Invading Nazi-controlled Europe with Britain under Nazi rule

Allied naval superiority will allow them to land in whatever peripheral point of their choosing,

The problem with this scenario is that the Nazis have clearly already established naval superiority over the Royal Navy in order to conquer the British Isles and as such it's up in the air as to what the Americans can do to take on this fictional Nazi fleet. This goes without mentioning ITTL's Wehrmacht has conquered both the British Isles and the Soviet Union by the end of 1941. The Americans should really be concentrating on defending the east coast from this Nazi juggernaut and their ASB allies.
 
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Where does the Reich get all this oil from? Because the Caucasus is easily in range of Allied air bases.
It won't be that easy considering the oil fields will be heavily defended by a far stronger Luftwaffe and the losses will be horrendous, even more so if they don't have as many British pilots/aircraft to help. It will take a while and a lot of attrition for any oil campaign to pay off.
How does the Reich out-produce the US in terms of aircraft, to prevent a 'respectable air campaign'?
The Reich doesn't have to outproduce the US to have air parity with them at first. CalBear's point was that this Ubër Germany will have far more resources available (including British tech designs) and a more powerful air force that any American attempt at a strategic bombing campaign will be many times more difficult with far more casualties than IOTL.
starting in October '45, the Americans will be deploying 2-3 bombs per month, and there will be little the Luftwaffe could do to stop even a significant fraction of them.
You need air superiority over a nation to deploy nukes in the manner you suggest and unless the Luftwaffe just magically disappears it will take years (far later than 1945) for the US to achieve air superiority/supremacy and use nuclear bombs without the bombers getting shot down by German fighters or flak. 20 Kt nuclear bombs aren't going to be a magic bullet against a Germany that stretches from London to the Urals.
 
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CalBear

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Leaving aside the utter impossibility of arriving at this situation in the first place:


Where does the Reich get all this oil from? Because the Caucasus is easily in range of Allied air bases.
How does the Reich get access to all of the UK tech? Are we to assume the British make no effort, at least, to destroy whatever papers/designs they had? They simply hand everything over?
Where does Heisenberg get the necessary stuff needed to make the joke that was the Uranprojekt to churn out A-Bombs?
How does the Reich prevent Allied occupation of North Africa, and a subsequent push from there?
How does the Reich out-produce the US in terms of aircraft, to prevent a 'respectable air campaign'?


With all due respect, I find the notion that the Reich could effectively withstand the US and the remnant British Empire to be implausible, even giving them the British Isles and Russia for free.

Allied naval superiority will allow them to land in whatever peripheral point of their choosing, and starting in October '45, the Americans will be deploying 2-3 bombs per month, and there will be little the Luftwaffe could do to stop even a significant fraction of them.
I agree that the scenario is one of those justthisclose to ASB ideas, however, if the scenario is accepted as put forward this issue is not quite as you present.

The Caucasus are not within easy strike range of any realistic Allied air base. It is fair to assume that a dismembered USSR is going to be severely restricted by any Treaty and will have a Reich that will be prepared to react with massive force to any attempt to climb off the mat (if there is one country on Earth that understands the danger of allowing a defeated foe to rebuild it is Nazi Germany). If the British are occupied the Italians have either taken Egypt as part of their rebuilt Roman Empire, or the Egyptians have thrown off the British yoke (Even if the British manage to hold on to Egypt somehow the round trip to Baku is 2,600 miles, until the B-29 enters service the Allies can't touch it, and the bombers will be unescorted.). Iraq fought a war with the British IOTL, one that they lost. Not going to lose it this time, not with the Britain occupied.. That effectively eliminates the best jumping off point for any U.S. attempt to move into the Iran. I would say that even continued control of the Raj is more than slightly questionable given the facts on the ground.

The UK might be able to get some of their most valuable people out, but it won't be all of them. Rolls Royce will not have its entire engineering department transferred en masse, there will be a large number of the designers, draftsmen, etc. who don't get out. Same situation exists for the rest of the British designers. Some of the people who are left behind will have the guts to tell the Nazis to go screw themselves, they will be the distinct minority and one thing that the Gestapo and SS were REALLY good at was making examples of people in motivate others. The British are not going to manage to pull out every physicist in time (If the Heer manages to get ashore it isn't going to take that long to wipe out the Home Guard, the British will be lucky to get the Royal Family and part of the Government out).

