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How strong was the French army in 1940? Didnt they have at least more than a million men? I still can't wrap my head around the fact that a nation with a population 80% that of Germany can be conquered within a month just because the upper echelons agree to a surrender. You'd think the army would split into countless guerillas spread all over France, harassing the occupying German soldiers and doing everything possible to make casualties mount.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
No, the worst case scenario is the nuclear annihilation of Germany in 1947 by the US. You can't really have a cold war when only one side has nukes.

If Germany is smart and consolidates their power, without provoking the US unduely, they will also develop nuclear weaponry too.

I dont know if there are unanimous sources to back this up, but Hitler had no alternative but to officially declare war on the US in December 1941. Not because of Pearl Harbor mind you, but because the war had already started between these two countries. Hitler mentioned in his declaration-of-war speech that by spring 1941 Roosevelt had already given the US fleet a "shoot on sight" orders regarding any Axis ship they spotted, so even without an official declaration of war, the US was de-facto at war with the Axis powers by 1941, and Germany declaring war on the US after Japan attacked them at Pearl Harbor was merely a necessary formality.

This thread makes me want to play Axis and Allies again.

 Grey Templar wrote:
If Germany is smart and consolidates their power, without provoking the US unduely, they will also develop nuclear weaponry too.

But how long will that take? Germany wasn't even close to having nukes, and didn't have any way to deliver them to the US. The US had working designs, mass production, and bombers capable of flying from the US and dropping them anywhere in Germany. Another year or two while the US finishes development on the B-36 and starts mass production of nuclear weapons won't make up that gap, and even if Japan somehow doesn't start the war US "neutrality" in Europe probably isn't going to prevent a preemptive strike.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Indeed. Worst case scenario is Nazi Europe/North Africa/Middle East currently exists, and the Cold War was between the US and Germany.

No, the worst case scenario is the nuclear annihilation of Germany in 1947 by the US. You can't really have a cold war when only one side has nukes.

Soviets didn't get one until 1949, and they didn't get nuked.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
But Germany wasn't smart now was it.

Well all WW2 alternate history discussions have to assume intelligent decisions on the part of Germany.

They were stupid, thats why they lost. But what if they were smart?

There would have been no war in the first place? WWII European theater was a calliope of bad strategic moves.

Don't invade France and leave Britain sitting there if you intend to continue picking on other countries.
Don't invade Yugoslavia
Don't send your armies to North Africa
Don't invade Mother Russia.
Don't declare war on the US in between dinner and dessert.

WWII did not have to happen. Germany and Japan made it happen.

 Sir Arun wrote:
How strong was the French army in 1940? Didnt they have at least more than a million men? I still can't wrap my head around the fact that a nation with a population 80% that of Germany can be conquered within a month just because the upper echelons agree to a surrender. You'd think the army would split into countless guerillas spread all over France, harassing the occupying German soldiers and doing everything possible to make casualties mount.

I think a big part of it had to do with how quickly the Germans bypassed the defenses that the French, and everyone else, had pretty much decided were impenetrable. There was also massive underestimation of the strength of the german army at the time.

The French also, IIRC, were still stuck in a WW1/19th century organizational structure. One where if the command structure falls the remaining parts are incapable of remaining cohesive.

This combined to make the morale shock of the sudden German capture of the capitol into one that the army couldn't recover from. So the vast majority surrendered.

This particular weakness of this organizational structure is why modern armies have such a focus on more self-sufficient combat units at every level. Everyone is trained in what to do if there is nobody above you giving you orders.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Indeed. Worst case scenario is Nazi Europe/North Africa/Middle East currently exists, and the Cold War was between the US and Germany.

No, the worst case scenario is the nuclear annihilation of Germany in 1947 by the US. You can't really have a cold war when only one side has nukes.

Soviets didn't get one until 1949, and they didn't get nuked.

The USSR never declared war on the US either. Japan did...

