Could the United States/Britain win WW2 alone?

Is the US going to drop Abombs piecemeal as they become available or will they wait until later in the year when they can drop a number of them at once?

Now there's a thought. If the air war really is as intractable as the Nazi-wankers claim, then the Allies might want to wait until the B-36 is operational to use nukes, which means mid-46, which means >30 bombs. That, I suppose is the safe way of doing things, wait until you have an unstoppable delivery system, then drop a bomb a day until the Germans give up when your stockpile is sufficient to wipe out half of Germany.

Probably not realistic politically though...
 
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And really, the belief that without the USSR, all those CGI wonder weapons become game changers is so absurd that I merely point you towards the search button. I'm sure as hell not going to spend time countering something which has already repeatedly been countered. Not to mention how even if all of them work properly, still none are capable of stopping an unescorted B-36 from dropping an A-bomb on its target.


Beer, I think that xchen08 raises a very good point here. To say the US/UK winning the war against the Nazis is a wank is false; is it very probable. Now, can the Nazis do things right and get lucky and win? Possibly, but unlikely, since they have to do a lot of things perfectly right.
 
I think that without the soviets fighting in the west the western allies are much nearer defeat.

1. Without the shift to the east, due to Hitler declaring war on the USSR, we would have a much longer battle of Britain on the cards. Although i know that the unmetionable sea animal would not really be sucess, I dont think it needs to. After a year or two of almost constant bombing of cities, factories and airfields, Britain would be exhausted. I could see a peace treaty between Germany and Britain just because the situation would of seemed hopeless to the British people. Thier cities firebombed, the RAF in tatters, no allies and the invincible armies of Germany ravaging the continent.

2 If Britain is knocked out America would not get involved in Europe much at all. Where could they base thier bombers and armies from? If the German Navy, slightly rebuilt, is opposing them and the nearest filling stations is in Iceland or Greenland.

Can i ask a question as well because the search function is crap...
If Germany had not declared war on America, after Pearl Habour, would of America declared war on Germany to help the British?
 
The Ta 152 or the Ta 183.

Eh? The Ta-152 can't even reach the B-36's cruising altitude, much less combat altitude of ~17 km with turrets removed. Not to mention that at extreme altitude, the B-36 is actually more maneuverable than its OTL contemporary fighters, ie from the 50s. And the Ta-183 is both worse and and a perfect example of a CGI plane, never progressing beyond models and based on an engine that never quite worked.
 

CalBear

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The Ta 152 or the Ta 183.

The Ta 152 was barely able to get out of its own way at 48,000 feet. An excellent aircraft at 41K, it was quite literally at the end of its tether at 48K

The Ta-183 was a pipe dream, nothing more, nothing less. While there are lots of comments on how much the MiG-15 resembled in the popular media, the resemblance is a matter of form/function not duplication. The U.S. F-86 also bears a striking resemblance even though you can clearly trace the Sable through its immediate predecessor, the straight winged FJ-1 Fury, again a matter of form/function.

The Saber, of course has a large number of difference from the MiG and both have a huge difference from the Ta-183: They could ACTUALLY FLY. The Ta-183, simply put, would never have flown, NEVER.

Next time you look at a MiG-15 (or its cousins the -17 &-19) you will notice that the Soviet engineers messed up the beautiful lines of the Ta-183 (assuming the bird was in fact inspired by the Reich design) with metal "fences" on the wings. Those fences are there for one reason only, the damned aircraft will not maintain stable flight without them. Stable flight is very important, at least to designers building things without a Nazi emblem on them (the Ho-229, along with the Ta-183, demonstrate that the Luftwaffe designers were not as concerned with stability as with a pretty design that would keep them out of the Heer).

The B-36 was also a POS, but it would not have been the critical aircraft, that would have been 1. The B-47, 2. The B-52, and, most importantly (& surprisingly to the casual observer) 3. The F-84G. The F-84G was, in many ways, a manned nuclear armed cruise missile, small, extremely fast, and almost impossible to intercept.

