Could the Allies defeat Germany only with air power?

... of course.

MM

michaelmaltby said:

... of course.

MM

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There are so many 'what ifs' going on in this thread I am a bit confused.

John

"... There are so many 'what ifs' going on"

What if the allies had an atomic bomb (in some useable form which could be delivered by air power [seque back to topic]) by March, 1944.

MM

The Germans tried the cruiser rules inspection route in WW1. This is what happened.
1 Firstly Churchill ordered the merchant ships and liners to ram the u-boats.

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No, you've got that back to front.

On the 4th February 1915 the Germans declared a blockade of Britain:

The waters round Great Britain and Ireland, including the English Channel, are hereby proclaimed a war region.

On and after February 18th every enemy merchant vessel found in this region will be destroyed, without its always being possible to warn the crews or passengers of the dangers threatening.

Neutral ships will also incur danger in the war region, where, in view of the misuse of neutral flags ordered by the British Government, and incidents inevitable in sea warfare, attacks intended for hostile ships may affect neutral ships also.

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The British Admiralty ordered ships to ram U boats on 10th February 1915, as a direct response to the German declaration.

2 The British opperated q-ships which were disguised trawlers that were armed and sank the u-boat when it attempted the inspection.
In the case of the Baralong incident the q shipped machine gunned the u-boat survivors and then hunted further survivors who had swum
to the Baralong and murdered them by shooting them in cold blood.

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And the Germans operated disguised raiders that approached merchant ships then opened fire on them.

In fact, the Germans started using disguised ships against Britain from the first day of the war.

On 4th August 1914, even before Britain had declared war against Germany, the Kriegsmarine sent a disguised liner, the Königin Luise, to lay mines off the British coast. The Königin Luise was painted in the colours of of a British railway/ferry company.

This kind if behaviour makes a mockery of the idea of a submarine or even a surface ship inspecting a ship. It was litterly a propagandistic farce; pure posturing.

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No. The whole idea of early submarines following the rules of war was a farce from the beginning. A submarine was typically slower than a freighter. If it did manage to capture one, there was no room on the submarine for the ship's crew, and any attempt to sail a ship back to Germany with a prize crew was inevitably going to run in to the British blockade.

In other words, submarines simply couldn't obey the rules of war and still be effective. When the Germans decided to try to cut off British trade with submarines, they were inevitably deciding to break the rules of war.

5 They did not sink netral ships. Anyone travelling to the UK could have chosen an American line instead of the British White Star Lousitania and they would not be targeted

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Of course they attacked neutral ships. They began doing so following their declaration of February 1915. That month a Norwegian tanker was torpedoed. In March a Dutch steamer was illegally seized (it was released by a prize court, only to be torpedoed and sunk later in the war). Another Dutch steamer was sunk, as was a Norwegian sailing ship. In April Danish, Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian ships were sunk.

In total U boats sank 158 Dutch ships, 773 Norwegian, 247 Danish, 172 Swedish (there were of course numerous other neutral ships sunk, but I don't have a full list).

michaelmaltby said:

"... There are so many 'what ifs' going on"

What if the allies had an atomic bomb (in some useable form which could be delivered by air power [seque back to topic]) by March, 1944.

MM

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If we had had that in 1939 to drop on Hitler's head imagine the pain that would have been avoided !

"... If we had had that in 1939 to drop on Hitler's head imagine the pain that would have been avoided !"

Can't immagine that ... given the state of (non-German) European political leadership (and public mood) -- Chamberlain -- as Mr. preemptive strike ----

MM

michaelmaltby said:

"... If we had had that in 1939 to drop on Hitler's head imagine the pain that would have been avoided !"

Can't immagine that ... given the state of (non-German) European political leadership (and public mood) -- Chamberlain -- as Mr. preemptive strike ----

MM

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Oh well...back Hitler to invading Russia...

I have wondered IF Hitler had invaded Russia without a DoW from Britain her allies and HAD he exhausted all his resources and HAD the Russians prevailed whether Britain, the USA and the CW would have ended up fighting Russia...

Was Europe in such turmoil that WW2 was going to happen anyway?

John

What if WWI had ended with a fairer and equitable Treaty of Versailles and the world ended up with a far different Germany, sans Hitler and Nazis.
What would the USSR have done?

gjs238 said:

What if WWI had ended with a fairer and equitable Treaty of Versailles and the world ended up with a far different Germany, sans Hitler and Nazis.
What would the USSR have done?

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Good question and mirrors my point.

The USSR was in a poor state economically and maybe unable to sustain a long war unaided.
Maybe Stalin would have moved to improve Russia's economic prospects ny annexing Poland and other north European countries.
How would this done?
In one fell swoop and risk war?
Or softy softy catchee monkey?

