Removing the benefit of hindsight, was there anything the Allies could have done that could have won World War 2 sooner?

This is an excellent item..  Recall that the German victory in France was based on wonderful good luck.  Anything done ahead of that event would have completely stopped Hitler's progress cold.  After that he was out of anyone's control.

This points out that the Brits had a winning hand in Norway and had they stayed in play the strategic position would have also altered the dispositions in front of the French.  In fact a Norgegian base would have supported a full on air war gainst Germany where it was most vulnerable.  I never understood this.

The fact is that German strength was prematurely deployed in 1940.  Unfortunately they got wonderfully lucky.  

Removing the benefit of hindsight, was there anything the Allies could have done that could have won World War 2 sooner?

David Rendahl

, 

former Intelligence Analyst at British Army

Plenty: I will limit myself to debates had by the Allies over strategy, where an alternate was suggested. 

Don't pull out of Norway in 1940 

British and French troops had just won the initiative in northern Norway and were poised to extend into Central Norway - German hold there was weak and their supplies had to cross dangerous seas to get there. 

Then Germany began its blitzkrieg. The Allies decide to pull all their troops and aircraft from Norway to reinforce France. They abandoned a campaign with momentum in Norway, a democratic, hard fighting country, with a will to win and geo-strategic importance to reposition not 1% of their fighting strength. 

They thought the 38,000 troops and handful of squadrons were needed in France. I cant think of anything those troops would have added to the 3.3 million allied troops and 5,000 aircraft in France and Belgium. The Norwegian Expeditionary force was largely supplied through the UK so they weren't even a drain on French or BEF reserves. 

Had they been allowed to pursue the Germans out of central Norway and start threatening Oslo the Germans have two options - withdraw the lot as a failed adventure or reinforce. One is a huge psychological win just when the Allies needed one, the other draws resources and upsets timetables for the battle in France. For very little effort. 

Oh and you close down the North Sea and Kattegat to the German Navy and disrupt vital iron ore imports into the German war industry. 

It was madness to abandon Norway and several MPs and Generals said so. Admiral Roger Keyes marched into Parliament in full dress uniform and condemned the government for its actions. 

Mediterranean Islands 1941 to 1942 

Crete, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Rhodes. Throughout the whole war the Allies greatest strength was Naval Superiority. British strategy has long been island focused - not keeping its troops locked into an attritional continental campaign for very long. Using the fleet to choose your campaigns. 

The Aegean islands were abandoned to their fate and losing them placed huge restrictions on naval operations in the Eastern Med. Just three of the 100 fighter Squadrons doing nuisance ’circus’ raids over Northern France and you held Crete. Hold Crete and Navy can dominate the Aegean. 

Air Vice Marshall Collishaw was begging for those fighters, for most of this time he had but one Hurricane squadron to cover the canal, Nile, western desert, Aegean and Greece. His remaining four fighter squadrons were in Gladiators. That’s why the Germans risked their airborne assault on Crete. 

RAF command preferred to sack Collishaw and use their massive resources to reverse engineer the Luftwaffe errors in the BoB, giving away a home advantage to wear down Fighter Command over France to no strategic purpose. We would also lose Malaya because of this short sightedness in fighter dispositions. 

Operation Torch 

Allies had unchallenged naval superiority and increasing air superiority from the middle of 1941. Using this to its maximum the Operation Torch landings didn’t have to start in Morocco and Algeria, but go straight to Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica. 

Why we decided to work our way along the North African coast, giving time for the Axis to circle the wagons in Tunisia, and then launch an attack into Sicily after it has been reinforced, and then start in the bottom left hand corner of Italy and work our way over a thousand mountains - when we had the ability to capture the barely garrisoned Tyrrhenian Sea islands in mid 1942 is a mystery. 

It was certainly a mystery to Admiral Ramsay who proposed using the Op Torch resources that way. 

Instead we went for long protracted campaigns from the furthest points on land, where the enemy had resources to put behind superb geographic defensive features. Put an army on Corsica in June 1942 you put Vichy in a bind, take Sicily in June 1942 you put half a million axis troops in Africa up the creek. 

The Axis now have to write off their entire Med strategy and find the resources to defend the oilfields of Romania and coastlines of Greece, Italy and Southern France, right around the time they were reaching their limits in Russia. 

Once you held those islands the Axis weren't taking them back without naval superiority. Which they weren't going to get. 

Invading French Indochina 

We assessed that Madagascar was vulnerable to Japanese invasion and diverted resources from North Africa to take it. We were busy taking out French controlled Lebanon and Syria with the overstretched Middle East command troops. But somehow couldn't find the men from the large and largely unused Indian Army to take French Indochina in late 1940? Before the Japanese get there. Game changer in the Pacific. 

Area Bombing 

You just don't reinforce failure. Late 1941 Bomber Command was getting 1% of its bombs within 5 miles of the target. We had the Mosquito coming online, Barnes Wallis had his earthquake bombs on paper and Romania had come into play - so its oilfields were now valid targets. The RAF went for area bombing and would consume close to half British wartime spending turning over rubble in Germany dormitory areas. A huge waste of resources that cost us dearly in other important campaigns. 

Air Marshalls Pierse, Cochrane, the entire USAAF and most Admirals, Generals and MPs had other ideas - but those were daylight, precision and tactical, in support of Army / Navy goals which threatened RAF independent doctrine. 

Transport Aircraft 

It had been customary for large British bombers to have a secondary transport role. We had pioneered the use of air mobile troops in the Middle East between the wars. We abandoned the production of transport aircraft to meet the capricious demands of the area campaign. If the production runs of just one of the Wellington, Stirling, Lancaster or Halifax were converted to transport aircraft (the York was available from mid 1942) D-Day and Market Garden become very different animals. 

Avro went ahead with designing the York transport in late 1941 because they feared Lancaster orders would be cut due to the failure of the bombing campaign at that point. The cost vs success of the area campaign were debated in the war cabinet and parliament. Options were there. 

Conclusion 

By the end of 1942 the Allies could have been safely entrenched in unsinkable aircraft carriers threatening the entire Axis coastline from Peenemünde to the Pyrenees, the Pyrenees to Ploiesti. That is a sizeable headache for someone grinding to a halt on the Volga. Stretch your enemy over the horns of a dilemma, and then strike were he is most vulnerable. 

Without the area bombing campaign we could have had the funds and resources to build an invasion fleet - possibly two - to pierce the Axis homelands n 1943. 

Or…. don't go for appeasement: 

Of course you could have cancelled the whole show if you: 

Invade the Rhineland in 1937 

Invade the Rhineland in 1938 

Invade the Rhineland in 1939