Though, it is questionable how much of the soldiers from Germanys privileged classes would be shipped to Eastern Front in that case. The captain, two crew members, and six passengers had left earlier in an ill-fated effort to get help. Theres rather broad agreement among mainstream historians on this. You must log in or register to reply here. Yet, here again is a case of the wrong equipment. Sure but this not what the OP specified so the answer remains yes the Allies could win without direct US involvement or even with the pre Lend-Lease levels of support if it happens early in the war. Unless you can refute the other scenarios for Allied victory before 1941 then the answer to the OPs question remains yes. Churchill kept working to delay/divert any landing in Western Europe: Roosevelt and Stalin Portrait of a Partnership. Defeat never came down to one battle or one campaign. The Lend-Lease act was enacted in March 1941 and authorized the United States to provide weapons, provisions, and raw materials to strategically important countries fighting Germany and Japan -- primarily, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China. By this time US aid was already flowing in, and the victory came afterSecond Battle of El Alamein, after US themselves joined. A map of lend-lease shipments from the United States to the U.S.S.R. from 1941-45. We're dealing with alternate history. At the same time, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini could have made demands for France and Britain to honor their promises to Italy for more Yugoslav territory in return for entering World War One on the side of the Allies. From there, it flew 5,650 kilometers to the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, one of some 14,000 aircraft sent by the United States to the Soviet Union during World War II under the massive Lend-Lease program. Siberia, is not even an option to consider. The root cause of world war II is industrial and imperialist circles in the west fostering and backing fascist movements, When we look into the reality on the ground circa the time period when Operation Sea Lion was supposed to, Without demeaning the sacrifice of those who fought in the ranks of the British, lets do a simple review: In. The Short History Of The Great Patriotic War, also from 1948, acknowledged the Lend-Lease shipments, but concluded: "Overall this assistance was not significant enough to in any way exert a decisive influence over the course of the Great Patriotic War. There was another sad example of not learning from history. My British born-American raised Mother has told me that my British born-Britsh raised Aunt Bethel always claimed that "Spam saved England" ---because it was ration free. Faced with these realities and incensed by the attack on Pearl Harbor, everyday Americans enthusiastically supported the war effort. From the depths of the Cold War to the present day, many Soviet and Russian politicians have ignored or downplayed the impact of American assistance to the Soviets, as well as the impact of the entire U.S.-British war against the Nazis. WebThe war may have lasted into 1946, but the Soviets would still have captured Berlin and probably would have overrun the rest of Germany, too. He rapidly began to simplify construction procedures for the T-34 and within less than a year the number of man-hours required to produce T-34s was cut in half. That neatly sums it up. Allies couldnt have won WW2 without full US support Allies could have won WW2 with US material aid but without US manpower Results are only viewable after voting. This series of articles represents an attempt to summarize the top mistakes and omissions that Germany made during the most terrible of all wars in human history. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war.". What would NOT have happened would have been an invasion of the UK. However, I have serious doubts that the Germans would have been able to win the war had the USA stay neutral. WebBy the time the allies were pushing through Europe, the US had collected many victories in the pacific, the arena of carriers and planes. Not enough men. Germany had the military potential to defeat France and could have likely forced Britain to make peace, but with a Navy less than one-sixth the size of Britains, it had no means of attacking U.S. territory, let alone defeating the U.S. military. Though after landing and adapting to Western Front warfare after a while US forces were the backbone of the effort in Western Front, by the time they started making advance into Germany the war was more or less considered over by many on both sides. With Great Britain in the war it meant Germany was dragged into various side campaigns from Greece to North Africa. "If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," he wrote in his memoirs. During World War II the Soviet Union received large amounts of aid from the Western world in the form of supplies and military intervention, both of which were declared to have been irrelevant for the Soviet Unions victory over Nazi Germany by Soviet historians. Scan this QR code to download the app now. Rather, the consequence of lend-lease was to virtually bankrupt this country and lead to the collapse in our manufacturing base, whilst the Marshall Plan created one of the strongest economies in the world - who got the short straw? The United States was never within striking distance of Germany and it should have been obvious that Japan couldn't mount an invasion of the American west