How would a British and Soviet only war against Germany go

Deleted member 1487

Well, that depends on how much the US stay "neutral" during WW2.

Let's assume that in this scenario, the US never push for Lend-Lease and only allow Cash & Carry for everyone (which in fact means only to the British because of the RN blockade of continental Europe). This means that the Soviet Union will have to fight back against the Germans without the benefits of US-trucks which ITTL they have to produce themselves (which means that they can't produce as many tanks in the same time as IOTL). Which will be important for the upcoming Soviet advances against Nazi Germany since 1943 (LL didn't help the Soviet Union in stopping the german advance in 1941/1942 so I don't think no LL would help the Germans in defeating the Soviets).

The UK will probably pay a higher price for driving out the Axis out of North Africa, but they were able to do so without much US aid so I don't see why they shouldn't be able to do it completely without US aid.

The Soviets will probably be able to drive out the Germans out of most Soviet territories until 1945, but then the war could become a stalemate. In this situation I think that the UK will probably pull off Operation Vegetarian and after that make a landing operation with the Commonwealth troops.

The really interesting question is what happens in Asia. I can imagine a scenario where the Anglo-Soviet alliance will fight a (cold/hot?) war against Japan in the 1950's.

Edit:

The economic factors would be pretty important as I think: The UK would not hang on the US but would develop an intra-Imperial trade which could help setting up something of a Commonwealth Union after the war.

Also the domestic butterflies in the US could be huge: A US which sees itself threatened by an Anglo-Soviet alliance would be quite interesting.
The Brits were out of cash by 1941 and were coasting on loans from money Belgium had in US banks and South African gold loans. The question was how long that would last given that you're presupposing that there is no LL come May 1941.
 

Deleted member 1487

What about a joint Anglo-Soviet nuclear weapon programme?
Are we counting the Soviet spy penetrated effort they had IOTL? The Soviets had nothing to contribute as they were pretty far behind Britain by that point and the Brits would not want them having any access to the research for their own bomb after the war.
 
The Brits were out of cash by 1941 and were coasting on loans from money Belgium had in US banks and South African gold loans. The question was how long that would last given that you're presupposing that there is no LL come May 1941.

They would take even more loans, probably nationalize the arms industries, but they wouldn't surrender. Even the Halifax fraction in the British government wasn't advocating for total German domination of continental Europe (the only solution Hitler would accept).

Are we counting the Soviet spy penetrated effort they had IOTL? The Soviets had nothing to contribute as they were pretty far behind Britain by that point and the Brits would not want them having any access to the research for their own bomb after the war.

Even though it would have taken longer then in IOTL I think that the Soviets and the British could have been able to develop nuclear bombs until 1948/1949, especially considering that they maybe work together with scientists who IOTL went to the US.
 

Deleted member 1487

They would take even more loans, probably nationalize the arms industries, but they wouldn't surrender. Even the Halifax fraction in the British government wasn't advocating for total German domination of continental Europe (the only solution Hitler would accept).
From who? The Belgians were close to tapped out, the South Africans have their limit too. You can't fight a war on highly restricted credit with little to no hope of victory. The issue isn't private ownership of the arms industry, it is paying cash for the necessary fuel, food, and raw materials to run said industry. Cash and Carry means having hard currency to run the war. Even the Churchill government can't keep fighting without the means.

Even though it would have taken longer then in IOTL I think that the Soviets and the British could have been able to develop nuclear bombs until 1948/1949, especially considering that they maybe work together with scientists who IOTL went to the US.
Why would the Imperialists work with the Commies? They hated each other and didn't want the other to have something like an atom bomb. Even if they did pool the same people neither have the resources to do a bomb project EVEN WITH LL.
 
From who? The Belgians were close to tapped out, the South Africans have their limit too. You can't fight a war on highly restricted credit with little to no hope of victory. The issue isn't private ownership of the arms industry, it is paying cash for the necessary fuel, food, and raw materials to run said industry. Cash and Carry means having hard currency to run the war. Even the Churchill government can't keep fighting without the means.


Why would the Imperialists work with the Commies? They hated each other and didn't want the other to have something like an atom bomb. Even if they did pool the same people neither have the resources to do a bomb project EVEN WITH LL.

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/wi-hurricane-in-berlin.440832/
 

Deleted member 1487

No, out of US$. They would effectively have unlimited credit from countries that would accept Sterling.
Good luck getting shipping to any of them but Canada and Ireland. That was why US supplies were vital, colonial sources were 200-400% further away, which means a halving or quartering of shipping tonnage to get them. In the face of the Uboat threat. Without means to escort them all the way.

