The Man in the High Castle - WOW, it could have happened!

[SaltyNuts]

I've always like the show, but I always considered it pure fiction. No way could Germany and Japan take over a country as big as the U.S.

However, I've been playing this computer game called Arsenal of Democracy. Its a WW 2 simulation (its an offshoot of Hearts of Iron II) that let's you play any of the major powers in WW 2 (and lots of more minor powers).

Anyways, I played as Germany. Taking down the USSR was TOUGH, but not too long after I held Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad the USSR sued for peace. My submarines had been wreaking havoc on the UK, weakening its economy, so I rather quickly took the British Isles.

Then I brought large numbers of transports with tons of troops, and landed in the Northeast United States. The U.S. went down fairly easily, MUCH easier than the USSR, given its much, much smaller army.

And to top it all off, after I had broken the spine of the US, and had conquered the vast majority of it from east to west, Japan landed some troops to occupy some of the west coast provinces! I LOL'd so hard.

But that made me think how lucky we are WW 2 turned out the way it did. We could have really been occupied. And I have a newfound respect for The Man in the High Castle!

 

[ElFenix]

i think you've started more threads in the last month than i've started in 17 years.


edit: i did that same thing in axis and allies once.

 

[MrSquished]

i think you've started more threads in the last month than i've started in 17 years.


edit: i did that same thing in axis and allies once.

Axis and Allies was such a good board game. Many good memories from playing that in my youth.

LONG LIVE AXIS AND ALLIES!

 

[Linux23]

Interesting game. I might have to the look.

And yes mithc is an interesting show.

 

[AznAnarchy99]

Didn't they win in the show cause Germany beat the US to the nuke as well?

 

[SaltyNuts]

That's right Anarchy, in the movie I believe Germany used at least one nuke on the US. But they could have done it conventionally as well is what I'm saying.

 

[AdamK47]

Wolfenstein: The New Order was such a great game.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Assuming something could have happened because it happened in a video game?

Yeah.

 

[Sonikku]

I've always like the show, but I always considered it pure fiction. No way could Germany and Japan take over a country as big as the U.S.

However, I've been playing this computer game called Arsenal of Democracy. Its a WW 2 simulation (its an offshoot of Hearts of Iron II) that let's you play any of the major powers in WW 2 (and lots of more minor powers).

Anyways, I played as Germany. Taking down the USSR was TOUGH, but not too long after I held Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad the USSR sued for peace. My submarines had been wreaking havoc on the UK, weakening its economy, so I rather quickly took the British Isles.

Then I brought large numbers of transports with tons of troops, and landed in the Northeast United States. The U.S. went down fairly easily, MUCH easier than the USSR, given its much, much smaller army.

And to top it all off, after I had broken the spine of the US, and had conquered the vast majority of it from east to west, Japan landed some troops to occupy some of the west coast provinces! I LOL'd so hard.

But that made me think how lucky we are WW 2 turned out the way it did. We could have really been occupied. And I have a newfound respect for The Man in the High Castle!

There's no reason why The Nazis should not have defeated Russia. With the kinds of losses Russia was taking, surrender shouldn't have been too difficult to obtain had Germany kept a bargaining table available. Instead they seemed more interested in gutting the populace to the last.

 

[JTsyo]

There was no way Germany was taking on the US without nukes. Don't forget while we were fighting in Europe we were also fighting in the Pacific too. Possible scenario for Germany: trap the British troops at Dunkirk and get Britain to bow out of the war. Invade Russia and obtain a quick victory. Then I guess it would be onto North Africa but they couldn't even dream of a invasion of NA.

US pop: 134.9 million (1942)
German pop: 67 million

Germany just wouldn't have the manpower to occupy Europe, Russia and then mobilize enough men for a transatlantic invasion. They would have to wait a generation or two to raise a new army from the occupied lands.

Also Germany wasn't a naval power, only scenario I could see where they could challenge the US in the Atlantic is if they got British cooperation and that would be almost impossible.

 

[Darwin333]

That's right Anarchy, in the movie I believe Germany used at least one nuke on the US. But they could have done it conventionally as well is what I'm saying.

