I don't think the UK was on the ropes. They didn't capitulate, won the battle of Britain and continued the blockade which forced Germany to head East in search of resources earlier than planned.

The Russkies could only defeat the Wehrmacht while they were so far from Germany. Germany took the Ukraine and Russia was literally starving. Without lend lease Russia would have been incapable of feeding the army required to go all the way to Berlin. Remember that Stalin had persecuted all the the most productive farmers a decade earlier.

I don't know what would have happened without US intervention. Germany's military was stretched thin and their fuel and food situation was dire, the Royal Navy's blockade and Russia's ability to keep throwing men into the meat grinder makes it highly unlikely that Germany could win the war. Maybe a peace would have been signed eventually.

The Germans were already on the defensive by the time lend- lease started to have a major effect. It certainly helped the Soviets win though. Without it, I think there's a stalemate in the East.

You’ve got fingertip access to a world of WWII history.

I’m not asking you to read a book.

Just watch YouTube, OK?    maybe you’ll learn something.

Germany could never invade with England having the most powerful Navy at the time. Any landing invasion would have been sunk.

You realize 85% of German combat power was on the eastern front right?
ETA I've read all of Col. Glantz's books for starters.

This. Handing over military command to a foreign country, no matter how close an ally, is telling. Can you imagine the US ceding it's military authority over to a foreign power? What kind of crisis would we have to be in to allow that?

you have to give the British credit for being obstinate and tough in their absolute resolution to keep fighting until they could get the Americans in... and that played a large role in America's steadily increasing support of them.

They were in a bad way after France... from what I understand the British Army was the first fully motorized force in the war, and they left all their heavy equipment, guns and vehicles in France when it fell... they had very little to fight with in Britain.

They did not perform very well post France... they beat up on the Italians, but the Germans humiliated them in Greece and when they sent a rather small force to bail out the Italians in Africa they were of course pushed back all the way across to Egypt.... when they finally got a commander who was patient enough train his army until he thought it was ready, and husband American equipment until he had overwhelming force advantage, along with the Royal Navy strangling the Axis of supply in North Africa... then they had a great performance and tide turning victory.

My point is they were biding their time, and credit to them to keep fighting any and every way they could... but it was not going particularly well. In fairness Churchill was impatient for action and not much of a "warlord"..

Back to back World War Champions!

.

Holy shit you're delusional. The UK would have never won alone.

I may disagree with Funky, and he can be a cheeky bloke, but our ancestors did win together.

If this isn't Churchill with hat in hand.....

"and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."

Where's our posh british translator? Nevermind, I'll give it a go. If you, the mighty USofA, do not join the fight, we are pretty much going to be Germans.

Disagree with your first paragraph - Agree with your second.

Germany was not winning the war against Britain at that time.  Britain was safe in our own right.  We were certainly in the thick of a hard fight, for sure.  Had we been hemmed in to our own island, unable to get out and only able to defend while losing strength, then I would agree that we were losing, but that is not what was happening.

Africa is not Britain. Nor are Greece, the Balkans or any other part of Europe. In fact, North Africa was under Italian or French colonial rule.

Our war for our survival in Britain was won in 1940.  We were by that point taking the fight the enemy on behalf of other countries.

We were hunting the Kriegsmarine and taking the fight to them in the Atlantic. The Hood was indeed a loss, but so was the loss of the Bismarck to Germany. Tirpitz never made it beyond the Norwegian Fjords, and the Graf Spee never made it past 1939.  The Royal Navy and RAF had superiority over the Channel and North Sea and had the Kriegsmarine surface raiders pinned in.  The U-boat attacks on convoys saw terrible losses, but we were countering it more and more effectively and had the Naval Enigma machine by May 41.

We had control over much of the Med and had hit Taranto causing fair amount of damage to the Italian fleet although not inflicting enough damage to render it defeated, won the Battle of Cape Matapan and were defending Malta.  Our biggest defeat in that time was the defence of Crete but we inflicted terrible losses on the Germans.  We didn't gain solid control of the Med until the Italian surrender in '43.

