"Better Off Alone?" Topic

Better off, provided Mussolini doesn't attack Greece. No German involvement in the Balkans balances the loss of Italy in the invasion of Russia (though as per Spain, you might get the odd division. What happens to Britain in this scenario? Nowhere to win an early victory, or get experience for the new army. Maybe Churchill plans an adventure just to get something happening.

Would have allowed Germany to attack Russia much sooner.
That could have changed the outcome. Probably not as the US was eventually going to join the war.

Grattan54, it wasn't the Balkans/North Africa stuff that delayed the attack on Russia. It was weather. any earlier, the Germans would have been up to their ears in mud.

Despite an unenviable record (and hindsight being 20/20), the Italians tied up masses of UK, Commonwealth, and Allied resources for three years. If Italy had remained an unfriendly neutral, part of those would have been needed as deterrent, but nothing like what was required to actively fight. Imagine for a moment the Royal Navy not actively engaged in the Med and able to focus exclusively on destroying the Kriegsmarine. Even a "sideshow" campaign like East Africa diverted over 100K Commonwealth personnel. We also can't overlook the implications for the Pacific, and the fact that all of those Indian, Australian, and NZ Divisions that were in North Africa, East Africa, the Levant, etc., were not present to counter the Japanese.

While mon ami Enfant Perdus raises very cogent points, the Med was also a diversion of German resources – as were the Balkans – Germany by mid-war had too much front and too few forces to cover it – so I am going to fall on the side of "better off alone"

Now, it would be very interesting to think as per Enfant Perdus's thoughts in the East as to what those extra British/Commonwealth/Royal Navy assets might have done to Japanese ambitions!

Well said Enfant!

The Balkans is an interesting chicken-egg situation. The Axis invasion of Yugoslavia was triggered by the anti-facist coup, and I am not versed enough in Yugoslav history to argue how much of that coup was precipitated by Italy's failures against the Greeks. If the coup was bound to happened regardless, then that's that, and Germany and the gang still invade. If not, and the Axis does not invade Yugoslavia, then it's possible the intervention in Greece doesn't happen, or happens at a much smaller scale. A cynic might even argue that, from the German perspective, the stalemate wasn't the worst situation. Additional Commonwealth resources were tied up assisting the Greeks, but there was no realistic scenario where those could seriously threaten the Germans. A drawn-out Greco-Italian struggle would have not only have locked down those Commonwealth forces, but also denied Greek shipping tonnage to the Allies as prior to the fall of Greece, her merchant marine was not in Allied service.

An interesting "what if" with the Pacific scenario is the Netherlands East Indies. The Dutch were already pushed into the Allied camp before the Italians initiated hostilities. If those Commonwealth assets weren't needed for Africa and the Med, would the Dutch at some point prior to December 1941 have been agreeable to an expanded Allied presence in the NEI? At the very least, having Australian, NZ, and Indian divisions close at hand (rather than on the other side of the world) raises interesting possibilities.