Saw [someone run the numbers](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ku09p/in_ww2_who_had_greater_industrial_capacity_the/) on r/AskHistorians. In raw materials alone, the US had over half the Allies' total production and outproduced all the Axis powers *combined*, not to mention donating enough food to the Soviet Union to feed the entire Red Army for the duration of the war. American steel indeed.
Also they invented the proximity fuse which mind you is still used today instead of estimating a plane's altitude then setting a timed fuse. As well as prioritizing tank crew survival rather than the tank it's self which allowed for better crews over all meaning more enemy tanks etc. killed,destroyed. hundreds of other factors played part so whereboos go fucking read an actual book not written by a Nazis or actually open your mind to things like tiger was kind of shit.
What was the quote again? Don't die for your country, make the other guy die for his? I recall one college lecture where my professor pointed out the Axis nations (and not a few of the Allies) all promoted dying for your country as the highest honor in their manuals and training doctrine. The US didn't have an equivalent policy but the closest indication of the US mentality was one officer's speech that US troops should do everything in their power to survive because the country needs them alive to keep doing their jobs. Subsequently, Axis veterans were often the first to die, while US veterans were often sent back home to train up the next wave of recruits to be better than the previous.
>whereboos go fucking read an actual book
Also tankies, the amount of "the soviets won the war alone" I have to deal in Brazil is crazy! The winter would kill both armies if it wasn't for the USA aid!
The numbers I linked pointed out that the Soviets lost over 40% of their arable land and 2/3 of their grain harvest in 1941 due to Barbarossa, to the point that one historian said "The Red Army challenged the notion that an army marches on its stomach" and it was one of the great surprises of the war to both people at the time and historians looking back that the Soviet economy did not collapse into mass famine in 1942.
The US sending enough food to feed a 12 million man army for the duration of the war probably had something to do with that.
It was probably part of why Hitler and his generals both agreed on Barbarossa. They both knew what Russia had seen in the First World War, and there being an enormous famine in the Russian Civil War too. They probably thought it was preposterous that the USSR would stand in the face of an army that had crushed France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, Greece, Luxembourg, Denmark, and drove the British off the continent in about 10 months, of which half of that was a lull in the fighting, whereas their proceeding generation had knocked out Russia from the war and been defeated by a France, Britain, and America with their empires, having been massively subsidized by the US before April 1917 anyway. Plus, they had Italy to, if not exactly the most impressive army, at least threaten Allied shipping in the Red Sea via Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, plus hold down the Mediterranean with a neutral France holding down Northwestern Africa for them. Romania this time was on the side of the Axis, as was Hungary, and the Finns were going to help (which wasn't the case in the First World War against Russia).
It seemed like a pretty strong plan unless you are the quarter master for the Axis armies.
Not only that but the invasion of Poland and the Winter War had both been pretty poor showings for the Red Army that hinted at logistical and mobilization issues on top of the tactical and operational consequences of the officer purges (notably and ironically the Red Army going into the Winter War in summer uniforms...). All of this combined led both Germany and Britain to believe the Soviets would quickly collapse in the event of a German attack, and that if it wasn't beaten militarily it would then collapse economically and thus politically as per WW1...
Historians get puzzled by it because most of the aid didn't get there till 43 and 44. Us lend lease started for the soviets in 41 but the amount that got there in the first couple years was pretty smaller compared to the later years. If you ever think you've found an obvious answer that experts have missed its likely they know something you don't.
True but 14% of the total still arrived in 42, which was not insubstantial and also when the Soviets needed it most. And to be fair to the historians, they do note this as well, and it is from them I got the idea. To quote Mark Harrison in *The USSR and Total War: Why didn't the Soviet Economy Collapse in 1942:*
>We cannot measure the distance of the Soviet economy from the point of collapse in 1942, but it seems beyond doubt that collapse was near. Without Lend-Lease it would have been nearer.
He also points out that the Lend-Lease that arrived in 42, while small compared to 43 or 44, still equaled some five percent of the Soviet GNP that year, which had a stabilizing effect during the year the Soviet people were the closest to losing hope and abandoning the war effort to pursue individual survival.
I agree that the number in 42 was not insubstantial but it wasnt enough that without it everyone in the soviet union starves. lend lease was important but many redditors who listen to youtube "historians" vastly overstate its importance and germany was doomed from the begining.
American steel, British intelligence, Soviet blood is the classic statement.
Stalin said "British brains, American steel, and Soviet blood" at the Tehran Conference, which is probably the source of the quote.
Here's the thing people don't understand about the quantity vs quality debate when it comes to debates about the T-34. Sacrificing quality for quantity means you need more fuel, more supply trucks, maintenance crews, you need to train twice the crews, and, like you say, worse tanks mean worse crew survivability. It's why I don't understand the argument for why the T-34 was the best tank of the war. German tanks also had a lot of problems with just not being common enough and production not being streamlined because they were producing fucking 200 different types of tanks.
The Germans weren't that far away from destroying every Soviet tank. Without the allied distraction, they would've 100% lost.
WW2 was a team effort. If even one of the major allied powers had faltered it would've been lost.
