How would World War II Have Gone had The US and Britain not helped the Russians at all?

[paranoid marvin]

I think we are getting away from the original post... .
But Operation Sea Lion was planned for the Summer/Autumn of 1940. And Barbarossa was almost a year later in the Spring/Summer of 41. Hitler may have turned to Barbarossa so early because Sea Lion didn't happen. If there hadn't been a Battle of Britain the Luftwaffe would have been far stronger in 41, so who knows what affect that might have had.
I don't think the German military were ever truly set up for Sea Lion. The 1974 Operation Sea Lion war game showed how badly it would have gone [and just look at the "cast" list!].

If there hadn't been a Battle of Britain, not only would the Luftwaffe been in better shape, they would have been able to attack much earlier. Even 3 or 4 months could have made the difference between success and failure.

But back on topic, there was never any realistic chance of the US and Britain NOT supplying the Russians. They desperately needed to keep that front open and as many German troops occupied as possible for as long as possible. If Hitler had defeated the main threat in Russia and captured the oilfields, he could have strengthened his defences in West Europe making D-Day impossible. Remember it was touch and go as it was, and that was with the majority of German forces tied up in Russia, with nearly all the airforce and panzer divisions. Without air superiority over the landing beaches, it would have been a much,much more difficult task. In fact they probably wouldn't even have attempted it, instead going up through Italy.

 

[BAYLOR]

Yes, he knew that he needed to get Hitler beat before he consolidated his forces in Europe and made it an impregnable fortress. On the flip side, there was always the danger that Russia would defeat Germany and become the dominant force; either was not a good option.

I think US would have eventually declared war on the US but I think that without a German declaration of war , Roosevelt would have had a tough time persuading them to declare war on Germany when Japan had just bombed Pearl Harbour.

In World War II we have Stalin and Hitler , two of the most evil dictators in all of history and , we allied ourselves with the former to bring abut the defeat of the latter. In the end , Stalin got what he wanted , he got keep his job and he got keep eastern Europe as a buffer zone.

Yes Ultimately , Roosevelt and his military commanders would have found some pretext a declaration of war on Germany going. For Uboats were already targeting US ships , so that might have been enough.

 

[svalbard]

The development of the Nuclear Bomb makes it all moot. That ends the war in Europe regardless of the helping Russia or not.

 

[paranoid marvin]

The development of the Nuclear Bomb makes it all moot. That ends the war in Europe regardless of the helping Russia or not.

It depends. If Britain has been occupied by Germany then there's no way that the US can deliver their payload of bombs. And even if they can launch their attack from the UK, would they? For one they have very few of the weapons, for another they have to make it from the UK to Germany in slow bombers to deliver them. Imagine one of their planes carrying a nuke gets brought down over Europe, and suddenly Hitler has all the technology sitting in his lap?

On the other hand Hitler does have the capability to launch attacks over large distances with his V2. If the war in Russia is going well, he is more capable of defending his manufacturing and weapons development in the West from UK/US air attack. It's quite possible that Germany has the capability to attack American cities with nuclear or chemical weapons before the US develops the capability to deliver their atom bombs to German cities.

But I agree that if D-Day has been successful, then Germany falls apart with atom bombs dropped on German troops, however well the Eastern front is faring.

 

[paranoid marvin]

In World War II we have Stalin and Hitler , two of the most evil dictators in all of history and , we allied ourselves with the former to bring abut the defeat of the latter. In the end , Stalin got what he wanted , he got keep his job and he got keep eastern Europe as a buffer zone.

Yes Ultimately , Roosevelt and his military commanders would have found some pretext a declaration of war on Germany going. For Uboats were already targeting US ships , so that might have been enough.

Germany had been sinking US ships and killing US citizens for more than 2 years. I'm not sure what it was going to take for the US to declare war on Germany. And after Pearl Harbour, it would have been even tougher to push through a declaration of war on Germany. It does surprise me that considering the pact between Germany and Japan that the USA didn't use the declaration of war on Japan to include the rest of the Axis powers at the same time. For sure Roosevelt wanted it.

 

[BAYLOR]

It does surprise me that considering the pact between Germany and Japan that the USA didn't use the declaration of war on Japan to include the rest of the Axis powers at the same time. For sure Roosevelt wanted it.

Very curious indeed.

 

[BAYLOR]

The development of the Nuclear Bomb makes it all moot. That ends the war in Europe regardless of the helping Russia or not.

A number of things put the damper on their bomb program . Armaments Minter Albert Speer determined that Germany didn't; have the necessary resources for large scale Atomic bomb project. They couldn't build the Large Cyclotrons which were necessary . Also Nazi Ideology caused many of their best scientists to emigrate to the US and other places. And there is also the notion that Werner Heisenberg an other did everything in his power to scuttle The German bomb program because they didn't want the Nazi regime to have access to such weapons.

