World War II

True, but my point was that Churchill didn't deceive the Americans into the war. His statement about giving us the guns to fight was a fair statement of what he hoped to get at that point. Roosevelt wanted to help but was restrained by public opinion (plus, I suspect, his realisation that the US forces were not altogether ready).

The point about invading the USSR is interesting: Churchill actually repeatedly warned Stalin it was coming, but Stalin believed this was trickery by Churchill to get him to attack Germany! Churchill was indeed pretty ruthless, but on this occasion he was truthfully relaying genuine intelligence.

If Hitler had not declared war on America and waited to attack Russia, Germany could probably have defeated England. However it would not have mattered if Germany defeated Britain or not as long as the British were effectively neutralized.

The German scientists would have developed the atomic bomb at about the same time as the Americans did . At that point Hitler would have been easily able to conquer any nation in Europe and the Americans would have been forced to just watch as first, it was not their war, and second, they would have been afraid of starting a nuclear war especially when bombers at the time had limited range.

It would have ended in a cold war detente with America on one side and a Germanized Europe on the other similar to the cold war between the Soviet Union and the West. What would happen after that is anybody's guess.

I have a bit of background in nuclear power, and have done some reading on the German efforts, plus reading and sightseeing on the Manhattan Project. The Germans simply were never close to developing a nuclear weapon. There were many reasons for this, not the least of was they ran off many of their best physicists in the buildup to the war.

Even under the best of situations, it's difficult to imagine Germany ever matching something on the scale of the Manhattan Project. These were huge energy-hungry industrial installations. In particular, the uranium bomb took huge amounts of electrical energy to produce. The plutonium bomb took less energy to produce, but the physics and engineering was much more involved.

The Germans researchers were handicapped by politics. Not only were people like Einstein run out of the country but the remaining scientists couldn't use some perfectly good theories (and even some facts!). They had to work around "Jew Science" - which was any idea that was developed by a Jewish person - and if a scientist became politically suspect then his work had to be rejected as 'false' if you wanted to keep working.

The heads of the German atomic project were rushing to get an atomic reaction going - rushing so much that they weren't bothering with led lined rooms or other safety procedures. If they had succeeded they would have died. It wasn't until they were in the POW camps and the bomb was dropped on Japan that any of them worked out the math to find out how much uranium they would need for the bomb and realised how little was needed.

Not that the Manhattan Project would have proceed at the same speed without a war with the Germans. Many of the scientists came from Nazis occupied countries and that drove them harder than any war with Japan would have done. And if the US was only fighting a war on one front then Japan might have fallen before Fat Man and Little Boy were finished. It would have been bloody, but after winning a war with Japan I doubt that the US would have kept shoveling cash into the bottomless pit that was the Manhattan Project. I mean, they ended up with a solid gold door stopper!

There is some good alternative history out there - in the fiction department. Tuttledove is history professor by day and alternative history writer by night and has produced some good stuff - Days of Infamy stands out in my mind as a good treatment of what could have happened if the Japanese had landed in Hawaii.

Goodgulf

I'm a big fan of Turtledove's more straightforward alternative history. When he starts mixing alternative history with things like time travel and aliens, I leave him on the shelf.

Guy

A very interesting discussion chaps. A quick invasion may have worked, but the English Channel made success very doubtful.
The Germans didn't have air superiority, the Royal Navy was still mighty and would have created mayhem with any invading force.
The Junkers JU88 which epitomised the Blitzkreig was easy fodder for Hurricanes and Spitfires.
We all know how close D-Day was to becoming a disaster for the brave US soldiers on the difficult beaches.
The weather on D Day caused The Allies problems.
D-Day was still very tricky and The Allies had nearly two years of massive economic advantage-The US war machine at full pelt, total naval and air superiority.
A more sensible option would have been to massively increase the U boat fleet and starve us into submission.
I won't even begin to discuss the fascinating theories that the British ruling class with a few exceptions who would have emigrtaed to Canada or Australia would have come to a Petain-like agreement quite easily and quickly.
Anti-semitism was rife in upper-class circles in the thirties, we could have done much more to take Jewish refugees if we had really wanted. Everybody in positons of authority knew exactly what was haoppening in Germany during the thirties. They just didn't react until it was too late-but Chaimberlain's Peace in our Time gained us time in which to build fighters, and ready the Navy. We didn't need to declare war in 39 we could have held on a little longer until France, Belgium or the Netherlands were invaded which would have bought more time.
Its all what-ifs and I read a superb quote the ither day-I never answer "What if questions"-can't exactly remember the details unfortunately.

