(01-10-2018 12:34 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  If you take a look at Germany's major European allies, Italy, Romania, and Hungary you can see where it would have been theoretically possible to organize them in such a way as to win the war.

It is probably fair to say that would have required herculean feats to have done and would have required nearly perfect performances from each country but it was possible, by the numbers.

I agree if your WWII was confined solely to land grabs in continental western Europe. Otherwise, defeat it was inevitable.

Recent new scholarship on the Japanese entrance to WWII shows that the vast majority of Japanese military leadership knew that any fight involving the United States would lead to defeat, but their culture of bushido eliminated anyone from saying so for fear of being weak. But that same culture of Bushido meant that of course they had to attack the USA.

Same realities in Europe. There was no way that Germany was not going to, at some point, engage in hostilities against the UK and the Soviet Union. The UK would be supplied, endlessly, by the USA and the Soviets only had to build their factories behind the Urals to be almost untouchable.

Defeat was inevitable for the Axis outside of two small opportunities:

German stops in western Europe
Japan stops in Manchuria

Otherwise the manufacturing might of the USA combined with the manpower of the Soviet Union meant certain Axis defeat.