Thomas1195
Banned
I said that with a POD before 1900 that eventually lead to ww1 without Russia, then Germany would have laughed at British blockade as they can trade freely with the Russian Empire (as they share land borders) without being interfered by Britain, and unlike Hitler, in this case Germany would not attack Russia.Germany only ended up fighting the US when it launched its unrestricted submarine warfare campaign of 1917, it only went to unrestricted submarine warfare because it could not endure the British blockade. Had Germany held off on unrestricted submarine warfare you ought still to have seen the Russian Empire collapse however the Germans found it a struggle to extract loot from Russia and most of what they did extract was consumed by their occupation armies in the East. Austria-Hungary was also a valuable source of supply and Germany extracted resources from the Habsburg Empire to the detriment of the Habsburg dominions own war effort with the result that the ability of AH to continue resistance was exhausted by December 1918. Evidence from the military operations of 1918 strongly suggests that Germany could not defeat the Entente in that year and with the fall of Austria-Hungary would have needed to sue for terms.
In the Second World War the Germans had conquered France and the Soviet Union was a neutral heavily supplying their needs and yet this proved insufficient for the German war economy in the face of British blockade. The led to the Germans concluding that they had to invade the USSR to gain its resources without having to pay for them. This led to the invasion of June 22nd 1941.
In both cases the Germany war economy did not exist in isolation and rather than relying on trade as the British did in World War 1 had access to and a reliance on loot to maintain itself.
The evidence of World War 2 is clear that Germany would not have laughed off a British blockade. The issue with an invasion of France was never the number of troops but the lack of roads to put them on...soldiers stuck in traffic are just an additional road block to supplies for soldiers at the front. Of course having a 1914 kick off without Russian involvement is a tad hard as the French would not go to war to support Serbia but went to war to support Russia who were supporting Serbia. The British went to war to support France and ensure the Germans did not make off with Belgium.
A war fought too close to 1900 sees France a lot stronger relative to a weaker Germany, not to mention the British.
Back to the topic, you cannot deny that Britain's heavy reliance on the destructive lend lease had a profound negative impact on their post war economy. If they had a bigger capacity to produce basic industrial products and capital goods like steel and industrial machinery to support the production of war machines, they could have avoided Lend Lease, or reduced their dependence on LL to at least Soviet's level (while LL was crucial for Soviet, Soviet's dependence on LL was far less than British Empire, despite losing a big chunk of industrial regions).
Btw, the total value of munition output of Germany was much higher than Britain, but it was heavily skewed toward land war equipment. German production of land warfare weapons and equipment well exceeded Britain, with the exception of trucks. Britain was very lucky to be an island as they never ever fought a land war with a similar scale of the Soviet-German front during the ww2 like either the German or the Russian had to.