Of course to counter that argument is the fact that South Korea did send some 320,000 military personnel to Vietnamso lets accept that if the USA and Australia didnt win, then neither did South Korea. They have won a lot. Since 1945, no European country has been more pacifistic in sentiment or more opposed to military intervention outside its own borders. And that is part of a larger problem. More guns and aircraft? Despite keeping much of their army in France, the Germans were still able to drive Russia out of the war by 1918. Federal Republic of Germany (1990present), Bridgman, Jon M. (1966) Revolt of the Hereros University of California Press. p. 164 (KIA: 676, MIA:76, WIA: 907, died from disease: 689, civilians: 100), No German soldiers have been killed by ISIS, however, many German civilians have been killed in terror attacks claimed by ISIS. After four years of unrelenting combat and economic blockade, Germany still had the strength to achieve more in weeks than four years of bloody Allied offensives at the Somme,PasschendaeleandChemindes Dames. According to Wikipedia, there have been about 10,624 battles in the history of mankind. Two organizations in particular have emerged to object to the governments policies in this area. Yet fascinating as these questions are, why are they any more fascinating than asking what would have happened if Imperial Germany had not invaded Belgium in 1914, if the Kaiser had built more U-boats, or if America had not entered the war? Want to know what happens when aNimitz-classsupercarriergoes back in time to battle the Japanese fleet at Pearl Harbor? George Patton's last words to us before we left Africa came home with meaning: "No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. The opposite was the case in the concentration camp sites in East Germany, which focused on the (often overstated) resistance activities of communist inmates, with whom the visitors were urged to identify. A strategic masterstroke? The Portal for Public History. That bogged down the men and material that could have been used in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Yet the Russian advance also frightened German Army Chief of StaffHelmuthvonMoltkeinto transferring three corps from France to East Prussia. That proved to be fairly well matched against Russia, France, and Great Britain at least in the early stages of the war. Want to know what happens when a. goes back in time to battle the Japanese fleet at Pearl Harbor? From a military perspective, advancing to Belgium was a brilliant move to sidestep north of the French armies and fortifications on the Franco-German border, and then turn south to capture Paris and encircle the French armies from the rear. There were public demonstrations against a touring exhibition that exposed the crimes of the German armed forces on the eastern front during World War II, which included the massacre of Jews, the killing of civilians, the wanton destruction of enemy property, and much more besides. Germany's defeat came about from a number of much larger factors. Does Germany ever win a war? :: Heroes & Generals General Gameplay Talk In both World Wars, Germany was defeated by the United Kingdom and its allies The German-United Kingdom relationship. If the War Goes On: Reflections on War and Politics [1] is a series of essays and other writings by the German-born Swiss author Hermann Hesse. He was much more reticent about his own service in WW2. Let's look at what might have been. Dozens of books and, suggest how history would have changed if Hitler had invaded Britain or not invaded Russia. There are at least some asterisks in Canadas undefeated record. After forcing the new Soviet government to sue for peace, the Germans quickly transferred 500,000 troops to France. If Britain lost the battle, and Germany was able to manufacture a successful invasion and capitulation, then the last realistic launchpad for the liberation of Europe would be gone. More trucks weren't possible again because the nation wasn't on a war economy. The United States was never within striking distance of Germany and it should have been obvious that Japan couldn't mount an invasion of the American west coast. Yet, the Germans lacked in numerous other ways. Extinguishing all English claims to French territory. All the other main political parties support Merkels refugee policy and are even more committed to the dominant German culture of memory. Case in point: invading neutral Belgium. While its militia played a small role in the War of 1812 against the United States, which ended in a draw, Canada didnt actually send its military overseas in a fully-fledged conflict until 1899 during the Second Anglo-Boer War. The entry of Britain and her empire added nearly 9 million troops to the Allies. Soccer fans visiting the main grandstand at the former Nazi rally grounds in Nuremberg, June 2006. Would the Third Reich have triumphed if it had developed jet fighters sooner? However, Russia did attack into East Prussia in August 1914, only to be surrounded and annihilated at the Battle ofTannenberg. Such physical reminders of the crimes of Hitler and the Nazis confront Germans every day, and while a small minority may not like this, they have no choice but to put up with it. The figure in her sculpture in the Neue Wache, said Kollwitz, represented "an old, lonely and darkly reflecting woman". World War II in Europe was Germany and Italy, which was joined by Finland, Hungary, Romania, and to some extent Bulgaria. Yet Germany nearly captured Paris in 1914, crushed Serbia and Romania, bled the French Army until it mutinied, drove Russia out of the war, and then came oh-so-close to victory on the Western Front in 1918. The first has already been mentioned: the complete disarmament of Germany. Still, by the late 1990s, most people in Germany accepted the validity of these accounts, and a majority of Germans had come to believe that their country bore the major responsibility for the extermination of some six million European Jews by the Nazis. Britain had guaranteed Belgium's