"Hitler must've sprung a little Füehrerwood"

Now there's a phrase that I've never read in Hanson's or Den Beste's stuff. Or Cornelius Ryan's, come to think of it...

"And without Russia, there would never have been an allied victory in World War II."

Well, there would have, but it would have been very nuclear and far messier.

Alternately, Hitler decides that he is going to be a racist, and what do loyalty and good faith in diplomacy have to do with him? He responds to Pearl Harbour by declaring himself shocked, shocked! That a nation of yellow men has dared to attack a White power, and declares war on Japan. In that one act of brilliant treachery, all Franklin Delano Roosevelt's dreams of getting America into the war against Nazi Germany are made nothing. Congress and an infuriated populace insist: Japan first! And Japan only!

Japan loses even faster and worse that in our timeline, as the Americans go after the Japs with singleminded fury. The only downside in the Great Pacific War is that the United States of America is ready for a conventional assault on Japan before the Atom Bomb is ready, so the endgame could be quite bloody. Still, the good guys win, hurrah!

In the Second Great European War, though, it's different. Without American help, the Battle of the Atlantic is quite possibly lost: for all Churchill's defiance, a staving United Kingdom must make peace. The Soviet Union alone is in diabolical trouble, and is highly likely to lose, and even if it does not lose is in my opinion most unlikely to go forward far, and certainly not all the way to Berlin.

I think Adolph could have won that war with a telegram. Had he just picked the White and winning side in the Pacific ... but (thank you God) he didn't.

You keep this stuff up, you're going to find a sawed-off horse's head in your bed with a very pointed note from Harry Turtledove attached to the mane.

Incidentally, Turtledove's recent "In The Presence Of Mine Enemies" is his best single book since "Guns Of The South." Premise is a family of Jews living undercover in late-20th Century Berlin after Hitler gets the bomb first and conquers most of the world. Chilling stuff, and effectively done, even if Turtledove's parallels with the USSR are a bit too cutesy for my taste.

Interesting hypothesis, but you fail to consider the extremely difficult terrain, especially in eastern Anatolia, and the impact of the weather on operations. No way to launch from Bulgaria into Turkey on 1 Jan 41 since uncooperative Yugoslavia was not under control yet, and it took weeks to get them controlled during good Spring weather in this timeline.
No Yugo supply line, no invasion of Turkey.
Even if you get control of Turkey, the terrain and lack of rail nets makes supply over the Caucasus into Baku nearly impossible.
Just for kicks, if you can find anyone who still has a complete copy of War in Europe (late 70's boardgame) try the Turkey option. You'll see how hard it is.
Consider that Hitler may have been hoping the Turks would join in, since they were German Allies in '14-'18. I believe he was also very disappointed that Franco did not bring Spain in on his side.
But, yes, if Hitler had gotten Turkish assistance, very bad for the Good Guys (oh, and Stalin too).

It's worth remembering as well that the Palestinians were allied with the Germans during WWII. And there were Arab SS regiments, for goodness sake.

Interesting scenario. Like you say though, the biggest problem would be getting there. Landing 20 or so divisons in Turkey would be quite a difficult task if the Balkans hadn't already been secured as a base of operations. There is no land bridge except through the Middle East, and British air and sea power in Greece and the Mediterranean would have made a sealift risky. It would have taken too long to push up through Egypt and Syria even if the committment had been made early in Africa.

The other fact of reality was that Hitler had a brilliant operational mind but was weak strategically. He never really understood global war, especially where naval warfare and transport were concerned. He probably took one look at the Turkish penninsula and dismissed it for the duration of the war.

Hitler also had a fair shot at Stalingrad and the southern oil fields. He just kept splitting his attacks and ordering his generals to take every objective in Russia at once, especially in the south.

If he would have abandoned the drive for Moscow once the snow started falling and turned south, Hitler could have taken Stalingrad and the oil fields, and robbed Russia of the ability to fight a long term war. Instead he exhausted his power all over the front, took nothing, and never regained the initiative. Lucky for all of us.

In "A War to Be Won" (authors not remembered) is a discussion of Germany's logistics issues.
According to the authors, the German loggy guys told Hitler what he could do and not do. He and his generals didn't listen. The loggy guys were right.
Germany didn't have the ability to go any further than they they got in the war, and logistics eats itself up (fuel for the trucks carrying fuel, etc) at a rate nearly exponential.
Their non Panzer, non-Blitzkreig divisions, which is to say most of them, used horses for transport.
They'd have had more mech infantry divisions if they'd had the steel, but they didn't. Didn't have the gas, either. They were using hodge-podge convoys of vehicles captured in Poland and stolen from Czechoslovakia and Austria for their support convoys in Russia. These wear out quickly, of course, as spares are not easily available.
The dullest part of war, supply, doomed the Germans before they started, which the loggy guys more or less told the generals.
At one point, says the book, one of the bigger shooters on the Russian front was reduced to presuming the mud would freeze earlier than historically possible, while the snow would hold off for several months. It was his only hope.
The Germans were awful where they went, but they went about as far as they were going to go, no matter what.

