Two WW2 questions

ugabug

Chieftain
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May 2, 2009
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1. Could the Soviet Union have defeated Germany without the allies?

2. Could the allies have defeated Germany without the Soviet Union?

I always see people either saying that without the US Europe would be speaking German now and the usual response to that seems to be that it was the Soviet Union who did all the work and that the USSR would of won with or without the allies helping. So what is everyone opinion on this?
 
In terms of raw production, manpower, money and territory, yes to both questions, but timing is important on all sides. Without a time frame of when the fighting is occurring and why it is impossible to say.
 
no to both; in "forseable future" at least

urss might've collapsed in '41, or would be much worse, and '41 might see the germans in moscow if they'd brought everything that was stationary in various sides of Europe.

us/uk landing on beaches defended by 100+ divisions... good luck with ww2 technology...
 
No to both.

Without the threat from an allied invasion, Germany could have put all it's resources towards Operation Barbarossa. Which would mean they probably would have actually made it to Moscow to dismantle the Soviet State.

And without the Soviets causing the Germans to put a good portion of their resources to the Eastern Front, an allied landing would probably have been impossible.
 
1. Yes
2. No

Defeating a huge landmass is practically impossible. Not the first time Russia was attacked by an overwhelming force. See Napoleon. He got Moscow and it didnt help him at all. Hitler didnt even managed that. You just cant control a country with a hostile population, a bad road network and bad weather conditions.

And Europe was already defeated in 1941. USA would have no reason to invade Eurasia, wouldnt be successful anyway. Or very very lossy.
 
The Germans would have invaded the USSR at least a year earlier, and in May which was their original plan. No Battle of Britian or occupying troops in Western Europe and the Balkans. They would have rolled the Soviets. Apart from the second front thing the western allies gave an enormous amount of aid to the Red Army. Radios, jeeps, food, natural resources etc.

With the Luftwaffe and the panzer armys in the west- with its proximity to Germany. any allied landing would be crushed.

So no and no.
 
I dislike what-if scenarios, but I can say that the statistics seem to incline towards "no" for both questions.

But it depends on what you mean by #2. Are we talking Germany in 1 September 1939? Or pre-Munich Agreement Germany, with a Czechslovakia that has the determination of WWI Belgium and a France that's willing to go on the offensive? I question how long Germany would've lasted in 1938 without Czech industry, the Allies quickly occupying the Rhineland and a two-front war. Though on the other hand, this is rather revealing of the problem with what-if scenarios: if you want to embolden France and Britain in 1938 to do these things, then I have to ask how these altered factors came about, and then you have the problem of this counter-factual being an unrecognizable universe.
 
There is possibly a yes to both but it really depends on the circumstances that the fighting would occur.

Could you please be more specific with when these wars would take place and how it the circumstances were different during WWII.
 
As others have said, it really depends on the timing.

The western Allies France and Britain could definitely have won in 1939 if they had immediately and audaciously attacked the almost undefended und incomplete Westwall while the Wehrmacht was still occupied in Poland.
From 1941 or so, with France, Scandinavia and the Balkans occupied - no way w/o the Soviet Union in the war. I don't see an invasion in Normandy or Sicily happening against a full-strength Wehrmacht.

As for Soviet Union alone - they were strong enough to win alone, but I don't see them winning if they had allowed themselves to be surprised as actually happened in Barbarossa, but had no Lend-Lease help and an undistracted Wehrmacht to face. I believe an earlier attack in Barbarossa, with full forces undepleted by the Balkans and North Africa, might very well have taken Moscow - and I don't see the Soviet winter counter-offensive of 1941 succeeding w/o that railway hub, with German troops holding the city instead of freezing in the open.

The oft-cited comparison with Napoleon is flawed: no railways in his time, so his Grande Armee couldn't be supplied under any circumstances when Russia declined to surrender and avoided open battle.

A Wehrmacht holding Moscow in 1942, needing only minimal occupation forces in the West, and concentrating their offensive on the Kaukasus oilfields might very well have forced a Soviet surrender. Whether they could have held the huge country indefinitely with the crazy Nazi terror tactics, turning every hand against them, is another question entirely, though.
 
