If Johnson and Jeffries had fought close to their primes...

Overy's economic analysis of the war, for one. Give Speer the breathing space he needs, and Germany can equal Soviet production. German troops remained tactically superior to the Soviets until close to the end. Stalin started out with overwhelming advantages in production, but the Germans had wiped most of the Five Year Plans' gains out during Barbarossa.

Some of the historians who've been called upon to speculate on what would have happened (e.g., Ambrose, Burleigh, Lukacs) believe that American intervention was necessary to kill Nazi Germany.

 

Germany isn't crossing the Atlantic anytime soon. Neither is the Soviet Union, if they somehow beat the Germans.

America's not exactly sitting in a cheerful place come 1939, but it's boatloads better off than the rest of the world.

 

The U-boats had really hurt Britain's merchant marine, yes.

The Luftwaffe was basically finished as a cross-Channel weapon by the time the Battle of Britain ended, though.

 

They continued backhand offensives against the Russians (like Kursk was supposed to be) until close to the end. And that was with American strategic bombing, the threat of a D-Day invasion, and the Red Army getting American supplies.

Not nearly as many. The British alone didn't have close to the same manpower that the American/British alliance could throw around.

The second does not prove the first.

German production rose throughout the war because (according to Overy) it became increasingly rationalized under Speer, and (according to Tooze) because factories were becoming increasingly efficient after they learned what to do.

That does not mean that the bombing effort was useless. Quite the opposite. It prevented Germany from using its vast resource base efficiently.

Germany was consistently outproduced throughout the war by opponents who didn't hold Continental Europe. This -- according to Speer's testimony as Minister of Armaments after the war, among others -- was because they couldn't get the necessary level of industrial concentration. They were worried about bombings. Add to that numerous smaller headaches -- the chronic shortage of oil after Ploiesti got bombed, American precision bombing tactics against industrial nodes like Schweinfurt's ball bearings factory (which the British did not use), and even the resources diverted to the utterly useless V-weapons program in an effort to one-up the Allied bombing campaign.

Which was absolutely essential to the mobile, offensive campaigns they waged late in the war. They also received weapons, food, ammunition, and a bunch of other stuff, though.

The entire point of this counterfactual is assessing America's contribution to war, right? Well, allowing the Americans to secretly funnel the massive amounts of material necessary to keep the Soviet Union afloat is basically involving them by other means.

It would suck a lot worse to go through all of that and then live under a Red and/or Nazi Europe after 1945. At least the western half escaped that.

 

Mendoza was making a big deal about Britain being an island nation supplied from the outside, so I assumed his "control the seas" comment was directed at commerce raiding.

Obviously the Germans aren't going to be duking it out with the Royal Navy (and surviving).

 

Okay, so no US involvement at all? No Lend-Lease to Britain, even?

Depends if they win or not. Though I guess it's an interesting abstract question whether people could enjoy living in the sort of sick society that the Nazis would build postwar.

Most likely because:

1) Stalin isn't getting any of that American aid in this scenario. That means that the Red Army in this "timeline" is going to have even worse equipment supply issues than the real one did. They're also not going to be mounting the sort of mobile penetrations that they did in 1944. As Janitor pointed out -- no American trucks.

2) The Germans, on the other hand, would get a few extra troops that they no longer need on the West Wall. And no D-Day means that they don't have to peel troops away from the East. But more importantly...

3) German industry will finally consolidate its resources and get its act together under Speer sometime around 1943. No American strategic bombing program means that they're going not going to be "hideously undersupplied" come 1944. They're also not going to be wasting as much money on interceptors to shoot down nonexistent B-17s. And finally...

4) The Germans maintained tactical superiority throughout the war, and they were operationally much better. Now they're being pushed backward -- toward their own interior lines, and away from a Soviet Union with more supply issues than existed in reality. And they have gear, now.

I'd say it's a good bet that they would. They're not going to hold European Russia in the long run here.

Even the Red Army was starting to run on fumes by '45.

 

You're probably thinking of The Great Dictator. It was the role that got Hitler recommended as leading man for the World War sequel.