More sophisticated Americans point to the entire Eastern Front, where the Soviets lost more men fighting the Nazis than everyone else combined.
In How the War was Won, Phillips Payson O’Brien argues that our air-sea power won the war after all:
Those who laud the Soviet contribution do so within a paradigm that understands the contribution to victory through manpower. O’Brien cannot deny that the USSR engaged a larger percentage of the Wehrmacht than the Western Allies. His argument is that the Second World War was primarily a mechanized war. The production and destruction of equipment is what decided the war in spite of the human cost of 70 million dead (civilians included).
The production of air and sea weaponry far outstripped that of land weaponry. As such, O’Brien argues that the air-sea war was more significant than the fight on the ground. For instance, the German army received only between 30–35% of production when it was lucky. A plurality of production effort was generally aimed at air weaponry. For instance, in May 1943 40% of German production efforts were spent on aircraft. American, British, and Japanese production efforts were similar, with the UK spending approximately one half of its production efforts on aircraft from 1940 onwards. Naval production for each of these four nations also typically outstripped that of armoured fighting vehicles (AFVs) associated with the great land battles.
Air and sea power allowed for more efficient destruction of Axis equipment. This destruction could be achieved in three phases. “Pre-production” destruction prevented the Germans and Japanese from producing weaponry in the first place by damaging factories and destroying or preventing the arrival of raw materials. “Production” destruction meant destroying equipment as it was being assembled in the factories. “Deployment” destruction refers to equipment lost as it was in transit from assembly plants to the front lines. The Western Allies — mainly Great Britain and the United States — were primarily responsible for these equipment losses. The Russians did not maintain a very large navy, nor did they invest in many large, four-engined bombers to strike at the German economy.
(Hat tip to T. Greer.)
“He opposes the Allied decision to focus on the Mediterranean in 1943 instead of mounting the invasion of France.”
This issue seems to come up from time to time. Rommel intended to push east into the Middle East. Whether his supply lines were up to the task is debatable, but the fact is he was practically within spitting distance of Arab oil fields when we entered the war.
The Afrika Korps then planned to link up with Vichy French forces in Syria who consisted of veteran Foreign Legionaires. From there they could have joined Rashid Ali in Iraq who seized power against the outnumbered British and was already being resupplied by the Luftwaffe. The final step then would be leading an Arab army north to join Caucasus rebels and complete an encirclement of the Red Army. The added benefit also is thwarting the joint Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran and cut off eastern supply routes into the USSR.
The entire campaign would’ve hinged on India. The British were clearly defeated in Iraq except for the fact that Gurkha and Sikh reinforcements bailed them out, eventually broke out into Mesopotamia, and proceeded to drive through Syria like crap through a goose. Had the Nazis been able to convince the Japanese to focus its forces west and attack India instead of frittering away in the Southwest Pacific, the Brits would’ve have been trapped in a tightening vice.
That is mostly wrong, Grurray. The easternmost that the Axis went was El Alamein, which is far from oil fields. It is not even in Alexandria.
There was no Syria Vichy in 1942 that was dealt with by the British invasion of Lebanon and Syria in summer of 1941. Likewise the British were not defeated in Iraq.
I agree with the book’s premises. Also, about the Soviets, it should be said that they had tactics that wasted a lot of men. Zhukov was one of big culprits. In short, replace the Soviets with the USA, and there will be far fewer deaths.
I don’t know if I’d call Zhukov a “culprit.” The craftsman must work with the material he has.
The US started the war with a vast reservoir of mechanically adept, educated personnel and the world’s best manufacturing sector. Naturally our way of war optimized capital expenditure over bloodletting, and the fact that most American boys had at least a general familiarity with machinery meant that it was easy for us to rapidly expand our navy and air-force, as well as super-mechanizing our army.
The USSR, on the other hand, started with an officer corps largely purged of talent and initiative, with little mechanical ability among its pool of conscripts, and with a comparatively poor industrial capacity. By the time their leadership had extracted cranium from fundament, the enemy was already close to their industrial and administrative heartland. It was necessarily going to be a bloody affair if they were going to hold on. Without Lend-Lease they very well might have folded.