John

Hop said:

No, you've got that back to front.

On the 4th February 1915 the Germans declared a blockade of Britain:
.

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You haven't researched this anywhere as much as you should, it is you that have it around the wrong way.

Some of your statements I find so sweeping I feel compelled to address them.

Prior to World War I, a series of conferences were held at Whitehall in 1905-1906 concerning military cooperation with France in the event of a war with Germany. The Director of Naval Intelligence—Charles Ottley—asserted that two of the Royal Navy′s functions in such a war would be the capture of German commercial shipping and the blockade of German ports. A blockade was considered useful for two reasons: it could force out the enemy′s fleet to fight and it could also act as an economic weapon to destroy German commerce. It was not until 1908, however, that a blockade of Germany formally appeared in the Navy′s war plans and even then some officials were divided over how feasible it was. The plans remained in a state of constant change and revision until 1914, the Navy undecided over how best to operate such a blockade.

The British—with their overwhelming sea power—established a naval blockade of Germany immediately on the outbreak of war in August 1914, issuing a comprehensive list of contraband that all but prohibited American trade with the Central powers, and in early November 1914 declared the North Sea to be a War Zone, with any ships entering the North Sea doing so at their own risk. The blockade was unusually restrictive in that even foodstuffs were considered "contraband of war". There were complaints about breaches of international law, however most neutral merchant vessels agreed to dock at British ports to be inspected and then escorted—less any "illegal" cargo destined for Germany—through the British minefields to their destinations.

The Northern Patrol and Dover Patrol closed off access to the North Sea and the English Channel respectively.

The Germans regarded this as a blatant attempt to starve the German people into submission and wanted to retaliate in kind.

So we have the Royal Navy
1 Initiating a Blockade against Germany in 1914.
2 Mining Neutral Waters, mines that sank ships, killed sailers and passengers. Apparently killing with mines is OK but torpedoing in declared zones is not.
3 Blockading food.

Its Moral to starve 600,000 people but immoral to torpedo a non neutral ship carrying munitions.

Personally I would see those using food as a blockade weapon tride as war criminals and strung up.

Hop said:

A submarine was typically slower than a freighter. If it did manage to capture one, there was no room on the submarine for the ship's crew, and any attempt to sail a ship back to Germany with a prize crew was inevitably going to run in to the British blockade.

In other words, submarines simply couldn't obey the rules of war and still be effective. When the Germans decided to try to cut off British trade with submarines, they were inevitably deciding to break the rules of war..

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This is bizzare facts to my knowledge. Firstly submarines are almost always faster than freighters, easily so. Secondlly German submarines DID obey the rules of war. They ordered the crew and passengers of the ship into life boasts and frequently did so prior to sinking that ship or trawler.

What rendered this impossible was Churchills order to ram the u-boat and the use of q-ships prentding to be american flaged rescue ships, including one which murdered in cold blood German submariners swiming from their sunken sub.

Meantime Lusitania, a british flagged ship, was carry 50 tons of machine gun ammunition and tens of thousands of artillery shell casings. The British even used hospital ships to carry troops to Galipoli. Anyone wishing to safely travel to the UK could simply choose to travel on a US flagged ocean liner.


It should be pointed out that

Flamborough Manor Home Page

"Two things virtually guaranteed British entry in the war: the secret
Anglo-French military and naval talks, which commenced in 1906, "

"At half past two on the afternoon of Sunday, 2 August 1914, Sir
Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, informed the French Ambassador of
the decision just reached by the British Cabinet — despite not yet
being at war with Germany, if, nevertheless, the German High Seas
Fleet ventured out from its base, the British fleet 'would intervene …
in such a way that from that moment Great Britain and Germany would be
in a state of war.' What led to the giving of this pledge?"

"That the Cabinet could not have prevented Britain's entry into the
war; all they could have done was to prevent the formation of a
coalition Government. "

"That the pledge to France and consideration of British interests were
the sole determinants of Britain's entry."

So when the Germans asked the French government whether they would stay neutral should Germany and Russia be in a state of war the French replied NO.

The reason they did was because they knew that a secret Admiralty treaty guarenteed them British support. France was still burning with Revenchasim of its defeat in the Franco-Prussian war.

Why would Britain seek to attack Germany? The reality was that Germany was an economic powerhouse that threatened to eclipse Britain. The German govenment had a polciy of "peacefull imperialism" towards the middle east that was working quite well. Georg Wilhelm von Siemens had promoted the Berlin to Iraq railway that threatened to bypass the British controlled suez canal. It came out at what is now Kuwait, an artificial nation created by Britain to prevent the port terminus to the railway being built there.