Most of North Africa was under French and Italian colonial rule. Italians had attacked British forces in Egypt and General Archibald Wavell launched a 500 mile offensive ending at El Agheila on 7 February 1941 with the destruction of nine Italian divisions and the capture of 130,000 men.  Germany with Rommel in command entered in '41 and and attempted to make inroads into Egypt again. There, front lines moved back and forth but Allied forces held and drove back the Axis forces offensives throughout '41 - with Rommel unable to progress because of supply line interference and over extension, and Allied resistance posing a serious threat of breakout form Tobruk. it was November 41 and Operation Crusader that forced Rommel back to El Aphelia in Italian ruled Libya prior to El Alamein in '42.

We had also been taking the fight to Germany and undertaking large strategic bombing campaigns - the first being against Mannheim in December 1940 and continued throughout 1941 and the rest of the war, as well as precision strikes against German railyards, and other transport infrastructure, airfields, and shipping, including the naval yards at Keil.

We were also starting to run convoys to Russia by Aug '41 and supplying them with British hardware.

I understand what you are saying - Germany and the axis powers were winning against other countries for sure. That does not mean Britain was losing, though. Britain was safe and it was British forces that were fighting the Axis expansionism across Europe and North Africa.

Did we want the US in the war effort? - Absolutely - Nobody wants to go it alone against the Axis powers, and a long an protracted war of attrition would have been extremely costly.  It is unlikely that we would have been willing to stomach the huge cost if liberating the whole of Europe by ourselves.

I'll drink to that.

Controlling of almost all of Europe, western Asia & North Africa the German were hardly out of resources.

do not forget that during this timeline 70-80k British and Commonwealth troops surrendered at Singapore... I think the worst defeat they'd ever had... it was kind of one disaster after another.

And the vaunted Royal Navy got their asses handed to them by the Japanese.

Africa was a sideshow. Hitler only wanted Rommel to shore up the Italians.  Rommel instead took the offensive.  As Rommel complained frequently, until Malta was captured, supplies from Italy would always be tenuous.   The German effort didn't really pick up until after Rommel was being chased out of Libya.  That's when the 5th Panzer Army was created.  Too little, too late and still Malta was held by the British.  British control of the Med. ensured that the Axis effort in North Africa was doomed.

However, that does not extend to projection into Sicily or mainland Italy.  Specialised ships were needed and Britain could not have survived without the immense American ship building program. You can't build a destroyer and freighter concurrently (material, tradesman, slipway).  Canada certainly helped out but America dwarfs the Canadian assistance.

Lacking radar, Regia Marina was fighting at a disadvantage.  They also started the war with only enough fuel for 6 months of fighting.  It was the smaller units like Decima Mas that put the hurt on the Royal Navy.  It wasn't enough though to offset British superiority.

Between Dunkirk and Montgomery the Brits were fucked. North Africa was a clusterfuck too.

yeah I think many people don't realize the "Afrika Corps" was put in there simply to keep the Italians from defeat... I don't think it was even two divisions.. elements of a light mechanized and a panzer division.

what Rommel(along with Italian units) was able to accomplish against the British was... not good, particularly from a propaganda perspective.... many in the German command thought he was a nut wasting his scant resources in offensive operations.. was sent there as a holding force.

Considering that the once great British Empire was completely bankrupted and dismantled after fighting two world wars, even with a bit of American help, it seems disingenuous to claim that they could have won, without it.    Economically, politically, spiritually. Britain was spent.    It was a close run thing, even With America on your side.

US strategic bombing had no effect on German industrial output.  It steadily increased as the intensity and frequency of US bombing raids increased.

It won the war in an unintended way however.

More than a million men were tied up in Germany fighting the allied bombing offensive.

Something like 80-90% of all 88mm flak guns were used in AAA role in the west.

Interestingly something like 20% of Soviet tanks were destroyed by the 88mm flak gun.

Take 1 million more Germans to the east with their 88mm flak guns and Germany is able to stabilize and maybe win a favorable peace like they did in WW1.

This is the quantifiable effect of the allied bombing campaign.  That and the fact that the Luftwaffe lost something like 80% of their aircraft trying to stop the bombing in the West.  Those aircraft transferred to the East also heavily stacks the deck in Germany’s favour.

No matter what @Agent_funky is an asset to the site and belongs here.  It's good to get perspective from across the pond.

One of these days we shall meet.

It'll be like two football hooligans. Blood will be shed. Noses might be broken. Then all the single malt in the establishment will be drank in good health.

