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

I agree. Our difference lies in how much of a chance we give the Germans, but your scenario isn't necessarily an unlikely one.

Overy was British...and now that I look at the list I gave, most of them aren't Americans.

I will note that Britain seems to produce a lot of excellent historians, for whatever reason. Perhaps greater consciousness of and appreciation for history over there. It helps when you have pubs that significantly predate the United States.

 

Oh, OK.

If Germany loses this, I agree that the answer would be "nobody". Even the Russians are going to lose more people than they did historically, and their reward is...more Stalinism.

But what exactly are the British going to do with that air and sea superiority? The air superiority is obviously going to go into strategic bombing, but their navy just gives them a way to land troops. Which they will still need to do against pretty well prepared defenses.

A British D-Day would need to contend with lots of stuff that the Allies didn't have to. They wouldn't have near-total air superiority that they did historically, which means that Rommel's panzers won't need to loiter as much. They won't have the troop strength that the Americans brought to bear. Or a host of other things.

I agree that it's a lot closer without American Lend-Lease, but at some point you'd have to consider massive infusions of (unpaid for) equipment an act of war. Or at least a contribution to the war.

It's like me saying that the Germans could have easily won the war against Russia...as long as the Germans got tons of war materiel for free.

They were in better shape after the winter following Barbarossa passed.

You're right that the Germans probably aren't taking Moscow.

They were good at a lot of stuff. Logistics wasn't one of them.

True, but Berlin wasn't the only area bombed. Moreover, while 100 batteries aren't decisive, it's more a question of 100 batteries + whatever fighter cover + trained pilots getting shot down (very bad personnel management style those Germans had...) + whatever stuff you're no longer producing for the Eastern Front because you need to worry about the air offensive.

I will just reiterate briefly that Britain's industry (and even the Soviet Union's, which was a remarkable effort held together by desperation and duct tape) was not getting bombed.

Adam Tooze (The Wages of Destruction, about the Nazi economy) would certainly agree with you, but even he concedes that the Nazis got their act together before the bombing campaign hit them.

German production climbed in '44 and '45 with the enemy at the gates, their manpower depleted, and their factories either dispersed into camouflaged camps or smoking ruins.

I don't think it's fanciful to assume that an unmolested German war economy could have outstripped Britain's production, which was operating from a much lower resource base. The Soviets, for their part, had lost their industrial heartland and had a (theoretically) even smaller resource base.

But yeah, they're probably not outproducing both of them. Not that they'd need to -- even a significant rise in production would probably be enough.

It doesn't dry up. It just becomes a lot less dangerous, for two reasons:

1) British area bombing didn't work very well compared to American precision bombing.

2) The British don't have close to the same resources to play with as the Americans, so at best their efforts are going to be halved.

At the end, yes. Though the fact that the Red Army was motorized against a largely non-motorized enemy certainly helped.

That's a possible scenario, yes. But their logistics aren't so poor that they'll remain supply-free, either. Increased production of equipment will filter to the Eastern Front as the war goes on.

Though Africa was an odd case. They had to deal with British air and sea power interdiction. (Shoulda gone for those islands, Rommel...)

On the other hand, Germany remained a horse-powered army throughout the war, yes. Partly because they didn't have the resources to produce fully mechanized divisions early on. (And didn't get any American trucks).

They didn't do so hot during their 1914-17 knife fight.

Strip the mechanization away from both armies, and Russia probably has a hard time penetrating deep into Europe like they did in '45.

(Which I concede may never become an issue, if you're right that Hitler will just keep his men there to die in the East. The Russians can just stroll into Europe over the bodies of frozen Germans).

 

Fair enough.

According to Tooze's Wages of Destruction, Germany's leadership basically knew they were done when they couldn't take Moscow. He makes a pretty good case for it, too.

 

At a tactical level, the Germans remained better than the (often better equipped) Russians throughout the war.

 

But it wasn't all or nothing. The German position did not totally collapse until later in 1944, and the Soviets had their share of reverses before that.

In a world with no US intervention like we're discussing, Kursk wouldn't have ended the war. It would probably have made it unwinnable by Germany, but not undrawable.

If you want to throw the Indian Army into the meatgrinder in Europe, you'd better gear up British industry to equip them for a modern, mechanized war. And it's not like Britain's rolling in spare steel, coal, and oil.

That aside, making India into a feeder for another European war isn't going to do well politically. The fallout's not going to be pleasant.

They dispersed and hid German industry, which is a much less efficient way to run production lines. Even moving them like that is disruptive.

Though common sense does suggest that factories produce less after you blow them up.

Area bombing of civilian targets and/or factory workers' homes. Terror bombing.

And even if we concede that their tactics were as effective as the Americans', they're still working with a much smaller air force here than in our timeline.

It says that they got their act together too late, and that they'd chronically underused the Continent's resources beforehand.

On their own, true. Cumulatively, the effects of bombing + a second front against America changed the war from "probably unwinnable" to "doomed".

Who in your scenario will not be receiving endless buckets of help from the Americans, and will need to build an army capable of cross-Channel invasion.

I also don't think that the British gave the Soviets massive amounts of stuff. Though the Red tankers did like the Matildas they got.

It wasn't their style to "stay out" at all. They were going to punch Germany out one way or another in the real world.

But this debate seems to assume -- through magic wand-wavery -- that they will stay out.

So I think it's fair to insist that "stay out" means exactly what it says: that they actually do stay out.

True, but you do see my point, don't you?

It's one thing to say "We could have won the war on our own!" It's quite another to say "We could have won the war on our own, as long as we (and our allies) got constant infusions of American stuff."

I'm sure the Germans could equally boast that they could've won the war "on their own" (but actually with massive American support).


More importantly:

There's the question of how much America will keep unconditionally supplying Britain (not to mention the Soviet Union) even if we allow them to continue to do so.

 

...And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I'd rate Jim Jeffries at #4 if he beat Johnson.