By StewartM
(This is an elevated post by commenter StewartM.)
What strikes me is our loss of leadership competency, from the extremely competent people who managed us through the depression and through WWII to the clowns of today.
I’ve been involved in Youtube exchanges where some idiot creates a video claiming how we “saved” the USSR in WWII via Lend-Lease. First, that is that factually untrue. The USSR saved itself; Lend-Lease was such a trickle in 1941-1942 that it had essentially NO effect on the Battle of Moscow in December 1941, and very little impact on the Battle of Stalingrad in the fall-winter of 1942. Stalingrad at the very least marks the point where “the USSR will survive and not lose” so Lend-Lease didn’t “save” the USSR. Lend-Lease did help the USSR, but the bulk of it (60 %) came in the last 10 months of WWII well after the USSR had turned the tide and driving back the Wehrmacht out of the USSR. The most important part of Lend-Lease help wasn’t the weapons we sent, nor the locomotives, nor the steel, nor the petrol, nor even the trucks (the most common ‘fact’ brought up). It was the food we sent–in 1942 42 % of the USSR’s arable land was occupied, and the USSR instituted a rationing program where soldiers, workers in essential industries, and children got first priority on food. If you weren’t one of those, you didn’t get much, and hunger contributed mightily to the USSR’s civilian death rate in the war. The FDR administration promised the USSR 10 % of US food production to help, but could only manage to deliver 3 %.
But my point in mentioning Lend-Lease is that such Youtubes miss the main reason why we did what we did in aiding the USSR. It wasn’t some act of friendship or mercy, we weren’t just ‘being nice’; we did it OUT OF ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST. George Marshall and the US military leadership were not sure we could win WWII without Soviet help; at the very least if the USSR went down to defeat and Hitler obtained access to the USSR’s resources it would prolong both the length and sacrifice of the US and UK. The military problem the US faced was war both in Europe and the Pacific, with far-flung bases and long supply lines that “ate” up manpower and required a powerful Navy and Air arm to protect. We thus couldn’t raise an army of hundreds of divisions and supply it overseas, to do the work that the Soviets were providing the West by grinding up the Wehrmacht. Keeping the Soviets in the war was quite vital; ergo Lend-Lease.
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In short, Marshall and his ilk had a clear and correct notion of what the US could do, and what it couldn’t do. The manpower restrictions on ground forces meant “no land war in Asia” which meant we wouldn’t field armies in China. Instead, we focused on a ground force manpower-minimizing “island hopping” strategy where we only took relatively few key islands and just left Japanese ground forces in elsewhere stranded and cut-off from supply. The bulk of the ground forces we did raise were going be used to defeat Hitler, whom Marshall correctly identified as the biggest threat to the US, given Germany’s technological skills and industrial base.
This kind of calculation is what we’ve lost. In WWII, we knew we were powerful, in some ways relative to the world more powerful then than now, but we knew we couldn’t do everything and that we shouldn’t even try. But after WWII, inside the US spread the notion (largely spread by conservatives and the anti-communists) that we had really ‘done it all’ and won the war without much of anyone’s help. Why did we cave to Stalin at Yalta? Why didn’t we let Patton drive the Soviets out of Eastern Europe? We had the bomb after all! (cue in Henry Stimson rhetorically patting his coat pocket). WE WERE OMNIPOTENT!
The first generation who acted on this belief, a belief definitely not shared by those who planned and executed WWII, was the “Greatest Generation” who had fought it as common soldiers when they assumed leadership—JFK through Reagan/Bush I. It led to Vietnam and to interventions everywhere, because we could and should impose our will upon the world. It was exacerbated when (as you say) financial means of scoring economies replaced measures of actual industrial capacity and output, from Clinton to today. What gets me is that the US’s leadership is more arrogant and more convinced of its supremacy despite the fact by all objective measures, whatever power the US actually has is far less relative to the rest of the world than the US during WWII during Marshall’s and FDR’s time. Yet Marshall and FDR knew we weren’t omnipotent and couldn’t ‘do it all’. And I fear nothing less than a massive comeuppance will change their attitudes.
GlassHammer
If you get the right degree, right network of peers, right internship, and right mentor you get to skip the grind of early career development in which “trial and error” both teaches and humbles you.
The velocity in which candidates move into leadership positions is just comical at this point.
