I'M IN THE US NAVY!!

[Sniper297]

Gotta disagree with some parts of Rockin Robbins' theory - Doenitz wanted 300 U-Boats to start the war, so he could have had 100 on station at any time when hostilities began. That number would have closed the Atlantic completely and forced Britain to surrender in 1940. He had the same trouble the US Navy had with all the old geezers insisting on battleships, so when the war started he had only 26 U-Boats ready to go. That meant about 8 to 10 U-Boats at sea at any given time, not nearly enough for a decent blockade. By the time he actually had 100 boats (Aug 1942) the Americans were in the war, the Brits had time to develop ASW tactics and weapons, and it was too little too late. If the Germans had those 300 U-Boats in 1939 it would have been decisive in my opinion.

[Torplexed]

Originally Posted by Sniper297

Gotta disagree with some parts of Rockin Robbins' theory - Doenitz wanted 300 U-Boats to start the war, so he could have had 100 on station at any time when hostilities began. That number would have closed the Atlantic completely and forced Britain to surrender in 1940. He had the same trouble the US Navy had with all the old geezers insisting on battleships, so when the war started he had only 26 U-Boats ready to go. That meant about 8 to 10 U-Boats at sea at any given time, not nearly enough for a decent blockade. By the time he actually had 100 boats (Aug 1942) the Americans were in the war, the Brits had time to develop ASW tactics and weapons, and it was too little too late. If the Germans had those 300 U-Boats in 1939 it would have been decisive in my opinion.

I think the point RR is making in his thesis is that whether Germany starts the war with 300 U-Boats or 26, at some point they need to start start sinking the ships of neutrals in a big way to starve Britain out. It's simply unavoidable to achieve a full blockade. If you play the tricky game of picking and choosing targets, then something valuable is always getting into British ports. However, in so doing you start to lose diplomatically and attract the ire of the world, including the US. In addition a 300 U-boat arm probably won't be as elite as the 26 boat arm. It's difficult to produce both quantity and quality. For me one of the most fascinating statistics of the U-Boat war is that the 32 most successful 'ace' commanders (about 2 % of the whole) accounted for nearly 30 % of the Allied shipping sunk in the Atlantic on average. These officers were aged about 28 at the outbreak of the war and had already served in the Kriegsmarine for nearly ten years. Individual command talent coupled with a seasoned crew was paramount and that sort of thing was difficult to mass-produce. Plus, nothing happens in a vacuum. If Britain notices prior to the war that Germany is putting all of her eggs in the U-Boat building basket, then possibly Britain puts in more orders for escorts.

And frankly every major navy prior to WW2 seems to have been afflicted with the battleship building bug. I've always thought that if the Japanese had poured the same resources into carriers and their air wings that they did the Yamatos they undoubtedly would have made the war in the Pacific a much more difficult proposition over the long term for the USN.

But we'll never know. Alternative history is always speculative and we can never know for certain all the variables involved. But that's the attraction of wargaming, I guess.

[Rockin Robbins]

Originally Posted by Sniper297

Gotta disagree with some parts of Rockin Robbins' theory - Doenitz wanted 300 U-Boats to start the war, so he could have had 100 on station at any time when hostilities began. That number would have closed the Atlantic completely and forced Britain to surrender in 1940. He had the same trouble the US Navy had with all the old geezers insisting on battleships, so when the war started he had only 26 U-Boats ready to go. That meant about 8 to 10 U-Boats at sea at any given time, not nearly enough for a decent blockade. By the time he actually had 100 boats (Aug 1942) the Americans were in the war, the Brits had time to develop ASW tactics and weapons, and it was too little too late. If the Germans had those 300 U-Boats in 1939 it would have been decisive in my opinion.

Sorry, in order to have any impact at all, first of all Donitz needed boats more modern than WWI coastal defense boats like the type VII. They didn't carry enough torpedoes, some of them were stored externally (yikes! That was stupid), they didn't have any surface speed, they didn't have any submerged speed, they had no range, they were uncomfortable for their crews, had no provisions for feeding the crews properly, I don't need to add from there.

In fact the Type VII had only one point in its favor, which was just another damning point of ineptitude, its ability to dive deep. A hiding submarine has just left the war. It is impotent. All a convoy had to do was drive the subs deep and run away.