Britains Admiralty had decided to convert from coal to oil and Germany's trade and diplomatic success in the Middle east was a threat.

Oil WWI

At first almost unnoticed after 1850, then with significant intensity after the onset of the Great Depression of 1873 in Britain, the sun began to set on the British Empire. By the end of the 19th Century, though the City of London remained undisputed financier of the world, British industrial excellence was in terminal decline. The decline paralleled an equally dramatic rise of a new industrial Great Power on the European stage, the German Reich. Germany soon passed England in output of steel, in quality of machine tools, chemicals and electrical goods. Beginning the 1880's a group of leading German industrialists and bankers around Deutsche Bank's Georg von Siemens, recognized the urgent need for some form of colonial sources of raw materials as well as industrial export outlet. With Africa and Asia long since claimed by the other Great Powers, above all Great Britain, German policy set out to develop a special economic sphere in the imperial provinces of the debt-ridden Ottoman Empire. The policy was termed "penetration pacifique"

The conversion of the British Navy under Churchill to oil from coal meant a high risk strategy as England had abundant coal but no then-known oil. It secured a major concession from the Shah of Persia in the early 1900's. The Baghdad rail link was increasingly seen in London as a threat to precisely this oil security.

In an attempt to stay on topic I will mention that Georg von Siemens financed the development of the first anti shipping missiles to be launched either from Zepplins or the giant R bomber biplanes.

Siegfried said:

So we have the Royal Navy
1 Initiating a Blockade against Germany in 1914.
2 Mining Neutral Waters, mines that sank ships, killed sailers and passengers. Apparently killing with mines is OK but torpedoing in declared zones is not.
3 Blockading food.

Its Moral to starve 600,000 people but immoral to torpedo a non neutral ship carrying munitions.

Personally I would see those using food as a blockade weapon tride as war criminals and strung up.

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An interesting point of view Siegfried. I'm sure that a lot of allies would like to treat their enemies the same way.

The most far reaching result of Jutland was that it convinced Scheer and the German Naval staff that the only way of gaining naval victory was via unrestricted submarine warfare, and not by defeating the British in battle. The Germans had fought Jutland as well or better than could be expected, whilst the British could be expected to perform better next time, and yet nothing had changed. However it was not the German submarine blockade of Britain but, the British blockade of Germany, maintained under the guns of the Grand Fleet, that eventually did most to bring the war to an end.

My contention is that anyway of bringing the slaughter of WW1 to the quickest end was humanitarian.

John

Siegfried said:

Personally I would see those using food as a blockade weapon tride as war criminals and strung up. ]

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Which would include every member of German Italian bomber crews, who attacked Malta, and the ships carrying food to the island.

the use of q-ships prentding to be american flaged rescue ships,

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Rather in the way that Graf Spee pretended to be an American warship, prior to sinking ships in the South Atlantic?

I dont think that without Pearl Harbour, that USA would have been involved in the European thetre.
That means Britain would not have had anywhere near enough of Air Power or anything else to consider anythin other than avoiding an invasion by the Germans.

If however, the USA had become involved, I think it would have been more likely that the Mediterranean would have been far more bloody.
The Allies would have had more difficulty in supplying the 8th Army in Egypt - because the LW would have been able to use far more resources in attacking any convoys. This said, I still think the Allies would have landed in North Africa in order to try to establish a base of operations with which to try to invade Sicily? or Greece ? and take the war to the Germans and Italians.

vinnye said:

I dont think that without Pearl Harbour, that USA would have been involved in the European thetre.
That means Britain would not have had anywhere near enough of Air Power or anything else to consider anythin other than avoiding an invasion by the Germans.

.

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My goodness one of the reasons the US was able to ramp up production of aircraft so quickly was the fact the Commonwealth was buying anything that could fly from the US well before Pearl Harbour.

It depends on what you mean by not entering WWII. Do you mean the U.S. not engaging in any missions but still supporting and supplying England with weapons etc?

If that's what you mean, I don't think the Allies would have "won" but I think the Nazis would have lost.

I think the destruction in Europe (especially England) would have been devastating.

However, most historians agree that a major flaw in the Nazi's plan was going to war with Russia. Neither Hitler nor Stalin trusted the other enough to stick to their original (or any) treaty. Therefore, I think the war would have gone on much longer, but eventually the Nazis would have fizzled out by running out of supplies to fight the Eastern Front. As the Nazis retreated back into Germany, I believe the German people probably would have initiated a coup d'etat against the Nazis because a large portion of Germans were against their coming to power to begin with. As the war dragged on, an even larger majority of Germans grew very disappointed with the Nazis.