It's an interesting 'counterfactual' novel in that it starkly portrays the Japanese courage in battle along with the Japanese barbarism in treatment of non-Japanese civilians and prisoners of war.

Its sequel, End of the Beginning, seems to demonstrate that, given the much greater productive capacity of the United States, a Japanese conquest of Hawaii would merely have postponed the Pacific war's inevitable outcome... --C.K.

Since Turtledove has flown into our off topic conversation, perhaps I can insert a bit of relevance by noting that he may very well be one of us. In one of his alternate history series, Samuel Clemons spanks a daughter, there are, a la the early Heinlein, a number of other throw away references to spanking in his various novels, and, most striking, his novel Household Gods, co-authored by Judith Tarr uses the heroines conversion from a 20th century gooey anti-spanking mother into a 5th, or so, century spanking mother as a marker of her conversion from romanticism to realism in child rearing.

One of the things that keeps me from writing more is a love of war games. There's one called World In Flames that beautifully captures the tactical and strategic realities of WWII - one that has gone through many editions, each better than the last. It allows the players to make choices for their countries - do you want to focus on navy, air power, armour units, base infantry, specialty infantry (mountain units, para unit, engineering divisions, etc) and has a political expansion that can help shape play. I've played it for years - and there is no way the Japanese alone can beat the Americans. In fact once the Americans start gearing up to war time economy the Japanese are pushed on to the defensive.

Which is very historic. Japan went to war because it didn't have the resources it needed. Even with more resources it doesn't have the industrial capacity of the US. It doesn't have the manpower to compete with the US. The reason they went to war with the US is that they felt the US was about to declare war on them (what with the embargo) and thought if they could knock out the Pacific Fleet they would have a better chance of winning. Even then many of their strategists predicted that a war with the US would end with a Japanese defeat.

Production capacity is paramount when it comes to modern warfare. Hitler examined the productively numbers released by the US government and dismissed them as wishful propaganda when they were accurate. It's possible that if he had believed they were true he wouldn't have declared war on the US.

As for alternative histories that feature corporal punishment, the better ones do. A good alternative history tries to capture the feel and mood of the period that's being altered. Spanking was accepted for most of human history so it makes sense that books in the past include it - if only as a background element. Bad alternative histories have people going "Oh, I never thought of that before. <Historic Practice> is wrong and <modern way> is better, it just makes sense to switch.". Usually those books unintentionally undermine historic groups that were fighting for social change. The past just isn't PC and good novels set in the past reflect that.

Goodgulf

One weakness of wargaming, as of much discussion of possibilities in war, is that it rarely captures issues about motivation. This does not matter where both sides are very determined, as would have been the case with a German invasion of England (I know a wargame by military people had the Germans establishing a beachhead but failing to get enough troops and munitions across the Channel quickly enough under air and sea attack, and getting driven into the sea by the counterattack). But if you look at Vietnam, for instance, there was a point at which the American people said, "This isn't worth it." Analyses of the American Civil War often fall down badly on this, assuming the North was bound to win. Well, yes, if the two sides fought to the bitter end, the North was bound to win unless Britain and France intervened; but the North could simply have said, "OK, you have your independence with slavery and free trade; we'll have no slavery and protection for our industry, plus all California and most of what we now call the South-west." After all, many people voted for Lincoln because they resented Southern attempts to rule the abolition of slavery in the North unconstitutional, and because of disputes over the then West ("Bloody Kansas"). The North could have grown tired of the war and survived. The South had to win or collapse. The South only needed to keep Yankee soldiers out of some parts of its territories; the North needed to conquer a vast area, much of it ideal for guerilla warfare. MOst well-informed neutral analysts at the time took full account of the North's larger population, better transport links, more industry and ships, and still thought they'd bitten off more than they could chew. Also France was keen to intervene to support the Confederacy (to advance French interests) and the British government iffed and butted about it, but the French wouldn't move without the British.