Recycle alert: This column first appeared in it’s current form on the web site StrategyPage.com in September 2002. I posted an earlier version on my website about five years ago.

What actually happened: Bad weather almost forced Ike to postpone D-Day at the last moment, but he decided to let it go ahead on June 6, 1944. Things worked out well, though a sudden, severe channel storm (the worst in a century) wrecked a lot of supply ships, wrecked the Mulberry artificial harbors, made air support impossible, and almost stopped resupply a couple of weeks later (June 19-22).

What might have happened: If the weather had been a little worse on June 6, Eisenhower would have been forced to postpone the landing. That by itself would have caused enormous security problems. Too many people had to know too much in the last day or two before the invasion. Hundreds of thousands of people would have to keep their mouths shut and not lose written material they had been given on the invasion. The German spy network in England had been neutralized, but the allies could not be sure there weren't other rings.

There would have been intense pressure to go at the next moment the moon and the tides were right. That would have put the landing around June 18 or 19, just in time for the severe storm. That storm, by the way, came up without warning, which is part of the reason it did a lot of the damage it did. If the allies had been caught by the storm in the early stages of the landing, with troops trying to establish themselves on the beaches, the troops that made it would have been cut off from resupply and reinforcements for almost four days. Allied air power would have been neutralized. The Germans might well have been able to destroy the invasion on the beaches and destroy airborne forces before they could link up with the main invasion force.

Immediate results: The initial invasion force is essentially wiped out—50,000 to 100,000 men killed or captured, including a lot of specialists like the airborne troops. The Allies also lose a lot of equipment captured or destroyed, including landing craft, specialized tanks modified to support the invasion force on the beaches, and other vital cogs in the wheels of an amphibious Allied landing. The artificial harbors that would have made supply over the beaches at Normandy possible are destroyed by the storm on their way over. Bottom line: D-Day has become an allied disaster that makes an immediate second try very difficult both politically and militarily.

Short-term results (through the end of July 1944)-Western Front:

Ironically, the Germans are slow to recognize the magnitude of their victory. Allied deception measures have convinced the German high command that Allied forces in England are much larger than they actually are. For almost a week the Germans remain convinced that the Normandy landings were simply a diversion, with the main landing still to come. That doesn’t prevent Nazi propagandists from trumpeting the victory as the defeat of an attempted Allied second front. For once they are telling the truth, but neither they nor most of their listeners really believe what they are saying, at least not at first.

The Allies work hard to maintain the illusion of the second great invasion, while Allied leaders try to figure out what to do next. British leaders have a chance to say “We told you so,” and they take advantage of that chance. The British have always favored a peripheral strategy rather than the strategy of an offensive into northern France. Now they push strongly for a renewal of the peripheral strategy, with offensives in Italy and possibly in the Balkans. US officials are chastened, and the Roosevelt Administration will probably be weakened politically in the long run, though there is an immediate “rally around the flag” reaction.

The British and Americans are bitterly divided on what to do next. An invasion of southern France like the one the Allies historically launched on August 15th may still be possible in August 1944, but only if the allies give up any hope of launching another invasion of northern France in 1944. The US is very reluctant to give up that option.

The British have no intention of launching another cross-Channel invasion in 1944. Even if the forces allocated to the invasion of southern France were stripped of anything needed for the northern invasion, rebuilding the specialized forces necessary to make that possible would take until at least late August at the most optimistic. The Allies would also have to come up with a new invasion plan, because the Germans would by now certainly be aware of most of the nuances of the D-Day plan.

Churchill has always opposed both the northern and the southern landings in France. His opposition to the southern landings has been far more bitter than his opposition to the northern ones. He thinks the forces earmarked for landing in southern France should be used to accelerate progress in Italy, or used for landings in the Balkans.

