what makes you believe that under hitler's poor management would then give nazi's a chance to win the war?

Overlord would have ended in the nazis favor if the generals would have been allowed to move their divisions of tanks like they wanted. Troops in Russia and Africa weren't getting much needed supplies and they still bloodied the noses of British and Russian troops.

The nazis were losing and were looking for anything to turn the tide at this point was before US gov dragged in, poor management was right and it showed even at the lack of supplies to the need of allied troops.

The only place they were losing was in Africa. They were at a stalemate in Russia and the British had been driven back to their island.

It is as you stated the nazi's lost due to hitlers poor management and this was apparent even before the US dragged in towards the end of the war.

none of the countries they conquered fought for the germans, there were deserters though

A.

But imagine if the USA had of intervened in 1939, when Great Britain was pleading her to!??

Would Hitler have rushed to try and invade Britain, denying the US a staging base? Or would he have sued for peace on the Western front, possibly saving hundreds of thousands of lives?

More then likely it would have brought the European conflict to a far quicker end, there by affecting Japan's decision to bomb Pearl Harbour.

We would never of let them take our Island..........But it would of been close, as previously stated Germany strecthed them selfs too thin and ultimatly would have been defeated regardless

What is forgotten in much of this discussion is that Britain had to fight in the Pacific War too. Had Japan not got involved Britain and the Commonwealth troops would have been able to focus on fighting against Germany and Italy in Europe and Africa. A combined British and Commonwealth / Soviet allied force would eventually have worn Germany down. This changed with Pearl Harbour as British and Commonwealth troops were now fighting the Japanese too.

I have no doubt that Britain could not have fought against a combined German, Italian and Japanese Axis without the US, this would have been too many fronts to fight on and would have lead to the same problems the Germans faced after attacking the Soviet Union.

We then have to ask the question had Japan attacked British and Commonwealth assets and not Pearl Harbour would the US still have been able to remain neutral? I suspect not, I do not imagine the American people would been comfortable with a massive war raging in their back yard.

Yes, they did. The SS in particular had large formations of foreign volunteers, mainly from countries like the Ukraine. General Vlaslov led a large Russian army against the Red army.

As for the topic at hand it's an interesting one. It's not so much a simple question of removing the US from the European theatre - you have to remember that should the USA have been neutral during the fighting, Japan could and would have invaded the Soviet Union from the east. The biggest German catastrophies occured due to Hitlers irrational decisions that stared in the face of logic - even with the USA in the war, had Hitler allowed his staff greater control over the battlefield, the German army would have avoided most of the reversals it suffered in 1943 easily. Hitler was staunch on enforcing the 'Not one step back' policy that Stalin had also forced on the Red Army with equally dire consequences. The only differences were that

a) The germans lacked the armour and infantry reserves that the Soviets had
They were fighting on foreign soil and
c) By 1943 Germany had to divert large numbers of troops to France and especially Italy.

That is not to say that Germany would have won outright in the east - but at the very least they'd have forced Stalin to conceede a draw, or have withdrawn successfuly to a single stabilised line of defense to protect their extensive empire.

Britian, on its lonesome, was no major thread to Germany, but it certainly became one with the onset of war against Russia, if only for lending itself to possible attacks on the reichs western front.

Without the USA in the war, Japan and Germany however ultimately would have destroyed the Soviet Union with ease. Even with the USA in the war, again as above, Germany could have still easily come out on top of the war with proper structure in place, if not totally victorious.

I think a far better question is - what if the July 1944 plot that so almost killed Hitler had come to pass and the revolt was a success? Germany could have tactifully surrendered to the Western Allies , and easily kept the Red Army at bay for quite some time if they transferred and threw everything at it they could muster (A policy Himmler considered personally to himself in 1944 when the war was clearly lost). Like in 1918, the German army could have ended the war defeated but somewhat intact, with the same being said for proper Germany as a whole in comparison to the utter destruction of 1945 and the subsequent loss of vast amounts of territory to the Red Army (obviously no matter what it was always inevitable that Eastern Prussia would be lost forever).

I thin that hilter would have won because he was a very strong force back int he www2 era and he had a lot of supporters and tanks and economies so i think he would have won has it not been fro the ameirican invervention who started invading so i think that is what woulda happenedc

Nazi forces were already being pushed back by Canadian and European forces not to mention hitler and his general made a huge mistake by trying to invade Russia in which most of the forces sent in froze to death followed by Russian forces then invading from the east. Hitlers troops were also beginning to be thinned out and the money flowing in began to halt slowly.

