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[smjjames]

No, but you can go under the ice, and if you need to surface, you can just go up through the ice

I know, the US did that all the time during the Cold War, I'm just saying that the subs won't be of any help in getting the fleet through the ice.

[Kot]

After a bit of thinking - I actually realized that America would never be able to conquer South America. Farmers in straw hats with guns made in caves out of boxes of scrap is like kryptonite for US Armed Forces Superman.

[Amperzand]

They might very well be able to build a strong alliance rapidly, but I don't think conquering territory by force whose population has no intention to stop fighting is something we're very good at, no.

[Culise]

South America combined is not "a bunch of dudes with pointy sticks jumping out of trees," and I'd love to see your citation for that.

Yeah, they're bunch of dudes with M3 Stuarts, with Cessnas for air force and river boats for navy. Sure, they can guerilla all they want in the forest, but without capabilities to hold out the US Army face to face for at least a while it's all matter of conquering the cities and letting the dudes with AK spears run around the forest until they die of old age. The only relatively modern army down here is... Brazil? I think? They have relatively modern tanks, like, Pattons and first generation Leopards, I am kinda sure.

The thing is that Canada's going to quickly be reduced to "guerilla[ing] in the forest" as well; there's no way they can stand and fight against a superior force numerically that also has has technological parity, and if they make the attempt, they'll be eradicated long before any aid can ever arrive, either over the Arctic Circle or elsewhere.  If you look at old anti-US Canadian war plans, this is actually something they recognized.  Even their most aggressive plans (the infamous "Defense Plan 1") consisted of spoiling attacks intended only to divert the Americans until aid arrived from the Commonwealth, and this was back before World War 2 when the US military was nowhere near the modern day colossus it is today.  As such, it seems weird to claim that South America's guerilla warfare is somehow a testament to its backwards and incapable nature while Canada's guerilla warfare is a testament to its forward thinking, endurance, and logistical miracles. 

Besides, where are you even going to bring these supplies in?  The large port cities capable of transshipping the necessary supplies to fight a war against a million-strong army are not on Hudson Bay, and any such large concentration of infrastructure is going to be an early and major target in either case precisely because of this sort of threat.  Looking back at World War 2 again, in spite of having a far smaller logistical "tail" than most modern warfare, this sort of thing was what would have scuppered things like Sealion or Operation Green, and was the heart of planning for Torch and D-Day.  Oh, and also, they're hundreds of kilometers away from the Canadian population centers, so you will either need to lug these supplies over the wilderness to the soldiers, or bring the soldiers to the supplies; either increases the risk of overland interdiction throughout the entire process. 

Actually, it occurs to me that Canada is even worse off than South America, because it's already inside the US's coverage envelope; tremendous amounts of US Cold War-era planning was the detection of enemy forces coming over the Arctic, because this was precisely the aerial route that Soviet forces would have taken to reach North America, and submarines moving under the cap was a threat all through the Cold War due to Soviet naval bases at Severomorsk, Murmansk, Zapadnaya Litsa, and elsewhere in the Kola Bay.  If the US has to take over sole operation of NORAD and the North Warning System because they just conquered Canada, well, the infrastructure is already in place to watch for enemy forces coming over the Circle, and the threat of submarine forces will not be discounted; if anything, it will be a greater concern due to the active state of war. 

EDIT:

I'm pretty sure the US navy still needs to refuel which does limit ship range. (Sure, the carriers are nuclear powered, but their escorts and support ships aren't.)

It does, but its myriad global commitments means that it has made a fine art of UNREP.  Ever since World War 2 and the operational needs of the US Navy that pushed them across the Pacific, they've been able to operate more or less indefinitely at sea by operating a dedicated underway replenishment force (the Military Sealift Command generally and the Combat Logistics Force specifically), just as the Air Force has made extensive use of aerial refueling for every historical major conflict since Vietnam.  That does become a possible point-failure source once the rest of the world gets their own navies within a fighting shot of the US, but until then, it will remain a major part of US operational freedom worldwide. 