To address some of the other items that have been brought up

1. Could the Allies get air superiority over Europe?

Of course they could. By mid-1944 somewhere on the order of 85% of all German fighter production was being kept in the West. The Allies wiped them off the map in a brutal war of attrition. The American factories would not suddenly stop producing because the Soviets fell (might knock back the production numbers for the P-39 a bit).

All of Germany and Central Europe will be within bombing range of the Allies with the B-29, and with the F8B they will have a very fast extremely long ranged (430+mph & 2,800+ miles), piston engined escort aircraft aircraft to defend them all the way in & out.

2. Could the Allies outproduce the Reich?

Certainly. The BRITISH outproduced the Reich. The Reich will not be able to simply add the production of OTL USSR to that of Speer's slave works. Far too much of the Soviet production was dependent on both raw materials (frex: 2.3 million TONS of steel, 229,000 tons of aluminum, 103,000 tons of toluene) as well as completed items and prefabbed parts (frex: 350,000:eek: trucks, 1.9 MILLION shell casings, 600,000 KILOMETERS of telephone wire) for the Reich to simply blink and turn Soviet manufacturing miracles into Nazi ones. Even Soviet oil production was greatly aided by both Western drilling equipment and by supplies of additive chemicals for the raw crude. This, of course does not even begin to factor in the 10,000 or so fighters and bombers, 6,000 tanks, 51,000 jeeps, etc. that allowed the Soviets to build more of their own equipment while doing the heavy lifting against the Reich.

3. Is the victorious Reich still resource poor?

Obviously. The vast majority of the USSR's mineral wealth is in the vastness of Siberia e.g. the East side of the Urals. That material is still outside of German control, and a defeated USSR is not going to be any better at pulling it out of the ground than the undefeated one was (it will just be short a few thousand locomotives and couple hundred thousand trucks to move whatever it does manage to get out of the ground). The Reich still has no access to natural rubber and ALL of its synthetic plants (including those in the General Government area) are well within bomber range from the UK, North Africa, and Iceland (folks seem to forget that the Allies have Iceland available to base/stage heavy & super-heavy bombers and long range fighters which is well out of the range of the Luftwaffe's striking arm).

The Reich has no hope of defeating the RN/USN, no hope of even challenging for control of the Sea lanes, and virtually no hope of breaking the Allied blockade.

4. Nazi wonder weapons

The only wonder part of the V-weapons is why anyone wonders about them. The V-1 was a failure, the V-2 was too short ranged to be a true threat and too damned hard to hide (all you need are a dozen or so radar tracks of the inbounds from three radar receivers and bang, the launch site is well known, followed shortly by being hit by a 1,000 plane raid), and the V-3 was a dumb joke.

The Me-262 was inferior to the Meteor AND the P-80, with follow on Allied designs far better, more reliable, and many built 3,000 miles outside of Goring's wildest dream for bombing range.

The late Nazi subs had some good, even excellent, features, but they were also still vulnerable to attack by the increasingly effective Allied ASW forces, which also had made huge technological strides, except the Allied strides tend to be ignored since they are not "wonder weapons.

As far as the Nazi fascination with huge land forts, I would say that the Allies would have supplied lunch for the work crews if the idiot Nazis would have actually tried to build the P.1000 Ratte (and would have thrown in supper if they had built the P.1500 Monster). If you can hit (and sink) a 37 meter wide battleship traveling at better than 30 MPH how much trouble does anyone thing it would be to hit a 13 meter wide tank moving at 10 mph? Stupidity squared.

The real question is IF the Allies would be willing to pay the price to defeat a Greater Germany. My guess is yes, but it isn't a total slam dunk.
 
Pikers3

In that case you could well be accurate. However in the discussion here the Germans do attack the SU but defeat it, probably in 41 or 42. [41 is pretty unlikely but then so if any Nazi victory over the SU without a significantly different Nazi leadership from possibly pre-war]. As such Germany will face the 41 season at least with heavy fighting and periods afterwards with at least bitter guerilla resistance.

As such it is unlikely to see major changes outside the eastern front before Dec 41 and the US dow. From that point on the allies start getting overwhelming superiority in production, especially in the war.

