Could the Western Allies Win Without the USSR?

The 4.2 exchange rate was the Swiss exchange setting, and only comparing money to money. In America the problem wasn't inflation in the Depression, it was deflation. The dollar bought more in the US than a mark bought in Germany. A loaf of sliced bread was 8 cents, a pound of steak was 33 cents. Another problem for Hitler was that the Krupp works wouldn't accept anything except gold in payment for their products, they wouldn't take a Reich Mark, only gold transferred to their Swiss and Swedish accounts.

BTW, the P-47 started out at under $60,000 and only ended up in the $80,000 range for the most (and least produced) expensive model. And read and digest my post which includes "mekozak's" data to get a little less slanted opinion of the German economy, and its dire straits.

 

Stating that without the Soviet Union the war would end in 1945 anyway is ridiculous.
a) Hitler will never surrender so the A bomb doesn' have the psycological effect it had on Hiro Hito, it remains a better WMD than HE or fire bombs but that's all.
b) Without the losses in the USSR a Germany that concentrates on fighters may still be contesting the air over Europe in 1945.
c) The German army broke it's back in the USSR long before there was a second front, the invasion of Sicily came after Kursk and by Kursk the German army was a shell of it's former self.
d) Without an Eastern front a lot of the "soldiers" would be in the factories and German production would significantly increase or at least have better QA.
e) Hitler is fighting for his survival, after 1940 Britain is not and the US is definetly not, guess who will suffer war weariness first?

IMO with no combat in the East Germany's position in Europe is nearly unassailable, The western allies may attempt to land in Spain or Norway but they can't win against 150+ German divisions backed by a million of allied troops with the forces they historically mobilized. Without France's manpower pool, and with Britain's limited population, the US would need the bear the brunt of a WW1 type attrition and I don't think they have the stomach for it especially without a Pearl Harbor to bolster the war's popularity (the Japanese will not attack without Germany at the gates of Moscow).

The Germans can't invade the British Isles and the allies can't invade mainland Europe, an air war of attrition favors Germany, the relative cost of bombers compared to fighters and the higher crew losses due to operating over enemy territory will be hard to compensate.

Looks more like a probable stalemate with Stalin holding the balance than an allied victory in 1945.

 

"TOS"; I remember that Hitler transferred the 4th Panzer from Kursk to Italy to counter the Sicily operation before the final battle at Kursk, so they happened at the same times, and that removed a number of panzers 1000+ kilometers from the fray.

 

1- Well, you actually put a decent argument (for the first time). I too though like you (that the US was invincible those days) a few years ago, until a started reading military history.

2- I have already demonstrated that you need more than simply "more industrial capacity" do win a war. First, the objectives of the US were more difficult to achieve: They wanted to invade and occupy a country, while Germany wanted to only defend itself and kill the jews (with wasn't that difficult, before they invaded the soviet union) .

For example, a bomber cost a lot more than a fighter, with countered it.

3- I know these numbers, they are based on 1937 data.

They are correct, but, germany had much more territory in 1941 than in 1937. In fact, its steel production capacity nearly doubled, so her warmaking potential jumped from 14.4% to about 25-30%. And 40% doesn't defeat 25% when the side with only 25% is defending and has superior military skills.

Thats my point! The US didn't have the logistical capacity to deploy a force thousands of kilometers away that is strong enough to defeat Germany.

 

With the limited amount of fighters they had operational, they destroyed 30% of all bombers made by the US.

Imagine if they had 10 times that! (they could have if they weren't fighting the big war ever with the soviets).

 

My Comment:
Whoa there your quoting alot of figures without context..For one your bringing up figures for the US in around 1938 at that time it was still coming out of the Great Depression,it was basically the last nation to fully recover from it. Two your figures give the Germans an advantage in GDP of about 20-22% but Germany's GDP is distributed amongst 280,000,000 people according to your figures whilst the US's is distributed amongst 135,000,000 people so the US has a massive advantage in per capita income. Three..In steel production The US in 1938 produced 26,400,000 tons of steel, Germany 20,700,000 tons, the USSR 16,500,000 tons and Japan 6,000,000 tons BUT the latter 3 countries were at full capacity at the time whilst 2/3 of the US steel industry was idle. In other words the US could produce twice as much steel as Germany,the USSR and Japan combined. The US before the Depression was producing over 8 times as many vehicles as Germany,France and UK combined. Furthermore in 1938 only 11.7% of expenditures was for armed forces that being only around 1.6% of it's GDP whislt Europe & Japan were spending at far higher rates and one of the reasons the Germans went to wart in 1939 was because the country was darn near bankrupted.

