Nazi Germany VS The Soviet Union

1939:

Germany invades Poland, overrunning it within weeks, followed by a declaration of war by France and Britain.

Despite the pleas of Donitz, however, instead of building U-boats, Hitler orders Raeder to continue on his massive surface fleet. Hitler decides the O-class battlecruisers will be continued.

All other surface ships (besides extra Panzerschiffle) of Plan Z will continue to be built:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Z

How will the Western Allies adapt to a different Kreigsmarine? Will the Lion class battleships continue to be built? How will naval warfare in the Pacific fare, particularly with less development of anti submarine warfare? How many ships of Plan Z could have been built? Will the war have ended sooner? Could the Western Allies landed earlier, therefore allowing them to take over more of Europe?

What do you think?

@martin-of-tours

Based on how the Japanese command and the decisions they would have likely made, there would have been almost no impact on the war. The Iowa class battleships, which were awesome, but arguably had little impact strategically would have had their resources shifted to speed up the building of the Essex class carriers, with little expense on the Soviet Union or the British. The US would not need to defend California or even shift resources for it-the US can easily just activate their militia (remember the Second Amendment). Japan would not have invaded (or even thought of) invading the continental US, and capturing Midway or Hawaii (a formidable task in itself) would still have made it hard, if not impossible, to win in an invasion. Japan would have needed more ships and men than planned for Operation Downfall, which would be impossible, considering only the US could muster that large of a force. Japan would also have to deal with China, the threat of the Soviet Union, and the British. It would have been a waste of a victory, as Japanese troops would probably have been slaughtered on the beaches of Midway.

Now if the Japanese political and military leadership was headed by people who know what they’re doing, then absolutely! This would have set the US back quite a lot. The Japanese then should have adopted a strong dug in defence, operating the capital ships only in range of powerful land based aircraft and submarines, coming up with an effective convoy system, and working with the army to coordinate operations. This could have taken up so many US resources to beat that the Soviets would have had a lesser victory at Stalingrad, and Rommel could have held out longer in Tunisia if there were less forces in Operation Torch.

The best thing for the Japanese to do, of course, is to attack the Soviet Union. The Far Eastern troops were grossly exaggerated by the Soviets (which the Japanese willingly believed after Kahlkin Gol), and replacements for the ones that have been siphoned off west were generally worse, with little training. The Japanese air force was less outnumbered by the Soviets than the Germans were, and had even more of a quality advantage. The Japanese could have easily destroyed most of the Soviet Pacific fleet in days, destroyed the Red air force in an even more total fashion than the Germans did, and captured Vladivostok. Japan’s decisions are kind of stupid when they basically thought that they had a greater chance of defeating the US, a nation that has had their resources not yet tapped in any way (except Lend Lease) than the Soviet Union, whose cream of forces were destroyed in 1941, their replacements almost always understrength (most Soviet cavalry divisions were less than a third of a real division, rifle and tank brigades were only a quarter of even a small World War 2 division, and rifle divisions were only half as effective as a German infantry division), suffered enormous equipment and officer shortages, and had horrible logistics. In addition, many Soviet units had little training, and were expected to get that on the job fighting, leading to huge casualties. And that’s the west! The Far East forces were infinitely more inferior. As for oil, Japan could have reduced American unhappiness by doing withdrawing partially from French Indochina and reducing operation in China, both of which are necessary anyway for mustering forces. Diplomatic decisions are much easier to reverse than military ones, and the US would have saw the invasion as a removal of a threat to American interests in the Pacific (both Japan and the Soviet Union would have their hands tied up). Coupled with a better German strategy, the war in the East could have been won in 1941.

I strongly recommend you read Nigel Askley’s books, who give the most detailed account of Operation Barbarossa, detailing German and Soviet mobilisations, production values, and reinforcements, all used for a war simulation. I haven’t bought them all and don’t read them entirely (only the parts I’m interested in), but they are very good books, and more are being written. The part about Soviet Far East forces (Volume 3B) is very well done, and they also cover the Soviet and German air forces and navies.

If you’re looking at physically discernible traits in posterity (i.e., the baby boom generation), I’d say they would require considerable epigenetic or even genetic alterations in the parents (i.e., the people living there at the time). That’s not a very likely effect from such levels of pollution. If anyone was affected in any way, it seems more probable that their overall health would suffer to some degree, but it would probably be difficult to attribute that to any specific factor. An extensive epidemiological study may be able to demonstrate some effects, but I don’t know whether anybody has done one.