coast. The railroads would have periodically come to a halt. Again I asked myself the question would the Allied powers had won without US involvement, and it is harder for me to say than the previous thread. In conclusion, if Germany won WW1, the German government would have been considerably more powerful and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires would have lasted longer. Though this indeed tied some German forces, the forces were not anything which could be compared to what was being thrown to Eastern Front, with one notable panzer group being stationed ner Pas de Calais (Hitlers folly), and most of the preparation taking the form of elaborate fortifications that were called Atlantic Wall prepared mainly by Rommel. After this proposal was rejected by the Poles, he could have demanded the return of merely Danzig and the Polish Corridor perhaps with some of the same assurances to the Poles offered by the German delegation at Versailles in 1919, namely to allow the Poles a road/rail corridor to the German port of Danzig just as he offered Poland in real life. In addition, much of the $31 billion worth of aid sent to the United Kingdom was also passed on to the Soviet Union via convoys through the Barents Sea to Murmansk. 21st Army Group could advance from Venice/Trieste to Vienna and Prague, but there's no one on their flanks. Instead of the four Allied powers the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union then standing together in a final Allied Victory Parade in a defeated Berlin in September 1944, the Germans could have celebrated the defeat of the British, marching through London and Moscow as they did Paris. without L-L the Soviets certainly cannot become the juggernaut they did towards the end of WWII, and might have abandoned large parts of the country west of the Urals when they were invaded. They are related because both buildups on both sides of the cold war started during WW2 to fight the Axis powers. Would The Allies Have Won Ww2 Without Russia? The thing that is certain that war would last even longer in that case, and cost many more lives. So, until 1944 summer, Soviets were practically alone in Europe. Normandy and the Bocage around it could be considered bloody battles, with Allies moving inch by inch. Lend Lease for USSR was important in non-combat equipment radios, trucks and similar. An estimated 25 million Soviet citizens perished in the titanic conflict with Nazi Germany between June 1941 and May 1945. But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. WebIn 1963, KGB monitoring recorded Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov saying: "People say that the allies didn't help us. I think one of the key questions is whether the RAF and the British naval forces would have been able to resist for so long the Luftwaffe and the Nazi marine forces without the resources and aid provided by the USA. This is the first in a series of five articles providing critical analysis as to how Germany Might Have Won World War II. Sorry Soviet and British Nationalists: the USA economic, industrial and operational/tactical contributions were key: You know, that's the crux of the problem in all these discussions: practically. The Moscow Victory Parade on June 24, 1945, involved some 40,000 Red Army soldiers and nearly 1,900 military vehicles. On December 8, 1941, one day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war on Japan. Photo: Museum of the U.S. Air Force (Courtesy Photo). Throw in the fact that Germany's victories in Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France didn't really help this tied down vast amounts of men and material that could have been better used on the frontlines in the Soviet Union. The Soviet failure to invest in developing armoured personnel carriers for their infantry, better reconnaissance vehicles and mobile flak guns were serious technical mistakes that proved costly in battle, but Lend-Lease deliveries of US-made halftracks and reconnaissance vehicles helped to partly rectify this deficiency by the last year of the war. The others were never found. In announcing he had achieved peace in our time at Munich in September 1938, Chamberlain revealed his belief that the Munich Agreement was just the prelude to a second and much more comprehensive Four-Power Peace Conference between the UK, France, Germany and Italy. There were the puppet states of Slovakia and Slovenia, volunteers from across Europe including neutral Spain, but all this was matched against Great Britain, France, Poland, the Soviet Union, and notably the United States. A Japanese attack on the Soviet Union, on the other hand, would have put Josef Stalin in the very difficult situation of also fighting a two-front war. Nikita Khruschev, who later became Soviet Premier, was aware of this and noted in his memoirs: "How could we have advanced from Stalingrad and Kursk on to Berlin without American aid and foodstuffs? In World War II, the three great Allied powersGreat Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Unionformed a Grand Alliance that was the key to victory. This included such small arms as the MG34, MG42 and the world's first "assault rifle," the StG44. Copyright 2006-2022 Historum. The United States is a country of machines. However, it is likely he would have invaded all of those nations at some point during the 1940s regardless of what Hitler did or did not do since his massive expansion of the Red Army was completed by June 1941, by which time the Soviet Union boasted