neutrality. R May 8, 2014 Topic: History Region: Germany How Germany Could Have Won World War I If Berlin had made some different choices we would be living in a very different world. But neither Pegida nor the AfD has managed to disturb the German consensus about the Nazi past. Meanwhile, millions of former Nazis hid or burned their uniforms, and in the final days of the war, the Gestapo set fire to incriminating records all over the country. At the Zeppelin Field, another vast arena used for the Nuremberg rallies, the Allies had blown up the huge swastika that topped the main grandstand, which had been constructed by Hitlers architect, Albert Speer. The private or small-scale remembrance of the millions of soldiers lost in war is still intense. Throw in the fact that Germany's victories in Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France didn't really help this tied down vast amounts of men and material that could have been better used on the frontlines in the Soviet Union. If it won the war, it would be through the immense power of its army, not its navy. The very idea of an army and military service was highly controversial in post-war West Germany. Such revelations were not uniformly accepted. Failing that, and given the shorter distances in the West, it would have been better to have temporarily conceded some East Prussian territory while concentrating on capturing Paris. It mustered fifteen dreadnoughts to Britain's twenty-two, and five battlecruisers to Britain's nine. The party has said that it wants to end Germanys sense of responsibility for the German past, but with so many solid and prominent memorials to the victims of Nazism scattered all across the land, from the Stolpersteine to the concentration camp memorials, it is difficult to see how that would happen. Much as kung-fu movies make fighting multiple opponents look easy, it's generally better to defeat your enemies one at a time. The Germans honored this convention until 1915, and then switched to unrestricted submarine warfare in which ships would be sunk without warning. Another dubious claim made on many lists is that North Korea never lost a warbut that's another technicality because the Korean War . In 1965 James M. Gavin published an article in "The Atlantic" magazine about his wartime experiences. Meanwhile, the canal that camp inmates had been forced to build was leased to a commercial enterprise, as was a wing of the former camps brick factory. The French battle fleet was half the size of Germany's and was deployed in the Mediterranean against Germany's Austro-Hungarian and Turkish partners. Only once has federal Germany been ruled by a single party with a parliamentary majority. It might not have been easy, but it would have been far easier than fighting on two fronts. This reflects the legacy of the communist regimes failure to instill an adequate culture of remembrance in its citizens; former East Germans dont seem to have the same allergy to right-wing extremism that former West Germans have. Yet postwar German efforts to forge a new identity could not just leap across the Third Reich as if it had not existed. On either side, rival visions of the new Germany emerged. German surface ships enjoyed better armor plating, guns, propellant and fire control systems than their British rivals. Perhaps it is the grim aura of fatalism that discourages speculative history of the Great War. Nazi Germany had a powerful High Seas Fleet, but it was still really no match for the British Royal Navy and it never really could be. The Soviets blew up the remains of the bombed-out Reich Chancellery in Berlin. And broader hostility towards the military in general remains strong. It failed in 1870, and it would have failed in 1914. "Wrote a farewell letter to Peter," she recorded. During the Spanish Civil War, which has been called a dress rehearsal for the Second World War, Germany's Luftwaffe perfected its strategy of using dive bombers and close-support attack aircraft. France had a population of 39 million in 1914, versus Germany's 67 million. They lost 170,000 men to just 12,000 Germans in one of history's most famous battles of encirclement. Operation Overlord and the battle of Normandy was just a diversion from the much more massive Soviet Operation Bagration which broke the back of the Wehrmacht.] But even though the GDR was a Soviet puppet state its leaders were keen to establish their own links with a deeper German history, including its military tradition. The few memorial sites that appeared on the grounds of the old concentration camps in West Germany said little or nothing about the camps themselves, instead paying homage to the victims with Christian monuments organized according to religious denomination. Great Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany on September 3. If it won the war, it would be through the immense power of its army, not its navy. More than 1,000 children have been injured, it added. A history of Germany's coalition governments Whenever a new war starts all other factions get boni because they are less players. But the sight of such an unmistakably Nazi memorial, which depicts 88 steel-helmeted infantrymen in relief marching round the side of the block, brandishing their weapons, aroused growing protests from the 1970s onward. Even with everything noted above, Germany and its European partners could have still won the war were it not for Germany's declaration of war on the United States on December 11, 1941. The First World War saw two factions of "great powers" square off. List of wars involving Denmark - Wikipedia After forcing the new Soviet government to sue for peace, the Germans quickly transferred 500,000 troops to France. Timelapse of Every Battle in History Watch on The term "battle" referred to the meeting of two armies on a single battlefield and fought each other for anywhere from one to several days. Kollwitz's sculpture is meant to represent not only a mother's grief at the loss of her soldier son but also all those non-soldiers caught up in the horrors of