Naw, they could have won the war in Europe but in reality we did get the nuke first so we would have nuked the shit out of them if they had tried to invade. Plus we had a far superior navy that would have prevented them from crossing the Atlantic with the kind of troop transports that would have been required.

 

[Darwin333]

There's no reason why The Nazis should not have defeated Russia. With the kinds of losses Russia was taking, surrender shouldn't have been too difficult to obtain had Germany kept a bargaining table available. Instead they seemed more interested in gutting the populace to the last.

Their delay in invading Russia was their undoing. You don't fight Russia in the winter...

 

[Linflas]

Their delay in invading Russia was their undoing. You don't fight Russia in the winter...

Yep without the 7 week delay things likely would have been much different.

 

[pmv]

Assuming something could have happened because it happened in a video game?

Yeah.

Absolutely, this.

A video game is in no sense a simulation of the real world!

I think I dimly remember Axis And Allies the board game. What I particularly remember was that it allowed a very quick Russian victory if you, as the Russians, just took the initiative and smashed your way through to Berlin way before the game expected you to be actively involved (I dimly recall there being some loophole that allowed you take the initiatve in a way you weren't supposed to be able to as Russia). If I remember rightly you won as soon as you grabbed Berlin, even if you couldn't realistically hold on to it.

Of course, I am very likely confusing it with some other table-top WW2 game - it was a _very_ long time ago (feels almost as long ago as the actual war).

No way could Germany, or Japan have conquered the US. I doubt Germany ever had a chance against Russia, and certainly once they failed to take Moscow before the first winter the war was lost. I've heard it said that it was the Greeks being so effective against the hopeless Italians (forcing the Germans to spend time saving their allies there) that was partly responsible for Germany fatally-delaying getting to Moscow...but maybe that was just a story put out by patriotic Greeks!

Perhaps, if Hitler hadn't been so irrational, the Germans could have just conquered France, Belgium and Poland etc and then stopped and not attacked Russia at all. But probably Russia and Germany were always going to go to war at some point, given the nature of their regimes. And Germany was in no position to invade Britain either, so they'd have had to somehow persuade them to make peace.

Had that happened, we'd have ended up with the situation of a powerful and threatening Russia, a continental Europe united with a dominant Germany, and a Britain standing isolated apart from that united Europe. Pretty hard to imagine that, eh?

 

[Paratus]

Their delay in invading Russia was their undoing. You don't fight Russia in the winter...

One might say they fell for one of the classic blunders.......

 

[clamum]

There's no way Japan would've been able to land troops on the west coast. With what landing ships? And supply those troops? No way.

 

[deustroop]

I suspect that it did not matter that winter operations created a special hardship for the Nazis. The flaw in the German war strategy was its commander. Hitler frequently bit off more than he could chew. Operation Barbarossa is an example.The Wehrmacht mounted a simultaneous offensive along the entire strategic Soviet front. The list of simultaneous major russian targets was a Plan destined to fail but it was drafted by the military and had some credibilty, a low chance of success perhaps but then Hitler scuppered his Plan by halving off two armies from Leningrad to fight at Moscow. The failure of this operation drove Hitler to demand further operations of increasingly limited scope inside the Soviet Union, such as Case Blue and Operation Citadel, all of which eventually failed.
After that the war was over, except for the russian army's systematic raping of every european woman they could find.

 

[Darwin333]

I suspect that it did not matter that winter operations created a special hardship for the Nazis. The flaw in the German war strategy was its commander. Hitler frequently bit off more than he could chew. Operation Barbarossa is an example.The Wehrmacht mounted a simultaneous offensive along the entire strategic Soviet front. The list of simultaneous major russian targets was a Plan destined to fail but it was drafted by the military and had some credibilty, a low chance of success perhaps but then Hitler scuppered his Plan by halving off two armies from Leningrad to fight at Moscow. The failure of this operation drove Hitler to demand further operations of increasingly limited scope inside the Soviet Union, such as Case Blue and Operation Citadel, all of which eventually failed.
After that the war was over, except for the russian army's systematic raping of every european woman they could find.

Germany would have very likely taken, and been able to hold, Moscow if they weren't delayed in starting the offensive and caught trying to advance in the Russian winter. The cluster-fuck that Operation Barbarossa turned into directly led to the two offensives you listed the following year after Germany was already bloodied and was trying to save face/still accomplish its goal of taking Russia.