Then, 300 U-boats was a laughable target. Okay, you have a 1,300 ship convoy with 100 destroyers. Somehow (it's impossible) you get all 300 U-boats against the one convoy. If they all sink a target, and they wouldn't--the vast majority would be killed without firing a single torpedo--1000 ships reach their destination. Big Victory! And it would be at the cost of letting every single ship that wasn't in that one convoy get to its destination unmolested.

And suppose that "doomed convoy" were attacked with such success, The US loses 40 ships in one day to U-Boats. Count the US in against Germany. Argentina loses 10--count them in too. Canada--they're in. Peru--in. Brazil--in. Instantly Germany snatches defeat from the jaws of victory because they are so boneheaded that they think sinking other nations' shipping is a way to punish Britain. Sure Britain did without but it was the cost of victory they were well willing to pay. Germany was playing checkers. Britain was playing chess.

Even with an anemic 300 WWI technology U-Boats, building that many would have been so provocative that the Allies would have been the ones to start the war and the first thing gone would have been the U-Boat production facilities. Yes, as now, the Allies were reluctant to provoke Germany but there were limits to what they would have tolerated.

And there's part two of my basic theory. Every ounce of steel put into U-boats, every hour spent producing and maintaining them, every man necessary to build, maintain and run the U-Boats was taken from the parts of the war effort that would have actually helped Germany. All of that was aid to the Allied war effort. Without the waste of manpower, materials, time and expertise spent on U-boats they would have more tanks, more guns, more railroad infastructure, more vehicles, much more blitzkrieg. How many tanks does one measly antique U-boat represent? Many, many!

Were Hitler sane, and he was not, were he a good military planner, and he was not, he would have realized that Germany was well able to confine its conquest to continental Europe and succeed. They could have done that with Britain's help, had they not had U-Boats and had they made that conciliatory speech that I outlined above after sewing up the continent.

Only a third of Britain was within German bomber range anyway. A German plane shot down over Britain was dead or a prisoner of war. A British plane was gone but many many pilots jumped into another plane and were back in the war. You don't attack someone unless you have a foolproof plan to win. There was no plan. No German calculated the fact that unconditional submarine warfare guaranteed the defeat. No German wasted time realizing that 1/3 bomber coverage wasn't going to bring Britain to her knees. There was only one weapon that would work against Britain and the US: keep them out of the war. Buy time while accomplishing all other goals. It's called management. Marshalling your strengths and rendering your weaknesses harmless.

Now, if Germany followed my course and THEN decided to build a fleet of MODERN U-Boats, who would stop them? They could have built them in a time of peace, as a power greater than the United States and with their world supremacy unchallenged. Chances are they could have built them without anybody knowing it. Connect the dots. It's much better things turned out the way they did, because a sane German leadership would have had the keys to the castle Europe.

But no, a thousand WWI U-Boats could not win the war. Donitz asked for 300 because he wasn't bold enough to ask for what he needed. He was also subservient to Admiral Raeder, who wanted a crushing surface fleet. Building submarines worked against Raeder's plan, so Donitz asked for what he thought he might get. He didn't get that. Too bad. It would have been an even greater gift to the Allied cause.

Yes Britain screamed that it hurts. Yes, Churchill said that the only thing he was afraid of was the U-Boats. But remember, they were playing chess. What hurts, you keep silent about. What is ineffectual you scream in pain so that more enemy effort can be spent in that direction. Churchill wanted more U-Boat action because that was central to his plan of bringing the US into the war on the side of the Allies. The U-Boats dutifully helped him reach his goal. Then after the US entered the war half-heartedly they solidified American resolve by sinking a bunch of shipping off the American coast--a silly exercise of making more trouble for yourself, again snatching an even more humiliating defeat from the jaws of victory.\

Yamamoto understood in Japan. No one in Germany would buy a vowel and realize that they were outmaneuvered and manipulated into utter defeat. Raeder and Donitz were both responsible for tragic mistakes--more concerned with their own personal fortunes after the war than what was good for their country. Their only aim was to secure more money for their personal functions in the war, regardless of other needs for the nation.

[Crannogman]

I have heard it posited that the German expenditures on their U-boat fleet led to a vastly disproportionate response in Allied investment in ASW - that the net effect was to actually dilute the Allied war effort more than the Axis's. In that respect, it was a reasonably-effective form of asymmetrical warfare. I don't have hard numbers, but I recall the ratio of resources committed by each side to be greater than 3:1 for the Allies.