 Paradigm wrote:
- Germany would have very little capability to threaten them given the distances involved

Except that the US knows that nuclear war is inevitable, knows that Germany is working on their own nuclear weapons, and was "neutral" in name only. Once the nuclear-armed B-36 squadrons are ready Germany disappears under mushroom clouds before they can do the same to the US.

- In essence, they would be launching on an occupied nation unless they actually hit Germany (and thus get through hundreds of miles of territory without being shot down), and at the least fallout would be all over Europe

That's exactly what the B-36 was designed to do. It had the range to attack Germany from bases in the US, the altitude to ignore pretty much any attempts to shoot it down, and once it is armed with nuclear weapons even the worst loss rates of real-world bombing missions won't prevent the complete destruction of Germany. And fallout is a problem, but not one that was really understood at the time.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Soviets didn't get one until 1949, and they didn't get nuked.

They were also recent allies of the US, and the US was exhausted from years of fighting in WWII. By the time anyone seriously considered a war against the Soviets they had nukes of their own. Germany, on the other hand, was an enemy the US was already preparing to fight and in this hypothetical scenario they aren't tired of war yet.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Paradigm wrote:
- Germany would have very little capability to threaten them given the distances involved

Except that the US knows that nuclear war is inevitable, knows that Germany is working on their own nuclear weapons, and was "neutral" in name only. Once the nuclear-armed B-36 squadrons are ready Germany disappears under mushroom clouds before they can do the same to the US.

Sure, and those B-36s are operating from where exactly? And they're also getting shot down by a competent Luftwaffe.

And Germany has a better delivery system for nuclear weapons than airplanes. They have ICBMs decades before anyone else. And the US and Russia only developed ICBMs as fast as we did because we were picking the remains of German ballistic developments. In this situation we don't have that advantage.

So in the end, Germany has nuclear tipped ICMBs before we do. But not quite long enough to hit the US. Maybe they even figure out to put them in Submarines.

This all adds up to a cold war.

 Frazzled wrote:

1. The Soviets were arming at the same time and reorganizing after the Purges/Finland.
2. You assume the German economy would have lasted that long. There are strong arguments that the German economy was running on borrowed time. Where the Japanese economy was running out of oil, the German economy was running out of money.

On 1 yes they were reorganising, just very slowly. Given the poor quality of training of all ranks were still receiving before Barbarossa I'm not sure that another year or even 2 would have strengthened the RKKD sufficiently to allow them to successfully defend against a much strengthened Wehrmacht.

On 2 the German economy lasted at least until 1945.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Sure, and those B-36s are operating from where exactly?

Bases in the US. That was the whole point of the B-36, to bomb Germany directly from the US in the worst-case scenario that all of Europe is conquered.

And they're also getting shot down by a competent Luftwaffe.

Not really. Even against B-17s German fighters weren't inflicting anywhere near the 100% losses required to stop a nuclear attack, and the B-36 flies considerably faster and higher.

And Germany has a better delivery system for nuclear weapons than airplanes. They have ICBMs decades before anyone else.

No they don't. They have short-range ballistic missiles with nowhere near enough range to hit the US. The V2 was not an ICBM.

Fair enough, but the V2 was just a precursor to true ICBMs. And really the only difference is how long it can fly.

You're assuming that Germany makes no advances, yet the US has the same advances it only got because it was accelerated by looting German technology.

1. The RAF was essentially at the breaking point when Hitler ordered the focus to change to terror-bombing. Most military theorists and historians are in agreement that the RAF would have collapsed within 2 weeks if the Luftwaffe had maintained its ops tempo and targets, as the RAF was short on planes and pilots and would not have been able to rebuild itself otherwise.