[Helgoland]

Different question:


What would WWII have looked like if the Nazis had sided with the Chinese instead of the Japanese?

There already were German instructors and specialists helping the Kuomintang, and Göring apparently was a bit of a China friend anyway. More info here.

[Rolepgeek]

America would not have gotten as involved in the war anywhere as soon, and Germany might have been able to take over Egypt and get access to Oil if they managed to take down the British RAF. Which they would have if they'd kept bombing the airfields and such another couple of weeks rather than switching to bombing London.

[Culise]

I wonder.  I don't think favoring China instead of Japan has any effect on either the Battle of Britain or the Battle of North Africa, and I'm not even seeing how the Battle of Britain affects the Battle of North Africa.  For that matter, I'm not even certain of the effect of the Battle of Britain even on the RAF in Britain itself, much less North Africa; the entire month where the Germans were attempting to attack the RAF directly via bombing runs on air fields in the south resulted in the temporary shutdown of a single station (Biggins Hill), which was restored to operational status in two hours.  The problem with the Battle of Britain was never the air fields; even if worse had come to worst, they could and would have redeployed northward to Scotland to preserve their active force, using southern airfields primarily to rearm and repair on the fly.  It was that the Germans could not replenish their losses as well as the British.  Fighting over Britain meant that every parachuting British pilot returned to the fight, while every parachuting German pilot was lost to the war as a POW (if lucky; those who bailed over the Channel or the North Sea, in the brief case of Luftflotte 5's operations) - civilian repair services put almost 5000 planes back into commission between July and December, once they got into gear.  British planes, if damaged, didn't need to fly as far for an emergency landing.  British planes low on fuel or ammunition could rearm and return to the fight without a trip across the Channel.  Crew-wise, German fighter forces tended to have around 50-65% of their operational crews by the raw numbers by mid-September, and in the single month of August, they had lost almost 20% of their actual aircraft frames.  These were all key factors in the reasoning behind shifting to nighttime raids in September, which were less effective.  While the Germans may have managed to do more damage by focusing on the operational destruction of the RAF, it was unlikely to be more than a pipedream, continuing to deplete the cream of the Luftwaffe, and the Germans would have run out of planes before the British did. 

As for how it affects North Africa, I'm not certain.  Rommel, by El Alamein, had already overreached his supply lines.  The Allied air force in theatre had always received obsolete and outdated craft that wouldn't have served well in the air defense of the British Isles, including American lend-lease.  Moreover, they always outnumbered their German and Italian counterparts, even after the deployment of the Afrika Korps.  Key forces in the DAF were never going to be deployed to Britain for political reasons, either (read: the South Africans threw a snit).  Unless the Germans miraculously take far fewer losses than the British, it's unlikely the Regia Aeronautica alone will make up the difference. 

