+BBruce Not much speculating with 'what ifs' when it comes to history, but would millions of lives have been saved if Britain had surrendered to Hitler?

Hitler would have carried out a much larger program of genocide - he also intended to wipe out Poles and Russians as far as he could, so we'd have to balance the loss of those populations against the 60 million or so who died during the course of the war.

But the Third Reich would probably have run out of steam after a while, just how long is anyone's guess. It was a personality-led creation (based on the cult of Hitler) and it is doubtful if it would have maintained its impetus much past his demise. Even the Soviet Union which was far less based on a single personality hardly survived a century despite the huge upheaval that accompanied its arrival on the world stage. Plus the circumstances that gave rise to the Third Reich would in time have been forgotten and German's less 'patriotic' about its origins.

But in any case I'm glad Hitler was defeated when he was, we Irish were on his list of 'inferior' people too, people who couldn't be assimilated easily.

But would he world have seen any less slaughter? Over 100 million people have died in about 100 or more 'small and medium wars' (eg, not big world wars) since 1945. I don't see that armies behave any less brutally when they think they can get away with it, whatever flag flies on their sleeve. War brutalizes those who participate in it unless they are lucky enough to be so revolted by it that they turn the opposite way, as happens at times.