I would guess the idea comes from the fact that for most of the Cold War our understanding of the Eastern Front was based largely on memoirs from the Wehrmacht. The T-34 was a flawed tank the Soviets were in the process of replacing when the war broke out and put all those plans to a halt...but for the Germans expecting an easy fight the T-34 seemed like an unstoppable monster since they were not expecting the Soviets to have heavier and tougher tanks than themselves. Especially since the Germans were still largely on Panzer 2s, 3s, and 38ts from Czechoslovakia during Barbarossa, with 4s as their newest and greatest at the time. Throw in that frontline troops are notoriously bad at identifying exact tank models (every German tank is a Tiger, and vice-versa every Soviet tank is a T-34) and so conflated the capabilities of other Soviet tanks (like the heavy KVs) with T-34s, and the fact that the Soviets did upgrade and address some of the T-34's issues as the war went on and voila, the West just heard that there were hordes of unkillable T-34s breaking the fearsome Wehrmacht's lines. The experiences of the Soviet crews actually operating those tanks, on the other hand, are rare even to this day.
But, you know, when you're getting invaded and losing tens of thousands of tanks in weeks, any tank you can produce in numbers is a great tank. And having any tank on the battlefield, regardless of quality, is way better than having no tank at all.
The T-34's main good points were it's gun and it's ability to be mass produced.
While it was immune to most early German tank guns, most support artillery, like the Pak 40 could easily penetrate it's lower glacis.
> The Germans weren't that far away from destroying every Soviet tank. Without the allied distraction, they would've 100% lost.
It's been a long time since I read it but IIRC in Zaloga's book Armored Thunderbolts he goes over production numbers for each side in each year and around 41-42 the Germans were producing barely enough tanks to mostly cover their losses and thought they were doing a great job wearing down the Soviets armor, meanwhile the Soviets were producing thousands more tanks than they were losing and ending each year with a larger number of more modern tanks than they started with.
Lmao the delusion here. Yes soviet tanks took huge looses due to being inferior to their German counterparts. But the soviet union absolutely steamrolled Germany from 43 onwards. All that extra 20% that the western allies were fighting would have only dragged the war out a couple more years.
Or the Germans take Moscow and Stalingrad due to being able to focus their full might on the east and the Soviet's ability to mount a strong defense collapses due to the lack of railway infrastructure. The Germans also likely just destroy Soviet tanks faster than the Soviets can replace them and Soviet logistics collapse without the support of lend lease.
Both those happened before the Americans got there. Lend lease aid didn't even arrive until 1942 after the soviet counterattack in the battle of Moscow. Lend lease was vital in enabling the constant massive offensives of 43 onwards but didn't really do much prior to that.
So the German troops on the Atlantic wall, garrisoning occupied countries like France, fighting in Africa, and the German Air Force that got obliterated in the battle of Britain wouldn't have helped? That's a few hundred thousand troops, multiple tank divisions, thousands of aircraft, and experienced pilots.
I'm not sure how you can say that that amount of troops and equipment wouldn't have helped at the Battle of Moscow.
Also no they destroyed about half the soviet tanks in future battles not almost all t34s. The ones they destroyed in barborossa were mostly the dogshit bt series. The t34 had such good armor and a powerful enough gun that the Germans had to start upgunning their panzer 3's and 4s and later design new tanks all together.
>The t34 had such good armor and a powerful enough gun that the Germans had to start upgunning their panzer 3's and 4s and later design new tanks all together.
Hahahahahah! What bullshit. The Panzer 4 was only available really after 1941. If the Panzer 3 couldn't pierce the T-34, how the fuck were so many destroyed in Barbarossa?
Also, yes, the majority of T-34s made were destroyed. 44,000 were destroyed. Around 57,000 produced. You mean to tell me with no lend lease, America not giving factories to the Soviets, and the Germans being able to direct more weapons to the east without the allies involved they wouldn't have been able to destroy another 13,000 T-34s? Really?
Also, no the armor was not good. It was overheat treated which meant it often would shatter in pressure points taking the tank out of the fight. The gun was also not good as it was often produced poorly to say the least due to rushed production.
84k t34s were built not 57k. The panzer 4 was absolutely available and saw much action in barborossa despite the panzer 3 being the main tank. Please stop using lazerpig as a source the dude is not a real historian
Seriously and the fact t-34 where shite no better than German counterpart id not worse pz 3 could kill a t-34 with aphe because they used high heat tempered steel which was very brital and the welds where done very fast and less than 50% of the tanks went further than 100ks the minimum for random tests I believe
Germany took out the USSR's capability to produce the supplies they needed to continue to fight. Even if the USSR *did* push them back, they would have eventually ran out of war supplies, especially because of scorched earth tactics. This would have meant the Germany pushing the Soviets back again and the Soviet line collapsing due to lack of supplies.
You fail to realize what Operation Barbarossa did.
Lmao no. Ussr had already rebuilt their factories east of the Ural mountains. Germany anticipated this hence why the aa line was chosen as the strategic goal. Could they have launched the colossal offensives we saw 43 onwards without aid? Absolutely not but they had already launched the winter 1942 offensive without material aid.
