America's REAl contribution to WWII

Yeah, that's dumb.

I can buy the argument that American military contributions are somewhat overplayed, especially within the US, but he says nothing about American industry, which was obviously central to how the war played out.

But it is a great photo.

 

I hope for his blog's sake that he's better at science and politics than he is at military history.

 

honestly, if you can't see some truth in what he wrote, then it's because you don't want to. he brings up some very interesting arguments that i would imagine most americans (myself included) had never entertained before.

that said, I happen to disagree with the point that the final outcome of ww2 would not have been different without the US's involvement. without the US, the combination of Japan + Germany would have been enough to finish Russia, even in winter. France would also have been much more difficult to liberate had it not been for America's contributions. i'm not an expert on WW2, but the final outcome certainly would have been different without the US imo. the same can be said, however, about pretty much any of the other factors he mentions that helped the allies to victory.

 

Only if the Germans had.................magic! The US industrial effort was important in Russia winning the war, but after Stalingrad the inevitable conclusion was only a matter of time.

 

really? i think the russians would have had a pretty darn hard time dealing with both a German and Japanese front.

 

Absurd statement to make to an English speaking audience (American or British).

Japan was SMALLER? Have a look at the old Co-prosperity sphere circa the end of 1941, I don't know, EVER, Bora? Japan was weaker than Italy? The same Italy that outnumbered the Brits by some absurd amount in North Africa, only to have the Brits whip their collective asses until the Africa Korps arrives to bail them out? Japan, would have surrendured without a shot fired? Maybe if you let them keep all the parts of the Korea, China, and the Southern Pacific Islands they'd already taken. These are the people that were preparing their civilians to resist until the end in response to an American invasion of the home islands......they took a WEEK to think about whether or not to surrender after we NUKED them. Surrender without a shot fired?

The decisive battle in Europe was DONE by summer 1941. No 'real fighting' there to speak of until 1944. I'm incredulous that any European with a sense of history would have the gall to criticize American treatment of Jews. Honestly.

Uh, got to agree with you re: the whole Africa not critical thing. But Torch and Husky was Churchill's idea. Plenty of American officers hated the idea of helping to liberate the Brits' colonies in Africa for them. But better not go into too much detail about Stalin begging and pleading for the opening of a western front....kinda weakens the whole 'if not for Russia' thing.

Patton riding straight to Berlin?!? That's cute. Berlin was deliberately left to the bloodthirsty red horde. I'm sure everybody west of the Rhine is intrigued of your notion of what Europe really is. Only Greeks, Turks and Slavs? Oh, and no 'locals' chased the Wehrmacht out of anything by themselves, buddy.

 

Its kind of piling on at this point, but I thought I'd point out that:

1. Without the US' anti-submarine resources the war in the Atlantic would have been lost rather quickly, and England knocked out of the war, unable to sustain her population let alone her military.

2. Japan was brought down not by its internal crumbling or whatever he says, but by the phenomenally successful submarine war waged by US fleet boats, which ruined the Japanese merchant marine and severely hampered its Navy. You can't operate an island empire if you can't haul anything between islands that won't fit on a plane.

3. The Japanese Navy was way beyond the abilities of British, Dutch, and Australian forces to handle; the story of those fleets is a story of remarkably capable people facing overwhelming force. The defeat of that navy is popularly attributed to the skill and luck of the US naval air forces. But the actual events were more complex, and in a real sense the result was created by the US' foresight and ingenuity in developing an immense ifrastructure of fleet auxiliaries which could move to any suitable undeveloped harbor and create an almost first class fleet base in days, lacking only drydock facilities for cruisers and capital ships...


4. US applied industrial strength completely revamped the entire fuel generation and distribution systems of the western world; within a year or so of US entry to the war places like Maracaibo and Aruba were suddenly among the most important ports in the world, and the facilities that made them so were a product of complex planning, financing, and construction worked out in a remarkably short time. Its a story almost as impressive as the relocation of the entire Soviet industrial base to the Urals at the outbreak of war-- the weather was better and more financing was available, and it wasn't really done under fire. but the scale and timeline was similar. Those ports provided a huge porportion of the fuel for the entire effort against Germany-- without that fuel on the global market, the Soviet war machine might have had to depend on their cavalry in the summer too.

