Was WWII....

[Foreigner]

Sgt Jasper, Weasel,

I have to respectfully disagree with your disagreement.

I will be the first to admit that I enjoy alternative history "what-if". The main problem in those, IMO, is that they tend to award the "dice rolls" exclusively to one side, tend to assume not the most logical reaction from the other side (but postulate the one that would support their idea better), and also ignore some real logistical and other resource constraints.

- What if Hitler hadn't called off the Panzers at Dunkirk and had launched Sealion?
Well, one possibility would be for the British and the remaining French troops to surrender en masse. However, I would think it less likely. Seeing as there was nowhere to run, there's quite a good chance they would actually give the Panzers at least a bloody nose. Maybe pull a little Battle of Pharsalus on them, or at least a Pyrrhic victory. After all, Rommel was stopped in North Africa after the British's backs were against the wall. Seeing the British not running away with the tails between their legs, maybe the French would have put up a stiffer resistance, too. Hitler might have won in the end anyway, but at a much greater cost.

Much has been said about the evacuated at Dunkirk forming the core of the rebuilt British army, but I am somewhat skeptical of the claim - they may be experienced, but they were also beaten. One could argue that by providing a stiffer resistance, they would make for a better inspiration and better morale booster for the new recruits.

As for Sealion - Hitler would have to decidedly win the aerial Battle of Britain, then neutralize the Home fleet, then muster enough logistical capability to support an effective invasion effort - I would say this is a series of increasingly improbable events. The only thing that would help him would be a catastrophic breakdown in British morale, which I honestly don't see enough supporting evidence for. The risk-reward trade-off just isn't favorable enough for Germany, especially considering that the main prize was the Lebensraum in the east, and any delay with Britain means there would be more time for Stalin to prepare.

- If the Japanese had followed up Pearl Harbor with an invasion of Hawaii, or even just destroyed the fuel tanks.
For the Japanese the main prize were the resources of Malaya and the Dutch West Indies. Occupying Hawaii would be more of a distraction and a huge resource drain, and the supply line for the occupying forces very vulnerable to interdiction. Absent occupation, the oil tanks and other infrastructure (dry docks, sub pens, etc.) could have been rebuilt with the labor and resources otherwise allocated to raising the sunken and repairing the damaged battleships. Granted, for the US Navy it would have been a much longer schlep without Hawaii as a base, but the main resources in the US mainland would be still intact, and again, short of a major breakdown in American morale, I can see a longer campaign, maybe even the loss of Papua-New Guinea and fighting on the Australian shores, maybe 5 nuclear bombs dropped instead of 2, but I don't see the Japanese holding on to their conquests in the end. After all, even Yamamoto, if memory serves me right, estimated that the Japanese could only run rampant in the Pacific for 18 months, at most.

- If Rommel had been allowed to post his reserves close to the beaches in France.
Well, I would then say they would start taking losses even before the invasion started. In the end, I think the allied superiority would tell. Rommel's reserves might have been able to stop the allies in some places for a long time, or in all places for a short time, but I still don't believe he had the resources to stop them everywhere for good. After all, didn't the Germans attack the Anzio beachhead head on, and still failed to crush it?

-If the atomic bombs had fizzled.
Then we would have to assume that neither Germany nor Japan would have it (as the bombs were the result of incredible resource commitment, not some genius in a basement thinking up a way to make matter go boom). In the end, we are still left with overwhelming Allied superiority in weapons and resources (and the will to use them), and even without an invasion of the main Japanese islands I don't see a reasonable way for them to turn the war around.

As for the better codes, I would argue that at the then level of technology no code would be truly unbreakable if used widely enough for military operations. After all, it took relatively a small time to crack the 4-wheel U-boat Enigma. Sorry if I sound repetitive, but the Allies simply had more than enough resources and the will to apply them to counter any Axis advances (similarly to the short-wave radar race, e.g).

As for the battle of Atlantic, I would recommend the analysis in Clay Blair's "Hitler's U-Boat War" - two monster volumes of about 900 pages each. In summary (IIRC) - 95% of transports leaving the west Atlantic shores made it safely to their destination. In all but 2 months of the war, the shipping tonnage available to the Allies increased - even during the "Happy Times". Therein lies the ultimate reason for the U-Boats' failure - all the strategic calculations hinged on the assumption that the Allies would not be able to add tonnage faster than the U-Boats would sink them. And we all know how that turned out.

Even without the broken codes, the U-Boats still had to close with the convoys and escorts, which after some point had radar and HF-DF to help them out, so the toll exacted on shipping would have to be paid in sunk U-Boats. We can argue about the relative effectiveness, but really, how much more effective the U-Boats would have to be to put a dent big enough to even consider the possibility of a victory? They would have to become 4 times more effective to bring the transport losses to 20%, and I am not sure even that would have stopped the convoys.

I am not saying all this to diminish the sacrifice or dispute the need for the effort to win; it's just that the larger the scale, the smaller the overall effect of any single event, person, or chance outcome.