 

[SaltyNuts]

There's no reason why The Nazis should not have defeated Russia. With the kinds of losses Russia was taking, surrender shouldn't have been too difficult to obtain had Germany kept a bargaining table available. Instead they seemed more interested in gutting the populace to the last.

Sonikku, I wouldn't take it quite as far as you did, but my research indicates that the German intelligence agencies investigated in late 1944 where they went wrong in the SU. They came to the conclusion that not coming as liberators is what cost them - in the beginning people worshiped them as liberators, but then they started wiping everyone out, and the resistance started, etc. Not that they necesarrily would have one, but that was their best shot. Very interesting!

 

[SaltyNuts]

And for those of you indicating that a loss to the SU was a forgone conclusion, you are completely wrong. The German army got 20 miles away from Moscow, the communications and nerve center for the entire SU. Who know what would have happened if that would have fallen. And the only reason it didn't is probably because stupid Japan attacked the US instead of coordinating with Germany and attacking the SU. That freed up a large numbers of Siberian troops to be rushed to the outskirts of Moscow to defend the city.

Oh no, it could have been very, very different.

And yes, it would have taken some time for Germany to build up an invasion force for the US. But once the SU was tamed, it would have been lights out for the UK pretty quick. Then Germany could capture ports further west over time - she had control of the air, control of the seas via submarines, and troop transports take little time to build. I suspect her first landing on the north American continent (after taking places in between, maybe iceland for example) would have been in relatively un-populated Canada. Then the panzers would break through the Canadian wilderness onto the US just like they broke out of the Ardennes forests onto France.

 

[Sonikku]

And for those of you indicating that a loss to the SU was a forgone conclusion, you are completely wrong. The German army got 20 miles away from Moscow, the communications and nerve center for the entire SU. Who know what would have happened if that would have fallen. And the only reason it didn't is probably because stupid Japan attacked the US instead of coordinating with Germany and attacking the SU. That freed up a large numbers of Siberian troops to be rushed to the outskirts of Moscow to defend the city.

Oh no, it could have been very, very different.

If Japan and Germany had invaded in the summer or spring the SU would have been majorly fucked. Hell, if Japan simply hadn't attacked Pearl Harbor things would have been different as Republicans didn't want anything to do with Hitler. Though conquering America probably would have been a pipe dream, Germany gaining control over all of Europe and becoming so entrenched that nothing America could do would be sufficient to remove them by the time we woke up was a very distinct possibility.

 

[MrSquished]

The book The 900 days The siege of Leningrad was amazing. I read it multiple times as a teenager but not since. But it was one of my favorites.

 

[deustroop]

And for those of you indicating that a loss to the SU was a forgone conclusion, you are completely wrong. The German army got 20 miles away from Moscow, the communications and nerve center for the entire SU. Who know what would have happened if that would have fallen. And the only reason it didn't is probably because stupid Japan attacked the US instead of coordinating with Germany and attacking the SU. That freed up a large numbers of Siberian troops to be rushed to the outskirts of Moscow to defend the city.

And yes, it would have taken some time for Germany to build up an invasion force for the US. But once the SU was tamed, it would have been lights out for the UK pretty quick. Then Germany could capture ports further west over time - she had control of the air, control of the seas via submarines, and troop transports take little time to build. I suspect her first landing on the north American continent (after taking places in between, maybe iceland for example) would have been in relatively un-populated Canada. Then the panzers would break through the Canadian wilderness onto the US just like they broke out of the Ardennes forests onto France.

No and No.

The Moscow attack failed due to factors already discussed. You should pay attention. Perhaps you are "takin a piss" as the Brits say? Anyway, here are the temperatures outside Moscow recorded in early Dec. 1941, days before before the Japanese attacked. The battle for Moscow was already lost.