 

[paranoid marvin]

A number of things put the damper on their bomb program . Armaments Minter Albert Speer determined that Germany didn't; have the necessary resources for large scale Atomic bomb project. They couldn't build the Large Cyclotrons which were necessary . Also Nazi Ideology caused many of their best scientists to emigrate to the US and other places. And there is also the notion that Werner Heisenberg an other did everything in his power to scuttle The German bomb program because they didn't want the Nazi regime to have access to such weapons.

I agree that (thankfully) the Germans were their own worst enemy when it came to development of the atom bomb. Which is at odds with Hitler's love of overly-complicated weapons that looked great on paper but were too intricate for their own good. And good that others were willing to risk their lives to defy Nazi ideology.

But the issue with these weapons was much more about the delivery than the weapon itself. A rocket packed with biological/chemical weapons can be far more damaging casualty-wise than the atom bombs of their day. If an improved V2 had been targeted at New York, there's very little the Americans could have done to stop it. a lot more risky to send a B-29 from UK to drop it's payload on Germany.

 

[Ambrose]

Germany declared war on the US in support of its ally Japan.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Germany declared war on the US in support of its ally Japan.

This is true, but they didn't need to. There was absolutely no benefit in doing so, and it was exactly what Roosevelt and Churchill had been hoping for for the last 2 years.

 

[reiver33]

Hitler’s personality (I’m basing this on the biographies of Guderian, Manstein and Gehlen) was that of a procrastinator with a weak ego. He hated reacting to events and would dither rather than admit the enemy had the initiative.

Declaring war on America was his way of reasserting control on the strategic situation, given that the attack on Moscow had stalled. It wasn’t a treaty obligation, given that Japan didn’t reciprocate by declaring war on the USSR, it was a strategic blunder of mammoth proportions, but indicative of the ‘make it up as we go along’ approach that bedevilled the ‘higher’ levels of German leadership.

 

[Bren G]

A better question is : What if aliens decide to colonize earth during WWII? Harry Turtledove has the answer!

 

[Aquilonian]

As regards the actual outcome of the war, all three of the Allies (USSR, USA and British Empire) were needed to make this possible. USA supplied the most equipment and money, USSR gave by far the most lives, and Britain held out longest and provided the essential launch point without which it would have been totally unfeasible for the USA to have invaded Europe.

However as regards gaining some sort of victory over Nazi Germany, there's a crucial difference between the USSR and the other Allies, which is that the USSR was fighting an existential conflict. Hitler saw the Russians as sub-humans who mostly needed to be exterminated in order to clear the land for German settlement. By contrast, he admired the British for their success in controlling a vast Empire, and much of the British Elite including the Royals admired him and wanted to make peace. As for the USA, isolationism was a very strong force in US politics at that time, large ethnic groups in USA were hostile to Britain, and important elements of the American Elite were pro-Nazi either ideologically or just because they did good business with them.

So the Russians, unlike their Allies, HAD to fight, question is, what policy changes would have been needed for them to win without outside help? About halfway through the war Stalin reversed his previous policy of persecuting the Orthodox Church, because he needed their support to motivate the people. I think he'd have had to go much further down that road, making it a holy war for the Russian nation, fully reinventing himself as a Christian Tsar and abandoning Marxism or at least altering it out of all recognition. In our time Putin has pretty much taken on the mantle of the Christian Tsars and the CCP has abandoned Communism in all but name, so it's all doable.

The resulting Russian push-back would have been even fiercer and more ruthless than it was in our timeline, a war of extermination against the Germans, leaving Germany largely devastated and depopulated with any survivors retreating to the mountains in the south. In occupied Europe the Communist elements in the Resistance movements would have prevailed so post-war the whole of mainland Europe would have been Communist along Stalinist lines, and would have taken much longer to recover from the war.

 

[BAYLOR]

As regards the actual outcome of the war, all three of the Allies (USSR, USA and British Empire) were needed to make this possible. USA supplied the most equipment and money, USSR gave by far the most lives, and Britain held out longest and provided the essential launch point without which it would have been totally unfeasible for the USA to have invaded Europe.

However as regards gaining some sort of victory over Nazi Germany, there's a crucial difference between the USSR and the other Allies, which is that the USSR was fighting an existential conflict. Hitler saw the Russians as sub-humans who mostly needed to be exterminated in order to clear the land for German settlement. By contrast, he admired the British for their success in controlling a vast Empire, and much of the British Elite including the Royals admired him and wanted to make peace. As for the USA, isolationism was a very strong force in US politics at that time, large ethnic groups in USA were hostile to Britain, and important elements of the American Elite were pro-Nazi either ideologically or just because they did good business with them.

So the Russians, unlike their Allies, HAD to fight, question is, what policy changes would have been needed for them to win without outside help? About halfway through the war Stalin reversed his previous policy of persecuting the Orthodox Church, because he needed their support to motivate the people. I think he'd have had to go much further down that road, making it a holy war for the Russian nation, fully reinventing himself as a Christian Tsar and abandoning Marxism or at least altering it out of all recognition. In our time Putin has pretty much taken on the mantle of the Christian Tsars and the CCP has abandoned Communism in all but name, so it's all doable.