Soredemos
Sorry, but the ‘idiot’ YouTubers aren’t wrong. Less America (though M3 Lee tanks were sent and they did serve a purpose, though the Soviets didnt like them), but if you look at lists of Soviet armor during the battles around Moscow early in the war British tanks like the Matilda were absolutely present and helped fill in the ranks to make up for the catastrophic early Soviet tank losses before their own production could be moved east and brought back online. I’ve seen numbers that almost 25% of the Red Army tanks around Moscow were British at one point.
Further into the war Lend-Lease trucks and food especially were crucial to keeping the Soviet war effort going. Something like 150,000 Studebaker trucks were shipped to the USSR.
This is a very silly thing to try and argue against.
Bill
Great piece of writing. One of the best bloggers I know is Tim Watkins who wrote about the relatively small Western Allied WW2 effort compared to the USSR’s at:
consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2019/06/22/the-wwii-battle-you-probably-havent-heard-of/
I grew up not far from a beach in England used by green American troops for live ammunition landing practice and “Yankees” threw gum and candy to the kids in the town, including my father. So I believed the Western myth put out by the American liberators of 1943 who turned into the permanent occupiers of Europe since 1945.
Purple Library Guy
Leaders in our society have to project, and often to believe, one of our society’s upper-class-accepted stories about how that society works and should work. I think one problem we have is that the contrast between our official stories and reality has become more stark and obvious over the years, which means to believe them you have to be more of a fool.
Jan Wiklund
The view of a retired British senior civil servant:
“The idea that this crisis has its origins in culpable ignorance and stupidity by western leaderships is pretty widely accepted now. But what hasn’t had enough publicity, I think, is that this ignorance was actually willed and deliberate. That is to say, certain things were simply assumed to be true, and no attempt was actually made to verify their accuracy, because it was not thought necessary. The belief in a weak Russia that could be pushed around, the idea that even if the Russians didn’t like what was happening in Ukraine there wasn’t much they could do about it, and the conviction that any attempted Russian intervention would collapse into chaos after a few days leading to a change of government in Moscow, were not judgements arrived at after proper analysis, they were articles of ideological faith, for which no evidential support was necessary or looked for.
And this isn’t the first time either. The grisly list of western political disasters of the last twenty years, from Iraq to the 2008 financial crisis to Libya, to Syria, to Brexit, to Covid to the rise of so-called “populism,” is distinguished less than by malevolence or stupidity (though both were present) than by an arrogant belief in the rightness of the opinions of the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) and by their ignorant but strongly-held views about the world, which the world itself had a responsibility to adhere to. Why bother with the labour of finding out the facts when are sure you know them already?”
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/france-saves-europe
Nevertheless, I would be interested in the publicity there are. We have Kishore Mahbubani: Has the west lost it? and others. But has anybody written about the dark farce of free trade – how the West thought it could rule the world because they were the biggest participant in this free trade, and forced through a lot of rules through the WTO that they fell on themselves?
Soredemos
@Bill
That piece makes abundantly clear that the Westen allies make crucial contributions that made the Soviet efforts easier, and even calls out Russians that try to dismissively downplay Western contributions. Especially the Western destruction of the Luftwaffe and crippling of German oil infrastructure. The German airforce had enough strength to bring adequate support to one front or other. But it couldn’t manage both at the same time. And the Western allies played the main role in effectively smashing what strength it did have.
This isn’t a binary issue. The Soviets could do the bulk of the fighting and dying (which they did), while the Western allies made efforts on and on the battlefield that eased, or even enabled at all, the Soviet efforts (which also happened). The appropriate corrective to ‘you’d all being speaking German if not for Easy Company of the 101st Airborne!’ is not ‘the Allies did nothing and it was all Ivan alone, by himself, with no assistance’.
It’s very likely that without the combination of Lend-Lease assistance and other theaters siphoning off Axis forces that the hard pressed Soviets would have been overwhelmed in the first year or two of fighting. Lend-Lease mattered, regardless of if some people want to smugly scoff at it, not just at first but on an ongoing basis. The numbers I can find say that the Allies, primarily the US, donated a total number of trucks that amounted to somewhere between 150 and 200% of the USSRs own domestic wartime production. Either the USSR simply couldn’t produce enough trucks itself (doubtful), or they didn’t feel the need to because they could rely on Lend-Lease and devote their industrial capacities to other vehicles.
