Who was the most powerful nation: USSR or USA?

by the way, the above post does not factor in Italian, Yugoslavian and Romanian (and other European allies of Germany) military deaths... which add up to about one million

pretty much all of these occured in the USSR, perhaps 100,000 of them killed by the allies?

heres another site, only this one isnt referenced (so theres no proof its true)
http://members.aol.com/forcountry/ww2/gic.htm

 

But the simple number of deaths is exactly one of those stats that hide the real contribution of the US: industrial, air and naval power. It is very likely that the USSR would not have been able to defeat the Germans without their regular supply of Anglo-American trucks, jeeps, tanks, boots, planes and so on. It is absolute fact that the USSR could not have defeated Germany in the air and on the oceans like the US and Britain together accomplished in the years before 1944. All these factors are very important in war but they cannot be expressed in the number of people killed doing it.

 

The site is almost certainly wrong, just judging by the figures for Sicily.
There are no complete statistics available, but Carlo D'Este (using source material from bothAxis and Allied) estimated german losses at approximatley 12,000 captured and killed, and 19,000+ wounded evacuated. Italien losses were estimated at 2,000 killed, 5,000 wounded and 137,000 captured (including some 34,000 Sicilians who were given parole on their home island).

But Roel has the real point. You can't judge the US/Brit contribution by number of axis troops killed. It is unlikely the Soviets would have been able to achieve their successes without the material and strategic aid of the western allies.

 

i agree with the above in terms of the ussr being unable to defeat the germans on their own....this also says much for the resillence of the german armed forces and the german nation that it took the combined strength of the western allies and the ussr to defeat them.

 

from higher up " Zhukov_2005
Soviet mainstray strategy was "take these here 100,000 men, and throw
them against these here German defenses."

Hardly ,
the soviets were inferiors tacticaly for most of the war , but
totally kicked german arses strategicaly
- at the stalingrad counter attack which was a total surprise ,
- at operation uranus wich made manstein
abandon the attempted rescue of the 6th army ,
-at kurstk were the grerman
command badly blundered and the soviets did everything right ,
-during the mud offensive of the winter of 43/44 clearing the ukraine ,
whith the germans backpedalling under the constant threat of enciclement
-at operation bagration, the biggest defeat of a german army ever !
when with total surprise mashall zhukov and vassilievsky
annihilated army group center , utterly destroying three armies with
less losses to the attacker than the defender and leaving one third of the
eastern front without any substantial german forces left in it .

the russians also developped artillery corps , the infantry man
equiped with automatic weapons as a standard , and last but not least
something called the operational science ..distinct from the tactical and
strategic and of wich all the present day staff officers are much into
but of wich I do not understand :lol: :lol:




.

 

Strategically they may have understood war, but tactically all those brilliant operations did indeed come down to "take these here 100,000 men..." etcetera. If this had been done without proper planning or the selection of the right objectives, Russia would probably have been bled white.

 

actually, i think casualities and deaths are a very big factor in America's war, given their initial reluctance in comitting to involvment in WWII.

hypothetically, if Germany's army fought only one enemy in europe, the USSR or the USA. Given the military competence and large size of all three forces, they would definitely defeat the USA, though not the USSR

this is because the USA was not willing to lose 10 million men fighting in a foreign war, they would withdraw before allowing that to happen

whereas the USSR was willing to lose 20 million defending their homeland from ~90% of the German military

its possible the USSR would have lost their war without american supplies, but the USA would likely not have even entered the war had the russians not also been fighting against hitler

 

I'm not sure about that, but even if it's true, does this make the American contribution to the war any less important? It doesn't matter exactly when or why they joined, the fact is that they did, but that their contribution to the war cannot be so easily measured by a number of deaths.

I would argue that the Allied victory in WW2 is the result of an Allied effort, and that no country could have done it on its own.

 

How about Soviet reluctance in committing to involvement in WWII until they were attacked. Maybe they stood by because they were too busy goobling up chunks of Europe themselves while France fell and Britain was alone. Do you really think the Soviets sacrified 20 million for a free Britain and France?

How about the European powers wanted the US to keep out of European affairs until they were no longer in position to handle the Nazi's alone.

It is apparent that Roosevelt was convinced that the US would have to fight the Germans sooner or later, and that he had reached this conclusion before the the German invasion of the USSR. I think once the US had lost enough lives in trying to defeating Nazi Germany, they would not have stopped unitl it was over. FIve million would have led to ten million, if that is what it would have taken.

 

No. I think they sacrificed 20 million people to stop the nazi's from enslaving Russia.

