than the initial number. In fact, by the time the Battle of Leyte Gulf was fought, they were reduced to using their carriers as bait to pull the US Navy’s heavy forces away from covering the landings in the Philippines. This lead up to the famous “Turkey Trots To Water…..” message .

The Germans never had an operating carrier. I wont even bring up Russian Naval capabilities at the time as comparitively, it was very small.


If we do a naval comparison with the Allies consisting of just the USA, Great Britain and Canada* and the Axis consisting just of Germany and Japan, one sees the huge discrepancies in Naval power which would have made the Life magazine scenarios impossible.

Allies (just the US, Great Britain, including Canada):
Carriers:168 (includes CVE’s and those turned over to the RN. Not counting the Great lakes training carriers)
Battleships: 13
Cruisers: 80
Destroyers:589
Convoy Escorts: 1136
Submarines:370

Axis (Germany and Japan):
Carriers: 16 (this can be confusing as some of the Japanese carriers were never fully operational. one lasted about 20 mins from launching till a US sub sank it)
Battleships: 4
Cruisers: 9
Destroyers: 80
Convoy Escorts: 0
Submarines: 1308**

Manufacturing and Logistics
What many people don't realize is that during WW2, America fielded the first fully Mechanized Army. No one else had the industrial capability or the national wealth to produce the prodigious quantities of equipment needed. When we watch war movies, we see the Germans sweeping forward in their Panzers followed by motorcycles and trucks loaded with soldiers. Sure, they had Panzer divisions and mechanized infantry supported by Stukas and the Blitzkreig that they unleashed was very effective. However, in reality, the bulk of the Wehrmacht (and yes, even the Waffen SS) was horse drawn. The vast majority of German Infantry marched into war on foot with their baggage train, artillery and equipment being hauled by horses. The Germans were masters at moving and concentrating their mobile assets in trouble spots which did make a big difference in the early years of the war and on the Eastern Front. Time and time again, it was seen that once you got past the Armored fist, the Germans rolled up. It was just very difficult to get past that Fist. This is not to take away anything from the Germans. As soldiers, they were absolutely superb.


Apart from being transferred from island to island by the IJN and their Merchant Marine, the Japanese soldier relied on shoe leather to get from point A to Point B. About the only time a Japanese landing was physically challenged was at Wake island and the first time they were repulsed by a mere handful of defenders. They were successful the second time but they had an overwhelming force compared to the defenders. Trying to land at Midway, they were routed.



As Mark mentions, the article in question article seems like typical journalistic fear mongering to sell papers. Of course we know that now but back then it must have been very scary to read that particular article.



I read somewhere that when Hitler's spies made an assessment of American manufacturing capabilities, he dismissed them out of hand saying;"No one can produce that much". What this former Austrian house painter didn't realize was that it took the US, from start to finish, just 12 days to build a Liberty (cargo) ship, and they weren't making them one at a time either. Germany and Japan basically ran out of trained pilots by 1944 and their training organizations were incapable of producing meaningful numbers. Whereas, the US pilot training program was producing almost 100,000 trained pilots a year by then. I also read about North American producing Mustangs at the rate of more than one an hour. Across the bay was Grummann and they often beat North American's capacity. That was just two of the many aircraft factories making planes during WW2. Keep in mind those other factories were making B-17's (and later B-29's), B-24's, B-26's, P47's, F4U's, etc, etc.

In the end, it was logistics and manufacturing capability that won WW2. Once the US entered the war, regardless of who the other combatants were, it was just a matter of time before it was won.

*Notice that for the purposes of this post, I have left out a great many other nations (including Russia) but only because their naval capabilities were only a percentage of the total. The Russians managed to manufacture enough munitions and supplies to keep their huge armies fed and supplied. The Russians also did produce a huge number of tanks and the T34 with its Christie suspension wasn't too bad. At least, tolerances were loose enough that it always worked, even in the frigid Russian winter. Russian Naval capability was small, especially for Capital ships, during WW2.

** While it looks like the Axis has a huge advantage in Submarines (and the kriegsmarine almost stopped the huge American and Canadian convoys supplying Britain during its darkest days), by 1943, allied anti-sub measures had blunted that underwater advantage. For one thing they were building ships faster than they could be sunk. In comparison, after a somewhat slow start, US subs around the Japanese islands operated with near impunity as the Imperial Japanese Navy was reduced by the allied Navies.

-- Sat Aug 06, 2011 11:33 pm --

I just see a trend in in general in europe of people discounting the US and making fun of them.

You're absolutely correct, Shooter.
That is very fashionable right now. Revisionism is very popular and Political Correctness is almost a religion.
As with the demonization of firearms, unpleasant facts are to be modified so no ones feelings get hurt. If the facts don't fit your hypothesis, lets make them fit somehow.
You just have to read your average newspaper opinion piece or article, ........sifting through multiple sources and viewpoints to get at the facts? Huhn? Research? Huhn? What is that?

[sonny]

History is written by winners & Americans had won

-- Sun Aug 07, 2011 11:48 am --

History is written by winners & Americans had won

[timmy]

When we watch war movies, we see the Germans sweeping forward in their Panzers followed by motorcycles and trucks loaded with soldiers. Sure, they had Panzer divisions and mechanized infantry supported by Stukas and the Blitzkreig that they unleashed was very effective. However, in reality, the bulk of the Wehrmacht (and yes, even the Waffen SS) was horse drawn. The vast majority of German Infantry marched into war on foot with their baggage train, artillery and equipment being hauled by horses.