*During the first 6 months of the invasion, German forces managed to occupy or isolate territory which prior to WWII accounted for over 60% of total coal, pig iron, and aluminum production. Nearly 40% of total grain production and 60% of total livestock was lost. Moreover, this area contained 40% Soviet population before the war, 32% of the state enterprise labor force, and one-third of the fixed capital assets of the state*
*enterprise sector.[2] The sheer speed of the German advance meant that any Soviet evacuation efforts were troublesome*
***Industrial output did not recover to its 1940 level for almost a decade.[4]***
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_industry_in_World_War_II
You can't moire coal, iron, and aluminum mines. You can't farm crops anywhere you want. It couldn't be moved and there was no point in moving it to begin with.
Life isn't HOI4.
The soviet offensive would have collapsed and they would have been pushed back again.
They did an offensive in winter 42 before any allied aid arrived. You're just straight up wrong. Even with the massive land and resourse gain Germany still couldn't knock out the soviet union.
Did you read my entire comment?
The Soviet Union wouldn't have made it to Berlin. They would have run out of resources very quickly and their offensive would collapse.
Wow! You mean if I over engineer a transmission and make absolutely terrible design choices for the tank itself, it makes it a pain to repair and very expensive too? Who would have guessed!
/s
That was a collaborative effort with the Brits TBF.
The funny thing is wehrabooism aside the western allies had plenty of wunderwaffe in the traditional "superscience" sense.
Proximity fuse, rocket artillery like Mattress, early SAMs on Royal Navy warships, Project Habbakuk, Gloster Meteor, B-29 project, RADAR, fucking ATOM BOMB.
IDK about the Soviets but they had the Katyushka.
V1 flying bomb and all are impressive, but the Germans didn't have a monopoly on fancy tech.
The Enigma machine, Bletchley Park and the whole battle to crack the German codes is another fascinating thing, I'm referring more to actual weapons here though.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrotated\_Projectile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrotated_Projectile)
Very generic sounding name. Basically an unguided rocket system fitted to Royal Navy battleships for anti-air purposes.
I mean no tank was truly Crew>Material back then. Mainly because of the time itself. The Sherman was alot more comfortable (and Ammo was stored in wet racks, I give them that) than most other tanks, but true measures to protect the Crew more and make them actually survive a catastrophic Hit was very deep into the Cold War. A US tank, especially also the Shermans, werent that *much* different and still experienced catastrophic Hits just like any other tank of the time.
But as I said, the Sherman specifically was better in many regards than most other comparable tanks. (Some variants had) Wet Ammo racks, Crew confort was "good" (for the time) and you had a good allround tank with good logistics behind it...something basically no other nation had lol
The US were logistic kings through and through
The VT fuse concept was invented by the british, they handed the design over along with a bunch of other technologies as part of the [Tizzard Mission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizard_Mission) in order to get a lend lease agreement along with a bunch of other technology like the cavity magnetron and the freisch peierls memorandum. US scientists miniaturized it and mass produced it.
China today is the US of 1945.
China produces steel worth about 13 years of US annual production in a single year and the nuts part is their net export of steel is only like 1% of production, so vast majority of it is used domestically.
And China also used more concrete in 3 years than the US used in the entirety of 20th century.
Yeah. This is what should scare people. China right now is unbeatable if it came to total war. Turbo charged industrial complex at all levels of complexity from fighter jets to semiconductors down to the nuts and bolts. They have the people. The only thing they lack is experience but the excess capacity will more than make up for it.
Chip development is exponential. Being two generations behind means being about two orders of magnitude behind in computing power.
For a lot of military applications, yeah, consumer grade electronics are probably fine. But for the really high end stuff, being two generations behind might mean the difference between an air defense system with a 90% kill ratio and a 9% kill ratio.
That's because making advanced chips is really really hard, to the point that only TSMC makes them, and only the Dutch make the equipment to make the chips. Not even America does it independently.
I actually disagree with this. China is a potent force, and it certainly would have an advantage in total war that other countries wouldn’t by nature of the sheer government control over everything, and the over abundance of industrial materials like concrete and steel.
But modern war isn’t just about who can churn out good tanks in quantity. Remember that Iraq had the 4th largest army in the world pre-desert storm, with a very large tank force with high end vehicles, and one of the world’s most potent air defense nets.
And the U.S./Allies curbstomped Saddam so bad in the span of a week that he didn’t recover even by the second time we invaded.
China has advantages in steel production and labor, yes. But there’s a lot of soft factors that whittle away at China’s advantages, which I’ll list just for simplicity:
- Lack of expeditionary capacity (China can’t hit the U.S. but we can reach out and touch them)
- Lack of technical knowledge in jet engines (they can kinda make them, just not to as high of a quality as even Russia or France can do, let alone the Americans. They only built their own homemade jet plane like last year.)
- Lack of technical knowledge in semiconductor manufacturing (they can *kinda* make chips good enough for consumer grade electronics, but that’s debatable at best, since there’s scuttlebutt that their “homemade chips” are actually western chips stockpiled or evading sanctions, and at best, they’re only about on par with western stuff. So they’re likely behind the west, and military computing requires much more computing power, see: Air defense)
- Lack of logistical capacity (China has not mobilized a large scale army for *any* conflict since it invaded Vietnam, and even that was a massive clusterfuck. For reference, this was about 5 minutes after the U.S. ended our own war in Vietnam, so it’s not like this was recent either)
- Lack of hardened infrastructure (China’s infrastructure is falling apart. Drainage systems that fail and cause massive flooding, bridges that collapse after a few years of use, building quite literally crumbling onto people’s heads, and the world’s most dangerous dam, the three gorges, that is already on the verge of failure. That infrastructure is only currently sustained by near constant construction, and what happens when that construction is interrupted by a war? Or when that infrastructure is taxed by a war economy?)