 

Well brndirt1, second to my copy of "The Economics of WW2", Germany (1937 boundaries) had a GDP, combined with Austria, of 460 billion in 1944, more than 30% of the US GDP of 1500 billion in 1944. That 5 to 1 difference is the biggest I have ever read about.

And Germany in 1944 had much more territory than 1937 boundaries + austria. In fact, second to the same book, (the economics of ww2), total Axis controlled territory had a total pre war GDP of 1.48 trillion. While the US had a total pre war GDP of 0.8 trillion.

Even with military mobilization I doubt that the US could overproduce Europe alone. And Europeans are better in war then Americans.

And those numbers of military output are wrong: The US never produced 6 times more "guns" than the soviets in 1944! That number doesn't make any sense.

 

Good Lord!!!!! 10 times as many fighters??? Just how are they going to get enough pilots? Oh 20,000 FW-190's were produced during the war along with 35,000 Me 109's so just how many more are you going to build?
Those USAAF bombers shot down something like 9,000 of them.

 

Higher per capita income isn't an advantage. Since 100 billion for an army of 2 million soldiers is better than 100 billion for an army of 1 million.

They were the pre war figures. All countries increased their GDP with mobilization. Yes, the US increased their GDP more (between 1939 and 1943, us gdp increased by 55%, germany by 20% and britain by 25%), but that doesn't mean that my figures are useless.

If you want to know a good GDP estimate of the US if they weren't in the depression in 1938, it would be 950 billion dollars (turning the per capita number of hours worked into their pre depression levels). The 1.4 trillion figure is for total mobilization in 1943-1944.

 

"ickysdad", and this post also ignores the fact that the US was an oil producer/exporter and the largest petroleum entity in the world with over 60% of all production inside of our borders. We (America) also had access to huge untapped bauxite formations in other nations with whom we weren't at war with. The Germans had no indigenous bauxite deposits. They gained access to them when Italy occupied Le Baux France (the name-sake of the mineral). They had to buy their tungsten from Spain, and Spain didn't sell it cheap. They had to buy their nickel from the USSR, after the Soviets occupied the Finish mines, and they had to buy their chromium from Turkey. I think their only source of magnesium was the Soviet deposits, and after Barbarossa that was a thing of the past.

America had iron, copper, zinc, coal (antracite as well as bituminus), silver, gold, and some tungsten (wolfram), chromium, magnesium, manganese, and access to friendly bauxite. America was raw material rich, and well protected by thousands of miles of salt water.

I think I'll just let this go, it is headed nowhere fast.

 

You assume that there would be a war btween the US and Germany,if the SU was defeated .But is that true ? Hitler declared war on the US,not the opposite .After the fall of the SU,Britain would be alone,without allies .The entrey of the US in the war was not self-evident,although Roosevelt did all he could to provoke Hitler,and even the US did enter the war ? The first fighting between US and German ground forces was between february 1943.In the best Britain would be alone for more than a year .
I do not see any reason why congress shold declare war on Germany,if the SU was eliminated .

 

1- If they had 10.000 operational fighters in 1943 the bombing offensive would never have worked. Germany never pilled up a large fighter force in the war, and by 1943 they had less than 2.000 operational fighters. That small number of aircraft meant that the bombing offensive never had to face a large concentration.

2- They would get enough pilots training more people. In fact, in 1943 Germany trained only 3.600 fighter pilots, but they lost 1.6 million men in the eastern front. If they allocated more resources to training pilots, they could train more.

3- In fact, with the resources wasted in the V-2 project is was calculated that they could have produced 25.000 aircraft, enough to cause serious problems to the bombing effort (and maybe even win the war).