What are you trying to say with that link?
 
If Japan never attacks pearl harbour, they may well attack the USSR. However neither the soviets nor the japanese had the ressources available in 1941/1942, for major fighting in the far east. Also the japanese lacked a competent tank force, and the supplies to create and sustain one. They maybe reach Kharbarovsk, but thats the farest they can advance. The USSR had quite a lot of border forces in the east, and the civilian population had a high war spirit.

On the german-soviet front, there are rather few changes. No land-lease means the soviets forces are a bit less mobile, but the effect of american land lease was very minor to the course of the war. And the soviets didn't have to send many forces to fight the japanese (as allready mentioned their far eastern force was allways quite strong). Its likely that the red armys advance would be a bit slower, but by 1945 (at latest) all of the Soviet Union is free, and by mid to late 1946, the red flag flies over Berlin. I doubt that the nazis would do any better (by significant means) than OTL, let alone reaching a stalemate, considering these numbers.
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-980ab93832a8719d3a6d3ac0937a26ee

Now, without US help, the Allies (by this point only britain and its dominions) can not hope to land in Normandy or southern France. Without operation torch, the war in africa is longer and way more costly for the british. Even a landing in sicilly would be very hard, not to speak about further advances. So after Berlin fell and the wehrmacht lines collapse, the USSR moves on to liberate all of europe. If they are very lucky the british can seize southern Italy and most of France in the wake of total german defeat. In any case, eastern europe, along with all of Germany, Denmark, Greece, Austria, Benelux, and maybe France, Italy and Norway are red after the war.

As V-E day comes the USSR is able to move masses of forces to the far east. Think about operation august storm on steroids. Japanese forces are crushed and the red army liberates most of northern China, all of Korea and eventually, though inevitably, all of mainland Japan. Maybe they would even get the east indies and south-east asia (still occupied by the japanese when they surrendered, OTL).

The post war world would be quite different than OTL, and pretty red. If France and Italy didn't become communist after ebing liberated by the soviets, they would likely do in the lost war period (even when the US tried to supress them in OTL, with CIA, funding, marshall plan and Nato, they allmost won).

If the US stays isolationist after the war is debatable, but likely in my opinion. They have no presence abroad and no reason to take the risk. Britain may form an anti-communist bloc, with its few remaining allies, but they would not nearly be a match for the communists. De-collonization (even without communist France prior) would see most of the third world go communist or at least pro-soviet (without tge strong capitalist bloc, lead by the US). Britain becomes isolated, the CPGB gains in strengh, and in the early 70s, Great Britain becomes communist aswell.
 

Deleted member 1487

What I'm saying is that Britain would and could have built atomic weapons without us assistance.
With what money? I mean yes, technically they had the skills to do so if resources weren't an issue, the problem is how to do so during the war given that they thought it was impossible even with LL and US involvement.
 

Deleted member 1487

On the german-soviet front, there are rather few changes. No land-lease means the soviets forces are a bit less mobile, but the effect of american land lease was very minor to the course of the war. And the soviets didn't have to send many forces to fight the japanese (as allready mentioned their far eastern force was allways quite strong). Its likely that the red armys advance would be a bit slower, but by 1945 (at latest) all of the Soviet Union is free, and by mid to late 1946, the red flag flies over Berlin. I doubt that the nazis would do any better (by significant means) than OTL, let alone reaching a stalemate, considering these numbers.
Umm...what? The Soviets would have suffered mass famine without LL not to mention huge truck deficits, as they got double the number of trucks from LL than the USSR built during the war.
http://critcom.councilforeuropeanst...ning-in-the-soviet-union-during-world-war-ii/

https://www.rbth.com/business/2015/05/08/allies_gave_soviets_130_billion_under_lend-lease_45879.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/68zy47/was_lend_lease_necessary_for_soviet_triumph/
To quote David Glantz from "When Titans Clashed":

Lend-Lease trucks were particularly important to the Red Army, which was notoriously deficient in such equipment. By the end of the war, two out of every three Red Army trucks were foreign-built, including 409,000 cargo trucks and 47,000 Willys Jeeps.
[Note, Glantz's 2/3 stat is a higher ratio than Ellis indicates, but Ellis still points to 2:1 import/production, and regardless there may be other caveats in play]

As for the domestic ones, almost all of those were licensed copies of Ford trucks anyways!

The importance of those trucks can't be underestimated. First, they were they of vital importance for the logistics of the Red Army as well as its motorization and increasing mobility. Glantz again:

Without the trucks, each Soviet offensive during 1943-1945 would have come to a halt after a shallower penetration, allowing the Germans time to reconstruct their defenses and force the Red Army to conduct yet another deliberate assault.

