While I feel it was a blunder to attack the USSR before finishing off the UK I also don't think it was possible to invade the UK. I go along with the old line by a Britsh Admiral of the Napoleonic period. "I don't say they can't come, I just say they can't come by sea."

I don't agree that North Africa was unavoidable. The Germans didn't have any presence in Tunisia, Libya, or Egypt until they went there to pull Italian chestnuts out of the fire. If they WERE to go into those areas they should have done so with enough forces to do the job, not the penny packets like they did with Rommel.

German paratroopers would have been a non-factor in a cross channel invasion. The Germans suffered between 6,400 (German admitted) and 16,500 (everyone else's numbers) causalties during the invasion of Crete. That is out of 22,750 troops. After Crete, the Germans never jumped again enmass.

The Allied landings at Anzio.Operation Market Garden

The use of paras in Crete was successful (though terrible in casualties, I agree). But maybe that was a wrong example. I think Belgium would have been a better one. It all hinged on air superiority. We might not have seen mass drops, but small airborne sappers and commando units that would have taken bridges and airfields and opened the way for reinforcements, both beach-landed and air-landed. But as I said, terms would have been better than invasion.

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I don't agree that North Africa was unavoidable. The Germans didn't have any presence in Tunisia, Libya, or Egypt until they went there to pull Italian chestnuts out of the fire. If they WERE to go into those areas they should have done so with enough forces to do the job, not the penny packets like they did with Rommel.

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I agree with the last part of that, yes, they should have used more force. But I still maintain that North Africa was vital to the defence of the Med and thereby France and Italy. If Italy had been left to fight alone, she well might have sued for peace with the Allies and taken a neutral stance like Spain. Or at worst (for Germany) a humiliation of Italy in North Africa might have triggered an overthrow of Mussolini by the armed forces. All very speculative, I know, but just as Egypt is currently vital to NATO and the west if it is to dominate the Med, so was North Africa at the time.It was Europe's left flank (depending on viewpoint!), just as the north Atlantic was the right flank.

I disagree Crete is a better example as it is an Island. The German army was eventually able to relieve the airborne forces in Belgium by land. Though the German airborne forces were successful in Crete it was due to tactical errors by British and Commonwealth forces. The Royal Navy despite operating with no air support prevented the German naval invasion.

Let's review Italy's contribution to the war and then figure out whether Germany was better off with or without her. With an 8:1 superiority in N.Africa, they loose & need the Germans to bail 'em out. So to make up for that, they go into Greece & have to be bailed out again.

Italy was less of a danger out of the war -- in the war they disrupted time tables, sucked off forces necessary elsewhere, and generally contributed nothing but opportunity for, in particular, the British to add to their military, naval, and aviation history ...

The terrain in N.Italy, Greece & the Balkans meant that the only "soft underbelly" was along the coast of France. And that belonged to Germany. From there they could control (or at least disrupt) the entrance to the Med from the Atlantic and minimize the impact of Allied forces in the Med ... There was nothing in N.Africa except a bumbling ally ...

With air superiority in the South of England, any attempt by the Fleet to intervene would have been subject to uninterrupted attack by the Luftwaffe, with results similar to the loss of the Prince of Wales & Repulse in South East Asia, or Pearl Harbor.

The day and night bombing of German industry was a key ingedient to wearing down the German war machine. Where would those bombers be stationed if not England?

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I think even if Britain had fallen or accepted terms, there would have still been some sort of British resistance and even an alternate government in exile, as there was in the Netherlands and France. And that would have been sufficient for the US to become increasingly involved, along with the Commonwealth. Stalin, faced with the full might of Germany and Italy would have engineered an agreement with Roosevelt that would have allowed US troops into the USSR.

Even if the US had resisted Free British, French and Commonwealth pressure and stayed out of war with Germany, it would have still had to eventually deal with a German-occupied Siberia uncomfortably close to Alaska and Canada. The fighting between Japan, the US and Australia, particularly in China and the northern Pacific would eventually have dragged Germany in.

The Holocaust - ...galvanized a world against the Nazis.

We have to remember, anti-Semitism was much more prevalent back them and many Americans, at least, would have had more sympathy for a German than a Jew.