History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

Oh yea, educate me on their planned retaking of Europe by themselves. I'll wait.

A British commando that was captured and brought before Rommel told that Rommel had mused it was too bad they couldn’t ally against the Soviets vs fighting each other.

If you look at post WW2 Europe and even Operation Paperclip, the US and Uk knew quite well the USSR was the next enemy. There was even discussed plans to immediately launch an attack on Soviet held territory, although that never moved anywhere considering how taxing the conflict with the Axis had been.

It's fascinating to me that their intelligence was so bad, they didn't even know this (if it's true).

Some maxims military strategic theory transcend accessible technologies, and the fact that Hitler (thankfully) sucked at military strategy was no secret to his own high command. There's no hindsight to be had here when his own contemporaries saw the looming failure of his military operations.

If concentration camps were not a thing, who knows? But the moment soldiers started seeing the senseless violence towards the women and children, it was never an option to fail.

I think at best it would have sped up Russia’s capitulation had the Germans been more successful and pushed Stalin past the urals as he had anticipated. But given that the Wehrmacht stalled where it did, I don’t think a Japanese eastern front would have moved that needle significantly

They were in the war from 1939 to 1945 and had less casualties than the United States who was in the war, effectively from 1942 to 1945. The British took part in no major offensive operations or invasions outside of North Africa before the US entered the war, and then every major operation was in conjunction with the US and allied divisions.

It's not a disservice to say they sat it out, it's facts, they were playing a defensive war of attrition against Germany. Does that mean they wouldn't get bombed? No. Does that mean their ships wouldn't get attacked? No. Does that mean no British person died, just that they weren't really interested in fighting Germany on mainland Europe unless they had other people to do the majority of the work.

Over half their army consisted of colonial or Commonwealth troops. Over third of all their casualties were from either the commonwealth or colonies.

More Soviets soldiers died in Operation Bagration from combat than British from all causes including British civilian and commonwealth combat personal combined. 2,000,000 Bengali died of starvation because of British war policies that prioritized denial of food to the impending Japanese invasion over the people living in the area.

They were as passive as they could be, you act like responding attack = offensive action. They minimized their casualties until someone else came along and held their hand or just did the work themselves. The Soviets would be marching into Paris if the US hadn't come along and held the British hands in Italy and France.

Nearest thing to a shooting war across the future iron curtain was around trieste in Italy. Russian backed yugoslavs blocked from seizing the city by, I think, a Canadian armoured division.

I am pretty sure the Med campaign was because Italy was much easier to assault (and an easier place to open up a second front, which the Soviets were crying out for), and also because I think there was oil in the Middle East.

No need to make up conspiracies.

I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. There was a debate amongst the Nazis about how to proceed. One side wanted to attack both East and west. The other wanted to set up a treaty of sorts with Britain while they attacked to the east. Hitler in his hubris made the grievous error of attacking both at once, severely diluting his attack forces. Read the story of Rudolf Hess and his daring escapade into Scotland. He was the second in command (basically the equivalent of vice president) under Hitler and then after he defied Hitlers wishes he was basically written out of the story. If Hitler had thought or wanted Britain to make peace he wouldn’t have attacked them the way he did and the whole Hess incident never would have happened.

Japan’s land army was no match for the Soviets. Even being stretched thin in the west, it likely wouldn’t have taken much commitment to severely limit japan’s gains in the East.

I suspect it’s quite likely that as Japan decimated its own resources trying to invade Russia, Roosevelt would have eventually found a casus belli and started a war in the pacific on his own terms. The fear of this exact thing is why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in the first place.

I mean you just have read about Gallipoli to know he wasn't infallible and made plenty of mistakes. It is very easy to judge someone with the benefit of hindsight however.

This is the core problem with authoritarians. They rule by giving everyone to say that they are the smartest person in the world. This leaves them insane to gather new facts or challenge their assumptions. This eventually they hit the wall of reality and fail.

This is the answer. The Allied leadership - and respecially FDR - felt very clearly that WWII came out of not really beating Germany to the ground in WWI. There was a very conscious desire on the part of American leadership at least to get an absolutely unconditional surrender from both Germany and Japan in order to restructure those countries in ways intended to prevent WWIII from just inevitably coming along twenty more years later.

Germany got to the point it did in the war *because* Hitler was ruthless. But they couldn’t turn back and just make peace, because of it.

> exporting food from India to build stockpiles while people in India starved to death.

In fairness, 70 years after the end of the British Raj this hasn't really changed. About 40% or children under 5 in India still experience stunted growth from malnutrition, about 20% experience wasting from starvation, and about 800k children die from starvation, double that if you include malnutrition related disease.

Roll back to 2000 and the figures were much higher.

It was the first war to allow for mass destruction via air power - hindsight 20/20 on what was a "bad" idea and what was a "good" idea.

I don't think the Nazis would've stopped, their ideology was inherently expansive, making conflict with Britain (over African territories) or the USSR (over central/eastern Europe) basically inevitable. (Think of the Napoleonic wars and how peace was esencially untenable with France being so powerfull.)

However, asuming that they somehow changed motivations, it would be very a very stupid foreign policy for either Britain or the USSR to allow any nation to dominate Europe so thouroughly, even without taking into account the ethnic clensing and expansionist retoric.

There would never be a truce between Germany and the USSR after the war began. The German war aim was conquest in the east, and all they did was in preparation for commitment there. It was a war of extermination by the Germans and a war of survival for the Soviet Union. The USSR always expected that war was coming but thought they could buy more time. Germany struck as hard as they did because it was perhaps their only chance to win.

There would also never be a truce between China and Japan. That wasn't a war of extermination like the invasion of the USSR, but it was a war for the survival of a Chinese state.

Britain could have sued for peace but it would mean the end of the British Empire from defeat in war, rather than what happened which was imperial exhaustion. So that was never really an option.

The US has no justification that would satisfy the American public to go to war until Pearl Harbor. After that, no chance of a premature end to the war.

Japan had imperial ambitions that clashed with Britain and America. Their war goal was to seize as many resource-rich zones as they could before they burned through their supplies. They attacked Pearl Harbor specifically to try and force the US to accept Japanese imperial domination in Southeast Asia, not because Japan had any intent to invade the US. So there's no real way for them to stop either. If possible they would have extended to take over India as well.

[removed]

The USSR and the West were essentially racing to partition the axis. If either one had made peace it would have assured the other achieved total regional (and therefore probably global) dominance. So even if Germany had offered some kind of deal in say 1944, like restoring the French government and making peace with the non-Soviet allies, that would have just allowed Stalin to control the fate of Europe. Also, it would have risked Hitler staying in power should the Soviets also waver.

The invasion of Russia was the Nazis biggest error, but also, their main objective. So it's too unlikely that that would have happened.

It wasn't that close to defeat; British production was still out producing German in aircraft and the notion that the RAF was going to fall was bad intel, wishful thinking by the German high command or deliberate mildec. I think it's a bit overdramatic to claim the RAF was at its breaking point when most airfields remained operational and the military industry still buidling replacements. The British had solid air defense and early warning radar, international pilots, and plenty of juice left to punish the Luftwaffe.

That's literally what happened, the Axis kept trying to get peace but the UK refused as they were hoping to starve Germany with their blockade and win the war that way. Even in 1939, they had a policy of avoiding English and French ships as they were hoping to get peace.