And while the core benefit of all those extra wheels was movement of men and materiel, while Soviet propaganda photos always showed them mounted on domestic built trucks, most of the fearsome Katyusha rockets also were mounted on American built examples.

.....

All in all, it came to roughly 12 billion in aid from the USA. Soviet claims are that Lend Lease represented only four to ten percent of their total production (the impact was seriously minimized in Soviet studies of the war), but even if they are not downplaying it, this is no small amount! Certainly not all of it was the best stuff. The boots especially were ill-suited for Russian winter, and the opinions of the thousands foreign tanks (16 percent of USSR production) and planes (11 percent of USSR production) were mixed, but the trucks and food can't be overstated enough, the latter quite possibly saving the USSR from famine level hunger in 1942, since they had lost 42 percent of cultivated land to the German offensive, losing 2/3 of grain production! Equalling 10 percent of Soviet production, two percent of US food production was sent off to the Soviets, which, to put in perspective:

It has been estimated that there was enough food sent to Russia via Lend-Lease to feed a 12,000,000-man army half pound of food per day for the duration of the war.

......

Now, of course whether Lend-Lease was the key between victory and defeat is the golden question, and it is not one that many people are willing to answer definitively one way or the other, so you won't find me doing it either! What I will say is that at the very least, the vital role played by Lend-Lease, even if not the fulcrum between victory and defeat for the Soviet Union, certainly gives the lie to the assertions by many that the Western Allies were a sideshow in World War II, since without their assistance even excluding the battlefield, the Soviet war machine would have been a very different, and categorically weaker, force.
 
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With what money? I mean yes, technically they had the skills to do so if resources weren't an issue, the problem is how to do so during the war given that they thought it was impossible even with LL and US involvement.

Of the £28.700 Million spent in ww2 IOTL £2.780 Million was spent on bomber command MAUD would be a cheaper option.
 

Deleted member 1487

Of the £28.700 Million spent in ww2 IOTL £2.780 Million was spent on bomber command MAUD would be a cheaper option.
Problem was the Brits themselves said the Tube Alloys project was a waste because it wouldn't be ready in time (even with LL) and eat up so many resources that there wouldn't be much left for more readily available and necessary projects. In retrospect MAUD would have been probably been cheaper, but without BC that means the Germans save huge resources themselves, the V-weapons projects aren't delayed by the bombing of Peenemunde in 1943, and the Ruhr isn't disrupted in Spring 1943, which means a LOT more German armaments produced and usable on all fronts. So maybe you have a nuke by 1947 just using British LL resources, but what happens in the meantime as the Germans are able to put a lot more into armaments to use against the Soviets, plus have earlier V-weapons to pummel Britain with without a BC answer? The Luftwaffe would save huge resources as well which can be who-knows-where.
 


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

Uhm... 17 million tons of aid in total during the 1941 to 1945 period...

Thats nothing compared to soviet war production. And nothing compared to soviet food production, aswell.
 

Deleted member 1487

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

Uhm... 17 million tons of aid in total during the 1941 to 1945 period...

Thats nothing compared to soviet war production. And nothing compared to soviet food production, aswell.
The margin between defeat and victory given the immense losses of the invasion in 1941-42. Plus Soviet output was enabled due to American raw materials that weren't accessible in the USSR, like say sufficient quantities of aluminum, which T-34 engines were made out of. Aid also was disproportionately of finished materials as well, which allows for high value items to be sent like weapons, high tech/high capacity machine tools the USSR couldn't make for themselves even pre-invasion, an entire tire factory, high quality aviation fuel, etc.
However much it was relative to Soviet output, the extra external supply was vital given what it was. And in the words of Zhukov himself:
https://www.rbth.com/defence/2016/0...ies-aided-the-ussr-in-its-darkest-hour_575559
This month marks 75 years since the United States launched its Lend-Lease program to supply the Allies with much-needed war materiel for the fight against Hitler. Downplayed by the Soviet Union, the program was of vital importance to the USSR’s war effort, as even Marshal Zhukov later admitted.
‘And how much sheet steel they gave us!’
"Now they say that the allies never helped us, but it can't be denied that the Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war," Soviet General Georgy Zhukov said after the end of WWII.
"We didn’t have explosives, gunpowder. We didn’t have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives. And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? But now they make it seem as if we had an abundance of all that. Without American trucks we wouldn’t have had anything to pull our artillery with."
 