There was a realistic chance of capturing the fleet at both Mers-el-Kébir and Toulon, but in both cases that would have required a bit more forward thinking and political maneuvering on the part of Germany. A better outcome would have been Germany taking military control of the Regia Marina and using it for something other than target practice for the Royal Navy, as the Italian fleet was large and the newer ships were some of the finest in the world, but the officers were ineffective and inexperienced, and the crews poorly trained. Capturing either fleet would have made Sea Lion more feasible, but that would have required Germany to shift its approach at naval warfare from commerce raiding/berth warming to direct confrontation, something I dont believe it would have been willing to do, at least not until it might have been able to defeat the Royal Navy presence in the Med.

2. An assault on Leningrad was possible, but not desired (Hitler felt it would make Germany responsible for maintaining food supply into the city which would be too much of a drain on the war efforts resources) but not likely to succeed as manpower and materiel were stretched far too thin and inappropriately allocated. A plan was in place (Operation Nordlicht) but was pre-empted by a Soviet counteroffensive a couple weeks before it was scheduled to go into effect. Issues were further compounded by the fact that the encirclement of Leningrad was never fully realized, as the Germans refused to expose their lines by extending themselves too far north, and the Finns refused to extend their lines past the pre-winter war Finnish borders and did little to contribute to the siege directly. This resulted in a gap between the lines several miles wide that connected the city to Lake Ladoga, which allowed the Soviets to keep the city supplied and (to an extent) allow for some troop rotation via watercraft/ice road, meaning that the intended breaking of the city via starvation could not adequately be achieved.

3. France surrendered because a significant portion of its army was encircled and captured by the Germans, and the Germans were able to march into an undefended government and capture a significant portion of its civilian and military leadership, thus putting an end to organized military resistance. Surrender was the only option that would have avoided a mass loss of life on the part of the French. Despite the fact that 80% of the country was unoccupied, the majority of the French forces existed within the 20% that had been seized or were in the direct path of the German offensive.

4. No. There is however several series of documentaries that will cover that if you have 30+ hours to dedicate to it.

 Grey Templar wrote:


And Germany has a better delivery system for nuclear weapons than airplanes. They have ICBMs decades before anyone else.

IIRC the V-2 missiles could only be loaded with up to a single ton of explosive. All of the early nuclear devices I know off had a mass of 4,000kg or more.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Fair enough, but the V2 was just a precursor to true ICBMs.

A precursor, but only by years of development. It wasn't until the late 1950s that ICBMs were developed at all, and it was even longer before they were effective weapons. Germany isn't going to have 10+ years to work on building an ICBM because Germany will cease to exist in 1947 or so.

And really the only difference is how long it can fly.

Which is a huge engineering problem.

You're assuming that Germany makes no advances, yet the US has the same advances it only got because it was accelerated by looting German technology.

No, I'm assuming that both sides have the same technology that they had in 1945, before any looting of German technology happened. The US actually had the B-36 (and would have had it a bit earlier except for wartime changes of manufacturing priorities) and had mass production of nukes to arm it. Germany didn't have nukes, didn't have ICBMs, and didn't have anything capable of stopping the B-36.

First, the thread is a perfectly good topic and in no way a blog subject.

Secondly, I take it that the idea is to look at what might have happened if the actual historical scenario played out slightly differently than actually it did.

In this spirit, Paradigm's answer about the siege of Leningrad was a very good one, showing what went wrong and why, and how it might have been different.

To address point 1, it is unlikely that Operation Sealion could have succeeded. Hitler never expected to have to invade the UK. The German armed forces simply did not have the equipment and training necessary to mount a seaborne invasion.

It is remotely possible their first wave could by good luck have landed, consisting of infantry with light weapons and small stocks of supplies. Their job would have been to capture a nearby port to allow heavy equipment and supplies to be landed.

However once the invasion target was clear the RN would have been on the German naval forces like a pack of crazed wolves. Even if the RAF had been defeated, the Luftwaffe was not trained and equipped for anti-ship combat at that time. The follow-up wave would have been devastated at sea, leaving the infantry spearhead isolated and out of supply.