StewartM
Soredemos
I’ve seen numbers that almost 25% of the Red Army tanks around Moscow were British at one point.
Wrong. Don’t feel bad, plenty others have made the same error.
It’s true that the British had sent some 361 tanks (145 Matildas and 216 Valentines) before December 1941. However, they had filled their radiators with water instead of antifreeze, and in-transit across the Arctic the radiators had frozen and burst. Moreover, the tanks had likewise corroded due to exposure to sea moisture, and came with no spare parts and no Russian translations for the manuals. It took a yeoman effort to get even a handful of these tanks into the Battle of Moscow. Those were never enough to fill even a single unit at any time, so they were mixed in with Soviet tanks.
As for American tanks, they didn’t arrive until April 1942, and thus played no part at all.
Peter Samsonov (Tank Archives) has a video on precisely this point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjAeVwAflMY
If you prefer reading, there’s this:
https://www.tankarchives.ca/2023/03/tanks-worth-their-weight-in-gold.html
StewartM
Soredemos
It’s very likely that without the combination of Lend-Lease assistance and other theaters siphoning off Axis forces that the hard pressed Soviets would have been overwhelmed in the first year or two of fighting. Lend-Lease mattered, regardless of if some people want to smugly scoff at it, not just at first but on an ongoing basis.
It IS true that continued US/UK participation was vital, as the threat of action in the West kept German from using nearly 90 % of its ground forces to using 100 %, and likewise (with about 10 % less) with air power. But only 4 % of Lend-Lease Aid came in 1941, and by 1942 only 14 % of the total had arrived.
The numbers I can find say that the Allies, primarily the US, donated a total number of trucks that amounted to somewhere between 150 and 200% of the USSRs own domestic wartime production.
The problem with these calculations is that they forget that (duh!) the Russians made trucks BEFORE WWII too, so had pre-war inventory. Lend-Lease trucks only made up 5.4 % of the total at the time Stalingrad ended. Even at war’s end in May 1945, Lend-Lease trucks only made up one-third of the total of Soviet trucks. It’s the same with locomotives, Lend-Lease locomotives, while more than Soviet production, were only enough to replace the older/obsolete locomotives abandoned in 1941, and the Soviets never suffered for any lack (especially since in 1942 their rail network had shrunk, so they had plenty of locomotives in regards to the available track).
Again, the salient Lend-Lease aid was in the form of food. And it wasn’t enough to prevent a lot of premature mortality among Soviet civilians during the war.
mago
Yeah. And then the wind cried Mary.
KT Chong
When Xi Jinping became the General Secretary in 2012 and announced the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, many Chinese were very upset at Xi and the project. I was certainly not happy. My thinking was: China still had a lot of poor people, especially in the rural areas and outside the top-tier cities. China could use all that BRI money to help poor Chinese. Instead, Xi was going to give out all that money to other countries and other people for a vanity project and soft power. At the time, China had good relations with the US and West. So I thought it was not a priority for China throw away obscene amounts of money for ego and to cultivate soft power overseas.
That was in 2013.
Four years later, Donald Trump became the US President in 2017. President Trump began to wage a trade war against China. Since 2021, President Biden have continued Trump’s trade war with China. Biden has been gradually escalating the trade war, which has become an all-out economic war against China. America’s strategy is to isolate China from global trade. Trade is the lifeblood of China, and the US has been attempting to cut off China’s trade from the rest of the world.
Now, with 20/20 hindsight: the BRI gambit of Xi and the CPC (Communist Party of China) seems to be prescient. Somehow Xi and the CPC, years before Trump started the trade war and a decade before the economic war, had calculated the day would come. BRI was the countermeasure. Xi and the CPC had planned, prepared and implemented the countermeasure, years before America made its first move in the trade war.
The CPC has been playing 4D chess while the US has been playing checker.
The BRI has paid off. The Global South are now entangled and tied into a web of economic interconnections and interdependencies with China, and China is the hub of the web. This web has become impossible for the US to undermine and untangle. We are at the point that, if the US forced countries to choose between China and the US, many countries in the Global South (especially in Africa and ASEAN) would choose China and tell the US to shove it. In fact, some countries actually just did, (i.e., Chad, Niger, Malaysia.)
