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Thought Experiment : 1935

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Pretend the year is 1935.

You have just been crowned King or Queen of a United British Empire, consisting of the entire English speaking world. You have a dream. A vision of what is to come from Germany and Japan and the events of the early and mid 1940's.

Other than that, the world is the same as it was in 1935. Realing from the great depression, caused by a housing bubble and the excesses of the 1920's, the world is desperate for leadership. The aftermath of World War One is still fresh in everyone's minds. Germany is re-arming, Russia is being Russia. Unemployement and illiteracy ar rife. Disease and starvation are at alarming levels. The Spanish flu is haunting you worse than any man-made disaster. And YOU have unprecedented power.

:listening: What are you going to do?

http://www.banglacricket.com/alochona/images/smilies/waiting.gif

@Poseidon,

Poseidon wrote:

Pretend the year is 1935.

You have just been crowned King or Queen of a United British Empire, consisting of the entire English speaking world. You have a dream. A vision of what is to come from Germany and Japan and the events of the early and mid 1940's.

Other than that, the world is the same as it was in 1935. Realing from the great depression, caused by a housing bubble and the excesses of the 1920's, the world is desperate for leadership. The aftermath of World War One is still fresh in everyone's minds. Germany is re-arming, Russia is being Russia. Unemployement and illiteracy ar rife. Disease and starvation are at alarming levels. The Spanish flu is haunting you worse than any man-made disaster. And YOU have unprecedented power.

:listening: What are you going to do?

Go pre-emptive on Germany. Dramatically expand secret service activity in Germany, attempt an assination, coup and rebellion simultaneously. Attempt to cause as much chaos and devision as possible, especially within the Nazi party. Once Germany is in sufficent chaos attack with the help of checkolslovakia, poland, france and denmark- make sure that Hitler, assuming he wasn't finished off, didn't know which of his officers he could trust. If this fails destroy all axis naval capacity and do everthing possible to preserve the empire.
Oh and about the assasination. I'm thinking 1936 olympic athlete useing a concealed weapon to take down hitler.
War will allow production to get going again and employ millions. Striking first gives a big advantage. Without Blitzgreig the German war machine is lame.

@Poseidon,

why not pretend the year is 2008, its iraq (or afghanistan or any war-torn african country) & you have unlimited power ? What are the underlying threats to world stability & what could you do about them? (as one man with lots of power in a single nation being pulled apart by other more powerful nations )

Hitler wasn't the real problem (Lenin & Stalin were equally, if not more(they murdered more people), nasty)- the first world war happened without his influence & the issues which caused that war were not dealt with & so it all happened again. Hitler was a catalyst, a propaganda genius able to capitalise on peoples fears, hatreds&hopes-. You'd have to find an alternative route for europe from a feudal time of kingdoms, lords & princes to the era of nations.

@Poseidon,

Avatar 6v7 : You would perhaps save some lives. You would also have to convince others that you were correct as you could be deposed for being a war-monger. Are you going to tell them to invade Germany because you had a bad dream? I said unprecedented power, not unlimited power, or unchallengeable power. You might actually even inspire Islam to take the side of the Axis, or even perhaps Russia?
I give you 6 out of 10.

pqzod. You're avoiding the question. The reason I go back to 1935 is to distance ourselves from today's situation in order to be a bit more objective. We actually do face a similar scenario, so you get 1 point for alluding to the similarities, and another point for seeing Hitler as a catalyst rather than a cause. I would go a step further and see him merely as a symptom, the straw which broke the camels back, and he would have been replaced by someone the same as him (perhaps worse) if he had been assassinated.
2 our of 10.

@Poseidon,

Poseidon wrote:

Avatar 6v7 : You would perhaps save some lives. You would also have to convince others that you were correct as you could be deposed for being a war-monger. Are you going to tell them to invade Germany because you had a bad dream? I said unprecedented power, not unlimited power, or unchallengeable power. You might actually even inspire Islam to take the side of the Axis, or even perhaps Russia?
I give you 6 out of 10.

By this point the Anschlus will already have gone ahead, and anti-semitism is rife. Hitler has already begun agitating natives of the sudetenland and thus checkolsavkia will be sympathetic. The remillitarisation of the rhineland has already got France on side. Also I would begin with attempts to covertly overthrow Hitler. The treay of versaille and Hitlers failure to meet it, plus all its other provocation should give me the justification I need.
Under Stalin Russia has been persueing an isolationist policy, and it only a war with germany that changes this. While Russia may be useful as an ally, any Russian occupation of eastern europe must be avoided at all costs. If this can be done Russia will not attempt aggressive expansion.