The Allies are continuing to make progress in Italy, and Churchill points to that as a way they are tying down German troops. They also concentrate on the air offensive, which is certainly having a huge impact on the war by tying down German planes and manpower, by keeping German production from growing as much as it otherwise would have, and by cutting German mobility as allied planes target coal gasification plants.

In the short-term, the western allies also launch a series of raids along the French coast, to try to pin as many German troops down there as possible. Allied war planners scramble to put together another invasion plan. They need to work fast, because weather in the English Channel will make any invasion increasingly risky by September or October at the latest. There are still plenty of allied divisions in England, but planners have to assess the number of landing craft now available. They have to look at how long it will take to build more of the specialized tanks needed to support the invasion in the initial stages. They have to look at how long it will take to train the initial wave of men for their roles. They have to figure out how to replace the artificial harbors that were lost, or figure out some way of doing the invasion without them. Even if they can put an invasion plan together, they have to convince shell-shocked allied leaders that it is worth the risk.

Churchill and Roosevelt hastily arrange a summit meeting for early July. That puts even more pressure on allied planners. The allied leaders need to know if another attempt in northern France is even possible in 1944. That is still a matter of some dispute by the time of the summit. It may be possible to put together another attempt by late August, but only at the cost of pulling in landing craft from southern France and retargeting new craft currently earmarked for the Pacific. Pulling an invasion together in that amount of time would require that key items for the invasion get absolute priority in shipping. Supplying forces between the time they hit the beaches and the time they captured a port would be very difficult without the Mulberries.

There would be a very narrow window between the time an invasion was feasible from an equipment point of view and the time it became impossible from a weather point-of-view. Bad weather on a few key nights or schedule slippage could easily make an invasion impossible anyway. The maximum effort would have to start immediately for there to be any chance of success. On the other hand, the removal of so many of the core German divisions from France may make it possible to take risks that would otherwise not be possible.

At the end of an extremely acrimonious summit, Roosevelt and Churchill come up with a compromise of sorts. The allies will work to restore their ability to do a cross-channel landing, with that landing probably to come in the spring of 1945. They will develop contingency plans for a landing in the event of a German collapse or a significant weakening of German defenses along the Atlantic. They will continue plans for the invasion of southern France, but that invasion will be postponed until the allies have regained some ability to do a cross-channel invasion. The allies don’t want a situation where the Germans strip defenses from the Atlantic coast to defeat a southern landing and the allies can’t respond to that opportunity.

Churchill is reasonably happy with that compromise, because he’s reasonably sure it will eventually mean no invasion of France in 1944. That in turn means that his peripheral strategy will ultimately prevail because the allies can’t let their armies sit doing nothing until April or May 1945.

Short-term results (through the end of July 1944) on the Eastern Front:

The Soviets become aware of the magnitude of the Allied defeat early on. The Soviets have just launched a major offensive against German Army Group Center. Historically, that offensive tore a gaping hole in the German front. Historically, the Soviets then exploited that hole to totally destroy roughly 28 German divisions, take back the last portion of the Soviet Union held by Germany, and push deep into pre-war Poland, handing the Germans a defeat considerably larger than the one at Stalingrad.

The Allied defeat at Normandy initially has little impact on the Soviet offensive. The Soviets do have to face some of the roughly 1000 planes that the Germans historically poured into France to counter the D-Day invasion. That makes their command of the air somewhat less absolute. Other than that though, the invasion starts out pretty much as it did historically.

Hitler has forced the German army to concentrate divisions that are much needed on the front line in fortified areas. Troops in those fortified areas are supposed to dominate transportation chokepoints, slowing the momentum of any attack that penetrates between the fortified areas. In theory, the fortified areas should be able to hold out until German mobile forces crush the weakened Soviet forces that have bypassed them. In reality, the Germans simply don’t have much in the way of mobile forces in the area, and the Soviets have built up their logistical capability to the point where they can bypass the German-held transportation centers without losing much momentum.

