How the War Was Won
cepr.org
cepr.org
As for the USA, yes, holy shit, but it was also a country almost uniquely capable of achieving such a feat. Even more incredible is that it did that without even severely affecting the standard of living of its citizens, unlike the other countries, which all introduced very intense civil production rationing to pull off their more modest increases.
In the case of the USSR, fighting for its life and already an economy that barely focused on civil well-being, the doubling of war production and associated war expenses caused a gigantic famine in the immediate post-war years, while also causing massive suffering during the war years, and this aside from the brutalities introduced by the German invasion.
I never really tried to find out (well I tried but not too hard) but in my opinion this was the part of what later made 'American Dream' (tm) come true:
The enormous, trained work force no longer needed after the war at the plants where they worked for the war effort started to move out over the whole country, bringing their knowledge and families with them. Combine it with a surplus of parts, machine tools (hot rods with aircraft engines as an extreme example) which allowed to prop the small business everywhere. And also this allowed for many people of color to get a standing in life (random exceprt to confirm my opinion):
>> After the war. When Black, Hispanic, and Native American soldiers returned they found a country that still did not grant them full rights, but a movement for the expansion of civil rights had been born. Some black soldiers who had left farm jobs in the South decided not to return home. Instead, they moved to cities, looking for work that was similar to what they had learned in the armed forces. This movement represented an intensification of the black migration that began around the turn of the century.
>> Birdie Farr's husband, John, worked as an airplane mechanic during the war and wanted to work on cars after it. His war work was vital to keeping bombers in the air. Like many black veterans, John had trouble finding similar work when he returned home. John applied for a mechanic's job at a York, Nebraska, auto dealership. The owner said he wouldn't hire him as a mechanic, but he'd hire him to clean up the shop. John said, "That isn't what I went to school for or come out of the service for. I want a real job." John had to work at odd jobs in the York area. Eventually, he took a job at the auto dealer, running the car wash until he worked his way into a job as a mechanic. John Farr worked as a specialty mechanic for 22 years before he started his own auto business in York.
>> Birdie credits the war with helping break up discrimination. "The war broke up a lot of that prejudice," she says. "You were there to do a job. And if you can do it, you're going to do it not matter what color you are. You work next to the next guy. Your life depended on him regardless of what color they are."
This is certainly true. Comparatively though, rationing in the U.S was nowhere near as bad as it was even in Britain, never mind the Reich, any other European country or much less the Soviet Union and Japan. These latter two placed millions of their people on near starvation rations and imposed extreme cutbacks in even the most basic civilian "luxury" goods. The Nazis were remarkably consistent about feeding their own people well (though with steadily decreasing food quality) but they pulled this off by literally starving vast other areas of Europe.
One of the books I recommend in a reply further down "The taste of war" goes into deep, carefully referenced detail on the food rationing by country, and even with their cutbacks, Americans had it incredibly better than any other country involved in the war, by far. It truly was quite impressive.
Also, I strongly recommend a couple books here: First: "The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy" by Adam Tooze
Second (truly a unique book that looks at the world's biggest war with a focus entirely on how people in different parts of the fighting countries ate and avoided starvation) "The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food " by Lizzie Collingham.
Even today common US citizens themselves cannot comprehend the scale involved. There are some interesting YouTube videos on the bonkers production efforts [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] that give some other angles of perceiving the scale. By 1944, fully 44% of the US GDP was devoted to wartime production, starting from an already-formidable economic base that many already recognized back in the 1930's despite the US' comparatively feeble industrial showing in WW1. Among the more famous leaders who recognized this massive industrial potential before WW2 even started were Yamamoto and Churchill.
Just as astonishing as the scale was the rapidity. The US military before WW2 was objectively not a top 10 rank by nearly any metric one cared to employ. This shifted practically overnight with substantive progress measured in months.
To really geek out over some of the critical numbers, check out this page [6].
