Here is what I think is a possible Axis victory could look like
Ohhhhhh… my goodness, this comes up often. Let's give it a whirl.
- Hitler does not halt the army at Dunkirk, capture the BEF.
Fair enough.
- Only Bomb British airfields, not cities
That would indeed have been better strategy than the OTL Nazis used. It wouldn't have been enough, though. The grand total that the Nazis could have possibly achieved there would be… to expel the Royal Air Force from bases in the South of England, which left them perfectly free to use bases in the North of England (out of German reach) from where they could still fly over the South. IOTL, of course, the Nazis failed to achieve even that.
I'm also not quite sure where you're going with this, since I presume you're fully aware that it was beyond Hitler's ability to take the United Kingdom out of the war by force, and the Battle of Britain was ludicrously damaging to Hitler's air force, which means plenty of losses without much reward (since it couldn't have actually forced the United Kingdom out of the war). A better strategy, I'd argue, would be to simply not launch the Battle of Britain altogether. That would have given Hitler quite a lot more planes to work with, and if the UK tried to take the initiative against German airspace it would be the one with the disadvantage of attacking heavy positions.
If all of this happened, of course, Tube Alloys is still there, so even if the Axis are winning everywhere else they're going to end up with one hell of a nasty surprise (the Nazis were unaware of it, and their intelligence was so amazingly incompetent that they were certainly going to remain unaware of it) when mushroom clouds appear over the Ruhr and the Rhineland. So Axis victory is fundamentally impossible because of that. But for the moment let's leave that aside and analyse each point as it comes.
- Take Giblator, force Spain to help and join Axis
Force Spain? That would be Peninsular War 2.0, i.e. a very bad idea (and how would they attack? Over the Pyrenees? Very
very bad idea). I presume you mean that Hitler ought to have enlisted Franco's Spain. The problem here is that Franco didn't want to; why fight, when his nation is still recovering from the very recent Spanish Civil War and there is not much to gain?
It goes without saying that without Spain the Germans have no hope of taking Gibraltar.
Oh no. The Italians (with German help) vs the British in the Mediterranean? USA or no USA, I know who I'm betting on, and it sure ain't the Italians; it's the power with the larger and qualitatively superior navy.
- Tell Italy not to invade Greece, promise it to them later
This might have worked if Hitler controlled the Axis. The problem is, things were considerably more complicated than that. In fact the Italian invasion of Greece was deliberately conceived and intended as an act of defiance against Germany—Germany had acted unilaterally, without consulting Italy, to its own advantage so Italy would do the same elsewhere, i.e. in Greece. It was essentially Benito Mussolini's temper tantrum against Hitler—not something that Hitler could have avoided by fiat.
Still, it shouldn't be too hard to pose the Axis just leaving Greece alone (Greece would have been happy to be neutral) if Hitler were more adept at avoiding offending his ally Mussolini, so we might as well do that.
- Invade Egypt and move to Palestine
So the Axis should fight in North Africa, with immensely poor supply lines either overland across a desert with horses who can't eat sand or across a sea dominated by the enemy, thus essentially dooming their own forces, of whom they could not supply large forces anyway, to be cut off and defeated?
Just because they were foolish enough to do it IOTL doesn't mean it was a good idea…
while forcing Vichy France to let them use Syria
Tread all over Vichy France? That carries a significant risk of getting Vichy France annoyed enough to be…
unhelpful… when the opportunity arises.
How?
Now, Germany should try to make peace. Listing so many men and the BoB might force the government to sue for peace. Allow good peace terms like French withdrawal.
I really don't think this is likely. By this point, you see, Hitler had proven himself an opponent unlike other opponents. The British in particular had (infamously) maintained a policy for a long time of bowing to his demands, listening every time to his reassuring statements that this was the last thing he wanted… and seeing him lie, again and again.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me a hell of a lot more than twice, a lot of shame on me but I'm not falling for
that one again!
Negotiations, to be meaningful, require the implicit assumption that the sides will actually do what they say they will do. With Hitler, this assumption no longer existed; the British had (finally) been convinced that he would never stop wanting more land, that he would never stop being a threat to the rest of the world, until he was forced to stop. Ironically, it was Neville Chamberlain (after the invasion of Poland, of course) who put it rather well:
Neville Chamberlain said:
His [Hitler's] action shows convincingly that there is no chance of expecting that this man will ever give up his practice of using force to gain his will. He can only be stopped by force, and we and France are today, in fulfilment of our obligations, going to the aid of Poland who is so bravely resisting this wicked and unprovoked attack upon her people. We have a clear conscience—we have done all that any country could do to establish peace—but the situation in which no word given by Germany's ruler could be trusted and no people or country could feel itself safe has become intolerable.