Then maybe we can toss a few cars on end or blow something up. Not sure if you are still allowed to play with explosives, but we've got some stuff that'll put a toothy grin on your British face.

I'm no history scholar, but, I do recall that Winston Churchill was afraid that Britain was about to lose and was quite relieved when the US finally entered the war. Even with the US in the war, it was still no cake walk for either the US or Britain to finally defeat the Germans. It could have gone either way, except, for the fact that Hitler made some strategic blunders with his men in France and on the Eastern Front with Russia. Can you imagine Britain conducting D-Day without US troops? That right there alone says that anyone who believes that the US entered the war when Britain was winning is either a liar or a fool. Do they seriously believe that Britain could have won if the Japanese didn't bob Pearl Harbor??

Britain got its ass handed to it at Dunkirk.  They left men and materiel on the beach.  It was not the same after that.  An invasion by Germany would have been a bloodbath, but the Germans weren't relying on that.  They were working on their own WMD programs, they had the first jet, and they were perfecting long range ballistic missiles (think: Werner von Braun.)  They were tinkering with nuclear.  Germany was going to hammer Britain into submission from a distance and then turn its technological might against the Soviets and do the same to them.  Then the U.S. entered and Germany was, literally, sunk.  If Germany had lasted another year or two, there's no telling what they would have come up with.

The Royal Navy won WW1.  The Germans were completely blockaded and starving.

They tried fighting the British once at sea, and never tried it again, and starved as a result.

The British Army is most directly responsible for the Allied victory on the battlefield in WW1.

After Verdun the French were a spent force.

After the Ludendorff offensive of 1918, the Germans were spent.

The British Army was still able to function and maintain offensive operations.  By mid 1918 it was tactically and technologically in a class of it's own.  The British Army was the only one left standing.

The British were going to win anyway, America's entry was the final nail in the coffin.

US assistance in WW1 was far less than WW2.

Good post. I’d only quibble on ETA2 that our entrance provided a strength that forced worse terms on Germany.

how can you say better? Without both ww1 and WW2,  there is no Pax Americana

Agree with this.  America was icing on the cake in WWI.  America's industrial might won WWII.  The sleeping giant was woke.

Winning? No the Brits were getting their asses handed to them, as the surrender of Singapore and the evacuation at Dunkirk show.

They didn't really win many major engagements in WW 2 without US support or as anything other than as part of a US led offensive.

Typical European ingratitude there. They're happy to have more capable people, i.e. Americans, defend them and foot the bill for their defense, all the while denigrating the US.

Those sad sacks can't even deploy two moderately capable warships to the Gulf nowadays.

You need to read more history books.

The Germans tried playing the naval warfare game with the Royal Navy and got their shit pushed in everytime:

Graf Spee, scuttled and trapped by the Royal Navy.

Bismarck, sunk by the Royal Navy.

Tirpitz, sunk by the RAF.

Scharnhorst, sunk by the Royal Navy.

On land the British won the war in North Africa, in large part because the Germans couldn't get past the Royal Navy in the Med, to supply the Afrika Korps.  Rommel and the Afrika Korps were finished after defeat by the British at the 2nd Battle of El Alamein.

WW2 was a war for oil and ideologies.  The Germans could only get it in 2 places, the Soviet Union or the Middle East.  The British stopped Rommel from seizing the oil fields of the Middle East.

Frankly, the Germans lost the war because they ran out of gas more than anything else.

I know it doesn't fit the 8th grade American narrative of WW2, but the British won the war in the West once Montgomery stopped the Germans from getting the oil fields in the Middle East.

From that point on for the Germans, it was take the oil fields in Southern Russia or lose the war.  Knowing the Middle Eastern oil fields were no longer a viable option is a large part of the reason Hitler made a stupid decision at Stalingrad.  The Germans had to win a strategic victory in southern Russia.  It was the German loss at the 2nd Battle of El Alamein that backed them into this corner.

It wasn't until the invasion of Italy that the Americans really began to contribute something meaningful on land in the European theater.  Due to the complete incompetence of American General Clark, who could set up a shit show in a brewery, the Italian campaign was a complete abortion.

Starving Britian into submission is the answer.

It could still be done.

The British had culminated in 1917, and they had culminated again by 1941, as what remained of the pre-War Merchant fleet was going to the bottom, and the  survivors of the pre-War Army camped out in POW camps.