"The temperature dropped far below freezing. On 30 November, von Bock reported to Berlin that the temperature was –45 °C (–49 °F).[62] General Erhard Raus, commander of the 6th Panzer Division, kept track of the daily mean temperature in his war diary. It shows a suddenly much colder period during 4–7 December: from –36 to –38 °C (–37 to –38 °F).[63] Other temperature reports varied widely.[64][65] Zhukov said that November's freezing weather stayed around –7 to –10 °C (+19 to +14 °F)[66] Official Soviet Meteorological Service records show the lowest December temperature reached –28.8 °C (–20 °F).[66] These numbers indicated severely cold conditions, and German troops were freezing with no winter clothing, using equipment that was not designed for such low temperatures. More than 130,000 cases of frostbite were reported among German soldiers.[40] Frozen grease had to be removed from every loaded shell[40] and vehicles had to be heated for hours before use. The same cold weather, typical for the season, hit the Soviet troops, but they were better prepared.[65]

The Axis offensive on Moscow stopped. Heinz Guderian wrote in his journal that "the offensive on Moscow failed ... We underestimated the enemy's strength, as well as his size and climate. Fortunately, I stopped my troops on 5 December, otherwise the catastrophe would be unavoidable."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battl...vance_.2830_September_.E2.80.93_10_October.29

The rest of your post is just as uninformed or piss taking . Perhaps its Salty is Nuts ?

Germany had already attempted to defeat the UK from the air but lost that fight and once the Bismark was sunk in May, Germany had no surface navy of significance.Don't know if it could have invaded Bermuda much less the UK with what was left.

And your final joke, which is really funny:

"Then the panzers would break through the Canadian wilderness onto the US just like they broke out of the Ardennes forests onto France."

Haha, as everyone knows, the krouts were broken in the Ardennes.

Long Live Patton and the 2nd Armored Division.

Semper Fi MoFo.

 

[OutHouse]

Absolutely, this.

A video game is in no sense a simulation of the real world!

I think I dimly remember Axis And Allies the board game. What I particularly remember was that it allowed a very quick Russian victory if you, as the Russians, just took the initiative and smashed your way through to Berlin way before the game expected you to be actively involved (I dimly recall there being some loophole that allowed you take the initiatve in a way you weren't supposed to be able to as Russia). If I remember rightly you won as soon as you grabbed Berlin, even if you couldn't realistically hold on to it.

Of course, I am very likely confusing it with some other table-top WW2 game - it was a _very_ long time ago (feels almost as long ago as the actual war).

No way could Germany, or Japan have conquered the US. I doubt Germany ever had a chance against Russia, and certainly once they failed to take Moscow before the first winter the war was lost. I've heard it said that it was the Greeks being so effective against the hopeless Italians (forcing the Germans to spend time saving their allies there) that was partly responsible for Germany fatally-delaying getting to Moscow...but maybe that was just a story put out by patriotic Greeks!

Perhaps, if Hitler hadn't been so irrational, the Germans could have just conquered France, Belgium and Poland etc and then stopped and not attacked Russia at all. But probably Russia and Germany were always going to go to war at some point, given the nature of their regimes. And Germany was in no position to invade Britain either, so they'd have had to somehow persuade them to make peace.

Had that happened, we'd have ended up with the situation of a powerful and threatening Russia, a continental Europe united with a dominant Germany, and a Britain standing isolated apart from that united Europe. Pretty hard to imagine that, eh?

the dice decided the outcome of any scenario of A&A

 

[Sonikku]

"The temperature dropped far below freezing. On 30 November, von Bock reported to Berlin that the temperature was –45 °C (–49 °F).[62] General Erhard Raus, commander of the 6th Panzer Division, kept track of the daily mean temperature in his war diary. It shows a suddenly much colder period during 4–7 December: from –36 to –38 °C (–37 to –38 °F).[63] Other temperature reports varied widely.[64][65] Zhukov said that November's freezing weather stayed around –7 to –10 °C (+19 to +14 °F)[66] Official Soviet Meteorological Service records show the lowest December temperature reached –28.8 °C (–20 °F).[66] These numbers indicated severely cold conditions, and German troops were freezing with no winter clothing, using equipment that was not designed for such low temperatures. More than 130,000 cases of frostbite were reported among German soldiers.[40] Frozen grease had to be removed from every loaded shell[40] and vehicles had to be heated for hours before use. [65]

fuck. I'm glad I wasn't a soldier during WW2. What a shitty, miserable job.