What I do think is that American forces sped up the inevitable demise of Nazi Germany certainly not the ones however that won the war. America never even entered the war until near the end when Germany was beginning to buckle already.

They may have won without the US's help, but it probably would have taken longer.

Heck, he could have given the USA a run for their money, but made a terrible tactical mistake at Bastogne, or the Battle of the Bulge. Instead of attacking the surrounded US forces with all his King Tiger units at once, he attacked one at a time, allowing the US to defeat them much easier than if he attacked with all at the same time.

First off, apologies for not reading all of the thread. People may have already raised similar issues to me, and some may have already been refuted.

I chose B.

I think that it was the US industrial capacity that significantly altered the balance. That being said, I think it is a far more complex problem than people state. IMO, there was no single event (Eastern front, V weapons, etc) that would have significantly changed the war. Depending if the US had continued to supply the Commonwealth effort, there could have been varying outcomes for each major turning point.

Some factors to consider:

- Some people tend to think that Hitler was a strategic & tactical genius. He wasn't. He made many bad decisions, often going against the recommendations of his generals. This forms part of the basis as to why the Allies vetoed a plan to assassinate Hitler; he was doing a poor job and they didn't want someone more capable in control.

- A lot of us tend to think that the nuclear weapon programme was purely a US effort; it wasn't. The original emphasis as to its viability came from the UK and the TUBE ALLOYS project. A lot of the scientific expertise was transferred from the UK to the US in order to protect the programme. The key factor would have been as to whether the UK could have initiated and sustained a uranium / plutonium enrichment programme sufficient to have produced nuclear weapons in time to alter the course of the war. The German nuclear effort was far from a success under Hiesenberg; he saw many technical hurdles to overcome. It is quite possible that they could have gone onto the correct path, but that is debatable.

- A major consideration in the destruction of German industrial capacity was the daylight bombing by US forces. IMO it is unlikely that Britain could have sustained a large enough bombing campaign to have severely reduced the German industrial capacity.

- Although there was considerable US effort in the European theatre, the main effort was in the Asian and Pacific theatre. This prevented the Japanese from more rapid expansion and from a linkage of Axis forces around Africa / India / China / Burma. This would have provided a significant threat to the USSR and to Commonwealth forces in the Pacific.

- I'm biased here, so take that into consideration, but in different circumstances Australia could have become the 'powerhouse' of the Commonwealth effort. There were a variety of resources available and there was the capacity to significantly expand industrial production. Strategic repositioning to reinforce Australia's vunerable northern flank could have provided a 'second base' from which to supply the means to effictively fight the war in the Pacific.

That's all I can think of for the moment...

I'm not an historian but my readings incline me to agree with Waspie Dwarf's analysis, to the T.

I've watched enough Hollywood movies to know for a fact that America won WW II singlehandedly. Much as we needed their land as a take-off point, the Brits themselves only got in the way, and our Generals wasted lots of time finding undefended towns for them to "attack" and "overtake", just so they would feel they played a part in winning the war. And the Russians just waited until the Nazis turned into popsicles before making an easy stroll across Eastern Europe! My heroes are Gen. Patton and Sgt. Rock

Ive played enough video games to know that one single U.S. soldier had to constantly rescue the french and english and that the Nazi's just stood there in the middle of a field while you took pot shots at them.

Ive also read enough comic books to know that Captain America won War World 2.

Germany would still have fallen even if America hadn't entered the war. Britain, France were being pushed back in the western front, although the line continually went back and forth. Meanwhile Russia was pushing the Germans back from the east far more effectivly than the west - more troops and being communist it was easy to change factories into heavy industry to keep churning out tanks. Infact once the tanks were completed Stalin sent them straight into the battle - America only helped the west by forcing the western lines more forward - but remember, Germany was fighting two fronts, and with Russia advancing quickly.
The west never touched German soil, Russia were the only Allies that marched into Berlin - and once by this time that Russia were in Berlin, Adolf Hitler had assassinated his family and then committed suicide.

So, Without American involvment in ww2 would we have lost the war? no, I don't think we would have, they only came into it in the last 2 years. Hitlers V1's launch sites were overtook by Allies and there effect in england-london were not all that much (compared to the destruction by bombs ect).
If Hitler never attacked Russia for their oil supplies and kept his "non-aggression" pact, resulting in Russia not coming into the war. Then the Allies would have been over-run easily.