I don't think I need to speak much for the mentality of the British government at the time; they spoke quite clearly for themselves.
Or, if no peace, then
- Invade the Soviet Union earlier
Why do you think so?
Where does he get them from?
Leave the west too undefended and you hand victory to the British by the back door. Hitler can't take too many men from there.
hopefully no men in the Balkans
Then where does he get (among other things) Romanian oil? The Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia could have been avoided by a well-chosen PoD, as (I think) could the Italian invasion of Greece, but for there to be no war in the Balkans drying up German manpower is a bit of a stretch.
Yes, that one's pretty unambiguous. Fair enough.
- Treat the Soviets okay, act like liberators
I should talk about this, I know Hitler and the Nazis obsessed over "subhumans". But I think the argument can be made to wait for after the war. And maybe use some Jewish men as troops.
Er… where do you get this thought? Racial policy was something the Nazis were pretty clear on; they weren't very good at tolerating deviations from it, or even mere delays in it, for the sake of pragmatism. Given the choice between using trains to transport his soldiers to where Germany desperately needed them to fight or to transport his victims to where they were going to be murdered, Hitler prioritised the latter. That's not indicative of a man who would have happily postponed his campaign of racial extermination until after the war.
Racial extermination wasn't some unfortunate side-part of Nazi policy; it was at the core of the whole thing.
And
- Focas on taking Moscow before winter
That's easier said than done… If more effort is put into the drive towards Moscow and less towards the other army groups in Barbarossa, the result is just that the Soviet defence (once it gets into shape) reacts accordingly.
- Also invade from Turkey and the Middle East. Turkey would be forced to join the Axis
!!!!
Talk about getting overstretched! Turkey can be easily aided by both the British and the Soviets (in fact an Allied Turkey establishes a connection between them outside the Arctic and makes it much easier for them to cooperate against Germany) and it's a very large country which would now have been driven onto the Allied side. It won't be easily walked over and forced to join the Axis.
As for a willingly Axis Turkey, why? What motivation is Turkey given to join the Axis?
- Get Japan to invade the Soviet Far-East. Promise them oil from the Middle East.
Japan regarded it as extremely important to
avoid a war with the Soviet Union. Japanese armour and doctrine were vastly inferior to their Soviet counterparts; they would be crushed underfoot (as indeed they were IOTL once the Soviets rolled into Manchuria, albeit not quite that decisively due to the less developed Red Army). And Hitler can promise the Japanese Middle Eastern oil all he likes, but he can't actually deliver any oil (or, for that matter, anything else) to Japan in any serious quantities, so what's the use of it?
It says something that even Imperial Japan, which thought that attacking the British Empire and the United States (each of which was a naval power that hugely industrially outclassed it) in the Pacific at the same time was a good idea, didn't attack the Soviet Far East. It would just be an incredibly bad idea.
- Kill Stalin at Moscow and offer peace terms to new goverment.
Conquest of the Soviet Union isn't as easy as just attacking Moscow. Perhaps it could have been done, but it's pretty hard. No government except a puppet
can accept terms from a foe bent on the complete annihilation of not just itself but all of its people; there is literally no situation where surrender would be a better choice for the Soviets/Russians/whichever-government-it-is than fighting on.
If not, wait and move to the A-A line.
An occupation of the Soviet Union would make all of Hitler's other conquests put together look like a walk in the park. The Nazis would have to control a gigantic mass of land full of over a hundred-million people (a population exceeding their own) who passionately hate them and who know the land far better than they do, all the while having exceptionally poor supplies and trying to keep a ready stance against the Anglo-American threat in the west. That's not easy.
If Britain is still in the war, move army back west while offering peace terms. If not, let Japan take Far East colonies.
…by which time Japan, which has obligingly attacked the USA and the British Empire, has already been crushed by the United States and the British Empire, and the USA (even if it is not at war against Germany) and the British Dominions are busy supplying the UK with all that it needs… and the UK (or the USA, if the USA is at war against Germany and has therefore taken over the project as it did IOTL) is preparing to turn Germany into a car park.
I hope that serves as an adequate response.