That said, you are likely right that Germany could have pursued more beneficial routes to success

[ColonelSandersLite]

I had to come out of lurking for this one. Honestly, RR doesn't know what he's talking about.

Here's part of the reason why:
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87...campaigns.html

The Battle of the Atlantic resulted in western allied forces being scaled down pretty damn significantly.

The idea that British people would have accepted peace without a fight after Dunkirk is laughable. It's just as laughable as saying the Texans would have accepted peace after the Alamo, or that the US would have accepted peace after pearl harbor.

The logic that Uboats guaranteed US entry into the war in the form of us lending destroyers to the British is also laughable, since we where also quite happy to provide every other form of arms and equipment to both the British and the soviets before we entered the war anyways. If it wasn't destroyers, it would have been even more tanks, rifles, and aircraft.

His assertion that there was no plan to knock Brittan out of the war is blatantly false. The plan was:
1: Attrit the RAF's fighters to the point that they could not put up an effective defense. Until they tried and failed, German command believed that this would take four days.
2: The bombers would then have free reign to operate unescorted, thus being able to strike deeper targets more effectively. (Despite his assertion to the contrary, if bomber operations weren't limited by the range of their escort fighters, the he-111 and ju-88 have a range that covers the whole of the British isles.) They would then spend the next four weeks dismantling the British military production. Notably, *every* British naval base was within bomber range. This would force the British navy to leave the home islands or be sunk. This may possibly force a military surrender.
3: The German navy could then blockade at will quite effectively. Also possibly resulting in a surrender.
4: Terror bombing may force a surrender.
5: If not, an invasion of a starving terrorized England at some later date TBD (never really seriously considered).

Obviously, they failed at point 1, but that doesn't mean they didn't have a plan.

I think that's enough. I could go on, but I won't. The one thing I do agree with him on though is that opening the war with 300 u-boats was probably an unrealistic desire. If the Germans had listened to Donitz better from the outset, maybe they could have had a hundred though and that would have *really* helped.

[ColonelSandersLite]

Originally Posted by Crannogman

I have heard it posited that the German expenditures on their U-boat fleet led to a vastly disproportionate response in Allied investment in ASW - that the net effect was to actually dilute the Allied war effort more than the Axis's. In that respect, it was a reasonably-effective form of asymmetrical warfare. I don't have hard numbers, but I recall the ratio of resources committed by each side to be greater than 3:1 for the Allies.

Yeah, for clarity, check the link in my post immediately above. The expenditure was about 10 to 1 and he says that probably a pretty conservative number. It also doesn't weigh into account the decreased sea lift capability that accompanied our war effort as a result, as that's harder to quantify.

[Rockin Robbins]

Originally Posted by ColonelSandersLite

I had to come out of lurking for this one. Honestly, RR doesn't know what he's talking about.

Here's part of the reason why:
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87...campaigns.html

The Battle of the Atlantic resulted in western allied forces being scaled down pretty damn significantly.

The idea that British people would have accepted peace without a fight after Dunkirk is laughable. It's just as laughable as saying the Texans would have accepted peace after the Alamo, or that the US would have accepted peace after pearl harbor.

The logic that Uboats guaranteed US entry into the war in the form of us lending destroyers to the British is also laughable, since we where also quite happy to provide every other form of arms and equipment to both the British and the soviets before we entered the war anyways. If it wasn't destroyers, it would have been even more tanks, rifles, and aircraft.

His assertion that there was no plan to knock Brittan out of the war is blatantly false. The plan was:
1: Attrit the RAF's fighters to the point that they could not put up an effective defense. Until they tried and failed, German command believed that this would take four days.
2: The bombers would then have free reign to operate unescorted, thus being able to strike deeper targets more effectively. (Despite his assertion to the contrary, if bomber operations weren't limited by the range of their escort fighters, the he-111 and ju-88 have a range that covers the whole of the British isles.) They would then spend the next four weeks dismantling the British military production. Notably, *every* British naval base was within bomber range. This would force the British navy to leave the home islands or be sunk. This may possibly force a military surrender.
3: The German navy could then blockade at will quite effectively. Also possibly resulting in a surrender.
4: Terror bombing may force a surrender.
5: If not, an invasion of a starving terrorized England at some later date TBD (never really seriously considered).

Obviously, they failed at point 1, but that doesn't mean they didn't have a plan.