However, as noted, I'm not even certain how a choice to retain the Chinese mission plays into this.  Taking it separately for that reason, it's key to note that the Japanese will enter war with the Western Allies in either case; the political pressures at play (namely that the US does not want to see all of China vanish into Japan's gaping maw, and that the Japanese are still going to see that the British and Dutch are too occupied - literally, for the latter - in Europe to defend their Far East holdings) are not going to disappear just because of the German mission in China.  Indeed, US involvement with China may well actually end up similar to Soviet involvement with Bulgaria; a bit of a "quid pro quo" mutual non-aggression for most of the war where China/Bulgaria doesn't actually declare war on the US/USSR.  German aid to China was rather reliant on the USSR once the Sino-Japanese War began, and thus would end with the onset of Barbarossa in either case.  It was never all that major in absolute numbers as well, and would be unlikely to help tilt the balance of the war towards China any more than US or British aid to China (the Flying Tigers) did (or didn't) historically.  German promises were grandiose, but it's difficult to see how they would have materialized once the Sino-Japanese War began, much less after the European War or Barbarossa.  Likewise, US aid to the UK was operating without any concern for the Japanese, and several US destroyers had already engaged their German counterparts in the North Atlantic before war was declared (most famously, the USS Reuben James was sunk by a German U-boat with the deaths of over two-thirds of its crew); continuing bleeding along these lines would inevitably have brought the US into the war against Germany.  Moreover, US aid to the USSR was also unaffected by the historical war between the US and Japan.  Operating under Soviet flag, the Japanese permitted the shipment of US supplies to the USSR even during the peak of the Pacific War, accounting for half of all Lend Lease to the USSR.  While direct war materiel was not permitted, locomotives, rail stock, trucks, and the like were not considered war materiel, nor were radios, electronic equipment, or canned foodstuffs (read: rations), which all proved invaluable in maintaining Soviet logistics.  I see no reason why ongoing German-Sino cooperation would change this.  The USSR actually gains additional reasons for its ongoing aid to the GMD pre-Barbarossa: now, they're also supporting an ally of their German friends.  They're also simultaneously invading Xinjiang, but those are mere details that also won't change in this timeline, any more than they did historically.  As for Barbarossa, by 1941, the Japanese control most of the Chinese coastline and northern China, the best-trained and most-reliable forces available to Chiang have been destroyed outside Nanjing and Shanghai, and the Chinese have largely completely withdrawn to the western interior.  The Chinese, even moreso than the Japanese, have a very, very good reason to not involve themselves in any invasion of the USSR under these circumstances: they have no ability to do so.  If anything, if the Japanese are sufficiently anti-German, Stalin may authorize an earlier draw-down of the Far East command's strength in order to reinforce the German front.  While the involvement of the Siberian divisions is rather overstated due to reliance on German sources (which notoriously underestimated the USSR - the logic goes "well, we thought they could only raise such and such a number of divisions, but we're facing close to twice that; rather than our assumptions being incorrect, they obviously pulled these extra divisions out of Siberia"), they can't be entirely discounted, either; even the 28 divisions historically transferred were not insignificant, especially as they were already winter-ready and trained for snow operations. 

The biggest major advantage to the Axis, I think, is rather straightforward: the Germans will not declare war on the US after Pearl Harbor.  This buys them a few months to a year in which US is not fully involved in the war, but given how US involvement in the North Atlantic is increasing and the excuse for "Ameri-British cooperation against the Japanese" pushing a cooperative military agenda, I'm hesitant to push it any further beyond that.  I'm not sure, however, how effectively they can capitalize on this opportunity; by December 1941, they're already stuck in the USSR.  Indeed, without the US actively mobilizing for war, the US is actually free to increase Lend-Lease shipments to the UK and USSR even further without diverting supplies to their own armed forces.  As for China itself, the US ends up trusting Chiang even less than they did historically (as hard as that is to believe it possible), but the common enemy of the USSR and ChiComs still likely drives the two together in the post-war world. 

EDIT:
Oh, I thought of something else: tungsten.  Historically, the majority of German tungsten was sourced in China, and without a renunciation of the Chinese mission, that trade would continue for a time.  However, looking it up, the trade collapsed not just because of the diplomatic situation, but also the military situation: with the Japanese capturing most of the ports, China simply couldn't ship its tungsten anywhere.  If Germany sticks with China, Japan won't let Chinese tungsten or German payments cross their front lines to go through the ports.  If Germany sticks with Japan, all the tungsten mines are still in the Chinese interior under Chinese control.  It's rather a horse apiece. 

[Rolepgeek]

The continuous bombing of the RAF meant that they could not choose whether or not to respond to a bombing run like they could with London. They had to respond. Their pilots were becoming exhausted, and iirc, the general in charge at the time said that if the attacks on airfields had continued for another few weeks the RAF would be forced to shut down. It was about more than equipment; they were running out of trained pilots. And if the RAF got shut down, they could do an amphibious assault on Britain. How successful that would have been? Who knows. But if Britain falls, US has a much harder time supporting any assault on Europe, if/when it gets involved. And a year or two, given the pace of the war, would have been enough to take over Britain, if it was going to be taken over.