Germany is also highly unlikely to get any degree of oil out of Baku. Even after any destruction by the Soviets might be repaired its very close to allied bases in Persia and a hell of a long way, by either land or sea, from the German industrial centres.

Steve

I think that without the soviets fighting in the west the western allies are much nearer defeat.

1. Without the shift to the east, due to Hitler declaring war on the USSR, we would have a much longer battle of Britain on the cards. Although i know that the unmetionable sea animal would not really be sucess, I dont think it needs to. After a year or two of almost constant bombing of cities, factories and airfields, Britain would be exhausted. I could see a peace treaty between Germany and Britain just because the situation would of seemed hopeless to the British people. Thier cities firebombed, the RAF in tatters, no allies and the invincible armies of Germany ravaging the continent.

2 If Britain is knocked out America would not get involved in Europe much at all. Where could they base thier bombers and armies from? If the German Navy, slightly rebuilt, is opposing them and the nearest filling stations is in Iceland or Greenland.

Can i ask a question as well because the search function is crap...
If Germany had not declared war on America, after Pearl Habour, would of America declared war on Germany to help the British?
 
The real question is IF the Allies would be willing to pay the price to defeat a Greater Germany. My guess is yes, but it isn't a total slam dunk.

This is the crux of the question. Germany's task after the defeat of the USSR is to make the price high enough that the WAllies don't want to pay it. It's a BoB/Blitz/Sealion (the threat not the operation) scenario. Germany doesn't have to invade Britain or anything they just have to avoid being invaded and destroyed by bombing.

Personally I think that without the Eastern Front Armies eating virtually everything Germany had Germany could dfend itself effectively enough to make the WAllies question the importance of unconditional surrender, and the necessity of invasion and occupation in order to bring this about.
 
This is the crux of the question. Germany's task after the defeat of the USSR is to make the price high enough that the WAllies don't want to pay it. It's a BoB/Blitz/Sealion (the threat not the operation) scenario. Germany doesn't have to invade Britain or anything they just have to avoid being invaded and destroyed by bombing.

Personally I think that without the Eastern Front Armies eating virtually everything Germany had Germany could dfend itself effectively enough to make the WAllies question the importance of unconditional surrender, and the necessity of invasion and occupation in order to bring this about.

As long as the Allies can gain air superiority over Germany without paying an unsustainable cost, and public will persists into 1945, the question is moot. Sure, if the allies have to win the war entirely through conventional means, while they can do so, it would be painful and it is conceivable that Allied willpower will falter, but by 1945, the allied leadership knows they just have to wait a bit longer for their superweapon to be ready.

Basically, Germany needs to inflict so many reverses on the Allies, that they decide to give up the struggle as hopeless before the success of the Manhattan project makes them realize that cheaply destroying Germany without needing invasion is possible.

The B-36 was also a POS, but it would not have been the critical aircraft, that would have been 1. The B-47, 2. The B-52, and, most importantly (& surprisingly to the casual observer) 3. The F-84G. The F-84G was, in many ways, a manned nuclear armed cruise missile, small, extremely fast, and almost impossible to intercept.

While pretty much everyone agrees that the B-36 is rather crappy with its high cost and terrible reliability, and it was undeniably obsolescent by the time it actually entered mass service OTL, I'm unaware of any aircraft or weapon system that could stop it from delivering an atomic bomb in the mid-late 40s. Are you aware of any possibilities? And it would certainly enter service before the B-47, while the Thunderjet can't carry first or second generation nukes.
 
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Eurofed

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As long as the Allies can gain air superiority over Germany without paying an unsustainable cost, and public will persists into 1945, the question is moot. Sure, if the allies have to win the war entirely through conventional means, while they can do so, it would be painful and it is conceivable that Allied willpower will falter, but by 1945, the allied leadership knows they just have to wait a bit longer for their superweapon to be ready.

