This video is 18 minutes long but definitely worth viewing. Very interesting thoughts at the end.
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I am kinda glad it didn't, that's a city I want to visit!...or maybe Fat Man or Little Boy would have fallen on Berlin.
Hitler had no designs on conquering North America. His main aim was to keep America out of their European war.SKC,
From where would the planes be deployed that would have been able to make it to Berlin (if not shot down en route)? That's the thing, if England falls in 1941/42 Germany would have been able to seize nearly all the territory in Europe and extended their grasp well into the Atlantic and Northern frontier. Their Luftwaffe would have had a time to regroup, resupply and presumably they once again would have had control of the oil fields of Northern Africa (and middle east). Never mind the fact that they would have begun production of fighter jets and bombers which would have run circles around the best planes we could field.
It changes the entire dynamic. It also means that they could have begun supplying their friends the Japanese with military advisers, weaponry, etc. which would have made our war in the Pacific much, much tougher.
So even if we come up with the A-Bomb in 1945, it would have been a near impossibility to have dropped them on Berlin or any other German city. The Air War in Europe was much of the deciding factor and without the bases in England and Scotland where pretty much all of our fighter and bomber squadrons were launched, we would have had no other place to put them (or places which would not have been incredibly vulnerable to attack and destruction.)
The far more likely scenario would have been German planes bombing our East Coast from seized positions in Canada's northeastern frontier.
Because every single thing I've ever read paints Hitler's vision as dating back to earlier grand Germanic visions where they dominated much of Europe (not Britain) and into Soviet Russia. Those visions didn't include the British Isles or damn sure North or South America. It's purely speculation to say "yeah but he may've wanted Arizona and Peru too". Nothing indicates that he did. Besides, his generals would've killed him before they put troops on a boat to try and cross the Atlantic. They all thought Barbarossa was madness, much less pursuing trans-Atlantic dreams.100 Tons, I was writing that in effort to show that we could have been forced into some sort of truce or acknowledgment that we would have likely had to agree to Hitler's terms at some point. I don't think it's a stretch to think that in a few years Greenland/Iceland would have fallen, cut off from their European allies. (Hell, the Germans had bases in Greenland as it was, mostly weather monitoring, but it wouldn't be a stretch to think they could have used it as a staging area for long range bombing.)
What makes you think he ultimately would have stopped with Europe? The Germans were already working damned hard to establish working relationships with numerous South American countries and obviously the Japanese had their eyes on Australia, New Zealand and most places in between. They guy wanted to go down as the greatest leader in history and what makes you think that his ultimate goal wasn't to reduce virtually any possible challenge to his rule? That would have only really left the US and Canada as that threat.
442nd?
Haven't watched the video yet, but all very good points. As I have aged and reviewed WW2 history, it's easy to see the efforts of the red army can't be overlooked as a major factor in the defeat of Nazi Germany.
One thing I have always heard was that the red army was a pretty despicable bunch, those that encountered them feared them more than the Nazis to some degree. There are stories about villages being liberated from the Nazis by the Soviets only to end up raped and pillaged. And their sheer numbers are why there were so many casualties...I don't think they had the best training either. The typical Nazi soldier was better trained and hardened by war when going up against a similar US soldier early on in our involvement. They had better weaponry in the first engagements (some would say they had better weapons the whole time, just ran out of gas lol).
The German tanks were a great example of this. Their exterior was much more capable of withstanding a hit from our tank artillery. The Sherman tank was cheaper to build and we were rolling them out fast, but we had to....the tiger tanks the Germans commanded were impressive, and the 88mm cannons the Germans used were making Swiss cheese out of our armor.
I'm sure most of that is fairly common knowledge to those who are familiar with WW2 history. We really didn't get air superiority until the P51, and it was simply on par with Japanese zeroes and whatnot. Britain took a helluva hit prior to the U.S. Coming into the fray, I would imagine morale amongst the British troops was getting pretty damned low around 1941-42.
... if just for the scale of the place if nothing else.