[Culise]

Well-traind pilots, certainly, but what they had could fly well enough to pose a threat to the Germans.  The number of pilots in the RAF Fighter Command actually increased during the months in question: they went from 1200 in July to 1400 in August and 1500 by mid-September; while it's out of timeframe, this trend continued and hit 1800 by November.  The only numbers that dropped in the months in question were the single-seat fighters available, but even that's a touch specific; Overy notes that the number of total fighters actually went up marginally by 100 fighters on raw strength and 38 serviceable between August and September, a span that includes the week-long massed assaults on RAF airfields from August 24 on.  In fact, it isn't until mid-September that the numbers of available airframes starts to dip even slightly, corresponding (rather oddly, in my opinion) not with the attacks on RAF installations, but with the beginning of the Blitz.  If you adopt the numbers from the 50s and 60s at face value, which neglect replacement rates for pilots or repair rates for aircraft, even then you still have to consider German losses as well.  In August alone, Germany lost 250 Messerschmitts (about 2:1 ratio between the light Bf109s and heavy Bf110s), and on the bomber side (though I hesitate to add them to what was in large part a fighter campaign), 98 He111s, 75 Do17s, and lumping them together, 167 Ju87s and Ju88s.  That's 25% of their fighters gone in a single month, and all pilots with them; on the bomber side, they stopped committing the Ju87 Stukas because they were sitting ducks.  Even if the British were actually running short of trained pilots, which is somewhat questionable, they have plenty of fresh-faced young graduates coming up to replace them.  The Luftwaffe, we know today, couldn't even manage to replace their losses in either trained or untrained pilots during the Battle of Britain.  They certainly weren't broken, but they took a heck of a beating, and if you want to extrapolate British losses in this brief period linearly without accounting for repair or production (especially the former; old numbers from the 50s-60s on this at least did include production, but only production), it's only fair to do the same to the Germans - they would have been out of the air war before the end of the year, if such a linear extrapolation actually held. 

Still worse, the Axis powers in general had one major deficiency in terms of their pilot training programs that the Allies generally lacked.  In the UK and USA in particular (I'm not so familiar with the USSR, but I believe they had this as well), particularly-capable aces were regularly cycled out of the flying rotation and stationed ground-side to rest, recuperate, and most importantly, train new pilots.  In Germany and Japan, aces were kept flying until they get shot down.  This was probable one of the two major contributors to the unusually high kill tallies for Axis aces (along with separate methods for counting casualties), but it also means that their knowledge and experience is never used to create a new cadre of pilots.  Every fresh pilot put out by the British has much more training than their German counterparts.  Of course, the lack of rest and recuperation had other consequences; German pilots quickly began to develop a particular case of combat fatigue after multiple sorties, made worse by how many of their compatriots were lost. 

Regarding the views of air marshals (not generals) on the ground in 1940, what you say is accurate.  This is one of the major impetuses of the popular view of the Battle of Britain, but unfortunately, it is limited by the knowledge of the British regarding the Luftwaffe in 1940, which we know today to have been quite questionable (the British, obviously, not having access to German archives).  On the British side, the Luftwaffe's effective force in terms of total planes, total pilots, and ability to replenish losses was consistently and significantly overestimated, leading to the perception of a massive force preparing to darken the clouds over Dover, a great push that would wipe the RAF from the map.  That said, German intelligence on the RAF was no better; just as consistently, the Germans thought that all it would take was one big push and, again, the RAF would be wiped from the map.  Unfortunately, the intelligence was flawed as indicated; the British had no idea that the Germans were operating between 45%-65% of their nominal strength while they were fielding closer to 90% squadron effectives, and while in retrospect we know this to be true, given the intelligence failures, it's understandable that the British thought they were so beleaguered when they were nowhere near as close to the brink as they feared.  If nothing else, they still had the reserve air groups (13 and 14) in Scotland, never significantly committed over England, that was always available for scramble if the situation in the south did become dire enough.  Fascinatingly, for a specific example of this kind of error, German errors in intelligence on the No.13 made them believe it was a shell squadron without any actual fighters, which led to devastating losses during the Eagle Day campaign when they sent unescorted bombers across the North Sea (as I very briefly alluded to in my first post) right into their teeth.  The No.13 Group was actually the designated rest squadron for the 11, no less; even during the Battle of Britain, the RAF was never so hard-up that they refrained from regularly cycling exhausted pilots to Scotland and cycling in fresh pilots to replace them. 