The Soviets have a problem. Their initial attack is as successful as they could have hoped for. Unfortunately for them, the Allied defeat at Normandy has just potentially freed up a rather large number of German divisions. The Germans have over 50 divisions in France but many of them are static divisions, capable only of fighting from a fortified position. The Germans have roughly 24 divisions in France that they rate as capable of fighting on the eastern front. Nine of those are panzer divisions. Most of the rest are infantry divisions or parachute divisions fighting as infantry.

The panzer divisions worry the Soviets. Collectively they have over 1500 German-made tanks, including over 500 Panthers. The German line has collapsed and created a gap over 200 miles wide. The Soviets would normally need to move quickly to exploit their advantage—to keep the Germans off-balance and keep them from establishing a coherent defensive line. That means pushing aggressively with armored spearheads, ignoring vulnerable flanks and relying on ability to react faster than the enemy.

The Soviet nightmare is a panzer-led counter-attack that cuts off those Soviet armored spearheads after they’ve been worn down by the stresses of attacking over miles of rough country. That’s how the Germans restored the front in the aftermath of Stalingrad. Time and time again the Soviets have pushed a little too far and had German mobile forces turn victories into defeats, or at least into draws.

Stalin is pretty sure the Red Army is going to have to fight the majority of those nine panzer divisions and their 1500-plus tanks. He would rather fight them on his own terms rather than on theirs. At the same time the Soviets are near a smashing victory. If they can take the ByeloRussian capital of Minsk, they will have won a decisive victory, trapping the bulk of Army Group Center. That prospect is a little too tempting, and in late June the Soviet armored spearheads find themselves in a wild series of mobile battles with six of the nine battle-worthy German panzer divisions from France and nine of the fifteen battle-worthy infantry or parachute divisions attempting to turn the tide in the east with a series of counter-attacks.

This is exactly the type of battle that the Germans have always excelled at, but the Soviets have learned a great deal in the last three years. They also have a considerable edge in numbers of tanks, planes, and divisions even with the German reinforcements. The Germans do manage to push back the pincers closing on Minsk and establish a new defensive line, but the effort leaves the Panzer divisions exhausted, down to less than half of the slightly over 1000 tanks they started out with. The Soviets lose larger numbers of tanks—over 1500 in the two weeks of the battle, but they can afford those losses. The Germans now have very little in the way of reserves for either the eastern or the western front.

The Soviets consolidate their gains in the second and third weeks of July. There are still “moving pockets” of German troops trying to fight their way back to German lines, and a few holdouts in some of the fortified areas. The Germans have lost ten to fifteen divisions—heavy losses, but less than half the roughly twenty-eight divisions that they lost historically. They are actually considerably stronger than they were at the beginning of the Soviet offensive due to the reinforcements from France. That infuriates Stalin. He puts a great deal of pressure on the western Allies to try again. The Soviets go back on the offensive in late July, but make slow progress.

The Soviets and Germans race to rebuild their mobile forces. Historically, the Germans ramped up their tank production considerably in mid-1944. Monthly production of medium tanks was probably in the 600-700 range in June, the majority of them Panthers. The Germans also produced around 100 heavy tanks, and on the order of 1000 assault guns, tank destroyers, and other armored fighting vehicles. Historically, much of that production went to replace losses on the western front. In this scenario, around ninety percent of that production heads east; quickly rebuilding German tank strength. Soviet tank production is still considerably higher than German production—considerably over 1000 per month not counting Lend-Lease vehicles, but the fact that the Soviets are facing the bulk of German armor production makes the battle of production considerably closer than it was historically.

August 1944-September 1944: The French Resistance has been decimated. It made a supreme effort at the time of the landing, but the Germans have been free to throw as much at the French as they needed to with the threat of invasion temporarily lifted.