A better question than where does Heisenberg get the stuff needed, where does Manhattan? Did the British realize that implosion hydrodynamics expertise would be required once an implosion weapon was determined to be necessary long before the unsuitability of a plutonium based gun-type device was even know? If not, James Tuck, the genius who developed the explosive lensing system that made implosion very possible never left the UK (IOTL he didn't arrive in the U.S. until 1944). Same goes for Sir Geoffrey Taylor, who was also critical to the development of the implosion process. He was an expert in fluid dynamics, hardly the first person that would be evacuated for work on the Bomb. The number of Uranium bombs that can be produced is quite low (it took a full year to enrich enough uranium for Little Boy), so there is not prospect for mass production. At best Manhattan can produce one Little Boy bomb every four months.

North Africa was already touched on above, but with the British out of the war there is little to prospect of a successful invasion of North Africa before 1944, very possibly 1945 or later. Operation Torch was only possible because the Vichy French had minimal resources (and lacked support from a noteworthy segment of the French population). That is unlikely to be the case if the Italians have followed up on their reestablished Roman Empire scheme (which was close to Mussolini's heart). It is also very likely that the Wehrmacht would have a substantial presence on Gibraltar, even if the Rock has been returned to Spain. Such a force would make any effort in North Africa quite difficult.

The Reich now has the enormous resources of the USSR (at a minimum the European portion, although it is likely that "reparations" would be required from the rump USSR as well, to prevent the Soviets from reconstituting if for no other reason). The Soviets have considerable raw materials, factories, and a fully conquered European USSR, coupled with General Government, provided more than enough strategic depth to place factories well beyond the range of any American bomber force (in practical terms the earliest any effort to strike into General Government or further east would not begin unto 1949 at the earliest, when the B-36B (a rather poor platform for the sort of attacks necessary, as mentioned in an earlier post) is in full squadron service. Even then any strikes will be entirely unescorted (even the longest range U.S. fighter, a version of the P-82, only has a combat radius of ~1,100 miles, Berlin is 1,500 miles from the part of Iceland suitable for construction of major air base facilities).

If the UK is gone, the U.S. and Commonwealth have almost no way of getting at the Reich.
 

CalBear

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Couldn't the US just build a massive navy and airfleet after defeating Japan and basically exterminating it so as to have garrison duty(not advocating genocide simply stating in this case the Us of the forties wouldn't blink from it) and basically ramp up war production like 500% build a truly massive naval and aerial host, and launch a combined invasion from Iceland, North Africa, southern Persia to the Black Sea and then across Ukraine and perhaps even across the Arctic Ocean.
Short answer is no.

The U.S. was already producing at maximum capacity. Although a number of major warships were cancelled the U.S. can not ramp from 22 CV to 100 CV in any practical time frame. Same goes for aircraft, except even more so. Only a very few aircraft will even be able to REACH Occupied Europe, even fighters like the P-47N and F8B lack the range, and placing carriers within both land based air and what is sure to be a substantial submarine force is a sure way to lose decks (keep in mind this is not the beaten to a pulp Japanese Empire that never did really figure out how to use its submarine force, it is a Reich that has absolute ownership of the European Peninsula).
 
Assuming this scenario happens in 1941 or even a 1942 early on where Hitler avoided declaring war on the USA and Japan attacks PH as planned (in a previous post I explained how this was unlikely) you now have the USA building up and beating down Japan without any help from the UK, Australia and NZ will be on board with the USA because they are directly threatened by Japan. Even if the USA directs 100% of its effort to beating Japan, and even if the bomb project goes forward as OTL I can't see the USA defeating Japan before 1944/45 without the bomb which won't be available until the same time or later than OTL. Absent the threat of the German bomb the US effort is going to be allowed fewer resources.

Let us assume, just for arguments sake, that Japan surrenders in early 1945, the bomb not used or ready yet. What has the Reich been doing for the last few years. They have, in their own clumsy way, integrating the resources of western European industry in to their plans (like British, French, Norwegian, Dutch shipyards as a an example). Generalplan Ost is sucking up people and resources but also rebuilding the rail network in the occupied USSR to European gauge as well as improving it, building highways and other infrastructure. Even slave labor using hand tools can get a lot done. I expect the decision to put pretty much all "advanced" weapons research on the back burner won't happen, so by 1945 you'll see at least some of the more sensible weapons coming on line with bugs more worked out, and better materials for jet engines etc.