 

How much of Soviet production was because the Allies at great cost supplied them with a good deal of their raw materials? If you want go get into economic data about Germany read "Wages of Destruction".
And Yes the US could outproduce all of Europe at that time. For one thing alot of production figures for Europe include from 1939 till 1945 and even pre-war years whereas the US figures are from 1941 till 1945. If Japan doesn't enter the war because the Germans aren't at the gates of Moscow then that means alot of US production that went into say BB's,cruisers and carriers(and crews to man them) can go instead to tanks,army weapons instead. Remember the US at one time planned an army of around 160(???) divisions instead of the historical 90+. Furthermore no invasion of the USSR means no Tiger or Panther tanks because the T-34 isn't encountered so no shakeup in German tank design therefore the allies won't have the problems they did later on with underarmed/underarmoed tanks.

 

1- I read those books...

2- Yes, allied raw materials helped the USSR, but they consisted in 17% of their military spending. The fact is that the USSR produced more weapons than the US in most categories, and to say that the US had 4 times the war production of the USSR doesn't fit with any data (the largest difference was in combat aircraft, were the USSR produced 60% of american production).

 

Going nowhere fast is a good description and some ignore the fact it only takes one to wage war( Hitler proved that) and there seems to be plenty of evidence that Hitler wouldn't have invaded in 1941 Stalin would have attacked Hitler in 1942 or 1943 at the latest so the whole thread is mute. Europe isn't big enough(no continent) for two mad men like Hitler & Stalin.

 

Before the Nazis invaded the USSR, and before Pearl Harbor the winds of public opinion were shifting away from the isolationists. And like it or not politicians are still beholden to their constituents and their opinions. Here are some of the Gallup polls from before Pearl Harbor, and these were polls taken from voting age Americans, male and female. They show that by mid-1941 the bulk of the American public were no longer strictly isolationist, but caught between stay out of the war completely in every way, only defend America, or get more involved.

By this time Poland had been attacked and absorbed, the western European nations had been attacked and over run in spite of both stated neutrality and strong defenses. In Asia Japan had invaded and brutally subjecated many of the local peoples, and extended their occupation by aggression into Indo-China, even though the Japanese had been "handed their hats" by the Soviets in the Mongolian/Manchurian border clashes. Even an Imperial Prince had surrendered and been captured by the Soviets, much to the dismay of the Royal Family.

These now discredited positions had been the mainstays of the America First proponents; staying neutral like Norway, Belgium and Denmark (didn't work), a strong defensive posture like France (didn't work), and simply responding to aggressive stances with appeasement (didn't work). So by mid to late 1941 the polls showed this:

Gallup Poll #248, Question 3 (mid-Sept 1941), 55% of Americans believed that the country was already involved in the war. As shown in Question 5K and 5T of the same poll, a little over 1/2 of all Americans believed FDR was doing the right thing with his actions (that 55%), while about 20% of that 55% believed he hadn't gone far enough. A near complete reversal of the numbers from the first months of 1941 when only about 17% favored going to war!

Furthermore, in Question 6 of Poll #248, 60% of Americans approved of the decision to fire on German submarines. Finally, a great majority of Americans answered in Questions 11K and 11T that American democracy and German fascism could not co-exist. Now, while in that same poll the vast majority answered they did not want to declare or go to war unilateraly at the time, they approved of FDR's actions (you can also check out Gallup Poll #248, Question 13 to see that 2/3 of Americans support FDR's policies in general as well as his foreign policy specifically).

In Gallup Poll #250, Question 3K (conducted October 7th, 1941), now 66% of Americans believed the US should continue to help the UK even if it risked war in Europe against the Nazis. In Question 3T of that poll, the same 66% ratio of Americans now stated that it was more important to defeat Germany than to stay out of the war. (all emphasis mine)

Additionally, according to Gallup Poll #254, Question 3 (conducted in late November 1941), 73.58% of Americans now believed the United States should "take steps now to keep Japan from becoming more powerful, even if this means risking a war with Japan."

Pearl Harbor obviously wasn't the only reason America went to war with gusto. It was "the straw that broke the camel's back", it was end result of an ongoing built-up of straw after straw which America as a whole finally saw the Axis as a necessary evil which had to be addressed.

FDR was a skillful politician and not "ignoring or exaggerating" the actions of the Axis powers. FDR was only exploiting the Axis own failings, aggressions, and mistakes to rally Americans out of their "not our problem" mentality.