Anyway it is unlikely the Luftwaffe could have defeated the RAF. While the south-eastern fighter groups were under pressure by late August 1940, the Luftwaffe was also getting tited out. Reinforcements would have been brought down from the north British sectors if the situation became critical.

It was Paddy Griffith who ran the wargame of the Operation Sealion in 1974. He covers the whole topic in his excellent book "Sprawling Wargames".

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sprawling-Wargames-Multiplayer-Wargaming-Griffith/dp/1445202999/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1432840379&sr=8-1&keywords=sprawling+wargames

 Peregrine wrote:
Germany didn't have anything capable of stopping the B-36.

The new jet and rocket powered planes they were developing?

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

1. The Soviets were arming at the same time and reorganizing after the Purges/Finland.
2. You assume the German economy would have lasted that long. There are strong arguments that the German economy was running on borrowed time. Where the Japanese economy was running out of oil, the German economy was running out of money.

On 1 yes they were reorganising, just very slowly. Given the poor quality of training of all ranks were still receiving before Barbarossa I'm not sure that another year or even 2 would have strengthened the RKKD sufficiently to allow them to successfully defend against a much strengthened Wehrmacht.

Well they were able to turn it around in one year, while getting the holy crap kicked out of them at the same time.

On 2 the German economy lasted at least until 1945.

Once war started yes. There are strong arguments that the economy would not have lasted another year absent substantial conquests or scaling back their budget. In essence if they didn't go to war they were going to go Weimar again unless they pulled back heavily on their budgets and resulting economy. Is Hitler gong to be around if the economy goes into a tailspin?

They proved incapable of stopping B-17s.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Fair enough, but the V2 was just a precursor to true ICBMs.

A precursor, but only by years of development. It wasn't until the late 1950s that ICBMs were developed at all, and it was even longer before they were effective weapons. Germany isn't going to have 10+ years to work on building an ICBM because Germany will cease to exist in 1947 or so.

And really the only difference is how long it can fly.

Which is a huge engineering problem.

You're assuming that Germany makes no advances, yet the US has the same advances it only got because it was accelerated by looting German technology.

No, I'm assuming that both sides have the same technology that they had in 1945, before any looting of German technology happened. The US actually had the B-36 (and would have had it a bit earlier except for wartime changes of manufacturing priorities) and had mass production of nukes to arm it. Germany didn't have nukes, didn't have ICBMs, and didn't have anything capable of stopping the B-36.

And the fact that Germany was being squished from both sides in 45 doesn't affect their technological evolution? You're comparing a bombed-out crushed Germany to end-of-war US. I'm feeling rather confident that mass-produced ME262s would've been rather formidable enemies.

 sing your life wrote:
The new jet and rocket powered planes they were developing?

Produced in limited numbers, and suffer from serious limits. The rocket planes have awful endurance and limited ability to intercept anything that doesn't fly right to them, and the ME-262 can't fly high enough to catch a B-36. Even post-WWII jets had a hard time intercepting the B-36, and would actually lose a turning dogfight against one at high altitude. Interceptors capable of reliably stopping a B-36 weren't developed until years after WWII, and Germany doesn't have that much time.

 sing your life wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
Germany didn't have anything capable of stopping the B-36.

The new jet and rocket powered planes they were developing?

And the US was developing jets as well. If we keep extending eventually the US has stealth tech, drones, and MREs.

Never gonna happen.

1. Germany was bent on war. If they didn't go to war. if they take Western Europe they are still facing Britain in active war and a strengthening USSR, then the USA is the least of their worries.
2. That assumes they stop. They Nazi Party is not going to stop an invasion of the USSR. they might delay it a year or so, but absent someone wacking Hitler that doesn't happen.
3. If Germany doesn't invade the USSR (lets assume Hitler chokes on a Berliner), and Japan still attacks Pearl, and Germany doesn't declare war on the US then I'd envision
A. Japan gets the full faith and credit of the US military coming at it. They get curbstomped on like a cat at a pit bull convention.
B. Britain eventually negotiates a peace treaty with Germany or joins the USSR if the USSR ever attacks Germany (less likely if Hitler is gone-assuming someone sane is in charge).

