Trump, Bannon and the Coming Crisis

[SomeGuy]

(02-17-2017, 01:31 PM)Mikebert Wrote:

(02-16-2017, 10:41 AM)SomeGuy Wrote: Oh, and roughly 80% of German casualties were suffered on the Eastern Front.  Large Communist movements existed in France, Italy, and other places in Western Europe during that period.  Had the US not intervened, the Red Army probably would have pushed through to the Channel.

I disagree.  Without the US there would have been no Western front.  Germany was not a pushover and it would have taken the USSR quite some time to defeat them one-on-one. Britain might have tried something in the Balkans, and when they got bogged down maybe settle for recovering Norway.  As the USSR rolled back the German positions at some point I think Churchill would have grown fearful of exactly what you suggest.

Hitler came to power partly because German capitalist elites preferred the Nazis to the Communists.  In the end I think Churchill would have come to the same conclusion and made peace with Hitler.  But Churchill had gambled that the Americans would get involved, in which case his side would have the preponderance of the power and the capitalist West would in the end come out on top (as they did in 1991).

Look at the production figures in Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers again.  The USSR was outproducing Germany in all major military-industrial categories at the start of the war, and its lead would only grow.  It had more men, more oil, more steel, more of everything.  I am quite certain Churchill would have been happy to stand aside and see the two fight it out (I think I can find quotes of his to that effect if need be), but I doubt seriously he would have been willing to intervene on Hitler's behalf by the time Barbarossa got going.  By the 1940s Germany was but a middle power, and could no more have prevailed over the Russians than the Japanese could have against the US.

If you'd like a compromise scenario, sufficient resistance by Churchill (and by that point, probably the US) might have kept France and the rest of Europe in the Western column, and Stalin might have been satisfied with a neutral Germany (under different leadership, of course) as a buffer state.  See the "Stalin Note" of 1952 for possible details.  I doubt it would have changed much about the following few decades if things had panned out that way.