By 1944, as the Soviet officer corps was in better shape, war production was humming, and the soldiery were more mechanically aware, so you start to see them substituting better doctrine (fully realized Deep Operations) and mechanization.
The idea of the war moving through the Middle East and somehow joining up with the Eastern Front is, at best, ludicrous.
The Germans really didn’t grasp the scale of what they were attempting to do until they reached too far into the Soviet Union to turn back, and by then, it was too late. How they would have garrisoned the whole range of territory from Egypt to the Caucasus is a question I’d love to see answered, because absent somehow co-opting the Turks into rebuilding their empire, I don’t see where the manpower would come from. You might have made common cause with the Arabs, but as soon as it became apparent that the price was the return of the Turks? Yeah… About that easy handwave, from Egypt to the Caucasus? Not happening.
German vision was far greater than German reach. Hell, for the most part, they didn’t even manage to make use of the captured industrial base and resources in France or the rest of Europe. They came, they looted, and then they tried taking all that labor back into the Reich, to utilize at hideous human and economic cost, instead of integrating the captured industrial capacity into a proto-European Union–Which, arguably, they should have been striving for as an actual attainable goal, vice the Greater German Reich fantasy they were living.
No, having Rommel win in Libya and move through Egypt and Palestine is just a quicker path to even more over-extension and inevitable disaster. The Germans were good at conquest, and horrid at actually integrating those conquests into their programmed goals. The rape of the Ukraine and Russia never should have started until they’d completed their conquests, and if they’d had half the brains they are reputed to, they would have come into the Soviet territories posing as saviors, and held off on their little racial fantasies until well after the program of conquest was over with. Instead, they alienated every single one of their potential anti-Soviet allies, and killed off the population that might have supported them. Idiots, the lot of them…
Kirk, what’s interesting is the contrast between the Germans in WWI vs. WWII. In WWI they rather effectively integrated captured industrial and agricultural capacity into their war-time economy, especially in the East.
Apparently Nazism costs your leadership an effective 20 IQ points or so…
Germany lost this war four centuries earlier, when Martin Luther divided Christendom against itself over some petty doctrinal dispute. While Portugal, Spain, Holland, France, England, and Russia were carving vast empires out of the blank spaces on the map, Germany was busy killing two-thirds of its population in a pointless religious war.
WW1 and WW2 were a last-ditch effort by Germany to get itself some space to grow, colonies with rich soil and abundant natural resources, to which Germans could freely emigrate without giving up their German identity.
If not for Martin Luther, half the world might be speaking German today!
Dave, Luther was merely the match that lit the fuze on a tremendous powder barrel. If it hadn’t been him it would have been someone else. Even assuming the absence of the Wars of Religion and 30 Yrs. War, why would Germany have necessarily unified any earlier than it did? Between nonreligious internal differences and external meddling it’s hard to see how it could have happened in a substantially different manner.
@Scipio,
Honestly, I think the problem wasn’t so much Nazism as it was the fact that the people behind the ideology just weren’t that bright, and refused to take off their self-imposed blinders. The sheer stupidity of the Nazis, and how often they acted against their own long-term self-interest was absolutely astounding. It is almost as if they were someone’s cartoon caricatures of what totalitarian tyrants should be, rather than rational actors in their own right.
There are so many places that they demonstrate this that it’s not even funny. V-Waffen, for example? Did no one do the math, to figure out that the V-2 was simply not a cost-effective means of delivering payload to target? It’s like they lost their minds, looking at the shiny, and didn’t do the math to figure out “Hey, this things costs us X to deliver Y… Does Y do enough damage to justify the expense of X? I mean, for the love of Mike, the V-2 just doesn’t make sense until you couple the technology with a damn weapon of mass destruction, and the idiots didn’t have any of those in the pipeline that were deployable on that platform. Or, at least, so we think…
On the one hand, I look at the V-2, and think “Y’know… A rational person who could add together two and two to get four would look at that thing and go “Pretty toy… Now, what’s it good for? 1,000lbs of TNT? Fuhgeddaboudit, von Braun… We’ll pay attention to your theories after the war is won…”. Instead, they had what amounted to a Manhattan Project going, with nothing to put on top of it. WTF? Really? So, if they were rational, there must have been something they thought would justify the expense, and we just don’t know about it. Allied cover-up? Inattention to detail? Who knows…
The other hand would be that such irrational decision-making was pretty much endemic to the Nazi regime, and entirely in keeping with a bunch of other stupid things they did. Porsche, for example? Maus? Ferdinand? Yeah… Meanwhile, they weren’t even able to keep enough Mark IV tanks in production to replace losses. So, building the V-2 with nothing to put on top of it? Completely possible. Just not very sensible…
One shudders to think what the Germans of that era might have accomplished with some halfway rational and intelligent people running the place. If they’d have fixed their economy and waited for Stalin to attack? Who knows… German might be the dominant tongue, today. As it was, thank God for Adolf Hitler and his cronies, because without them, beating the Nazis would have been a lot harder.
