Semi-OT: Reasons "The Man in the High Castle" couldn't happen

[Lokasenna]

I have a friend who just started watching the show. What I'm looking for is reasons why it could never happen. I've already tried to explain that no, Germany wouldn't have ever been able to invade America, nor would Japan. I understand that it's a historical fantasy and that the themes of the show can be separated from the setting, etc., but I just find the setting beyond far-fetched and in the realm of implausible. Please confirm.

I brought up lack of ships, lack of fuel, lack of surprise (presumed aerial detection), lack of shipping again, US technological and manufacturing advantage, etc. The little nuggets and bunches of details that this forum's community has in their brains would be really helpful [:'(].

[Canoerebel]

The premise is certainly as plausible as Harry Turtledove's Guns of the South. Meaning: impossibility offered solely for lighthearted entertainment purposes.

P.S. I have no idea what The Man in the High Castle is. I've never heard of it. So my opinion is based solely upon your brief description.

[Trugrit]

I’ve never read the book and never seen the show. I’m not very interested in alternate history
But I think the book deals with concepts other than war reality.

I think you should go to Amazon and read some of the book reviews.
There are about 940 reviews and it appears that people either love it or hate it; not
For the sole reason of the implausibility of German/Japanese invasion and occupation of America.

Of course the Germans could not have launched a successful invasion of the U.S. with the one
Exception being that if Nazi Germany had developed nuclear weapons before the U.S.
In that scenario all bets are off on the outcome of the war.

[Leandros]

ORIGINAL: Trugrit

Of course the Germans could not have launched a successful invasion of the U.S. with the one
Exception being that if Nazi Germany had developed nuclear weapons before the U.S.
In that scenario all bets are off on the outcome of the war.

Which is interesting because Swedish TV just started showing a new 6-part series of the "Heavy Water Action".

The first part was quite good, I liked that the parties involved spoke their original languages. The "heroes",
of course, were "normal" Norwegians - which made it even better...[;)]...

Fred

[geofflambert]

I remember a movie, I don't think it was T T T but after the PH attack one of the generals or admirals meeting with FDR had a line something like "My god, they could invade in California and come all the way here and capture the capital!" I just pictured the Japanese army riding their bicycles up Route 66. [:'(][:D]

[geofflambert]

Too bad that Jonathan Winters and Brian Keith aren't around to make "The Japanese are coming! The Japanese are coming!"

[Yaab]

Germany could have invaded USA provided she had had an unsinkable carrier in likes of UK as a jump off for the invasion. Think Cuba allied with Germany.

[Jorge_Stanbury]

Well, GB is too far... and invading Cuba or any other Caribbean island would be as difficult as invading the US... because the USN would not remain idle while this invasion is taking place

That said, I saw some Nicaraguan/ Cuban communist guerrillas invading Florida in that 1985's classic; "Invasion USA"
but thanks god Chuck Norris wouldn't allow it

[Yaab]

Technically, the US forces just had to cross the English Channel in amphibious mode in order to invade France. I guess the Germans would have had to use Cuba as a staging area for their invaion of Florida then.

[geofflambert]

And that was before we completed the defenses of Florida with reticulated pythons. Crocodiles and alligators were not enough.

[geofflambert]

Also, unfortunately for the Hun, Margaritaville did not yet exist.

[Yaab]

Swamps, alligators... You say Texas would have been a better invasion spot? Alligators with guns?

[geofflambert]

ORIGINAL: Yaab

Swamps, alligators... You say Texas would have been a better invasion spot? Alligators with guns?

Yes, another advantage for the Hun was "Texas Tea" did exist. That is, Long Island Iced Tea without the iced tea. [:D] Incidentally, W.C. Fields' formulation for a martini was 'A glass of gin over which the shadow of a bottle of vermouth has passed'. [:D]

[mind_messing]

ORIGINAL: Lokasenna

I have a friend who just started watching the show. What I'm looking for is reasons why it could never happen. I've already tried to explain that no, Germany wouldn't have ever been able to invade America, nor would Japan. I understand that it's a historical fantasy and that the themes of the show can be separated from the setting, etc., but I just find the setting beyond far-fetched and in the realm of implausible. Please confirm.

