D-Day

[Csargo]

An Allied loss at D-Day was possible, if not too likely given the superior amount of materiel the Allies poured into it.

So I'm off to talk about a situation where the Allies had indeed been thrown into the sea.

That woud likely have been the worst possible scenario for Europe.
Germany would still be in serious trouble. The Allies would not come running to the table over such a defeat. They would retreat and plan for new operations.
But those operations would take time, and until then only the planned ones could be carried off, if not too securely.

So we have a huge Allied army still sitting in England, just edging to get over the little stretch of water. This would force Germany to keep the garrisons in France in place. Of course some more mobile units could be transported to the east, but they would be far from enough to halt the Russians. A few divisions might even get sent to Italy, bogging the Allies down once more.
But ultimately Germany would still lose, but this time she would basically only lose to the Soviet Union, which due to the transfer of troops (and lack of the opposite later) would suffer more losses, and would feel a right to all of Europe if not just a much larger share than they got historically.

Personally that would mean I would have been speaking Russian as my second language rather than English (it was damn close even in the historical events).

So what your saying Kraxis is that if D-Day would have failed for the Allies then Europe have been most likely all Red after WWII?

[Kagemusha]

So what your saying Kraxis is that if D-Day would have failed for the Allies then Europe have been most likely all Red after WWII?

Well The Soviets didnt stop until they met the Western Allies.They would have eventually "gave freedom" to all Western Europe.Without the Allied advance in Western Europe.

[Lord Winter]

Many people say if hitler haven't held back his reserve of panzers, the allied invasion would have been crushed and a thrown back to sea, but the germans would have taken heavy causalities as well due to allied air superiority. Lucky for us this didn't happen due to allied deception including the creation of several inflatable "tank divisions". Also the allies using a network of double agents and false messages made it look like they were actually going to invade the Baltic.

IIRC, wasn't it the allied generals who gave the operation 50-50 chances of success?

Eisenhower had a letter ready were he would take responsibility for the failure of the invasion, it sounds familiar thou.

[Papewaio]

If D-Day had failed and then the extra German troops diverted to slow down the Russians and tourniquet the Italian peninsula it might have meant that:

1) Two German cities rather then two Japanese cities would have been nuked. I remember reading biographies of some of the scientists at the Manhatten project, they were all for nuking the crap out of Nazi Germany but were not partial to nuking Imperial Japan.

2) A larger portion of Europe would have been part of the Soviet Union. Germany for starters would have been totally consumed and probably Vichy France as well. Possibly because the SU would have had greater leverage the pogroms run by the SU would truly have made Hitler look like a prom night newbie when it came to screwing over the people of Europe.

[Kraxis]

Also with no strong Allied presence in form of 'newly' created Allied states the SU could do pretty much what it wanted in Europe. The surprisingly 'easy' peace Hungary and Rumania got could possibly have been a lot nastier.

From the amount of killing and raping done to the relatively few Germans they got hold of... Well the situation would have been pretty grim for the Germans, but also for the various states that worked with Germany (my own Denmark would not have been treated nicely I think). It is a little known fact, but the SU troops on Bornholm (stayed for a year after the war had ended) in the Baltic acted to a fairly large extent as lords over the local population. They didn't abuse them, but their made their will go through. And this was in a country the Western Allies had claimed officially in a world where the SU was fairly weak.
I do not want to think of them taking the entire country in a stronger state, with more of a reason to be angry.

But I'm certain that an Allied defeat at D-Day would produce a Europe under Soviet control.

[rotorgun]

This is a good question to debate, and has been wargamed to death by many avid gamers from my generation. The general concensus is that If the Panzer reserve was held closer to the beachead, and the German high command could have worked together with the operational commanders, that Germany could have defeated the invasion. There was an excellent game that Avalon Hill published back in the pre-computer game days of my youth that had an enormous amount of counters. It had the complete order of battle down to the company and battery sized elements for the battle. Air power and off shore naval artillery were abstracted, but played a big role in the game. Although the Germans were able to create several breakthroughs to the beaches with their armored units in about 50% of the games, when they did so, allied naval fire and air power destroyed them in the process. So at best, the allies lost only half the time. As others have said, the overwhelming allied material superiority made this very unlikely.

Had Germany suceeded in reality, I believe that the political fallout would have been dramatic. FDR and Churchill would likely have had to sack Eisenhower and Montgomery at least. There is some probability that they might have lost the confidence of the war weary people back home; losing the elections of 1944 was a serious posibility IMHO. As to wether they would have tried again is certain. Europe dominated by Hitler was unthinkable. The war would have only dragged on longer. I must admit that a greater portion of Europe would have come under Soviet sway as a result.

Great topic CSAR!

[English assassin]

Hmm. But:

If the allies had been pushed off the beaches in June 1944, the Germans would have known there could be no invasion in the west for at least another year. (Due to a combination of a need for good weather and the sheer lead time required for planning)

They could therefore safely have stripped NW Europe pretty bare of troops until, say, May 1945. Also, presumably, most of the Norway divisions could also have been redeployed, since it would have been clear there could be no landing in Norway either.

IIRC the Soviets were actually closer to the limits of their available resources and manpower than is generally realised by the end. With the extra divisions available possibly the Germans could actually have held them off. Presumably also the Italian front could have been held static.

I can't see the allies nuking Germany in this case, since that would hand the continent to Stalin.

The big unknown are the politcial ramifications. Churchill was seriously worried about the effect the V2's had on civilian morale in London and if the D day failure was sufficiently bloody, would there have been any appetite for another go in 1945? if the Russians were fought to a standstill in Poland in 1944, with no second front and no promise of one in 1945, would Stalin have offered/accepted a separate peace? Who can say? But some sort of armistice leaving Nazi germany intact and in control of NW Europe must have been a possible outcome. And once the Soviets had made peace the western allies really would have had little prospect of taking western Europe.