The quick failure of the D-Day landings has a negative affect on the air war over Germany. Historically, the Germans threw a large number of half-trained pilots into the battle for France, and quickly lost most of them along with their fighter planes. The Germans moved around 1000 planes into France after D-day and lost almost all of them. In this scenario, many of those pilots and their planes are available for their intended role—rebuilding German air defenses. There are nowhere near enough of them, and some of them are sucked in the eastern front battles, but the Germans are rapidly expanding fighter production.

Hanging on to France helps the German air effort in a number of ways. The Germans use French factories to some extent to produce aircraft parts and ancillary aircraft. German early warning radars are more effective when they have the depth that France gives them. Allied warplanes still have to fly from England rather than from French bases, which limits their ability to loiter over German airspace to some extent.

German advantages in the air war compound themselves. Better German air defenses means somewhat less damage to oil facilities, which in turn means more fuel to train pilots, which in turn means better air defenses in the future. The impact is not huge initially. US and British forces still control the skies over Germany in July of 1944. That control is just not quite as total as it was historically.

One other thing has changed. As Hitler convinces himself that the invasion of France has been defeated, he allows the ME-262 to be put into production as a pure fighter jet. He wanted the bomber version mainly because of its potential role in disrupting the invasion. He figures that by the time the Allies try again purpose-built jet bombers like the Arado 234 will be available. That decision doesn’t have as much impact as some postwar accounts would imply. The Me-262’s engines are still nowhere near ready for reliable mass production, and there are still a large number of bugs to be ironed out before the jet can be truly operational. Still, the German fighter force can now openly prepare to bring the new fighter into service.

By the end of July, the world of this scenario has diverged considerably from ours. Instead of the war in Europe being essentially won, it is still an iffy thing. Allied production still dwarfs German production, and the allies are still on the offensive everywhere they are in contact with the Germans. At the same time, an early end to the war doesn’t seem likely.

The western allies are still engaged in their tug-of-war over strategy. England is renewing its push to get the Americans to concentrate on Italy and the Balkans, using the threat of a second attempt at France as a means of pinning down Germans, while the real action happens elsewhere. The Americans want to make another try in France, at least doing the southern landing but Roosevelt is politically weakened by the D-Day disaster with an election coming up. The American navy is pushing for a Japan-first strategy. Roosevelt is buoyed politically by continuing successes in the Pacific. He is very reluctant to push for another risky invasion with the election approaching. On the other hand the Soviets would howl if their promised second front didn't happen in some form. US diplomats have been quietly promising that at least the landings in the south of France will happen in 1944.

The US has become by far the dominant of the two western allies. However, it can’t always translate that dominance into a dominant policy role. As Churchill foresaw, by the time the allies have the means to launch a significant landing in northern France it is obviously too late in the year to do so. If the allies invade southern France and the Germans respond by shifting troops south, the allies won’t be able to respond. Churchill gets his peripheral strategy, at least until spring of 1945.

Eastern Front: As the magnitude of the German victory at Normandy becomes apparent, it has political consequences. That’s especially true in Romania. Historically, the Romanians switched sides on August 23 of 1944, taking Germany’s last major source of natural oil with them. In this time-line the Romanians decide to wait a while longer. Finland continues to edge away, but more cautiously.

The Soviets are still on the offensive, but they are also quietly talking to the Germans through intermediaries. Stalin is extremely tired of winning victories only to see the destroyed divisions replaced by ones pulled from an inactive western front. He would like to see Soviet troops in Berlin, and even Paris, but he is worried about the long term impact on the Soviet Union of the effort required to get there without western help on the ground. He would be quite happy to return to the situation prior to the German invasion, with Soviets rebuilding while the Germans and western allies grind each other down. On the other hand US Lend Lease is very attractive, and there is no guarantee that the western allies will ever invade the continent if the Soviets reach a separate peace with the Germans.

The reconstituted panzer divisions are also still a threat, making wide-ranging offensives very dangerous. The Soviets continue to advance, but by the end of September 1944, the Germans still control the Romanian oil fields, Poland, and still have a dwindling toehold in the pre-war Soviet Union.