5. Much has been written about the superiority of German tank design, and there is some justice in this-- but those writers are looking at half the picture and believing the American tanks came out the way they did through some lack of foresight or design skill. They did not. The good German tanks-- later Panthers and the Tigers-- were produced in surprisingly small numbers, were slow to react due to warm up times required, operated poorly in mud, and were difficult of repair. The American tanks were designed to start on a dime, operate off road in European conditions, to be produced about as fast as gumballs and to be reassembled out of pieces of damaged units overnight. I don't know the exact figures, but the Sherman alone must have been produced in something like two or three times the numbers the Germans managed for their entire program for twice the timespan... add to that the Soviet ability to manufacture T-34s like they were using carbon paper to do it and the German's vaunted design superiority vanishes like the real world illusion that it was. Produceabilty is part of design. I can't claim that the T-34might not have won "its share" of the war alone, because it might have, but I can claim that there was never any chance that it would have to.

6. The invasion of Normandy was really necessary whether the US was in the war or not, was it not? The Soviets certainly spent much of the war begging for increased pressure in the west anyway. Well, the landings were literally not possible without the landing craft technology developed by the US. Those boats didn't exist even in the dreams of anyone else; they are such a staple of the photos of the war that it is easy to forget that nothing like them existed before. They were the joint product of the US industrial machine's ability to design, and ability to produce in huge numbers in a short time, something never before seen just because it was needed.

Germany probably could not have achieved its objectives with or without US opposition. Even had they caught the Russian industrial base in place and won that war the first blitz, they had probably thirty years of digestion to do before the infrastructue of Europe could be built up to the point that a conquest of England might be attempted; and thats assuming that they didn't waste a ton of time and resources on "purifying" the population instead of developing the base. We forget today that the German supply and logistics structure functioned primarily on a horse-drawn basis wherever railroads couldn't reach. That Polish cavalry was only slightly quaint, not grossly.

But Japan was in it on a self-percieved 200 year timeline. This guy's article grossly misapprehends the strength of the Japanese empire. If allowed to stablize their situation in 1942-- assuming that they did not attack Pearl Harbor, which one must do to postulate US non-involvement mustn't one? If allowed to stablize it in '42, presumably with the nullification or partial conquest of Australia, they'd have been happy with 50 or a hundred years of relative peace to organize and exploit the conquered territories. Whether US' continued possession of the Phillipines would have allowed that is questionable, and the elimination of Australian resistance was by no means a gimme, but we're already playing "what-if." IF those things could have been done the Japanese Empire would not have crumbled of its own weight, but prospered and modernised to the point where it might not have been beatable in our day.

The war pretty much required all of the efforts of everyone involved; when the stakes are everything, you use whatever you have. The Russians paid the biggest price, the British army gets the least attention, the Italians get dissed more because they didn't win than because they couldn't have, and almost nobody today remembers why Hitler wanted Norway, or that Brazil played a real role in the war... and people write articles like that one because they have not the imagination to see the details that shaped the time...

 

The Russians could have easily dealt with a supposed Japanese front. In terms of fighting ability, the Japanese soldier was the worst of the war. And Russia kept sizable forces in the East for most of the war. If Japan tried to invade they would have failed horribly.

 

The only 'truth' in his whole blog that I could see was that US (High School) History is poor quality, and white-washed to give credit to the US for all good things, and to ignore everything else.

But US Universities and Colleges? And bookstores and libraries? The importance of the Soviets in defeating the Nazis probably come as no surprise to any of the regulars in this forum.

Most of the other information and opinions about WWII in his blog are based on bad data and poorly thought-out theories.

Read 'Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943' by Antony Beevor.

 

He clearly meant compared to Germany and Italy combined. And Japan's GDP was only slightly higher than Italy's by itself.

I think Russia counts as European.