I think that's enough. I could go on, but I won't. The one thing I do agree with him on though is that opening the war with 300 u-boats was probably an unrealistic desire. If the Germans had listened to Donitz better from the outset, maybe they could have had a hundred though and that would have *really* helped.

Finally, a reasoned rejoinder, although characterizing my opinions as "laughable" and "blatantly false" does nothing to build credibility. If you are correct you don't need to call someone "ridiculous" you just trot out the facts.

It's an interesting paper you cite. It makes many logical errors. First of all, in comparing the proportional costs of the U-Boat war, it fails to consider the fact that ALL portions of the war expenditures were disproportional. That is how victory was accomplished, by the disproportionate application of power on a country foolish enough to think it could fight alone against the world. Yes, I know about the Italians, the anchor around the neck of Germany. So they were at a handicap.

On land, disproportionate use of power was policy. No attack was made unless we had a 3 to 1 advantage in manpower and materiel. At that ratio planners considered that we were evenly matched, so they sought to exceed that. So establishing a 10-1 expenditure ratio for the Battle of the Atlantic is only showing that the Allies treated that theater like all others. They sought to win by total application of all economic, production and manpower resources.

Certainly the cost in dead submarine crews representing the most committed, experienced and trained personnel in the German military machine was a cost far higher than any the Allies paid. It is not the raw amount of expenditure that is important at all. It is whether that expenditure can be afforded. The Allies could afford to lose the men, shipping and materiel they did. The Germans could not afford to lose the lesser amount that they lost. Therefore adding up dollars and reichmarks is meaningless unless you're out to write a college thesis and need an idea that will pass muster.

Let's dissect your allegation that "The Battle of the Atlantic resulted in western allied forces being scaled down pretty damn significantly." That's true. War is always a balancing and rebalancing of strength, weakness, opportunity and threat. You always have a finite ability to produce and where you produce is always going to be modulated even without any opposition. "To do this they had to cut back on that" is just a fact of life that you and I do every day and we're not fighting a submarine war outside of our computers. It certainly is no way to analyze whether the U-boat war was sensible or not.

Because, guess what! Without the U-Boat there would have been no Battle of the Atlantic. There would have been no lend-lease of destroyers. The US, with a huge number of German immigrants and active Nazi organizations including an island in New York advertised as a Nazi retreat--"Live with people who think as YOU do!" would have been very neutral. Roosevelt knew well that if he were caught doing his chummy act with Churchill, which included setting up a potential government in exile in New York City directly contrary to the US constitution, Roosevelt would have been immediately impeached and removed from office. But the U-boats sinking American ships turned the tide of public opinion away from deeply entrenched isolationism to enmity against Germany.

Without considering the historical context: whether the U-boats were necessary at all, adding up the dollars, resources and cost is (note that I don't say you are "laughable") irrelevant. The fact is, without the U-Boats directly attacking Britain and the US, the Battle of the Atlantic would not have happened at all and none of those compared expenses would have taken place at all. To further emphasize the streigth of my point of view, money saved In the US would have been spent on cars, movies, eating and drinking. British money saved would have been spent non-militarily if they could have been kept out of the war, but German money saved would reichmark for riechmark have gone into locking down Fortress Europe.

So logical errors are ignoring the capacity and affordability of the cost. Just comparing cost numbers is a fatal error of diagnosis. If I sue Donald Trump and it costs me my house, bank account, retirement savings and Trump spends 100x more than that to defend himself that's not a victory on my part. I lose everything I have and Trump doesn't notice the difference. The analysis that you quote would say that my suit was worth it because I forced him to spend 100x my cost. But my cost was 100% of my assets and I lost the case. He lost a tiny fraction of 1% of his assets. Comparing costs in the way that paper did is entirely meaningless.

Now let's scrutinize your comparison of the Alamo with Dunkirk. At the Alamo, that was a fort on Texan ground. They were defending their own turf, their own homeland. British presence on the continent was in treaty obligation to other nations. There's just no equivalency there. And the British were not seeking conflict at all.

