America should not have engaged in either World War

[Judge Holden]

Albeit the RN blockade was highly effevtive in WW2 it was rendered uneffective in ww2 the mokment we overran France.

Ok. How much oil and foreign resources was Germany able to ship in from foreign nations after the fall of france?

A fair bit of swedish iron for sure, probably some wood from finland...but is there anything that could actually give germany more than a snowball's chance in hell of not falling apart the moment things went south in the east for lack of oil and due to vast amounts of infrastructure and manpower being dedicated to synthesising/replacing that they could have easily acquired overseas?

The thing about strategic war is that its not just about shitting out more guns/tanks/troops/food/oil than your enemies, its preventing your enemies from acquiring more guns/tanks/troops/food/oil and thus terminally fucking up the strategies they enacted based on holding these assets and forcing them to reroute ever more precious resource and manpower to replicating or synthesising or working around the lack of such resources. Incidentally thats also why the RAF and later USAF bombing campaign of german factories and industrial assets was such a pain for the Germans.

The Soviet Deep Operation stratetgy effective as it was, was only possible becasue of the millions of gallons of fuel, the millions of tonnes of food and the thousands and thousands of tonnes of equipment the USA provided them. The soviet Stalinorgel (the Katyusha rockets) were solely built on Studebaker trucks by late 1943.

Which in and of itself was fraction of all the shit the soviets produced throughout the war for themselves, hell its one of the reasons they were so freaked out at the prospect of losing the caucuses since thats where their oil and a fucktunne of their food was. And IIRC the large majority of the lend lease came into the USSR after 1942/1943 when the war was pretty much impossible for Germany to win anyway given how spent their resources were. It helped them win as completely as they did, but it was not the major factor in them winning.

US industry was definitely one of the main factors in allied victory, and its arguable a real victory* would have been impossible without it aiding the allied cause, but it definitely wasnt the only main factor.

* as in a victory that doesnt consist of "grind Germany into a stalemate in the east, continue the blockade and bombing campaigns while keeping them contained in the Mediterranean, and hope to survive until their resource shortage goes supercritical and/or their economy explodes for lack of foreign assets to cannibalise and the mutinies of 1918 happen again"

 

[Pixy]

The USSR would have steamrolled them, and was already planning to do that before we nuked that shit and ended it. We joke about Americanized Japan but imagine a USSR Japan.

To some extent, the Soviets achieved that. They took the Kuril Islands just before the war ended in August 1945.

 

[Übertroon]

The simple fact of the matter is that our involvement solved more than it broke. The USSR likely would have been able to expand its sphere of influence all the way into France without American intervention, and Japan likely would have been able to walk away from the war with at least some military hegemony over the Southeast Asian region. China likely wouldn't have changed much, but putting a less militant government in place in Japan did more to stabilize the region than most give it credit for.

I get that the idea that the Soviets could win the war alone is a response to the idea that the US won the world war highhandedly, but there's no way the Soviets would have won against the Germans without support from the US. At one point the US supplied all of the Soviet Unions copper and aluminum for tank production, without it the production of T-34s would cease somewhere around the summer of 1942 as stockpiles ran out. They were also provided enough food to feed 30 divisions every day, 427,284 trucks, 13,303 halftracks and tanks, 35,170 motorcycles, half of the aviation fuel used by the soviets during the war, and almost all of their locomotives as most of their trains were wrecked in the first months of the invasion by the Germans.

Now ignoring just lend lease, american bombers also ruined German infrastructure, this made fighting a war with the Soviets egregious. For example lots of the mechanical problems with German heavy vehicles came from substandard engine parts, that's because the factory that made those parts originally was wiped from the face of the earth. German railway lines and roads got so ruined that they had difficulty just keeping their own population fed. Supply lines got so ruined that when the allies captured German factories in 1945 they found them stacked with armaments, they just hadn't been able to send them to the front because none of the supply trains were able to run.

Without America involved German industry would operate at near 100% for the conflict, and the soviets would face dramatic shortages in raw materials, precious metals, food, oil, and fuel as the summer of 1942 comes to an end

 

[NeroRisotto]

if america didn't enter ww2 then there would have been less of those god dang dirty joos ruining the modern wurl

 

[Kyria the Great]

if america didn't enter ww2 then there would have been less of those god dang dirty joos ruining the modern wurl

POL's logical bounds at full play.