Churchill and Roosevelt (Stalin too) were having talks about the war before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I believe it is accepted that Roosevelt would have engaged the U.S. in WWII even without the Pearl Harbor incident. The Germans had sunk dozens of U.S. Merchant Marines supply ships in 1941 and 1942. Also, the beginnings of The Manhattan Project preceded the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

In 1940 Japan, Germany and Italy signed the Tripartite Pact which sealed their alliance as the Axis powers.

The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor because the Japanese anticipated the United States would inevitably enter the war, and they wanted to strike a huge blow against American naval battleships and aircraft carriers, thus stunting America's ability to enter the war with a strong navy.

The U.S. had already stopped some trade (though not all) with Japan which limited Japan's supplies and Japan saw this as a sign America was drifting away from its original stance of neutrality. Japan also resented an infiltration of Western culture and ideas since the turn of the century. The strongest reason for their attack on Pearl Harbor, however, was not so much a vendetta against the U.S., but a strategy to give them the upper hand in the war. It was somewhat obvious the U.S. would eventually enter.

John

Siegfried said:

It came out at what is now Kuwait, an artificial nation created by Britain to prevent the port terminus to the railway being built there.

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Kuwait was, in fact, founded by an Arabian tribe in 1705.

By 123 BC, the Kuwait region came under the influence of the Parthian Empire and was closely associated with the southern Mesopotamian town of Charax. In 224 AD, the region fell under the control of Sassanid Empire and came to be known as Hajar. By the 14th century, the area comprising modern-day Kuwait became a part of the Islamic caliphate.

In 1899, Kuwait entered into a treaty with the United Kingdom that gave the British extensive control over the foreign policy of Kuwait in exchange for protection and annual subsidy. This treaty was primarily prompted by fears that the proposed Berlin-Baghdad Railway would lead to an expansion of German influence in the Persian Gulf.

After the signing of the Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1913, then Emir of Kuwait, Mubarak Al-Sabah, was diplomatically recognized by both the Ottomans and British as the ruler of the autonomous caza of the city of Kuwait and the hinterlands.

However, soon after the start of World War I, the British invalidated the convention and declared Kuwait an independent principality under the protection of the British Empire.

The Kuwait people were glad of the protection afforded by the British Crown.

John

Readie said:

The Kuwait people were glad of the protection afforded by the British Crown.

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I think more like Kuwait Emir was happy for British "slip money" in exchange for being a puppet state for British interest. What exact they needed "protection" - its mobster term - from a railway gauge german was building for Turks?
Its like saying Eastern Europeans were glad of the protection offered by the Soviet Communist Party, or that Czech were happy for the protection German Empire provided during WW2. Such was official name, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Same propaganda bs if you ask me... the British bought the local Emir, probably desolate nobody at time, and dressed up political move into nice formalities. I doubt anybody else was "glad" for these protection the French, British, Spanish or even American, or other colonizer imperialist provided. Please stop dressing up imperialism like some humanity movement for greater good of world. The British like everybody else had never had such goal, they just wanted to fill their pockets, and keep everybody else as far away from the meat pot..

Tante Ju said:

I think more like Kuwait Emir was happy for British "slip money" in exchange for being a puppet state for British interest. What exact they needed "protection" - its mobster term - from a railway gauge german was building for Turks? ..

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Which could carry troop trains, capable of offloading thousands of soldiers to annex their country, in a matter of hours.

The British just wanted to fill their pockets,

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With what? Sand?

Just a reality check guys. this whole su-debate stems from whether the US was justified in WWII in providing escorts to its shipping against unrestricted attacks by the germans.

The arguments thyat have been presented are

1) The US was unjustified in protecting it property and its nationals. Some have suggested that it was illegal for the USN, and possibly even its shipping to proceed beyond its 3 mile territorial limit

2) Unrestricted attacks are legal

3) The rossevelt administration used mostly propaganda and lies to turn its people against the peace loving Germans

4) Hitler was a law abiding peace loving international citizen

5) Nazi Germany was a far more moral state than the British empire

6) The allies caused the outbreak of the war, and appear to be the agressors


This is how modern day proGerman revisionist historians work. A complete rewrite of history. try asking them how many Jews were murdered by the germans during the war. If any answer at all is given you will be shocked, at the very least they will try and argue the holocaust was true, but the numbers are inflated, and only a few Germans knew about it. A claim I know from personal experience to be a lie

Watch the coughing, spluttering and indignant cries of bias erupt now.


This thread is about a bees di*k away from being closed