This is certainly a point many folks miss. In fact, many of the tanks used by the Germans in the invasion of France in 1940 were tanks they had captured in their takeover of Czechoslovakia. If you read the specifications of the early Mk 1 through Mk III Panzers, they hardly come up to the standard of light tanks later in the War.

One country to have missed a bet in 1938 was Czechoslovakia. The Germans at that time had 41 divisions, the Czechs 35, and a veritable Maginot Line for defenses. They could have made quite a stand, had they decided to determine their own fate, rather than to leave it to Chamberlain in Munich. The poison pill here was the terrible relations between Poland and Czechoslovakia over Cieszyn at the end of WW1. A solid mutual defensive pact between Poland and Czechoslovakia would have been adequate to deal with Germany in 1938, and I think, adequate to enforce the demilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936. It's well known that, had Hitler's few battalions that he remarched over and over into the Rheinland to simulate a larger army been resisted with adequate force, the Army would have toppled him then and there.

Certainly, the French were not going to do it. I believe that the French lost WW2 at Verdun and in the Nivelle offensive of 1917. After that, they were a spent force. (WW2, Vietnam, Suez, Algeria...)

The Germans were masters at moving and concentrating their mobile assets in trouble spots which did make a big difference in the early years of the war and on the Eastern Front. Time and time again, it was seen that once you got past the Armored fist, the Germans rolled up. It was just very difficult to get past that Fist. This is not to take away anything from the Germans. As soldiers, they were absolutely superb.

One noteworthy thing that comes to mind for me is the quality of the individual German soldier. Almost any unit of any size could be broken into independent combat teams, which then were led and fought with skill, determination, and teamwork. The Nazi training of the Hitler Youth had molded the nation's young men into a very flexible fighting force at almost every level.

Whereas, the US pilot training program was producing almost 100,000 trained pilots a year by then. I also read about North American producing Mustangs at the rate of more than one an hour. Across the bay was Grummann and they often beat North American's capacity.

This outlines a huge factor in the Pacific War. Once the F6F Hellcat was avaiable, the US carrier forces had a fighter with clear superiority over its opposite, the Zero. Added to that, it was relatively easy to fly. Rather than running our pilots into the ground, as the Germans and the Japanese, US pilots were rotated back into the training programs, once they had sufficient combat experience and skill. Large bodies of aviators were given sufficient training to fly Hellcats and defeat their Japanese counterparts.

On the other had, the Japanese had a much smaller pool of qualified aviation candidates to draw from. They were trained endlessly in a samurai-like tradition for excellence. Then, they were expended wastefully, and there were no qualified backups in the works to replace them.

... by 1943, allied anti-sub measures had blunted that underwater advantage. For one thing they were building ships faster than they could be sunk. In comparison, after a somewhat slow start, US subs around the Japanese islands operated with near impunity as the Imperial Japanese Navy was reduced by the allied Navies.

[/quote][/quote]

Part of the anti-sub measures was the Allied use of Ultra -- the cracked enigma intelligence that was used to defeat Donitz's Wolf Pack tactics. Out of about 1100 U Boats made, over 700 were lost. The loss rate for U Boat submariners was about 75% -- highest of any service. In contrast, the US subs in the Pacific accounted for almost 60% of the total Japanese tonnage sunk -- a successful campaign, indeed.

However, the US effort here is not all "wonderful." I believe that Admiral King and his refusal to implement convoy for the first part of the war was totally incompetent -- he should have been sacked. (Finally, during the U boat crisis, the British had to send help to the USN for implementing convoys and anti submarine patrols.) Another problem on his watch was his protection of a coterie of admirals in the Ordinance Department who successfully fended off all attempts to show that USN torpedos were defective due to bad magnetic triggers. Even to the end of WW2, King still thought of taking Pacific Islands for naval bases alone. I think his one bright spot was appointing Nimitz as commander of the Pacific Theater. Some anecdotes about King:

FDR said that he: "...shaves every morning with a blow torch"

King liked to sit on the toilet for lengthy periods of time reading. This caused great problems at the Cairo Conference, where King ensconced himself on the only throne available while others waited uncomfortably for relief.

At the Casablanca Conference with the British, King, well known as a virulent Anglophobe, almost came across the conferece table and grabbed Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff , and threatened to give him a sound thrashing when Brooke accused him of favoring the Pacific theater over Europe.

The battleship Iowa was used to transport President Roosevelt, Sec. of State Hull, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff across the Atlantic to the Tehran Conference with Churchill and Stalin. On the way, the destroyer William D. Porter had a torpedo malfunction and launched a live topedo at the Iowa, carrying the President of the USA and the military leadership! Iowa was able to avoid the torpedo, which exploded in the ship's wake. After the crisis was over, King was glaring at the Porter from his flag bridge when the chief of the Air Force, General Hap Arnold, asked him, "Tell me, Ernest, does this happen often in your Navy?" King was so furious that the Porter was transferred to the horrible Aleutians Theater for a year.

[xl_target]

History is written by winners & Americans had won

WW2 is unique, at least compared to past wars, in that it became very easy to publish a book in the latter half of the 1900's. Every individual soldier could have written and published a book if he so desired and many did. There is a vast body of literature written on this particular period in history. Memoirs were written by soldiers on both sides of the conflict. Consequently many battles can be scrutinized from either side and facts cross checked. This makes it much harder for revisionists to distort facts though there have been many attempts to do so.