World War II Without The Yanks

[Utisz]

It's the classic question: how would WWII have ended up if the U.S. stayed neutral as they had at one point intended?

Would Hitler and the Axis have been able to stave off the rest of the Allies, or were the U.S. crucial to the liberation of Europe?

Would Japan's imperialistic expansion have continued unabated, or would they have been defeated in any case?

[jyng1]

It's the classic question: how would WWII have ended up if the U.S. stayed neutral as they had at one point intended?

Would Hitler and the Axis have been able to stave off the rest of the Allies, or were the U.S. crucial to the liberation of Europe?

Would Japan's imperialistic expansion have continued unabated, or would they have been defeated in any case?

Was the U.S. in World War II? Can't remember reading anything about them.

[Utisz]

Was the U.S. in World War II? Can't remember reading anything about them.

[jyng1]

Was the U.S. in World War II? Can't remember reading anything about them.

Oh that's right, there were 5 Yanks at El Alamein.

[ashi]

I believe the subsequent political implications of this altWWII ending in ~1950 with the same victors would pale in comparison to those of the subsequent decades of an isolationist US without the super charged manufacturing industry or the infinite political capital and influence to reshape Europe and become the World's Police. Hilter's ambitions were never going to survive Stalin's willingness to treat Russian lives as a infinite resource and subvert the global communist movement to his own ends. How would Japan have fared against China and Russia? Less clear to me, especially without American war crimes killing so many civilians and destroying such large portions of so many Japanese cities.

[Senseye]

It's hard to say.

I think eventually Hitler would have lost anyways, too much trouble with Russia on the Eastern front. It certainly would have taken longer though. And who knows how the Japanese situation would have gone. Would they have just messed around in the Orient or actually tried to hook up with the Nazi's and gotten involved in Europe?

[Ferrus]

There likely wouldn't have been a Pacific War. The US an Japan mainly came to blows because:

a) The Japanese lacked key resources such as rubber and oil, made worse when the US embargoed them
b) Indonesia solved a lot of these problems but unlike French Indo-China controlling it meant their vital supply routes being at the mercy of the US navy in the Philippines the British navy in Signapore.

If the US had been more committed to neutrality it is likely they would not have put an embargo on Japan, which likely would have meant they would have focused on winning the war in China rather than expanding the scope of the conflict. No need to entangle the US and UK when the war in China was already becoming a gruelling battle of attrition. It stikes me that after Operation Barbarossa ground to a halt in November 1941 Japan would have had less and less interest in tackling the Soviet Union's weak flank. if the Germans had managed to take Moscow, maybe they would have changed their minds but they also had little to gain strategically in Siberia beyond a few ports of the sea of Japan that they occupied during the Russian Civil War even if the USSR had started to fall apart.

As for Europe, the Soviet Union would have already won given the US policy of cash and carry to the USSR and UK at this point. A lot of the situation would depend on if the US was much more radically neutral and denied weapons and foodstuffs to both sides, that (more than any direct military intervention) would have drastically shifted the calculus in favour of the Germans as both the UK and USSR at that stage of the war had problems with food and military supplies. My sense though is whilst it would have dragged the war on longer, the Germans made fundamental errors of logistics from the start of Operation Barbarossa and they could not have advanced much more than they did. German tanks kept moving beyond the range of supporting troops, had problems with refuelling and maintenance this was not a problem so much invading small, technologically more advanced Western European countries but was suicidal in the USSR. Notwithstanding the failure to properly provide infantry with preparations for a cold and defensive winter, It's possible that maybe they could have gained enough of a foothold if they had pushed a bit further to naturally defensible lines for winter to have focused building a massive system of defensive logistics but the Nazi regimes fixation of eliminating ideological classes of enemies, Hitler's obsession with constant aggressive front attacks and the increasing impotence of Wehrmacht expertise as opposed to Hitler's ever more megalomaniacal sense of his own genius makes this rather unlikely. The Soviet System was based on redundancy of command so even the capture of Moscow probably would not have been the end. Without Japanese intervention I think it was pretty much inevitable the Soviet troops would counterstrike in 1941, get bloodied again (but less deeply) in 1942 and then have the run of things from 1943 onwards. But the liberation of territory may have taken longer. Without US troops in the UK in 1944 I also rather doubt D-Day would have happened as Britain would have been forced to invest much more heavily in keeping the empire safe especially in the Middle East, N Africa and Meditterean and any incursion would, if even possible, be limited to coastal towns and airfields that served as platforms for naval and aerial raids against the Britain itself. The likely outcome would have been Soviet domination of much of Western Europe up to France and probably a retaliatory invasion of overthrow of Franco and Salazar in Spain and Portugal. And perhaps even some kind of Finlandisation of Britain itself (and probably the Irish Free State also) given what would have been a very precarious geopolitical position - an outcome that elements of the old fashioned isolationist Republicans in the US could have lived with.