Looking back, it gave me an intuitive grasp of just how much of the manufacturing sector the US bled out to the PRC, and even then, US manufacturing is still no slouch on the world stage.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfMrqOdrCidQ2gpuSIxW0...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncgQ33yu7Cc
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6at-eJfJOgI
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BExMOol11LA
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTtR1hqpnwU
[6] https://www.ww2-weapons.com/military-expenditures-strategic-...
Promoting industrial production is a way of taking away credit from the millions of soldiers who actually went and died using it.
The US did do a fair bit of naval work in the second half. And Russia was always openly appreciative of the Hormel SPAM.
Careful with rehashing German canards about the USSR, repeated to their American interlocutors, and which mostly absolved the Wehrmacht of their own mistakes. "We were brilliant, it's just that the Soviet 'asiatic horde' was too numerous and didn't care about casualties". This has been shown to be false in more recent studies, less influenced by Cold War thinking. (For example: Glantz shows the frequent outnumbering of Soviets vs Germans was often due to concentration of force -- the Soviets weakened some sectors to overwhelm Germans in others, which is a sound tactic which the Germans failed to understand or prevent again and again, and who made them claim the Soviets were "a horde").
The conclusion of experts is also that as the war went on, Soviet strategic and operational thinking got better, not worse, while Germany's followed the opposite direction (and correspondingly, Stalin's confidence in his generals grew, while Hitler's weakened). They became masters at deception and strategic maneuver, it was just at the tactical level that the Germans were consistently better. As for casualties, well, Nazi Germany was hell-bent on eradicating the "surplus" Slav race from Eastern Europe, so... The fighting on the Eastern Front was savage and unlike what the Western Allies faced because the Germans were engaged in a war of extermination, and the casualties reflected this.
"It's not that the Germans were murdering them by the millions, it's that they were bad at defending themselves" is an odd argument.
> it completely ignores the pacific theaters which the United States, Australia and New Zealand took on
It doesn't ignore them, it's just that those theaters weren't as instrumental in defeating Nazi Germany as the Soviet Union's contribution to the war. It's just that the Pacific War looms larger in American culture, for understandable reasons.
> Once you dig into the numbers, the American aid to both GB and Russia kept both countries in the war in 1942
It's ok to bring attention to American industrial might and their very helpful assistance to the USSR, but it's even better to remember it was the Soviets who defeated Nazi Germany. It's the Soviets who heroically defended Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, against all odds. It's the Soviets who disassembled whole factories and relocated them in record time to the Urals when they fell threatened by the German advance. It was the Soviets who, with Operation Bagration, inflicted the single largest military defeat on Nazi Germany (we have heard plenty about Normandy, why so little about Bagration?).
Especially since all of this was downplayed for political reasons during the Cold War.
No question that that Soviet strategic thinking got better. Stalin's purges had ensured that. But the casulty nunbers never approached parity, unlike every single other army in any other theater given the supuriority.
Another example I would point out is Stalin's bald face lies to the western allies about his intentions to Berlin. Stalin wanted the glory - and more importantly the political control - of Berlin, and deliberately misled the allies into attacking south rather the risk the allies getting any share of the battle. This for example freed up Wenck's XII Army to to try and break back into Berlin in a effort to build a escape corridor.
On the lines around the factories - I'd point out that quite a few American factories, power stations, research facilities were also torn down and shipped to Russia. Sean McMeekin makes the argument that the balance of power was provided by American and British airplanes, and even tanks. In fact the uranium that help kick start the soviet bomb program was supplied - by America.
On Bagration, the point is fair - but it is nowhere near true or fair to state that "it was the soviets who defeated nazi germany" and to point at horrific soviet casualty numbers as justification. Those casualty numbers that had almost as much to do with Stalin's purges, his decision to clandestinely enable the rearmament of Germany in 1920s and 1930, his own wars of aggression against Poland and Finland and the constant and systemic view of the total worthlessness of soviet and civilian lives. To think otherwise is to buy into the soviet propaganda, now being endlessly trumpeted by our very own dictator in the 21st century - Herr Putin.