 

[Frank D'arbo]

here's more or less why we were in WW2

 

[TaimuRadiu]

The Japs would have invaded the Phillipines anyway even if Hitler wasn't such an exceptional individual, though.

 

[Slap47]

What separates the USA from other shitholes in the Americas is that it was a country with a public sphere.

This sphere made the interests of the people the interests of the state and this created stability and basic decency. Removing this characteristic is fundamentally changing the country.

For 1940s America to be powerful as it was historically it must have this public sphere and that public sphere means America having progressive politicians who will embargo Japan for being crazy.

Honestly I have sperged at length about how crucial the need for oil and foreign resources were in making Germany and Japan act the way they did in the run up to WW2 and during WW2 as I believe both states' absolute existential desperation for these things were behind pretty much all the seemingly dumbass decisions they made, either in seeking them out or in reacting to the lack of them, so I think the more interesting question is how world history would have gone had Hitler's diplomatic team been canny enough to prevent war with britain and the resulting Royal Navy blockade that prevented them getting the oil they needed to carry out Barbarossa the way they wanted.

Assuming Ribbentrop was quietly taken out behind the proverbial woodshed and replaced with someone less autistically obsessed with annoying foreign nations and screwing up Hitler's plans while feeding him bad information on how said foreign nations "really" felt before he could do any damage, this may well have been possible, given how strong anti-war sentiments were in the west and how fear of the USSR united pretty much everyone.

Hell maybe having an actual diplomat giving him a halfway accurate picture of how nations like the UK and USA were feeling would have made Hitler act with more tact and subtlety in his pre-war actions, given how most of his more provocative gestures came about atleast partially as a result of the horseshit Ribbentrop was feeding him about the world outside germany.

Assuming that he and his foreign ministry are successful in running a PR campaign of "self determination for Germans" and "protecting Europe from the soviet menace" with a hefty helping of "Versailles was totally unfair guiz " then Germany could probably wind up getting control of the areas it wanted, albeit a few years later, from Austria to the Rhineland to Danzig and the polish corridor, with Poland being far more likely to give concessions to prevent a war since they would not be able to count on British/French assistance* and given their own issues with the USSR they might even have wound up aligning with Germany in order to defend themselves from the east.

Oh yeah, and given how Ribbentrop was a fanatical pusher of the alliance with Japan despite Germany's existing links with China in trade and military, we can assume that Germany doesnt jump aboard the unproductive alliance with Japan and instead maintains its fairly lucrative and strategic friendship with Nationalist China.

So basically now the board is set with Nazi Germany cementing its control of central europe, likely at the head of some mutual defence pact with Poland and other nations like Hungary and Romania, Britain and France adopting neutral/isolationist positions, the US pretty much doing the same as it was IRL, Japan getting really fucking angry it didnt have the oil it needed to wholely subjugate China but maybe a little more aware of how alone it is in the world right now...

....and the USSR suddenly feeling extremely worried as Stalin realises Germany is going to be looking for a pretext to start "Operation: I cant believe its not Barbarossa" a few years down the line, and will almost certainly not be suffering from any blockade or bombing or foreign intervention when it does so.

Honestly with such a setup, and the fact that even without being cut off from world trade Nazi Germany was an economic timebomb that its leadership knew would explode a couple years down the line at best unless they got a vast amount of assets really fuckin fast, let alone the whole "I literally have been fapping about lebensraum for 20 goddamn years now" thing Hitler had going, its pretty much certain that Germany would find the excuse it wanted and start the war in the early-mid 1940s, probably much the same as how Barbarossa actually started IRL with the buildup of troops accross the border and the initial slamming bulldozer charge into the east.

However this time Germany would not be operating as the oil starved "mein logistics chain is literally fucking horses and mein troop carriers are literally fucking legs because we cant afford the petrol" pile of desperation it was IRL but would likely have all the oil and resources it needed for a sustained mechanised combat, have wasted none of its strength or resources subduing europe or being bombed by the RAF, would not be redirecting vast quantities of resources to the U-Boat programme since the UK wouldnt be an issue, and most importantly would not be entirely reliant upon the drive to the Caucuses in order to capture the food/oil reserves there**.