[misko27]

On a totally different note:

And if the RAF got shut down, they could do an amphibious assault on Britain. How successful that would have been? Who knows. But if Britain falls...

I can tell you right now that there is basically no situation in which Germany is able to pull off Sealion. Straight up. It was a terrible plan. Control of the skies is only one of several requirements to pull off a massive amphibious invasion. The US and the Royal Navy, working in Tandem, managed to pull it off; but they were two of the three largest navies in the entire world, and they operated essentially unopposed. There is no situation in which the Royal Navy would not oppose an amphibious invasion of the mainland, even if loss of air superiority meant it cost them massively. The Royal Navy in your situation is banished from south Britain, but the British had planned for this historically; they would have been rebased at Scarpa flow, outside the range of german bombers but well within range to oppose an amphibious invasion.

Furthermore, the Germans simply did not have the capacity, the naval wherewithal to do it. It just didn't exist! Transportation by sea is a massive industry for a reason you know! Docks and ports aren't merely "nice to have" they are basically essential, and there is a reason that the main objective after you secure a beachhead is "secure a port". Hell, even Hitler knew this much: the entire point of the Battle of the Bulge was his attempt to seize a major port and cut the Allies off. Sealion was supposed to be done with River Barges for Christsake! Riverbarges. On the High Seas. The Royal Navy could tip those over by getting too close if they got bored of sinking them from afar. In fact, it's a debate whether they'd even need to do anything: thousands of German soldiers go down to a watery grave just due to weather alone in this scenario. And to have an invasion you need a long, steady stream of troops and supplies. Even if you somehow get a beach-head (which is already a huge debate, but I'll give it to you for the sake of argument), if your supply chain gets interrupted by bad weather or the Royal Navy, all you've done is create a large number of German POWs. And what about Tanks? The much vaunted German Blitzkrieg would have been very unimpressive without their tanks, but, again, river-barges are literally the best the Third Reich had to offer when it came to transporting them, and I don't think I need to explain why that's a problem.

And regardless, even if Germany takes over the skies, I strongly doubt the efficacy of large-scale urban bombing. The British ended up paying the Germans over tenfold when they seized Air Superiority over Germany, and yet I doubt many will argue that the bombing was the crucial element that led the Allies to win. Sorry to say but you cannot actually merely bomb the enemy into submission, unless the bombs in question are nicknamed "Little Boy" and "Fat Man". And if you can't do that, and you can't get rid of the Royal Navy, and you'd rather go conquer the evil commies anyway... Even if Germany wins the Battle of Britain, Britain will still be there when America enters the war, although there is a lot to be said about the state of Britain when America does arrive (I don't want to go too far and say that the consequences would not have been very grave indeed for the British, but it's not "win the battle or be conquered" grave).

TL;DR: Boats are hard, and Germany cannot into boat like Britain can into boat, so Germany cannot into Britain.

[Sheb]

Well, the massive bombings of Germany manage to basically halt their weapon industry. Germany would have lost anyway, because the massive bombings only started well after Barbarossa had bogged down, but in an alternate universe where Germany hadn't invaded the USSR, I think the Brits and US would have ended up bombing all of Germany to rubbles and invading the mainland.

