Bright side for whom? If the Allies are that bogged down in Italy they're not going to be reaching the Rhine or Germany itself any time soon, but the Soviets will be quite well-off. :eek: If Germany starts taking hits on its military capability strong enough to aid the USSR at the right time for...
It wouldn't even necessarily take NATO, a German Empire with a goal aiming at a new Brest-Litovsk but a military machine of the size and scale of the Wehrmacht could do this itself. The problem is not so much that the USSR, in the abstract, is unbeatable, the problem is that Nazi Germany is the...
By the same token, there is the huge problem of Hitler doing this and doing so without irreparably damaging the German command stucture. What Halder and company were doing with this in 1941 from a German POV was nothing short of criminal, as it meant that when Hitler was at his finest, he...
Eh, there was a potential to defeat the Italians before the Germans ever got to North Africa, albeit I'm not sure what the British'd do after that. On the other hand, given the time-lapse between Operation Compass and the German invasion of Greece, the British could conceivably smash up the...
One can imagine that in this context Stalingrad might actually be what does in Mussolini here. Not only did he get curbstomped in North Africa but the last great Italian bastion of military strength got chopped up in Russia for nothing in return.
Wasn't WWII a lot like WWI under all these categories IOTL?
1) The Siege of Leningrad and the Italian Front, to say nothing of the war in Belarus certainly all qualify for this. Not to mention the Battles of Narva. Much of the actual combat and the way victories were won boiled down to...
When reading about the Arab-Israeli Wars, I learned that Lebanon had actually had one civil war *before* the more infamous one in the 1970s-2000s. How might this war in the 1950s be averted, and what would be the consequences for Lebanon and the rest of the region if it was in fact averted? I...
Is it cheating to have "Barbarossa" come about on June 22nd 1941 under Wilhelm III as opposed to Hitler? Otherwise I think Hitler's pretty much guaranteeing Germany to be asked to do the impossible. Nonetheless, if I *have* to work with this, I'd go about it the following ways:
The first...
IMHO the real answer to all these questions is "they both self-destruction and good riddance to bad rubbish." From reading Clark and Glantz I don't think Herr Hitler's armies had it in them to conduct a war all that capably, given that even their own memoirs note their taking pride in...
If we go by the Dodecanese Campaign IOTL, perhaps they would. Whether this is :D or :( or worse :eek: is a good question. I think the British could certainly do a fair job in terms of power projection, though a more interesting question is if the Allies win in North Africa *and then* go into...
Well, I don't think the landing craft problem gets solved just because Torch gets resolved more quickly, so you probably see an earlier Salerno. Would a more pro-Axis Italy have made any real difference to the Allied conduct of the Italian Campaign in terms of the actual fighting? I mean when...
Another POD I was curious about is if there's any way for Operation Torch to work out with a more rapid Allied victory. I got into this after reading An Army At Dawn and so I'm curious about two things. First, is it possible for this to end earlier, and second what happens to the Allies if they...
Assuming somehow that the German Empire survives WWI to win it, by an exhaustion war or what have you *and* the USSR survives, what happens if Kaiser Wilhelm II or Wilhelm III lead Germany into a war with this version of the USSR? I can't really see the Kaiser being as idiotic as Hitler was, but...
I've become fascinated by the period of Japanese democracy in the 1920s and was wondering if there was a way both to prolong it and to avert the rise of the generals. What would have happened without a Second Sino-Japanese War to Mao and Chiang?