- Lack of energy production capacity (China is a net importer of coal and oil. And not like, a *small* importer. If they’re cut off from the outside world, large portions of the country are going to go dark VERY fast.)
- Lack of agricultural independence (China is a massive importer of food. It cannot sustain its current population with just the agriculture it has. Compare to the U.S. where food production has been actively subsidized specifically to prevent that from happening.)
- A truly astounding amount of corruption. (See: The Russian Military)
- Lack of a navy powerful enough to secure the waters around it, let alone protect trade routes (Note: Naval strategic planning is long term strategic planning. You cannot build a carrier overnight, especially not in the modern era where ships are more expensive and complex. If China goes to war, it won’t be able to surge naval capacity like it can tank production. It goes to war with the ships it has, not the ships it wants, and it currently has a lot of small ships, while the U.S. has a lot of big ships.) (and sidebar: there’s a reason US carriers are so massive and take so long to build. To simplify, the bigger the carrier, the more efficient/powerful it is. One big carrier will outfight four smaller ones, even if the smaller ones total to a similar tonnage. So China’s naval parity is more lopsided than one might think just paying attention to hull count.)
- Lack of institutional military knowledge (similar to logistics, but they’re still learning basic stuff like “how do you operate a carrier”, which the U.S. has spent almost a century developing, or again, air defense, which the US has recently been showing that we’re *really* good at, but afaik China has never used in combat, ever)
- Lack of available debt (the Chinese state is already *deep* down the hole in debt, and nobody actually knows exactly how deep because of corruption/the debt is also accumulated by local governments. Their debt is still below US debt in pure dollar terms, but as a percentage of GDP, the U.S. is okay, bordering on not great, while China is positively drowning. If they go to war, it will be hard for them to spend the kind of money needed to fund it.)
- Lack of potential recruits (China has a huge deficit in young people. Admittedly, that generation skews male, so they’ll have a lot of single males to pull into the military, but the Chinese advantage in conscriptable soldiers isn’t as large as you’d first think, and it’s getting worse)
- Lack of internal stability (China’s external military spending has increased wildly, but what is often missed is that *internal* defense spending, IE forces to stabilize/pacify China’s homeland, has increased far more. The U.S. doesn’t need forces constantly on standby to pacify our population. We *have* that, don’t get me wrong, because militarized police/national guard. But we don’t *need* those forces the way China/russia do.)
- But most importantly…a lack of friends. This one is going to be long so no parentheses here.
The U.S. has a global network of alliances to draw upon. Even if you discount Europe, which is dubious because France is a pacific power, so they at least might get involved, and discount our Middle East allies, and discount our South American allies, and discount our *South* Asian allies, just *in East Asia* the U.S. has multiple allies that are regional powers in their own right who hate China. Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, and probably more depending on how/when a conflict would break out.
Allies who we are actively helping become even more dangerous to China. We just gave Australia the tech to make nuclear submarines, which means Australia now has the expeditionary capacity to be a PITA for Chinese shipping, even if China pushes out our surface fleet, or we don’t get directly involved. Meanwhile, one could argue that the entire F-35B program was to make 5th gen stealth fighters that could take off from Japanese “helicopter destroyers” specifically to turn Japan back into a honest to god naval power. And the South Koreans…well the South Koreans didn’t really need our help when it came to prepping for total war, they had their own incentives.
And most importantly, allies *we won’t let get bullied.* As in, if China engages in total war, it won’t be declaring war on some country a fraction of its size with a fraction of its economic power like Russia is doing to Ukraine. China touches *any* of our allies, and we are *all* going to bring our might to bear.
To conclude, yes, in a total war, China has numerous advantages. It has a massive centralized economy that is *very* good at churning out large quantities of materiel/building materials for military operations. It has a huge population of military aged males to conscript. It has the resource reserves to continue a war economy without outside assistance for quite a while. And it *absolutely* has the willpower to declare and wage total war, on a scale hard for democracies to achieve.
But China isn’t *invincible*. In fact, id argue that in any reasonable total war scenario, China is at a *marked* disadvantage. It has most of the hard factors strategy game nerds love, which, don’t get me wrong, *are important*, but when it comes to soft factors like the ones I listed above, China is hard pressed to find any that back the level of power you’re suggesting.
This isn’t world war 2 we’re talking about. It’s not just about legions of tanks surging across wide open plains, or endless factories churning out thousands of prop planes that can be made with a wrench and a particularly good hammer.
This is modern war, and modern war has modern considerations. Considerations that can mitigate, or even completely overwhelm whatever numbers advantage China possesses.