So now in 1945 you have Germany having spent four years reaping gains of its conquests and integrating things, being allowed to develop and build improved weapons systems. All of North Africa north of the Sahara is under German/Italian control. Any remaining independent countries in Europe and the Middle East are at best Axis friendly neutrals or puppet states. Best case scenario for the USA is control of North and South America, Greenland, Iceland, Azores, maybe Canaries. In the Pacific, the USA and ANZAC Control all Pacific Islands, Japan, Korea, maybe Borneo, DEI. French Indochina, Malaya, Burma, Thailand maybe - a lot depends on what happens in India. Persia/Iran, Arabian Peninsula a toss up. Sub-Saharan Africa is dicey, I expect South Africa will be Germany friendly - but what resources will the USA or Germany put in to scooping up the imperial possessions of UK/France/Belgium. China, don't go there.

OK. Looking at this map, not having the option of being able to put nukes on German targets that matter, and having just finished a 3-4 year war with Japan that was at least as bloody as OTL, what does the US and allies do now? Retaking the UK from Iceland is impossible, period, right now. Going through the India and maybe Persia - very iffy. Using the rump USSR as a jumping off point - sure once you build the entire support infrastructure from Vladivostok to the Urals. This will take YEARS and won't be a secret, so the Germans can do something about it. The USA will have its hands full keeping the Nazis from making inroads in the western hemisphere in various countries - IMHO the ONLY thing that happens is a Cold War.
 

CalBear

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Better question is how hard will it be to transfer things back from beyond the Urals? Soviets lost, they will undoubtedly be required to move back whatever they originally took out of European Russia to save it from the Reich.

That won't be easy, but with unlimited slave labor it is more than doable. It is also worth keeping in mind that the Reich managed to move entire aircraft and tank factories underground IOTL while the CBO was blowing the pougies out of Germany.
 
A better question than where does Heisenberg get the stuff needed, where does Manhattan? Did the British realize that implosion hydrodynamics expertise would be required once an implosion weapon was determined to be necessary long before the unsuitability of a plutonium based gun-type device was even know? If not, James Tuck, the genius who developed the explosive lensing system that made implosion very possible never left the UK (IOTL he didn't arrive in the U.S. until 1944). Same goes for Sir Geoffrey Taylor, who was also critical to the development of the implosion process. He was an expert in fluid dynamics, hardly the first person that would be evacuated for work on the Bomb. The number of Uranium bombs that can be produced is quite low (it took a full year to enrich enough uranium for Little Boy), so there is not prospect for mass production. At best Manhattan can produce one Little Boy bomb every four months.
I don't think this would be a big problem, since it hardly seems to have stopped the Soviets, French, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, North Koreans, and so on and so forth. The only nuclear power I can think of that didn't figure out implosion was South Africa, and they had fairly good reasons for it.

Granted, all of these people were going second. Granted, they benefited from knowing that it could be done and from knowing that implosion was important. Granted, not having Tuck or Taylor would delay the program. But the evidence is that once you know a bomb is possible and once you start really dedicating resources to it, it doesn't actually take that long to figure out how to build one, even the most fiddly little details.

(This does have the rather pessimistic effect of predicting that the Germans will probably get the bomb rather quickly, too, once they become persuaded it can be done)
 

CalBear

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I don't think this would be a big problem, since it hardly seems to have stopped the Soviets, French, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, North Koreans, and so on and so forth. The only nuclear power I can think of that didn't figure out implosion was South Africa, and they had fairly good reasons for it.

Granted, all of these people were going second. Granted, they benefited from knowing that it could be done and from knowing that implosion was important. Granted, not having Tuck or Taylor would delay the program. But the evidence is that once you know a bomb is possible and once you start really dedicating resources to it, it doesn't actually take that long to figure out how to build one, even the most fiddly little details.

(This does have the rather pessimistic effect of predicting that the Germans will probably get the bomb rather quickly, too, once they become persuaded it can be done)
You hit the most critical part, namely inventing the damned process in the first place. Everyone who has the slightest interest in the process understands the general principals now, Tuck, however, made it up from scratch, including the process of how to focus the detonation properly to get the exact shape of the compressed metal (wrong shape fails to achieve critical mass before being blown apart).