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Empra

Banned
Let's assume that in this scenario, the US never push for Lend-Lease and only allow Cash & Carry for everyone.

Then its game over for the British by 1942/43 at the latest. By March 1941 they had a few million left in gold and dollar reserves, they were basically broke. Say good by to some 100 000 LL machine tools - 1/3 of total "British" war time supply. No 30 000 LL tanks - half of total wartime supply. No 25 million tons of additional shipping space built by the US. Most importantly no 1 Million tons of LL food in 1941, no 1.7 million tons of LL food in 1942, no 1.4 million tons of LL food in 1943. The British starve and the British die, by the tens, possibly hundreds of thousands every year beginning in the winter of 1941.

As for the Soviets, they will be lucky if they can pull of Stalingrad and advance to Kursk, but without LL they have no prospect of advancing any further.

They would take even more loans, probably nationalize the arms industries, but they wouldn't surrender.
How long would Britain "never surrender" when 5000 or 10 000 civillians starve to death every month? Its far easier to swing heroic speeches and to stand firm with a full belly, then close to starvation with NO prospect of victory.

Even though it would have taken longer then in IOTL I think that the Soviets and the British could have been able to develop nuclear bombs until 1948/1949, especially considering that they maybe work together with scientists who IOTL went to the US.
What you think is ASB then. Firstly because OTL Britain had its first nuke in 1952, during peace time with a lot of help from the Americans and second neither Britain, nor the Soviet Union, nor both could have continued the war until this time without LL.
 
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Assuming LL, the Soviets are in Paris by 1946, but Italy is Britain aligned. Germany can't defeat the USSR for similar reasons that Japan can't defeat the USA.
 
Then its game over for the British by 1942/43 at the latest. By March 1941 they had a few million left in gold and dollar reserves, they were basically broke.

As already covered, this was the result of a deliberate strategy to tie the US as close as possible to Britain. If the US is engaged in international affairs then it will oppose Germany and support Britain; if the US is disengaged then Britain will be following an entirely different sterling zone strategy.

It won't be pretty, as British military buildup will be much slower. They could squander everything on Bomber Command, or find themselves unable to push convoys around Norway, allowing Germany to slowly grind down the Soviets. But nor is it a guaranteed failure, particularly in the very likely absence of a Pacific War. You could even make a reasonable argument that North Africa is cleared in 1941, as the British consider themselves too weak to help Greece, and that there is no political gain in doing so with a disengaged US, and hence push on after Compass. Probably not the most likely outcome, but not an absurd idea either.
 
Problem was the Brits themselves said the Tube Alloys project was a waste because it wouldn't be ready in time (even with LL) and eat up so many resources that there wouldn't be much left for more readily available and necessary projects. In retrospect MAUD would have been probably been cheaper, but without BC that means the Germans save huge resources themselves, the V-weapons projects aren't delayed by the bombing of Peenemunde in 1943, and the Ruhr isn't disrupted in Spring 1943, which means a LOT more German armaments produced and usable on all fronts. So maybe you have a nuke by 1947 just using British LL resources, but what happens in the meantime as the Germans are able to put a lot more into armaments to use against the Soviets, plus have earlier V-weapons to pummel Britain with without a BC answer? The Luftwaffe would save huge resources as well which can be who-knows-where.
The V weapons were of dubious value.

Yes they were technology advanced and whatnot, but it didn't take the RAF too long to figure out how to shoot down or 'flip' the V1 and cause it to crash in a field or something, and the V2 while impossible to intercept was wildly inaccurate. They are terror weapons NOT strategic ones. You can aim 1,000 at a specific factory and have all 1,000 land within 5km of the factory, maybe, but what if none hit?

Giving the Luffwaffe more fighters and bombers would be a far better use of resources.
 

Deleted member 1487

The V weapons were of dubious value.

Yes they were technology advanced and whatnot, but it didn't take the RAF too long to figure out how to shoot down or 'flip' the V1 and cause it to crash in a field or something, and the V2 while impossible to intercept was wildly inaccurate. They are terror weapons NOT strategic ones. You can aim 1,000 at a specific factory and have all 1,000 land within 5km of the factory, maybe, but what if none hit?

Giving the Luffwaffe more fighters and bombers would be a far better use of resources.
The V-1s were FAR more cost effective than the Blitz and certainly the RAF bomber offensive per Allied estimates:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb#Assessment
The V-2 and V-3 I will give you, but the V-1 was a bargain and cost the Allies more to counter than it cost the Germans to make. Without American innovations like the mass produced VT fuse and computer/radar guided 90mm AAA taking down V-1s is not really cost effective either.
 
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