Also, it’s uncertain how much of the oil even reached the beaches or the fishing grounds. It seems obvious that the marine ecosystem could handle less oil, over a much longer period of time, and at various locations, much better than the massive BP spill. So a lot of that WWII tanker oil may have evaporated, or sunk to the bottom, or gone down with the ship and slowly dissipated.

I don’t think that the war itself would have played a major role in deciding to either clean up or ignore any oil that may have landed on the beaches. If the oil would have arrived in a town like, say, Biloxi, then people would have probably cleaned it up because it posed a direct threat to the livelihood of the local fishermen. On the other hand, if it would have landed in a remote location, it would likely have been ignored, simply because environmental awareness was not exactly a major concern in the 1940’s, war or no war.

In each case, I’m only speculating - we’d need to look for contemporary reports to know the truth.

And of course, the petroleum flavor does little for the shrimps, so I don’t think too many were eaten.  :-)

@KurtGodel7:

@Octospire:

You make some ineteresting points, the strategic alliances between the French and Soviets basically doomed Germany to either fighting WW2 or being a sitting duck when the Soviets came a knockin’. Chamberlain could of been bigger than Churchill in the current popular imagination if he had of engineered a successful alliance with the Germans and then defeated the Soviet Union. You are very much correct that forging an alliance would of been very difficult considering the Pro-Soviet sentiments amongst the worlds elites, however I think with the right propaganda they could of turned the tide. In reality it wouldnt even have to be propaganda just the truth about the Soviet Union under Stalin, the labour camps and purges that were reality long before exterminating the Jews was even a thought on the Nazi parties planning table.

Germany and Britain had ties going back centuries that could of been rekindled in spite of French protests, the Soviets werent going to sit within their borders forever especially with their massive advantages in manpower and industrial capacity.

What is facinating about this whole era is how accomodating Hitler tried to be with the British at least at first, he wanted an Anglo-German alliance so badly just like the alliance between the Prussians and the British during the Napoloeonic era. Had the British been receptive to these offers or at the very least not signing their way into world war 2 by alligning themselves yet again with the French things could of been very different.

As I previously said I think the key would be proganda making the Nazi’s seem like the lesser of two evils and demonising the Soviets to the point where it would be essential for the British to side with Germany. It really shouldnt of been that hard as the atttitudes of the late 1940’s and 1950’s Western world illustrated. There was already communist uprising in China undermining the Nationalist government, how hard would of it been to demonise the communist way of life and show the world what life in the Soviet Union was really like.

Good post! :)

From a purely ethical standpoint, several differences between the Nazis and the communists occur to me.

The Soviet government had murdered tens of millions of innocent people even before WWII began. (And added considerably to that total both during and after the war.) Conversely, the Nazi government did not begin killing large numbers of people until its food situation precluded feeding everyone within its borders.

The Soviet government was bent on world revolution. Outside of communist-controlled areas, their focus was primarily on tearing down the existing social order and anything which supported it. As an example of this, David Horowitz (an ex-communist who’d been raised as a red diaper baby) noted that shortly after he got married, his wife attended a meeting of communists/radical feminists. She came home in tears: the radical feminists/communists had harshly judged her for choosing to stay home and raise kids instead of putting her career first. That was the last such meeting Horowitz’s wife attended. He went on to add that within a year, every woman who chose to continue attending those meeting had had her marriage end. Communists felt that stirring up trouble between the sexes was a good way to harm the existing social order. In contrast, the Nazis were generally pro-family, and even brought Mothers Day to German-occupied France.

Recently, a relatively well-known Canadian journalist decided to quit her career, and become an artist instead. She went back to school to obtain her art degree. She was successful in obtaining that degree, but she said it nearly killed her as an artist. The postmodernist (read:communist) opinion is that until the world’s sexes and races are equal, beauty has no place in art. Consequently, no effort should be made to make art beautiful. This journalist chose, as her subject matter, to paint the people who cleaned up the art room after the art students were finished using it. She felt such people were too often unnoticed. Her postmodernist professors harshly condemned her for this, and asked her what she, as an educated and well-off white woman, could possibly know what it was like to be a poorly paid racial minority. While the politicization and perversion of art to suit a twisted and evil political agenda may seem like a minor thing in comparison with the mass rapes and mass murders for which communists are responsible, I still see this as significant. In contrast to this, the Nazis tended to prefer traditional to modern art, and believed that it was perfectly appropriate for art to be beautiful or visually pleasing. They sometimes censored depictions of the nude human form, which they saw as decadent.