But neither America nor Britain and the CW are dictatorships. The Western public has no way to know that nukes are coming (heck, nobody knew if nukes were going to work up to Trinity) and may easily come to see a conventional war in Europe unwinnable if the USSR is crushed or bows out, all attempts to land in Europe fail or are not dared (moreover, it not so granted that ITTL the WAllies would manage to conquer North Africa or keep the Middle East in the first place) and losses in the air war keep piling up. In such a scenario, FDR could easily lose the 1944 election to a Republican candidate campaigning on a "screw Europe, let's focus on Japan" platform.
 

Beer

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Of course they could. By mid-1944 somewhere on the order of 85% of all German fighter production was being kept in the West. The Allies wiped them off the map in a brutal war of attrition. The American factories would not suddenly stop producing because the Soviets fell (might knock back the production numbers for the P-39 a bit).
Dear Calbear, something the US wankers don´t get and your post is a perfect example, is that you take to OTL mid44 situation and transplant it 1:1 into ATL. This is wrong, since you still underestimate the eastern front. It gusseled many ressources the air industry never got because the land war in the east was more important. By mid-44 the Luftwaffe was bled dry. In ATL there is no more eastern front. All eastern front aces are available for the west front. ATL Germany has more material to devote to air defense a lot earlier, which means more fighters and esp. more research. The birth defects of the Me 262, Go 229 and other planes will be corrected, making them more deadly. Yes, Germany can´t outproduce the allies, but the ATL Luftwaffe can make the air war too costly for the allies.
Btw, e.g. the Ta-152 could reach the B-36 top ceiling! Even with the turrets removed. Research in books, not some military channel manure is a fine thing!

The Me-262 was inferior to the Meteor AND the P-80, with follow on Allied designs far better, more reliable, and many built 3,000
I´m truly NO nazi-wanker, but this has to countered. First, the Meteor had a very strong dutch roll, which made them barely operational as a fighter and would have lost against a Me 262 in most cases. The roll problem was only solved after the war! And the P-80 was only a good fighter after features pilfered in Germany were available. The Me 262 was definitely as good or better as those two. As stated above, don´t believe anything shown on TV. Second, you make the same mistake as many others, that Germany´s air defense stays static and hampered by the same problems as OTL. That the main problem for production and research was the eastern front drain, which is no longer in ATL, is conveniently forgotten.
There were even OTL new and/or revamped versions of jet fighters/bombers on the boards e.g. a Me 262 variant, which corrected the flaws, only they weren´t produced due to the war situation. ATL Germany can produce them, since the front which had 2/3 of germany´s forces is no longer a problem!
And do you know that your "follow on allied designs" had many features that were pilfered, stolen from german drawing boards? As said, and some of the "we are the best crowd" seem to forget it, allied jet plane and rocketry research made a decades jump after pillaging the german research! This is no german wank, this is OTL fact!
 
Firstly the nukes alone won't cause Germany to surrender, they'll have to be in conjuction with other military operations. Nukes and an invasion could be the straw which breaks the camles back, but since the first 2 nukes weren't available until August 1945 I doubt an invasion could happen until spring 1946. Doubtless such an invasion could be directly into Germany, perhaps even including landings in the Baltic and parachute drops all over the place, but it would have to happen.

Secondly there's more to defending Germany than fighters. Much of the WAllied airpower was limited in range, does the Luftwaffe practice air-denial over northern France and the Low Countries, air-superiority over western Germany and air-supremecy over centeral Germany? Without the eastern front the Stienbock raids could be greater in scope and encompass counter-air targets, the He177 only suffered 10% casualties in 1944 when bombing British targets. These raids, as well as V1 and V2 and XXI uboats could occupy much of the WAllies attention, reducing their ability to generate sorties over German held territory and making the fighter's task easier.
 
The Nazis are toast. The Western Allies will focus on beating Japan, and will have completed that by mid-1945. Military efforts around the European perimeter will be made, and be successful, as Germany can't hope to keep supplies to Africa, Crete, and the Greek islands up against overwhelming Allied airpower...unless they use their airpower to counteract that, but then any talk of some new German advantage in the air is now nonsense. Allied success in these theaters will keep British and American heads up.

