Urlik said:
Britain was still friendly with Italy and Japan until May and July 1940 respectively.
things could have been very different if Britain had been more inclined to stay friendly with them instead of staying friendly with France, Poland, the Netherlands and Belgium then the War in Europe would have been over in 1939.
You mean staying friendly with Japan after they invaded British held islands including Hong Kong? I'm fine with tweaking history a little here and there, but that seems to be a little excessive.
even if France, the Netherlands and Belgium had stayed at war with Germany, they would have had a much harder time of it and Germany would have been able to occupy them quite easily.
And tie up a lot of military resources needed for Barbarossa before the Red army is able to recover from the purge.
without Britain as a base to launch an attack against Germany through France and without North Africa as a base to launch an attack against Italy, WW2 would have been won by Germany within a couple of years.
While this much is true, they could always back door through the USSR, or the Middle East. Japan isn't going to be as much of a problem since the US would probably devote its entire military industries towards eliminating them instead of splitting it up between two fronts.
Britain would still have been friendly with Japan so Japan would have been able to forget South East Asia as they would have been getting supplies and support from the British colonies and they could then concentrate on China and eventually the USSR.
Japan did not have any long term plans with Britain. Even if Britain were to go so far as to ally with Germany, I don't think the Japanese would have stopped their advances into British held territory. The pacts between Germany, Italy, and Japan were not full military alliances, at most they are very politely and friendly worded treaties.
Britain would still have been friendly with Italy so instead of a war in North Africa, Italy could have attacked the USSR through the Balkans.
Like that went so well the first time. The problem with the Italian army is not one of a lack of numbers, but rather of morale, leadership, organization, and their ability to supply themselves away from their home soil. Similar to Archonsod's sentiment, I don't think the British expeditionary forces would have surrendered like De Gaulle and his French forces.
it is doubtful that the USSR could have stood against the combined force of Germany, Italy and Japan, and as even Churchill shared many of Hitler's views on the USSR, it is quite probable that Britain would have joined in against them as well.
The more forces Hitler seems to have under his control, the more objective he seems to point out on the map in order to divide his forces. I don't think the Germans would have reached Moscow, taken Leningrad, nor taken Stalingrad, nor transversed the Caucasus and seized the oil fields with the substandard divisions any of its allies (barring Japanese) helping them. Their supply lines made it almost impossible to effectively move supplies up to the front, the trains rails were of a different type between Russia and the rest of Europe. Whatever allies divisions Germany could field, they would come up against the obstacle of supplying them all. There simply isn't enough oil to do that while upholding military operations at the same time once you get stopped by the Winter of 1941.
If the German high command had been left to its own devices, and own planning and choosing of objectives, Herr Manstein believed that they could have won an agreeable treaty, or at least fought the Soviets to a stalemate, but with Hitler in the command bunker that became impossible.
with all that territory available to provide resources and no real threat on the doorstep for any of the Axis countries, the USA would not have stood a chance once the USSR fell.
The resources and territory the Germans captured was far from ideal. Western Europe wasn't exactly resource resource rich compared to South East Asia with their rubber and the Middle East with their oil. What little there was in steel production in France was not put to direct use for the war effort. Hitler for the most part did not want to instigate a war time economy. The only time he did was when the Allies were bombing them.