Basically imagine operation Barbarossa with substantially more men since none would be bound up either in other fronts or in logistics chains for said fronts, all the oil it needed to fuel its massed tank formations for as long as needed, nobody bombing their factories, nobody blockading them from food and trade, and most importantly the strategic depth to make mistakes and fuck things up but still have the opportunity to recover and regain fighting strategic strength.

Against this the USSR has a few more years to prepare and martial its resources and manpower....under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. Who IRL kept repeatedly fucking things up by directly managing the war for a year after Barbarossa, until his strategic fuckups got too dire and he was convinced to step back and allow his general staff the opportunity to salvage the situation. An opportunity that may well not exist given how Germany's initial thrust into the USSR will be a hell of a lot stronger, and they wont be recieving any of the logistical lend lease aid that was so crucial IRL during the period of moving factories east en masse.

Basically it all comes down to whether a greatly more prepared and accordingly militarised USSR can resist a literal Super-Barbarossa by a far better resourced and mechanised and a significantly more patient and less desperate Nazi Germany? Can the Third Reich kick in the front door down hard enough during the opening phase of the war to truly bring the whole rotting structure down?

Furthermore just how different is the Pacific War going to be with China still getting German aid with modernisation and Japan not being able to count on western nations being distracted by europe given they still have their existential problems with oil and resources?

Will the "INVADE WESTERN COLONIES! THEY TOTALLY DONT HAVE THE SPINE TO RESPOND!" team in the Imperial government be a little more quiet and allow the "FORGET KHALKHIN GOL, THE SOVIETS AINT EVEN GONNA EXIST IN A FEW YEARS SO WE SHOULD MARCH ON SIBERIA!" clique to dust off the old Kantokuen plans and take advantage of the coming shitstorm?

* Admittedly they didnt get it IRL but Poland didnt know that at the time
** Granted they would still likely make a major push there in order to starve the Soviets of these resources, but it would not have been such an insanely important priority to prevent total failure of everything.

Fundamentally changing the character of Hitler should be verbotten when it comes to alt-histories. His audacious decisions and imperious attitude are central to both his successes and failures. Going to war with France and gambling everything on going through the Sedan makes sense in hindsight but it pretty risky and off the wall. His mindset of always being aggressive permeated the entire society and you're stretching it by changing that fundamental Nazi characteristic.

Similarly, changing the Germans autistic commitment to autarky is also kinda a step too far. The entire point of the war was that goal so creating a situation where either Japan or Germany benefit from a free market is pretty silly. Even then, it is pretty clear that the USSR was getting stronger and the Germans were reaching its limit on the sustainability of its military spending and number of men it could reasonable have in the army. The Soviets had mobilized more than 2 million men between 1939-1940 and by the end of the war they would have tens of millions more thanks to an excellent reserves system.

Here's a pretty cool documentary about Hermann Göring who wanted to create a bomber that could reach New York & back but didn't get used since it was made in 1944 and still in a testing phase.

It was basically a giant flying wing, even today people are still trying to figure it out since it was so advanced for its time. But yeah, even if the Germans bombed the hell out of New York a land invasion is a whole different story.

American tanks and trucks were made in Detroit, American planes were made in Wyoming and American oil was in Texas. I dunno how this would matter.

The merits of strategically bombing cities is still up in the air as well...

 

[Judge Holden]

Fundamentally changing the character of Hitler should be verbotten when it comes to alt-histories. His audacious decisions and imperious attitude are central to both his successes and failures. Going to war with France and gambling everything on going through the Sedan makes sense in hindsight but it pretty risky and off the wall. His mindset of always being aggressive permeated the entire society and you're stretching it by changing that fundamental Nazi characteristic.

Im not changing his character. Im changing the information he was getting and trusting and upon which he based his audacious decisions and imperious attitude. Hitler was certainly a gambler and definitely a risk taker but he was not stupid. He only acted the way he did with Poland IRL because he was assured by arch-speds like Ribbentrop that the Western powers would just grumble and do nothing. When push comes to shove he still has to engage in aggressive war against the Soviets due to his own personal agenda, not to mention doing so before the economy goes tits up and before the Soviets become too well prepared to resist him.