Allied victory in World War II was exactly that.
The Soviets killed up to 15 million of their own before the war even started. (This number may be an overestimate because most locales had been required to overreport their own population over the past century, such that when an accurate census was conducted, the new number lacked both those killed and also the overreports.) How many million Ukrainians were deliberately starved before the war? 2 million? 4 million? (We may compare this to Churchill personally arranging to starve 3 million in and near what is now Bangladesh, around that time.)
Neither Germans nor Soviets saw any reason to bother feeding or sheltering their POWs. Soviet POWs were treated as deserters and sent to the GULag on their return, along with many thousands of Cossacks who had escaped well before the war, and were rounded up and sent back.
We need not doubt that there was a great deal of ineptitude in the Soviet officer corps, which had been mostly exterminated before the war and then repopulated according to purely political criteria. And, we need not doubt extreme disregard for the lives of conscripts, both Soviet and many, many others shanghaied from occupied territory.
None of this is to minimize the heroism of the people sent to fight against the Nazis, subject to attacks both from their own government and from a foreign invader. Fairly early in the war (1940?) the NKVD was ordered to abandon its quota of deserters to be shot from the rear for not advancing eagerly enough.
The "asiatic hordes" is a German-created myth, for example. It was necessary for them, because of their cognitive dissonance that made it difficult to accept being beaten by apparently "racially inferior" enemies. How else could they explain it? Was the enemy outthinking them? Impossible, they were genetically inferior. So it must be that they were simply too many and didn't care about piling bodies and bodies until they won.
Also, the Cold War made it necessary for German officers to show themselves as useful to their new American allies, so that they could provide valuable insight into how to battle the Soviet Union. If they could show themselves to be brilliant, only beaten by an unfair superiority of the enemy hordes, Hitler's meddling, etc, so much the better.
'"I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in this war," Stalin said. "The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war."...
'"If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," [Nikita Khrushchev] wrote in his memoirs. "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me."...
'In 1963, KGB monitoring recorded Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov saying: "People say that the allies didn't help us. But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. The Americans provided vital explosives and gunpowder. And how much steel! Could we really have set up the production of our tanks without American steel? And now they are saying that we had plenty of everything on our own."'
The counter-argument was that this was propaganda, but I don't accept that.
https://www.rferl.org/a/did-us-lend-lease-aid-tip-the-balanc...
Research seems to indicate that over one-third of the tanks used by the Russians in defence around Moscow during Barbarossa (in Dec 1941) were British:
* https://www.historynet.com/did-russia-really-go-it-alone-how...
* https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1351804060069781...
* https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/1344630636296818690 (via)
More from the 2013 Kursk presentation at the [US] National WWII Museum:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6xLMUifbxQ
I've heard the expression: Word War Two [in Europe] was won by British intelligence, Russian blood, and American steel.
I didn't know this, but I don't find it astonishing. This was when Russia was losing and the defense of Moscow was pretty desperate. It's likely a lot of those British tanks were lost during that battle (as noted, they weren't very good) and replaced with T-34s.
It's worth noting that most of the recorded losses of tanks by the Germans were in battles against T-34s.
Russia had to first survive long enough to get things turned around so they could take the offensive.
On the T-34s:
> To the Deputy People's Commissar of Medium Machinebuilding, comrade Goreglyad 8a Ryazanskaya St.
> In response to your letter #16/2291 on March 18th, 1941
> The GABTU considers it necessary to deliver the V-2-34 engine together with the main clutch for the following reasons:
> The warranty period of the main clutch is seldom higher than the lifespan of the engine: the engine's guaranteed lifespan is 150 hours, the tank travels 2000-2250 km in this time. The existing main clutch needs replacing after this time.
> The existing design of the main clutch on factory #183 T-34 tanks requires the following changes to be compatible with diesel engines received from factory #75:
[…]
* https://www.tankarchives.ca/2020/12/weakest-link.html
* https://twitter.com/Tank_Archives/status/1344342553911582722 (see thread on Kursk)
When the average lifespan in battle was ~14 hours, the stated 150 hours sounds pretty good.