@avatar6v7,

Changing history could have serious consequences...what if i could go back and kill hitler? would a cleverer man emerge from this event? a hitler with his extra nut and extra sense of priorities..invade england first and destroy the land base from which america can use to fight the nazi,,, then attack russia...no we can never think we are changing history for the better..

@xris,

xris wrote:

Changing history could have serious consequences...what if i could go back and kill hitler? would a cleverer man emerge from this event? a hitler with his extra nut and extra sense of priorities..invade england first and destroy the land base from which america can use to fight the nazi,,, then attack russia...no we can never think we are changing history for the better..

Hitler's charisma and political genius was what kept the NAZI party together.

@avatar6v7,

avatar6v7 wrote:

Hitler's charisma and political genius was what kept the NAZI party together.

Hitler was the product not the manufacturer...if he never existed the cause of his rise to power would still have been there..another strong leader with more intelligence and with the same grudges could have conquered the world...the paradox of history and interfering with it could have enormous consequences..

@xris,

xris wrote:

Hitler was the product not the manufacturer...if he never existed the cause of his rise to power would still have been there..another strong leader with more intelligence and with the same grudges could have conquered the world...the paradox of history and interfering with it could have enormous consequences..

Would they have though? There were extreme forces on both the left and right in Germany, and is was only through Hitlers schemes that the right won in the end.

@avatar6v7,

Cut Italy out of the Stresa Front and deny them a presence in North Africa.

Confront Germany concerning Austria, Sudetenland, and the remilitarization of the Rhineland, making it known that progression on the part of Germany in any of these would result in a military strike.

The last bit would to engage in friendly diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, hopefully agreeing on a mutual defense pact without having to sacrifice Poland.

@avatar6v7,

avatar6v7 wrote:

Would they have though? There were extreme forces on both the left and right in Germany, and is was only through Hitlers schemes that the right won in the end.

can you understand the logic of my argument? its not the left or whatever or this could or could not....i will give you two scenarios...one the moderates take control and through negotiation we have peaceful a democratic goverment ...secondly there arrives a young intellectual with right wing attitudes he implements a growth in arms and he eventualy makes war with france and britain ..defeating them..dont say it could not of happened because you dont know..can you choose is my next question? Even killing one human can change world events beyond recognition...

@xris,

xris wrote:

can you understand the logic of my argument? its not the left or whatever or this could or could not....i will give you two scenarios...one the moderates take control and through negotiation we have peaceful a democratic goverment ...secondly there arrives a young intellectual with right wing attitudes he implements a growth in arms and he eventualy makes war with france and britain ..defeating them..dont say it could not of happened because you dont know..can you choose is my next question? Even killing one human can change world events beyond recognition...

your point? How bad could could it possibly be?

@avatar6v7,

avatar6v7 wrote:

your point? How bad could could it possibly be?

The point is you dont know?....if the war had been extended by two months the germans could have obtained the atom bomb the jet fighter...if you had managed to kill hitler a year before hand and his generals carried out a more successful war...what could have happened??If i was a believer ide say you cant play god..

@Poseidon,

Poseidon wrote:

Pretend the year is 1935.

You have just been crowned King or Queen of a United British Empire, consisting of the entire English speaking world. You have a dream. A vision of what is to come from Germany and Japan and the events of the early and mid 1940's.

Other than that, the world is the same as it was in 1935. Realing from the great depression, caused by a housing bubble and the excesses of the 1920's, the world is desperate for leadership. The aftermath of World War One is still fresh in everyone's minds. Germany is re-arming, Russia is being Russia. Unemployement and illiteracy ar rife. Disease and starvation are at alarming levels. The Spanish flu is haunting you worse than any man-made disaster. And YOU have unprecedented power.

:listening: What are you going to do?

So in other words, we don't know anything different than what FDR, Stalin, and Chamberlain already knew at the time -- but we've had a dream?

That's not enough to justify anything different than what happened historically. I mean it's hard to prepare for the apocalypse.

Not to say that things couldn't have been done differently. By 1935 you already had Japanese atrocities in mainland Asia and just a year later there was the Spanish Civil War.

The US and Britain could have armed themselves faster (in 1941 the US military was a trifle). The US and Britain could have had more active diplomacy with Stalin, which might have prevented the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (which was the final necessary step to open up Poland to the Nazi invasion). Stalin could have avoided killing his entire military leadership. France could have prepared a mobile army rather than a static defense line, and they could have fortified their border with Belgium as well...

Lots of things to do differently short of a preemptive war against Hitler.

