This is an elevated comment, from Stewart M.
By 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.
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.
(This blog is for understanding the present, making educated guesses at the future, and telling truths, usually unpleasant ones. There aren’t a lot of places like this left on the Web. Every year I fundraise to keep it going. If you’d like to help, and can afford to, please Subscribe or Donate.)
Eclair
“. 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.”
I can attest to that ‘notion’ (can we call it ‘disinformation’?), being born twelve months before Pearl Harbor, and growing up during the anti-communist, Russians -under- every -bed, Fifties. It was less than twenty years ago, that I became aware of Russia’s role in the defeat of Germany, as well as of their horrific losses during the war: 27 million casualties by some calculations. And that was thanks to a women’s book club, reading a novel (whose title or author I cannot remember.) The Internet provided additional facts.
The three decades following WW2 in the United States were an exercise in creating and maintaining an almost completely false narrative of US exceptionalism. Including our Founding Story of how Pilgrims fleeing religious persecution and, later, doughty pioneers crossing the Plains in covered wagons, created a Nation by eliminating the barbarous (and un-Christian) savages who did not deserve the Land they had lived on for millennia. School history classes, movies (every Saturday in the pre-TV days), books, then television, all presented a fabrication of distorted half-truths as well as outright lies.
Well, the cat’s out of the bag, the ‘alternative narrative’ is out there and cannot be easily suppressed, although the powers -that- be are certainly trying. It’s going to be really really messy for the next decade. At least.
bruce wilder
One of the remarkable aspects of U.S. war planning was that there was competent and deliberate planning. World War I was experienced by the U.S. domestically as economic chaos. Railroads seized up, war profiteering was common, an agricultural depression followed et cetera. FDR and the New Dealers were determined to not repeat those mistakes.
It may have been only incidental, but economics as an academic discipline and profession was much richer and more diverse, and was thus able to contribute to the competence with which new policy and institutions and infrastructure were developed. From the decision to build the Pentagon, the world’s largest office building, to managing the migration of millions from farm to industrial cities, to breaking the monopoly of Alcoa on aluminum to drafting leading business executives to do indicative planning to devising ways to finance industrial war production that avoided crippling risk aversion and war-profiteering, the competence was thorough and deep. There was a struggle going on politically between reactionary capital and managerialism, but it was handled well. Harry Truman, the Senator from Pendergast, rose to national attention relentlessly rooting out corrupt war-profiteering and, yes, some thought it ironic.
The U.S. has recently experienced acute shortages infant formula and a specialized kind of glass bottle used in routine medical testing. The pandemic was a catastrophe for the integrity of public health — Biden worse than Trump, as impossible as that seemed at one time. I have recently seen headlines regarding U.S. dependence on Russia for uranium for nuclear power production. (No one draws the connection to Hillary Clinton and a famous Clinton Foundation scandal because why would they?) Boeing’s troubles are well known. Intel’s a little less so. Google’s deterioration is obvious. Insulin pricing scandals and opiates epidemics, but Pharmacy Benefits Managers are allowed to roil the drug store business on an epic scale. It is almost as if 40 years of neoliberal ideology has left politics itself ignorant of its responsibility for results.
Daily Reader
Repost “comment article” from 3 weeks ago?
Feral Finster
If ever you want to have your mind blown, no dope required, get thee to YouTube and look up a 1945 documentary on the Kaiser Shipyards in Monterrey, California.
In under five years, Henry J. Kaiser turned a mudflat into five shipyards, shipyards cranking out oceangoing cargo and specialized ships like they were potato chips. Not only that, but they had to build all the supporting infrastructure, housing, schools, electricity, etc., and recruit and train a workforce of thousands, most of whom had never seen a ship before.
And of course, with WWII going on, there weren’t a lot of surplus workers who were desperate for any kind of job., nor were commodities sitting around for the taking or farmers going broke for lack of makrets for their crops.
But they did this. They built all that, and without the latest AI or smartphones and their wifi coverage sucked, to boot. You watch this documentary and see workers like ants assembling a ship from soup to nuts in a couple of days and ask yourself – Where did we all go wrong?
Purple Library Guy
I think it’s about propaganda. Marx used to talk about capitalism (and I think theoretically other economic systems) creating contradictions, which would sharpen over time. I think social systems maybe create contradictions on a social level as well, and propaganda is an example. The thing about propaganda is, ruling classes need it, but over time as self-congratulatory and otherwise elite-useful things, that aren’t actually true, get embedded in a society, new leaders were consumers of the propaganda before they became producers of it.