Sorry i wasn't more clear.:blush: The timeline for the Allies would be after the fall of France and Hitler decides he would rather have a secured Western Front before ever attacking the Soviet Union. And Stalin for whatever reason isn't going to attack Germany. Pearl Harbor will still happen and the US will still join the war as it historically did. So in this type of scenario do you think there is any chance of the Allies wining?


For the Soviet Union scenario the UK and Germany sign a peace treaty after the fall of France in which Germany still occupies most of France. And when Pearl Harbor happens Germany doesn't go to war with the US however the US will still have sent the Lend-Lease shipment to the Soviet Union. Now in this type of scenrio who will win the Soviet Union or Germany?
 
Sorry i wasn't more clear.:blush: The timeline for the Allies would be after the fall of France and Hitler decides he would rather have a secured Western Front before ever attacking the Soviet Union. And Stalin for whatever reason isn't going to attack Germany. Pearl Harbor will still happen and the US will still join the war as it historically did. So in this type of scenario do you think there is any chance of the Allies wining?

If the U.S. is involved, they win because of nuclear weapons.

For the Soviet Union scenario the UK and Germany sign a peace treaty after the fall of France in which Germany still occupies most of France. And when Pearl Harbor happens Germany doesn't go to war with the US however the US will still have sent the Lend-Lease shipment to the Soviet Union. Now in this type of scenrio who will win the Soviet Union or Germany?

Soviet Union would probably still win (If you can call what they'd have left of a country a victory) simply because Germany's goals were nearly impossible. If Germany were willing to modify its goals and simply set up some sort of new government against Stalin instead of trying to occupy, I guess they could then be called the "winner".
 
If you take any of the three main Allies out of the equation, the situation gets pretty grim. How grim is speculative, but we can be sure that none of the allies were terribly dispensable.
 
I think the idea of Britain going Napoleonic Wars Redux on Germany is interesting. Whether or not the "no USSR" hypothetical means the USSR stays out of the war entirely, or the USSR is not fighting Germany (meaning it could have already been conquered???) makes a huge difference. For the former, I think Britain could have starved Germany out. The latter is harder to say. United States is still an awesome force to behold, but much, much farther from Germany.
 
Sorry i wasn't more clear.:blush: The timeline for the Allies would be after the fall of France and Hitler decides he would rather have a secured Western Front before ever attacking the Soviet Union. And Stalin for whatever reason isn't going to attack Germany. Pearl Harbor will still happen and the US will still join the war as it historically did. So in this type of scenario do you think there is any chance of the Allies wining?


For the Soviet Union scenario the UK and Germany sign a peace treaty after the fall of France in which Germany still occupies most of France. And when Pearl Harbor happens Germany doesn't go to war with the US however the US will still have sent the Lend-Lease shipment to the Soviet Union. Now in this type of scenrio who will win the Soviet Union or Germany?

1. The Soviet Union has better reserves of resources and manpower than the Germans, so in a war of attrition the Soviets would win. There is a very strong possibility that the Germans would be able to overwhelm the Soviet Union before it can bring its resources to bear.

2. With France's fall the Allies would have no ability to invade Europe. On the North Africa Front Rommel would have had the Resources he needed to to defeat the allies because they were not in use anywhere else. And Africa would be the Germans. The Best the Allies could do at this pint would be a blockade but it probalby would not cause Hitler to lose the war or anything

Edit: Fixed Order
 
2. Could the allies have defeated Germany without the Soviet Union?

I shall answer this with one two-word phrase: "Manhattan Project".

In more detail: The Third Reich might be able to guard continental Europe from conventional invasion for a good long time, but it would neither be able to take the UK out of the war nor meaningfully challenge Allied naval superiority. Allied air forces would also be increasingly superior. As the war drags on with no new conquests, the German economy keeps doing worse. After 1945, the Allies have nukes.
 
1. I don't know if, left alone and not stressed, the germans wouldn't have nukes pretty fast too; or even faster than the allies. Their project was stalled, but without that much drain on their resources...