To use a somewhat related example, it took the Soviets, who HAD the Cliff Notes on the process, four years to manage to duplicate the physics package. It took the British, who had scientists IN Manhattan, including Tuck and Taylor, until 1952 to test their first weapon. It is true that eventually you can get the process in place once you know it is possible, but the fiddly bits are very fiddly indeed. Every month the process is delayed for Manhattan allows another month for the Reich to get into the game. By the time the Indians, Israelis, and Pakistan managed it the work could be managed by undergrads. same goes for the DPRK, although they are so short of resources that it was (and still is) a major challenge.

There is even more delay in the effort since the conditions that prevailed over Japan in August 1945, which allowed the U.S. to effectively conduct an unopposed field test with both weapons, will take years to achieve, assuming it is possible to achieve them at all. Unlike the Japanese, the Reich had a robust ADZ, excellent high altitude fighters going back to 1937, and a full appreciation of the danger related to strategic bombing. It is critical to recall that the WAllies IOTL managed to destroy the Luftwaffe by using the 8th Air Force bomber wings as an anvil that the 8th's fighter groups used to hammer the Luftwaffe flat. No escort mean that is going to be, if not impossible, incredibly painful (especially considering the long term issues with the B-36's defensive armament). Without the Luftwaffe rolled back a single bomber is never going to survive the trip to Berlin or beyond, be the attack day or night. The speed of the B-36 also means that they can't simply insert the nuke carrier into a formation, the required break away maneuver is literally impossible to conduct with a bomber box, it was exceptionally difficult to mange with the pair of three aircraft packages used against Japan.
 
What exactly is stoppping the US from invading the U.K./British Isles as early a date as OTL Torch?
 
To use a somewhat related example, it took the Soviets, who HAD the Cliff Notes on the process, four years to manage to duplicate the physics package.
OTOH, I have read that the Soviets would only have taken a year or two longer to figure it out even without spies in Manhattan. Ultimately, it seems that believing something can be done means that you'll figure out how to do it, be it ever so difficult, so long as it can be done and you're willing to keep going after it. And implosion nukes were very definitely possible in the 1940s, obviously.

As I said, I am therefore...optimistic is really not the right word here...I don't think the Nazis would find it so difficult to build a nuclear bomb if they put their mind to it, in this scenario where they have plenty of time and resources to use on the project. It would be expensive, certainly, and time-consuming, certainly, but they could do it. So ultimately I think this would end up in a Cold War where the United States tries to hold on to the Americas and Asia-Pacific while peeling off whatever bits of the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa it can manage, while Germany tries to stay on top of Europe, North Africa, and as much of the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa as it can persuade to come over to it. On the "plus" side, I guess the United States would find it much more profitable to promote democratic regimes here than IOTL...
 
The biggest impetus to the US bomb program was the concern that Germany would get one. Here with no war between Germany and USA after the Germans beat UK/USSR and USA is bust curb stomping Japan the Manhattan Project will probably be going on with a reduced commitment of resources, and absent at least some of the personnel from the UK. While the Germans may or may not get some useful information from Tube alloys research and personnel that were existent in 1941 (and not some records will be destroyed and some folks will escape or not even be identified) the incorporation of occupied territories and their resources, partial demobilization of the military and beginning to provide the "goodies" the Germans were promised, and research on conventional weapons will limit the money and resources to the atomic projects. For the Germans even more than the Americans any urgency to make the "maybe possible" bomb is not there right now.

Until you have atomic weapons and delivery systems that could take them across large distances (bombers capable of penetration/escorts, ICBMs/SLBMs) the Nazis and the Americans (and allies) can only nibble at each other at the edges. Distance and logistics make direct confrontation on a scale that would produce any real result almost impossible.

BTW IMHO in this scenario I expect you'll have a 2-3 year delay in the USA getting the bomb, you won't see the Nazis get one for a year or two after the USA gets one but given the deficiencies of delivery systems on both sides it will only make the Cold War chillier. Look at how long it took to get A-/H- bombs that were small enough and rugged enough to put on a missile, and how long it took to make them long range and accurate enough for intercontinental use. Neither the USA nor the Nazis can expect bombers to be effective against the other across the Atlantic at least until you get B-52 equivalents. Submarines with "cruise missiles" like the Regulus would probably be most likely to be successful early on, but these have severe limitations - limited capacity, limited range and the need to surface to fire them - make them a supplement not a primary striking force.
 