war - especially Holocaust victims but also less well-known sufferers, such as the German women who suffered mass sexual violence at the end of WW2. Instead of the four Allied powers the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union then standing together in a final Allied Victory Parade in a defeated Berlin in September 1944, the Germans could have celebrated the defeat of the British, marching through London and Moscow as they did Paris. Challenging the Royal Navy's maritime supremacy through a naval arms race was the one move guaranteed to arouse the British lion. Not much. - Quora. There was a limit, as well, to what the Allies could achieve in encouraging or forcing the Germans to come to terms with what they had done. As we celebrate the ending of the war 75 years ago, know this: victory for the Allies was never guaranteed, and historians agree there were countless ways Germany could have won the war. Counterfactual conjecture allows us to see the conflict far more. There are numerous problems with any argument that suggests that Vietnam didnt lose a war, and it is a matter of putting things in perspective. Without landing craft another example of wrong equipment and lacking control of the skies of Great Britain, an invasion by Germany was simply impossible. This is the first in a series of five articles providing critical analysis as to how Germany Might Have Won World War II. What would happen if German won the war? (2023) US President Ronald Reagan (left) with Helmut Kohl (centre) at Bitburg cemetery in 1985, An elderly visitor at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin earlier this year, Australians smash Tina Turner dancing world record. But the re-opening of the Neue Wache as a "Memorial Site for the Fallen of the World War" in 1931 revealed sharp divisions within German society. Ideally, Germany could have found diplomatic means to have fought against Russia alone without war with France, or vice-versa. ", But then a 1990s travelling exhibition called The Crimes of the Wehrmacht showed how the army had often been complicit in atrocities. From the late spring to early fall of 1945 Europe saw several large "Victory Parades" that celebrated the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of the Second World War. They arrived too late forTannenberg, while depriving the Western offensive of vital troops at Germany's best time to overcome France and possibly end the war. It was this militaristic state that built the Neue Wache or "new guardhouse", a classical building on the famous central Berlin street of Unter den Linden, which is now at the heart of the annual day of mourning. As the brief rise of the National Democratic Party in the late 1960s showed, when a coalition government of the two main parties holds power, as they did then and as they did under Chancellor Angela Merkel until the 2017 elections, the lack of any adequate political opposition encourages the rise of right-wing protest movements in Germany. German Empire (1871-1918) Weimar Republic (1919-1933) Nazi Germany (1933-1945) Federal Republic of Germany (1990-present) Military Wiki If Germany had won on the Western Front, it would have acquired some French territory and maybe Belgium. Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) formed in 2014 in Dresden and has since held a series of mass street demonstrations against immigration, calling for the preservation of German culture and decrying religious fanaticism. One Pegida speaker declared that Germany had become a Muslim garbage dump. Opinion surveys in 2014 showed that although somewhere between a third and half of all Germans sympathized with the movements complaints, the great majority declared themselves unwilling to join in the demonstrations, correctly considering Pegidas fears of a supposed overwhelming of German and European culture by Muslim immigrants to be grossly exaggerated. Germany's biggest-ever defeat in football history came in 1909 when they lost by a 9 . These lost soldiers could not be commemorated in public as heroes, as the German military were more and more associated with the brutal conquests and war crimes committed by the Nazi regime. Uprising exposes weakness of Putin's rule, says Zelenskiy - as it Yet Germany nearly captured Paris in 1914, crushed Serbia and Romania, bled the French Army until it mutinied, drove Russia out of the war, and then came oh-so-close to victory on the Western Front in 1918. Victory for the Allies was never guaranteed, and historians agree there were countless ways Germany could have won the war. More divisions? It reflected the traditional German preference for mobile warfare (Bewegungskrieg), which favored superior German tactics, rather than a static war of attrition (Stellungskrieg) that could only favor their numerically superior opponents. When Adolf Hitlers thousand-year German Reich came crashing down in 1945 with the Allied victory in World War II, reminders of the 12 years of its actual existence were hastily scrubbed away as Germans scrambled to adjust to life after Nazism. When it comes to alternative history, the Second World War is king. There's a movie for that. This proved crucial in the Blitzkrieg against the Low Countries and France. Indian footballer in same league as Messi and Ronaldo. "The vast burial grounds are a reminder of the past that also confront the living with the consequences of war and violence," it says. Here are a few possibilities in which history could have been very different for Germany: If twentieth-century Germany had a tombstone, it would say"This is What Happens to Those Who Fight on Two Fronts". The country has given material expression to this acceptance by preserving physical traces of the Nazi era and building fresh memorials to its victims. Did Germany Ever Stand a Chance of Winning WW2? - WAR HISTORY ONLINE 1.8M subscribers in the AskHistorians community. 