I brought up lack of ships, lack of fuel, lack of surprise (presumed aerial detection), lack of shipping again, US technological and manufacturing advantage, etc. The little nuggets and bunches of details that this forum's community has in their brains would be really helpful [:'(].

I finished reading TMITHC recently as well (not seen the series), and the premise of it was a departure point before Roosevelt's election that leads to an ultra-isolationist USA that doesn't get involved in WW2 until the Axis have the overwhelming advantage in the European theater and atomic bombs. Essentially the US buries it's head in the sand until it's too late due to elections, which in the grand scheme of things isn't a massive flight of fantasy.

In terms of what you're asking after:

- China needs to be wrapped up to free up the IJA for an invasion of the US. Tricky, as the Japanese would still need significant garrisons to ensure the loyalty of the collaborationist regime.
- Russia needs to be beaten. Not impossible if the Germans are kicking down doors at Moscow.
- The need for oil is still paramount as in our time-line. That means the Philippines, Malaya and the DEI.
- Requirement for another Pearl Harbor style surprise attack that sinks the USN carriers, or a Midway style battle to hand Japanese naval dominance in the Pacific.
- The Japanese then need to take Hawaii, and then land on the west coast and win. While keeping their imports up. Shipping shortage anyone?

Of these, the big stumbling blocks are #1, 4 & 5.

[wdolson]

ORIGINAL: Yaab

Technically, the US forces just had to cross the English Channel in amphibious mode in order to invade France. I guess the Germans would have had to use Cuba as a staging area for their invaion of Florida then.

The US and UK were just barely able to invade France in 1944, but to do so they had to do the following:

1) Make sure the bulk of the German army was bogged down thousands of miles away. Most people don't know Operation Bagration was timed to come right after the Normandy invasion to make sure the Germans didn't transfer any units to the west.
2) Completely control the Atlantic. Subs won't do it, a blue water navy was needed. Subs can deny control of a body of water to someone else, but they can't control a body of water themselves. Germany would have had to build a blue water navy at least as big as the navies the US and UK were committing to the Atlantic. This was beyond their industrial capacity.
3) Build a large fleet of amphibious vehicles and other specialize landing ships for the invasion.
4) Support the invasion with a huge supply train from the home country.

Any move from Germany to ally with Cuba along with the slightest interest from Cuba would have likely triggered an American invasion of Cuba. One of the things that brought the US into WW I was Germany making alliance offers to Mexico with promises that Mexico could keep large swaths of the US after they defeat the US. Mexico wisely declined.

The US is the only country to ever win a full scale war on two fronts at once. Between the large population and massive industrial capacity, the US was the toughest opponent in the world in 1940. And then attempting an invasion of the US would have been complete folly without some major advantage nobody had. The entire New World is a natural fortress. The only navy in world history that ever had the lift capacity to pull off an invasion of the US was the USN circa 1945 and even then it would have been tough.

Gaining a foothold in the New World is tough. The US has followed the Monroe Doctrine since the 1820s and other powers have not messed with the New World much since then. The Monroe Doctrine says the US will react strongly and quickly to any outside power trying to establish a military presence anywhere in the New World. Even if the isolationists were in power, they would have reacted to any move by Germany in this hemisphere. A beachhead on Cuba would have been throttled in short order by air power and the USN if not a counter invasion of Cuba.

Trying to just hold on to a presence in Cuba would have been at least as difficult if not more difficult than it would have been for Japan to hold onto Midway.

And subduing the US population if they could have invaded would have been an even tougher task. All but one successful occupation of the 20th century had at least a ratio of 20 soldiers per 1000 population. And that is only after the civilian population has mostly been disarmed. It takes closer to 100 per 1000 when there is an active insurgency. The US had a population of 132 million in 1940. That would have required an occupation army of about 2.6 million troops and an invasion force of about 13 million. The entire German army in 1940 was 6.6 million men. The total who served through the entire war including the Volkstrum was about 18 million.