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
I'm feeling rather confident that mass-produced ME262s would've been rather formidable enemies.

For B-17s, yes, or for lower-altitude aircraft sent to clean up whatever is left after the nuclear attack. Not for the B-36, which can ignore the ME-262 as it flies past at 5-10,000' higher than the ME-262 can reach.

 Frazzled wrote:

Well they were able to turn it around in one year, while getting the holy crap kicked out of them at the same time.

I think getting the crap kicked out of them was the main factor for this. Would peace have allowed the needed chances to actually be made?

 Frazzled wrote:

Once war started yes. There are strong arguments that the economy would not have lasted another year absent substantial conquests or scaling back their budget. In essence if they didn't go to war they were going to go Weimar again unless they pulled back heavily on their budgets and resulting economy. Is Hitler gong to be around if the economy goes into a tailspin?

Well they would have gotten Middle Eastern oil for one thing. In fairness I don't know much about the German economy during this period but I don't suppose that it would have been an insurmountable issue in a despotism that had just conquered half of Europe.

Don't forget that the ME262 was much heavier than it was supposed to be. It was originally designed as an interceptor, but Hitler had the great idea of converting it into a fighter bomber, a pure me262 might have been better.


Also, German production was increasing up until the end of 1945, Speer did an excellent job on getting the economy in order. Even with all the bombing.

 Peregrine wrote:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
I'm feeling rather confident that mass-produced ME262s would've been rather formidable enemies.

For B-17s, yes, or for lower-altitude aircraft sent to clean up whatever is left after the nuclear attack. Not for the B-36, which can ignore the ME-262 as it flies past at 5-10,000' higher than the ME-262 can reach.

Again, though, this is the ME262 that Nazi Germany produced while being smashed to death by the allies. If there's a gap of a few years where Nazi Germany controls Europe while the US gets its B36's up, why would Nazi Germany not be evolving too?

Query, does anyone know of any fiction discussing what would have happened had the Chinese stayed as Germany's ally (where in the real world the Axis realized Japan were stronger, and ditched the Chinese). The whole matter, in my understanding, was down to Hitler's distrust of Communism, rather than one held by everyone in either country's governments. German led peace efforts were attempted early in the Sino-Japanese war, but never came to anything after the Chinese lost Nanking (afterwards the Germans just started backing warlords before stopping aid altogether IIRC).



Similarly the involvement of pro-independence fighters from India is an interesting area too. I'm talking about all the Sikh units that were part of the German army in WWII as they saw siding with them as a way to get rid of the British (who I can't say I've ever see turn up in any sort of fiction I know of, and hardly documentaries either). Not that they had a fools hope of ever gaining independence this way, but I'd assume that the experience shaped the movement to an extent (if the survivors weren't rounded up and shot by the British afterwards that is).



Definately subjects for alt-history wargames such as Dust I suppose ...if they took things perhaps a bit more seriously that is. If its not Europe or Japan then those theaters tend to be a bit overlooked I feel.

 welshhoppo wrote:
Don't forget that the ME262 was much heavier than it was supposed to be. It was originally designed as an interceptor, but Hitler had the great idea of converting it into a fighter bomber, a pure me262 might have been better.

But why would Germany have made that change? This is the problem with hypothetical scenarios like this, you have to assume that Germany does a bunch of things differently and somehow always makes the right decisions to give them even a chance of winning, while the US doesn't do anything to improve their situation. If we have pure-interceptor ME-262s then why don't we have B-36s with better performance to match them?

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
If there's a gap of a few years where Nazi Germany controls Europe while the US gets its B36's up, why would Nazi Germany not be evolving too?