Minor nitpick:

Either umlaut the "u" in "Führer" or spell it the ASCII-friendly way, i.e. "Fuehrer".

You can't have it both ways. Or was that simply a "nuanced" way of approaching the German-word-in-an-otherwise-Enlgish-sentence problem?

Securing the Mediterranean might have been a 'better' option - better for Hitler, that is. An invasion of Malta would have removed that pesky island from its use as an Allied aircraft and boat base; it was relatively unmolested, and harried the supply lines to Africa in no small measure.

A commitment to victory in Africa, made possible by securing the Med (also greater troop and supply efforts), would have allowed the Nazis to push east through Egypt and into Palestine, Iraq and then north, opening up a Caucasus front already *very* close to the oil fields. Launched in concert with a serious push on Moscow alone (center of the spider's web, in so many ways), might have held a greater chance of effectively knocking the Soviets out, leaving the north (Leningrad) and the Ukraine for easier cleanup later.

Now, a push through the Middle East to the Caucasus isn't the easiest thing in the world - there's still a good bit of mountainous terrain to be crossed - but it might be easier than slogging through Turkey. I also won't pretend that the supply lines wouldn't have been rather extensive, but that's not insurmountable.

Don't forget that the Nazis, for most of the war, had the huge oil complex in Ploesti to draw on -- and Roumania was firmly under the German boot. It was only late in the war that Allied bombers could target the Ploesti oilfields.

Hitler may have judged that trying to drive through Turkey to Baku wasn't worth the effort -- far better (he reasoned) to drive through Ukraine and turn south. Had Hitler not been so focused on capturing Moscow and instead used the winter of 1942 to consolidate his gains in western Russia, he could easily have driven into Baku the following spring.

We can all be grateful that Hitler's strategic thought was so narrow -- the Nazis might have won the war in 1942.

Interesting. One thing comes to mind: If one of ol' Adolph's grand objectives was the reunification of all scattered germans and the absorption of all scattered german communities back into the greater Reich, as you suggest, doesn't that mean that eventually he would have engaged in the same sort invasion of the U.S.? Since one rationale of his invasion of the Soviet Union was the "rescue" of the german "colonies" there, shouldn't we therefore conclude that any nation that had german communities also be subject to invasion? The U.S. has several such communities -- areas that were heavily settled by germans who still, to a certain extent, cling to the "old ways". For instance, much of Texas was settled by germans, especially that part in the vicinity of San Antonio. What about Fredricksburg, or New Braunfels? They were german communities, originally, and to a certain extent they still are. I mean, Admiral Nimitz -- from Fredricksburg -- was one of those ethnic germans, his parents weren't at all thrilled when he married outside of the german community. I mean, I'm part german, myself -- like most "old family" Texans. Anyway, with all of those germans, does that mean that somewhere in his grand timetable Hitler intended to invade Texas? Could Be...

I usually have trouble holding on to both Southern Europe and the Middle East, so I usually mass all my troops in Kamchatka and the Falklands.

I usually have trouble holding on to both Southern Europe and the Middle East, so I mass all my troops in Kamchatka and the Falklands.

If you want to think about failure of imagination, ask yourself this: why didn't Japan invade and seize Hawaii? It was surely capable of doing so. Why did it limit its attack to bombing the US fleet? The longest stretch of open water in the Pacific is between Hawaii and California. Had Japan taken Hawaii there is no way the US could have taken it back by direct attack. The US would have been forced to fight its way to Japan across the Aleutian Islands.

I believe the answer is that the Japanese thought of Hawaii as legitimately belonging to America, unlike the Phillipines, which were part of Asia and hence properly belonged in the Japanese sphere of influence. They knew the US would fight to get Hawaii back, but thought we would not fight for possessions far off in Asia.

Turkey tried to invade Russia from the Caucausus in WW1 -- killed and froze to death a lot of Turks and Russians, with no success.

John Keegan's opinion in his book on WW1 was that Turkey was crazy to attempt the invasion of Russia thru the Caucausus.

The terrain is vey mountainous -- would the German mechanized divisions been able to force their way thru the passes?

uncle joe supplied nearly all the fuel for adolph's forays in western europe.

hitler wanted to take it.

