How the Soviets Really Won WWII :)

[Thoth]

Get your vision checked.

[notyoueither]

I could seriously go for Sigourney Weaver as GG.

Rrawrrrr!

[Thoth]

I could seriously go for Sigourney Weaver as GG.

Rrawrrrr!

HooYeah! :drool:

I'd hit it! /TedStriker

[Drake Tungsten]

She was never hotter than she was in Ghostbusters.

[Thoth]

She was never hotter than she was in Aliens.

FTFY.

[EPW]

:barf:

[Kuciwalker]

How can someone not like Ghostbusters?

[Drake Tungsten]

They might not have any taste. There are people out there who will choose to watch Julie & Juila, after all.

[Thoth]

They might not have any taste. There are people out there who will choose to watch Julie & Juila, after all.

No. Ghostbusters was entertaining, but only if the viewer was drunk or high.


Not that that is a bad thing. But I wouldn't call it quality film.

[David Floyd]

If Britain had fallen PRIOR TO December 7, 1941, then I can easily imagine the US staying out of the European war. OTOH, it was Germany that first declared war on the US, not the other way around, so the US might have gotten involved either way. But THEN AGAIN, much of the reason Germany declared war was that the US was fighting an undeclared war against Germany on England's behalf, anyway. If Britain falls, the perceived need for Germany to declare war against the US goes away.

If Britain and SOMEHOW fallen AFTER the US was already in the war, I simply can't see the US agreeing to a negotiated settlement without a REALLY good reason. Even if Britain falls I can easily imagine the Commonwealth fighting on - or at least Canada, Australia/NZ, and India. Australia/NZ and India all had really good reasons to - that is, they would have been fighting Japan. The lack of need for Commonwealth forces in the African and European theaters would have freed up quite a bit of additional shipping, warships, and troops to utilize against Japan or safeguard the Atlantic. Canada I could perhaps see dropping out of the war, but the US would never have allowed it to become a German vassal state. In any case, I can very easily see a large part of the Royal Navy simply sailing to Canadian and US ports rather than surrendering.

However, no matter which of the above scenarios you take, Germany was absolutely incapable of defeating the US, should they have chosen to declare war (and obviously Japan was not capable of such either). Germany simply had no way to get to the Western Hemisphere. They had no surface navy to speak of, no doctrine for operating a blue water navy, to say nothing of aircraft carriers, no aircraft suitable for naval aviation in existence or even (well, I believe they experimented w/ a naval version of the Bf-109, but that aircraft would NOT have stacked up well against US naval aviation, nor did Germany ever deploy this variant of the Bf-109) in development, and no strategic aircraft capable of reaching the Western Hemisphere in existence or in development (keeping aside unrealistic "superweapons" which are only conjecture), even by the end of the war in 1945.

Even if the Royal Navy had surrendered INTACT to Germany, Germany still wasn't going to be able to challenge the US in the Western Hemisphere. Either they charged across the ocean immediately, when the US was weak, or they waited to build up, which would have been a serious mistake. Clearly seeking an immediate engagement would have been the sounder solution, except that the Royal Navy was essentially a battleship navy at that point, and the carriers they did have in the fleet (Ark Royal, Furious, Glorious, and a couple of more) operated aircraft that were far, far, far below the standards of the rest of the world (well, the US and Japan). Early in 1942, the US still had USS Ranger, USS Hornet, and USS Wasp in the Atlantic, along with several battleships. The airgroups on those carriers would have made short work of any German fleet trying to seek an engagement in the Western Hemisphere.

That leaves the U-boat threat, but really, what's the point of that threat? The US isn't trying to ship supplies across the Atlantic - anything going to the Soviets at this point would be going through Vladivostok (which the Japanese never really interdicted) or the Middle East. The U-boats would sink far LESS shipping in this scenario, but the Atlantic Fleet would eventually still be able to swamp the U-boat threat once the shipyards started churning out CVEs, DDEs, and (in Canada's case) ASW corvettes en masse.

Any attempt by Germany to outbuild the USN would have to end in failure - they couldn't divert enough resources away from the Luftwaffe and Heer, because of the Eastern Front, and even if they could, the US would still have been outproducing them. The US outproduced the ENTIRE WORLD COMBINED during WW2 when it came to both warships and merchant vessels, with a significant technological edge as well (radar/sonar, proximity fused AA guns, naval aviation, fleet logistics, etc.). True, the US can't invade - and anyone who thinks the US would have been landing in North Africa is probably dreaming. We could have attempting it for political reasons, and it might have worked, but not in November of 1942. In 1943 or 1944, sure. An invasion of Britain would have been a possibility, using Ireland as a stepping stone, depending on how the events on the Eastern Front played out. If the Germans ended up winning on the Eastern Front - which I think was very much a possibility in this scenario - then there's no way the US is invading England, Ireland, or North Africa.

Ultimately, though, all the German success on the battlefield would have been rendered irrelevant by August of 1945, when the US had developed atomic weapons, the means to continually produce them, and the means to deliver them from an aircraft that would have been, if not invincible, then a VERY HARD target to hit - the B-29. That's why all of this conjecture just doesn't matter. If the US is in the war, then there is no reason to assume that the Manhattan Project would have been delayed by any significant margin, and if that's the case, then we can easily imagine a very different, and much costlier, end to WW2 in Europe. Even if we finished up against Japan on schedule, imagine this scenario: 30 heavy and light carriers, with hundreds of US escort ships, deployed against the European coastline, operating aircraft that match and/or exceed the best interceptors the Luftwaffe can throw against them, able to gain local superiority ANY TIME they launched an alpha strike. Combine that with 2000 B-29s operating against strategic targets and cities, and then throw in atomic strikes at the rate of 1-2/month for as long as necessary, with the rate only increasing as time went on. Germany can't win.

[Jon Miller]

Could we have used Iceland for a forward base?

I think Ireland would go pretty soon after Britain.

JM

[Felch]

We're trying to have a mature discussion about Ghostbusters here. Thanks for going off-topic though.

[David Floyd]

Iceland was held by the USMC by July of 1941 - a Marine brigade, IIRC. Germany didn't have the surface fleet or amphibious assets to invade Iceland at any point during the war, and certainly not that early on, assuming a point of divergence from our history in that time frame. They could have built such a capability, but that would have been matched by a larger US garrison and the US Atlantic Fleet.

No, Germany wasn't going to take Iceland. However, Iceland wasn't really big enough - or close enough - to serve as an advanced base for the invasion of England, in my opinion. It didn't have the infrastructure or even the physical size to support the hundreds of thousands of soldiers, thousands of aircraft, and thousands of ships involved in such an operation.

[Lord Avalon]

When we finally cross the streams, the Germans are TOAST!

[David Floyd]

That is quite literally correct.