Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Military History Visualized"
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I think that conscription armies are a bit different.
Lets say you fight a war with blackwater troops, Gurkhas and the french foreign legion... then the civilian population wouldn't protest as much about having to fight an illegal war on foreign soil in order to steal natural resources. But if you have spend your own peoples blood abroad just for the sake of a rich scumbag wanting more money in his pockets, then people would be furious.
On the other hand I think that national conscription army would be superior in fighting moral to a mercenary army when it is fighting a just war, that say a war of defence... or maybe a war to stop a genocide.
Then you talk about the economic aspects of war. In the past was an imperial power punished for being militaristic and having an aggressive foreign policy, since the cost of war would mean higher taxes for the population in that country. That in turn would make the products that that country produces more expensive and less competative on the world market, and foreign competitors would grab more shares of the world trade.. while the warlike country sinks to the bottom, and the empire declines.
But today America have new system: The petrodollar. All countries around the world needs dollars, since its the only acceptable payment for oil.
And that in turn keeps up the demand for dollars around the world, and America can print more money and other countries happily grabs more dollars to increase their foreign currency reserves. And America can pay for things by just printing money. America doesn't have to pay for wars and a huge miliary like empires in the past, she can't dump over that cost on Europe and Asia.
So why don't Europe and Asia then just stop taking dollars? Because if the demands for dollars go down, then the value of the dollar goes down. That would hurt America, but a cheap dollar would also help their industry to take marketshares from European and Asian producers. So its simply a dilemma for Europe and Asia.
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"Stronger and and better concealed the French front. "
No it wasn't. Stop making up lies about history. Finland was a massive failure and humiliation for the Red Army. If a weak poor shitty country with nothing in plenty besides swamps and mosquitos could defeat a military/industrial gigiant, then an attack on Germany would have been suicidal.
"BT tanks which was designed to fight in Europe not Russia..... Amphibious tanks and the largest airborne force I think some of the high numbers was 5 million but probably close 500,000 cant use that for offense you also missed a critical analysis."
When you copy a good imported American tank design, its not strange that the tanks you produce are more suitable to Europe than to a poor 2nd world country.
And having a massive army isn't the same thing as having aggressive intentions, and likewise doesn't military experimentations in offensive weapons mean you are going to use those weapons.
Countries develop new weapons and tactics all the time, because things that worked well in the last war, doesn't necessarily work well in the future wars. Mounted knights became unfashionable when gunpower came, and battleships dissapeared when planes and uboats came.
And building amphibious tanks isn't anymore strange than Kaiser Wilhelm II deciding to build the largest fleet of battleships in the world, despite the geography says Germany isn't a real naval power.
"Why would an defensive nation eat 3 nations, eat half of poland, take parts of Romania, and Finland and destroy a Japanese army."
Russia wanted to retake land lost in world war 1 (just like Germany). Stalin was bully who only cowardly attacked small countries. Attacking Germany + the Axis powers + occupied Europe, when the army have failed terribly at Finland, when the defensive lines are unfinished, when officer corps have been slaughtered, when dissent in the country is widespread, when tanks and airplanes need repairations and spare parts, when the international community always have been hostile towards USSR... all just seem foolish and suicidal.
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The problem was that Germany was producing luxury cars before world war 1, and the car manufacturers was happy with producing small numbers of cars to rich customers instead of massproducing things for the masses. And the German ministry of war was also of the opinion that it wanted to get its trucks from many companies instead of being dependent upon on just a few... and all this made the German automotive industry very ineffective during world war 1, because the lack of standardization when every company built their own vehicles and types of trucks.
So the allies could easily outproduce Germany in tanks and trucks... when their industries was used to Fordism, taylorism and massproduction.
And the German industry never solved this ineffectivity problem. Economic crisis can be painful, but they can also be necessary in order to create a strong economy in the long term. Structural rationalization means that demand for products falls in a market, and competition among companies gets harder about the smaller number of customers that are left. And some companies doesn't survive this struggle of life and death.... so some companies go bankrupth and their workers lose their jobs and they have to sell all their machines and tools to pay off their debts, or they get bought up by a competitor at a low price.
So when the economic crisis have killed off all companies with uneffective, uncompetiative ways of production... then only the strong companies with good leadership, management are left.
And when then garden has been cleansed of all weed, then there is plenty of room for expansion. And companies could grow stronger when many competitors are gone, and they can increase sales and hire more workers.
