In a recent article, I commented about America and Russia winning World War II and, strictly in terms of total number of people committed and resources contributed, this was true but perhaps it's more fair if you make the measurements in terms of the percentage of a country's population that was committed, etc. Or perhaps none of that matters at all.
Of one thing I'm sure, if not for what England did during the Battle of Britain, World War II, as we know it, would have been lost by the Allies.
Without England, there wouldn't have been anywhere to stage for the landing on the continent. Any attempt to perform the landing from vessels sent all at once across the Atlantic would have been shredded by the u-boats so the only option would have been to stage in north Africa where England had defeated Italy and then Germany. However, there would have been little chance of getting men and materiel there as the German Navy would have controlled the Mediterranean.
With England defeated and possibly occupied, Hitler would have had no concerns about the Western or Southern fronts and the Russians took some while to push back Hitler's armies on the Eastern front so the German scientists would have had freedom to develop V3 and V4 rockets. They had already been belting England with V2 rockets which came very quickly after the V1 buzz bombs so it's probably a safe prediction that the V3 or the V4 would have had the capability for crossing the Atlantic to hit the US in fairly short order.
So this is where the story would start. I'm thinking about it but I'm not sure it would be worth writing as I'm sure if Germany had won then it would have gone the same way as all previous empires. It would have ended up overextended and would have collapsed under its own weight, just like the Persian Empire, Roman Empire, the British Empire, the USSR, and who knows how many other examples. Various stories have been written already and give differing magical answers to what would have happened if Germany won and subsequently was defeated but I don't see any point in that line of reasoning as it would ultimately have lost anyway; empires always do.
The part that interests me is how the rest of the war would have played out if England had fallen. Hitler certainly would have started chucking rockets across the Atlantic at America but what would happen next. It's likely that America would have caught up and started chucking rockets back pretty quickly as they weren't that far behind.
I'm pretty sure that Germany's development of nuclear weapons was stopped by a combination of British and American long-range bombing so this took place after America entered the war. Therefore, it would not have happened if the Battle of Britain had been lost and consequently Germany's nuclear weapons research would have continued uninterrupted. Meanwhile, America's nuclear weapons research was proceeding just as we've seen in the history books. Who would have developed one first is anybody's guess but likely Hitler would have blown up the first one at Stalingrad as he must have been so pissed when his armies, particularly his treasured Sixth Army, got thumped there.
I don't think there's the faintest chance that Stalin would have surrendered after Stalingrad was nuked as Russia is one hell of a large country. It seems likely that Germany would then have been working as quickly as possible to build more. As we saw from America's nuclear program, it took quite a while to build them so that would have slowed things for a while.
Meanwhile, after America hammered Japan's aircraft carriers at Midway, the outcome was pretty much inevitable but it was a flaming bitch to accomplish and it resulted in a whole hell of a lot of dead people in island-hopping across the Pacific to take the battle all the way back to Japan. However, the resources that otherwise were being committed to the war in Europe would largely have been committed to the Pacific so perhaps it wouldn't have taken so long.
America would almost certainly have known of the nuclear attack on Stalingrad as Stalin would have got pretty tight with Roosevelt after Germany had declared war on Russia and England had fallen. Knowledge of that attack would have spurred America's nuclear research greatly while they at the same time it would have been pushing hard on developing long-range rockets and the guidance systems to deliver them accurately.
My guess is that America would not have immediately struck after it developed its first nuclear weapon as it would have tried to build as many as possible to gain as much of a tactical advantage as it could. Germany would have been at a substantial disadvantage in any case as it had taken a great deal of territory through the course of the war but the Third Reich was managed from within a relatively small area.
I suspect that half a dozen or so nuclear bombs on Germany would have broken the back of the Third Reich. There had already been attempts to assassinate Hitler during the war as was recorded in history and, as we saw, Hitler probably would not have surrendered after the nukes but I think there's a very good chance the German military and/or the German people would have taken him out themselves.
Thus ended the modified version of the Second World War but in the follow-up, Russia had seen the damage from the nuclear weapons and, having directly felt the effect of them, it would have had even more of an incentive to build some of their own nukes in the post-war years. Perhaps this would have extrapolated out to exactly the same Cold War that we saw in the real history and that's why I'm not sure if there's a story in this. There's a story in something even if everything comes out the same but it will need some more thought before committing any serious time to writing it.
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