As you say, if the USA had stayed out of the war, which became a bit tricky after Japan destroyed a lot of the USA fleet at Pearl Harbour, we'd have entered a dark era which might well have run for, as Hitler hoped, 1000 years.
Hey... it could have happened very easily had the US lost both the battles of Coral Sea and Midway, which traditional military science says should have been the case..
Had we lost Coral Sea, which was in fact a tactical draw (or even a loss given the sinking of the of the Lady Lex and crippling of the Yorktown), New Guinea would have been captured and it's likely that Australia would have been required to sue for peace or surrender.
Without Australia, there would have been no base for the US to stage and direct its island hopping campaign and Japan would have remained relatively secure.
And likewise, as a friend of mine and I were discussing this morning over coffee, had Hitler 1.) not been convinced that Goering could case the BEF to surrender at Dunkirk and 2.) been provoked by Churchill into turning from bombing RAF airfields to bombing cities, the British army would have ceased to exists as a fighting force, and they would not have possessed an airforce to defend their coast (or navy) from a Nazi cross-channel invasion.
Had Britain fallen, Hitler would have been essentially free to direct his full military power against Russia, as well as free up sufficient forces to conquer N. Africa and the mid-east oil fields.
We certainly would not have been able to stage an invasion of Europe, ala D-Day.. And Spain and Turkey would likely have come into the war on the side of Germany, with Turkey likely to have been promised the restoration of its former Mid-East empire.
Oh yeah, unlike many people who seem to think WWII was an inevitable win, it was quite the contrary. It was a desperate struggle, with the tide of the war actually being more a matter of incredible luck and miscalculations on the part of Hitler and Tojo.
Hawk |