Germany was hard hit by the hyperinflation and the Great depression, but it got out of very quickly when Hitler turned the economy around with his defence spending. People got their jobs back and companies produced stuff for the military at full capacity of what their factories could bear. Germany never had as a painful structural rationalization as USA and many other countries, so she never had mass unemployment like USA had during the 1930s, but on the other hand did the German car producers remain ineffective and old fashioned... while American car producers increased their effectivity.
The Great Depression had helped the nazis. Without it people would have been angry on Hitler for increased taxes to pay for his military spending, but now people could not see how much the military took from their pockets... since the standard of living had fallen so much in Germany during the economic crisis that people had forgotten what was normal... so when Hitler gave people jobs it felt like a great improvement of standard of living that people atleast could support themselves with their own job and have something to eat.
And the quick mobilization for war that America did after 1941 would also not have been possible without the great Depression that started in 1929 and lasted to 1941. Millions of unemployed Americans was hungry and queing at the soup kitchens and large factories was closed, and with the war those millions either got to wear a military uniform, or going to a factory making the uniforms.
And since millions were unemployed and factories was unused, the American government didn't have to force people to move to a job in the defence industry and neighter did they have to steal any factories that was used for civilian production when there was so many closed down factories that could be used.
So massmobilization was going through very smoothly, and people didn't mind taxes and war rationing as much when they were used to starvation during the economic crash, and people wasn't so unhappy about paying more taxes, instead they were happy to just get a job.
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The Russians wasn't so interested in building tanks that could take out other tanks from long ranges, so they rather massproduced tanks with less quality and less precision of the guns and having gun sights that leaked in dust.
85mm and 122mm guns became standard, because the russians had made tests firing all their guns on a captured Tiger tank and concluded that only the 85mm Anti-aircraft gun and the 122mm field gun could penetrate it.
And russians designers also liked the idea of making tanks compact and small so armour thickness in millimeters increased without adding extra weight, and the tanks would also be harder to detect and a smaller target to hit, but the disadvantage with low cost compact tanks is that when it gets a penetrating hit, it will become very hard for the crew to abandon the crampy tank.
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Germans was a people of perfection, so they were building tanks complex high quality tanks that could take out the enemy from long ranges so they didn't have to risk their few expensive machines. The Germans had problems dealing with KV1 and t-34 on the Russian front, so they decided to put a longer gun barrel on the PanzerIV tank.
So the replaced the old 75mm L24 gun with the longer 75mm L48 gun, with gave the tank better ability to deal with tanks, because a long gun barrel gives more muzzle velocity - and when the bullet flies faster it can go through more millimeters of armour. And another advantage with long gun barrels is that they have better precision.
So when the Panther tank came, it had a very long 75mm L70 gun with amazing capabities and it could penetrate any allied tank on the battlefield. The gun was extremely accurate and the gun sights was also best of any tank in the war.
But the disadvantage of having a long thin gun instead of a short fat, is that the shot you fire doesn't contain much explosives, so they aren't as effective when firing on soft targets such as footsolidiers, trucks and buildings.
And the 88mm guns had been in use the entire war, since the 88mm anti-aircraft guns had proven themselves as excellent as dealing with enemy aricrafts, but also good at taking about enemy tanks from long ranges, and sometimes the guns was also used as artillery support.
And in 1941 the Germans meet superior russian tanks that was hard to knock out for all German weapons - but the 88mm anti-aircraft gun. So it was decided that new German tanks would be constructed with this gun.
And 2 variants of this gun was under development, and one was longer than the other.
The Tiger tank got the shorter 88mmL56 gun, which was an excellent gun, since anti-aircraft guns are designed to reload fast and the velocity of the shots is very high because you need lots of speed to throw up a bullet thousands of meters up into heaven - but that good velocity also means that anti-aircraft guns are excellent in penetration armour.
The Nashorn got the other gun (88mmL71) which was even longer and more powerful. The Nashorn could snipe and kill tanks at distances almost comparable to modern tanks. The gun was rapid firing, accurate, had extremly good penetration, and eventhough the caliber was smaller than some Russian guns, so was it still a monster in 1942-43 when the best allied tanks only had a 75mm caliber.
And later on would the Jagdpanther and the King Tiger also be given the same gun, while the JagdpanzerIV was given the same gun as Tiger I (88mL56), or the same gun as the panther (75mmL70).