I mean hell, they managed to put aside the whole "we literally exist because we fucking hate the goddamn USSR and communists in general and want to violently conquer their land" thing for almost half the war with the Molotov Ribbentrop pact with the Soviets, so I think them running a marginally better foreign PR campaign to assuage the concerns of the UK whom Hitler desperately wanted on side from the getgo isnt exactly unrealistic

Similarly, changing the Germans autistic commitment to autarky is also kinda a step too far. The entire point of the war was that goal so creating a situation where either Japan or Germany benefit from a free market is pretty silly. Even then, it is pretty clear that the USSR was getting stronger and the Germans were reaching its limit on the sustainability of its military spending and number of men it could reasonable have in the army. The Soviets had mobilized more than 2 million men between 1939-1940 and by the end of the war they would have tens of millions more thanks to an excellent reserves system.

Autarky was the end goal, of which conquering the USSR was a key component of. It wasnt a case of Hitler declaring "right! fuck the outside world we dont need anything at all from them forever now so screw oil imports and rare minerals!" the moment he seized power as emphasised by both his repeated pre-war/early war attempts to prevent a British blockade and the fact that the Nazis were happily continuing with international trade until it was cut off from them by said blockade.

Again I have to stress that Hitler was not an idiot, and he was more than willing to delay ambitions, make compromises, and cautiously toe the line when it suited him and when he was convinced it would allow for greater success down the line. If that meant buying shit from abroad until they could source it from newly conquered lands then he would have happily done so were it not for the whole Blockade thing.

 

[Manwithn0n0men]

We were in WWI because of our debtors losing the war and we needed to get their money
We were in WWII because WWI wasnt finished by the Europeans

 

[Webby's Boyfriend]

OP is a Russian spy, WWII was a real life-epic of good vs evil and a time when the US saved the world.

 

[Absolutego]

We were in WWI because of our debtors losing the war and we needed to get their money
We were in WWII because WWI wasnt finished by the Europeans

Yeah if we hadn't made sure the Entente won WWI we'd be the ones spending the 20's in a massive recession, while the financial capitol of the world moved from London to Berlin instead of to New York.
I'd say WWII was us realizing that certain regions of central Europe cannot be simultaneously united and martial without endlessly attempting to conquer the rest of the continent.

 

[Inflatable Julay]

If America hadn't been involved in WWII, we would not have bombed Japan. If we didn't bomb Japan, they wouldn't have invented anime.

 

[ArnoldPalmer]

I agree that The U.S. more or less invited itself to WWI (despite clapping serious cheek in the process), but if America didn't intervene in WWII, we wouldn't have:

-The Space Age, and subsequently...
-The Information Age
-Anime, as a result of irradiating Japan
-The American and Japanese Postwar Economic Miracles
-Most consumer electronics we take for granted now
-SEGA, and by extension, Sonic the Hedgehog, and by extension, Chris-Chan, and by extension Kiwifarms, as Service Games would never have moved from Hawaii to Tokyo, following the Coin-Op Slot Machine ban of 1951
-The Cold War (it would have been worse if the USSR had nobody to contend with)
-An Allied victory in Europe (for better or worse, tbh)

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Oh no, how dare the US stop selling stuff to the Japanese while they launch unprovoked invasions of every fucking country around them so they can rape, murder, and plunder. What poor little lambs.

No. Only good Jap is a dead Jap

 

[KimCoppolaAficionado]

Oh no, how dare the US stop selling stuff to the Japanese while they launch unprovoked invasions of every fucking country around them so they can rape, murder, and plunder. What poor little lambs.

No. Only good Jap is a dead Jap

The war's been over for over 70 years, gramps. Let go.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

The war's been over for over 70 years, gramps. Let go.

I would rather have had every Jap fried to a crisp than them get an inch of White man's colonies.

 

[Emperor Julian]

Correct me if I'm wrong but the US wasnt the aggressor in either war so this is redundant.

 

[Oskar Dirlewanger]

America emerged from the world wars as the dominant superpower.

"Great" Britain on the other hand... the entire empire collapsed and the country actually bankrupted and they had to literally sell off the entire thing to the jewish bankers in return for establishing Israel, all because of a mentally ill obese lolcow Churchill who thought that pushing his country into total war will cure his depression.

 

[Mrs Paul]

We did NOT join because of the Lusitania -- indeed, we didn't declare war until 2 years later, dumbass. Try the Zimmermann Telegram.

That's not to say that there was some lingering anger over the sinking, but it wasn't what made us enter the War.