Not too surprisingly, the mid-west of America were the most "isolationist", while the coasts (east and west) were the least. Those not on the coasts had less personally at risk did they not? And don't forget that when the Japanese invaded/took over the French Indo-China colonies, Sec. of State Hull had openly promised both Britain and the Dutch government in exile free use of both our naval and air bases for their weapons of war out of which they could strike back at the Japanese if necessary. The Japanese knew this, the Dutch knew this, the Brits knew this. But, that jumps over the original premise of no American presence in the P.I. at that time.

But at any rate, the Gallup polls had exposed a shrinking not growing isolationist movement from mid-1941 on, and after Hitler invaded the USSR, the membership began to shrink even further as the American Communist and Socialist parties saw their "workers paradise" under attack, and even the outspoken Senators Nye (North Dakota) and Wheeler (Montana) had begun to tone down their "stay out" speeches.

Jennette Rankin (from my homestate of Montana) voted against declaring war, but then voted for every bill for defense spending afterwards. Just as she had done in WW1. While she was a pascifist, her speech condemning the declaration of war is telling in that it included the phrase; "I cannot vote to send men into a war which I myself am barred from participating in by my gender." (paraphrasing)

I sometimes think that those opinions of the American Isolationist position get blown out of proportion as if we in the USA wished to just kept on whistling in the cemetary hoping "nothing would happen to us".

 

Wikipedia, GDP numbers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#endnote_RelGDP

Country 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 Austria 24 27 27 29 27 28 29 12 France[1] 186 199 164 130 116 110 93 101 Germany 351 384 387 412 417 426 437 310 Italy[2] 141 151 147 144 145 137 117 92 Japan[3] 169 184 192 196 197 194 189 144 Soviet Union[4] 359 366 417 359 274 305 362 343 UK 284 287 316 344 353 361 346 331 USA[5] 800 869 943 1 094 1 235 1 399 1 499 1 474 Allied Total:[6] 1 629 1 600 1 331 1 596 1 862 2 065 2 363 2 341 Axis Total:[7] 685 746 845 911 902 895 826 466 Allied/Axis GDP:[8] 2.38 2.15 1.58 1.75 2.06 2.31 2.86 5.02

Take out the Soviet Union.

Allied total drops to 1700 in 1943 and 2000 billion in 1944.

That's about a 2 to 1 advantage in GDP. A large advantage? yes. A overwhelming advantage? No.

Also, fighting alone agaisn't germany for about 2 years before the US can mobilize means that Britain can fall. If Britain fall in 1942, the US is fighting alone 900 billion Axis with its 1250 billion GDP, a quite small margin.

Note that these data doesn't include Greater Germany, with had 40% more territory and population than Germany. This means that G. Germany had a GDP of about 580 billion in 1942 and 1943, about 45% of the American GDP in the same period. Since a Fw-190 costs 55.000 RM and a B-17 costs 240.000 dollars, and (second to that talking car), a RM was valued in 0.22 dollars, than a Fw-190 costs 12.000 dollars. So if you have 45% of the GDP, you can buy 9 Fw-190 for every B-17!

 

Just what weapons are you talking about ? Your aircraft figure is way off because for one thing you must figure in the fact that US aircraft were much larger,heavier,i.e. required much more resources then a Soviet one. How many 4 engined bombers did Germany or the USSR produce? How many trucks did either produce? How many large naval ships did Germany or USSR build?
Oh just who says the Europeans are better at war then Europeans? You better be glad the no economist sees that your saying per capita isn't very important.

 

1- I am just saying that it would be improbable that Germany could have been occupied if not for the USSR. The US didn't have the resources and the strategic position to do that alone.

2- Hitler was mad. Stalin wasn't that mad. I think that he would like to wait for the western countries to kill one another until he could make his move.

 

The US didn't have what?

Before we start the broken record of "Lend Lease" you need to go look at a globe.

The US Supplied Russia and Great Brittain with everything from spam to Aviation Fuel and adding machines. Saying that the US didn't have the capacity to produce or deliver something during WW2 is just plain dumb.

The US was producing LIberty ships in the neighborhood of 3 per day wich is much faster than the Germans could sink them.

Aircraft, Tanks, Weapons, and personel were produced even faster because they didn't have to wait for the cement to dry.