If the common people could be made to see these and other difference between the Nazis and communists, I firmly believe that most people would respond by becoming significantly more anti-communist than they were anti-Nazi. The problem was that Western elites tended to sweep communists’ crimes under the rug, while focusing excessively on (and often exaggerating) those of the Nazis. Outright lies were told, and believed. For example, Walter Duranty of the New York Times told a number of pro-Soviet lies, including the whitewashing of the Ukrainian famine. (A forced famine that the Soviets committed in the early '30s, which resulted in deliberate starvation and death of 7 million innocent people.) Against such a backdrop, it is possible to tell the truth without necessarily being believed.

While these things would have represented an obstacle to a NATO-style Anglo-German alliance, they were not necessarily an insurmountable one. But it would have been an uphill battle, even if both Hitler and Chamberlain were both fully committed to the idea, and even if the Nazis had been as good at understanding political considerations outside Germany as von Bismarck had been.

While with hindsight we can see what the Nazi’s were capable of, but we forget they were up against the wall and fighting for their very existence who knows what the British or Americans may of done in the same position. The fire bombing of Tokyo killing up to 210,000 a single night is just a preview of what the allies were capable of when faced with the massive casualties possible with an Invasion of mainland Japan.

The Germans in the early 1930’s were an intolerant towards Jews and other minorities such as gypsies but in reality they were not that much more intolerant towards Jews than the Americans in the early years of Nazi rule in Germany. Had the Nazi’s got their alliance and not surrounded on practically every side by Anti-Nazi nations it is likely they would not of comitted much of the atrocities they did in reality. As Kurt Godel quite correctly said the Soviets were already an evil regime long before the Nazi’s put the first Jew in the gas chamber. Had the Germans had alliance to maintain with the British they couldnt take the hard line with ethnic minorities and under take the actions they did in reality, I think carving up the Soviet Union would of been seen as more than worth the trade off of not so publicly persecuting ethnic minorities in the eyes of the Nazi leadership.

I agree that it would of been difficult for Chamberlain and Hitler to forge a NATO style alliance but as you say it wasnt entirely impossible and looking at the reality of World War 2 in a lot of cases the highly improbable did actually end up occuring. For instance the quick fall of France and decimation of Allied armies and also the suprisingly successful early U-boat campaign against Allied shipping in the Atlantic. I think if the Nazi’s had of been less agressive and built up their strength perhaps even getting a treaty where by their armies had free passage through Poland to the Soviet Union, that combined with a continued anti-communist propaganda campaign in Britain may very well of turned the tide of public opinion and made Hitler look like the possible saviour of the peoples of the Soviet Union. Of course had the Alliance materialised the peoples of the Ukraine and Soviet Union been treated fairly and with compassion as the invasion continued its likely that the Soviet Union would of crumbled under the weight of internal revolution and Anglo-German attack.

It would be the 100 million N. Americans against only the Germans plus the “desirable” races.

The massive extinction of these other people would not take place until everything globally were settled. I think the limited nature of the extermination would not be on the grand scale until America was dealt with. I think we are assuming a level of cooperation in former UK colonies akin with the French conquests, so the level of Serbian reaction would have been somewhat mitigated by the axis partners carving up that nation and exacting the type of ethnic violence that occurred much latter. Germany had a commitment to pit old enemies against each other in an effort to make their job easier.

The Soviets i feel would be somewhat difficult, but they did convert a few divisions of Russians who were against Stalin.  The middle east was another basket of potential friends who could be enlisted easily to fight the Jews. Germany raised a number of Muslim units in the war.

If Hitler was removed, the replacement would be far worse because a NAZI victory would remove all the remaining inhibitions against violence against what they deemed lessor men. The SS would have selected somebody like Heydrich who had the most firm convictions of their type.  The choice would have to be political leader, and not a military one.

On the German-Japanese partnership, i think they would not fight until USA had surrendered first. Once all opposition was gone eventually it would happen, but the Germans would have the best scientists, so the Japanese would be at a disadvantage.

Most of the transports and escort ships used to ferry men and supplies were Italian ships or in some cases captured French and Greek freighters.

the German navy had very little surface forces in the Med.

IL2 Sturmovik and the T-34 all versions for WWII. The MIG15 for Korea. These three had a tremendous impact when they first appeared on the battlefield. Got to get the AK47 in there somewhere.