Cav Dog wrote:All great questions! I think that if the outcome of three battles are changed the war could easily continue into '47:
Hmmm. Well, let's see if I can manage to contribute without putting too much of a "wet blanket of reality" over an otherwise amusing discussion...
1. The US Navy loses Enterprise and Hornet in addition to Yorktown at Midway
A highly plausible development. Hard to come up with any reasonable gaming approach that has the Midway battles work out the way they did in real life. The USN was very much overmatched, and the battle could very easily have swung hard against them.
But the question remains ... what impact should we reasonably expect that a major loss at Midway have had on the total war in the Pacific?
I don't think that even a crushing USN defeat at Midway would have done much to prolong the war in the Pacific. The Japanese managed to expand out as far as they could reach with their own self-imposed logistical limitations. They could raid farther than the outter ring that they occupied, but they could not conquor and hold any farther out. They simply did not have the supply infrastructure, and it would have taken them six or eight years of concerted building effort (skipping their naval construction in favor of merchant construction) to do more.
Regardless of what happened at Midway (and later at Guad-al-can-al), the USN was going to come back with overwhelming superiority with the ships that came off the slips in 1943. That plan had already been set down by 1940. Nothing at Midway would have stopped it. Nothing in the IJN's construction capabilities would have contested it. Once those ships were worked up and deployed in 1944 it was game over for the Japanese in the Pacific. It was only a question of how long it would take (and how many lives it would take) for them to recognize this simple truth, and submit.
However, there was a factor that might have prolonged the war in the Pacific -- the war in Europe! Actual US warplans anticipated the war in the Pacific continuing into 1947 as it was. What shortened the war was the surprising strength of the Soviets, and Germany's collapse. US (and joint US/UK) strategy was always to put Europe first, and leave the Pacific to manage on a shoestring until Germany was subdued. If Germany had required even more resources, the Pacific would have gotten even less.
2. The Germans are able to take Stalingrad without losing the 6th Army.
An interesting what-if. If the Germans succeed at Stalingrad or the Soviets have failed (and how, under what changed circumstances, should probably be spelled out), there could have been several far-reaching results.
a ) The Caucasus would have been cut-off from Moscow. The reason Stalingrad was so important was its location on the north-south communications lines within the central USSR. The Volga and most of the rail lines from the Caucasus run through it or near it. If Stalingrad fell, then so also would fall the Soviet access to something like 1/2 of their petroleum resources. Ouch! And maybe those same resources fall, in at least some partially useful form, into the hands of the Germans. Double ouch!
b ) Stalingrad was a crushing defeat for the German war effort, not just for the number of German troops lost when the 6th Army was encircled. The Germans lost a total of about a quarter million troops in the Stalingrad defeat. But the German war effort lost almost a million troops!
Stalingrad cost the Italians their 8th Army, knocking them out of the fighting on the Eastern Front and making a BIG contribution to their withdrawal from the war overall. Stalingrad cost the Romanians their 3rd and 4th Armies, leaving them organizationally shell-shocked for about a year, and so contributing significantly to the loss of the Crimea in the summer of 1943. One might make the case that if not for Stalingrad, Romania would not have switched sides in mid-1944, and so the Ploesti fields might have still been supporting the Reich after D-Day. Stalingrad also crushed the Hungarians, who did not return to the field on Germany's side (in any numbers) until the Soviets and their newly allied Romanian "compatriots" were on their border in mid-1944.
And Stalingrad put the final kabosh on Germany's diplomatic efforts to woo Turkey to their cause. Not that Turkey was likely to join actively in the war, but a "biased" neutral stance was to Germany's benefit.
3. Rommel is able to use his panzers as he wanted and forces the Allies to abandon the beaches at Normandy. (Would the Normandy invasion even have happened in '44 if the Japanese had won at Midway and the west coast of the US was threatened?)
Looking at the second half of this question first -- the original US war plans anticipated invading France in circumstances that included the collapse of the Soviet Union and an un-defeated Japan. So I expect that D-Day would have gone forward in either or both circumstances.
Also it was beyond Japan's capabilities to project a significant threat onto the US Pacific Seaboard. They could, and they did, conduct a few raids. They might have done a little more raiding, perhaps getting a cruiser or two within shelling range, and they might have come back a few times, but at that point it would have quickly shifted from a positive return on investment (20 army divisions and 10 airforce wings tied up on coastal defense for a year and a half, due to a couple of submarine patrols) to a negative return (the same 20 divisions and 10 wings now tied up due to an expanded and ongoing presence requiring a significant portion of fleet supply resources).
But regardless of what the Japanese did or did not do, it is certainly plausible that the D-Day invasion could have been repulsed. I think it was Ike or Bradley who described that possibility as the greated catestrophe that the US could have suffered during the war.
Even though I don't see it as being quite such a paradigm-changing event, my belief is that failure to gain a foothold on D-Day would indeed have prolonged the war in Europe, and consequently the war in the Pacific. It is likely that if the Overlord forces were repulsed, the US Army would have simply invaded again somewhere else. Perhaps the Dragoon/Anvil invasion of Southern France would still have gone forward, but now as a main effort rather than a side-show. Perhaps they would have tried again somewhere else. But in either case the war would be prolonged. Southern France (or anywhere in Southern Europe) is a LONG route to get to the German heartland. And landing again later in the year means a shorter campaigning season -- so less progress is made before it all slows down for winter, and there is more work to do in the spring of 1945.
Also, a Soviet failure at Stalingrad probably means no Operation Bagration, so the Wehrmacht is not suffering crushing blows while the US/UK are clawing their way out of the boccage. Put another half a million men into the German reserves, and the outlook for success in the Normandie campaign looks a little different.
However, the bigger risk to a US invasion of Europe was the Battle of the Atlantic. By 1944 the US industrial capacity was greater than all other nations of the world combined -- more than 50% of the industrial capacity of the ENTIRE WORLD. Germany did not even manage to best the Soviets on industrial output (though they certainly could have, if they had more than half a clue). But there was nothing they could do to best the US. However, tanks and guns in Cleveland don't win wars in Europe. Without success in the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943, there might well have been no Overlord. Churchill was right when he said it was the U-Boats that really worried him.
But alas, all any of it leads to is greater probability for an artificial sun over Berlin. The B29 was conceived as a plane to reach any part of Germany from North Africa or Scotland, and the Manhattan Project was conceived as a response to fears that the Germans would get there first (which they were far from doing). US policy makers decided, as early as 1943, that the Germans could be defeated without A-bombs, and decided that there was less risk of the Japanese deriving critical technology from any duds, and so the A-bomb program was re-directed exclusively at the Japanese. But change the history of 1942, 1943 and 1944 events, and one should not doubt that Germany would have received the worst of nuclear attentions.
One must assume failure of the Manhattan Project, or at least of the B29 AND B32 projects, to make any plausible scenario for the war continuing into 1947. But it is not an unreasonable condition to assert that, for the sake of the what-if, the Manhattan Project stumbles down a blind alley or into a developmental dead-end, and so looses a year or two.
Just my $ 0.02 ... keep or discard at your discretion.
