Titanic wrote:You make the point that Germany was weak (in reality definitely not as weak as you are trying to make out). The Treaty of Versailles said they could have an army of 100,000, naval force of 15,000, 6 battleships, 6 cruisers, 6 destroyers and 12 torpedo boats. These limits are fairly generous and led to the Nazis having a very well trained, extremely competent core within their army, and Hitler fairly quickly ignored these and began to build up the army.
The fact also remains that from 1920 up until 1936 Britain and France invested very little into their military so their air forces, navies and armies would have been almost 20 years out of date (essentially WWI standard), and hardly much more modern the the Germans. Germany began its boost in military investment in 1933, so by 1936 they would have been well under way into a military state, so if a war broke out the would have been ready to ramp up production for the war time effort. In 1936 Britain had only just begun its boost in military spending so if a war broke out there was no way they could alter the economy and focus it entirely on the war effort within a short period.
Even if the British and French had superior air forces and armies (which I still doubt), the Germans would have quickly overpowered them due to their production process and supply chain being more ready for the war and able to take the stresses that a war would produce, whilst the British and the French would be caught off guard and unable to create the changes necessary within the country to fight the war within time.
Your first point about the navy doesn't make much sense. They were allowed 18 real ships, how was that going to challenge the royal navy? They got their asses handed to them in WWI, if they went to war again in '36 with the same ships, the same thing would have happened. Two the reason for a lot of England's hardships during WWII, was because of Germany's U-boat corps and in 1936 they didn't have a U-boat corps.
The main reason why Germany did so well at the beginning of WWII was because of their tank corps and blitzkrieg. Germany didn't have the tanks nor the aircraft to use blitzkrieg as an effective strategy in 1936. So in your scenario of WWII starting in 1936, WWII wouldn't have become something we think of it today, but more like WWI.
These limits are fairly generous and led to the Nazis having a very well trained, extremely competent core within their army, and Hitler fairly quickly ignored these and began to build up the army.
That is the fault of Chamberlain and his French counter-parts. If they had regulated Germany more closely, WWII wouldn't have happened (even if it did it would have been at a more scaled down level). And finally I believe that you have little faith in what your grandfather's generation could do, and his French counter-parts because there is no better way to encourage people to do something, when there are barbarians at the gates