Also: BOTH joe and adolph were SOCIALISTS - adolph blended his with nationalism and pan-Aryanism; joe blended his with nationalism and pan-proletarianism.

Their hegemonistic aims HAD to clash as soon as ONE of them saw more to gain by destroying the other.

That is simply the S.O.P./M.O. for both - in everything: domestic politics and international strategeries.

adolph thought that IF he could defeat the UK navy that the UK would fold. that's why an invasion of GB was never mounted - even though it probably would have succeed in 1940.

turkey was an ally in WW1. adolph though he copuld count on them.

resupplying a nazi invasion force strung out all the way from europe to eastern turkey and then further ewast and over the caucausus MOUNTAINS would have been too expensive and risky. instead, adolph went for the "head" of the russian snake = moscow.

russia was willing to absorb casualty rates that would have even made later vietnamese cringe and surrender. adolph didn't expect that. and lost.

remember: war is a battle of WILL.

Andy:

The Wehrmacht did quite well in Italy, which is just as mountainous (if not more so) than the Caucasus. I think the decision was more a strategic one on Hitler's part -- the early successes in Russia during Barbarossa convinced him that it would be less effort to drive through European Russia and turn south. By thte time he realized his mistake, it was too late: he had to bring up the southern prong of his invasion force to reinforce the northern prong. Like Napoleon, he got too fixated on taking Moscow rather than on consolidating his gains.

italy's mountains are narrow foothills compared to the ranges between turkey and baku.

Monty:

The Caucasus is far more mountainous than Italy, in terms of peak heights. Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus is the highest mountain in Europe. Besides, the Wehrmacht was on the defensive in Italy--a much easier proposition altogether.

Charlie32: War in Europe? Jeez, there's a blast from the past. Yeah, the Turkey Option was a indeed a real turkey. Far better to draw the Spanish option and overrun Gibralter in 1941, after which the Mediterranean quickly becomes an Axis lake (figuring an airmobile attack on Malta).

The best Hitler might hope to get out of occupying Turkey would be to strategically sandwich the British in Egypt and Palestine. Neutral or occupied, the Turks weren't about to let the Russian Black Sea fleet foray in the Med, and as others have noted the Causcasus just wouldn't be crossed (with or without elephants, tanks, etc., the German mountain divisions had enough trouble managing on the Russian side of the range).

The more interesting prospect was a coup in Iraq, and for that story you should read Fitzroy MacLean's "Eastern Approaches."

Off the topic a tad, but how about this: what if one of the attempts on Hitler's life had succeeded?

That would have really confused things, because people like Rommel weren't particularly keen on genocide.

Of course, timing would be everything.

One thing though: I wonder if less people actually would have died if Hitler had been more successful against Britain and Russia, only to run up against the atom bomb in 1945.

One demonstration or actual use probably would have been enough to dictate terms, and we might not have been left with a Soviet Union to face down for 50 years.

As it was, the firebombing of Dresden killed as many people as a nuclear strike would have.

John,

It's amazing that Hitler survived the various attempts on his life, but it may have actually been worse for Europe (and the world) in the long run.

A kinder, friendlier Third Reich may have been more appealing to Britain or the USA, but by '43 or '44 the USSR was seeing red and was going to roll over Germany no matter who was in charge. The best a Rommel regieme could have hoped to do was to keep the US and UK out of Europe, and either be overrun by Soviet ground forces in '46 or '47, or have been nuked into oblivion once Stalin had the bomb.

All in all, having Hitler mismanage the war to its final days probably resulted in a better outcome for everyone involved (with the possible exception of the Jews...although they still would have been used as slave labor during a protracted war even if the death camps were shut down). Waving a white flag at the Russian bear just wouldn't have worked.

"If you want to think about failure of imagination, ask yourself this: why didn't Japan invade and seize Hawaii?"

Because the Japanese script called for us to negotiate a cease-fire after Pearl Harbor and when we didn't the Japanese were stumped.
Lotsa jokes about Germans always going by the book but the Japanese were if anything worse.
When the minutely detailed plan fell apart they either screamed "BANZAI" and charged the machine gun nest or did nothing and waited for a new blue print.

I have wargamed a German invasion of Czechoslovakia and a German victory may not have been a foregone conclusion. The Czechs had a potent little army with considerably good armor and nice defensive terrain.