So you tell the people for long enough that America is perfect and all powerful and the Leader Of The Free World ™, the next crop of leaders think that. You tell people for long enough that markets are good and government is bad and you should just give all the money to rich people so they can piss on your head–um, trickle it back down–you get people running the government who don’t think there’s any point to governing and so are obviously not going to bother learning to do it well.
I’m sure it happened with feudalism too. You’d get monarchs who thought they could do crusades without having what it takes to win, because the clergy told them God was on their side and they couldn’t lose.
Ian Welsh
Woops.
I was seriously sick three weeks ago and I guess it didn’t properly transfer to long term memory.
Ah well, no harm done, it’s still a good comment article.
Curt Kastens
The only reasonable thing that a reasonable person can do is wait to see if Russian or Chinese Troops reach the border of the country that you live in then welcome those troops as liberators. Welcoming the invadoors would not be an act of treason. It would be an act of counter treason. The treason was committed in 2003 and before that in 1981-1986 and before that in 1972 and before that in 1967 and before that in 1963 and before that in 1913 and before that in 1877 and before that in 1831.
And here in Germany the most recent treason was in 2023, and before that in 2022, and before that in 2003. I am not oppossed to the German Consitution. It is a wonderful document. I am now opposed to the people who interpret it and enforce it.
They are and have been betraying both the letter and the spirit of the document.
The US Constitution on the other hand is grossly outdated for enlightened minds of the 21st century. Though I recognize that I can not do anything about either unless the Russians and or Chinese liberate my home and homeland. I hope that they hurry because they might not be aware of how unstable the planet’s climate has become over the past few years.
StewartM
Feral Finster
If ever you want to have your mind blown, no dope required, get thee to YouTube and look up a 1945 documentary on the Kaiser Shipyards in Monterrey, California.
In under five years, Henry J. Kaiser turned a mudflat into five shipyards, shipyards cranking out oceangoing cargo and specialized ships like they were potato chips. Not only that, but they had to build all the supporting infrastructure, housing, schools, electricity, etc., and recruit and train a workforce of thousands, most of whom had never seen a ship before.
To give you another example of our competence back then, let me give you these videos, on how we refloated the Pearl Harbor battleships sunk or damaged on Dec. 7th, 1941:
The Salvage of Pearl Harbor Pt 1 – The Smoke Clears
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB-V9cCSC8o
The Salvage of Pearl Harbor Pt 2 – Up She Rises!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlLCe1WNaIE
The Salvage of Pearl Harbor Pt 3 – The First and the Last
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eibt2gYuFD4
When you read account of the Battle of Midway, you’ll read things like “The US had no battleships”. Poppycock!! We did, the new Washington and North Carolina battleships were in their shakedown voyages, but we also had older battleships like:
USS New York (BB-34)
USS Texas (BB-35)
USS Wyoming (BB-32)
USS New Mexico (BB-40)
USS Mississippi (BB-41)
USS Idaho (BB-42)
USS Colorado (BB-45)
The newest of these ships, like those sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor, were built in 1923. You’d think that these would have been pressed into service due to the emergency the US was facing, particularly in the Pacific against the Japanese.
But oh, no. What happened to the refloated Pearl Harbor battleships, plus most of the older ones listed above, were put into drydock and re-done from stem to stern. They came out a lot more ‘kickass’ (radar-controlled gunnery, new AA batteries, the works) and far more capable ships than they were pre-war. It was a testament to the judgement and patience of the managerial class at the time.
All this should end with the trick question: “When did the battleship Oklahoma, BB-37, torpedoed at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941 and capsizing, sink?”
The answer is: May 17th, 1947. You see, they were able to re-float Oklahoma as well, but decided against rebuilding her. After the war she was being towed back to the West Coast to be scrapped, when the tugs pulling her ran into a storm. To save themselves, the tugs were forced to cut the cables to Oklahoma and she sank in deep water.
At least that’s not as bad as what happened to her colleague Nevada. Nevada got underway at Pearl Harbor, survived that, and was everywhere during the war, at D-Day providing fire support and at Okinawa where she got hit by a kamikaze. After this 1914-era battleship had gone through two world wars, and all that mayhem, she was chosen to take part in the Bikini atoll A-bomb test where she was targeted by not one, but TWO, atomic bombs. And yet she still didn’t sink!!!
Sadly, she was so radioactive after the Bikini atoll tests there was no other option but to scuttle her. She’s still there today.
somecomputerguy
What changed is ideology, and the lack of meaningful political alternatives. We have two Republican Parties. One is for Rockefeller Republicans, and the other is now fringe reactionary.
Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR announced that every privately owned business in the country had just been drafted. For the next 4 years the U.S. ran on a Soviet-style centrally planned economy. And it worked. That is why, until the ’70s, the smart money was betting on the Soviets to win the Cold War.
If economists predicted doom, nobody listened, because they had stopped listening ten years earlier. Leslie Groves traveled the country, and when he found suitable sites for the Manhattan Project, he simply wrote a check. No one debated whether we could afford to fight WWII, and this was after we had already been spending like crazy to get out of the Great Depression.
They operated under the hard-won understand that “markets” are empty shibboleths.
Now economists are becoming famous rediscovering policies from the New Deal State, that economists worked so hard to bury. See Isabella Weber.
Curt Kastens
Maybe the following link belongs in an Open Dread. But there is no Open $pread showing up right now. Zinse the link fits nicely with my comments about how it is not treason to not to support our western governments agressions against those societies that are trying not to get occupied by these western governments, I think that it is a reasonable call to place the link on this thread.
https://sputnikglobe.com/20241102/russian-forces-took-us-daniel-martindale-who-helped-russian-military-from-ukraine-forces-territory-1120752763.html
Maybe the link deserves a spot on the week end wrap. A tiny bit of good news to intersperce among all of the stories about our disfunctional societies.
Lisa
Ian you really need to do your research. The USSR got 2.5 MILLION tons of Lend Leases supplies in 1942. Trucks, trains, steel, explosives, radios, aluminium, aviation fuel, copper wire…
Rather than list them all I’ll let Zhukov have the final words on this:
“Now they say that the allies never helped us, but it can’t be denied that the Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn’t have been able to form our reserves and continue the war,” Soviet General Georgy Zhukov said after the end of the War. “We didn’t have explosives, gunpowder. We didn’t have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives. And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? But now they make it seem as if we had an abundance of all that. Without American trucks we wouldn’t have had anything to pull our artillery with.”
Ian Welsh
I didn’t write this, but I’m confident Stewart has done his research.
Lisa Mullin
I think I’ll take Zhukov’s (and Stalin’s) word about the importance of Lend Lease to the USSR over Stewart’s.
425,000 trucks, jeeps and tractors.
US machine tools and other machinery.
Sheet steel
2,000 trains, 11,000 goods wagons
59% of aviation fuel.
33% of explosives.
45% of copper
56% of aluminium
80% of trains and rolling stock
Stalin: “without the use of these machines, with the aid of Lend Lease, we would have lost the war”.
StewartM
Lisa,
Your totals in the last post are for the whole war. Not just 1942. 1942 saw only 14 % of that total arrive. Only 2.1 % arrived in 1941.
1941 360,778 2.1 %
1942 2,453,097 14 %
1943 4,794,545 27.4 %
1944 6,217,622 35.5 %
1945 3,673,819 21 %
Total 17,499,861 100 %
Raw tonnages mean nothing without context. If you were to weighed Soviet production of everything we sent, how much would that be? The Venus is a big object, for sure, but what’s its mass compared to say, the Sun?
Moreover, you’re omitting the fact the Soviets had pre-war inventory. “How much was produced in the period of 1941-1945” is not the complete picture. For instance, the vast majority of trucks used by the USSR in WW2 were of Soviet manufacture, because despite receiving more US trucks than they made, the Soviets had pre-war inventory. Ditto for locomotives; the US did send 2,000 locomotives to the USSR (the Soviets preferred those from certain companies, I can dig that up if you’d like) but they had 24,000 at the war’s start and were able to rescue all but 2,000 of oldest, most worn-out, locomotives during the 1941 retreats. So all those locomotives we shipped did was just to replace Soviet losses (and given the reduction of the Soviet rail network during the dark days of 1942, the Soviets never really suffered a shortage of either locomotives or railcars).
Another example: the Soviets only made 8-8.5 million tones of steel in 1942 and 1943. Contrast that with 80-82 million which the US produced, and 28-30 million that Nazi Germany produced during the same time frame. Yet the Soviets outproduced the US and Germany in tanks, and Germany in aircraft, in 1942, producing 24,500 of the former and 21,900 of the latter. That’s despite having received only some 16 % of the total Lend-Lease deliveries. That’s more than their prewar inventory, despite losses and despite the fact they had to relocate much of their industry east of the Urals.