Looking back, I am amazed and impressed by the competencies and foresight of the Chinese leadership. The BRI is not the only example. You look at BRICS, the moves China has taken over the past two to three decades to dominate every supply chains, the green industry, EV, shipping, multiple technology fields, etc. I no longer think all that winnings happened by accident and coincidences. Everything has taken a decade or more of plannings, preparations, implementations and actions. I still have a lot of reasons to dislike Xi Jinping and the CPC, but I have to admit and appreciate the competence levels of the CPC.
KT Chong
I am sure the Belt and Road Initiative was not solely Xi’s brainchild. The entire CPC and/or politburo (from the time even before Xi became the General Secretary) had likely calculated, gamed, planned the project as a countermeasure to what was to come from America. The way they had foreseen and planned the countermeasures a decade or more in advance… that is just impressive.
Jorge
If you thought this tempest was fun, just ask the America-Won-WW2 people about the Soviets and the Japanese. Does anybody have that one to hand?
Purple Library Guy
I guess another reason for the crisis of competence is lack of obvious consequences for so long. In not only the United States but to some degree in other Western countries, it has been possible to lead the country very badly and for the consequences to the ruling class to be either nonexistent or actually positive in the short term. They’ve been able to play international politics as domestic politics, and domestic politics as not only class war but as maneuvers to get special deals for all kinds of little splinters of the ruling class, and nothing seemed to happen except the little people’s lives got a little more precarious. So basically, competence in leadership hasn’t seemed to be IMPORTANT, certainly not compared to willingness to back the short term interests of the right people.
As a British blogger whose name I unfortunately forget said a little while ago “There’s a lot of ruin in a country”–it takes a good deal of work before the damage done really starts to break a previously important country’s ability to project power internationally.
But we seem to be arriving.
shagggz
@Soredemos,
As you say, the Soviets had untapped industrial capacity they could’ve tapped into in the absence of Lend-Lease. It strains credulity that those amphetamine-fueled Krauts were anywhere near an alternate timeline where they conquered Russia. Russia does not get conquered.
Eclair
Had an interesting conversation last night, at our local brew pub in north-western Pennsylvania. Now this state is currently a swing state, and this rural, and economically depressed, county voted 70% for Trump in the last election. Our group was a mix of Democrat, Republican, and agnostic. The discussion was started by one woman who said she had listened to an NPR segment, during a sleepless night, on Indigenous history in the US, and was completely devastated upon hearing that elimination of the the Indians had been US government policy. She could not wrap her head around this ‘inconvenient’ bit of history and the knowledge that ‘her’ government had been so ruthless and cruel.
So we discussed history that we had not been taught in school, European colonialism in North America, in South America, then in India and Africa, and the current live wire, Palestine. Talk ranged into the hunt for resources: gold, oil, diamonds, metals. And, of course, the US invasions of oil-rich Iraq and Afghanistan and why we have demonized Iran, and why the US/UK ousted their elected Prime Minister in the 1950’s.
The conclusion? Our government has lied to us for years, decades, and these alternate realities and truths are now being revealed through the internet, through ‘alternative’ media. Based on this track record, why should we believe anything we are currently being told by our government and mainstream media? And why should our current crop of ‘leaders’ be starting wars in far-away countries when our own communities are being devastated by hurricanes, by floods, by wild fires, by corporations sending their manufacturing facilities to other countries?
mistah charley, ph.d.
Stewart attributes “interventions everywhere, because we could and should impose our will upon the world” – to the “Greatest Generation” after they got into power – JFK through Reagan/Bush I. My own view is that it was the Dulles brothers – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_(Kinzer_book) – Eisenhower’s Secretary of State and CIA Director.
I was reminded of the Dulles boys this morning while reading about Milton Eisenhower, who shares the name of the storm now heading toward Florida.
Ike’s warning, at the end of his presidency, about the ruthless killing machine which had taken control of the U.S. – the Military Industrial Complex, latterly termed the Military Industrial Congressional Financial Intelligence Complex – MICFIC – was in vain.
This week I asked Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, to paraphrase the metaphors in the phrase “a conspiracy to milk, shear, and slaughter the sheeple” – it did so correctly. Nevertheless, it seems to me, to adapt a Cordwainer Smith story title, that chatbots understand – if what they do is understanding – in vain.
different clue
@ Purple Library Guy,
” Some British Blogger” may have been quoting or at least very closely paraphrasing Adam Smith . . . ” “BE ASSURED MY YOUNG FRIEND, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith wrote to his distraught friend, John Sinclair, after the battle of Saratoga (1777). “