Also: the idea that German ground units can just be transferred to the Atlantic Wall doesn't make any sense, and I'm surprised everyone's just accepting that. Huge forces will be required to watch a USSR that desires revenge and still has a large army with increased production, albeit one without Lend Lease. Of course, a lot of German military manpower is also going to be used to start committing genocide on an impressive scale in the East, and constructing new German colonies throughout Poland, the Baltics, Ukraine, and European Russia. One would think that raising the Holocaust an order of magnitude should keep the "moral dimension" of Allied morale up, as well as causing a complete rejection of any negotiated peace.

Also, Beer needs to stop using "wanker" as he obviously has no idea what it means. Then again, this is the same guy that called Mitteleuropa an "earlier EU"...
 
I think that constant smoldering warfare would continue in the Urals, and almost certainly in the western portions of Kazakh SSR, should the Nazi's attempt to occupy them. If they try to carve out republics this early (early or mid forties) they'd still have to spend an impressive amount of resources. I think it's also a relevant question as to whether Germany would go for Persia. A lot of that terrain is fairly difficult to fight in, and Britain would fight pretty hard to hold it. Not only that, but there could easily be Russian remnants there. I suppose it depends on how thoroughly the USSR was smashed.

I'm surprised at how little the war in the Mediterranean and North Africa has been covered. I think that Germany could do some damage to the allies by pushing for the middle east. What were allied plans to defend the middle east, should El Alamein, and presumably Alexandria fall?
 

CalBear

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As long as the Allies can gain air superiority over Germany without paying an unsustainable cost, and public will persists into 1945, the question is moot. Sure, if the allies have to win the war entirely through conventional means, while they can do so, it would be painful and it is conceivable that Allied willpower will falter, but by 1945, the allied leadership knows they just have to wait a bit longer for their superweapon to be ready.

Basically, Germany needs to inflict so many reverses on the Allies, that they decide to give up the struggle as hopeless before the success of the Manhattan project makes them realize that cheaply destroying Germany without needing invasion is possible.



While pretty much everyone agrees that the B-36 is rather crappy with its high cost and terrible reliability, and it was undeniably obsolescent by the time it actually entered mass service OTL, I'm unaware of any aircraft or weapon system that could stop it from delivering an atomic bomb in the mid-late 40s. Are you aware of any possibilities? And it would certainly enter service before the B-47, while the Thunderjet can't carry first or second generation nukes.

The B-36 was only combat ready in January of 1949 (about 11 months ahead of the B-47B) and not available in useful numbers (considering combat readiness issues) until mid-1949. There was a reason the Air Force slid the B-50 (aka B-29D) under Congress' nose in late 1947 and it's name was the B-36.

The F-84G carried the Mark-7, which was a 2nd gen weapon (unless you count the Hiroshima uranium Mark 1 as 1st Gen and the Nagasaki plutonium Mark III as 2nd Gen). It was introduced with the other 60/92 lens weapons which were the first real advance over the Mark III.

As far as a weapons system that could have been effective against the B-36, I would point to the Wasserfall W5 SAM. It had an engagement envelope up to 60K with a slant engagement range at that altitude of around 8 miles. It wasn't a perfect system, but, unlike most of the vaporware the Reichgear fanboys like to talk about it was actually used in combat. It wasn't a great system, about 40% of the W5 ever fired failed to guide, but it was certainly capable of getting to the B-36B max altitude of 43K and even the later B-36J (which wasn't in service until 1954) Featherweight's 50K.

The 128mm Flak 40 AAA gun was also able to put a round up to 48K, which would have been sufficient to reach the "B" model at max altitude. The twin mounting of the 128 was able to put up 20 rounds per minute.
 

CalBear

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I think that constant smoldering warfare would continue in the Urals, and almost certainly in the western portions of Kazakh SSR, should the Nazi's attempt to occupy them. If they try to carve out republics this early (early or mid forties) they'd still have to spend an impressive amount of resources. I think it's also a relevant question as to whether Germany would go for Persia. A lot of that terrain is fairly difficult to fight in, and Britain would fight pretty hard to hold it. Not only that, but there could easily be Russian remnants there. I suppose it depends on how thoroughly the USSR was smashed.