This is in 1935. Ask the same question about, say, January 1938 and it's a more interesting conundrum.

@xris,

xris wrote:

The point is you dont know?....if the war had been extended by two months the germans could have obtained the atom bomb the jet fighter...

Hitler had abandoned his nuclear ambitions very early in the war -- he had almost no research into an atomic bomb. Soviet intelligence actually uncovered that before Berlin fell and before the general armistice (read the tremendously researched The Fall of Berlin by Antony Beevor for more info about that). Germany DID have a jet fighter, but they funnelled resources into making V2 rockets instead, which had no strategic or tactical value at all.

Even if Germany developed a nuclear bomb in, say, March or April of 1945, they still would have lost the war. Soviet and Allied troops were already inside Germany by that point. I mean how many bombs could they drop when the allies had 100% complete air superiority by that point?

Quote:

if you had managed to kill hitler a year before hand and his generals carried out a more successful war...what could have happened??If i was a believer ide say you cant play god..

I doubt it. The outcome of the war in Europe was a foregone conclusion as of the spring of 1943. After losing both Stalingrad and Kursk, the war was over for Nazi Germany. Even if D-day had never happened, there was not a prayer that Germany could win the war. What they had was thousands of kilometers of occupied eastern Europe and USSR -- so they traded territory for time. By the time of Kursk, the best German troops were long dead and the Red Army had come into its own. Hitler spent the rest of the war sending out 16 year old Hitler Youth, old men, and easily-defecting Czech and Romanian and Hungarian draftees to fight for him. Hitler knew from the very beginning that he could not win a war of attrition, which was the whole rationale behind blitzkrieg -- knock out the opposition quickly. But when they got stuck in the mud near Moscow in 1941, the war of attrition had begun. And Russia bled Germany dry.

@Aedes,

my powers of explaining my view seems to be failing....im not getting into a debate about what or could have happened...im trying to explain that going back in time with prior knowledge can not always solve the eventual outcome...life has so many ifs and buts and changing the course of history can or could lead to even more disasters...If the allies had won at Arnhem...i could give you many scenarios...

@Poseidon,

Yes, I agree. I mean what if Hitler had died in that gas attack during WWI... What if Stalin had actually fortified his border rather than essentially inviting a German invasion...

What's odd, though, is that from a military point of view, Hitler and Stalin were probably the two absolute worst military leaders in the history of the planet. Just exemplary cases of abominable leadership. The difference is that Stalin's degree of delusion got better as the war went on, and Hitler's got only worse and worse.

@Aedes,

Aedes wrote:

Yes, I agree. I mean what if Hitler had died in that gas attack during WWI... What if Stalin had actually fortified his border rather than essentially inviting a German invasion...

What's odd, though, is that from a military point of view, Hitler and Stalin were probably the two absolute worst military leaders in the history of the planet. Just exemplary cases of abominable leadership. The difference is that Stalin's degree of delusion got better as the war went on, and Hitler's got only worse and worse.

So my point of destroying hitler could have the outcome of a more intelligent nazi taking power and we now being its slaves..

@xris,

xris wrote:

So my point of destroying hitler could have the outcome of a more intelligent nazi taking power and we now being its slaves..

More likely someone who didn't think that invading the USSR was a good idea. And more likely someone who didn't think that pouring troops into exterminating ~15 million noncombatants was a good military strategy. Hitler created more or less unwinnable wars that might have been prosecuted better with better military leadership, but better military leadership might also have smelled the roses and decided that scorched fire apocalyptic suicide campaigns were not worth it.

There is really only one alternative scenario in which Germany has a real chance of winning WWII (and by this I mean the Eastern Front). And that is if Japan could have been convinced to invade the USSR instead of taking over the Pacific. Hitler wanted them to. If they had done so, and drawn the Soviet military attention to Japan, then it would have been almost impossible for Stalin to prevail against Germany.

If that's the case, then D-day becomes far more important than it was historically, because by June 1944 (historically) Germany was already doomed -- they'd been pushed all the way out of the Soviet Union, and the Red Army was on the verge of storming into Poland. If Germany had indeed truly defeated the USSR, then an allied invasion would have been critical.

@Poseidon,

Hmmm ... I was actually looking for a solution that could have avoided the war, or at least made it less important. An economic or education strategy.

How could the Germans themselves have been convinced to perhaps overthrow Hitler from inside? A German civil war would have been a much smaller problem.

Also a good point about Japan and Manchuria. Could an internal Japanese rebellion have brought about a civil war in that part of the world?

Or even better : can we envisage a result that avoided war altogether?

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