Would invading America even be worth it?

B-29_Bomber

Banned
How so? US bombers could reach Europe.

Sure, but not for bombing runs. They were delivering them to Britain, their air strip.

Google "Robert Goddard".

The Americans were still behind the Germans in rocket tech. They only caught up thanks to Operation: Paperclip.

Although they don't have nukes yet, they would have a long range delivery system that can cross the Atlantic before the States would

It's simply not worth strapping conventional bombs to ICBMs, particularly early ICBMs.
 

Caspian

Banned
In a general sense, the cost of building an invasion force capable of successfully invading the United States would likely be greater than the potential economic gains such an invasion would bring, unless you can continue to exploit former U.S. territory for a period of a century or more.
 
Sure, but not for bombing runs. They were delivering them to Britain, their air strip.

Well yes, but with Britain out of the picture for whatever reason (presumably the lead paint being drunk by the RN to get this to happen eventually weighed so much the island sank) the US is going to be developing longer range bombers, which means the B-36 is going to be top priority, rather than low priority it became as a result of Britain still being in the war.

Anyway, invading America in the 1940s is flat out impossible. As in, "I would sooner believe racist time travelers gave the Nazis ray guns, than they can invade America on their own" impossible. Even with Britain as a launching point, the industrial output of North America approaching full blast, and the two most powerful navies in the world to protect the supply route it took years.

The Nazis have none of those advantages. They couldn't even get enough troops across the English Channel to make Britain give up, so how on Earth are they EVER going to get the shipping and naval capacity built up to take on a country that outweighed them almost 3:1?
 
There's shitloads of money all over the place in America. I mean wowsers. If you could successfully invade it and strip it bare, you'd probably make a tidy profit. Americans are used to being bought and sold, just look at their athletes. Really, it would be so worth it. There's fortunes everywhere, just waiting to be harvested.

The trick is cracking that nut to get at the chocolaty goodness inside.
 
How plausible would it be to try something like quietly sneaking in terrorists?

It might be workable to make some kind of raid that terrifies Americans and forces much greater costs in security.

Going beyond a terrorist raid is lunatic for many reasons, and four fifths of them are logistics and naval.
 
How plausible would it be to try something like quietly sneaking in terrorists?

It might be workable to make some kind of raid that terrifies Americans and forces much greater costs in security.

Going beyond a terrorist raid is lunatic for many reasons, and four fifths of them are logistics and naval.

Something like a St. Patrick's Day Raid?
 
Pulling off a terrorist attack would be difficult. The FBI's counterintelligence abilities were getting better all the time, and on top of that the NKVD had extensively infiltrated the German security services as well as the United States, and if the attacks were judged to be damaging enough to the Soviet war effort (e.g. diverting resources from Lend-Lease) the NKVD would be pulling out all the stops to prevent the attack.
 
The only way invading America works, with space bat help or lots of butterflies, is under one of several conditions.
1. No nukes - therefore the ability of the USA to trash the invader (say Germany & Japan) in their homeland is limited. This includes the subset of the bad guys having a missile/air defense system that will stop all or almost all attacks with nukes.
2. Treachery/cowardice - A surrounded USA with bad guys on the borders, isolated gives rather than resist. Or, enemy agents manage to sabotage US defenses.

Invading the USA only makes sense if you either want to trash it in to a wasteland or to take it over intact enough to benefit from resources, industry, population.

BTW those above are pretty ASB
 
I see just ONE plausible way of invading the USA: in a civil war, one of the sides requests support from a foreign power. Said foreign power refuses to leave afterwards, and uses the degraded state of the country to occupy it. Even with that, the expenses would be so large and resistance so though that it would end in a net loss.
 
Would the Germans have a better chance of trying to convince the USA to join with them (say against the USSR or betray Japan) or risk losing possibly millions of lives to try and cross the channel to invade. Which in and of itself would be a logistical nightmare, even if they had foothold in say, the Caribbean. Or of course, nuclear war

Invasion is out of the question for the reasons cited above. It's the first sentence of this that got me thinking.

