Poll: Earliest Possible Defeat of Nazis if Moscow Falls

When can Britain and the US defeat Germany with no Soviet Help?

  • 1944

    Votes: 5 9.1%
  • 1945

    Votes: 7 12.7%
  • 1946

    Votes: 11 20.0%
  • 1947

    Votes: 13 23.6%
  • 1948

    Votes: 3 5.5%
  • 1949

    Votes: 3 5.5%
  • After 1950

    Votes: 13 23.6%

  • Total voters
    55
Gotta go with the Atomic Card as well,

Addenda, the Nazis take Moscow but do they also take the Russian oil fields in the South? If not the Nazis are still at a disadvantage moving forward.
 
My thinking is that if the Germans do manage to take Moscow, it will be by the skin of their teeth. Either that winter or the following spring, the Soviet counterattacks will surround the 2nd Panzer Army (or whatever actually makes it into Moscow) and it will be a scenario much like OTL's Stalingrad, but on a larger scale.

Russia would have Ukraine with its food supplies and the Germans would not. Germany really needs that food supply. Without that food, famine like in WW1 would be in the Reich.
 
On the issue of the atomic bomb, I should point out it took until April of 1941 that efforts to develop it as a weapon, instead of as a propulsion system for submarines, truly began. From then on, any number of things can happen to derail the project or prolong it, so to assume that combat deployment will definitely occur by August of '45 shouldn't be taken as a article of faith. Even presuming such does occur, the maximum altitude of an unmodified Flak 88 was essentially the same as the maximum altitude of a B-29; I think that should be clear as to what it means about efforts to achieve mass nuclear attacks.


I'd recommend Rhodes 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb'. Its a good 400+ page primer on the Manhattan Project, and its antecedents in Britain and Europe in general. Reading into Rhodes one can see HLs point about possible delays in the path to atomic explosives, and points where it could have been accelerated as well. Low funding for research made for much of the time used. It often looks like it took a typical professor or research team more time to obtain the funds for a laboratory test than to preform the experiment/s. ie: When the US Navy started its atomic energy project in 1939 all of $1,500 was budgeted for the year.

Another delay may have been the unavailability of French research through to June 1940 to British physicists. Had that data been transferred in a organized fashion to British hands there might not have been a period of 6-10 months in 1940-41 while the British physicists determined he energy levels of a bomb might be possible. Or even with that data they might have miscalculated and dismissed the possibility, leaving the research remaining in power plant possibilities. There were a lot of variables through to the test of Fermis experimental pile in 1942. Development could have been accelerated or slowed and several points along the way.
 
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