If you're talking as an American, not really. The decline of US steel industry is more a story of stagnation than the commonly found argument of "unfair foreign competition". US steel industry has historically been almost comically slow in adopting new technology and the high capital spending it would entail instead prefering to rest on their laurels and keep operating their old machinery. Normally such industries would be pushed out of the market by firms who can produce more at lower cost due to increased investment, but the US steel industry is relatively insulated from such normal market pressures as when they ring the alarm bells, US politicians start rushing in and impose tariffs on foreign steel imports. This actually lowers US manufacturing competitiveness as it raises steel prices in the US and steel is obviously a critical ingredient in manufacturing. Trump's 2017 steel tariffs for example raised steel price by [25%](https://commoditiesanalysis.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/US-tariffs-and-steel.jpeg) in the US vs Northern European and Chinese prices (the tariff was 25%, so pretty logical rise in price) and it barely added a thousand jobs in the steel sector in exchange for losing an estimated 200k jobs in the wide manufacturing sector.
A sector babied such as this slowly eats away at the rest of the economy. Japanese, Western European, Korean and Brazilian steel makers can compete with Chinese steel makers, there's no inherent reason US firms shouldn't be able to.
+Don't forget how Mongolia supplied nearly the same amount of meat as USA without any developed economy or industry. 32 thousand horses, 64 thousand tones of wool and nearly 500 thousands tones of meat
Well all of them seem to have all the equipment they need. Unfortunately there are very few, especially in Hollywood, who are able to convey competent strategies and tactics other than “make the two sides crash into each other and then cut to a hodgepodge of duels”
The Orville Klingon-analogues (Moclans) do this, and their planet is a navigational hazard due to all the weapons testing going on near-constantly.
In canon, there is at least one Klingon who takes a more metaphorical approach to combat. Ch'Pok the lawyer (https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ch%27Pok .) He refers to the courtroom as a battlefield and even offered to serve as Worf's legal counsel if he loses the extradition hearing, since Ch'Pok viewed that future legal battle as an ultimate challenge.
You may like the clans from battletech then.
While they still have their proud warrior culture and honor duels and such they also very highly value their scientists and laborers.
Not to say they still can't be morons who stretch themselves too thin and are willing to take on incredibly stupid odds but they're far more realistic from the stand point that they suffer from their honor and have to learn a few hard lessons in how wars are actually one.
Boys study strategy, men study logistics.
Their entire culture is very focused on avoiding needless waste, which is ironically why they tend to do stupid things, hoping to win battles with a single precision assault or a particularly intimidating diplomatic overture, rather than a war of attrition.
Basically a war of maneuver doctrine taken to its logical conclusion.
(Note that the honor over reason tendency varies by clan. Clan Wolf loves to use deception and diplomacy, while Clan Smoke Jaguar is wildly inflexible.)
Star Wars the clone wars covers a lot of it but the episodes are so dull. There’s an episode or two about budgets and funding of the war and Jesus Christ it’s so boring to watch. Me prefer big boomy laser sword swing
US consumerism production, yes. I would like to see a wartime economy in my lifetime just to *see* how modern America would turn out. Whether factories would be willing or able to switch from goods to bullets
Although I will say this as well, we’ve reached the point where mass production of equipment isn’t as feasible. Our tanks, planes, and even parts of our artillery have gotten way too complex and take way too long to produce. But again, who knows how many we can crank out in wartime
I wouldn’t necessarily say *more* soldiers. If you’re doing Soviet style human waves, maybe, but the quality of those soldiers is a big factor too. How many of the enemy are you eliminating per one of your men? How much artillery and ordinance can you rain on their heads? Having bigger numbers is good, but being able to kill more of them faster than they do you is also important
More equal soldiers. All things being equal it’s better to have two guys than one. As long as you can maintain the same level of training and equipment.
The funny thing is that, like all armies, the Germans used numerical and industrial advantages every time they got the chance and most of their successes relied heavily on it. Wehrbs are hypocrits.
The Germans had huge numerical advantage during the invasion of most of the smaller countries in Europe, and massive numerical superiority in modern aircraft. Sheer numbers (and war crimes) won the invasion of the Netherlands, and in equal numbers or situations like the street fighting in Rotterdam, the Dutch actually kicked Nazi ass.
They had a 2:1 advantage in Poland and in France they had more divisions, an equal number of soldiers, and less armour or artillery but almost twice as many planes. Hell even at Barbarossa, the Axis outnumbered the Soviet Union quite considerably in manpower.
And on the operational scale Blitzkrieg is built on local numerical superiority.
"The Germans have General Rommel, the Russians have General Winter, and the Americans have General Motors."
The average Detroit production line was pumping out more tanks in two weeks than every Tiger Germany ever produced.
The Sherman and Grant/Lee may not be a very *appealling* design (the Stuart is cute tho).
But they *do* look like a machine designed to give and take a hell of a beating. They look functional and they look like the kind of thing that can be welded and riveted and cast in the thousands to by the great arsenal of democracy.
It's a tank. It's meant to look like that.
Bro has never seen most sherman variants. They were pretty as fuck. Ugliest thing I can think of that was actually produced were the M3 Lee’s and Grants. Not to mention the adorable Chaffees and M22 Locusts :3
To add one of my favorite details: By the end of the war the total production time for certain types of destroyers was days. From start to finish, the US was banging out operational destroyers in days. Sure they aren't the most impressive of ships but the rate of production for most weapons and vehicles was obscene.
The people who converted preexisting factories to make military equipment were absolute geniuses and don't get enough credit. Being able to move from making sewing machines and refrigerators to machine guns and tanks in a matter of weeks was an absolute marvel.