Assuming Germany had conquered all of Europe, they would need millions of garrison troops to control all the conquered territories or see mass uprisings they couldn't subdue. That would have tied down million of troops there. Then they would have had to man a vastly larger navy and merchant marine, which would have tied down millions more, leaving them without enough men for the invasion and occupation force for the US operation.

It's just plain impossible.

The Man in the High Castle is a Phillip K Dick novel. He tended to use his premises as a launching point for some deeper message or explore some facet of human nature. I haven't been able to bring myself to watch the show, the premise is too far fetched for my tastes, though there is a parallel worlds/time travel series by John Barnes that had a successful invasion of the US scenario that was feasible. The protagonist went to a parallel 1960 where the Allies had been almost completely defeated because Germany was given advanced technology by another group from another parallel world in the late 1930s. It's an entertaining and fast moving story, I've read the series twice and I almost never read books twice.

Bill

[Lokasenna]

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

The premise is certainly as plausible as Harry Turtledove's Guns of the South. Meaning: impossibility offered solely for lighthearted entertainment purposes.

P.S. I have no idea what The Man in the High Castle is. I've never heard of it. So my opinion is based solely upon your brief description.

Right, I'm OK with that (bold part) in principle. I think it's just the degree of familiarity that I have with WW2 thanks to this game, this forum, and all the video and other material I've absorbed.



The German A-bomb point I hadn't thought of. I suppose in that instance, anything's possible (assuming no A-bomb for USA). Better to surrender and save your people, regardless of the conditions.

ORIGINAL: Jorge_Stanbury

Well, GB is too far... and invading Cuba or any other Caribbean island would be as difficult as invading the US... because the USN would not remain idle while this invasion is taking place

That said, I saw some Nicaraguan/ Cuban communist guerrillas invading Florida in that 1985's classic; "Invasion USA"
but thanks god Chuck Norris wouldn't allow it

OK, but what does invading Florida get them? So far as I know, that area wasn't exactly strategically important. Most of the wartime industry was elsewhere, and an invasion would've been repulsed eventually.

ORIGINAL: wdolson

ORIGINAL: Yaab

Technically, the US forces just had to cross the English Channel in amphibious mode in order to invade France. I guess the Germans would have had to use Cuba as a staging area for their invaion of Florida then.

The US and UK were just barely able to invade France in 1944, but to do so they had to do the following:

1) Make sure the bulk of the German army was bogged down thousands of miles away. Most people don't know Operation Bagration was timed to come right after the Normandy invasion to make sure the Germans didn't transfer any units to the west.
2) Completely control the Atlantic. Subs won't do it, a blue water navy was needed. Subs can deny control of a body of water to someone else, but they can't control a body of water themselves. Germany would have had to build a blue water navy at least as big as the navies the US and UK were committing to the Atlantic. This was beyond their industrial capacity.
3) Build a large fleet of amphibious vehicles and other specialize landing ships for the invasion.
4) Support the invasion with a huge supply train from the home country.

Any move from Germany to ally with Cuba along with the slightest interest from Cuba would have likely triggered an American invasion of Cuba. One of the things that brought the US into WW I was Germany making alliance offers to Mexico with promises that Mexico could keep large swaths of the US after they defeat the US. Mexico wisely declined.

The US is the only country to ever win a full scale war on two fronts at once. Between the large population and massive industrial capacity, the US was the toughest opponent in the world in 1940. And then attempting an invasion of the US would have been complete folly without some major advantage nobody had. The entire New World is a natural fortress. The only navy in world history that ever had the lift capacity to pull off an invasion of the US was the USN circa 1945 and even then it would have been tough.

Gaining a foothold in the New World is tough. The US has followed the Monroe Doctrine since the 1820s and other powers have not messed with the New World much since then. The Monroe Doctrine says the US will react strongly and quickly to any outside power trying to establish a military presence anywhere in the New World. Even if the isolationists were in power, they would have reacted to any move by Germany in this hemisphere. A beachhead on Cuba would have been throttled in short order by air power and the USN if not a counter invasion of Cuba.