CalBear

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What exactly is stoppping the US from invading the U.K./British Isles as early a date as OTL Torch?
Lack of warships, especially carriers.
Lack of amphibious lift.
Lack of sufficient numbers of trained personnel.
Lack of sufficient supply chains.
Lack of experience.
 
If not in late 1942, how long would it take for the US to successfully invade the UK if they were determined to do so and wanted to use the British Isles as a springboard to invade Europe like IOTL?

How large of a military force would the Reich keep in Britain (including collaborators)?
 
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a rump Soviet state is always described in geographical terms, driven back to A-A Line, etc.?

What If Beria and/or his squads decide they have an unhappy fate and become the collaborators? basically turns the whole USSR into Gulag without the Germans fighting a guerrilla war (on the same scale.)
 
At least as large as the Soviets, assuming their program doesn't collapse from excessive graft (which is always a possibility with some of the Nazi bigwigs), so 30,000+ by the mid 1960s.

Calbear, I have to ask, despite seeing you as probably one the greatest sources when it comes to World War Two, do you think think that the Reich having 30k+ nuclear weapons, by the 1960s, is a bit wehraboo-ish.

Sorry for the label, but why would you think that the Nazis would gain great enough industrial resources to make that much nuclear weapons in the 1960s? Didn't you once post somewhere on the forum that even if Hitler had the full blueprints for an atom bomb in 1940, he couldn't build it because he didn't have enough of the resources to do so? Which one were you referring to? The implosion or the gun-type?
 
Didn't you once post somewhere on the forum that even if Hitler had the full blueprints for an atom bomb in 1940, he couldn't build it because he didn't have enough of the resources to do so?
TTL's Nazi Germany will have far more resources and time available (particularly from the USSR) than if they were still at war with the Allies like IOTL.

If the Reich isn't at war that means they'll be able to devote a significant amount of effort, resources, and personnel to a nuclear program. I don't know if they could build over 30,000 but surely they could build thousands of nuclear weapons considering they now have the resources of Europe from Britain all the way to the Urals to accomplish it plus many experts and technicians of their own.

The Reich was evil but they weren't as stupid as many make them out to be.
 
TTL's Nazi Germany will have far more resources and time available (particularly from the USSR) than if they were still at war with the Allies like IOTL.

If the Reich isn't at war that means they'll be able to devote a significant amount of effort, resources, and personnel to a nuclear program. I don't know if they could build over 30,000 but surely they could build thousands of nuclear weapons considering they now have the resources of Europe from Britain all the way to the Urals to accomplish it plus many experts of their own.
Mid-60s might be a bit extreme, but...they'll have access to many of the resources that the Soviets used to build theirs, plus all of the resources of everything west of the Soviets that obviously the Soviets did not have, plus an (initially, at least) better overall industrial base. The Soviets didn't hit the 30k weapon mark until about 1980, but the United States did in the early '60s, so it seems plausible to me that a surviving Nazi Germany would be able to put together 30k weapons by at least the late '60s to '70s...
 

CalBear

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Calbear, I have to ask, despite seeing you as probably one the greatest sources when it comes to World War Two, do you think think that the Reich having 30k+ nuclear weapons, by the 1960s, is a bit wehraboo-ish.

Sorry for the label, but why would you think that the Nazis would gain great enough industrial resources to make that much nuclear weapons in the 1960s? Didn't you once post somewhere on the forum that even if Hitler had the full blueprints for an atom bomb in 1940, he couldn't build it because he didn't have enough of the resources to do so? Which one were you referring to? The implosion or the gun-type?
Hitler didn't in 1940. In this ATL he now has the resources of the entire European Continent. The Soviets managed to produce 39,000 nuclear weapon stockpile, with arguable fewer resources than the ATL Reich would have at its disposal.By the late 1960 in the ATL being discussed, the Reich managing to build 75% of that total seems to be entirely feasible.

IOTL the Reich lacked the materials and manpower to produce either kind of first generation nuclear weapon. By the time it had acquired the access to the materials it was being pounded flat by the CBO (and had, for a variety of reasons, more or less walked away from its Bomb project). As noted earlier, there will not be a CBO ATL to derail any effort and there will be more than a few people who might be able to get the Reich program back on track.
 
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