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I wonder if the U.S. could win with putting fewer than 10,000 troops on the ground. Again, we bomb all of their airfields. That takes care of their air support. Then we take out their heavy infantry with these beasts.
That's true, but logistically speaking, do you send in a couple of SEAL Teams in Black Hawks to do the job? Remember, we need to bring a body back, not simply kill him, which a Tomahawk cruise missile could easily do.
We could just crack open a history book and see where Hitler was on any given day and time. Set up an ambush... but why take any risks at all? Why not go back to the 1920s and find the younger, penniless Adolf peddling his paintings on the streets of Vienna? Tell him you've got a commission for him, offer to take him out to dinner? Maybe go find him eating lunch at a cafe in Argentina in the 1950's?
Really, the whole idea is silly sci-fi but really... it would be too easy to do just about anything if you had time-travel in your arsenal.
Breaking the back of their army and air force is one thing. That would only take weeks (not days, as some have suggested - you can only destroy so many tanks, aircraft, and bases in a day, no matter how many aircraft, bombs, and missiles you have. You have to keep going back and rearming.) But once you've destroyed their military, you still have to occupy the country to completely defeat them, and it would probably take months for us to get the troops and the armor over there to occupy basically half of Europe. We could probably do it in a few months, but I don't see it happening any quicker than that.
And no, there is no credible scenario in which we would hit them with a massive ICBM strike. No need for it. Our conventional weapons would crush them with almost a 0% casualty rate on our side, and most of those casualties coming from accidents rather than enemy fire.
Scenario 1: Britain allows us to set up bases and deploy from their shores. The Brits, however, provide no manpower, no raw materials, etc. We're completely on our own. Now let's assume Russia remains neutral so Germany doesn't have to worry about an invasion from the East. How long does it take for today's U.S. military to liberate Europe and defeat the German army?
Scenario 2: The U.S. thinks it's better to assemble a SEAL Team and bring Hitler back to America--dead or alive. Would they succeed?
Does Germany have the same technology advances as America in your scenarios? Or is it modern technology vs WWII tech?
Our problem is not winning the war, it is winning the peace.
Indeed. With the political restraints placed on it today, the U.S. Army would have a lot more trouble dealing with Werewolf than it did in actuality.
But the Kriegsmarine, Luftwaffe, Wehrmacht, and SS as a traditional military force would be largely destroyed within two to four weeks.
Initial air strikes would concentrate on taking out the airfields, capital ships, and missile silos. A few V-2 silos might be saved by being held in reserve so their location would remain unknown, but within a week most of Germany's ability to project power beyond the European mainland would be lost. Indeed a few strategic strikes in Norway might well spur a defector in the ranks to surrender German forces in Scandinavia in this first week once it became clear they were absolutely cut off from resupply and reinforcements,. After that there's a lot of ground to cover, but apart from isolated good spots the Germans would have trouble putting up significant resistance.
But again... why bother? 1000 ICBMs launched from submarines and land-based silos would have ended the whole war in 30 minutes and there's no way the era's leadership would have stopped to think whether they should have or not. Like I said: Total War... if you have the means, you use it.
Please. The Western Allies rejected the plan to castrate all German men over 12 and colonize Germany with American and British soldiers. What you're suggesting is several times worse even if we assume they use neutron bombs to simply kill everyone while minimizing the radiation released, and a thousand ICBMs is at least an order of magnitude worse than that.
I would imagine much more time would be spent deploying troops to Europe and getting all of the necessary supplies there than actual fighting.
It seems the U.S. would be able to establish air superiority in a little over an hour. They wouldn't even have to engage the Luftwaffe. Just send some bombers to destroy all of their air facilities. One less thing to worry about.
Bomb all of their communication facilities. Two less things to worry about.
What would it take, say, 3 or 4 days to destroy all of their tanks using helicopters and/or jets?
You're thinking like it would be a modern war.
Modern weapons (i.e. LGB's JDAM's etc.) are precise munitions better suited to hitting their target than using massed fire. Even in WW2 airbases were dispersed to avoid mass destruction of aircraft. WW2 aircraft were more than capable of short take offs and unprepared runways than modern aircraft, if you bomb the runway you get the ground crew to take a mower to the section of grass next to the paved runway, and in an hour of so you're back to operational status. Even after heavy bombing (an initial wave of 90 Ju88 dropping full sticks of bombs [3,100lbs per plane] for 27,900lbs of bombs in the initial attack followed by continuous bombing from multiple waves for six hours) Biggen Hill for instance was back in operational status the following morning, there is no reason to suspect that German airbases were less able to retain operational status.