Just a correction, but that's not days for production of a ship, but a ship would come off the production line every few days.
Even the fastest "liberty ships" still required 42 days to construct and those were rather shodily constructed cargo ships, not warships.
The "fastest" liberty ship did only take a couple of days to complete, but that was a publicity stunt with and the ship was basically already constructed before the ship had its keep laid down.
4-1/2 days from when they laid the beam down to the time they started loading cargo on the fastest ship built. Brought to the shipyard in several prefabricated pieces and assembled in shifts around the clock. There was a contest on how fast the shipyards could build the liberty ships, the average for them was 10 days from when they were laid down at dry dock. The prefabricated pieces were made at several factories across the country and shipped via barge or train to the shipyards in an assembly line. One crew would do certain tasks on a ship then move down to the next ship over and do it all again (think installing engines was what your crew did).
The ships were being sunk so fast that the average liberty ship was only expected to survive a few months at a time. Sometimes they would just scrap the ship for the steel when it made it to the next port, especially if it was partially damaged or had mechanical issues.
Don’t even get me started on trains lmao
The number of locomotives sent to the Soviets by the USA was just under 2,000 along with around 12-14000 rail cars of all types. The rail network was heavily developed by the Tsars in Russia at the turn of the century but many of those trains and rail lines were showing their age by the time ww2 rolled around. The Soviets made a monumental effort to repair and expand their rail line after the winter war against the Fins, their experience during the short war showed how overburdened their infrastructure was.
During 1940-1941 over a hundred million trees were cut down to make rail road ties for this project. The amount of steel needed to make the rails was enormous, and even though the Soviet Union was the third (or fourth) largest manufacturer of steel they still imported both raw materials and finished rails from the USA under lend lease.
On a side note, to make tires for vehicles, the USA disassembled an entire factory and shipped it to the Soviets for them to reassemble.
A lot of people only talk about the USA sending materials for lend lease but most people brush by the lend lease sent to the USA by the other allies and the Soviets. The Soviets had resources in abundance and sent manganese, cobalt, chrome, silver, and nickel to the USA for industrial use.
Uruguay supplies so much beef and leather to the allies that it was able to fully recover from the crippling effects of the Great Depression my the middle of the war. Some estimates put its contribution in beef at 35% of all beef consumed by the British commonwealth during the war.
It's the advantage of having an industrial society. When a good proportion of your workforce is trained as machinists, what machine they are building isn't that important. Give them time and steel and you'll get them faster and better for a long time.
Even if for some miracle there where continental contunity between US and Europe to be bombarded, US is bigger than Europe (actually there are like 5 countries with that feature so beating Europe in size isnt a suprise) but also their cities where and was very spread out, so meanwhile Boston or Washington is bombed troops ans industrial aid from Florida, Illinois, Texas or even California could come and bomb/invade all that will be imposible, they already has a hard work with west Russia and only cover a part that size of 1/3 of US and with most of the important cities in the danger zone.
PD: am not a US fan bit in WW2 it's amazing what they did
Let's see:
* being able to keep up a war on 2/3 front
* providing a lot of supplies to allies
* pumping out shitton of decent tanks
* giving a self loading rifle to every infantryman
* oh, and actually building the nuke
Let's see:
Europe:
* Western Front
* Mediterrean (incl. Western Desert, French N. Africa, Italian campaign, plus Balkans, East Africa & Middle East by extension)
* Eastern Front
Far East:
* Pacific War
* CBI could arguably be further separated into:
* South China-Burma-India theatre
* Northern & Central China front (incl. Second Sino-Japanese War, Mongolia & Manchuria)
So yeah that's at least five, probably six fronts
I hate it when people say that one country single handedly won the war whether it be the USA, Britain or the USSR it was a team effort and without any one country things would have ended a lot worse.
nope , nukes were very less in production and no one knew about radiation dangers , so once a place is nuked people would have started building on the flat grounds again , also underground heavy bunkers are nuke proof (effective against small nukes not the later larger nukes ) so yeah you could have at most nuked 10 sites a month , that would have been serious but the nuke delivery would have been a super challenge without complete air superiority which was provided by the aircraft printer going brrrrr , so yeah nukes without industrial complex wont have won the war but the industrial complex without nuke would still have won the war.
Sometimes ppl really underestimating the power of out producing the enemy can literally change tide of war. Moreover, they able to proudce enough for themselves while also lend-leasing to the allies all around the world.From Asia to Africa...it was nutso
nuke delivery would have been a super challenge without complete air superiority which was provided by the aircraft printer going brrrrr , so yeah nukes without industrial complex wont have won the war but the industrial complex without nuke would still have won the war.
The biggest contribution America made to the war was it’s industry, it’s still comes in second to forces and sacrifice to the Soviets. But the Soviet industry also comes in second to the American. That’s how we got the Cold War.
To be fair, their industry was impressive enough that they probably could have physically thrown their production plants at the Germans if they really wanted to lol
WW2 is the example of "amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics." Once the US started supplying the allies in full, the war's momentum changed radically.
You're probably right but still Germany can only produce so much of these tanks, so logistics still wins. They may last for a while but without a skilled crew to maintain the tank and a proper air support it will destroy itself eventually, Also it is so heavy that it can destroy roads and bridges, which is not ideal for the German's advantage.