The resulting Russian push-back would have been even fiercer and more ruthless than it was in our timeline, a war of extermination against the Germans, leaving Germany largely devastated and depopulated with any survivors retreating to the mountains in the south. In occupied Europe the Communist elements in the Resistance movements would have prevailed so post-war the whole of mainland Europe would have been Communist along Stalinist lines, and would have taken much longer to recover from the war.

In that scenario The allies might bring Operation Unthinkable into play .

 

[Aquilonian]

Operation Unthinkable was a mad fantasy of Patton's. Certainly the British Army (which like all the WW2 armies was almost all conscripts) would not have stood for invading the Soviet Union. Some of the generals maybe, but the ordinary soldiers would have balked at fighting their way into the USSR.

British people of my parents' generation, who were adults during WW2, had massive respect for the Soviet Union and especially for the Red Army, who had always been shown in the media as our glorious Allies from summer 1941 onwards. Communism was much more widespread in the UK at that time, it was not unknown for the wife of a Conservative cabinet minister to be a CP member. Even 20 years later when Yuri Gagarin visited the UK he received a hero's welcome- my mother took me into Manchester to see him go through the streets in an open-topped bus cheered by huge crowds. As a little boy, fascinated by space flight as we all were in the 60s, I was just as interested in the Soviet cosmonauts as in the American astronauts.

 

[BAYLOR]

Operation Unthinkable was a mad fantasy of Patton's. Certainly the British Army (which like all the WW2 armies was almost all conscripts) would not have stood for invading the Soviet Union. Some of the generals maybe, but the ordinary soldiers would have balked at fighting their way into the USSR.

British people of my parents' generation, who were adults during WW2, had massive respect for the Soviet Union and especially for the Red Army, who had always been shown in the media as our glorious Allies from summer 1941 onwards. Communism was much more widespread in the UK at that time, it was not unknown for the wife of a Conservative cabinet minister to be a CP member. Even 20 years later when Yuri Gagarin visited the UK he received a hero's welcome- my mother took me into Manchester to see him go through the streets in an open-topped bus cheered by huge crowds. As a little boy, fascinated by space flight as we all were in the 60s, I was just as interested in the Soviet cosmonauts as in the American astronauts.

The Russian soldiers had no choice but to fight. Stalin and his generals special units of solders in the Russian army whose job was to shoot anyone who wouldn't fight or tried to retreat.

Operation unthinkable would have been a bloodbath for both sides had the allies launched it .The Russians would have ultimately lost but , the end result wouldn't have been with the cost in lives.

 

[Aquilonian]

The Russians would have ultimately lost

What's your reasoning behind that assertion, BAYLOR?

 

[BAYLOR]

What's your reasoning behind that assertion, BAYLOR?

We had the B29 Bomber , so their factories and installationS , oil fields and power-grids wouldn't be out of our reach given we'd also have airbases bases in Irag . We also have the atomic bomb though initially we don't have a enough of them , by the end of 1945 we would . The combined US and Royal Navy could have effectively destroyed whatever naval assets the Russian s possessed and blockaded their ports. O nthe battle field the Pershing Tank was coming online by 1945 and those were more that a match for the T34 tank and the more powerful Stalin Tanks . In the air US and Uk fighter planes were slightly better then anything the Russian possessed. And even all that ,It end up being Pyrrhic victory for the US and UK with a massive loss of lives on both sides. It wouldn't have been worth it.

 

[Aquilonian]

Fair enough if the war had been fought by robots not human beings. But the moral and motivation is a crucial factor. The men of the British armed forces would have had no interest in defeating Russia and would have told their officers where to get off. Don't forget that we (the Brits that is) elected a Socialist government towards the end of WW2, with about the biggest majority of any British election win in modern times. And the Russians are intensely patriotic. In how many countries would you hear people singing the national anthem in the street, just for the hell of it, not as part of a demonstration or rally? I've seen that in Russia. Over a million people died in the siege of Leningrad but they didn't give in.

 

[BAYLOR]

Fair enough if the war had been fought by robots not human beings. But the moral and motivation is a crucial factor. The men of the British armed forces would have had no interest in defeating Russia and would have told their officers where to get off. Don't forget that we (the Brits that is) elected a Socialist government towards the end of WW2, with about the biggest majority of any British election win in modern times. And the Russians are intensely patriotic. In how many countries would you hear people singing the national anthem in the street, just for the hell of it, not as part of a demonstration or rally? I've seen that in Russia. Over a million people died in the siege of Leningrad but they didn't give in.

Maybe the Russian were supremely Patriotic but not to their supreme leader . Stalin had units of solders set up to shoot any soldiers that either tried to retreat or wouldn't fight. And people in Leningrad who so heroically resisted and suffered died, Stalin ruthlessly punished their leaders after the war, It referred to as the Leningrad affair. The Russian in public may have saluted and praised him in public but in reality hated ,feared and lather him . These same patriotic Russian would been all to happy see Stalin die because he was a devil.