"Logic of an "Extended WWII"" Topic

Apologies if this has been covered before . . .

I've occasionally seen ads for computer games based on a "Germany invades the USA" scenario (and I'm currently reading Philip K Dick's "The Man in the High Castle", which has a similar theme, and which assumes the war ended in 1947.

Typically, these scenarios feature Germans using the Maus, lots of Tiger 2s, Panther IIs etc. They're flying He162s, ME262s etc. The US has Pershings as much as 76mm armed Shermans and it uses M36s. For light tanks, they have Chaffees. You get the point.

However, something got me thinking about how the war could have resulted in a German invasion of the USA.

A German win at the Battle of the Bulge in '44 would have been far too little, too late. Likewise Kursk in '43. Really, after the surrender of the 6th Army at Stalingrad and the defeat of the Afrika Korps at El Alamein (both in 1942), Germany had no chance of winning the war. 1942 is typically considered the turning point. Without securing the oilfields they had no show. So to have been in a position to invade the USA, they would have had to have defeated the USSR in 1941/early 1942 ("The Man in the High Castle"'s scenario), and have already defeated Britain in 1940/41.

That means no need to develop the Tiger (even the Tiger I) or Panther tanks.

An invasion of the USA would probably have been undertaken with PzKfw II, III and IV tanks, 38t and other early war equipment, possibly with some repurposed Matilda II or Valentine tanks for good measure, with the assistance of the now Axis aligned Royal Navy. The US would have been defending themselves with M3 Lees, early model M4 Shermans, and M3 Stuarts.

Not so much fun maybe, but more realistic I think.

Cheers,
John

I don't think that you are supposed to put that much thought into it.

Re the US Navy, whatever was available in about 1942 I guess, without going into too much thought on the subject. It would be possible that much of it was still committed in the Pacific, but see below. The thought exercise was mostly about what the armies would look like (which is, I'm suggesting, not the late war style typically envisaged), not how to do a whole campaign development :~)

I also didn't consider what would have been happening in the Pacific. If Britain had been knocked out of the war in 1940 or '41, Burma and India would have been Japanese territory, as might have been Australia and New Zealand. Japan might have seen no need to bomb Pearl Harbour so the US might not have even been involved yet. So maybe no M3 Lee or M4 Sherman! Who knows?

Too much thought? Isn't that what we do? ;~)

Cheers,
John

Absent early Wunderwaffen -- and maybe even with them -- I don't think Germany can defeat the USSR. If Stalin gets war production going east of the Urals, it's just too late for Germany. Germany will never be able to keep up with Soviet output of war materiel and the Soviets will never run out of soldiers.

If Hitler strikes even earlier and just drives across the south (rather than trying to take Leningrad and Moscos at the same time) -- across Ukraine, past Rostov-on-Don, and down to Georgia and Azerbaijan -- he could possibly capture the Baku oil fields.

They can fuel the German army in Russia, but I don't think that much of that fuel ever gets the thousand-odd miles back to Europe because the bulk of the Soviet army is still intact and hitting that supply line.

So … what if Germany has atomic bombs and long-range bombers by, say, 1937? Can it defeat the USSR decisively and turn on Europe?

I can see a viable scenario where France collapses on cue in mid-1940 but Churchill does not become Prime Minister; a compliant Vichy government turns over its fleet to Germany intact and with that help, and and the threat of invasion in the late summer of 1940 -- or an actual invasion that succeeds in seizing England up to the line of the Trent and Welsh marches, say -- Britain sues for peace and becomes a German satellite and the Royal Navy is also assimilated into Germany's war plans. These combined European navies plus the U-boat menace allow Germany to threaten the USA with an amphibious invasion to a degree (and what's Canada status at this point? Does it become an anti-German redoubt, or a submissive "Vichy" dominion? Could it be a staging ground for a land invasion by Nazi armies transported there?)

The UK would never surrender, in the dark days they had plans to move the government and the royals to Canada and continue the war.

The real key to German victory is not military, it's diplomatic. France falls and at that moment Germany needs clear diplomacy to stop the war with Britain.

Germany has no interest in Sub-Sharhan Africa, give the British back all their POWs to start negotiations, just after Dunkirk. Offer all French colonies in Southern Africa, South America to the UK and 1/2 the French fleet.

Germany installs a more pro-Axis leader in France and Italy gets the French North African colonies. What Germany gets is a united Western Europe, a neutral UK, and then invades USSR with 7 million "allied" French, Dutch, Italian, etc troops alongside the German army.

Stalin falls out an 8 story window and someone else takes power and lets Hitler have everything west of Moscow in return for recognition of the new Russian government.

Only then could Germany think about crossing the Atlantic to fight the USA. The Germans would have come up against the T-34 and the KV series tanks so they would have developed both the Tiger I and the Panther.

With UK neutral and the rest of Europe on their side the Germans could invade the USA but good luck sustaining the invasion force with that long supply line.