They ELECTED Neville Chamberlain, you know, and he was in Munich doing exactly what the British people wanted him to do: buy peace at any terms. (seems somehow depressingly familiar) When they entered the war defending Poland, they did it reluctantly, not with the do or die enthusiasm of the defenders of the Alamo. Without threat of U-boats, with the easy escape from the continent, the Germans could well have said "You have done your duty and that duty is discharged. We have no animosity with your people, etc" And a society gutted twenty years previously by a war whose tragedy we Americans cannot even imagine would have grasped onto that straw for all they were worth. Churchill was setting his government in exile in New York City in 1939 you know. He did it because there was a real danger that his government would throw in with the Nazis. He and a small cadre of like-thinking individuals weren't going to participate in that. It's telling that FDR was willing to risk his presidency to help Churchill set up foreign government on US soil. an action directly prohibited by the Constitution.

Comparing costs without comparing ability to pay, ignoring that those costs need not have happened at all and letting others do the thinking are fatal errors which do nothing to support your claim that my positions are "laughable."

[CCIP]

I raised a point on the other (SHIII forum) but one thing that is good to keep in mind between SH3 and SH4 is how much room the US fleet boats had to grow and improve compared to the U-boats. The fleet boats were not really designed for the role they were performing, and it took them a while to figure out the enemy and find their own strong points. But when they got it ironed out, the fleet boats proved very much up to the tasks. This contrasts nicely with SH3's U-boats, which basically had just above the minimum capability to perform the specific task they were designed for, and not much more - and as the war went on, they found themselves pressed up against their limits, and beyond.

If you go and visit some of the fleet boat museums and contrast them with, say, what you find aboard the U-505, with a discerning eye you'll see the differences right away - American submarines were a whole generation ahead of the U-boats; they had power and room to spare, and the equipment - from radar to the diving control systems - was a whole new ball game compared to the U-boats which still operated largely by manual turning of a lot of valves, Mk.I eyeball and direct drive propulsion. The U-boats are an elderly diesel-powered Vokswagen Golf from the 1980s to the fleet boats' shiny new 2015 Tesla Model S. It takes a while to sort out the kinks on the new tech, sure, and you still get a lot of mileage efficiently out of an old diesel, but there's a huge difference technologically that you'll feel right away.

There's a lot of naysaying about fleet boats being slow and unweildy, most of it totally unjustified. Besides diving depth and speed of dive, U-boats really don't have much on them - the fleet boat is by and far the more capable, it's just that you have to learn to use it right.

[Rockin Robbins]

I agree, that's the flipside of whether U-Boats were appropriate weapons for Germany to use. If we pretend they were a wise use of power then the fact that the U-Boats weren't adequate for the job rears its ugly head.

It's a fact that Germany could have done better with fleet boats. But America would have lost the Pacific with a fleet of Type VIIs. You can't take a knife to a gunfight and end up winning. Germany did that.

[Crannogman]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

Comparing costs without comparing ability to pay, ignoring that those costs need not have happened at all and letting others do the thinking are fatal errors which do nothing to support your claim that my positions are "laughable."

The paper does indeed compare the ability of the combatants to pay the cost of the Battle of the Atlantic. While the Allies outspent the Germans in the Battle of the Atlantic 10:1, their overall production was only 4:1. Thus as a fraction of their productive capacity, the Allies spent 2.5 times more than Germany on the Battle of the Atlantic.

Yet the German war machine was totally outmatched in a Total War. Their chief advantage was in quick, overwhelming victory, and a campaign of attrition played to their weakness. Thus a U-boat fleet hampered their war aims by distracting them from more winnable theaters

[ColonelSandersLite]

You continue to assert that the US involvement in WW2 was directly due to the battle for the Atlantic, apparently primarily stemming from our supplying of destroyers to the British. You are blatantly wrong and the historical record shows this pretty clearly. Consider these facts:

The destroyers for bases agreement came on September 2, 1940.

However the following preceding events telegraph quite clearly our intention to provide arms against Germany, regardless of the u boat threat:

Cash and carry was ratified on November 5, 1939. England and France can buy whatever arms, munitions, and equipment they want.

On May 31, 1940, FDR introduces a billion-dollar defense program to build up American military strength. Hey, the allies can buy anything they want, and now there's going to be even more of it!

On June 1, 1940, due to the imminent fall of France, FDR agrees to send the British, at no charge, a very sizable shipment of arms. The shipment included 93 bombers, 500,000 Enfield rifles, 184 tanks, 76,000 machine guns, 25,000 BARs, 895 french 75mm artillery pieces, 100 million rounds of ammunition, 500 stokes mortars.

