D-Day

[Rodeo Joe]

Let's remember what these folks did for us 80 years ago for our freedom, the greatest generation.

Joe

 

[Trunk Monkey]

Never forget. God bless them all.

 

[Boston-Bull]

​

 

[Zep5.0]

Back to back world champs thanks to these brave souls! Hate to see where the world would be had D-Day never occurred.

 

[Sniper83rdID]

 

[gunn]

Back to back world champs thanks to these brave souls! Hate to see where the world would be had D-Day never occurred.

My guess on an alternative timeline:
- Germany would have pressed for peace with the UK at gunpoint. The UK would likely have to give up more of their overseas possessions. Would Germany have taken India away from the UK? I'm not sure what they would have gained from that militarily. Fun fact: some indians actually fought for the Nazis and Fascists in a bid to start a legion that would eventually liberate India (which became independent in 1947). If the Nazis liberated the Indians before they could do it themselves, would India have joined the Nazi war machine? I'm not so sure.

Indian Legion - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

- Germany would have consolidated their efforts to the East. They would have either pushed the Soviets to the Urals or gone after the whole enchilada. They might have run out of men of fighting age had they made it all the way past Siberia.... but on the flipside they would have gained vast resources (esp oil) which they would have needed for their war machine. They should have stopped.

- Pearl Harbor happened in 41 and D-Day in our timeline happened in 44 so we (the USA) were always going to war with Imperial Japan. Japan was doing their best to colonize China and East Asia. If we focused our WW2 war machine purely on Japan, we probably would have flattened them more efficiently and more thoroughly. I'm not sure we would have colonized mainland China but I could see the US taking more territory formerly held by Japan: Okinawa might have become a US territory like Guam and Samoa. Same maybe for the Phillipines, the Korean penninsula, and even Vietnam. Let's say that US exerts its imperialism and after flattening Japan, rebuilds it as a pacific state. In this scenario, Japan would continue its rapid industrialization but by the 1960s, it would still be the place where "cheap shit is made" for the US as nothing would likely cause it to develop in to place where "really cool stuff is made" any faster.

- I think Germany would have continued their war through Africa if not in the 40s then in the 50s. The Italians would have helped Saharan Africa and Germany wanted the Central part (the vast riches of the Congo). South Africa, led by whites, would have taken the bottom third. I'm sure the black people would have been enslaved to mine the riches of Africa. Unlike with Russia though, there wouldn't be a near peer force to oppose their march. SM Sterling has an alt history where a group of racial purists called the Draka (ex Confederates and Boers) push up from S. Africa and out-Nazi the Nazis.

New Order (Nazism) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Now, if Hitler had stopped getting greedy and decided to stop marching into Russia (say, taking everything West of Russia proper) and focused on getting the resources of Africa instead, they'd crank out a new gen of lebensborn and would likely attack the US in the 1960s. So instead of fighting a proxy war with China in Vietnam, we'd probably have fought the greater German Reich, in the 60s.

Germany would have nukes, rockets, a well developed industrial base, a vast source of raw materials from Africa/Siberia, a new generation of lebensborn (Germany's birthrate was 2.27 per woman in 1940 and eaked at 2.47 in postwar 1965), and "white enough" folks from Central/Eastern Europe (aka the Slavs) and South Africa (Afrikaners/Boers) to do their dirtier work and IMO, would have been a lot harder to defeat.
Even if we had a lot of east asia to draw from and maybe the folk of Latin America would throw in with us after seeing how things go for the Brown people in Africa, I'm not sure that's a war the US could have won.

---
One area I'm less sure about is what would happen in the Middle East. A lot of the Arab world supported the Nazis, obviously because the Nazis had a thing against the Jews, but the Nazi's didn't exactly like the Arab nationalists (and neither did Germany's allies the Italian fascists). Both wanted to control them. Some Arabs were definite collaborators but since the Nazi's viewed them as an inferior race, and some countries/kingdoms were sitting on oil that the Nazi war machine will ahve needed eventually, I'm willing to bet the German Reich would have taken over the Middle East eventually. Kind of like how the US war machine reactivated in the 50s to fight China on the Korean Penninsula, I could imagine the Nazis taking over all the lands they didn't let Mussolini keep all the way to the Persian Gulf.

Yeah, this would have been a shittier timeline.

 

[rampagingsloth]

Yeah, this would have been a shittier timeline.

What about if aliens had invaded at the beginning of WWII?

Worldwar series - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

A great series of sci-fi books, Turtledove is known as an alternate history writer, he tries to make historical figures accurate in his stories and he uses quite a few, like Patton, Churchill, Stalin, most of the more obvious ones. I highly recommend reading the series, I like the general idea of "what if" scenarios such as you described. I may have to read those Stirling books, never heard of them.

 

[Grog6]

By remaining out of the war as we did, it gave america's industrial base time to get up to speed, and convert over processes, and convert America into a war footing. Ford and chrystler convert over to making tanks and airplanes, shipyards making warships. All that took a few years, during which we were supplying other armies, and our troops had tome to mobilize and train. By the time Pearl was hit, we were much more ready, and the attack got everyone off Chamberlains appeasement train. When the us shifted position on the axis powers, Chamberlain was out, Churchill came in, And the ass kicking commenced.
We built the bomb to nuke Germany, not Japan. But Hitler was dead, the Pacific war was still going on, and it decisively ended their war effort with two bombs. Imagine how different Europe would be if we'd nuked Berlin?

