What if WWII had gone differently?

November 29, 2006 5:57 AM

What would have happened had we 'stopped Hitler' before WWII?

I'm particularly interested in the opinions of people with a history or military history background.

What would have happened had some combination of England, America, Russia and France invaded Germany earlier? Say, for example, after the anexation of the Sudetenland or even earlier. Would the German army have collapsed? Would the Nazi's have been able to run an insurgency? Would the British or Americans have been able to stomach an occupation? Would the war be seen as having been justified? Would it have ultimately prevented the holocaust? I ask this because I often here neo-cons and hawks make the argument that if we had stopped Hitler sooner than we could have prevented all the horror of WWII, but having seen the results of our Iraq invasion I'm not so sure now. Any thoughts? I'd really love answers based on factual information about the make-up of the various armies involved and public opinion at the time. Have there been any alternate history books about this?

posted by empath to human relations (12 comments total)

One more question -- when do you think the best time to intervene have been - in terms of chances of ultimate 'success' and in terms of having 'legitimacy'?
posted by empath at 6:00 AM on November 29, 2006

Have there been any alternate history books about this?

There are these two books:
What If?: Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been

And

More What If?: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been?
posted by xoe26 at 6:03 AM on November 29, 2006

Oh and this list of books called
Great Alternative History
posted by xoe26 at 6:05 AM on November 29, 2006

Thanks, but I'm more interested in the specific scenario of the Allies starting the war against Germany earlier instead of waiting for Hitler to invade Poland and France, which none of those books seem to have.
posted by empath at 6:08 AM on November 29, 2006

I believe Niall Ferguson counterfactually argues for the 'what if' Britain had entered the war one year earlier in his new book The War of the World. I haven't read it myself, but heard him talk about it at a book talk.
posted by AwkwardPause at 6:10 AM on November 29, 2006

One more question -- when do you think the best time to intervene have been - in terms of chances of ultimate 'success' and in terms of having 'legitimacy'?

Btw, only base your answers on information that would have been available at the time. This is not a 'if you had a time machine would you kill hitler' question.
posted by empath at 6:10 AM on November 29, 2006

You want soc.history.what-if. I personally think the scenario not believable, because in 1938 the Red Army had been incapacited by Stalin's purges, Britain and France had even less munitions than in 1940, and US public opinion had no interest in a European war.
posted by Aidan Kehoe at 6:18 AM on November 29, 2006

What would have happened had some combination of England, America, Russia and France invaded Germany earlier? I think its fairly certain that neither the US nor USSR would have invaded. The US was pretty isolationist until Pearl Harbour, and the latter was in an non-agression pact with Germany until 1941.

I guess France or Britain could have intervened militarily after something like the remilitarization of the Rhineland - and defeated Hitler-but they wouldn't have had much support within their populations (see how later Chamberlain was hailed as a hero for averting war), and I can't see them finishing him off, or doing more than kicking him out of the DMZ - why would they? He had much more justification for his actions than, say Saddam had to Kuwait in Gulf War1 - and we didn't depose him then...

It's all guess work really...
posted by prentiz at 6:26 AM on November 29, 2006

when do you think the best time to intervene have been - in terms of chances of ultimate 'success' and in terms of having 'legitimacy'?

1918, at Versailles. Either go easier on Germany or make sure that Germany is actually occupied by the Allies and reconstructed.

The US and USSR certainly wouldn't be involved. I suspect that if you want to get the UK or France in military action against Germany in the mid-1930s, you'd need to first have some sort of large-scale colonial uprising or something necessitating a military buildup so that they'd have the forces for it.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:34 AM on November 29, 2006

In my opinion, you have to go back to at least 1936 to find a time when Germany could be stopped without the help of the USSR. Would the UK, France and the US have been able to muster public support for what would have been more or less an externally imposed military coup?

An easier way would have been to shut off Germany's fuel supply.
posted by watsondog at 6:44 AM on November 29, 2006

I don't think it would have been possible to raise public support for going to war before the actual war started. The Rhineland belonged to Germany and people thought they were taking their own territory. Austria was a reunion of German-speaking people and the Anschluss was fairly popular in Austria. The Sudetenland had a majority-German population and had been part of Austria. People could have excused each event as Germany taking what was theirs.

Wikipedia has a pretty good article on the remilitarization of the Rhineland. Hitler said, " If the French had then marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance." But the French didn't want to go to war without England, and the English felt that the Germans were "walking into their own backyard."

Hitler was Time's 1938 Man of the Year. "To those who watched the closing events of the year it seemed more than probable that the Man of 1938 may make 1939 a year to be remembered."
posted by kirkaracha at 6:57 AM on November 29, 2006

According to the game Command and Conquer: Red Alert, Stalin would have filled (or at least tried to fill) the power vacuum.
posted by jaded at 7:01 AM on November 29, 2006