That's not terribly surprising in either case, when one does the net assessment of what Germany looked like in 1913 and 1938, compared to the Western Allies. Add in the necessity to defend the Far East and Suez, and no military of its size and relative modernity could have done much better.

The Germans and Japanese had leapfrogged 1920s British preeminence in carriers, tanks, radios and other industrial age innovations and operational level art.

The remaining British silver bullet, namely its technological prowess, was crippled by an industrial base utterly unable to turn technical innovation to fielded hardware, and a military to occupied fighting for its life to effectively integrate lessons learned on a widescale basis.

Hmmm.

Imagine an isolationist US in 1939 and beyond.

For good or bad, you'd singing Deutschlandlied or eating your horse.

Germany wasn't going to do shit with the British.  They walked away while winning the Battle of Britain.

Hitler even let the BEF escape at Dunkirk, because in his mind he though it might make the British more amiable to doing a deal.

Almost the entire Nazi leadership and the German officer corps of WW2, fought in WW1.

In purely military terms, every German soldier and sailor, from a private to the generals, came away from WW1 with these 2 lessons forever burned into their collective consciousness:

1) We can only win a war on 1 front.  A 2 front war is an automatic defeat for Germany.

2)  We cannot ever hope to beat the Royal Navy.

From an ideological perspective of national socialism, there was the need to avoid a war on 2 fronts at all costs and create a greater Germany in the east.  In order to achieve these cornerstones of the political ideology, Germany would need an alliance.  An alliance with a powerful anti-communist country.

In the history of the world, there has never been anything more anti-communist than the British Empire.

You don't need to be a Bohemian corporal, with a typewriter and doing prison time, to put two and two together here.

In order for the 1,000 year Reich to happen, Germany needs an alliance with Britain, or at the very least a friendly peace.

The British might be a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them.  The British knew that Germany needed peace at basically any price.

There is a very interesting area of research into British / German negotiations from the fall of France in May 1940 all the way into about 1943.  Conventional historians MSM liars will tell you no such thing ever occurred, yet documents possibly relating to these negotiations have been sealed in the British archives for 100 years.  Cause that doesn't stink.



One thing the British win the world championships at every time, is being shady fucks.

No one has ever answered why the #2 man in Nazi Germany, Rudolph Hess ended up Britain, and the British tried to keep it secret!  Then the Germans send in a hit team on a 1 way trip.

We do know that high level negotiations were occurring in Switzerland, Sweden and Portugal between British and German intelligence agencies.

The $64,000 dollar questions are:

A)  Were the British simply hedging their bets, that if the war turned against them, they could quickly sign a very favourable peace treaty with the Germans and avoid an invasion?

B)  Were the British simply stringing the Germans along, in order for them to divert as much of their war effort against the Soviets and not the British?

C)  Was there a civil war going on at the heart of the British power elite?  We now know today Churchill was compromised by and on the payroll of an ANTIFA organization in London.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/no-more-champagne-churchill-and-money-david-lough-review/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3231410/Winston-spendaholic-teetered-brink-bankruptcy-saved-secret-backhanders-new-book-Chuchill-s-finances-reveals-spent-40-000-year-casinos-54-000-booze.html

We know most of the British elite, including Lord Halifax we very anti-communist.  Nobody, from the upper echelon of the Tory party, to the Labour party, trusted Churchill.

D) All of the above.

When people say Britain was on the ropes with Germany, it was anything but.  It was an island that controlled the seas and Germany would do literally ANYTHING to give the British the peace they wanted and cease hostilities, in order to cement the cornerstone of national socialist ideology.

For further reading on this very controversial part of WW2:

https://www.amazon.com/Double-Standards-Lynn-Picknett/dp/0751532207

Actually quite the opposite.

Britain would still be a global superpower.  Keeping the British Empire intact is the whole cornerstone of National Socialism.

Germany destroys communism in the Soviet Union and controls the European continent.

Britain, through it's Empire and the Royal Navy, maintains global stability and trade.

We were providing arms munitions etc.  prior.
All manner of surplus was sold in containers to US after the wae in an attempt to repay even a small portion of what was owed, then there was the Marshal plan.
Consider how much was given by Obama to Iran for what was basically in escrow circa 1980 and should have gone to families of injured back then.
Then think of what they would owe us for things never repaid.  Europe and Asia.  Then add in South Central America.  If we were so bad for selling them war materials imagine results of being left to their own devices. (Lots of Crown Oak trees to build wood sail ships.)