There was indeed a Vichy Syria. The Luftwaffe flew out of Syrian airbases when they were air dropping supplies in Iraq.
The Syria-Lebanon Campaign has been mostly supressed and hidden in the history books. It was fought on three separate fronts between the French Foreign Legions against Commonwealth forces, Algerians, and Israelis led by the English.
After Montgomery stopped Rommel in Egypt, an Allied invasion commenced on Syria and Lebanon on three fronts – the Aussies drove up the Levantine coast to Beirut, Israeli commandos and Algerians into the Golan Heights on the road to Damascus, and Gurkhas & Sikhs through Mesoptamia on to Aleppo.
The Australian War Memorial has a detailed history of it all on their website, including eye witness accounts. Thank goodness for us the Aussies sense of national pride motivated them to remember it because it still has a lot of lessons for us today.
Speer was adamant that the strategic bombing offensives of the allies hurt the German very badly. Even beyond what the USSBS experts believed to be true. Allies only doing the bombing, NO Soviet.
Zhukov a bulldozer and steamroller without a lot of nuance? Wasted the lives of a lot of men and material to gain those batons of the marshal. He got them too. But all those top Soviet commanders were more or less the same way.
Syrian-Lebanon and also the campaign to capture Madagascar not much talked about. French [FFE] are ashamed their own men did not do much during either offensive but had to rely primarily on FFL and colonial troops.
A “Two Ocean War”. Those convoys to the Soviet Union the immensity most startling. One convoy of forty or fifty ships carrying enough gear to supply an army of 50,000 men.
Convoys the Persian or across the Northern Pacific actually more numerous than the Arctic Route.
“Apparently Nazism costs your leadership an effective 20 IQ points or so…”
Even by 1943 Rommel saw the war was lost and negotiate quick while you still could. But Hitler had his own mind and that was that.
Morris, I’m not so sure I’d take Speer at face value, especially in this regard. Let’s remember that his self-serving memoirs were a means to an end, and he played to his audience, which of course wanted to hear all the good things about the bombing campaigns…
The facts paint a different picture, which is one of ineffectiveness. Whether you like to admit or not, the numbers tell the story, which is that German production steadily rose throughout the entire bombing campaign. What finally did them in wasn’t the bombs on top of factories, but the destruction of rail lines, moving stock, and fuel production.
It would be interesting to be able to run experimental tests to see what difference the bombing campaign made, but we can’t do that. The only real fact we have is that we won. If we could have done it sooner by attacking different targets, we’ll never know. All we can do is guess, although I do find it interesting that some latter-day thinkers suggest that a better target set, namely the electrical transmission infrastructure, might have been more effective.
Lucklucky said:
“There was no Syria Vichy in 1942 that was dealt with by the British invasion of Lebanon and Syria in summer of 1941. Likewise the British were not defeated in Iraq.”
That is correct. The Rashid Ali Gaylani government in Iraq was installed by coup at the start of April 1941 and the political/military standoff that saw Habbaniya RAF station besieged was resolved by British military intervention by the end of May. No British ‘defeat’ was involved and the situation was resolved quickly by modest military action. Similarly, the Syria-Lebanon campaign, a somewhat larger effort, was largely confined to June-July 1941 and, as Lucklucky said, no Vichy Syria existed in 1942. It was gone.
1942 was the year of Rommel’s greatest success and closest approach to the heartland of Egypt and of British control in the region. By that time, there were no potential allies waiting for him in the Levant or Mesopotamia. None that would have been useful or already controlled territory, at any rate.