Don’t get me wrong am not being a Greek egotist but I do feel the truth should be known who really brought the Germans to their knees down.

Bellow is some very correct info regarding the historical facts concerning ww2. A link which no longer is available but I have the info still.

Now read bellow very carefully please.

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Today, very few of us in the cyberspace community appreciate the 28th of October 1940. Historians have written much about various turning points in our planet's history, but this turning point of the Second World War is not well known by most of us.

The scene is in Europe, in Rome, Italy during the autumn of 1940. The dictator, Benito Mussolini, is feeling melancholic and inadequate. The reasons for his frustrations are that his ally, Adolf Hitler and the Germans, have been conquering the nations of Europe: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Romania, and Austria. Their combined population was close to 140 million. Mighty France, a nation of 43 million, had collapsed and surrendered after only 17 days of fighting in an agonizing and humiliating defeat.

Mussolini was being confronted with faits accomplis, as Hitler would inform him that the Germans had conquered a country three days after the fact. Mussolini decided to show Hitler that the Italians also could conquer Europe, and have Hitler "learn of the conquest from the newspapers."

Mussolini's choice for this mighty show of Italian strength was Greece, a small country of seven million people versus Italy's 44 million. The disparity in their armed forces was even greater: Italy had close to ten times the firepower of Greece in its army and navy. Italy's large air force had total air superiority since Greece had a very small defensive air force.

Now that the choice was set, the invasion route was selected: the Albanian-Greek border. All that remained would be to deliver an ultimatum to Greece. The insulting ultimatum demanded that Greece allow Italian troops to occupy the country (i.e., surrender) or Italy would declare war and invade Greece. Mussolini had given the Greek Prime Minister Metaxas three hours to reply. After reading the demands in the early morning hours of the 28th of October 1940, he rejected the ultimatum and replied with a single Hellenic word: "OXI!" (pronounced Ohee, meaning "NO!"). It has become a Hellenic battle cry that blooms defiantly every 28th of October on walls throughout Greece and Cyprus, and in the thousands of Hellenic communities in almost every country around the world. These Hellenic communities today number more than ten million Hellenes (Greeks) outside Greece.

Mussolini never waited for Metaxas' reply. Before the ultimatum had expired, five heavily armed divisions of Italian soldiers began moving from Italian-controlled Albania over the border into Greece. Expectations of an easy Italian victory soon evaporated. The quick march to Athens for an Italian victory parade never materialized. After a 25-kilometer advance inside Greece, the 200,000 Italian troops were halted for days by a ragged army of Greek soldiers in mismatched uniforms and shepherd's clothes.

Though Italians outnumbered them more than two to one, the Greeks astonished the Italian generals with their courage, their tenacity, and their limited artillery's precision. The Greek forces had six mortars for each division against the invader's sixty. All Greeks helped in any way they could. The courageous women of Greece supplied clothing, food, and support to the defense of their country in very difficult winter conditions. Sometimes, large groups of women would stand arm-in-arm for hours in icy rivers and streams to slow the waters enough to permit the movement of equipment and supplies to the front.

Within four weeks of the invasion, those undermanned, under-supplied, and underfed Greeks drove the Italian army back into Albania and kept on going, continuing the pursuit into Albania. By this time, Mussolini had replaced the commanding general several times, and finally assumed command of the military campaign himself. He tried to rouse his troops to victory with speeches reminding them of the great legacy of their predecessors, the ancient Romans, but without success.

The Greeks pursued the Italians more than 60 kilometers into Albania, and by December of 1940, the Greek army had liberated the southern third of Albania, better known as Northern Epirus. A Greek populated area since ancient times There was even serious concern by the Italians that the Greek armed forces would cross the Adriatic Sea and invade Italy itself. By the end of the five-month campaign, in March 1941, the Greeks had dealt the Italian armed forces some unexpected numbers: 12,500 Italians returned home badly mutilated by the fighting; 13,800 were buried in the frozen soil of Greece; 25,000 were missing in action; and 40,000 were POWs held by the Greek Army.

We should remember that the USA was still neutral, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a year away. The USA was not involved in any fighting then, but all the major USA newspapers and periodicals such as LIFE and TIME carried cover stories about the Greeks and the history that they were making. In the USA, Greeks and Greek-Americans of all ages were showered with admiration at school and work in response to the historic events.