If, you continue to stand by the logic that providing arms to Germany enemies made us defacto enemies of Germany, these events make the battle of the Atlantic a moot point. To wit, we did not get even slightly involved in the battle of the Atlantic until after we had already started supplying other arms and munitions.

Further, on the other side of the globe where the battle of the Atlantic did not even come into play, we had been giving aid to china since 1937 in the form of both materiel and economic sanctions against japan. (Fun fact, even Germany provided aid to china prior to the Tripartite Pact. Not many people know this) This culminated in severe economic sanctions in 1941 and (hopefully) we all know what happened as a result. The point is, while we liked china and wanted to help them, we quite frankly did not consider ourselves to be even remotely as close to china as we where with the UK. Not to mention the fact that we where also quite happy to supply arms and materiel to the soviet union before we entered the war as well.

During late August - mid September of 1940, congress caves to public pressure over fears that Brittan will fall and enacts our first peacetime draft.

It was shown quite clearly from our actions that we had no intention of just spending our money "on cars, movies, eating and drinking", not because of the battle of the Atlantic, but in spite of it. None of this was a secret. The republicans tried to use all of the above as ammunition against the democrats during the 1940 elections, yet FDR remained president and the democrats remained firmly in control of both the house and the senate. FDR took this to be an affirmation of his policies and proposed lend-lease the following month. In February, polls said that only 20-25% of Americans disapproved and it was ratified in march of 1941.

Take a look at this data: http://web.mit.edu/berinsky/www/files/3040.pdf You can see that the tipping point for intervention came as early as September of 1940 and continued to climb, reaching 70% a full quarter before pearl harbor. The first sinking of an American vessel was not until may of 41. The first sinking with casualties wasn't until October 31 (Reuben James) and the first merchant sinking where there was casualties was not until December 2 (Astral). Popular support for intervention had already hit a 2/3rds majority before the Germans even sank any of our ships.



In regards to Brittan accepting a peace, you are flat wrong in saying that Chamberlain was elected. He was appointed by George 6 when his predecessor stepped down immediately following the coronation of the new king. Appeasement was never very popular in the UK. While there was support for the Munich agreement, it only lasted a matter of days. Public opinion soured almost immediately. The British people routinely booed at Hitler when he appeared in the newsreels, well before the outbreak of hostilities. In fact, the British public was spoiling for a fight to such a degree that Chamberlain was practically forced to introduce a conscription program more than 4 months before Germany invaded Poland. Check out "Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement, and the British Road to War" and "Public Opinion and the End of Appeasement in Britain and France" for more info.

It doesn't matter *where* Dunkirk happened, what matters is its effects on British morale. Just Google "Dunkirk spirit". The effects of which can be seen quite clearly in the civil response to the threat of German invasion. The public reaction and mobilization in defense of the home islands tells the story pretty fully. The parallels between the after effects of Dunkirk and pearl harbor are quite obvious if you've done any reading on the matter at all. The British people where not looking for peace, they where looking for a fight.

I know that there's more I could correct you on here, but frankly I have better things to do. Your posts contain so many egregious factual errors that I honestly have to wonder where you even got most of that information? I mean seriously man, your pet theory is riddled with so many factual errors that you should be the last person to ever criticism somebody else's work (a paper written by the current commander of NS Newport BTW, it's not some "college thesis") for containing logical errors. I would suggest that first you look into getting your facts straight, and only then, start looking at logic.

[Rockin Robbins]

Just as a beginning http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/higher...se/revision/2/

It would seem that your point of view that the British were hungry for war with Germany has some considerable opposition and my view is in the majority, which is funny because my views tend to be pretty original and pretty challenging. But the BBC certainly thinks that Hitler enjoyed a favorable view on the whole in Britain, that most thought his territorial demands were just and some even voted not to fight if the occasion should arise. Quite interesting and contrary to your statements.

Even if both of us are only half right, without being surrounded by U-boats and with decent statesmanship by Germany I think there was a good chance Germany could have kept Britain and the US out of the war. This would have made Fortress Europe pretty strong.

Of course Hitler still could have bought the big one by invading the USSR..... He was always one with the ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

[ColonelSandersLite]

Everything mentioned in that article took place in 1936 or earlier. You do realize that the climate of Europe changed a *lot* over the next few years right?