Wait, in WW1 they were starving due to the blockade, while in WW2 they were at least adequately fed until the very end.
Dubious, that was more a function of logistics than output. In the east, Hindenburg reorganized the captured provinces into essentially a vast workshop and granary for Germany’s armies on that front. The priority was the men in the trenches, partly due to the leadership’s idea that it would facilitate winning the war quickly and partly because shipping large quantities of it back west would have been difficult. Remember that the only really efficient bulk goods transport of the time was by ship.
One key achievement of the strategic bombing campaign over German occupied territories was creating public pressure on the Nazi regime to stop it. This led the Nazis to divert more and more fighter cover from combat support to civil defense. Once Allied fighters had enough range to accompany the bombers over Germany, attrition of German fighters soon reached fatal levels.
Deprived of air cover, the Germans had to launch operations like the Battle of the Bulge under sustained cloud cover. If they’d tried such a gambit where conditions allowed Allied air power to see their build up, the Bulge would have been a Small Bump. As it was, American artillery superiority over the Germans helped blunt the Bulge and, when the clouds cleared, the German position was doomed.
Grurray, stop peddling false information. I corrected your information thinking that what you wrote was a mistake that you would correct.
“The idea of the war moving through the Middle East and somehow joining up with the Eastern Front is, at best, ludicrous.”
Yet this is exactly what the British feared, and they fought the French for control of the Middle East to stop it. We can comfortably say this sitting back in our armchairs 75 years later, but multinational armies fighting and dying in battles on multiple fronts proves us (you, that is) wrong.
That the British feared it at the time doesn’t mean it was plausible. Sitting in their seats, with leviathan dangers looming in the shadows of fragmentary information, it makes sense to go out of one’s way to deal with even seemingly implausible threats, assuming the resources are available. The potential danger was vast, the probability low, but the cost of making eliminating the danger was also relatively low.
We can see that it was impossible now, but that’s because we have access to the true dispositions and capabilities of both sides as well as a half century of post-war analysis.
For example, the British also feared a German invasion of their homeland. Who wouldn’t, with the Nazi juggernaut having just trounced every serious army in Europe? And the Nazis began seriously planning for it, too. In reality there was no chance that such an operation could have been more than an abortive disaster for the Germans, even if they had somehow won the Battle of Britain (another hopeless effort, in hindsight).
The Nazis did actually have a plan and forces in place.
Had Hitler not been so crazy and incompetent to attack Russian urban areas and used the same blitzkrieg strategy that defeated France, we’d be talking about something completely different. Turkey would have entered the war on the Axis side, and Stalin wouldn’t have been able to call in Turkic reinforcements.
Kirk:
The correct metric on which to evaluate the bombing is not overall production, but overall production minus the amount production devoted to defending against the bombing. And by that metric, it was massively successful. the defense of the reich was an enormous resource sink. By 44 it was consuming pretty much the entire luftwaffe and 1/5 of all german ammunition production. It meant that hundreds of thousands of personnel and tens of thousands of artillery pieces were shooting at allied planes instead of russian tanks and soldiers. Add in the indirect costs of the dispersal of industry that the germans undertook to avoid bombing, and the costs are incalculably high.
You are definitely correct that speer should not be taken at face value though, everything he said was designed to keep him out of Spandau. Fortunately, we have Adam Tooze’s amazing Wages of Destruction, which I would rate as the single best book on WW2 in existence.
Grurray: “Had Hitler not been so crazy and incompetent to attack Russian urban areas and used the same blitzkrieg strategy that defeated France, we’d be talking about something completely different.”
The only place Hitler did that was Stalingrad, and while it was a costly mistake, it was hardly war ending. If by some miracle Operation Blau had achieved all of its objectives, it would not have knocked the Soviets out of the war. The Germans still would have been overextended and vulnerable to something like Operation Saturn. At most, it would have extended the war, and extending the war just leads to atom bombs dropping on Berlin. The ultimate fact of all counterfactual analysis of World War Two, at least all analysis that starts after december 7th 1941, is the ticking clock of the Manhattan Project.
Precisely correct, Cassander. It’s amazing how surprised many people are when you answer their clever alternate-historical axis victory scenario with “then Little Boy falls on Berlin.”