seven times as many tanks and four times as many combat aircraft as Nazi Germany. The major effects would have been on the US. Would an America isolationist enough to deny the UK Lend-Lease have been isolationist enough to grant Hitler the monies that he used to build his Army and Navy. There may have been mass starvation in the UK. Germany invaded France with more horses than Napoleon had used in 1812! Although Allied aid was used directly to supply the armed forces with both durable goods and consumables, indirectly it probably released resources to households. His intended purpose of this second conference would have been to redress Germanys remaining legitimate grievances stemming from the unjust Treaty of Versailles and thereby secure a more just and lasting peace to avert the potential outbreak of World War II. By A Soviet report by Politburo member Nikolai Voznesensky in 1948 asserted that the United States, described as "the head of the antidemocratic camp and the warrior of imperialist expansion around the world," contributed materiel during the war that amounted to just 4.8 percent of the Soviet Union's own wartime production. Which still means the answer to the OP is yes, the Allies could win. American and Soviet pilots pose in front of a Bell P-39 Airacobra, supplied to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease program. Without landing craft another example of wrong equipment and lacking control of the skies of Great Britain, an invasion by Germany was simply impossible. Germany built no heavy bombers and lacked any truly effective long range aircraft. One look at the map of southern Europe easily tells even people with non-military education that there is nothing soft about that location at all Italy is hilly, rough terrain, and where Italy connects to Europe is even worse impassable Alps totally clog the north, and beyond Alps there are many more difficult obstacles like Black Forest, or Yugoslavian hilly countryside. What role did the United States play in World War I? For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. You are using an out of date browser. As we celebrate the ending of the war 75 years ago, know this: victory for the Allies was never guaranteed, and historians agree there were countless ways Germany could have won the war. Thus, landings in 1944 came at a point at which Soviets broke German armies and were racing towards Berlin. But it would also take longer and cost more loss of lives. Japan had attacked the United States, so Germany was never required to join with its Axis partner. "During World War II, only the supplies brought in by Lend-Lease prevented the paralysis of rail transport in the Soviet Union.". This abrupt reversal in policy ended up triggering a world war which would cost over fifty million lives. I already posted a similar thread about US involvement in WWI. And as it happened in the real life, that means the fall of the entire German south flank in East and the loss of the Balkans. But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel After the fall of France in June Italy and Japan never posed the same kind of threat as the European superpower they fought alongside. Roosevelt had caved in to Churchills delaying tactics on the invasion before, and now all concerned, from Hopkins to Marshall to Leahy, were worried it might happen again. Historically, Germany already outproduced the USSR in certain areas like locomotives, trucks, and even bombers, with 12,664 produced by Germany in the years 19411943 as compared to 11,359 built by the USSR.170 Without Allied intervention and Lend-Lease, Soviet margins in these areas would most likely have widened, while margins in areas such as tanks would have shrunk significantly. This proved crucial in the Blitzkrieg against the Low Countries and France. Most Russians believe the Soviet military would have been able to win World War II without the efforts of the U.S. or its allies, a Opposing camps of historians generally agree on that, but little else when it comes to History Forum for World History - Historical Events, Historians, Archaeology, Ancient History, Modern History, Human History, History Books, Military History. All rights reserved. Whereas Japan would not benefit from the lack of resources and infrastructure in these areas. Despite the self-professed role of the US as the guardian of freedom, democracy, human rights and the world order, and the huge sums of money it spends on its military, it has never led a successful campaign to achieve the goals it set for itself. There is one World War II historian, John Lukacs, who has said that all three major allies were needed to beat Hitler. Unfortunately, his offer was ignored by Allied leaders who proceeded to declare war the following day. The lack of lend-lease would have made life very difficult, and it would have taken much longer to assemble any kind of invasion force - possibly allowing Germany to develop atomic weapons and extended range missiles. Perhaps my original question should have been "What would have happened in WWII if there had been no Spam?". However, even with lack of US presence in the war, Germany would still need to keep some presence in this Atlantic Wall of theirs. It is no exaggeration to say that America won the war abroad and the peace at home at the same time. 