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Germany started to massproduce things from 1943 onwards. And Germany couldn't do any "American style massproduction" before then, simply because it lacked factories for massproduction and enough skilled workers.
The Americans could on the other hand start massproducing tanks almost right away, since they already had huge factories for massproducing cars that could be converted into producing tanks and there was lots of skilled workers. And America and Britain was also richer countries than Germany, so those countries could afford more tools and machines which made their workers more productive.
So I would say that Germany couldn't have done much about their low military production prior to 1943. Maybe they could have increased workhours, removed weekends and used women in the war effort earlier.
But I think that Germany was at an disadvantage from the start, since they lacked oil and had to waste industrial capacity to get oil by other means (converting coal into oil), and Germany was also under allied bombing while Germany could do nothing against America, and Germany had been suffering under the Versaille treaty and their automotive industry was not used to massproduction.
The only trumpcard the Axis had was their superb, experienced military and skilled leadership.
And all this was thrown away in 1942, with the defeats at Midway, Guadacanal, El Alamein and Stalingrad.
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The Russias military is developing many weapons that are superior to anything the west have. The Armata tank is the most modern tank in the world. The PAK-FA is the best fighter jet in the world - by far. And Russia also got other weapons that are if not the best, so among the best in the world - such as the Ka52 attack helicopter, the S-400 surface-to-air missile, the Kornet anti-tank missile, the T-80 tank, and the SU35 fighter is atleast on paper superior to any western fighter jet, and the MIG35 and even the old MIG31 is comparing well to the most modern European fighter jets.
So considering Russias small size of the economy, one should not mock them for achieving so impressive technological achievments but rather applaud them. I am not a Russian fanboy, and much less a fan of Putin. But I can respect Russia for doing some things well, unlike retarded Russia-haters who say bad things about the country regardless if they deserves it or not.
And yes, Russia is poor compared to Europe and USA. But Russias industrialization also started much later, and the country had its economy destroyed in a world war and a large chunk of its economy destroyed by the Germans and a large part of its population murdered by Hitler.
And then in the 1990s Russia implemented neoliberal economic reforms under Yeltsin that crashed the economy, bankrupted 80% of the farms in Russia, and made the Russian GDP go down by 2/3rds.
More Russians got killed Yeltsins corrupth economic reforms than the amount of Russians killed by Hitler. And HIV, drug-use and prostitution started to spread where it was previsously unknown. The hyperinflation ruined ordinary Russians while corrupth oligarchs and the Maffia made big money.
So western powers share some of the blame for Russia's economic development after the world war and the economic policies pushed by the Washington consensus in the 1990s.
The Soviet union also made disasterous economic decisions as we all know with its over-spending on the military and its creation of mass-starvation in Ukraine.
But its economic development was none the less impressive in many aspects. And if one does not call the Soviet economic development a success, then I don't know what country one could then possibly call an economic success.
Soviet started as a poor feudal country of farmers that became one of the largest industrial countries in the world and entered the atomic age. The average life-span for the population more than doubled. The country managed to win the space race against the richest country on the planet. It managed to defeat the mightyiest invasion army in history. It managed to industrialize the country in record short time, not only once, but twice after the Germans had wrecked most of the industrial centers in the country. The peasant country became a superpower.
I think the development by the Soviets can be impressive in many aspects. But I don't think starving a million Ukrainians and censoring and killing political dissidents was a price worth paying. Nevertheless, did Stalins brutal industrialization financed by all stolen Ukrainian food save the world from nazi world domination. For without all those factories and machines that was built, Russia could never have defeated Germany.
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Of course would it be more difficult to train 4x more tank crews if Germany built StuGs and PanzerIVs instead of Tigers.
But on the other hand would Germany not have to bother with making special military bridges, special trains, recovery vehicles, and storing more types of spareparts and such.
Germanys biggest problem was after all the lack of numbers of tanks. So the few they had would they have to drive around much to counter allied attacks on one front, and then they had to move to another front to fight back an allied attack there... and so it went on.
If Germany had more tanks deployed along the frontline then it wouldn't have to move around as much. And having tanks in defensive positions would not consume much fuel anyways.
Another benifit of lighter tanks would be that they would be easier to pull away from the battlefield so they could be repaired. Because controlling the battlefield after a battle is almost as important as to win the battle. If you control the battlefield afterwards, then you can repair your own tanks and perhaps also repair and steal some enemy tanks as well.