Maybe Hitler wanted a fight in 1938 but he may not have liked the outcome. He very well may have won but it might not have been the walkover like Poland or France

Why assume Hitler having to fight Turkey? Offered restoration of their empire, or union with the Turkic peoples in the USSR, it is possible that the Turks would have been as happy to provide facilities for Hitler as they now are for the US. Also, in terms of communications, the Balkans which are fairly rugged to say the least, didn't slow the Wehrmacht at all, in spite of opposition. With Turkish collaboration they could easily have built up a strong logistical base, and could even have told Stalin it was for an attack against British holdings in Iraq and on to India. Stalin was desperate to believe anything that indicated that the Germans were not going to attack,after all.

"If you want to think about failure of imagination, ask yourself this: why didn't Japan invade and seize Hawaii?"

The reason is simple. The Japanese couldn't do it. In order for the Japanese to successfully invade Hawaii, they would have to transport 3 divisions to the Hawaiian Islands, a distance of 4000 miles, on transports that could do maybe 14 knots on a good day. Not only that, but most of their amphibious sealift capacity would be tied up in the invasion, which would mean that the Phillippines and Singapore would not be invaded.

That's the logistical problem. The second problem is that while the Japanese fleet is tied up conducting amphibious operations at Oahu, the striking power of the American fleet is still fundamentally untouched, and even after Pearl the US Navy was not a force to be trifled with, having 16 Battleships and 7 Aircraft Carriers.

Because the Japanese Fleet would be tied to the invasion beaches until at least one island was completely secured, the invasion force would be fixed to the invasion beaches.

Submarines based at Pearl would be able to strike the Japanese fleet at will, and provide intel as to the fleet's location. The carriers(not tied to any fixed location) would be able to strike at will, simply by flying aircraft to the invasion beach.

Not only that, but the Japanese fleet would be in a box. Not only would they need to use the fleet to support the invasion, they would also need it to interdict supplies that would be sent to Oahu, additional reinforcements that would be sent to Oahu and the other islands, *and* take on and destroy the Pacific fleet.

Logistically, the war for Japan was lost literally the moment they decided to fight it.

The movie they showed me during the Pearl Harbor tour said that Yamamoto attacked only to destroy the fleet because he thought that the US fleet would stop them from his attempt to seize the southeast asian oil fields. I doubt that's the case. FDR's reason for taking on Japan was Pearl Harbor, absent that, he probably never could have gotten the political will to attack Japan and they could have taken whatever Asian territory or oil fields they wanted.

Getting back to Hitler, if that scenario happened that might actually have worked out better for us, If Stalin goes down before he has a chance to stab FDR in the back, no Iron Curtain, no Berlin Wall, no Russian nukes, no Cold War, no Cuban Missle crisis, No Korean War, No Kim Jong Il with Nukes turning his country into one big concentration camp. Hitler comes out of that war far weaker than Russia did out of the real one, probably doesn't have to bmob yet, so we let them have Europe and promise to bomb them into the stone age if they ever come after us.

The consequences? No European Allies for Today's War on Terror, but how's that different than the status quo? Heck, Nazi Germany's as likely to take them out first too. At the very least, they're at least as attractive a target to Osama & Co. as we are.

MarkD, you seem to be forgetting some of the consequences. Like the systematic slaughter of every non-Aryan population in Europe. Franks, Slavs, Poles. Not only that, but Hitler, or his ideological heirs, would have destabilized the Middle East even more than Israel's simple existence. The Nazis liked the Arabs' anti-semitism, but they were still untermensch. And the Nazis in Africa is a another unpleasant idea.

Very good and thought provoking post. I might have to try Vodka myself sometime 8^)

And without Russia, there would never have been an allied victory in World War II.

Sorry, a personal peeve: Russia started WWII just as much as Germany. They signed the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact in August '39, and together invaded Poland the next month. The Russian invasion from the east was a little later than the German one, but was an invasion nonetheless. I doubt Hitler would have dared go beyond taking Czechoslovakia without the safety of the treraty with Russia.

What John Bono says about Pearl Harbour seems basically correct. Basically, they needed to take islands nearer to Hawaii to secure their logistical chain. Midway was the stepping stone to Hawaii, which is exactly why they tried to take it. They failed, and that was a key to the rest of the Pacific war. Had they succeeded, they would have been able to threaten and possibly take Hawaii. They never could have truly beaten the US, but a US victory would have taken much longer and been much harder.

Eric,

Point taken on the slaughter in Europe, but the destabilizing effect on the Mid-East? I was counting on that. The Nazis and the Islamofascists would likely be too busy trying to annhilate each other to worry about America.

Still probably a worse scenario for the world as a whole though.

MarkD, the US began buying substanial amounts of oil out of the Middle East after World War II. Either the Nazis would have been buying that, or taking it from their Arabian peninsula colony.

While I don't like keeping the sand ticks afloat, I do like burning up their only natural resource before using up ours.