In 1943 this is 24,1000 tanks (Soviet tank production dropped slightly as factories shifted from making light tanks to more useful medium/heavy models) and 34,900 aircraft. Again the bulk of Lend-Lease aid had not been received, nor could it have been actually put to use (people think that as soon as a delivery was made that the Soviets could instantly put that aid to use, but this was usually not the case…it took months to get the shipments of British tanks, received in October-November of 1941, into any actual battle, and they dribbled into the Battle of Moscow over a course of three months a dozen or so at a time).
In part the Soviets performed this miracle by aggressively re-working every scrap of steel they could lay hands on, as most metals can be recycled an infinite number of times (in theory at least). The US sent steel to the Soviets, but the Soviets declined to use it in their medium and heavy tanks, as US steel did not meet Soviet quality standards. The Soviets tried to rework US steel to achieve better performance, but failed.
https://www.tankarchives.ca/2018/01/american-steel.html
Instead, the Soviets substituted US-made steel for less demanding uses. It helped, but those fleets of Soviet tanks that were made were not made of American steel. Our steel just wasn’t good enough (Soviet high-hardness steel may have been the best tank steel produced by any WW2 nation).
As what Stalin, Khrushchev, or Zhukov were said to have said to their Allies, take that with a grain of salt. For one thing, these are often misquoted or presented out of context, as per Khrushchev:
“If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war,” he wrote in his memoirs. “One-on-one against Hitler’s Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me.”
First of all, there’s a vast difference between “not would have won” vs “being saved”. No matter how you cut it, Lend-Lease did not “save” the USSR. When the USSR could have lost WW2, at Moscow and at Stalingrad, it had virtually no impact on the battle of Moscow and very little on the Battle of Stalingrad. Even the victory at Kursk in the summer of 1943, the majority of the aid had not been sent yet (Stalingrad determines that the USSR will not lose WW2; Kursk determines that they will win it, as long as the Grand Alliance holds together). Only like 15 % of the trucks in the Red Army, tops, were US-made in the summer of 1943.
Secondly, I agree with Khrushchev on the USSR likely not surviving the onslaught alone. But Lend-Lease isn’t really the reason for that. If Germany could have focused its entire force on defeating the USSR, it probably could have won in 1941. The very fact that there was a strategic threat in the West, meant that the Germans in 1941 could deploy only 88 % of their ground forces, and about 80 % of their air force against the USSR and not push those totals closer to 100 %. That’s huge.
Later on, the Allies did more. The invasion of Sicily and Italy caused a few divisions to be transferred to the West. The increasing threat of a Western invasion caused Hitler to issue Fuehrer Directive 51 in November 1943, which essentially put the Eastern Front on notice that it would have to make-do with its own resources, as the forces in France had to be built up to resist the expected Allied invasion. Lastly, the bomber offensive, particularly the US daylight offensive, resulted in the Germans stripping both the Eastern and Mediterranean front of fighters, and even Western Europe/France to a degree, to deal with the B-17s and B-24s sent on those unescorted deep penetration raids in the summer/autumn of 1943. That’s also huge.
All that “helped the USSR win WW2”, probably a lot more than Lend-Lease did. That’s the “help” I think Khrushchev is talking about. The biggest single Lend-Lease item was not anything you mentioned, but food; that is the point that more recent Russian historians are pointing out. Food shortages were a major contributor to the civilian death toll in the USSR.
https://histrf.ru/uploads/media/default/0001/12/df78d3da0fe55d965333035cd9d4ee2770550653.pdf
Having said all that, at some point in WW2 there is a point where the USSR could have won WW2 all by itself. Maybe after Bagration in the summer of 1944 (the Germans LOSE almost as many troops as they HAD fighting the Western Allies in France in Bagration), or the offensive into Rumania or the Balkans in the autumn of 1944, where there’s another mass destruction of entire German armies, the USSR could have won by itself. Likewise, there’s a similar point where the Western Allies could have finished off Germany by themselves had the Soviets quit the war (certainly by January 1945, after the failed German Ardenness counteroffensive).
But for most of the war, both sides needed each other. Most of the people who argue your points, Lisa, are trying to make Lend-Lease some sort of charity. In fact, the Soviets actually PAID $41 million for the first shipments! And moreover, it’s clear from Allied thinking that we thought that keeping the Soviet Union in the fight was at the very least highly desirable, if not outright essential, to victory. This wasn’t just during the dark days of 1941 and 1942, even at Yalta we were willing to make concessions to get Soviet assistance against the Japanese, because we believed we needed it. The US couldn’t field mass armies like the Soviets, due to our need to maintain a sizable naval arm, an air arm, a merchant marine, etc. Every US base, be it in England, on the continent, or in the Pacific, required construction workers, hospital staff, aircraft mechanics, port facilities none of which operate without PEOPLE to run them. The Soviets were doing the job of “tearing the guts out of the German army” for us and we damn well knew it, and that it was important to us that they continue to do it.
