What If The Nazis Had Invaded America? Maps Reveal How Hitler Could Have Attacked The U.S. (As Imagined By 1942 Issue Of Life Magazine)

By Paul Bentley

Last updated at 8:37 PM on 1st September 2011

 Dailymail

The year is 1942. After the Luftwaffe launch a devastating attack on the British fleet, Hitler’s ships race across the Atlantic and – with the help of 5th columnists – invade America.

This is just one of the nightmare scenarios imagined by Life magazine at the time, when the threat of a Nazi invasion seemed all too real.

Created in the months after Pearl Harbor, the March 2 issue featured a series of maps showing how experts predicted Hitler might try to annex the U.S.

On the maps below, black arrows alone mean a feint, while black with a grey border indicates a full invasion…

Its purpose was to serve as a warning to readers that America was no longer just an observer of the Second World War.

The varied diagrams show different options which would have been available to the Germans – from invasion across the Atlantic to the East Coast to the imagined bombing of the Panama Canal before launching at attack via Japan from the West.

The maps were created by Life as a follow-up to an article by science fiction author Philip Wylie, who had written a controversial article imagining an American defeat in the war.

Drawn as the U.S. had just become involved in the war, invasion was thought of as a very real possibility at the time.

The war in Europe had been raging since 1939.

By 1942, the Axis powers were in control of Austria, Czechoslovakia. Poland, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Norway, Yugoslavia, Finland, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia as well as parts of the Soviet Union and North Africa.

Meanwhile, Nazi ally Italy controlled Sicily, Ethiopia and Libya and the Japanese had annexed large areas of China, South-East Asia and Indonesia.

After the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, America was facing the genuine threat of the Axis powers going for all and trying to annex the biggest Western nation.

The maps shown here appeared as a spread in Life, showing detailed plans of how the Nazis could work with their allies to take over America.

In one, forces are imagined bypassing the British before taking Iceland and heading to America via the St. Lawrence and Hudson Valleys.

In another, the West Coast is hit first, with Japanese forces taking Pearl Harbor, before launching attacks on Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.