SEAD today strongly relies on radar emissions, almost all air-defenses rely on radar to acquire and target HARM missiles for instance would be useless against 1940's air defenses since except in few instances did not use RADAR. So would most aircraft installed EW systems that rely on passive radar detection to alert pilots of possible incoming fire. So Apache's and similar would have no warning of ground fire directed at them, and the tools used in 1940 are not dissimilar to those used today, how would said Apache handle an 8.8cm HE shell impact? I can tell you, it wouldn't be pretty.
Communication facilities were also dispersed, you'd have to find them and bomb them, they may not even have emissions (using hardlines not radio), how do you spot a communication base when it looks like any other building and has no EM emissions?
Quote:
Originally Posted by BajanYankee
That's true, but logistically speaking, do you send in a couple of SEAL Teams in Black Hawks to do the job? Remember, we need to bring a body back, not simply kill him, which a Tomahawk cruise missile could easily do.
You'd want to fly in something low and slow (a Blackhawk) over the 1940's Berlin Air Defenses? Rather you than me.
When you say SEAL team do you mean the 300 personnel team, or a platoon of 20 (including the command element)? If you mean Team that's 600 men deployed in 55 Blackhawks I think that kind of defeats the purpose of using Spec-ops. Even using two platoons (40 people) using fast-rope isn't really stealthy, since in the 1940's people would be looking for the strange "whop-whop-whop" noise they're hearing.
Problem is you're assuming that the enemy would be like a modern enemy that has had it's technology stripped, that would not be the way it would work. They never had the tech to get used to, so not having it isn't a detriment. The more technically advanced would have an advantage, but there would be no equivalent penalty on the lower tech side.
In my opinion were this possible that the higher tech side would be stunned, they would go in thinking they have all the advantage and inflict heavy losses but also receive heavier losses than expected (thus being stunned), this is typical of most engagements we (the US) have seen from Vietnam onwards. In the 1940's people accepted that wars cost lives, the bigger the war the heavier the cost. Look at Iraq, it started in 2003, and cost around 4,500 US lives, the Battle of Moscow cost Germany a high of 400,000 men in 3 months (97 days), or around an average of the same casualties the US suffered over the entirety of Iraq for every single day for 97 days. Do you think that the US has the political will to experience those levels of casualties today and not break, Germany did in 1941? I'd think that with today's political will even 1/10th or less over an extended period of a week or more would result in some form of reflection.
I think your overall presumption of an easy victory in such a scenario is greatly overrated. As Jaggy correctly states too, there's a big difference between "winning the war" and securing peace. Even if Berlin fell within a few weeks of an offensive, the war is not won. You may have secured a strategic objective, but that's not winning the war.
Please. The Western Allies rejected the plan to castrate all German men over 12 and colonize Germany with American and British soldiers. What you're suggesting is several times worse even if we assume they use neutron bombs to simply kill everyone while minimizing the radiation released, and a thousand ICBMs is at least an order of magnitude worse than that.
100,000 citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would probably have to disagree with you. And besides, there is such a thing as a pure fusion weapon... all the "bang" of a hydrogen bomb without the "bonus" hershey-squirts until death, hair shedding, skin peeling, vomiting, eyeball popping and millennia-long ground-tainting of circa 1950's nuclear weapons technology. Unfortunately, pure fusion bombs are much harder to say "no freaking way" to when it's optional to use them.
They are certainly still top-secret in this current era but still in the arsenal nevertheless. Guess that's the big surprise for WW3... shoulda given a spoiler alert.
100,000 citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would probably have to disagree with you. And besides, there is such a thing as a pure fusion weapon... all the "bang" of a hydrogen bomb without the "bonus" hershey-squirts until death, hair shedding, skin peeling, vomiting, eyeball popping and millennia-long ground-tainting of circa 1950's nuclear weapons technology. Unfortunately, pure fusion bombs are much harder to say "no freaking way" to when it's optional to use them.
They are certainly still top-secret in this current era but still in the arsenal nevertheless. Guess that's the big surprise for WW3... shoulda given a spoiler alert.
You mean the attacks that occurred days apart and stopped when the Japanese surrendered? That's hardly the scouring of Europe you were proposing.
You mean the attacks that occurred days apart and stopped when the Japanese surrendered? That's hardly the scouring of Europe you were proposing.
I mean the leadership of that time had no qualms over killing MASSIVE numbers of enemy men, women or children or doing whatever it took to win and were not thinking ahead much... and our enemies would have done the same to us if they had the means to. I have no doubts that any one of the allies/axis would have murdered every last person in enemy nations if they thought it would win the war. Go back and watch US propaganda of the time:
I mean, seriously... all Japanese were fanatical human robots who worshiped the Emperor as a literal god and had minds 2000 years out of date? Germans may have looked normal on the surface but were all closet psychopaths hiding a genetic predisposition for war and mass-murder? (never mind that a very large proportion of Americans at the time were of Germanic heritage!) The hatred, the ignorance, racism and bigotry ran far deeper back then than it does today.
Yea, they would have done it.
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