Suppose that, after Pearl Harbor, the Germans decided to keep the US out of the European war. This actually wouldn't have been all that hard, provided that Hitler was willing to abandon some of his territorial ambitions and focus on the East and the USSR.

This would require Hitler to disavow any ambitions in the Western Hemisphere, reach a truce with the British and make some accommodation with respect to British overseas territories. He'd also have to break with Japan and condemn Pearl Harbor.

I think this kind of deal would put FDR and Churchill in something of a bind politically. By offering the British a peace treaty and a guarantee of non-interference with its overseas possessions, Britain's war is over. It will garrison the hell out of the British Isles, of course, and fight with the US against Japan in the Pacific and Asia, but it's still not a bad deal.

Similarly for FDR, the temptation would have to be there to take the deal, which would probably be popular with the public. The US can concentrate on Japan and still help the British to build up their home defenses. At the same time, the Germans pull back from the Atlantic to focus on the land war with the USSR.

The ASB element to this is that it requires a sane Hitler who recognizes the perils of a two-front war and the industrial capacity of the US as an obstacle too large to overcome, as well as his inability in practice to conquer the British Isles.

I suppose if there's a hole in this it would be whether Hitler is willing to put up with a substantial armed power mere miles from the French coast. That part is a huge risk, particularly if the US chips in with its Air Force to guarantee British security. On the other hand, it would have bought time to conquer the USSR and consolidate its hold on everything else in Europe that it took over.

Thoughts?
 
No, again, that was very much a high cost, low result action.

I was thinking of a reverse Operations_Grouse_and_Freshman
with the aim of doing something like killing FDR.

I have no illusions that anything other than possibly a high result, low cost raid could possibly work out for the Axis.

The thing is, the US wasn't an occupied country at the time. You don't have the natural vulnerability to recruitment among the populace. Assuming, of course, this is an identical US.

Granted, German-Americans were a large ethnic group, and still are. In the previous world war, there was rampant paranoia that German agents would act against the US government. That alone led to the near complete elimination of German as a first language in the country. Assuming that there is an even greater German threat, the US would be quite backwards to risk letting an attack come in and demoralize it to such an extent that it would quit.

Just the sheer number of contrivances that would be necessary to facilitate an invasion would be folly. You'd have to have a US that practically deindustrializes before WW1 breaks out, have it completely ignore the plight of Britain and the USSR, refuse to send any form of Lend Lease, never build up its forces in wake of Japanese aggression, much less German aggression, never cut off the flow of Japanese or German funds, never work together with the various governments in exile to defend their colonial possessions (Greenland/Iceland et al).

Then the US would have to (a) ignore Britain as it capitulates and apparently gives the Royal Navy to the Germans (never having worked to ensure that it would go to Canada as they did OTL), (b) never making a move as Germany sets up sizable bases in Former French or British possessions in the New World, (c) allowing the Germans to integrate themselves with the various New World nations and bring them over to their side, (d) never performing any actions of their own to hamper German efforts to integrate their vast empire and keep the various puppet regimes on their feet.

Frankly, it would almost take Draka-levels of obliviousness for the US to never notice or react to everything being drawn against it. Yes, you could create a situation where some group in the US would act against it and start committing terrorist actions against Germany, but the US and the other allies (who do exist. We shouldn't look at the US versus Germany in isolate) would be doing the same thing against the Germans. And the Germans have a lot more people who would want to get their revenge on the (again) occupying forces. Frankly, it would be a covert, Cool War. And, even if the US gets behind on rocket science, they are quite a ways ahead on atomic science.

Everything, basically, would have to go right for the Nazis for years on end for there to be a chance for an invasion to roll out. And, frankly, even if they do manage to pull a thing off, slip by the various fleets, and land, the US should be able to rive them back. It isn't like their manpower is being split between three fronts, against one implacable foe who keeps sending reinforcements and a mountainous slog on the Italian peninsula and now to the beaches of northern France. And, even if there was a Zimmerman telegraph type of event again, I'm not sure how much good it would do.

tl;dr, the Germans would have to be so lucky that they make the Japanese in the first few months of the war look like broke suckers.
 
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