Besides which, you're going to have to do better than posting a BBC article to better the two fairly heavyweight academic sources I gave you. I can seriously recommend "Public Opinion and the End of Appeasement in Britain and France", though honestly "Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement, and the British Road to War" isn't so great (it has its good points though). Just as one (of many) examples of how quickly support for the Munich agreement and Chamberlain crumbled: "I have had trouble enough with my present Cabinet and I feel that what I want is more support for my policy and not more strengthening of those who don't believe in it or at any rate are harassed by constant doubts." - Neville Chamberlain, just one month after the Munich agreement was signed.


If you want to keep arguing this, you're going to have to come up with a lot of internally consistent counter arguments based in actual facts to even attain the lofty status of "half right". To be clear, when the other party has posted fact after fact, often with sources, that directly contradict a great number of blatant errors, you must come up with something more compelling than a single, largely irrelevant journalistic source to save any remaining credibility for your theory.

The fact is that the only way Hitler could have avoided war with Brittan, France, and the US was to not invade Poland. There was a very clear line in the sand, and he just had to go and cross it.

[jorgegonzalito]

It's nice to see that sometimes a simple question generated a long debate but leaves the naval subject itself to enter the field of geopolitics, it would still be interesting.

[Rockin Robbins]

Furthermore, it is only technically correct to say that the Prime Minister is selected by the monarch. First of all he is an elected official and a member of the House of Commons. Then he is elected a second time by his party to become party leader. So he is elected twice. The monarch traditionally selects the leader of the majority party, which was the Conservative party of Neville Chamberlain, elected twice to his position, once to the governing body and again by his peers to party leadership. His selection by the monarch is cut and dried, a selection in form only without substance. It is not a choice. It does nothing to divorce him from the public opinion he represents.

I read ColSanders thing and actually questioned myself. Has 50 years of historical interest and investigation, a lifetime of conversations with people who know, hundreds of books all led me wrong? After all I'm not looking stuff up on the Internet and then spouting the results of my browsing, I'm talking off the cuff from my own knowledge and don't make any claim to 100% infallibility.

But performing some checks leaves me on solid ground and ColSanders misrepresenting the nature of my cited material, perhaps banking that the chance that a simple reading of the title "
An evaluation of the reasons for the British policy of appeasement, 1936-1938" which would totally prove him wrong wouldn't be read by people who would be inclined to believe him just because he made the allegation that it was entirely about the period before 1936. Balderdash! I say.....

And then the bald statement that Chamberlain was not elected but merely selected, representing nobody's opinion. The fact is he reflected the conflicted opinions of the British populace, totally devastated by losing an entire generation 20 years previously, buffeted by a poor economy after the crash of 1929, watching Germany's success in making a comparatively vibrant economy because of the "brilliant" leadership of one man.

Chamberlain was a Conservative, by the way, who against the wishes of many, rebuilt the military at great expense in the late 1930s. He was severely criticized for that. But when the chips were down he believed in peace at just about any cost. But I believe that appeasement was not foolishness. It was the appropriate political move, the proof that the representative governments had gone the final mile in preventing war, leaving no stone unturned, no chance untaken. After all, again, an entire generation would be asked to fight and die. They needed to do that knowing that they weren't fighting for a warmongering elite, but because there was no way out. Even sure knowledge of the result should not have deterred Chamberlain from his course. He did the right thing. The French went along and perhaps even led to appeasement efforts. As my citation above shows clearly the British public had a strong majority opinion that Germany had been treated much too harshly after WWI (and that is the opinion of history today also) and that a strong leader like Adolf Hitler was just what they needed.

Chamberlain has been treated as a patsy by history. But he was an honorable man who rearmed Britain. He took the last mile of the road to preserve peace. He repudiated appeasement immediately when Germany took the second half of the Sudetenland. He led the war effort for most of a year and was the one to announce the war to the British public, not as a grand theater of glory but of a duty imposed on men disposed to do peaceful things, but who would rise to the occasion and gain victory. Chamberlain's image today is in stark contrast to the deeds of the man.

This sympathy toward Germany could well have been used to keep Britain out of the war. But Hitler never did play well with others....

As for submarines pulling America into the war, does anyone seriously believe that U-boats could ever have sunk thousands of American merchant sailors without a declaration of war against Germany?

Check your scorecards. If Britain enters the war we have a stalemate. If America enters the war there is no path to victory for Germany. Keeping both out of the war, there is no path to defeat except for the USSR. I give Hitler 7-3 odds he still would have screwed the pooch.