The military is always doing 'what ifs' war games and they ain't video games. During the Cold War all kinds of 'what ifs' were done if the Soviets attacked in Europe, for example. Military schools take old battles and refight them.
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No and I never said that. They teach tactics and strategy, and the outcomes changes with the competency of the officers in charge. A war game isn't exactly a "what if," because they're actually doing it real time most if the time, that is.
I never went to military school and so don't really know what their games are like. Sometimes it could be a video game, and I have my doubts whether or not those are useful or just entertainment. Video games don't train you for action, they simply develop keyboard reflexes. Now if the video is a simulator it can be very helpful ... as in an aircraft simulator. That isn't a "war game," however.
At Red Flag and Top Gun, they fly the missions and it's all real except for the live ammunition. Ditto for Army tank and helicopter games. Same for submarines and other naval assets, too.
I found difficult to Germany overrun Britain. I already wrote: Fighter Command was totally different by 1941, and even in 1940 the Germans were not close to defeat it as popularily claimed. The British pilots were well trained, they flown in modern machines (Spitfires) and they had excellent ground control, which make the fighters much more effective. While the main oppositon was of medium bombers.
Historical Britain wasn't interested in a peace treaty. Otherwise they would have accepted one of the numerous German peace proposals.
Britain declared war during September 1939 with the intention of destroying Germany. That's not possible in this scenerio so Britain will have a change of government with war mongers swept from positions of authority.
Fortunately for Britain Hitler had no desire to harm the British Empire so a gentle peace treaty should not be difficult to obtain.
You don't actually believe that Britain had a choice do you? You make it sound like Britain were the "bad guys". Come on now, you are smarter than that. Do you really think that Germany was forced into war by the British "war mongers".
If they were war mongers, what was Hitler and his goons?
Of course not but the result of such a war game leads to a decision and a following action, here when adult people playing in a sandbox, the result moves nothing except you can boast in the pub that you had won the war if you had been in charge.So all those 'what if' war games that are done in military schools are a waste of time?
You don't actually believe that Britain had a choice do you?
You make it sound like Britain were the "bad guys"
Do you really think that Germany was forced into war by the British "war mongers".
Perhaps. The British could have asked to the Füher where his sphere of interest lays. I think the Germans would like from the idea of a free hand to fight Russia. This also would likely put Japan against the Russians as well.
There's no such a thing. Politics is interests.
Germany wasn't forced. But neither the US was forced to Iraq. If the countries considerate that there's a treat to their interests or national security in some cases, they would declare war or they would finance coups against the adversary (the Americans and British have a tradition of this, BTW). This always happened and always will happen, and it's not only with the US and Britain. In the case of WWII, Britain and France didn't wanted a strong Germany in the way the Füher wanted to achive this (by force). Perhaps they also felt treatned by Germany, but I think it was much more because Germany was a treat their interestes. I think they were aware that a clash between Germany and the Soviets was likely, and they could have leave it to happen. But risk to have a German superpower was not the best thing to be done. A defeat of Russia in Germans hands also would improve considerably the position of Japan. If Japan managed to have the Soviet Far East as it's new colony, and managed to control China, again there would be a harm to the British (and American) interestes.
That is a flawed view of history.
In the end they were, Communist collatoral damage.And Poland and the rest if Eastern Europe were colatteral damage?
In the end they were, Communist collatoral damage.
Hitler should have tried taking Churchill out to lunch, buy him a box of cigars, maybe take him to a strip club.
Maybe things would have turned out differently.
TTo get at the Russians, the Germans had to smash the Poles
Litvinov was telling the French Chargé d'Affaires in November 1938 that there 'is no other way to organise the peace' than 'to return to the old path of collective security'. Yet, suspicion of the West, which had been inflamed by Soviet exclusion from the Munich negotiations, militated against the chances of success for this policy. Litvinov's deputy, Vladimir Potemkin, had remarked after Munich: 'For us, I no longer see any outcome but a fourth partition of Poland.' The Soviet leaders were afraid that France and the UK were scheming to get them engaged in a war with Germany, Stalin's speech of March 10th, 1939 in which he declared that the democracies were encouraging 'the Germans to go Eastwards', warned them against hoping that the USSR would 'pull their chestnuts out of the fire'. Their anxieties were fanned by the guarantee to Poland of March 31st. 'Chamberlain is prompting Hitler to direct his aggression to the north-east', Litvinov wrote to Maisky on April 4th. He added: 'Chamberlain is counting on us to resist occupation of the Baltic area and expecting that this will lead to the Soviet-German clash he has been hoping for'. The Soviet Union felt particularly vulnerable to the possibility of an attack through the Baltic states aimed at Leningrad.
Five years earlier Litvinov had tried, at a time when Germany was still weak, to get Berlin to join in a guarantee of the Baltic states but without success. Yet London appears to have been oblivious to this almost instinctive Russian fear about their Northern flank. This is revealed in the way Halifax described to the Cabinet how absurd it was of Soviet propaganda to represent British policy as pushing Germany into conflict with the Soviet Union; absurd, he said, because 'Germany could not, in fact, invade Russia except through Poland or Romania'. If the UK had guaranteed these countries she would, so Halifax explained, inevitably become involved in war should Germany invade Poland or Romania to attack Russia. Although a Fellow of All Souls, Halifax was not strong on geography. He appears to have overlooked the fact that Germany could indeed invade Russia without traversing Polish territory by going through the Baltic states; and this was just what Moscow feared and what they believed our guarantee to Poland had encouraged Hitler to do.
While the UK tended to play the diplomatic hand in Western Europe at this time, their policy was closely affected by support for France which had given hostages to fortune in Central and Eastern Europe by their pacts with the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The Soviet Union made a pact of mutual assistance with Czechoslovakia in May 1935 but this did not become operative unless France fulfilled her obligation under her pact with Prague. They made an agreement with Poland in 1938 and with many other countries in the inter-war years, but noticeably not with Romania with whom negotiations broke down over the Soviet claim for the return of Bessarabia.
As a matter of fact the British Government were not bent, as Soviet propaganda persisted in maintaining then and for the next fifty years, on trying to foment a war between Germany and the Soviet Union in which they would destroy each other while Britain remained unscathed. Such an interpretation could have been a mirror of what the Soviet Union, mutatis mutandis, were at times hoping for themselves. But such a strategy was never the British objective.
They knew only too well that a war between Germany and Russia would result in the domination of the Continent, at any rate for a considerable time, by either Berlin or Moscow. Besides which, as a result of France's 1935 Mutual Assistance Agreement with Russia and of Britain's close involvement with France, any war in which Russia was fighting Germany would inevitably lead toBritain being drawn in. In Cabinet on November 23rd, 1938, Chamberlain said:
We do not wish to see France drawn into a war with Germany on account of some quarrel between Russia and Germany with the result that we should be drawn into war in France' wake