1274-1275 The war against Valdemar Birgersson: Denmark Magnus III of Sweden: Sweden: Victory. Dozens of books and wargames suggest how history would have changed if Hitler had invaded Britain or not invaded Russia. R May 6, 2020 Topic: Security Blog Brand: The Buzz Tags: Hitler World War II Military Defense Technology Fact: Adolf Hitler Could Have Won World War II As we celebrate the ending of the war. A supermarket built on the grounds of the Ravensbrck womens concentration camp was never opened after widespread protests (although the building itself was not demolished). The sense that no matter what, the conflict would have been one long, miserable slaughter, a four-year live performance of "Paths of Glory." This time the focus was on a sculpture from the 1930s by the artist Kthe Kollwitz installed in one of the building's chambers, depicting a woman holding a dead child. Much of the book is critical of war and the German war effort, yet contains multifaceted accounts of various Germans who resisted war (especially Nazism). Keeping America out of the war should have been the goal for Germany. West Germans, the vast majority of the formerly united countrys population, seemed to suffer from a generalized historical and moral amnesia in the postwar years; on the rare occasions when they spoke about the Nazi dictatorship, it was usually to insist that they had known nothing of its crimes and to complain that they had been unfairly victimized and humiliated by the denazification programs and the victors justice of the war crimes trials. No country has placed more weight on stability and continuity, a preference expressed most succinctly by Adenauers famous electoral slogan of the 1950s: No experiments! And no European country has been more welcoming to immigrants and refugees, including Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish Gastarbeiter (guest workers) drawn by the economic boom of the 1960s and more than a million refugees from the Middle East and elsewhere looking for a safer and better life who have flooded Germany in recent years. The authorities pledged that the facility would be run in accordance with standard legal norms and penal practices, unlike its predecessor. Given that fact, it is hard to accept that Australia wasnt technically among the non-winners. The much-heralded economic miracle transformed West Germany into a prosperous and flourishing society. And later military triumphs - especially over France in 1871 - were crucial landmarks as Prussia and Germany became a great European power. When did England go to war with Germany? Italy was a reliable partner but its army was neither prepared nor even eager for war. How long was the war between England and Germany? As well as being anti-Islam and anti-immigrant, the AfD denies human influence on climate change, wants to ban same-sex marriage, supports what it calls traditional family values, opposes European integration, and repudiates what it sees as a culture of shame and guilt over the Nazi past in favor of a new sense of national pride. It covers the period 1914 to 1948. It is also easy to assume that German defeat was inevitable at the hands of an Allied coalition richer in manpower, weapons and money. Russian military thought has long prioritized the offensive, attempting to win the war at the strategic and operational levels, rather than at the tactical. Yes, Germany Could Have Won World War I (And Changed History Forever) War commemoration was diplomatically sensitive too. Does Germany ever win a war? Of the countless history books, TV documentaries and feature films made about World War II, many accept a similar narrative of the war in the West: Though Nazi Germany possessed a superior army . Perhaps it is the grim aura of fatalism that discourages speculative history of the Great War. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.". If it is plausible to imagine a historical timeline where Hitler won, then why not one in which the tsars still rule Russia, the British Empire was never exhausted by war, and the Ottoman Empire still controls the Middle East? How Germany remembers the world wars - BBC News Imperial Germany was a nation too clever for its own good. As wartime gravestones eloquently testified, many Germans had fought and died for Fhrer and Fatherland. But with the fhrer gone and the fatherland under enemy occupation, there seemed no point in fighting on. The wreath-laying ceremony - in the year marking the 75th anniversary of the end of World War Two - takes place in a building that symbolises the country's fraught relationship with the memory of war, writes Chris Bowlby. Germans by and large wanted to focus on the gigantic task of rebuilding and reconstruction and to forget the Nazi past and the crimes in which, to a greater or lesser extent, the vast majority of them had been involved. Defeat never came down to one battle or one campaign. The Atrocities Of The British Empire | Historic Cornwall If the German fleet could not break the British blockade, impose its own blockade of Britain, or enable a German amphibious invasion of England, then what was it good for? Germany's defeat came about from a number of much larger factors. More divisions? Yet the Russian advance also frightened German Army Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke into transferring three corps from France to East Prussia. To date, more than 56,000 Stolpersteine have been placed in urban locations in some 22 countries, the vast majority in Germany itself. Germany built no heavy bombers and lacked any truly effective long range aircraft. Depending on how that one gets chalked up will finally determine if Canadas perfect track record continues. At the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, October 2015. Kaiserschlacht ("Kaiser's Battle") offensives shattered several British armies and compelled British commander Douglas Haig to warn his troops that their backs were "to the wall." In recent decades, however, Germany has accomplished an undeniably impressive feat: a collective acceptance of moral responsibility for the terrible crimes of its recent past. Defeated regimes are not only swiftly removed from power but often immediately erased from memory as well.