Would the Allies win without Russia in the real war?

Interesting read so far, although I have not gotten through the whole thing yet (the site is huge!). Thanks for sharing.

@CWO:

@Narvik:

I spent some of my military service up there in the 80ties, and cant belive how Churchill in 1940 would think it was even remotely possible to walk 50 000 Brits over the mountain with no skies and no supply and no winter gear.

Churchill had a track record of cooking up grandiose flanking operations that looked impressive on maps but which were of dubious practical value, and a bad habit of giving a completely inadequate amount of thought to their operational and logistical details.  Gallipoli in WWI is the most notorious example, and the 1940 British invasion of Norway had many of the same problems: it was planned too quickly and too superficially, and like Gallipoli it was based on the premise that an amphibious invasion can be improvised by basically just loading a bunch of troops onto standard Royal Navy warships and throwing them at an enemy coastline.  As the Americans eventually learned in the Pacific, successful amphibious operations require months of careful planning and training, lots of specialized equipment, and close inter-service cooperation.  So it doesn’t surprise me that Churchill wouldn’t have bothered considering the practicality of marching several divisions of British troops through Norway’s mountains, in winter, with no special training or equipment.  Another place where he made this mistake was Italy, which was another of his pet flanking operation concepts.  His argument that Italy was the “soft underbelly of the crocodile” falls apart when you look at a topographical map of the Italian peninsula: it’s ideal country for a defender because it basically consists of narrow coastal plains (defilades in military parlance) flanking a rugged mountainous interior.  And to (literally) top it all off: where would the invading Allies have ended up if they had managed to fight all the way up to the top of the Italian boot?  In the Alps.

I think you make some very good points.

But the invasion of Africa was to secure Britains fuel links to the middle east.
Also I believe his intention was to invade Greece.

I do believe that in some ways the invasion of Greece would make some sense
as it could help with the Russians more readily once the fronts meet up.
Also a third of Germany’s oil comes from the Romanian town (or city) of Polesti

I’m picking Hitler for 2 reasons first I’m assuming that I’m Hitler here and don’t have him screwing everything up. So I take Moscow in August. 2nd and most importantly I don’t have to march to Moscow but ride in a truck/tank/half-track or fly after my troops have taken it.

@ABWorsham:

I find it strange that the Japanese used the submarine in the war to shell targets rather than hunt shipping lanes.

The use which the Japanese made of their military resources was sometimes odd – or, let’s say, less-than-optimal.  I don’t recall the details, but another example is the fact that Japanese military transport ships shuttling between Japan and the forward areas of operations (like the Solomons and the Dutch East Indies) would sometimes travel completely empty on one leg of the journey because of such factors as lack of coordination or cooperation between the Army and the Navy.  This was an inefficient use of Japan’s transport tonnage. Better planning would have ensured that outward-bound ships were always packed with fresh troops and equipment and that inward-bound ships were always packed with raw materials and other items needing to be brought back to Japan.

If you had to point to the biggest Axis blunder of WW2 it would be that Japan never attacked Russia.  Yes, they may not have gotten very far and the terrain did suck, but the real estate was improtant enough to Stalin that he had 100,000s of troops stationed there just in case it was attacked.  Once Stalin found out that Japan had no intention of attacking they diverted those troops, and that was what made stalingrad possible.  It can be argued that w/o that victory the Germans may have broken the Russians, captured Stalingrad and than than the oil fields.  Hitler’s idea that was w/o oil Russia would lose the war (and he was probably right).

Well considering Italian troop quility of the time, Italy may have decended into revolution even before the Russins in this case. :-o

The Allies would have lost. Hitler’s turning on Russia at the time and place he did was one of the biggest reasons his thousand year Reich failed when it did. I am sure most people on these forums have tried out the USSR neutral scenario. Just with them neutral the game becomes much more difficult.

FDR was playing for time prior to Pearl Harbor. He had already comment the US to a virtual state of war in the Atlantic and had sent Pacific naval units over to the Atlantic already. Maybe the atom bomb could have still shifted the balance. But the allies weren’t the only ones working on technology. Conflict with Japan was coming, their preemptive strike on Pearl Harbor brought the USA in too early.

A year since the last post