First of all Germany had no planes that could reach more than a third of Britain. You can't conquer a nation you can't touch. Secondly, Germany had no way to transport the invasion across the English Channel. This very basic qualification for any invasion has, for some reason, been ignored by those who champion German possibility for victory in WWII.
Conclusion: the Battle of Britain and subsequent invasion were never possible from the beginning. Hitler was only wasting his best-trained pilots tilting at windmills.
Second, the only way to strangle Britain with the subs was to sink American shipping. Doing that would have brought the US into the war with or without Pearl Harbor. Without Pearl Harbor, you can imagine the consequences. With Pearl Harbor it just doomed Germany. Had Britain signed any type of armistice, it would have been short-lived as they would have been necessarily liberated right away to give us the indispensible base of operations they were in order to prosecute the war.
Third, if there were no attack on Russia is absurd. Hitler's goals in order of priority were the killing of all Jews and the conquest of Russia. Everything else was just an obstacle to those two goals. The top two obstacles as he saw it were the French, a mere nuisance, (use a french-derived word to describe them: how appropriate) and the Italians (sometimes with the friends you have you don't need enemies). In other words, Russia was a primary goal of Hitler's war, not an unfortunate error. The United States was an unfortunate error, and the UK as well. I believe we tend to unjustly minimize the British contribution to victory.
If Britain were neutralized, it would only have been for a very short time, as the means of making them capitulate must bring the US into the war. Conclusion: build half the number of submarines, use them for defensive purposes, use the saved raw materials for more land based weapons and win the continent of Europe.
Of course Hitler was capable of none of this.
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