 

Then why use it to try and downplay US committment to the war against Germany? the Soviets only became involved when the had to. The US involvment was voluntary, they could have left Germany alone, even after Hitler's declaration of war, the US only had to worry about U-boats. Using Soviet casualties as a measure of committment is mis-leading. The Soviets were far more willing to expend their people than the Anglo-Americans ever were.

 

i'm not downplaying anything. i'm just saying the Soviet did more fighting and made more sacrifices than the US agaisnt a larger enemy...

its hard to say that without sounding dismissive, but i do still think the USA played a large part in WWII, just that th USSR's was larger

 

The number of deaths is not the statistic to go by, then, because it hides America's real contribution to the war. That way it is very easy to say the USSR won the war all by itself.

 

Did more fighting against the German Army (I assume this is the larger enemy, since both were fighting Germany, Itlay, Rumaina and Hungary. The West also had to contend with Japan and Bulgaria unitl much later in the war). The Soviets were almost totally missing from the war against Germany at sea. Any Soviet success in the air was arguably because of Western Allied pressure. Even a little thing like chemicals supplied by the US to increase the octane content of aviation fuel helped the Soviet effort in the air.
The Soviets made a much lesser contribution to defeating Japan than the Western Allies did to defeating Germany, coming in only long after the issue was decided. Victory against Nazi Germany didn't look as automatic in June 1944 as it does today (gotta love that hindsight!). Japan was clearly finished by August 1945, the only question was how long it would take and many more were going to die.

All the fighting the US did required them to raise, train, transport and supply an army (and air force) across a vast distance over an ocean. From virtually zero in 1940.
Anglo-American policy included trying to limit casualties (their own at least). The Soviet leadership had no such concerns about the sacrifice of their population as long as they (1) remained in power and (2) defeated the Germans.

I think it is entirely possible the Soviets would have been forced to accept some kind of armistice with Nazi Gemany, and an outside possibility of outright defeat, if:
- Britain hadn't remained in the war alone in 1940
- there had been no Western lend-lease to give the Soviets an "edge" (no Soviet tank or mechanized armies without all those Studebaker trucks)
- there had been no second front (the Atlantic), third front (the air), fourth front (the Med) or fifth front (NW Europe).

If casualties are your measuring stick for contribution to winning the war, then the Chinese made the biggest sacrifice and contribution, probably over 30 million.

 

I'm using fighting as a measuring stick...

Just ask yourself; Who did the most fighting, caused the most damage to the enemy, captured the most ground and destroyed the most equipement in WW2 overall??

Ze Germans of course, but since we're talking about only USA and USSR. the USSR did more fighting and inflicted casualties is a way of illustrating that.

P.S. notice i'm not using civilian casualties as an example, those 30 million chinese were almost entirely civilians and they mostly killed each other in the chinese civil war, not WWII

 

...and the very fact that they were able to do so was thanks to a large extent to Lend-Lease.

If they hadn't been given so many trucks, jeeps clothes and food and had to divide their industry and workforce between producing combat equipment and all the behind the scenes stuff for logistics, food, clothing and agricultural machinery do you really think that there would have been so many fully equipped combat units to be able to fight the Germans?

 

When it comes to destroyed equipment, I think the US is a fair contestant to the USSR, seeing as how much of the German Navy and Air force was destroyed by them. Add to that the amount of equipment destroyed in factories by the Strategic Bombers and you get a fair idea of how many forces the US and Britain first diverted from Russia and consequently destroyed.

 

Plus the Japanese Navy, and their merchant marine.

And the smaller but still significant amount of IJA units encountered

 

The US (and Allies) quite probably, I wouldn't care to actually calculate in terms of square mileage but when you consider the naval and land battles of the Pacific, the Liberation of Western Europe, N. Africa, and CBI that's a lot of space to which the direct Soviet contribution was pretty much nill.

Destroyed the most equipment...? How many capital ships did the Soviets sink compared to the Americans? How many strategic bombing raids did the Soviets carry out?

Did Germany really? What did the Reich look like in 1945 exactly? Germany made large gains but they weren't able to keep them which is a very important distinction. The USSR's ability to fight was because the US covered a huge amount of their behind the scenes stuff, the kit that gets the glory but is just as important to fighting a war as putting grunts in uniform and giving them a rifle.

I always wonder how many of the USSR's war dead can be put down to Soviet incompetence as well. The huge encirclements of Barbarossa, idiotic STAVKA orders and friendly fire... A lot of those 25 million probably died completely unnecessarily.

Equally Soviet Medical care was extremely basic compared to that of the Western Allies, again men who might well have made it home in the Western armies died needlessly in the Red Army.

Grieg posted some very illuminating figures on the sheer quantity of Lend Lease material provided by the US some time back, I wonder if someone might be able to dig them up?

 

This topic has the links to the other relevant ones and some nice information as well.

http://www.fun-online.sk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2984