I suppose we could have tried taking Siberia from what was left of the USSR, but I don't see the political will for that, if we did not engage the Nazis for Europe.

The VGs were descendants of Germans invited to Russia by Catherine the Great to modernize farming and settle land that would otherwise be fallow.

After subsequent tsars revoked many of the privileges that the VGs had enjoyed, some Volga Germans emigrated to the US. Many to eastern Colorado in the 1880s and 1890s, like my great-grandfather. There was a pretty big farming settlement called "Friedenfeld" (field of peace) near current Burlington. Most of the Friendenfelders had come from an early 18th century VG settlement of the same name.

Lots of VGs came to the Dakotas and Nebraska too. Even that nasty existence beat the heck out of what their cousins endured during the wars in Europe.

The Turks played WWII perfectly according to their objectives: namely to not piss anyone off too much that they get invaded. As a result there are some lovely party gifts that Ataturk got from Hitler in the mid-1930's in the way of fine automobiles (which can be seen at Ataturk's Mausoleum in Ankara). Then during the war Inounu spent the whole war straddling the fence until it became clear the allies would win at which point Turkey jumped on the winning team.

Hmmm... It appears that Mr. Green has dusted off his copy of Avalon Hill's "Third Reich" again. Turkey is an Axis Minor Ally, as I recall. At least he didn't calculate Hitler's BRPs for taking Baku.

Wasn't the oil wealth of Libya discovered sometime after WWII? If it had been discoverd earlier in history...

Postscript: Germany, Japan, Soviets, whoever, conquers the whole world and finishes with Australia.

The country is governed by a colonial administration, which slowly but surely becomes infected with the Australian anti-culture: virulent racism is slowly eroded, to be replaced by casual un-PC mockery ("taking the piss"); respect for authority and hierarchy mutates into a mutually parasitic love-hate relationship between the governors and the governed; the ruthlessly efficient military-industrial machine is undermined by "she'll be right, mate" and "no worries" values; the obsession with lebensraum is quelled by miles of beaches with deckchairs for all; and the most pressing issues include the availablity of beer and whether Collingwood are going to make the semis.

"Youse will be Aussimilated."

germany lost west prussia at the end of wwi. the lost pomerania and silesia to the poles at the end of wwii. and yes, hitler would have wanted alsatia and lotharingen back from france. you are forgetting that charles the great was a german, and all of his holdings were subject to a german emperor.

hitler didn't attack turkey because he actually didn't want bulgaria, hungary and romania to join the war. if they had joined the war, he would have been forced to cede them territory in russia. he wanted it all. only after the initial spring push failed with von rundstedt in the burbs of moscow, did he believe his logisticians. then he got his balkan allies to enter the war in the east. italy too.

hitler was balls to the wall for moscow? not so true. when von rundstedt was only 200k from moscow with 2 months of spring, hitler ordered army group c to attack southerly. his ukrainian front was stalled and needed a little kick. von rundstedt later begrudged those 2 months as he looked at the spires of the kremlin in the snow.

moscow was the single largest prize in the ussr. it represented more than 90% of the soviet communications, and 70% of their industry. true, a lot of industry had been moved. but not all. the fall of moscow was the end of the red army as a modern cohesive unit. they would have been reduced to little more than riders as a form of communications. hitler would have picked them apart at his leisure. barbarossa would have succeeded.

islamofascists and nazis? hahahahahaha. if hitler had won, what islamofascists? what jews? the middle east would be german today. interesting, i don't know what he would have done with the iranians, since they are technically THE aryans.

Interesting discussion.

Hitler's biggest downfall wasn't necessarily on the battlefield by the time of his interference in tactical matters the war was essentially lost.

Stalingrad, and Kursk were the final gasps, the rest was just a matter of time.

What did in the Reich was the corruption and empire building going on inside Germany. Everyone of the big players directly under Hitler had his own Agenda, and his own little empire which caused alot of infighting and syphoned off resources, and manpower from the areas that it was truly needed (mainly knocking the bolshies outta the war)

Guderian made great strides toward fixing alot of the corruption at least in the industrial sector (when he's factories weren't being bombed into rubble by swarms of B17s) but since he was a "disgraced" General because of his actions and comments during the early stanges of Babarossa, and his personal problem with Model if I remember correctly. Hitler never full trusted him again, and would listen to his advice over others like Goering, Goebbels, and Himmler.

Had Hitler listened to Guderian, Rommel, List, and Manstein; very few Europeans would not be speaking German as a primary language.

Eric Sivula,the Poles are Slavs-that's why Adolphus treated them like crap unlike the French,Dutch,Norwegians,etc. whom he viewed as aryans (they're all descendants of germanic tribes).