David Glantz, the editor of the Journal of Slavic Military Studies and noted expert on the Eastern front (I have some of his books) is more strident than I am about this. He has written:
“If the Western Allies had not provided equipment and invaded northwest Europe [our emphasis], Stalin and his commanders might have taken twelve to eighteen months longer to finish off the Wehrmacht,” Glantz noted.
“The result would probably have been the same, except that Soviet soldiers would have waded at France’s Atlantic beaches rather than meeting the Allies at the Elbe.”
bruce wilder
That’s a trouble with narratives: they create and then communicate meaning without disclosing the context that justifies that meaning. Narratives are not, in and of themselves, “true” in a factual sense, because they do not disclose anything like the minimally complete factual context or argue explicitly for how some minimally complete factual context produces the meaning ascribed by the narrative. A narrative, honestly and objectively synthesized from facts, will effectively compress its factual basis, but narratives do not encode their compression algorithm or come with instructions about how to unpack their factual basis. The moral meaning of the narrative — even a factually false narrative — is normally clear, ironic and “its complicated” accounts included. But, even a minimally full factual context — and it is context, after all, that creates “true meaning” — is generally impractical within the confines of a blogpost, blog comment or X-tweet.
Both StewartM and Lisa Mullin have pointed to bits of factual support, but neither could practically argue the complex mechanics of the Soviet / Nazi battlefield confrontation to identify the ways in which Lend-Lease aid could arguably have been critical to Soviet success.
The Nazi’s were held back from an offensive culmination resulting in victory by their own grand strategic hubris and viciousness. I have made this point in comments before, but I think it bears repeating here, because it goes to support the main thesis of StewartM’s OP — a thesis Lisa does not challenge — which is that U.S. competence was exemplified by appreciating the limitations of its own immense economic power.
World War II was a contest of industrial power and in that contest, enormous lead-times and vast investment was necessary to generate not just output, but capacity to produce output. The U.S. chose to expand its capacity. So did the Soviet Union, though their situation was desperate enough that they were often forced to squander resources in the early going especially, to hold Germany back. Germany had accumulated material in preparation for a rapid offensive, but not either the secure access to resources nor the production capacity to sustain the pace of that offensive into the Soviet Union at the same time that they were confronting the Anglo-American alliance. The Nazis may have calculated that they would secure access to critical resources by conquest. But — and this is where I think they went terribly wrong in their strategic as well as their moral thinking — they pursued a conquest by extermination. They made desperate resistance the only possible course of action open to the Soviets. Their murderous intent was revealed early on. It was not a face they showed the U.S., France or the U.K. in the West.
It was an exceedingly close thing in many respects. The Siege of Leningrad, the defense of Moscow, the Battle of Stalingrad — these were desperate struggles on a scale and of an intensity that is beyond imagination to conceive. In relation to the course of the larger conflict, they were also culmination points, past which Germany was simply incapable of supplying necessary material and personnel to sustain a continued level of military effort anything like that of 1941-42. The Soviets could and did scale up their military effort and built capability right through their entry into Berlin.
It was such a desperate struggle at the culmination of German efforts — such a near thing — I would be reluctant not to attribute some criticality to even marginal material aid. Anything that fed Soviets or their military production capacity at that point must be regarded as vitally important. However, I would not think any material shortage whatsoever could have persuaded either Stalin and the Soviet leadership class nor the mass of Soviet citizenry to countenance surrender or a separate peace. And, that’s mainly because no one at the time imagined that Germany was offering terms, any terms. In the West, Germany had offered terms, or the possibility of terms, and the French accepted an armistice. Britain chose not to, but it was arguably a choice, though with appeasement discredited, not an appealing one. American aid and support to Britain was absolutely necessary to keep Britain in the war and Britain’s supply lines across the Atlantic open. Britain had no option to invest in industrial production of the full scale and scope necessary to do much more than hold the line in Europe or Asia, and in many clashes they failed pretty miserably. Keeping Britain in the war was America’s greatest contribution to the possibilities of eventual Soviet success and Axis failure.
I would like to say something else about American “competence” in WWII in choosing its war aims. Calibrating prudently what it could do and accomplish with its admittedly immense relative economic strength and the immunity of that economic potential afforded by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans was certainly wise.