The entire Western world, discouraged and fearful of the Axis powers and the growing ugly war, took hope from this incredible victory. It was a double first: the first defeat of the Axis powers and the first liberation of territory captured by the Axis powers. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said of the Greeks: "Today we say that Greeks fight like heroes, from now on we will say that heroes fight like Greeks." However, there was history still to be made by the Greeks.

The Greeks outraged Hitler and the Germans. A small military power like Greece had succeeded in defeating their ally, Italy. The Germans invaded Greece in April of 1941, and after nearly two months of fierce fighting, overwhelmed the defiant Greeks but never fully defeated them as the Greeks had one of the most dynamic and relentless resistance movements. The Greek army included disabled soldiers from the Albanian campaign against the Italians, ordinary citizens, teenagers, and the elderly. On the Greek island of Crete there were few regular Greek army soldiers, since they were on the Greek mainland still fighting the Germans, but the ordinary Greek citizens were there: elderly peasant men and women with hunting guns, butcher knives, and agricultural tools slitting the throats of German paratroopers as they landed. About 10,000 German soldiers, young men in their prime, died trying to invade Crete.

Even Greek prison convicts demanded and were released from jail so that they could fight. The Greek freedom fighters took the lives of many German troops and destroyed much German equipment. The Germans were forced to divert 50 battalions to Greece, though they desperately needed them on the Eastern front.

The six months of fighting caused by the Greek resistance of the Axis powers also delayed Germany's invasion and campaign against what is today the Commonwealth of Independent States (the former Soviet Union). The fierce resistance of the Greeks in Epiros, Macedonia, Thessalia, Roumeli, Attiki, Peloponnesos, Crete, and the rest of Greece to the Germans caused delays. It overturned German plans to occupy Moscow before the onset of the heavy and deadly Russian winter.

This was something the Germans had not planned and thus were unprepared. The German war machine literally bogged down and froze. The Russians were successful in repulsing and defeating the Germans. This was a major turning point of World War 2. This signalled the beginning of the end of the German Third Reich. The sacrifice and success of the Greek armed forces, the Greek guerrillas, and the ordinary, anonymous Greek citizens drew the admiration of the free world and kindled hope for the final victory of the Allied powers.

We should note that Greek Prime Minister Metaxas was also a military dictator. Yet the Greeks united behind the belief that the defense of their country, which they wished to become more democratic again, was very important. That is another symbolism and irony of the 28th of October 1940, that the Greek people not only fought the fascist Axis powers invading Greece, but also later fought the extremist forces that were trying to rule Greece and not allow it to be a democracy.

The Greeks faithfully met their obligations to their allies, with heroism and self-sacrifice. As a small country, the human sacrifice and mega-devastation Greece suffered in World War 2 were much more than those of the almost all other countries that were on the victorious Allied side. In World War 2, Greece lost one of the highest percentages of its population in comparison to the other members of the victorious Allies. Greece lost, on a percentage basis, about 12% of its population, meaning about one million people.

The world leadership of the time, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, recognized the decisive contribution of the Greeks. The timeless character of the modern Greek was shining brightly for all to see: passionate, determined, and proud.

The next time you see or communicate with a Greek, tell them that you remember the 28th of October 1940. Send this article to others who may not know this important day in our planet's history. On that day, Greece, the birthplace of democracy said "NO!" to fascism, and defended its birthright despite overwhelming and unfavorable odds to yet another triumph. On that day, Greece, the ancient cradle of democracy and Western civilization, helped save democracy in its darkest hour. People have brought that birthright of democracy to most of our planet and for that we should all be proud. Interestingly, the 28th of October is also the anniversary of the opening of a symbol patterned after one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Colossus of Rhodes in Greece. This symbol of democracy is the Statue of Liberty on a small island between New Jersey and New York, USA.

This day is an inspiration to all those who cherish democracy and freedom. For when the world was a risk, an ancient and brave people were willing to risk everything. The ancient Greeks invented democracy, and the 21st century Greeks are still defending it. All of those who believe in democracy and freedom want Greece to continue as a vigorous and vibrant democracy into the Third Millennium. Hellenic civilization is in its 10,000th year and is still a major cultural force. This will become more evident as the Olympics return to their birthplace in the Athens Olympic Games of 2004.

The Truth.

those two have noting in common except for looks, and i can prove that if you want.