But if you don't can control the battlefield after a battle, then you have to fast pull away your heavy tiger to a repair shop before the Russians take over the area. And if that is not possible, then you have to blow up your own tank so that the Russians don't steal your tank and use it against you.
And recovering a 20tonnes tank is much easier than a Tiger I tank. A Tiger tank was so heavy that only another Tiger had enough power to move it. Or otherwise you would have to use 3 big Famo trucks to move your tank away from the battlefield - which is a complicated thing.
Your trucks are rare and in short supply in the German army. And even if you got 3 trucks, then you don't wanna use drive those weakly protected machines on a battlefield where the enemy is firing around you just so that you can use hours to drive away a Tiger tank to a safe place where you can do repairs and maintance.
Germany was losing the war after the start of 1943, so having heavy tanks that were too precious to lose and too difficult to evacuate from a battlefield was not optimal.
Earlier in the war could Germany use hundreds of captured T-34 tanks. But Germany would not use any later T-34/85 models in their army because they rarely controlled the battlefield after the battle and could therefore rarely ever capture any such tanks.
And Germany had to start using overkill tactics, and after they knocked out a tank they kept on firing on it until it catched fire - and only then would it be counted as a kill.
And the reason for this was that the Germans did rarely control the battlefield after a battle, and they had to therefore make sure that the allied tank was completly destroyed and could not be repaired and used again another day.
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Fact remains that the US had the strongest economy in world war II by far, even if they started to demobilize their economy before the war was over. It doubled its GDP during the war years, it created more planes than the rest of the world combined in 1943, it not only expanded its agricultural output and industrial production at the same time but it did also let the military grow from less than 200.000 men to 12 million.
And yet, so did America not even mobilize more than a fraction than what they potentionally actully could have.
The Soviet economy was more mobilized for war than the American - which is an impressive feat, since poor countries usally lacks the tools and effectivness in production in order to spare manpower from civilian agriculture so they could be put into the industry to make military equipment, or so that the farmers can provide the army with enough food.
Russia had large stacks of supplies before the war and thanks to skilled centralplanning it could even for a short while use 80% of its GDP to fight the war. Which is normally something that only the richest countries in the world are able to pull off.
Russia survived and won the war, but the price for victory was enormous. Millions of workers/taxpayers/consumers were dead. Factories, bridges, homes and roads had been destroyed all over western Russia - where 60-70% of Russia's GDP had laid in German hands. More than 13.000 villages and hundreds of towns had been under German occupation.
One could also compare GDP between the Axis powers and the Allied countries here:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.590.924&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Of course does GDP not tell everything. But it can oftentimes help to get the bigger picture of things. And in this case it can clearly demonstrate the American superiority. But I would go even further, and say that it understates Americas strenght, since it doesn't say anything about technological superiority, fighting morale, or the armount of resources at hand. And oil is the lifeblood of any economy, now as then.
And since America was the largest oil producer inte world and had plenty of cheap oil, I would say that that gave them a huge advantage to the rest of the world. They could replace human labour with cheap energy. And they didn't have to waste money and having to research facilities that could transform coal into oil.
Instead they could just focus all of their industrial capacity towards winning the war.
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The main problem was not what Germany did at the frontline, but rather what it did behind it. Killing civilians at the frontline sometimes happens, but rounding up millions of people and have them standing next to a ditch and have them shot is another doctrine.
At the frontline did the German army behave well. But behind the front did Germany create crimes of epic proportions. Most of the blame goes to the SS, SD, and Gestapo of course. They deserve 97% of all the blame for what happened. And without them would the German army, the reichbahn, and the German chemical industry never had became helpers of genocide either.
The genocide was unique in that sense that it s co-ordinated effort of all departments of the state-machinery of a modern government. The industry provided expertise in cremation ovens, poison gas, gas tight rooms, computers for data storage, and gas vans. The reichbahn provided railway transports. The intelligence agency tracked down people.
The military provided land mines, barbed wire, machine guns and much else. Doctors gave lethal injections and selected which people who would die and which were strong enough for slave labor.
Everything was systematic. Murder methods were systematically improved.
The cost of killing a person were kept at a minimum. And a tiny guard force of only a hundred men could easily kill half a million people. Only 2 people managed to flee and survive from Belzec while a quarter of a million died. And at Chelmno did also only 2 people survive out of half a million. Victims were systematically mislead by being given soap, and seeing shower room signs, and seeing sprinkles in the roof. Thousands of people could be killed in just an hour.