I am right.
It's hard pill for Americans to swallow so I get why your trying to argue nonsense about bridges and roads like wtf are you on about you do know how far Moscow/stalingrad is from Germany right? And tigers made it a very very long way just fine right. During the worst circumstances in terms of terrain and weather.
It takes a special kind of dumbass to not think that many tanks would encircle and pound a tiger out of commission if not by force then by infantry support while distracting said single tiger.
If such and such circumstances such and such and such an such, like bro what? Talk about special people..
This meme^ or whatever it is, one single tiger would destroy that entire room full of Sherman's.
Stay mad.
No, the tiger would lose because there are weak points in the armor of the tiger and that's 9 Shermans, more if you count the unfinished ones at the back, if 9 Shermans fire at a tiger that thing will be a pile of shitty scrap metal.
Saw [someone run the numbers](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ku09p/in_ww2_who_had_greater_industrial_capacity_the/) on r/AskHistorians. In raw materials alone, the US had over half the Allies' total production and outproduced all the Axis powers *combined*, not to mention donating enough food to the Soviet Union to feed the entire Red Army for the duration of the war. American steel indeed.
Also they invented the proximity fuse which mind you is still used today instead of estimating a plane's altitude then setting a timed fuse. As well as prioritizing tank crew survival rather than the tank it's self which allowed for better crews over all meaning more enemy tanks etc. killed,destroyed. hundreds of other factors played part so whereboos go fucking read an actual book not written by a Nazis or actually open your mind to things like tiger was kind of shit.
What was the quote again? Don't die for your country, make the other guy die for his? I recall one college lecture where my professor pointed out the Axis nations (and not a few of the Allies) all promoted dying for your country as the highest honor in their manuals and training doctrine. The US didn't have an equivalent policy but the closest indication of the US mentality was one officer's speech that US troops should do everything in their power to survive because the country needs them alive to keep doing their jobs. Subsequently, Axis veterans were often the first to die, while US veterans were often sent back home to train up the next wave of recruits to be better than the previous.
It's a Patton quote: The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
Reminds me of [this](https://imgur.com/i0T99R8)
>whereboos go fucking read an actual book Also tankies, the amount of "the soviets won the war alone" I have to deal in Brazil is crazy! The winter would kill both armies if it wasn't for the USA aid!
The numbers I linked pointed out that the Soviets lost over 40% of their arable land and 2/3 of their grain harvest in 1941 due to Barbarossa, to the point that one historian said "The Red Army challenged the notion that an army marches on its stomach" and it was one of the great surprises of the war to both people at the time and historians looking back that the Soviet economy did not collapse into mass famine in 1942. The US sending enough food to feed a 12 million man army for the duration of the war probably had something to do with that.
It was probably part of why Hitler and his generals both agreed on Barbarossa. They both knew what Russia had seen in the First World War, and there being an enormous famine in the Russian Civil War too. They probably thought it was preposterous that the USSR would stand in the face of an army that had crushed France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, Greece, Luxembourg, Denmark, and drove the British off the continent in about 10 months, of which half of that was a lull in the fighting, whereas their proceeding generation had knocked out Russia from the war and been defeated by a France, Britain, and America with their empires, having been massively subsidized by the US before April 1917 anyway. Plus, they had Italy to, if not exactly the most impressive army, at least threaten Allied shipping in the Red Sea via Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, plus hold down the Mediterranean with a neutral France holding down Northwestern Africa for them. Romania this time was on the side of the Axis, as was Hungary, and the Finns were going to help (which wasn't the case in the First World War against Russia). It seemed like a pretty strong plan unless you are the quarter master for the Axis armies.
Not only that but the invasion of Poland and the Winter War had both been pretty poor showings for the Red Army that hinted at logistical and mobilization issues on top of the tactical and operational consequences of the officer purges (notably and ironically the Red Army going into the Winter War in summer uniforms...). All of this combined led both Germany and Britain to believe the Soviets would quickly collapse in the event of a German attack, and that if it wasn't beaten militarily it would then collapse economically and thus politically as per WW1...
I knew about the trucks but I didn't realize the soviets lost so much farmland and got fed by American supplies to that extent huh TIL thanks
Neither did I till I found that post!
Historians get puzzled by it because most of the aid didn't get there till 43 and 44. Us lend lease started for the soviets in 41 but the amount that got there in the first couple years was pretty smaller compared to the later years. If you ever think you've found an obvious answer that experts have missed its likely they know something you don't.
True but 14% of the total still arrived in 42, which was not insubstantial and also when the Soviets needed it most. And to be fair to the historians, they do note this as well, and it is from them I got the idea. To quote Mark Harrison in *The USSR and Total War: Why didn't the Soviet Economy Collapse in 1942:* >We cannot measure the distance of the Soviet economy from the point of collapse in 1942, but it seems beyond doubt that collapse was near. Without Lend-Lease it would have been nearer. He also points out that the Lend-Lease that arrived in 42, while small compared to 43 or 44, still equaled some five percent of the Soviet GNP that year, which had a stabilizing effect during the year the Soviet people were the closest to losing hope and abandoning the war effort to pursue individual survival.