I would draw attention, as well to the so-called Atlantic Charter, which laid out idealistic war aims, which included self-determination of peoples and de-colonization, and foregoing territorial aggrandizement by the allies, and a post-war economic and trade regime that would be fair even to the losers. I don’t think the French or the British, with their empires, were enthusiastic. And, certainly the Soviets violated the terms by moving boundaries around in Eastern Europe.
FDR wanted a better world and expressed that sentiment in an idealistic foreign policy. There was some realpolitik hypocrisy in his actual execution, but his idealism put him on the right side of history and a great deal of horror and destruction would have have been avoided if his successors had recognized and embraced more of his vision. They would embrace his rhetoric, as we know, in the relentless and ultimately empty promotion of democracy and human rights. The enlightened self-interest the U.S. should have in promoting actual democracy, human rights and fair trade is a popular propaganda theme to this day, but the sense of it, the wisdom of it, is buried beneath the cruel, reactionary ruthlessness of the plutocrats and their neocon, neoliberal minions. That foreign policy establishment, backed by the self-interested military-industrial complex, is the rancid leftover of the idealistic sense of enlightened self-interest with which America in 1941 proposed to go to war, a sense well-informed by the many failures of the First World War to solve structural and institutional problems in global politics.
The present incompetence of the Blob(tm) in fashioning rationalizations for U.S. foreign policy has a lot to do with jettisoning that idealism for secrecy and covert action and a large standing military establishment. The Blob(tm) is inherently too corrupt to think seriously about, let alone act in, the collective interest of the United States, never mind the global community. The rot is deeper than not knowing limitations. I think they do accept limitations, but they don’t care about consequences except insofar as those consequence line their own pockets.
Lisa Mullin
Stewart: ‘amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics’.
This is a nonsensical comment “Having said all that, at some point in WW2 there is a point where the USSR could have won WW2 all by itself. Maybe after Bagration in the summer of 1944”.
The USSR would never have gotten to Bagration let alone undertaken it successfully, without the revolution in logistics that US supplied trains, rails and trucks gave them. You’re not going to move that amount of men, material, weapons, fuel, supplies, ammo on horses and carts.
The iron hand of logistics, the major reason Germany failed at Moscow, applied to the USSR just as much as it did to Germany.
Germany stripped western Europe bare of trucks for Barbarossa..and it wasn’t even near enough. Never forget that even running well past their logistical limits the Wehrmacht had no problems smashing through any Soviet opposition at any battle in 41 or 42.
And yes Stalingrad was a huge success but was largely an own goal by the Germans due to over confidence and over stretch. If Hitler had stuck to the original plan it’d have never happened.
And don’t forget the drubbing Manstein gave the Red Army shortly afterwards, when the Soviet offence ran out of logistics in yet another of Stalin’s disastrous ‘general advances’.
Plus the USSR planes wouldn’t have taken off without US aviation fuel, the planes would have no radios (nor tanks too), the Soviets could never have created enough aluminium to even build them.
I recommend you reading some actual history about the titanic USSR/Germany conflict such as:
Zetterling, The Drive on Moscow 1941
Glantz, When Titans Clash
Stahel, Barbarossa and Germany’s defeat in the east
Ovary, Russia’s War
Jukes, Stalingrad to Kursk, Triumph of the Red Army
rkka
Lisa,
Perhaps a German perspective might be useful here, that of Colonel-General Franz Halder, Chief of the German General Staff.
By 13 August ‘41, he notes that his army was bleeding a lot, 83k killed, 390k total casualties. That works out to ~1560 KIA for the 1st 53 days, and about 7,000 total casualties/day.
That’s an infantry division’s worth of riflemen killed, wounded, or missing a day, for the 1st 53 days.
By comparison, the Western allies managed to inflict ~640 KIA/day in France, and the Poles ~220 KIA/day.
In April ‘42, he surveys his army- AG Center down to 13% infantry strength, AG North down to 22%, and AG South down to 50%.
Everybody knows what the German armed forces did to the Soviet Army by early ‘42. Not many know what the Soviet armed forces did to the German Army by early ‘42: Bleed two Army Groups white, and the 3rd pale. Only AG South could be restored to a state fit for renewed offensive ops in ‘42 with the available infantry replacements, and that one got surrounded in November, with, as Stewart has shown, the vast majority of Lend-Lease yet to come. With such carnage inflicted on the German infantry branch, and such a long line to hold, I think the outlines of Soviet victory were clear by then.