Comments by "John Burns" (@johnburns4017) on "How close was the Soviet Union to Collapse in 1942-1943?" video.

  1. The USSR outproduced the USA in 1942 - Prof Tooze. Once the Germans failed in their Barbarossa gamble at Moscow in 1941, they were not going to win. The German economy was on knife's edge. Short of everything, all resources. They could not bring captured Soviet resources to use as the Soviets had a scorched earth policy. The Soviets reinforced their north allowing the Germans to advance in the south over stretching their supply lines. Then the Soviets gradually push south, being well supplied, even with oil from the British refinery in Iran, eliminating the Germans.
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  2.  MemeLover  I gave the source. The book is Wages of Destruction - The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Tooze clearly states the USSR outproduced the USA in 1942. Keegan: World War Two, chapter War Production: - Germany was third behind the USA, then the UK in GDP, in 1939. Germany = UK in capital goods production in 1939. - UK economy grows 60% during WW2. - Hitler says to Guderian, re: USSR, "had I known they had so many tanks as that, I would have thought twice before invading" Tooze: Wages of Destruction Preface, xxiii: Combined GDP of the UK and France exceeded Germany & Italy by 60%. - page 454: "It was poor because of the incomplete industrial and economic development of Germany". Interesting: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/workingpapers/publications/twerp603.pdf Snippets: "Soviet exceeded German GDP in 1940" "The Allies won the war because their economies supported a greater volume of war production and military personnel in larger numbers. This was true of the war as a whole, and it was also true on the eastern front where the Soviet economy, of a similar size to Germany's but less developed and also seriously weakened by invasion, supplied more soldiers and weapons." "the technological key to Soviet superiority in the output of weapons was mass production. At the outbreak of war Soviet industry as a whole was not larger and not more productive than German industry. The non-industrial resources on which Soviet industry could draw were larger than Germany's in the sense of territory and population, but of considerably lower quality, more far-flung, and less well integrated. Both countries had given considerable thought to industrial mobilisation preparations, but the results were of questionable efficacy. In both countries war production was poorly organised at first and productivity in the military-industrial sector had been falling for several years. The most important difference was that Soviet industry had made real strides towards mass production, while German industry was still locked into an artisan mode of production that placed a premium on quality and assortment rather than quantity. Soviet industry produced fewer models of each type of weapon, and subjected them to less modification, but produced them in far larger quantities. Thus the Soviet Union was able to make considerably more effective use of its limited industrial resources than Germany." "Before the war Soviet defence industry was in a state of permanent technological reorganisation as new models of aircraft, tanks, and other weapons were introduced and old ones phased out at a dizzying rate." The USSR had access to oil and more natural resources and far more men than Germany. Giving them the ability to produce far greater than Germany, which actually happened. This was despite that in 1942 the Axis forces outnumbered the Soviets.
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