8 ALTERNATIVE WORLD WAR TWO PLANS THAT COULD HAVE CHANGED HISTORY

Eight alternative World War Two plans that could have changed history
By Colin R, Kizaz, 14 November 2013.

World War Two took warfare to a new level. Its global scale, the numbers of combatants involved, the depth of the war efforts of the nations involved and the terrible human cost were all unprecedented. With the main fighting nations involved in all-out total war, much effort was put into coming up with new weapons and plans that could tip the balance or the decisive strategic innovation.

We will never know what effect these plans would have had - though counterfactual historians love to speculate - but here are eight plans that never made it off the drawing board.

1. Killing Hitler

To what extent was the Nazi war effort driven by the drive, the madness even, of one man? The Germans were certainly pretty keen to land a bomb on Winston Churchill, and plans to assassinate Hitler were considered throughout the war by the Allies. Some were madcap - Hollywood star Greta Garbo has been quoted as saying that she would have shot the Fuhrer (who was fan enough to send her a letter) as no-one would have searched her on her way to meet Hitler. Others were much more serious and perhaps the closest to going ahead was Operation Foxley.

The plans were cooked up in 1944 by the Special Operations Executive, Britain’s undercover warfare specialists. They got as far as picking a likely date and a shooter to carry out the killing while Hitler was at his retreat in the Bavarian mountains.

Using a sniper was the final decision on taking out Hitler after bombs and poison had been ruled out. One of Hitler’s bodyguards had been captured and armed with information about his morning walks from which the SOE planned a sniper attack. There was even a - very brave - Austrian anti-Nazi involved as an “inside man”.

There was strong opposition to the plan. Hitler’s military skills were limited and any replacement plan might prove a better strategy. Some were concerned that making Hitler a martyr to some Germans would hamper the ultimate aim of wiping out Nazism as an idea. The Allies were confident of ultimate victory by this stage and in the end no decision was taken and the plan never went ahead.

A BBC drama on the plan estimated that killing Hitler in July 1944 - if it had ended the war - could have saved 10,000,000 lives.

2. The plan to invade Brazil

America was fortunate that it was distant from the main theatres of World War Two. There were agents, of course, and some Japanese attempts to attack the US mainland were made, but the war was never brought home in the way that it was for millions of European and Far Eastern citizens. It was perhaps with preserving that relative peace that the American military made detailed plans to invade Brazil and occupy much of its north coast in Operation Rubber [codenamed Plan Rubber].

As well as the possibility of the war arriving in South America, American strategists were concerned that Brazil’s important strategic location - the shortest crossing of the Atlantic to West Africa - might be opened to the Axis powers. Brazil was then a military dictatorship and the Allies believed that they might side with the Axis regimes that had much more in common with their government than the Allied (largely) democratic regimes.

When in 1941, the Brazilians refused American requests to use their bases and send in troops to guard American planes there, these concerns gained - perhaps unjustified - extra impetus. American intelligence reckoned that up to 70% of Brazilian army officers were pro-Nazi (though the air force and navy were probably pro-Allied) and Brazil was starting to look like a very tempting destination for invading or invited Axis forces.

The plan to invade Brazil was shelved after massive diplomatic efforts persuaded the Brazilians to allow US soldiers onto their territory. In the end, Brazil was won around and it cut all diplomatic ties with America’s enemies, eventually entering the war on the Allied side with its expeditionary force travelling to Europe where it became one of the most successful units in the invasion of Italy.

3. The race to Norway

Plan R 4 was a British plan to invade Norway - then neutral - in order to stop the Germans getting there first to secure supplies of iron ore to fuel their armaments industries.

The iron ore was mined in Sweden (the French would no longer supply a country that was soon to be sending troops across their border), but much of it shipped through Narvik in Norway, which remained ice free while the Swedish ports were frozen. British intelligence thought that if the supply was limited to Swedish ports, Hitler’s war machine would be short of four-fifths of the iron ore that it needed.

The plan involved a pretended attempt to send support to Finland (then under attack from the Soviet Union) which would ask for safe passage through Norway and Sweden and then simply stay in possession of the mines and ports. The Swedes and Norwegians saw through the subterfuge and said no to the transit requests.

The Germans had some idea of these plans and started work on plans [codenamed Operation Weserübung] to invade Denmark and Norway to secure their supplies. In the end, the Germans got there first and the Allies could only send troops to help the Norwegian resistance to a Nazi invasion where, despite some successes, they evacuated to leave the Germans in control by June 1940.

4. Thinking the unthinkable

Military planners can use some strange names for their work. Ian Fleming was involved in a cancelled operation called Goldeneye that he later used for his home and then for one of his James Bond stories. However, when they called this one Operation Unthinkable, the British and the Americans weren’t joking - it was a plan to extend the war with a surprise attack on the Soviets following the defeat of Germany.

The reasoning was stark. In the face of massive Soviet forces in the East of Europe and a country led by Josef Stalin, who the Western Allies thought ‘unreliable,’ which is understating things a little, the plan was to “impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire.”

