Uncle Ruckus said: I think you massively overestimate American willingness to finish a war Roosevelt maneuvered them into. Yes Britain and the US expected the Soviets to collapse but they DIDNT. Its something ENTIRELY different to remain in a war where the worst case scenario was avoided, instead of one where it actually happnened. Its like saying:" I would have managed to get the couch from the first floor of my house to ground level even if my friend had not come to help me". In reality, alone you would have abandoned the project after a few minutes or once you would have reached the stairs. Click to expand...

Anti-GrammarNazi said: yway, it baffles me how deeply ingrained the "OTL result is the only result" mentality regarding WW2 is in this forum. Click to expand...

Anti-GrammarNazi said: Some argue that the UK and the US will pursue the war no matter the cost because the Nazis are an eventual threat to their homelands. Guys, this is not how human mentality works at large, if the UK and the US were dictatorships as brutal as the Nazis and Soviet ones, then yes, but it isnt. Unless you guys want to argue that the war will be so brutal that democracy will collapse. Unless such a shift happens, the people hold the keys to the war, not the President or Prime Minister.



The people, in particular the US, are not going to be so worried about the fact that eventually, down the line, Germany MAY become an existential threat. They are going to be more worried about the fact that their government is demanding of them to fight RIGHT NOW a continent sized Empire that has an aura on invincibility not seen since Napoleon (or even greater), just to counter a hypothetical future threat of them becoming too strong in a far away continent. Click to expand...

Anti-GrammarNazi said: Germany doesnt need all of Russia, only the resource rich areas. A withdrawal of all of Europe minus territories needed to turn the Reich into a superpower, could be in order. Click to expand...

sloreck said: The major Allies (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) have a population of roughly 207 million at this time. They can also draw on a portion of the populations of South Africa and India as well as some numbers (albeit small) of "free" forces. Say you have 210 million of which one third are males of potential military age which gives a population of 70 million to draw from. The comparable figures for the Axis (Germany {incl Austria}, Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria) are approximately 145 million yielding roughly 48 million to draw from. I exclude Japan because they did not play in Europe and the roughly 25 million males of military age who available to be in uniform were bogged down in China, whose population I have not included and their numbers balance out the Allied forces who were in the Pacific. What all this math means is that even including Italy and the minor Axis members, the Allies have the potential pool of pilots of 1.5:1 over the Axis based on population. The English speaking countries of the Allies in general have a higher educational level/system than that in the Axis countries with the exception of Germany and this means a smaller percentage of military age males in those countries have the background to be pilots, navigators etc. So, my best guess is that the Allied potential pilot/aircrew is twice that of the Axis - even before you get in to training programs, Germany's was not good and I can't believe that Italy, Hungary, etc had programs that were even that good.



Ending the active Eastern Front does free up Luftwaffe assets. However in this scenario, you will need some Luftwaffe assets in the east - transport aircraft and some ground attack aircraft to deal with the partisan issue. If Germany is occupying Baku and trying to get that back on line, you can be sure that they will need to station fighters there to protect against Allied air attacks from Persia. Once the Allies have Crete and Aegean islands as they will, attacks on Ploesti will increase, requiring more resources than OTL to defend. Likewise airbases in Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica will threaten Italian industry, the Alpine passes, Austrian infrastructure, and Southern France (hello 15th AF). All of these will have a call of Luftwaffe resources in all these cases more than OTL. The Allies will not have easy time, however the resources the Luftwaffe can pull from a now conquered Russia are going to have a larger task than they did OTL.



The Germans never fielded a decent heavy bomber in any numbers. In any case when you could get 3-4 single engine fighters for every four engined heavy, and they needed the fighters to keep the engine factories from being flattened. Engine production is a bottleneck. Click to expand...