All I know is if WWII Germany and WWII Britain went head to head in a cage fight with no help from anyone, just 1 on 1 Britain would have lost by 1942 or 43

Brits 'won' in the same way a kid calls on his 2 big brothers to beat up the other kid who was mean to him.

Marvellous idea.   Sounds like pre-invasion planning.  

For as long as the Germanic european continent wills it.

Again, without an outside lifeline, the UK would be strangled.

lmao

Why would they want to, strangle their “natural ally”.

Even assuming your “natural ally” theory, they would have soon gone to war over Africa, or the MiddleEast, or control of the Seas.

There’s no way they would have peacefully coexisted.

Britain had been involved with the balance of power in Continental Europe since 1066.    That wasn’t going to change.

And, nobody has ever accused Hitler of being a peace-monger. (Well, until just now)

Are you saying the thought of regaining the lost empire sends a tingling feeling down his leg?

Maybe from the standpoint that Canada was going to get involved. Some people have argued that Canada actually did most of the heavy lifting in WWII... With a liberal definition of "we" which includes Commonwealth nations..., he might be correct?

I'm not enough of a WWII historian to know if that is true or not.

EDIT:  It's not a theory.  It's very well documented.

Here is a former Lufthansa pilot to explain Hitler's views on the British.



Frankly, after the losses the Germans were going to suffer conquering the Soviet Union, it’s not something the British would have worry about for a generation.

Contrary to the communist propaganda we were all spoon fed in schools, National Socialism was a regional ideology with a goal of a greater Germany.  World domination is communist goal, remember the left always projects.

While the Germans were bleeding themselves out in the East it gives the British more time to consolidate their control over the oil in the Middle East and build an even bigger Navy.

I don’t see the British and Germans coming to blows further down the road.

Germany has always militarily been a land power.

Britain has always been a sea power.

Britain fights countries that builds Navies.

Spain
France
US
Japan

Besides, if Hitler wanted to try build a Navy he would have.  But he didn’t.  They tried fighting the British at sea in WW1 and saw the futility of it.

To fight the British and win you need to build the world’s largest navy.

The Germans started building a navy to fight the British in the 1890s, after 20 years of building at breakneck speed, the British still curb stomped them at Jutland in 1916.

Conquering then pacifying and then building a greater Germany in the East was going to take the bulk of Germany’s national resources for at least one generation.  Look at how much of a drain it was on West Germany just absorbing East Germany after the wall came down.

Germany wouldn’t even be in the position to even think about building a navy until mid 1960s.  From that point it would take them at least another generation to build a navy to rival the British.

So maybe the Germans would be in a position to try that by mid 1980s.

By which time both sides would have nukes, therefore MAD = not happening.

What is a far more interesting question is if a peace in Western Europe is concluded and Germany is pre-occupied with the Soviet Union and wins.  What happens in the pacific with the US, Japan, China and Britain?

It’s very interesting that the Royal Navy thought in 1912 and in 1920s and 1930s that their most likely future enemy would be the US Navy.  The reason being that the US was building a very large navy.

Then perhaps we'll stay out of the next one since they seemed to have their shit together for the last two.

I don't believe Germany "lost" WWI. They did surrender/capitulate but they were not defeated.
The terms of that surrender set the stage for WWII.

England was getting their ass handed to them and would have been starved, bombed, nuked, or invaded without our intervention.

Thank God Hitler invaded Russia for all our sakes.  That was a fuck up of the highest order.

O.K., they sank the Bismark and a few other capital ships, and sort of held on in N. Africa until Patton showed up.

Compare that to the near complete collapse of the British armed forces in Asia and continental Europe.

If not for the incompetence of the German high command at Dunkirk, and the foolish way the Germans conducted the air war during the battle of Britain, the British would likely have been forced to ask for terms from the Germans.

Mark Clark was an certainly an incompetent, but keep in mind the Italian campaign was Churchill's idea.

They had the strange looking man with a banjo angle covered an the royals are German anyway

Invading the UK would have been a shitshow for the Germans, no way the UK would beat Germany in a land war.

For the rest it's a race to the first Atomic bomb would be my guess.