July 1, 1945 was chosen for the proposed surprise attack, which would have involved massive numbers of men ploughing into the Soviet lines around Dresden. In the end the planners decided that such an attack would lead to a long, all-out war that the Allies had little chance of winning. Churchill asked his strategists to draw up plans for defensive operations against a Soviet attack under the same name, but this too was deemed to have little chance of success if the Americans focused on the Pacific theatre.

In the end neither plan went ahead. Russian troops were sent to the Far East to attack Japan and many of the countries the Western Allies hoped to protect (their first aim was a “fair deal for Poland”) vanished for decades under a new sort of Soviet colonialism.

5. So long Great Britain

Probably the best-known cancelled operation of the war was the German plan to carry on from the defeat of France, hop over the English Channel and subdue its last major enemy in Western Europe. Operation Sea Lion was planned out with meticulous detail but never quite made it because the Germans couldn’t guarantee naval and air supremacy for their crossing. However, it was a close run thing and the idea of a successful invasion of Britain has fascinated writers and historians ever since.

Plans to invade Britain had been around for a while, but got a boost when Hitler’s peace proposals were rejected, and on July 16, 1940, Hitler gave the go-ahead for the invasion plans. However, he put in place a number of conditions, basically putting the responsibility for the operation going ahead on the navy and air force, neither of whose leaders thought the plan was a goer.

That didn’t stop the Battle of Britain from going ahead, which was an attempt to wipe out the RAF as an effective barrier to the invasion. There was no chance the German navy, which was strong under the waves but less so above them, could destroy the Royal Navy and as planning progressed they were reduced to confiscating barges from occupied Europe to use as potential landing craft.

Enormous effort went into the planning, new equipment of all sorts was devised and built, the Germans even shot film (at Antwerp in Belgium) to be shown in their cinemas after the success of the operation. The British were certainly expecting the Germans to come and planned to face them on four date ranges when high tides would have been favourable to the invasion.

Hitler was convinced the invasion could not succeed in September 1940 and he turned his sights on to the Soviet Union.

Had the invasion gone ahead but failed, would it have dealt a terrible blow to the Nazis? Had it succeeded - and most military experts reckon it was all but impossible - would America have entered the war? Would Hitler ever have been stopped?

6. Through the back door

The United Kingdom is - in large part - a nation of islands, but does have a land border with one other country, its former colony the Republic of Ireland, or Eire. This back door route into the UK was considered by the Germans who drew up plans to invade Ireland themselves and also co-operated with the IRA on a proposed invasion of Northern Ireland called Plan Kathleen.

The IRA was inspired by ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ thinking and hoped to see a reunited Ireland as their reward. A plan was drawn up by an IRA volunteer and sent to the Germans, who weren’t impressed with it. The idea was for the Germans to make a landing while the IRA led a rising among the population. But the IRA men were no experts in detailed military planning and had no answers to the many questions the Nazis had.

However, the Germans did take the proposals as a sign of the IRA’s intent as an anti-British force who might be persuaded to take up arms with German support and inspired a later plan to attack Northern Ireland as a possible diversionary attack for an invasion of the British mainland. The plan was taken seriously until, apparently quite suddenly, the man behind it was told to start to focus on Gibraltar instead.

7. Invasion Australia!

This proposal is rather in the pipe dream category, but was certainly considered by the Japanese, with the Japanese Navy lobbying for an invasion on one of the British Empire’s most important possessions and a possible base for future American operations.

The plan came up in 1942. The target was to be Northern Australia, which the navy considered to be relatively lightly defended as the main military build-ups were around the country’s far-flung main cities.

The army weren’t so keen, arguing that they were overextended by the massive conquests in the Pacific they had already made. Australia remained a target, but the army and prime minister favoured a less offensive strategy - isolating Australia and raiding it from the air.

Australia did suffer major air raids from Japanese forces, but the only landings on Australian soil consisted of a party of four officers sent to reconnoitre some feared Allied bases.

8. Operation Tannenbaum, the plan to invade Switzerland

Switzerland’s neutrality survived the war, but wouldn’t have done so had Hitler had his way. The Fuhrer liked German-speaking countries and wanted them to join in his New Order, but had little luck in Switzerland. Despite reassuring the Swiss people they weren’t in his plans, he planned to invade as soon as his other enemies were vanquished.

Hitler’s views on the Swiss have been quoted. He said: “Switzerland possessed the most disgusting and miserable people and political system. The Swiss were the mortal enemies of the new Germany.” While he hated the multilingual, democratic Swiss, he had to acknowledge that many of them were Germans who should be welcomed to the Greater Germany he planned.

Expecting trouble, the Swiss started to spend a huge amount on their military and made a series of defensive plans.

As soon as France fell, the Germans set their sights on Switzerland, and high-ranking German officials feared one of Hitler’s apparently regular anti-Swiss rants would turn into orders to invade. Detailed plans were made, though German generals seemed to believe they would simply have to march across the border, while the Swiss had ambitious plans to make the Alps a defensive fortress. Many German operations included feints towards the Swiss border. In the end, no one is quite sure why Hitler didn’t go ahead with his plan.

[Source: Kizaz. Edited. Top image and links added.]