[Erkki]

Aerial bombardment did not stop Germany from increasing its war material production right until factories started getting conquered.

What both daylight and night bombing campaign did was tie up vast amount of resources from Germany, and make it possible for the Allies to actually make use of their superior industrial might in a war of attrition. Germany had no choice but to pull units from East and swap more production from bombers, tanks and so forth to fighters and flak guns. Half a million men were manning AAA and radars in Germany alone - all away from the East. Allies had no boots on the ground in continental Europe until 1943 in Sicily and Italy, so the only means of power projection was by air, and it was totally worth it.

I have a lot of thoughts on the topic of aerial warfare and I may later reply in depth.

[Sheb]

Actually, that's not true. I remember reading in Wages of Destruction that the allies DID manage to stop the constant increase in war material production.

[Erkki]

Actually, that's not true. I remember reading in Wages of Destruction that the allies DID manage to stop the constant increase in war material production.

Well, Germany's GDP was at its largest when the Reich was at its largest. But the factories in Germany kept going until very late in 1944 when they started getting conquered and running out of raw materials. Bombardments did shut down production for days or even weeks at a time, but Germany also kept building more factories. Tank and vehicle production too peaked somewhere in 1944, but aircraft production peaked I believe in late September 1944, long after aircraft factories in France and most in Italy and Netherlands were already unavailable and Allies were able to attain air superiority anywhere they wanted to. They built more planes than they could fuel or man.

What is true is Germany was late in turning its civilian economy into war economy, so part of the war material manufacturing expansion in 1944 is they were still working on that.

[Erkki]

Still worse, the Axis powers in general had one major deficiency in terms of their pilot training programs that the Allies generally lacked.  In the UK and USA in particular (I'm not so familiar with the USSR, but I believe they had this as well), particularly-capable aces were regularly cycled out of the flying rotation and stationed ground-side to rest, recuperate, and most importantly, train new pilots.  In Germany and Japan, aces were kept flying until they get shot down.  This was probable one of the two major contributors to the unusually high kill tallies for Axis aces (along with separate methods for counting casualties), but it also means that their knowledge and experience is never used to create a new cadre of pilots.  Every fresh pilot put out by the British has much more training than their German counterparts.  Of course, the lack of rest and recuperation had other consequences; German pilots quickly began to develop a particular case of combat fatigue after multiple sorties, made worse by how many of their compatriots were lost. 

This is partially inaccurate - Axis powers, even Japan, did rotate pilots back for training duties. For example Norbert Hannig(42 victories) was rotated back(29 March 1944) despite him being a very successfull pilot who could have scored dozens more kills had he served more at the front. Sakai was too, despite him being the most successfull ace at the time, although it was first because of his wounds.

What was problem for both Germany and Japan was they didnt initially plan to fight a long war; they did not prepare enough to replace pilots. Experience of frontline pilots wasnt used nearly enough, they werent rotated back enough, there werent enough resoures put into the training program in general and when they then found themselves thousands of pilots short, they had to cut the flight hours and shorten the programs, which then produced ever worse pilots. Quality of Luftwaffe's replacement pilots started falling rapidly after approximately mid 1943, Japan's even earlier. Majority of the responsibility I think goes to Der Dicke, Marshall Hermann Göring himself. He proved his worth in Battle of Britain too.

USSR used a system of their own, IIRC. In many frontline regiments they had one or two experienced squadrons and then a "training squadron" with 2nd line planes but led by experienced pilots, that would fly slightly easier missions than others. They would rotate pilots from flight schools to training squadrons and from training squadrons to ones that flew the all missions. 12. and 13. GvIAPs at least for sure had this structure: La-5 and Yak-9 for best squadrons, while training squads with old LaGG and Yak-1 would protect their bases and fly safe escort missions and train when they had the time.