And the guards did not have to look their victims in their face as they died.
And all information about their crimes was supposed to be hidden, bodies were burned to ashes to hide their crimes.
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America send large amounts of help. So I am not questioning that.
All I am saying is that about 80% of that help came between late 1943 to 1945... when the German army already had been severly beaten in Stalingrad and the axis forces was on the retreat. And Germany was unable to recover the huge losses of men it suffered from the winters and the many epic meatgrinder battles. After Stalingrad many axis countries tried to withdraw from the war. And the battle of Kursk was the beginning of the end of German air superiority over the Russian skies. German tank production had increased greatly, but none the less did tank losses keep phase with tank production.
Maybe Hitler could won the war on the East if he had gotten a peace treaty with the western powers. And attacked Russia in 1943, and grabbed the oilfields, the industries and farms from southern Russia so the Russian economy had gotten severly mutilated while the German resource shortages would have been permanently reliefed.
But besides from that, I think it is unlikely that Germany would ever win a war with Russia.
The Great victories won in 1941 wasn't just caused by German mastery of the art of war and Russian incompetence. But a huge deal of it was also caused by pure luck.
Had the Russians not so foolishly lined up the air force on the runways so they became simple targets and sitting ducks for the Luftwaffe, so they could totally destroy the worlds largest airforce in just two weeks... then the war could have ended very differently. Had Stalin been wiser and allowed retreats and concentrated all his supertanks into large units, he would certainly had caused much trouble for the Germans. And had he not overextended his winter counteroffensive, then it would have ended up as a huge success instead of a failure. And if Hitler had listened to his Generals instead of order "not one step back", then the Russian counteroffensive probably had destroyed the Wehrmacht, and the war would have been over in 1942.
So many things could have gone wrong, that it is strange that the Germans could become as succesful as they were before Stalingrad happened.
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"Why didn't people in ww2 just have infantry with diffrent support weapons in response to wathever threat they might face?"
Because of failed doctrine. Before world war 2 there was a belief in a breaktrough doctrine of modern weapon systems. Douhet spoke of huge airfleets of bombers who would breakthrough any air defences and transform every enemy city into rubble, and Liddle Hart instead spoke of huge fleets of tanks that would breaktrough any defences and force enemy to surrender.
Both of those doctrines failed in World War2. German warproduction rose the entire war despite the bombings, and at the end of the war production started to decline because Lorraine's steel and Romanias oil fell into Allied hands.
And Germanys early victories had nothing to do with massconcentration of all tanks at one place, but people later on started to believe it.
The list of failures of this tank doctrine can be made endless... allies in Normandy and Pattons failed breakout, and Montgomerys failed attacks at Caen, followed by Hitlers failure to learn from his enemies mistakes that attacking with tanks in bocage terrain with narrow roads is a terrible idea, launced his Arracourt offensive. Then they all decided to repeat their mistakes, with Patton at Metz, Monty at Operation Market Garden, and Hitler with the Ardennes offensive.
Tanks aren't invinceble machines, not even Tigers and Panthers. They can't move and fight in all kinds of terrain, such as forrests and towns. And even if they got good cross-country abilty, their supply trucks can't get there, and those wheeled vehicles are also vulnerble to enemy fire, and if the supply lines to the tanks are cut off, even the best tanks become worthless.
So the tanks can only move as fast as the supply tracks can supply them. And the supply trucks needs protection by friendly troops (usally the footsoliders), so the movement becomes limited. And that explains why the German troop movements in World War2 was no faster than in World War 1, since they were both determined by the phase of the foot-soliders.
The German army was famous for its rapid speed, but that has to do with auftragstactic and their extremly skilled NCOs. In fact, the German army was less motorized than the British, French and American armies, and still relied much on horses for transports.
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Its still a relevant comparison. America like most countries suffered from the great depression during the 1930s, which meant that ineffiecent car firms got knocked out while the most effiecent firms could grow their share of the car market. And that is the point in having what's called a "structural rationalization". It is this increase in effiecency and productivity that enables larger economic grow when economic crashes are over.