[starjots]

If this happened because the US was staunchly isolationist -- perhaps a different president etc. -- then there would be no embargo on Japan and no need for Pearl Harbor. The continual 'creep' of Japanese expansion could continue as long as they left the Philippines alone. Not hard to see them swallowing Indochina and Singapore if the US was that passive. The UK could not have stopped Japanese expansion - they had trouble keeping Japan out of India with the US involved as it was.

In Europe, if the Yanks had extended their isolationism to financial and material support, then Germany would have held western Europe sans the UK and been able to focus more resources on the USSR. The UK sans US support would be much weaker -- basically fighting for existence the whole time instead of taking offensive action in Africa and a much weaker bombing campaign to draw off German resources/hinder production. There would be no invasion of Italy and no German army needed to defend that front. There would be no winning the Uboat war without the US small aircraft carriers. There would be no need for a large army to defend against the invasion of Europe.

To put it in perspective - In WW 1, if the US had not supplied extensive armaments to the allies prior to 1917, I think they would have lost to Germany. I base this on reading Churchill's accounts of WW1 and WW2, just my opinion.

That leaves the question if the USSR would come out on top anyway. Maybe. Maybe not. Hitler was a fuck up when the chips were down. Either way, Europe is under Nazi influence or Soviet domination for decades to come.

[starjots]

This scenario was covered, btw, in Star Trek TOS 'The City on the Edge of Forever.'*

As Spock noted, "Edith Keeler must die."

In this episode's scenario, Germany's penchant for superweapons won them the war - nukes and rockets to carry them.

*Possibly the best Star Trek episode of all time, worth a watch if you haven't seen it.

[Ferrus]

If this happened because the US was staunchly isolationist -- perhaps a different president etc. -- then there would be no embargo on Japan and no need for Pearl Harbor. The continual 'creep' of Japanese expansion could continue as long as they left the Philippines alone. Not hard to see them swallowing Indochina and Singapore if the US was that passive. The UK could not have stopped Japanese expansion - they had trouble keeping Japan out of India with the US involved as it was.

This I disagree with in the sense that I don't think the US could have tolerated being surrounded like that in the Phillipines and it would have made US neutrality impossible. That was why the Japanese went for a surprise attack in the first place, to avoid what they assumed would be US actions that would result from taking those areas. It should be remembers that the US, even the isolationists, deeply regretted the expansion into Chinese ports and the Pacific islands that resulted from WW1 and was one of the main bones of contention against the treaty in the US that put Japan and the US into a state of increasingly bad relations from 1918. So in this scenario I don't see the Japanese making such a move because a) they would have less need to b) they wouldn't want to risk a US attack. The only reason the military got the US attack approved even though the Japanese govt, the emperor and indeed some in the military were worried it was a bad decision is because they felt the embargo left them no choice.

Then again, in terms of realism it is difficult to see how an increasing embargo of Japan wasn't going to happen one way or the other. Complete Japanese domination of China would have been very perjudicial to the US military and economic position in the pacific and made the Phillipines and Hawaii extremely vulnerable strategically. The general trend since WW1 was pretty much forcing Japan and the US into conflict. One of the reasons that Britain terminated the Anglo-Japanese treaty in the 20s was precisely because Canada feared that an alliance with Japan could draw Britain into a war with the USA which could result in the American conquest of much of Canada (almost certainly turning their provinces into US states) that Britain was then likely to exchange in any peace settlement for more tangential and more importantly defensible American possessions such as islands and small colonies elsewhere. That was the environment in which the US's War Plan Red was conceived and the Canadian Defence Scheme No. 1 which envisaged using Canadian troops to try to fend off any invasion although it seemed unlikely to succeed based on both the judgement of certain elements of the Canadian army and that of the British army*. Canada's unease at the likely inability of Britain to prevent such an invasion from the south given their military commitments elsewhere in the empire and the relative unimportance of Canada to the war situation led them to pushing for the UK to disengage with the Japanese, which shows clearly that everyone knew US-Japanese stratgic interests were about to butt heads.

* They had not been informed of the British government's plan which later came out in archives not to send any troops to aid Canada, except perhaps to defend the maritime islands such as Nova Scotia, Newfoundland (albeit not a part of Canada then) and Prince Edward's Island as they considered the military situation over such a huge territory impossible. In the war itself it was unfortunately Australia who found out in very similar circumstances this reality when they were left exposed to a Japanese invasion and had a rift with the British government over pulling back Australian troops being sent to the Middle Eastern theatre. In the end the Australians (and New Zealand) unilterally created a strategic relationship with the US to defend themselves. This, along with the fall of Singapore and the financial indebtedness to the USA, not to mention the increasing dificulty of maintaining civil order in India even under wartime conditions were a culmination of intractable problems for the British empire that created an environment in which the ties that bound the metropole and the colonies grew progressively weaker and the empire dissolved into the mush of the commonwealth. Canada itself ended up copying the Australian playbook once the cold war and the Soviet nuclear threat from the north became palpable.