 

That's certainly true. I've seen a couple German tanker's writings where they were very jealous of the Sherman's cross-country ability to the point of wanting to trade.

Yup. Including even the Panzer Is and IIs, there were well over twice as many Shermans as all German tanks put together (~26000 German tanks to ~58000 Shermans). The British were outproducing the Germans in tanks in all years of the war until the last, when they started using Shermans as well.

 

There's no way either side wanted such a front; but there were skirmishes and the Russians were pretty clearly a match.

I think this characterization of the Japanese soldier terribly unfair-- he was underequipped, miserably supplied and cared for, and his command structure was inflexible and unimaginative once action was under way. The myth of his superiority was so fixed in his officers' minds that he was often sent to attack prepared positions in ridiculously inferior numbers. With the exception of mortars and the light machine gun he had nothing in his arsenal which wasn't clearly obsolete in comparison to its opposite number, and probably as many Japanese soldiers died of disease, malnutrition and starvation as Allied fire. Their medical corps in particular was an utter failure in war conditions.

I don't think we have any true picture of their fighting ability-- only that their fighting effect was poor. We do know that they had courage and endurance to spare, and they deserve some respect for that.

 

The biggest contribution the USA made during WWII was cracking the German and Japanese military codes. Knowing yourself and the enemy is always the most vital part to a war.

I still contend Dunkirk and the eventual failure of Operation Sea Lion was the worst military mistake of the war. Hitler should have annihilated the British Expeditionary Force at that moment and set the stage to focus all of his troops on the Eastern Front. Instead he made the mistake of starting Barbarossa while Sea Lion was ongoing.

 

This was not an error of Germany, it was part of the plan. Germany knew it had limited manpower compared to the allies and so went for high quality but low in numbers. It would not be a good idea to waste your elite and experienced SS panzer crews in flimsy tanks like the Shermans.

 

I thought that article would reveal in the second paragraph that those Russian cavalry units were riding American horses! (Or was that only WWI?)

The most thoughtprovoking WW2 observation I've read is that the Pacific front was largely a Sino-Japanese land war with US involvement as playing a relatively minor role. I don't totally agree, but the Chinese effort is pretty neglected.

Thank God we've gotten this far in the thread without criticism of the US's successful strategy to end the war.

 

In my opinion the author is not that far off. America's intervention was decisive. If USA never entered the war there would be no front in France or Italy, only the sideshow in Africa.

That means most of the German Army is on the Russian front. Although they might well have still lost in Moscow and Stalingrad I still believe, without the Americans the Germans could have held there own against the Russians, why?

by 1944 Germany had 50% of its Panzer units stationed in France which could have been on the Russian front instead. These were not any Panzer units but the all the major SS panzer divisions. These would have given the Germans to really implement there 'elastic defense' which Manstein was a proponent off.

Secondly the decisive Russian offensive in 1944 operation Bagration relied on American built vehicles, which made up around 90% of its mobile units. Without these Russian advanced and sweeping encirclements of the stranded German units could have have happened and the Germans could have responded and inflicted even higher casualties on the Russians.

A stalemate would have probably occured around the carpathians with Russia struggling to maintain its offensive over the long supply lines which had hampered the Germans. With no Western front Germany was capable of stopping Russia imo. The 'unstoppable jugganaut' is a completely myth.

 

Are you trying to conjure a Mel Brennan before August 6?

 

The US saved Western Europe from communism more than anything else.

The Russians were responsible for two out of every three Germany casualties.
Off course, they would not have been able to push so much pressure on the German war machine without the supply line the US established.

 

This is exactly the kind of statment that winds people up.

 

actually he has a point...a lot of time and money were spent to try and crack the codes and when it finally happened the tide of the war turned around. it provided an immeasurable advantage for the allies.

 

The US wasn't as key in breaking the German Enigma as I would initially think. I'll readily admit that the British provided most of manpower into that effort and that US effort into it was substantially less that the contribution to breaking the Japanese codes. Breaking the Japanese codes done by the USA played a major part with the victory at Midway. And the development of the Navajo code in the Pacific theater solidified the US intelligence advantage,