Consequences through the end of the war: As we get further from the divergence point, things get much more iffy. The Allies have an overwhelming advantage in production and manpower. The Germans are handicapped by the fact that Hitler is leading them. On the other hand, Germany has technical superiority in tanks and aircraft, and the Speer industry mobilization has more resources to work with. Keeping France’s more than 40 million people in Germany’s economic orbit would give the German economy a major boost, as would keeping Romanian oil and Polish agriculture. Those factors allow German production to rise even more than it actually did in late 1944 and early 1945.

Producing vast numbers of conventional aircraft and Sherman tanks with 75mm guns doesn't help the allies as much as the numbers suggest if those aircraft are going up against a couple thousand ME262s and those tanks have to face Panthers and Tigers.

The real Normandy invasion made the army face up to problems with the Sherman, and forced rapid improvements, as well as production of the Pershing. Encounters with Panthers and Tigers in Italy hadn't done that. They might eventually have in this scenario, or survivors of the Normandy invasion could have brought back stories of Sherman tanks unable to penetrate Panthers at any range. That could have shaken the army out of its complacency. If it didn't, a good part of allied tank production would be nearly obsolete by 1945.

Italy would be a long hard climb, even with the additional allied resources. In the absence of a strong Western front, the Soviet Army would have made some gains, but those gains would have been slower and much more costly than they were historically. Soviet losses in the war were historically incredibly high. In this scenario, the Germans were able to shift divisions east, and just as importantly new production flowed there rather than being chewed up on the western front. The Soviets would have had an even tougher time. Another year of relatively even fighting would have made losses even higher. At some point even the Soviets might have been exhausted. They might have even sought a separate peace, though that would have been difficult given the level of hatred the Nazi had created.

The war in the air would be interesting. Historically the Germans got the ME-262’s engine problems under control enough that it was ready for large-scale production in October 1944, though small quantities were produced before then. From October on, the air war would become more difficult for the allies. What impact would that have on any allied landings in France in the spring of 1945? There would be some, though more from the reconnaissance version of the Arado 234 jet bomber than anything else. Any German air resurgence would probably not be enough to abort the allied landings, though it might make them more costly.

By mid-1945 we might see clashes between B29 bombers and ME-262s. It would be interesting to see how that played out. The US might rush the P80 jet fighter into production if the German jets became too major of a problem. They were planning to have it in large scale production by late 1945. Moving that up would mean getting some pilots killed in unreliable early production models.

The End of the War: In any case, the war would probably still end in August or September 1945, with the US dropping atom bombs on Berlin. That would be followed in fairly short order by the German military deposing Hitler and suing for peace. As in Japan, the atomic bomb would just be the last straw for an increasingly war-weary population and leadership. Hopefully the Germans wouldn't be stupid enough to continue to fight it out. We didn’t have a large number of atomic bombs in the pipe-line, but the Germans would not know that. So, we would have peace in August or September 1945. The peace that resulted would be far different from the one in our world though.

The German army could still control all of Germany, most of France and Poland, and part of the Balkans when the bombs dropped. As the Germans surrendered, things could get very ugly.

• Communist and anti-Communist forces would rush to "liberate" territory in the Balkans and France.
• The Soviets would scramble to grab as much as they could in the east.
• The Polish home army would try to seize Warsaw and other key Polish cities before the Soviets got there.
• Soviet citizens serving in the German army and even some slave laborers would fight to avoid being sent back to Russia.
• Die-hard Nazis would yell "stab in the back" and try to take back the government. At that point I doubt that they would get much support. However, Germany would be a dangerously unstable place until Allied troops arrived.
• Laborers from every country in Europe would mill around, trying to get home, and/or fighting.
• Ukrainians and Poles would fight for any Ukrainian-speaking territory still in German hands.
• The Yugoslavs would have a three or more cornered war between Croatian nationalists, Serbian nationalists, and Communists.
• A series of bitter little wars would break out along the eastern borders of Germany, as Czechoslovakia and Poland attempted to seize border regions and expel their German populations.