Mike Bunkermeister Creek
Bunker Talk blog

I've long ago rejected any possible scenario for a successful or even marginally significant German invasion of the US. I think the progress of the war was essentially inevitable, and there is no "linchpin" of history which would have made it turn out other than it did. Germany was defeated before the first tank blitzkrieged into Poland, and Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was just the start of its inevitable collapse into defeat. But even if Germany had been able to launch something, they simply could no more have hoped to conquer the USA than they could the USSR. America is just Too Damn Big. There aren't enough planes, tanks, ships, or men to take her over, and what you might temporarily hold will shred your men to pieces. You think the French Resistance gave the Nazis hell? Can you imagine what they'd have faced across the 48 states? Panzers-schmanzers. There'd be Nazi corpses hanging from every telephone pole from Long Island to lower LA.
So why did an invasion work the other way around?
Well, first of all the Allies were a multitude of nations and people all dedicated to liberating Europe— Nazi Germany didn't have either the numbers or the commitment.
Secondly, compared to the US of A, Germany is a frickin' postage stamp. It's easy to invade what in America would be a single, medium-sized state. 48 of ‘em? Not so much. Heck, Texas alone is nearly TWICE the land area of Germany. Yeah, the USA may not all be heavily populated, but that's a LOT of territory to cover— Thirty times as much territory as Germany.
In short, an invasion of America was never gonna happen. Ever. Which any competent general could have told Hitler, assuming the nutjob was gonna listen.
Same for Japan.
But the other way around? Comparatively easy peasy.

People in postage-stamped nations shouldn't poke a nation that spans across a continent.

Early nukes for Germany ending the war in Russia and deterring the USA?
Still, I can't think of an invasion of the USA even remotely possible shortly after that.

I don't mind alternative history but, to me it has to make sense. I highly doubt that German could have moved an invasion fleet across thousands of miles to the US, under air and naval assault. Plus, how many troops could they really land verses a nation of 150,000 million people that would have put up a fierce resistance. Too improbable for me to take seriously.

"What if's" of invading the US like this make me think of the Richard Pryor line about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor- They saw the laid back Californians and assumed all Americans were like that, but didn't know about the people in Louisiana and Mississippi that have to be kept on leashes in the basement (paraphrasing from memory)

People in postage-stamped nations shouldn't poke a nation that spans across a continent.

Unless your plan is to lose and get a nice piece of the Marshall Plan!

Just don't invade New York during an air raid drill or you'll accidentally win.

Roaring mice aside, though, Parzival makes a very good point. The USSR, USA, and China were all too big for a small country to hold. Japan did better than expected, occupying or controlling a very large piece of the most populous parts of China, as well as taking over Southeast Asia and pushing the British out of Malaya.

That was probably it for Japan, though. Could they have conquered India as well? or Australia? And if not, why force the US into the war?

"Absent early Wunderwaffen -- and maybe even with them -"

I doubt even a secret Nazi UFO invasion fleet would have made a difference (though it's ability to drop large amounts of paratroops would have been impressive… ;-)

‘People in postage-stamped nations shouldn't poke a nation that spans across a continent.‘

Looking at the UK…looking at India.

Looking at the UK, looking at China.

Looking at Spain, looking at South America.

I think the key is how divided that nation is. In the 1940s, yeah, Russia and the US were very united.

But if they were not? Then there are opportunities.

But in the 1940s, even a German united Europa with no conflicts with Russia and the UK would need a decade of dedicated war level industrial output to build an invasion fleet to attempt such an invasion, not to mention the completely unsustainable logistics train.

The only way such an invasion would be sustainable would be with a very divided US, or a very willing Canada to serve as a supply base. That's jus fantasy.

The scenario is like the original Red Dawn movie, absurdly silly but still entertaining, despite the impossibility of it.

Sometimes a rule of thumb has a few pinkies mixed in. But I will also point to technological disparity in the counter-examples. And, as acknowledged, a greatly divided political structure and sense of nationhood.
But in the case of WWII, the technological and economic capabilities of the USA were on par with if not greater than the same in Germany and Japan, and the USA was a fully-united country with a strong sense of nationhood. The USSR a little less so on all fronts, but still not something one should poke— especially when one is going around poking everybody else! (Japan at least figured that one out… but it didn't save ‘em.)

Of course any "what if" scenario has to involve things that, by definition, didn't (couldn't?) happen. The discussion here has been interesting. I agree that Germany had already encountered T34s and KVis and KViis. But they had also already encountered Mathilda ii and Char Bis thanks that were technically superior to the German tanks. But they kept using PzKfw1-4 because they were winning battles and the war. If they had defeated the USSR, they probably would have reacted the same way, especially given that the US had M2 'medium' tanks at the time as their main equipment. Technological innovation tends to follow need, and a win in 1941 would have indicated no, or little, need to replace existing designs.
Cheers,
John