Posted on 06/16/2003 6:15:57 PM PDT by AveMaria
This is a nightmare scenario targetted towards all of you World War Two history buffs.
About a week ago, a statue of Eisenhower was unveiled at the Capitol in DC, honoring President Eisenhower in his army uniform. In a speech commemorating that occassion, Bob Dole asked the audience to consider what would have happened if Ike had failed in his crusade. Is there a possibility that Hitler would have managed to take advantage of political, regional, and ethnic divisions in America in the 1940s, and defeated good old USA?
It certainly would not have been possible for Hitler to stage a successful naval invasion across the Atlantic to take the Eastern Seaboard, irrespective of whether or not America succeded in Europe. He simply did not have a Navy that was large enough for that task.
I considered various ways in which the Germans would have defeated America, assuming that they had succeeded in their mission to conquer the Soviet Union:
1. They might have attempted to conquer Alaska, based on their ability to control Siberia and the arctic regions of Russia. From there, they would have rolled over poorly defended Canada, from which they would have launched a massive invasion from the sparsely populated North-Western US.
2. Using the historic grievances that Mexico has, especially over territorial loss in the 1848 war, Hitler could have encouraged the Mexicans to stage a massive military invasion from the South (something similar to what their illegals are already doing). Given that many South Americans had pro-axis fascist feelings during the war, Brazil and Argentina could have send their own armies as well, to support the Mexicans. And, considering that Latin America continued to trade with Germany in the war years, Germany would have been able to move massive armaments and troops to South America, support an invasion from Mexico. As a reward, Mexico would have been rewarded with the return of California, New Mexico and Arizona. The rest of South America would have had a chance to be freed from American regional dominance that has existed since the Monroe Doctrine.
3. Hitler could have reached out to the anti-FDR right-wing, the likes of Charles Lindberg, Henry Ford, Rev. Charles Coughlin, and their many followers who were influential in the America First Movement. He could have used the resentment that Irish-Americans and German-Americans had for Anglo elites who wanted to save Britain, a nation that many in both groups disliked (I am Irish myself, and I am aware about how many Irishmen resented going to help Britain. The Republic of Ireland made a conscious decision to stay neutral in the war to the very end).
4. Germany could have offered the South a second chance. If the South militarily supported the defeat of the Yankees, they could get back the Confederate States of America. The CSA would have been a fully independent right-wing nation that was allied to Germany, like Franco's Spain. They would have been allowed to preserve their system of segregation, a system that Germans approved of.
5. In the 1940s, Eugenics was highly favored by both liberal and conservative elites in New England. American race scientists like H. Goddard, Carl Bingham, Madison Grant, and Lothrop Stoddard were standard readings in the school system in Nazi Germany. A shared interest in race issues would have brought the Nazis and the New England Eugenicists together.
A combination of all those forces would have overwhelmed the FDR administration.
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Fox and Bush are doing that now with profound effect. If Hitler had tried it, it wouldn't have worlked because the population of Mexico was much smaller than it is presently. Any Mexican army would have been wiped out on the desert by American aircraft.
If they'd developed the nuclear bomb first combining with the their V-2 rockets.... Can you say Heil Hitler!
And once England fell, the US and Canada would be very much aware of "who's next", and would be prepared for an invasion. As was already pointed out, Alaska was a barrier, not a beachhead.
Only the most lunatic southern partisan would have turned to Hitler for assistance in re-establishing the Conferacy. Fifth Column propaganda, espionage, and sabotage activities would be harassing but probably not fatal.
An invasion force from Europe would have to face our long range land based bombers and our naval forces without air cover, a serious hardship. Once ashore, the surviving invaders would face, as was pointed out, an armed civillian populace, unlike anything Europe ever had to offer an invader.
Hitler did have medium range ballistic missiles, which the Allies did not, and in the pause to digest the Soviet Union, it is conceivable that Hitler could have developed nuclear weapons (Heisenberg was woefully far behind when the war ended) and used them. However, our primary delivery system until the 1960's was long range strategic bombers, so missiles weren't absolutely necessary for us, nor for Hitler.
One must remember that the nature of Nazism was to exterminate the thinking mind. Such a regime cannot easily foster sustained technological advancement. Both the Soviets and the Chinese worked hard to steal what we learned on our own.
But I don't think it would have ever happened. Even if Hitler had managed to defeat the Soviet Union in the short term, he didn't have the resources (manpower) to pacify and hold it. The Third Reich could not have been held together for long.
Barely started, and pretty much shut down for lack of resources before the end of the war in Europe.
Right. Not a bad plan. Being defeated in WWII would have been far, far worse for us than Vietnam, and probably would have led to an extremely damaging US loss of confidence, putting this country on a downward spiral. Would the world now be, pace Churchill, in a new middle ages, made more terrible, and perhaps more prolonged by perverted science? Not definite, but a real possibility.
This is truly the sort of thing that it takes a novelist to imagine.
But America was turning out a phenomenal amount of war equipment by then and we still had additional capacity to build ships, planes and other equipment at a faster rate if we needed to. We were basically supplying Great Britain as well as ourselves and if England fell, we would have even more output at our disposal.
Also, if the Germans staged a successful invasion of England, Churchill would have moved the mighty British Navy to American shores and as many fighting men and materials that they could take with them. He had planned for that contingency and mentions it several times in his memoirs.
I just don't think there is any realistic scenario in which Hitler could have successfully invaded, or otherwise defeated, the United States.
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Any excursion into Siberia would have resulted in 3,000,000 German popcicles.
But I was wondering if he would have received support from fifth columnists in America, who may have viewed it as advantageous to work with him.
It would be about like the soviet union but with nazism instead of communism. I dont think they could have invaded or gotten as good support from fifth columnists as the soviets.
McCarthy would have gone after nazi's in the govt instead of communists.
Absolutely correct.
It was built in WWII? Well, this discounts everyone's talk that Alaska was a barrier. BTW, what a wonderful stretch of beauty it is!
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They had one at one time. They couldn't support it and work in the Pacific simultaneously.
The hard part isn't in getting them to stop fighthing. It's in convincing them that negotiations have broken down.
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