Quote:
Originally Posted by Olefin
Sorry guys but without the US being involved in the war the Allies lose or best case fight the Germans and Italians to a tie in Europe as Japan takes what it wants in Asia and get the resources she needs to go from just dangerous to very very dangerous
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Interesting assumption(s).
The ones that are simply unsupportable on any level you care to name are -
* Japan runs wild in Asia and the US does nothing.
* The Japanese actively ally with the Germans.
Yes, it is, I suppose, possible that the US would not get involved with a European war, but she showed herself willing to push the Japanese to the wire and (from their insane, but consistent, point of view) forced them to attack Pearl Harbour.
The moment that happens, even if the US does a 'Pacific First' or, indeed, a 'Pacific Only', strategy, Japan is doomed and irrelevant.
That single fact makes the possibility of any active Japanese alliance with the German both so unlikely as to be not worth considering, and if they did, it would merely draw the US into the European war ... maybe only as a co-Belligerent rather than as an ally.
The German economy didn't have enough raw materials, and couldn't get them. They simply could. not. get. them. They were either on different continents and couldn't be shipped because the Commonwealth Navies prevented it or they weren't present in the quantities needed in locations the Germans could access ... or they were, possibly, available in significant (but still inadequate) quantities, and ther Germans could, theoretically, have reached those locations but, if they did, there was no way of transporting them from those locations back to where they were actually needed in any quantity.
And, again, the U-Boats never managed to consistently sink enough merchant shipping to overwhelm the Commonwealth and did not have the resources to produce the number of U-Boats and crews to do so in the face of relatively simple and cheap fixes such as the LRB patrols across the mid-Atlantic gap.
I do not say, and never did, that the Commonwealth would have had an easy victory - merely that, as shown by the Napoleonic Wars (and the earlier world wars against the French), a continental power cannot defeat a naval power and, as long as the naval power maintains its blockade and foments rebellion and alliances against said continental power, they will eventually win.
And, gee, economically speaking the Brits always managed to pay down the debt wars that were longer and (relatively) more expensive in terms of GDP than WW2 quite quickly.
Now, you could make a political argument and claim that the Brits couldn't maintain the rage, so to speak, and that they would eventually throw up a Quisling and sue for some sort of peace ... good luck with finding historical examples for that.
Phil