"In addition, much of the $31 billion worth of aid sent to the United Kingdom was also passed on to the Soviet Union via convoys through the Barents Sea to Murmansk."
The US, incidentally, was able to decrypt Enigma traffic independently of Bletchley using ordinary cryptanalysis.
Bletchley Park acted as central clearinghouse for intercepted ciphertexts, distributing decryptions with elaborate care to keep the Germans from knowing Enigma had been cracked. Late in the war, they built an electronic gadget called Colossus to decrypt traffic from a much more difficult version of Enigma.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Am...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe#US_Navy_Bombe
Do you have sources that indicate otherwise?
It was well known exactly when the Japanese planned to start the Pacific War, though intercepts did not say where. Many in the Navy were sure it would be at Pearl Harbor. Notably, the militarily useless battleships were there, but not the aircraft carriers.
No mistake, they had full access to the Polish analysis and bombe design.
The first is there's a time aspect to it. In 1941, after Operation Barbarossa, the Soviets shut down their factories and shipped them east, which meant there was about a 6 month period where production was more or less nonexistent. This is a critical juncture where resupply and refit essentially has to rely on Lend-Lease.
The other factor is that Lend-Lease to the USSR was primarily not about the big headline weapons: Soviets were mostly using Soviet-designed and Soviet-built weapons to fight and win the war. Rather, it was about providing the equipment that keeps the infrastructure ticking over. The US wasn't building the tanks for the USSR as much as it was building the things that built the tanks.
Americans may have given their steel, but Soviets gave their blood.
Additionally, they were happy to partition Poland following the Nazi invasion.
Stalin was a criminal and reaped what he sowed.
It's an inconvenient truth, now, to remember the Soviets did most of the fighting against Nazi Germany.
Yes it was short term alliance of convenience and both sides didn’t really trust each other but it does not change the fact that without material, political and military support from the USSR Germany’s position early in the war would have been much weaker.
That's in my opinion simplistic. They weren't "allies" in the standard sense of the word; they were outmaneuvering each other and gearing for war, which both parties understood was happening eventually. Remember they already had had their bitter proxy war in the Spanish Civil War, where Soviets and Germans had already killed each other. Yes, they cooperated with materiel and military tech; they also had to compromise geopolitically. The situation of both countries more or less required this. And yes -- with hindsight -- this backfired on the Soviets catastrophically.
But consider this: in the UK and US, businesses and politicians were at times sympathetic with Nazi Germany, at least before the outbreak of the global war, after which maintaining open sympathies for Germany would have been traitorous. But only the USSR was under actual territorial danger from Nazi Germany, so the compromises to be made were different. The USSR also had in its recent history a civil war where the Western Powers had intervened against them, so they were very wary of who to trust, "surrounded by enemies" so to speak.
From Wikipedia:
> The establishment of the [Molotov-Ribbentrop] treaty was preceded by Soviet efforts to form a tripartite alliance with Britain and France. Fearing encirclement by hostile powers, the Soviet Union began negotiations with Germany on 22 August, one day after talks broke down with Britain and France, and the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact was signed the next day.
How many people, when claiming Nazi Germany and the USSR were "allies", know that the USSR first tried to form an anti-German pact with Britain and France? And were refused! Not many, I suspect.
> [Germany and the USSR] cooperated in Poland, signed a treaty to partition eastern Europe
Again, consider that at the time, the UK thought having colonies was acceptable. Churchill, lionized in the West, was a staunch supporter of the British Empire. So yes, it's bad that the USSR tried to partition Eastern Europe (unlike the UK, they were in full paranoid mode, trying to create buffer zones to protect their homeland), but remember some Western powers like the UK and France also believed in partitioning the world according to their needs. Empires were more acceptable back then, it wasn't just the USSR.
