Micheal wrote:
Realistically, the history of WWII proceeded as it did for a reason, Hitler's hatred of the Jews, many of whom were now leaders in the Communist Bloc. Operation Barbarossa may have been delayed, would have been delayed if Hitler had been sane. That would have changed a lot. If Germany had finished up taking Europe first, including Britain, there would have been continued progress in Northern Africa and Germany would have taken the Middle East and India (a British Possession at the time) easily. Taking the Middle East would have secured his fuel supply and made the inevitable Russian Campaign a much better supplied endeavor.
The United States was still in the Great Depression at the onset of WWII. For the most part the Isolationists were hell bent on keeping us out of WWII. We would have taken years longer to recover economically and military spending would have still been miserably insufficient to build the fleets to a size capable of withstanding the redirected 90% of the German forces that were tied up fighting the USSR. More German resources would have been available to build a better navy.
The German technological base was growing rapidly. Two more years without the USSR in the war and the United States still sitting at home chomping on the bit would have sealed Europe's fate and let Germany consolidate its power base. Then they could have rolled into Russia on some pretext and killed all the formerly Jewish communists they wanted to, reconverting the Christian Russians and eventually, the members of the Axis would hold the entire Old World. The USA would not have had the Manhattan Project, there would have been no Allied Forces nuclear weapons capability. Eventually the Axis would have owned the world.
The United States would probably have been the last to go, South America would have been pitifully easy for the German machine. Canada would have German overlords. A two pronged attack, the Japanese finally moving against the USA in conjunction with the German invasion on the East Coast. Taking down the USA would have taken until at least the early 60s. The whole world speaking German wouldn't have happened. West Coast would be speaking Japanese and the East Coast to the Rockies would be speaking German. Australia and the Philippines would be learning Kanji.
The naval superiority of the pre-WWII seas would be negated by the advances of the Nazis working with the Japanese to make bigger better warships, including carriers.
Though tragic on an epic scale for those destroyed by the actions, Operation Barbarossa and less than six months later, the Attack on Pearl Harbor, were the two necessary actions to seal the Axis' fate.
That is my conjecture anyway. I'm not sure if it would really have worked that way, but it seems logical to me.
Possibly we would have won against the Axis, the logistics to move the armies across the oceans is indeed an immense problem. We did it by cranking out Liberty Ships, barely seaworthy boats to move huge amounts of men and munitions, supplies and guns. We would have been redirecting the Liberty ship effort into coastal defenses, dive-bombers and ammunition. The Axis powers would probably have developed nuclear weapons though, Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia would have been early targets. Shutting down the port of New York would have been a priority. Broadway wouldn't have need neon lights to glow at night.
Even if we had made little effort to build up our naval forces before WWII, we would still have massively outclassed the Germans navally. If they wanted to build up their naval power they needed to get those resources from somewhere, and they would have needed the land forces they used to invade the USSR so they couldn't pull from there. Added to that they would need major amphibious capability, plus sufficient shipping to supply across the Atlantic.
Then there's the fact that the actual land geography of the U.S. is even less conducive to attack than the USSR. We don't start narrow and widen out on either coast; we're wide all the way across and we have a major mountain range on either side. Those mountains would vastly degrade the effectiveness of any nuclear attack on PA or WV industrial centers as well; the mountains would channel much of the power of any bomb upwards, and the Germans would be very lucky to get weapons more powerful or numerous than the 3 we had (1 test and 2 used on Japan). That's not even counting Canada which is even more vast open space and obviously not going to take kindly to attacks against North America.
The Japanese can add to naval strength but even there they had limited ability to replace losses in both men and equipment. They had only 1 large aircraft carrier and no battleships enter service during the war and could not replace pilots. No amount of comical defense negligence by the U.S. can change that.
Invading North America would pretty much be by invitation of the U.S. or Canada. Even if Mexico allowed itself to be a base, there's still the massive logistical effort of supply across an ocean.
The entire scenario you laid out essentially requires knocking out the UK and that simply wasn't going to happen. Sea Lion was abandoned for sheer impracticability. As for Hitler getting the bomb, that
wasn't going to happen in a timely fashion. There's also the fact that buildign the necessary naval and land forces to invade the U.S. would be very visis ble and pretty much be a knockout punsh to isolationism.
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