God, there is so much wrong in this post that I don't know where to begin. It's good to see someone other than Domen and red_elk arguing though.
I'm rather split ... when he turned on the Soviets, or when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor bringing the U.S. openly into the war against him (Roosevelt tried and tried but could not get the xenophobic conservatives to recognize WW2 as a fight worth getting in, until Pearl Harbor). The combination of the two are what provided a united front against Germany.
If the united front against Germany is what you think turned the war against Germany (it isn't) then you should count Yalta as the turning point. It was only afterwards that Stalin stopped threatening a separate peace with Germany.
The Brits did not rule their own skies, despite a large and dedicated fighter force; their fighters could not stop the V-2 rockets.
Say what? The Germans didn't rule their own skies eitherYou're also aware of the fact that the V-2 rockets were not developed until 1944, right? And that the Battle of Britain was long over by then?
The Germans had technological advantages with the rockets, and if they had not had such a strong united front pounding them (especially with U.S. superbombers), they could have reigned supreme as the only power with jet fighters and bombers (if it hadn't been for the massive, broad bombing campaign which only made headway with U.S. involvement).
The only problem being that the V-2 rockets were impossible to aim, and therefore utterly useless in combat. The V-2's were intended as a terror weapon, to frighten the British into surrendering, but the fact is that even a thousand V-2s, all of them hitting London in the same night, wouldn't really have done any damage to the British war machine. As both Axis and Allied bombing raids showed, large-scale bombing of civilian populations - which is all that the V-2 were good for - actually increased a nation's resolve to resist, so the terror bombings of London made the British
more likely to resist Germany, not less likely.
As for jet aircraft, again, Germany only developed these very late in the war, and while they were infinitely more useful than the rocket program - or programs, since the V-1 and V-2 were actually produced by different teams using different technology, a prime example of the inefficiency and misplaced priorities of the Nazi regime - and didn't have the factory facilities to mass-produce them without significant re-tooling. The British were also less than a year behind them with this technology, with the first British jets being developed in 1946, after money had been diverted
away from them after the war had ended.
So jet aircraft would not have been that significant an advantage for Germany, particularly since Britain's aircraft, while inferior to these new German models, could still be produced in enough quantities that they could shoot down every jet aircraft without seriously threatening British aircraft production. Then there's the simple fact that the Germans didn't have enough fuel for their non-jet aircraft. Where would they get the necessary avgas for use in jets, notoriously fuel-intensive technology?
Assuming that the Germans somehow get their hands on the necessary avgas
and re-tool their factories to mass-produce jet aircraft, what difference would that make in forcing Britain out of the war, since even the late-model jet bombers - which were only a design, never actually developed - were only tactical bombers, not strategic heavy bombers, which is what would be needed to destroy the industry of the British Isles? All they could have done would be to repeat the Blitz, which, as you may have noticed, didn't even slow down the British war preparations.
The British empire was in collapse
Really? They didn't even lose India, which had a sizable - and
pro-Japanese - independence movement before the war started. Australia and New Zealand became more loyal, and British acquiescence to certain Japanese demands in 1940 - such as unilaterally cutting off their supplies to the Nationalist Chinese and allowing the Japanese to occupy Northern Indo-China - ended in late-1940, a year before US entry into the war against Japan, and months before Soviet entry. This is because Britain, correctly, recognised that they no longer needed to fear Germany as a threat to British independence, and so could risk a war with Japan in the Pacific, even without US involvement - Churchill had the plans drawn up for such a contingency, though they were heavily reliant upon Singapore, which would have proven problematic in the event of war with Japan without US assistance, seeing as how the fortress was proven to be useless in the actual war.
If the UK did fear Japanese encroachment, there was nothing to stop them from sacrificing the Dutch East Indies and giving in to Japanese territorial demands while they were busy with the Germans in Europe, as they did in 1940. Japan was never a serious threat to the British Empire in the East. They were really only a threat to Thailand and the Dutch, and only to the latter because the Netherlands were occupied by Germany, somewhat limiting their capacity to counter-attack.
with its global holdings falling much to their disbelief,
Only Singapore's fall surprised the British, and that was their own stupid fault. For an thalassocracy, Britain had a very incorrect view of the value of an offshore fortress like Singapore. It was useless without possession of at least the Kra Peninsula or Sumatra, preferably both.
especially in the Pacific and Indian oceans to the Japanese.
Name
one British possession in the Indian Ocean lost to the Japanese. Don't say Singapore, since in
isn't in the Indian Ocean (nor the Pacific, for that matter, though that's immaterial to this discussion). As for Burma and Malaya, they were overrun through the overland route by the IJA, not by the IJN.
Pan-Atlantic shipping from the U.S. was becoming more and more limited and endangered by Nazi submarines.
No it wasn't. The U-boat threat has been vastly exaggerated by later-generations (though, to be fair, it was also exaggerated at the time). The German U-boats were counteracted effectively by the convoy system, and the wolfpacki method of coordinated U-boat attacks, while effective in sinking tonnage, allowed for far less coverage in the Atlantic, actually allowing more ships to slip through German lines. In order to sink more raw tonnage, the Germans would need to produce more U-boats, and they didn't have the capacity to do so without forsaking some other area of production. And here is where we get to the real problem with Germany's war effort.
Even after Speer's impressive streamlining and rationalisation of Germany's war production in the latter half of the war, Germany still didn't have the production capacity to produce all the
transport vehicles it required, let alone weaponry. Their troops could never keep up with the armoured advance, even those on horseback in the Eastern Front, and Rommel could barely feed his troops in North Africa. Then there's the problem of fueling all those tanks, planes and submarines. Even during the Battle for France, German columns ran out of fuel and had to wait for re-fueling trucks to catch up before they could continue their advance. This problem plagued the Germans throughout the war: Heinz Guderian's advanced scout claimed to be within sight of the Kremlin when their tanks ran out of fuel during Operation: Barbarossa.
The Germans didn't have the raw materials to construct everything they needed, because every U-boat that was constructed meant some tanks weren't, and for every jet they built towards the end of the war they couldn't build small-arms, etc.. Even if Germany could have built all the U-boats they needed to strangle off British supplies, they'd have to do so at the expense of something else. That was the real death-knell of Germany: supply and production. And it was a problem that the British, despite their desperation in the winter of 1940, didn't have. They had all the raw materials they could ever need, and their manufacturing base was in Northern Britain, where the German's best bombers were never able to reach. Even if they never invaded Europe, they could simply defeat the Germans in a war of attrition. Then they could turn their attention to Japan, which was bogged down in China, let alone if they'd really turned their eyes towards India. The British could have won WWII on their own. It simply would have taken them longer. The Soviet and US entries into the war merely sped it up.