 

[Grog6]

The war was NOT popular here, until Japan hit Pearl. Then everyone in america volunteered for service, even the women, who went from clothing mills, to war weapon production. One of my Aunts was a welder in Newport News in the 40's.

 

[rampagingsloth]

By remaining out of the war as we did, it gave america's industrial base time to get up to speed, and convert over processes, and convert America into a war footing. Ford and chrystler convert over to making tanks and airplanes, shipyards making warships. All that took a few years, during which we were supplying other armies, and our troops had tome to mobilize and train. By the time Pearl was hit, we were much more ready, and the attack got everyone off Chamberlains appeasement train. When the us shifted position on the axis powers, Chamberlain was out, Churchill came in, And the ass kicking commenced.
We built the bomb to nuke Germany, not Japan. But Hitler was dead, the Pacific war was still going on, and it decisively ended their war effort with two bombs. Imagine how different Europe would be if we'd nuked Berlin?

What about Japan's nukes in that scenario? It was revealed after Japan's surrender that not only did they have a facility that was desperately trying to cobble together a nuke (with Germany's help, I believe) that we mostly pounded, but there was second facility in caves in Korea that we had no idea about, which could have had something going if the war had dragged on longer. It was some History Channel type WWII show that mentioned it, footage of Japan right after the surrender signing. Apparently we grabbed as much as we could before Russia could strip it, though I think they still got some parts of it. Can't remember.

 

[gunn]

What about if aliens had invaded at the beginning of WWII?

Worldwar series - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

A great series of sci-fi books, Turtledove is known as an alternate history writer, he tries to make historical figures accurate in his stories and he uses quite a few, like Patton, Churchill, Stalin, most of the more obvious ones. I highly recommend reading the series, I like the general idea of "what if" scenarios such as you described. I may have to read those Stirling books, never heard of them.

SM Stirling is in the same vein as Turtledove.
He has two main shared universes: First is the Draka series which IIRC had similarities to the series Turtledove wrote about what if the CSA won the first American Civil War (which IMO, was better than the one-off he wrote about time travellers comeing back and giving the CSA a blackpowder AK47 design - "Guns of the South")

SM Stirling's other world has two mirror realities
- In one, modern day nantucket is punted into the bronze age "Island in the Sea of Time". That was OK (but I read that a long time ago).
- In the other, the rest of the world loses the ability to use electricity. Everything else works but the modern world falls back to mideval tech. SCA LARPers rule the day and multiple societies emerge in the Western US that end up going to war. The first Emberverse trilogy talks about what happens in the immediate after math (Dies the Fire). The second trilogy talks about their children and the emergence of magic in everyday life. The third and fourth series is where shit really goes off the rails and almost feels like a paycheck book written without any real plan in mind except to cash the advance money.
- Personally, having read all his books, I found Draka and his more standalone story "Conquistador" to be better. Then again, I don't really care for magic books (which is why I don't find the bible or the book of mormon that interesting)

Another less popular author in the Alt history genre worth reading (more than SM Stirling otuside of Draka, IMO) is Robert Conroy. His books often involve a singular point of divergence and how the world might have diverged from that point:

Robert Conroy

Author of 1945, Red Inferno, and 1901

www.goodreads.com

North Reich - what if Hitler didn't declare war on the US
Himmler's War - what if Hitler died and Himmler took over
1862 - what if the British helped the CSA
etc.

He's a former soldier and his stories take a more military bend.

Last one that's interesting
Michael Chabon - The Yiddish Policeman's Union (what if Israel was destroyed and the Jews were given a refugee settlement in Alaska). Its a detective murder mystery (not my favorite genre) but in a very interesting social backdrop.

 

[Grog6]

Japan never had a meaningful nuke project, neither did germany. Germany was trying to build a reactor, using heavy water, And set the highly pyrophoric uranium powder on fire, but never knew about plutonium; Neither they nor Japan ever enriched uranium. Plutonium from a reactor is contaminated with pu 240 if you do it wrong, which makes for a fizzle.The reactors we used at Oak Ridge and Hanford used slightly enriched uranium from the Oak ridge Y 12 plant, and later the ORGaseous diffusion plant (k-25) During the cold war, we made two more GDP's, at portsmuth OH, and Paducah KY. Each of those plants drew more power than new york, and most of the eastern seaboard. TVA pretty much was dedicated to war work. The decommissioning of those plants, is why we haven't needed to build new power plants.
The Hiroshima bomb was two lumps of 235, fired at each other in an 8" howitzer barrel, lol.
Interesting fact: The gun assembly version of the bomb was code named Thin msn, and when it became clear that the spontaneous fission rate for reactor Pu239 was too high for gun assembly, it became fat man, the implosion device dropped on Nagasaki. We only had two more possible in any reasonable timeframe.