India in World War 2

@barnee

An incident would not have been needed-Pearl Harbour still would have happened, just without Hitler declaring war on the US. The Battle Of The Atlantic would still have been won by the Allies, it just would have taken longer without the US fully committing to it. US participation would still have increased though, and if Germany did not declare war (which they should not, to make this scenario more likely), the US would have declared war on Germany in 1943. It might have been a different situation with a truce though.

HERE

Notice the machine gun on top and the men posted

Zeppelins

@Gargantua:

Where’s the option for Patton redeploying SS and Wehrmacht troops and whooping soviet but all the way to Moscow?!?!

That would take some reorganization and wouldn’t take place until 1946. German units would need armed, reformed and equipped.

Would the British and French allow a German Army rebuilt?

How would the communist in Europe react to a “workers war” of liberation.?

@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 decided to make a new video with a narrator. Take a look and tell me what you think:

http://vimeo.com/88172193

It’s widely thought that Germany’s conquest of Romania is all that kept the German Army and People from complete starvation. Germany brought by train between 300 and 400 million tons of grain occupied Romania.

Germany also had a few long range U-Boats that went to the U.S to get precious supplies. In the early years of the war, the U-Boats were welcomed as heros.

Read “world war 2 behind closed doors” by laurence rees

There was a secret part in the treaty between the french, british and poles which the brits and the french promised military assistance against a German attack not a Soviet attack and remember they did not help in the war between the poles in the soviets in late 1910’s and early 1920’s but instead suggested the curzon line (which the Molotov-Ribbentrop line basicly followed)

Also the soviets at Tehran were more interested in soviet post war borders than they were in actually winning the war and remember in 1943 this was not a certainty. They wanted to keep there pre 1941 gains.

This is just a brief overview of some othe parts of the book I suggest you read it. It is very good.

The brits and the french could have attacked the siegfried line before the germans finished it and probably would have been succesful and because they did not co-operate with the Belgium people (I don’t know the correct word) and the dutch because the later two did not want to appear co-operating with the allies because at that time they were neutral. The Germans had a brilliant strategy in attacking (the aaa territory North West Europe) and then following nit up with the tank drive through the ardennes they cut of the Elite French and British troops from the rest of the army. They shouldn’t have allowed Dunkirk and should have forced the British and French into the sea and this would come back to haunt them.

@balungaloaf:

without US aid assistance via lend lease, without the allied strategic bombing campaign tying up much of the luftwaffe and anti air defenses, and without the threat of invasion keeping millions of german soldiers in europe, the soviets would have been smashed before they could ever set up a counter attack.  if moscow was taken, the people would give up on their communist overlords and capitulate.

You alluded to the pressure the U.S. and Britain put on Germany; and I fully agree that pressure was immense. Even in 1940–before the U.S. was technically at war–its industrial production created profound implications for the balance of power in Europe. With massive numbers of American aircraft being produced and sent to Britain, Germany had to either a) find a way to keep pace, industrially, with the U.S. and Britain combined, or b) watch its cities and people be destroyed by waves of British and American bombers. The invasion of the Soviet Union was largely precipitated by the desire to allow Germany to attain the raw materials and industrial capacity to achieve outcome A.

However, keeping pace with the production capacity of the U.S. and Britain also required Germany to invest heavily in its own production facilities. That investment diverted effort from what would have been immediately useful production against the Soviet Union. During 1942, the Soviets out-produced the Germans 3:1 or even 4:1 in all major land categories of production, and even out-produced the Germans 2:1 in planes.

Prior to launching Operation Barbarossa, the German military staff had incorrectly believed that the Soviet Army consisted of 200 divisions. Divisions which had fought very poorly in the Soviets’ 1940 invasion of Finland. In the spring of 1941, the German Army consisted of 150 divisions; 100 of which were used for the invasion of the Soviet Union. But in the months after the invasion, the Soviets were quickly able to expand the size of their army to about 600 divisions. Given the imbalance of sheer numbers, it is very unlikely Germany could have prevailed in a war against the Soviet Union even despite its military’s advantage on a man-for-man basis.