And this is also a reason why countries like America would do so well during world war 2, and the horrible structural rationalization Sweden suffered before all others in the early 1920 also helped Sweden to gain an economic leadership position in the world post world war2 since it had eliminated all outdated ineffecient production methods and was able to produce more stuff at a lower cost than all other countries during the 1950s and 1960s before others had catched up.
Anyways.. back to the topic.
Germany never undergone any real structural rationalization in its automotive industry during the 1930s, since Hitler had made the economic wheels of Germany go in high spin with his re-arment policies.
So the German industry never switched to American style massproduction methods with high levels of productivity. Speer also compared the productivity of nazi-slave labor with a rifle production plant in Springfield and concluded in his memoirs that Germany lacked productivity levels anyware near the United States.
And the German production of military trucks continued to be split up among many producers - which in turn created logistical problems with servicing the vechiles and pilling up spare parts for trucks of all kinds... Opel, MAN, Phänomen, Mercedes, Borgward, Hansa-lloyd Goliath, Hanomag, Henchel, Krupp, Magirus, Büssing-NAG, Ford, Daimler, Steyr, FAUN, Vomag, Adler, Framo, Nacke, Tempo
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The thing is that most of the lend-lease help came after 1943 when the war on the eastern front already had been lost for the Germans. So it was never any kickstart thanks to lend-lease to begin with. Russia could build its own tanks without American help.
My guess is that Russia would have won the war even without the lend-lease help. They would probably had cut back their production of guns and tanks, and instead increased their production efforts in make trucks and locomotives and food production if the lend lease help never happened. Russia would probably have played safer with her scarce manpower because the military, the agriculture, the mining industry, and the military industry would be competing harshly about all manpower they could get. And much more so than in richer countries such as Britain and USA, where tractors and machines were more plentiful and reduced the need for workers.
Lend lease was probably unimportant, since it probably didn't change the outcome of the war. When lend-lease started to arrive for real the second half of 1943, the axis had already lost the battle over the Atlantic, Japan had been beaten at Midway, the Africa Korps had been beaten at El-Alamein and kicked out from Africa, Germany had bleed much blood in the winter 1941-42 and in the winter 1942-43 had the Sixth Army been destroyed at Stalingrad.
It was too late for the Axis to turn things around.
Germany was beaten even before any real quantaties of lend-lease help had arrived. And the small amounts that arrived before 1943 barely made any difference.
After 1943 help started to arrive, which helped Russia greatly, and that in combination with the reconquest of Ukraine helped to relief the Soviet economy from shortages of food and manpower. And when food and trucks came from America, the Russians didn't need as much men to work to work as farmers or workers in an automotive factory, but could instead put more men in uniform to fight the Germans instead.
If the Germans had somehow kept Southern Russia under control and lend-lease never happened, then perhaps the Russian economy would have been under serious problems like it was in 1917. But that's another topic for discussion.
I am baseing much of my argumentation on the book - the Economics of World War II, by Mark Harrison
https://books.google.se/books?id=ZgFu2p5uogwC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=the+economics+of+world+war+ii+mark+harrison&source=bl&ots=5FivRGqGxO&sig=GpvSPtwGQvMAywRJfgMqx4jSjUo&hl=sv&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjNzfTVwaDUAhVHjiwKHTkJCV44ChDoAQgnMAE#v=onepage&q=the%20economics%20of%20world%20war%20ii%20mark%20harrison&f=false
German war production was never started for real until 1943, and didn't exceed Russias until 1944 (if I remember correctly. But by then the war had already been lost for Germany. And Germany couldn't have done much to increase their war production before 1943 either, since you cannot start large scale mass-production unless you first got a trained workforce and built factories for that purpose.
And Germany had to spend the first half of the second World War to train German men and women to become industrial workers and to build those factories (and military construction works such as the atlantic wall that consumed about a quarter of all concrete, steel and manpower in Germany).
So there was no way for Germany to outproduce the USSR, unless Germany had decided to wait with invading Russia until 1943.
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America never won the war in any sense, and there was no way they could. They were backing up a corrupt regime that put the foreign aid into their own pockets instead of the people, and it even sold weapons it was given to the enemy. And their solidiers lacked
will to fight. Vietnam was more than just a communist invasion, it was also a war of national unification, a war where people joined VietCong because they were feed up with terrorbombings and strategic hamlets, and most importantly of all - it was a class war of farmers who hated their oppressive landlords that often took 60-80% of their incomes in tax when they had to work for them because they owned all land and no land was left for the poor farmers. South Vietnam was controled by the landlords who used their Army to defend their own interests.
