I think you're kind of pointing to the London V-II raids. If Germany had had the production, London would have had to surrender. Luckily their initial V-1 bombs were not very accurate and their V-IIs were slow to ramp up, so that bought lots of time.
We have more land, so I think we could have dispersed the population to the country to make the bombs or raids less effective. But at some threshold you do have to give up and fight another day.
No they would not have. V2 raids are very ineffective and basically didn't effect the population much at all. Its just out of a blue sometimes a building explodes.
99% of those bombs don't hit anything relevant for the war effort.
At the same time production of those rockets was far more costly then whatever they hit in Britain.
And sure, if they could magically have no limits then maybe. But in practice, Germany had mass starvation while huge amounts of bio-mass was converted into rocket fuel. Not to mention very inefficient uses other materials.
Even ignoring all that, the total payload deployed by German over Britain was laughably small compared to allied bombing raids.
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.
If 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.
A 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.
Yes, 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.
>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.
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.
If they went on to do it to several other cities, demonstrating total control of the airspace and the ability to wipe any city of their choosing off the map overnight, and it was after years of losing battles... probably.
I’m not sure. Even then, knowing Japanese atrocities in all of Asia, it’s probably better to just keep fighting to the death as opposed to being subject to slavery, rape, or human experiments.
I’m sure a part of the reason the Japanese refused surrender was because their reflection in the mirror was not pretty.
I think all historians agree a US victory was almost certain, if not dead certain after Pearl Harbor. That attack didn’t destroy enough of the US fleet to buy the Japanese time to trie and get even with the USA in production capacity.
> In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.
Isoruku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Japanese Navy.
The problem with this line of thought is that it's basically ignores the historical exemplar that Japan used to justify their actions in the first place - the Sino-Ruso war. Russia was a juggernaut compared to Japan, but two catastrophic attacks - one surprised removed all support for the war from Japan, and the Czar gave in and ended the war.
Historians are arguing that in a industrialized conflict, where the United States was committed to war, Japan had no shot at winning. And to some degree that's true. But it depended on political factors that were no means set in stone.
But was America truly that dedicated to war with Japan? Turns out yes - but it's not hard to see a world where Japan wasn't quite a closely allied to Germany and/or Midway had gone the other way, or after millions where dead in the home island where that commitment would be tested.
Or conversely - as Hitler hoped - Japan would hold off America just long enough for the Russians to be finished off by the Germans in the East and Britain would finally come to the table. In a "Germany First" Strategy, America could not have taken the offensive in 1942 in that scenario.
But it's also reflective of the dehumanization that Japan's leadership as - the West was soft, just as the Russians were soft, and Japan's greater fighting spirit would carry the day.
Especially considering Midway was so close, even with the gigantic advantages the US Navy has ( intelligence so they basically knew what the Japanese were doing, in what order and where, and radars).
If faced with massive destruction and extremely high anticipated civilian casualties with absolutely no hope of victory...yes, surrender is totally rational
Once the US took Guam, the war was over (Guam was close enough to Japan to enable the US to enact a campaign of unlimited bombing). From that point forward, continued conflict was a matter of Japanese leaders sacrificing their own citizens for absolutely no gain