2. without luftwaffe screwed in russia and with russian fuel... air superiority, I really doubt. More then nukes.

German fighters were clearly the best in WW2 and the mustang had an easy job without many german fighters, but with many, I doubt it. Was a nice plane, but still, with that range, a fighter has to sacrifice stuff in order to get that autonomy.
 
1. I don't know if, left alone and not stressed, the germans wouldn't have nukes pretty fast too; or even faster than the allies. Their project was stalled, but without that much drain on their resources...

No, they would not. Their project was going nowhere fast. They did not really have adequate theorists available to work on it, nor did they have the spare economic capacity to pursue anything on the Manhattan Project scale (faced with a practical problem that might have more than one approach? Build more labs and try everything you can think of at once!)

Left to their own devices, sure, eventually they'd have a working nuclear bomb too. Some time in the early 1950s, probably. Except that their economy would have collapsed long before then (it really was that rotten).

2. without luftwaffe screwed in russia and with russian fuel... air superiority, I really doubt. More then nukes.

You do not seem to take into account the ludicrously overwhelming economic/industrial superiority of the western Allies. WW2 was very, very far from being an even fight.
 
Yes to both questions. Britain alone could have defeated Germany - as Cheezy said, they'd simply starve them out - let alone with US help, and Russia was much stronger than Nazi Germany. Its economy also wasn't crumbling, unlike Germany's.

As other people have already said though, the main question is one of timing. Germany damn near defeated Russia simply because of Russia's incredibly piss-poor defensive efforts in the months following Barbarossa, until Zhukov and others began to get their act together. If Germany hadn't made some of its rather large mistakes in the Eastern Front, they may actually have pulled out a victory there, though it's doubtful.

There's also the question of how the Allies would go about invading Continental Europe without Soviet help. Presumably through North Africa, but a Germany without a Soviet threat to its East may well have flooded troops into French North Africa to forestall such a move. Despite common belief, Erwin Rommel could never have conquered Egypt no matter how many troops and supplies he was given, because El Alamein was impassable. Theoretically that hurdle could be avoided by landing Axis troops in Vichy-controlled Lebanon and Syria, but it is doubtful they could do it quickly enough to forestall British efforts to seize those territories when they became hostile. Egypt wasn't falling, and without it the Germans couldn't defeat Britain, let alone Britain and the US.

In this situation, Germany would likely eventually collapse on its own within a few years. It's economy was rotten to the core. It's a little-known fact that Austria was annexed in 1938 for primarily economic reasons, rather than the racial and ideological ones the Germans claimed. Germany was desperate for iron ore and other resources which Austria possessed, and couldn't afford to pay for them through peaceful trade.

A more interesting counter-factual is what would happen if the USSR joined the Axis, as once seemed likely? As a willing and equal partner, not merely to buy time to prepare itself for war? That is the only realistic situation in which Hitler would not still keep numerous forces along the Soviet frontier to forestall an invasion, even if Operation: Barbarossa never went head. Leaving the German-Soviet frontier undefended would be an invitation for a preemptive strike by Stalin, who had to know that he would be on Germany's hit-list eventually. In this case, the thriving German-Russia trade may actually have allowed Nazi Germany to survive for many more years, quite possibly until Hitler's death and a softening of its policies. Germany my potentially have reformed over time rather than collapsed, much as China is doing now. It's an interesting thought.

To forestall this nonsense about Germany developing nuclear weapons, I point out that Germany lacked both the necessary materials and knowledge to construct a nuclear weapon. The Nazis had chased all the talented theoretical physicists out of Germany and it was actually damn-near illegal to use Einstein's theories when making calculations. As I mentioned in another thread recently, "Aryan physics" was an amusing display of rank stupidity on the part of German scientists, who refused to use such useful theories as the theories of relativity simply because their authors were Jewish. In this atmosphere, and with German research actually striking out in the exact opposite direction of American research, there was no chance in hell that Germany would develop a nuke before the mid-50s. Even then, it would likely be through espionage.
 
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