You do realize that the entire goal of the Nazi war effort was to beat everyone in Europe so they could beat the racially degenerate USA right?Roosevelt didn't prop up Britain and the USSR (and try to prop up France) out of the goodness of his heart and some europhilia - he ruthlessly used the European allies because Hitler was saying that once he had his new order in Europe, he was gonna come for the US and because German ambition would, even if Hitler's anti-US rhetoric turned out to be hot air, work to undermine US business interests (which after WW1 had made America banker of the world, were significant in Europe and around the world).Where are people saying that things will be as OTL if the Soviets are defeated?Things will be very different, but I'm sorry, the Nazis are still Nazis, the dunderheads running the German army are still the dunderheads in the German army and the resource and population limits of Germany+occupied Europe can't change enough to make up Germany's disadvantage. To get a really different outcome to WW2 (like "Germany wins") you need multiple PoDs, like the officer culture in Germany changing so that the men in the logistics branch were more respected while also not having men who believed in magic and fairy dust in charge of the country - or some other combination that makes Germany more lethal without making it too sane to start off a world war.Have you read much of what Hitler thought and wrote? And followed how it evolved over time? By 1941 his aims for Britain and America don't make for pretty reading if you're a Brit or American. You may as well say that the Soviets weren't an existential threat (they didn't want to destroy the West, they just wanted to spread the blessings of Communism - wasn't Stalin a warm hearted guy! How dare the ignorant American and British peoples reject the ideas of enforced atheism, expropriation of property, free room and board in the Gulag for free-thinkers, freedom to vote for anyone they wanted to, so long as they were the designated Communist Party candidate in the election etc. etc.) Just because Hitler thought his vision for the UK and USA would be better doesn't mean British people and American people were under any obligation to share his outlook. And in 1941 the Nazis aren't an "eventual" threat to the British homeland - Hitler at that point knew that the British would resist until they were broken and fully intended to break them - that's not "eventual threat" that's "clear and present threat". And while the Nazis were still an eventual threat to the USA, what kind of moron US government is going to allow the Nazis to get closer to being a clear and present threat when they've already knocked out France and the Soviet Union and conquered most of Europe and are talking about how they'll make a new Nazi world order and carve the US down to fit into the bit role that Hitler thinks they deserve AND where the Nazis have already declared war on them?So you're saying the Germans should leave large pockets of territory uncontrolled, allowing partisans areas of refuge where they can strike at will at the long lines of communication between the mines and oil wells of Russia and the German factories? That would be an utter disaster.Please note though, I'm not saying that the Germans couldn't _eventually_ crush the Soviet partisans - if they had a decade and a free hand, they could probably do it. Indeed, the WAllies may take so long to grind Germany down in this scenario that the Germans would have the time to crush the partisans even without a fully free hand - but the time and resources spent crushing those partisans are going to subtract from the time and resources Germany can dedicate to things that can be used to defend Europe or used to attack the WAllies. And Germany went into Russia with unrealistic assumptions - even without partisan activity, they didn't have the time to rebuild the Russian resource base and they weren't factoring in the time and trouble that repairing war-torn infrastructure would take. Faced with an impossible situation (i.e. a Britain and USA that had stopped letting them just win) the Germans turned to fantasy (not so unreasonable at the time, given that they'd succeeded so far beyond their expectations in France). But even if the Germans get a miracle in the Soviet Union (not completely out of the question - the Soviets were weaker than the Germans in 1942, and while a victory for the Germans in 1941 is pretty well impossible, a victory in 1942 could be achieved in a few ways) they're still left with a USA and UK that aren't led by complete morons and who have a massive advantage over poor little Germany.Add to that, the Commonwealth and the US were richer than Germany, let alone the Axis average and the Allies (OK, mostly the US) controlled the lion's share of world oil production (most oil production in the world was in Venezuela and the USA) which means they have alot more resources to throw at pilot training.The oil the Germans were aiming to take from the USSR was a small portion of world production (something like 13% of world production at the time - I may be wrong, but certainly the USSR was not producing at the level of the US or Venezuela at the time).fasquardon