'We Would Have Lost': Did U.S. Lend-Lease Aid Tip The Balance In Soviet Fight Against Nazi Germany? The Terror? Germany lost the First World War largely because it couldn't fight a sustained two-front war. Many contributed to relief efforts; others volunteered as ambulance drivers or nurses, or even as pilots and soldiers. This prompted Germany to declare war on the United States, which, in turn, led to the United States to declare war on Germany on December 11, 1941. JavaScript is disabled. WebMost Russians believe the Soviet military would have been able to win World War II without the efforts of the U.S. or its allies, a new poll finds. Even if Japan wisely realized this (and it seems they did, in Khalkin Gol) and refrained from pushing towards USSR, Soviets would still keep divisions across the border even if themselves did not advance that would force Japan to keep defenses and divisions here, reducing their war effort elsewhere. Such assessments, however, are contradicted by the opinions of Soviet war participants. The highlight of the event was the lowering of the captured German standards, which were flung down in front of Lenin's Tomb to be trampled by Soviet marshals riding white horses. Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. Rommel had scarce manpower and supplies at his disposal, yet he made good use of what he had, and Britain succeeded in stopping Germans only with amassing of massive resources and manpower in firstFirst Battle of El Alamein. Historically 21st Army Group had the English Channel/North Sea on one flank and the Americans on the other flank. What would have happened if the United States didnt enter WWII? Also see r/History or r/AskHistorians. But War of 1812. After all the euphoria in London and Paris over the avoidance of war with Germany in 1938 with the Munich Agreement, which enshrined the Wilsonian principle of self-determination to allow the 3.5 million Germans in the Sudetenland to unite with Germany, Chamberlain viewed Hitlers violation of the pact as a personal insult and breach of honor. Given the way the events of the war played out, there was no other foreseeable outcome other than her defeat. During World War I not to mention wars in European wars through the ages Germany didn't really fight alone. The additional firepower, resources, and soldiers of the U.S. helped to tip the balance of the war in favor of the Allies. Copyright 2023 Center for the National Interest All Rights Reserved. World War II in Europe was Germany and Italy, which was joined by Finland, Hungary, Romania, and to some extent Bulgaria. Thats assuming they were able to make advances. Especially considering that the route from NW China/Korea to Soviet heartland passes through never ending Central Asian steppes. Without the American entry into World War II, its possible Japan would have consolidated its position of supremacy in East Asia and that the war in Europe could have dragged on for far longer than it did. By the onset of the great depression, Americans no longer cared to talk or think about the great war; even veterans felt that way. So even though Japan could easily cripple British presence in SE Asia easily with its Navy (they mostly did that already), it is rather difficult to imagine Japan subduing India which would turn into another China for Japan. Victory for the Allies was never guaranteed, and historians agree there were countless ways Germany could have won the war. The plane spent 69 years on the tundra before a Russian Geographical Society expedition rescued it in 2016 and returned the wreckage to Krasnoyarsk. Although World War I began in 1914, the United States did not join the war until 1917. Operation Market Garden is a special case that demonstrates this, for example. Of course, we are not taking tactical considerations into account. How many U.S. troops lost their lives in ww1? The only viable route seems to be towards the West from Northern Italy, from a narrow region towards France. Eventually, those nations got out of the fight and in the case of Romania joined with the Soviets against the Hungarians. In early 1915, Germany introduced a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic. A monument in Fairbanks, Alaska, to the American pilots who flew almost 8,000 U.S. planes to Alaska and to the Soviet pilots who flew them on to Siberia as part of Lend-Lease. On the map below, the line I've drawn from Central Austria, up around Prague, down towards Budapest, and back to Trieste is about 700 miles. In addition, almost half of all the rails used by the Soviet Union during the war came through Lend-Lease. The German Army was practically at the gates of Moscow in late 1941. There is no plausible reason to believe that Romania wouldn't change sides once Red Army was at its borders. WebIt must be baldly stated: Germany would have won World War I had the U.S. Army not intervened in France in 1918.The French and British were barely hanging on in 1918. After demanding Slovakia declare independence, Czech President Emil Hocha traveled to Germany to meet with Hitler and request a German guarantee of the Czech Republic. Roosevelt also contributed to Soviet stabilization. And the Russian winter. Had the German invasion of Russia occurred in other climatic conditions, and with the Japanese army attacking in the eastern region, perhaps the result would have been different. Malyshev took charge of an industry that was in chaos, moving the Leningrad and Kharkov tank plants to the Urals. The War of 1812 lasted for two years between 1812 and 1814. Such machines were of higher quality than analogues produced in the Soviet Union, which made a significant contribution to boosting Soviet industrial production.