The point is there isn't going to be a gap of a few years. By the time Germany finishes securing Europe it's too late. Even in the actual timeline the B-36 was ready for mass production before the end of the war, and that's after it was dropped in priority as its primary role (bombing Germany directly from the US after the UK is conquered) was obviously unnecessary. If Germany seriously threatens to take the UK and eliminate the B-17 bases then the B-36 is almost certainly put into production earlier as a replacement. The limiting factor is the nukes to arm those B-36s, and that's not going to be a very significant gap.

Damn I knew I hadn't imagined this thread. There's a guy who makes some alternative history tanks (...tangentially related to this thread in that they fill in gaps, such as a Stug style Sherman or Crusader, each of which has a background to explain how they came to be)


Israeli Sherman/Stug


Panther APC

 Sir Arun wrote:
How strong was the French army in 1940? Didnt they have at least more than a million men? I still can't wrap my head around the fact that a nation with a population 80% that of Germany can be conquered within a month just because the upper echelons agree to a surrender. You'd think the army would split into countless guerillas spread all over France, harassing the occupying German soldiers and doing everything possible to make casualties mount.

It wasn't really a war that your average Frenchman wanted to get into. The war was started to help Poland, and nobody did anything to actually help Poland.

Ultimately, it's not just a matter of"the upper echelons wanted to surrender", it was that by the point at which they did surrender, they really didn't have a choice, the war was over and continued resistance was simply going to result in more dead and not a different outcome. The French upper echelons were incompetent, disconnected, and fighting amongst themselves (at least in the political sphere).


By all rights, in a straight up fight, the French Army should have won out. They had more troops, more tanks, better tanks, more aircraft, etc. The problem was that these were employed in a manner that was more suitable to 1916, and even that not particularly well.

The French basically went into the war expecting a repeat of WW1. They wanted to sit behind their defenses, build up forces and materiel, and launch a massive all out attack in 1941 (yes, two years after the war started) and blow the Germans away with overwhelming force. What they should have done was simply attack right from the outset and by all accounts, even according to the Germans, the French likely would have been in Berlin within a month. Instead they largely sat there for 9 months doing *nothing* with all of their advantages. This allowed the Germans to basically sit back, look at what was going on, move all their forces back from Poland and into position, work out ways around all the French defenses, and attacked when, where, and how they wanted to.

If you pit a 240lb heavyweight boxer against a 160lb boxer, the 240lb looks like he's got all the advantages, but when the 240lb guy is just standing there doing nothing, and has forgotten his most important training from his previous fights, and is distracted with problems in his head to boot, the 160lb guy who is totally focused on his goal, and who just learned a bunch of new stuff and remembers his old lessons, is going to take advantage of that and do something decisive. And that's pretty much exactly what happened.

So when the Germans did attack, they already generally knew the French battle plan, and had worked up a counterplan. The French high command was insanely incompetent (e.g. delivering orders by runner every few hours instead of by wireless as needed). So when they reacted to the initial German invasion, they played right into the German plan, and when lower echelon French officers tried to point out that something else was going on, the high command simply didn't believe it until it was too late. They'd try to organize defensive positions after the Germans had already passed them.

Meanwhile, because of the unpopularity of the war, and the 9 months of doing *nothing*, morale and discipline amongst the French army collapsed in many places. Many were lulled into thinking that a full blown shooting war would never take place.

As for any sort of guerilla war, France is not a huge place where you can disappear into massive forests for months nor hide in gigantic urban centers. Some guerilla warfare did go on, the French Resistance is famous as a result, but they simply could not operate the way partisans did on the Eastern Front. Too little space, friends and family were too close, and quite frankly the Germans were not terrible at finding ways to make such actions very painful.

That said, for six weeks of conflict, nearly 90,000 French soldiers died, a rate comparable to that of the worst of WW1, they didn't all just immediately surrender.


EDIT: Here's "The World at War" episode on the fall of France, probably the most illustrative documentary on the subject.