Assuming that the Germans surrendered after an atomic attack, would the Japanese follow suit? I’m guessing that they would, simply because even the Allied conventional attacks were destroying Japan as an organized society. If the Japanese did surrender there might be a larger and more significant number of holdouts. With the Germans undefeated until August 1945, the Soviets would not have been able to shift massive amounts of troops to attack Manchuria. They would have probably still tried to grab some territory as soon as the bombs dropped, but without 3 or 4 months of preparations, the results would not have been as spectacular. American reaction would not have been as kind either. With Communists fighting for power in several European countries, the United States would undoubtedly see a Manchurian attack as contemptible.

Unless the allies had already settled who would control what after the war before the bombs dropped, the aftermath would be messy.

• The German army would want to surrender to the Western Allies, but the Soviets would resist that.
• German and Japanese military equipment would be a prize to be seized by a bewildering array of countries and would-be countries.
• Surrendering Germans would set the balance of power between Hungary and Romania, between Hungary and Slovakia.
• Every territorial dispute in eastern and Central Europe would be reopened.
• The Nationalist and Communist Chinese would race to take surrenders of Japanese military and parts of Manchuria not in Soviet hands.
• The chances for clashes between the Soviets and a non-communist Poland over border regions would be very high.
•  France would be even weaker than it was historically during the period immediately after World War II. It would not have had ten months between D-Day and the German surrender to rebuild its army, and France would have endured another year of bombing. As a result, French Indochina might slide out France’s grasp without a prolonged fight.
• The Soviets would not get access to German missile technology. That wouldn’t stop the Soviets from getting ICBMs, but it might delay them by a few years. What would that do to the space race?

The western allies would have to make some very tough choices in a very short time. Would they be able to make a real peace, or would World War II against the Nazis quickly merge into a second round between the west and the Soviets? Would the German people accept defeat or would they try again in twenty years? What kind of world would emerge? My guess is that it would be a fun place to write about, but I wouldn't want to live there. What do you think?

Second thoughts-some possible objections to this scenario:

1. Would the Soviet advance really be as slow as this scenario has it being? That’s a tough one to call. Historically the Soviet advance from June 22, 1944 on became a series of routs, with one German army after another collapsing under Soviet attack. This scenario assumes that German collapses after the collapse of Army Group Center were
• At least partly the result of that initial collapse. German troops had to be pulled out of other parts of the eastern front to plug the gap left by the huge defeat in the center, leaving those parts of the line vulnerable.
• Partly because already inadequate amounts of replacement manpower and equipment had to be divided between the two active fronts. The Germans could somewhat hold their own in late 1943 and early 1944 because they could send the vast majority of new manpower and material east. They folded in late 1944 and early 1945 when that was no longer the case.
2. Would there still be a significant number of German generals alive to try to take power? That would be partly a matter of whether or not the assassination attempt and attempted coup of July 1944 happened in this scenario. I’m guessing the defeat of the Normandy landing would have led to cold feet on a large enough number of plotters that the attempt would not have been made until later if at all.
3. What about German wonder weapons? The German jets would have made life difficult for the Allies in late 1944 and 1945, but German pilot quality would have remained low due to inadequate fuel for training, offsetting the German technical advantage. The US developed tactics for handling jets based on mock dogfights between US conventional fighters and pre-production US P80 jet fighters. Those tactics, along with superior pilots and far superior numbers would have probably maintained Allied air superiority, though it that superiority would not be as absolute as it was historically. The V1 and V2 were impressive technical achievements, but as weapons they were a waste of resources. New models of U-Boats might have taken the field, but after the collapse of Japanese naval power any resurgence of the U-Boat threat could have been countered by enormous numbers of US escort carriers moved over from the Pacific.