I'm surprised at how little the war in the Mediterranean and North Africa has been covered. I think that Germany could do some damage to the allies by pushing for the middle east. What were allied plans to defend the middle east, should El Alamein, and presumably Alexandria fall?

The Reich never had the shipping needed to take North Africa. The Allies fleet controlled the water and nothing in this scenario changes that.
 
Dear Calbear, something the US wankers don´t get and your post is a perfect example, is that you take to OTL mid44 situation and transplant it 1:1 into ATL. This is wrong, since you still underestimate the eastern front. It gusseled many ressources the air industry never got because the land war in the east was more important. By mid-44 the Luftwaffe was bled dry. In ATL there is no more eastern front. All eastern front aces are available for the west front. ATL Germany has more material to devote to air defense a lot earlier, which means more fighters and esp. more research. The birth defects of the Me 262, Go 229 and other planes will be corrected, making them more deadly. Yes, Germany can´t outproduce the allies, but the ATL Luftwaffe can make the air war too costly for the allies.
Btw, e.g. the Ta-152 could reach the B-36 top ceiling! Even with the turrets removed. Research in books, not some military channel manure is a fine thing!

1) No matter the scenario, Germany cannot simply forget about the east. If they have successfully prosecuted a war in that theatre, then they need a major commitment of forces to watch whatever rump soviet state remains to their east, and significant resources to be used in pacifying the conquered territories (not to mention the almost-inevitable ethnic cleansing and colonization). If they haven't a large number of formations have to hold on the Soviet border, there being little love lost between the two nations (and the Soviets being involved in a rearmament campaign of their own).

2) It's interesting to note that most of the highest scoring aces were Luftwaffe pilots operating on the Eastern front. There are a variety of reasons for this, but superior quality of pilots isn't really one of them. The fact is, they flew a lot more missions against relatively low quality opposition. Air operations in the WTO (where the cream of the Luftwaffe served) is a very different affair, one whose core equation cannot be changed by the presence of a few aces, no matter how skilled. In the end, the Allies can build far more planes, and train more pilots better than the germans can.

3) You cannot just take, say, a tank factory, and convert it into fighter production. Reorienting for an ariel campaign will take a lot of lead-time, and a lot of the planes will suffer from inferior materials, or be grounded due to lack of fuel and trained pilots.

4) B-36s had a service ceiling above that of the Ta-152
 
I think we have to get a clear idea of the specific scenario here.

How, and when, and to what degree, was the USSR defeated? Without knowing that, a lot of the things people are proposing are liable to be inapplicable.
 
Again what date are we talking about here, if the U.S.S.R is knocked out of the war in 1941/early 1942 that makes a major difference. Both to German availablyof planes and pilots, to say nothing of morale and political considerations on the allied side.

Will the WA win most likely, but there are so many butterflies here it’s hard to predict just how. They win the war via bombing that’s for sure at some point a landing in Europe will be launched. There’s also the spectre of Franxoist Spain Franco played a clever game OTL but he was much closer to the Axis than is sometimes appreciated a German victory over the U.S.S.R and the help of some German divisions may cause Spain to make a grab of Gibraltar. That has serious effects on North Africa and the fate of Italy.

The most likely outcome is the war drags on past 1945 maybe buy a couple of years with hard fighting a lot more bloodshead on the WA side. The U.S.S.R in ruins and Germany maybe or maybe not having quite a few major cities nuked.

It'll be a bloody attrition at a rate not seen OTL, and the WA airforces wont simply steamroller the Axis all by their lonesome.:rolleyes:

I'm wondering how this will effect Siberia & China now through. With the U.S.S.R and Red Army crumbling to bits, Japan may make a grab for some Russian land and will have more troops free to fight the KMT & Maoists.
 
Japan may make a grab for some Russian land and will have more troops free to fight the KMT & Maoists.

Whoa, you have opened a can of worms you probably didn't want to.

Even a rump Russia is going to stop the Kwangtung Army dead in its tracks, if not go back on the offensive. A Japanese attack against Russia just helps the Allies in the Pacific Theater that much more.
 
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