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I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that England would not have surrendered if every single blade of grass and tree stump on the island had been re
by CPLX 5y ago
I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that England would not have surrendered if every single blade of grass and tree stump on the island had been reduced to smoking ash.
Arguable, clearly. But plausible.
- mc32 5y agoIf it were up to Churchill, probably but I don't think the military leadership would have followed all the way there. At some point, you have to be pragmatic. Yet, in this case, Germany would be thirsty for revenge (given the name of the V-II rockets), so that makes the calculus more difficult --on the other hand you had a Vichy France, so who knows.
- BurningFrog 5y agoA separate English peace would have made a lot of sense. Hitler had no interest in expanding westward. His plan was a great German empire where the Volga would be what the Mississippi is in the US. If France & Britain had not attacked, Germany would very likely have left them alone. In the east, it was a fight to the death, and both sides knew it. If the Russians surrendered, they faced extinction.
- pintxo 5y agoYes, Hitler was mainly interested in moving expanding eastward. But he was intelligent enough to see that the (declining but still) empires of France and Britain would not have allowed this to happen. Thus his initial attack westward to neutralize this threat to his eastward expansion plans. It's a tragedy, that Stalin secured this westward move by signing the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939, basically neutralizing the east while Hitler would sweep the west. We will never know what would have happened if Hitler had adversaries on both fronts from the beginning.
- BurningFrog 5y agoI mean, when France and Britain declared war 2 days after the invasion of Poland, you didn't need much intelligence to see where things were going.
- Loughla 5y ago>We will never know what would have happened if Hitler had adversaries on both fronts from the beginning. This is just one point among hundreds in this thread that I find fascinating for the same reason. So many people here know exactly what they would've and what we should've done back then. Because we have the benefit of nearly a hundred years of analysis and hindsight. Most of the disagreements here aren't actually about what happened, and why, but what the people in this thread would've done and why. I find that fascinating.
- mc32 5y agoExactly. They're basically the equivalent of "Ha! If I were Yamamoto, I would have...." because they know what happened and when and what would have turned events. But had they been in Yamamoto's (or Nimitz's or Patton's, or Rommel's) position, would have made much worse decisions. As you say they have complete benefit of decades of study of the war and tactics as well as limitations we are privileged to know only after the war.