Nazi Germany sealed its fate with Barbarossa. And it made it even worse by making it a war of extermination (unlike in other theaters of the war), a fight so barbaric and racially charged it forced a desperate defense on the Soviets, because surrender truly wasn't possible; and for the same reason, they ensured the revenge would be terrible.
I don't think that's widely accepted. There's a reasonable argument that Moscow formed such a communication and transport hub that losing it would have been a significant blow. If Moscow fell it seems likely Russia would have been cut off completely from the West and had to rely on Western aid over the Pacific to the East and then via undeveloped transport networks to new industrial bases. Unclear if this would have worked.
Also worth noting that the loss of Moscow would have meant the loss of the manpower that was there defending it.
You might want to look into the history of Radio Free Europe and the sources they link to.
"The Communist party translated and published [Fredrick W.] Taylor’s book The Principles of Scientific Management, and high authorities brought over Walter Polakov, an American follower of Henry L. Gantt, one of Taylor’s most fervent disciples, to provide a liaison with American scientific-management experts and to prepare production charts for the entire First Five-Year Plan...
"By 1928, when the Soviets inaugurated the First Five-Year Plan, Henry Ford had become an even greater hero to the Soviets than Frederick Taylor. An emotional cult grew up around Ford’s methods and even his person. By 1925 his autobiography, My Life and Work, had had four printings in the Soviet Union, and one American in Russia reported that plant managers were studying Ford with as much enthusiasm as they had had for Lenin."
https://www.americanheritage.com/how-america-helped-build-so...
Actually occupying territory was crucial, and as the Germans were driven back, transportation to the front got harder even as the Germans' transport task shrank.
A great waste in the war was ineffective strategic ("Norden") bombing, using up untold bombers, crews, and ordinance. Another was expending skilled ex-pat pilots on direct combat while rotating experienced own pilots back to training.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ag2x3CS9M
With these numbers the relative merits of the actual warfighters had little effect on the outcome. The war with Japan was won in U.S. shipyards.
All production was asymmetrical:
> The real measure of Japan as an industrial power in WW2 wasn't it's battleships, so much as it's lack of bulldozers [to, e.g., build airfields].
> A single field in England [see photo] in the summer of 1944 held more Allied earthmoving bulldozer capability than the Japanese built from 1937 - 1945.
* https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1403756475995066373
The Japanese didn't need bulldozers. They had conscripted local labor and their planes could take off and land on dirt strips.
* https://www.kenkenkikki.jp/museum/bulldozer/e_bull1930-04.ht...
> "The United States built more merchant shipping in the first four and a half months of 1943 than Japan put in the water in seven years."
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13152691-freedom-s-forge
It focuses on the efforts of two individuals:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Knudsen
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_J._Kaiser
Note that the books publication was sponsored/supported by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a very right-leaning, pro-business think tank: anytime the word 'union' comes up you can sense the author doing a *hock* *spit*.
I had no idea it was from AEI!
"From" may be a bit strong: in the acknowledgements the authors mentions that the AEI gave him a grant so that he could afford to spend the time doing research. The author is/was also a fellow at:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_Institute
This doesn't invalidate the outline of events that the book goes over, it just means that anything shown in a positive light may have been "too/more positive" and anything shown in a negative light could have been "too/more negative". Everyone has their biases.
The focus on materiel losses instead of human lives is puzzling.
The sacrifices made should be remembered. But lessons should be learned too.
In this case, the focus on material losses tries to show lessons to be learned for this aspect of the war. They do not argue that all else should be forgotten.
My opinion is that this article's take is trying to downplay the major contribution of the USSR in defeating Nazi Germany. It's not another take; they seem to imply it's the main take besides which all other contributions pale. And that's not true. Yes, economy and industrial output was a major deal and I don't think anybody [1] ignores this. But all of that would have been for naught if there hadn't been actual bodies on the ground, bleeding and defending or capturing ground. So it's true that Germany's war was doomed because its economy and industry couldn't compete (even with their vast use of slave labor) but still, had the Soviets not resisted them, they probably would have ended the war without catastrophic defeat but with a treaty, and possibly Hitler and some of the leadership would have survived.
