What if the all the Axis had the proximity fuse starting in 1939?

@Herr:

The Soviet Union indeed intended to spread communism all around the world, but whether that would necessarily have implied a military invasion of central Europe in the 1940’s, is not certain. Their approach varied quite a bit, from inciting revolutions of the “working class” in other countries, to promoting wars between “bourgeois” powers, to actual war.

Also, if I remember correctly, Lenin’s death was followed by a power struggle in the USSR between the Trotsky faction, which wanted to pursue an agenda of internationalist communism, and the Stalin faction, which wanted to focus on communism at home (or whatever the phrase was).  The Trotsky faction lost, with Trotsky himself eventually going into exile and ultimately being assassinated.

@Cromwell_Dude:

I am curious how things would have turned out had Germany pursued the African Front all the way to the Middle East oil reserves with no Russian invasion.

John Keegan has a chapter that’s (partly) on this subject in the book “What If ? - The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been”, edited by Robert Cowley.

The best chance Hitler had to convince Franco to enter the war was in 40 when France fell.
Yes…but heaven with that Franco said no.

_Do you honestly think it would have wasted troops taking the canary islands that serve little if any strategic value (England could barely defend itself, and if Hitler had waited on attacking Russia for a year and focused on England they probably would have been invaded). _

Yes I think because Canaries island would have been easily fall under UK control but worst, it would have been a strategic lost for Kriegmarine.
Uk would have acces to the middle of the Atlantic. A bad news for the U-Boat and give a better protection to cargos.

England did not have a good relationship with Spain.  I would compare that relationship to the US and Iran - yes, we aren’t killing each other but I would hardly call that a good relationship.
Sorry but you’re wrong. Of course it was not a real friendship relation but both konws the importance to talk.

Looking at it from Franco’s perspective, Franco wanted parts of France and Hitler did not want to give it to him.
No Franco wants Gibralter, Morroco and French catalogna but Hitler plan was to annexe Vichy and the southern France in 1942 and Hitler had to meet petain after the Franco meeting so it was not in the interest of Hitler to give to Franco parts of Vichy territory and see Vichy changing camp.

Hmmmm.  This just gave me an idea for a new thread
Good, it’s always interresting to discuss.

@ABWorsham:

@Dylan:

Hitler didn’t have a reason to invade Poland

Hitler had a reason to invade Poland. The rebirth of a new Polish State was at the expense of the Imperial German Empire. Secondly the Danzig Corridor seperate Germany from Prussia and Western Poland did have a minority of Germans living within it’s communities.

Along with the enslavement and extermination of the Slavic race, and to erase Poland from the world map for German “colonization”.

The French and British were willing to escalate a regional conflict into a World War over Poland’s freedom yet they did not have the backbone to keep the Soviet Union from controling Poland.

Hitler knew damn well what would happen if he invaded Poland. The British and French might have sown the seeds of war with the Treaty of Versailles, but Hitler has no one to blame but himself for starting it.

@ABWorsham:

Should the Italians and Germans occupied Tunisia in 1941? This would have given more airfields to attack Malta bound convoys, provided more ports for shipping, ports that were closer to the Apennine Peninsula. The addition of these ports would forced the British to hunt for shipping west of Malta, which could have helped ease the stress on Tripoli and Benghazi convoys.

Those might have proved to be advantages to the Axis, but they might have come at the cost of negative consequences that would have offset them.  Tunisia was a Vichy-controlled territory at the time.  If the Axis had invaded Tunisia, the Vichy regime would likely have regarded this as a breach of the 1940 armistice terms with Germany, and would probably have reacted in ways Germany would not have liked.  Remember that when the Allies invaded North Africa, Germany occupied the “unoccupied” Vichy-controlled southern part of France, to which France responded with the scuttle of its fleet at Toulon to keep it out of German hands.  France might have done the same thing if the Axis had walked into Tunisia in 1941, and might even have jumped to the Allied side entirely.  So the cost-benefit analysis of an Axis invasion of Tunisia involves some tricky might-have-beens.

The Poles fought very bravely twice in II. WW…both times cheated and beat by Russians and Germans… :cry:

And it is a big difference if those German ships are new (build in 1939, or something), because a lot of British ships were older then that.

The Allies would have lost. Hitler’s turning on Russia at the time and place he did was one of the biggest reasons his thousand year Reich failed when it did. I am sure most people on these forums have tried out the USSR neutral scenario. Just with them neutral the game becomes much more difficult.

FDR was playing for time prior to Pearl Harbor. He had already comment the US to a virtual state of war in the Atlantic and had sent Pacific naval units over to the Atlantic already. Maybe the atom bomb could have still shifted the balance. But the allies weren’t the only ones working on technology. Conflict with Japan was coming, their preemptive strike on Pearl Harbor brought the USA in too early.