Trying to just hold on to a presence in Cuba would have been at least as difficult if not more difficult than it would have been for Japan to hold onto Midway.

And subduing the US population if they could have invaded would have been an even tougher task. All but one successful occupation of the 20th century had at least a ratio of 20 soldiers per 1000 population. And that is only after the civilian population has mostly been disarmed. It takes closer to 100 per 1000 when there is an active insurgency. The US had a population of 132 million in 1940. That would have required an occupation army of about 2.6 million troops and an invasion force of about 13 million. The entire German army in 1940 was 6.6 million men. The total who served through the entire war including the Volkstrum was about 18 million.

Assuming Germany had conquered all of Europe, they would need millions of garrison troops to control all the conquered territories or see mass uprisings they couldn't subdue. That would have tied down million of troops there. Then they would have had to man a vastly larger navy and merchant marine, which would have tied down millions more, leaving them without enough men for the invasion and occupation force for the US operation.

It's just plain impossible.

The Man in the High Castle is a Phillip K Dick novel. He tended to use his premises as a launching point for some deeper message or explore some facet of human nature. I haven't been able to bring myself to watch the show, the premise is too far fetched for my tastes, though there is a parallel worlds/time travel series by John Barnes that had a successful invasion of the US scenario that was feasible. The protagonist went to a parallel 1960 where the Allies had been almost completely defeated because Germany was given advanced technology by another group from another parallel world in the late 1930s. It's an entertaining and fast moving story, I've read the series twice and I almost never read books twice.

Bill

Thanks Bill. This is essentially what I was trying to tell him but given we were speaking over IM, it's hard to have things in such an ordered format. The one trump would be A-bomb capability, really, which I suppose is in the P. K. Dick premise, but again - it's just a bit too far out there for me considering everything that actually happened in history. Changing more than just wartime outcomes, having to go back farther into history beyond the beginning of WW2 in order to change things... and then assuming that WW2 would still happen more or less as it did except sans USA involvement... too much for me to take it seriously, but I hadn't ruled it out as something to watch idly while doing something else.

[wdolson]

There was a documentary I saw several years ago that made the case that while Germany was quite advanced in many areas of engineering, they had fallen behind in science because most of the cutting edge scientists in central Europe were Jewish and had fled to other countries when the Nazis came to power. It made doing the basic science necessary to get to an atomic weapon much harder. The US and UK joined together their scientists along with an advanced engineering team and other talent from other countries who had fled to the US or UK.

It's not to say Germany probably couldn't have made atomic weapons eventually, but it probably would have taken a fair bit longer than the Manhattan Project took.

[BBfanboy]

Developing the science behind atomic fission is one thing, having the capability to make a bomb is another. I am not aware of any sources of uranium in Europe, the nearest would be somewhere in Soviet Siberia. So the USSR needs to be conquered first.
Then there is the extraction and refining/enrichment of the uranium which required enormous effort by a very large industrial facility. I forget how many months it took the US to produce enough U-235 and Plutonium for the three A-bombs they had. It was well over a year IIRC.
I just can't see Germany pulling together the kind of project the US did without reaction by the US who would get there first.

[JeffroK]

Why Cuba??

How about Labrador, Bermuda/Bahamas to provide a base in the south.

Depending on the political war, look at the US Armed forces of 1940 rather than 1945.
All of that Isolationist rubbishm Die Bund etc might see the US starting very late to re-arm.

[CaptBeefheart]

I read the book recently and don't think it's completely off the wall. You have FDR getting assassinated in 1933 (in real life, he narrowly missed being shot by the same character in 1932 just before his inauguration) and then a succession of isolationist U.S. presidents. Imagine Russia losing and the big 1940 navy/army buildup not happening until 1942, with the Manhattan Project behind Germany's efforts.

Cheers,
CC