What if WW2 ended earlier?

[Rodion Romanovich]

What Chamberlain did wrong was that he, when giving his ultimatum, didn't increase readiness and mobilization immediately to be prepared for war. Similarly, the French could have beated Germany early on together with Britain if Britain had mobilized properly and the French had accepted an offensive approach. Many people say the usage of an ultimatum rather than an unprovoked strike was the cause for why this war took 5 years to resolve, but in fact it was the lack of firmness of the ultimatum (only reluctantly and too late did they really mobilize properly to keep it) and the foolish strategy during 1939-1940 that made ww2 take long and cost so many lives. Often ww2 is taken as an example of why an ultimatum is bad in politicis, but in fact the ultimatum was the only thing that was done right by the allies in the earliest part of the conflict...

Oh, and the small French offensive was the Saar offensive, it was just a bit of marching into the German minefields without any real opposition. There were a few artillery duels and patrol engagements but nothing more really, and later the allies withdrew from what they had conquered...

Anyway one can't blame the supporters of the defensive approach too much either - even among the Germans there were a lot of old-fashioned generals who favored infantry based warfare, and it wasn't really until halfway through Fall Gelb in 1940 that they truly realized how powerful the Panzer spearheads could be. Rommel and others were repeatedly ordered to halt their offensives because the plans didn't have proper logistical methods for making the infantry divisions keep up with the rapid advance the armored divisions could allow, those things were developed later, especially during 1941. Also from what I recall the allies were shocked when they got to Belgium and found that there were very little possibilities for building up a strong defense there in the time they had at their disposal when they finally got there. It's possible that they could even have been able to win with the defensive strategy (with proper counter-offensive thrusts), if things had turned out differently. But Belgium can't be too much blamed for wanting to do what they thought was a way of perhaps being able to stay out of the war.

It would be interesting to see a reenactment of the battle with today's knowledge...