From what I know about Garner, he was an isolationist and lacked the visin that FDR had. If he'd made it in to the Oval Office in 1941, I suspect that he'd kept the Eurpoean war at an arms length. This was a man that once said, 'I hope Britian never repays her war debt to us, that way she can't borrow more money.' This was refering to Britain's WW1 debts to the US. A man with this narrow thinking might not have even shown any real interest in getting involved in the Eurpoean War. And without US aid and support, I suspect that eventually the British Government would have been force in to some sort of agreement with Germany. The British would be able to keep the Germans at bay and prevent an invasion, but the Churchill administration would have been hard pressed to have taken the fight to the continent and would have had to find a diplomatic solution, most likely in the form of a non agression pack with German. For the Italians, they could continued their conquest of Africa, with the British having to pull all of their resorces back to the home islands and counter any possible German agression. With Italy in firm control of Africa, Mussolini would have maintained his popularity and remained in power. For the Soviets, this could have meant doom. Without America aid, and if the British did sign a non agression pack, then the Germans could have concentrated almost all of the armed forces on the elimation of the Soviets. The Germans would have only token forces in the occupied countires and no troops in north Africa, so the bulk of the German forces could have and would have been concentrated on the Soviet Union. The end result would have been a very long and very costly war. The German, I think would have taken most of the eastern portions of the Soviet Union, with the western half, remaining a bitterly fought after territory for years. I suspect that Stalin would have been overthrown by his own forces after he showed a lack of military understanding and threw away so much of his forces in useless battles. I believe that the Germans would have started and supported an underground rebellion that could have seized power in the west and then worked out a diplomatic end to the conflict, with german keeping the eastern portions of the Soviet Union, while the new puppet Soviet government organizes in to something totally new. Without a post-war Soviet Union, the spread of communism would not have occured in the way that it did, so we could have avoided the cold war, however, with Germany in control of Europe, a new and different Cold war could and would have developed. Without American and British cooperation, the Atomic bomb would never have been built, at least not by the American and not when it was. The Manhatten project was a large, very expensive project that required some out of the box thinking. That kind of thinking was exactly what FDR excelled at, however, Garner never showed that he was capable of thinking in such a manner. I suspect that he would have dismissed the idea of an atomic bomb, especially when confronted with the cost and lenght of time to research and built one. The Bomb would have been built eventually, but I think that its more likely that it could have been a post war German or America that ended up with the bomb, maybe somewhere in the mid 1950s. The war in the Pacific would have been all together different. The US would have put all of its resources in to fighting the Japanese back to the home islands, but once there, I think that Garner's approach would have been to simply bombed and starved Japan in to submission. It's hard to know how long that would have taken, but one can assume that eventually a civil uprising would have occured. The Japanese would have done all to prevent a diplomatic solution and the civilians would have been the ones to suffer. They would have risen up against the military leadership and then sued for peace... maybe in 1947 or 1948. This would make up a post war world with America in control of the pacific, Italy in control of portions of south eastern Eurpoe and north Africa, and Germany in control of Eurpore an the once Soviet Union. Without FDR and Truman, I doubt that the United Nations would ever have come in to existance. The US would have been in good shape after the war, but would now be forced to live coexist in a world with the Nazi instead of the communist.but that my thoughts.... I'd be interested in hearing others.