You know what seems petty? With the Cold War finally past us [and Putin's latest adventures notwithstanding] it's finally becoming understood [again, see 1] that the USSR was the major factor in Germany's defeat. It wasn't the Americans saving the day in Normandy or whatnot, pop culture notwithstanding. And so of course, some think tank will strive to prove that if America wasn't the decisive factor in battle, then battle wasn't all that important after all. I call this way of thinking "sour grapes".
----
[1] anybody outside mainstream pop culture, that is, which still claims America "won" WW2 and that the major battles were in North Africa and Normandy. And which is puzzled when the Soviet Union is mentioned at all, except they "know" thanks to fiction like Enemy at the Gates, that the Soviets major "contribution" to the war was commissars busily gunning down their own troops, and maybe a sniper or two.
IE In reality, XYZ battles occurred. In an alternate reality if some of them lost, then we'd have new HIJ battles that won instead - because industry.
What would have happened if USSR lost "the enemy at the gates"? Did they have the industry to "do it again and win this time"? I honestly don't know, I am not much better than pop culture.
But I do heartily agree that pop culture lacks perspective on the USSR involvement. Partly because Hollywood contents travels world wide and partly because no one sees Stalin as someone they want to attribute "success" to, in particular because of the way it was done. I mean, Hitler probably had some good traits(maybe he was nice to dogs?), but no one wants to be the one saying that...
A lack of dynamic range in judgement as it were.
A very entertaining podcast, and well worth listening to!
But it's a mistake to think that the country with more economic resources will inevitably win. There's too many counter examples for that to be the case. Some include:
Korean War
1967 Arab/Israeli war (Note that this was before mass support of Israel by the US)
Vietnam War
US/Taliban conflict
But that's the reality that many desktop generals don't understand - you fight a unpopular war you are going to fight with one hand tied behind your back.
(Or at least there's a reasonable argument for that case and I didn't want it to distract from the key point).
And that made sense to me definitionally.
So I’ll make the same point here about the Soviet-Afghan war. Yes the US pumped in supplies, but it wasn’t a proxy war because one of the powers was actually one of the forces.
So, I think I understand better now and maybe no historians will yell at us for mis describing proxy fights
This doesn't make much sense - I think every definition of a proxy war has included things like the Vietnam war, the Soviet/Afgan war etc:
> That encouraged the American practice of arming insurgent forces, such as the funneling of supplies to the mujahideen during the Soviet–Afghan War. Other examples of proxy war are the Korean War, the Vietnam War[1]
To be clear, proxy wars are ones where at least one party is a proxy for another power. By this definition yes, the Ukraine conflict could be viewed as a Western/Russian proxy war (not US, since significant arms for Ukraine are also coming from other Western powers).
> US/Taliban conflict
Quote from article: Overall, by 1944 the Axis could deploy only a small fraction of their potential military capacity into combat—it was being destroyed in a multi-layered campaign long before it could be used against their enemies. This was the true battlefield of WWII, a massive air-sea super battlefield that stretched for thousands of miles not only of traditional front but of depth and height
The only thing I'd add to this article and the comments is: the Germans failed to realize that when they'd gone hundreds of miles into Russia over bad roads, with hostiles in their rear, they'd have a real serious problem supplying all those troops. The Russians call those "generals" of theirs General Distance (along with General Mud and General Winter).
> American view that the Soviets were useless and won just because of large numbers, General Winter and of course American help.
I think even harder to swallow is that Soviet technology was at least equal to US weapons. Their tanks are well known as being great, but their fighter planes were (especially the Yak-3, Yak-9 and La-7) were at least as good as comparable US and British planes.
We can't separate the problems any Russian invader would have from the tenacious resistance to this invasion. They were both essential. As was all the American help; particularly the trucks.