So the easiest way, and perhaps the only way to win the Vietnam war was to do a landreform and give the poor farmers a bit of land so they could feed themselves and their families.
But that would never have happened if USA didn't pressure South Vietnam. And if they pressured South Vietnam, they would have gotten accused of USA-imperialism by meddling in the affairs of independent countries.
The US Army had no idea how to fight the war so they could never have won the war militarily. Over half a million men, and a large chunk of their aircrafts wasn't enough. They used faked statistics that was supposed to show that the war was almost won by 1967 since the enemy lost more men than they could recruit. But with the tet-offensive in 1968 people lost faith in that talking point.
The US army had no idea how to fight, so instead they relied on this stupid idea of body counts and the absurd thinking that the war was a mathematics game.
So soliders were sent to places like Hamburger Hill to kill a bounch of enemies at a high price of their own, and when the hill was won they just left it and let it be taken by the enemy a time later.
Things like that made soliders furius. Their lives was worth nothing, they were just seen as a replaceable commodity in a production system, based on the same ideas as profit and loss in a company. And if a worker died, no big deal, America had plenty of men.
The soliders were tired of risking their lives by being told by their commanders to walk into enemy ambushes just so the warmanagers could produce high enemy body counts by rain artillery and air support over them when the enemy was found.
The soliders were just used as a bait, and sometimes their missions were almost suicidal. But the high level commanders didn't care, they just cared about high body counts so they could get a promotion, a bounch of medals and economic rewards.
So the soliders started a revolt against their commanders and started to refuse orders, and fragging became commonplace and the fragging incidents went up dramtically, but most of them was never reported.
So the commanders was then unable to push their soliders too hard. And in the end, the losses that got inflicted upon the communists were never anyware close to being impossible to replace by North Vietnam.
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Stalingrad meant the loss of the momentum of the German army...1942 was the year when Germany was supposed to have given such a hard punch on the allies that they wouldn't recover and Germany could then direct her forces to deal with the Americans when they finally was ready for war. As we all know did Germany fail completly with that and lost the battle of the Atlantic, they tought the capture of Tobruk had been so devestating that they never bothered to attack Malta and then they lost the battle of El-Alamein, and then Germany lost all her accomplishments in 1942 with the disaster at Stalingrad.
Germany fought on, but the Kursk offensive failed. It wasnt the catastrophy for the German tank arm as documentaries says, but it was a severe diplomatic backlash and Hitlers allies began negotiating and end to the war, and Spain withdrew from the war if I remember correctly.
And Germany began losing air superiority in the east by now, and the consequences hit them hard as their army had a relativly little artillery compared to other armies and now couldn't use air support like they did in the earlier war years.
The losses of experienced troops was replaced young boys with less experience.
Meanwhile did the allies become better at fighting the war. The Russians had learned from past mistakes, their air force have copied tactics from the Germans, their massed attacks with infantry now had become more effective when morale didn't collapse ase easily when they had much tank support when Russian factories finally had began producing tanks at a higher rate than they were lost. Lend lease help had also began making the Russian army more mobile with trucks.
So the quality of the German Army constantly sank, and the power in their attacks gradually declined and became less and less effective. So with the lack of oil, air superiority and much else did the front finally break and collapse
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Tanks in real life doesn't act like in World of Tanks. If the enemy shots off your track, you will need half and hour to repair it, you cannot do it instantly and you can absolutly not doing when the tank is still moving lol. Furthermore, if your tank gets penetrated by a shell its game over, its not like in games where you can take 4-5 hits before your tank gets wrecked. And if your tank takes serious damages, it can take many hours to fix.
And unlike WOT can't you turn your tank gun trough walls and destroyed tanks, like your tank was a ghost. And you cannot drive full speed into a mountain wall and backflip with your tank without serious damages.
And your tanks will also have to refuel in real life. And your tanks will be organized under a commander, instead all 15 tanks acting independently. And in real life will also vision be limited in tank combat, and often does the driver have the best view of the outside world. And tanks will have to take mines, infantry, planes, Anti-tank guns into consideration, and not just other tanks.
So its a tank game without much realism. Its for entertainment and not real life battle simulation like the game creators says. A realistic tank game would probably be pretty boring, as the game would be over as soon your tracks been blown off. And a single hit could take your tank out, so people would hide like cowards.
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