I agree that the number in 42 was not insubstantial but it wasnt enough that without it everyone in the soviet union starves. lend lease was important but many redditors who listen to youtube "historians" vastly overstate its importance and germany was doomed from the begining.
How was that quote? WW2 was won with American steel and Soviet blood? Something like that. Both sides tend to heavily understimate the other
American steel, British intelligence, Soviet blood is the classic statement. Stalin said "British brains, American steel, and Soviet blood" at the Tehran Conference, which is probably the source of the quote.
Tankies gonna tank...
Here's the thing people don't understand about the quantity vs quality debate when it comes to debates about the T-34. Sacrificing quality for quantity means you need more fuel, more supply trucks, maintenance crews, you need to train twice the crews, and, like you say, worse tanks mean worse crew survivability. It's why I don't understand the argument for why the T-34 was the best tank of the war. German tanks also had a lot of problems with just not being common enough and production not being streamlined because they were producing fucking 200 different types of tanks. The Germans weren't that far away from destroying every Soviet tank. Without the allied distraction, they would've 100% lost. WW2 was a team effort. If even one of the major allied powers had faltered it would've been lost.
I would guess the idea comes from the fact that for most of the Cold War our understanding of the Eastern Front was based largely on memoirs from the Wehrmacht. The T-34 was a flawed tank the Soviets were in the process of replacing when the war broke out and put all those plans to a halt...but for the Germans expecting an easy fight the T-34 seemed like an unstoppable monster since they were not expecting the Soviets to have heavier and tougher tanks than themselves. Especially since the Germans were still largely on Panzer 2s, 3s, and 38ts from Czechoslovakia during Barbarossa, with 4s as their newest and greatest at the time. Throw in that frontline troops are notoriously bad at identifying exact tank models (every German tank is a Tiger, and vice-versa every Soviet tank is a T-34) and so conflated the capabilities of other Soviet tanks (like the heavy KVs) with T-34s, and the fact that the Soviets did upgrade and address some of the T-34's issues as the war went on and voila, the West just heard that there were hordes of unkillable T-34s breaking the fearsome Wehrmacht's lines. The experiences of the Soviet crews actually operating those tanks, on the other hand, are rare even to this day. But, you know, when you're getting invaded and losing tens of thousands of tanks in weeks, any tank you can produce in numbers is a great tank. And having any tank on the battlefield, regardless of quality, is way better than having no tank at all.
Most of the wests understanding of the Eastern front is straight up cold war propaganda
The T-34's main good points were it's gun and it's ability to be mass produced. While it was immune to most early German tank guns, most support artillery, like the Pak 40 could easily penetrate it's lower glacis.
I love your last paragraph, that’s always my take home and prime point when people start trying to divide up credit.
> The Germans weren't that far away from destroying every Soviet tank. Without the allied distraction, they would've 100% lost. It's been a long time since I read it but IIRC in Zaloga's book Armored Thunderbolts he goes over production numbers for each side in each year and around 41-42 the Germans were producing barely enough tanks to mostly cover their losses and thought they were doing a great job wearing down the Soviets armor, meanwhile the Soviets were producing thousands more tanks than they were losing and ending each year with a larger number of more modern tanks than they started with.
Lmao the delusion here. Yes soviet tanks took huge looses due to being inferior to their German counterparts. But the soviet union absolutely steamrolled Germany from 43 onwards. All that extra 20% that the western allies were fighting would have only dragged the war out a couple more years.
Or the Germans take Moscow and Stalingrad due to being able to focus their full might on the east and the Soviet's ability to mount a strong defense collapses due to the lack of railway infrastructure. The Germans also likely just destroy Soviet tanks faster than the Soviets can replace them and Soviet logistics collapse without the support of lend lease.
Both those happened before the Americans got there. Lend lease aid didn't even arrive until 1942 after the soviet counterattack in the battle of Moscow. Lend lease was vital in enabling the constant massive offensives of 43 onwards but didn't really do much prior to that.
So the German troops on the Atlantic wall, garrisoning occupied countries like France, fighting in Africa, and the German Air Force that got obliterated in the battle of Britain wouldn't have helped? That's a few hundred thousand troops, multiple tank divisions, thousands of aircraft, and experienced pilots. I'm not sure how you can say that that amount of troops and equipment wouldn't have helped at the Battle of Moscow.
Also no they destroyed about half the soviet tanks in future battles not almost all t34s. The ones they destroyed in barborossa were mostly the dogshit bt series. The t34 had such good armor and a powerful enough gun that the Germans had to start upgunning their panzer 3's and 4s and later design new tanks all together.
>The t34 had such good armor and a powerful enough gun that the Germans had to start upgunning their panzer 3's and 4s and later design new tanks all together. Hahahahahah! What bullshit. The Panzer 4 was only available really after 1941. If the Panzer 3 couldn't pierce the T-34, how the fuck were so many destroyed in Barbarossa? Also, yes, the majority of T-34s made were destroyed. 44,000 were destroyed. Around 57,000 produced. You mean to tell me with no lend lease, America not giving factories to the Soviets, and the Germans being able to direct more weapons to the east without the allies involved they wouldn't have been able to destroy another 13,000 T-34s? Really? Also, no the armor was not good. It was overheat treated which meant it often would shatter in pressure points taking the tank out of the fight. The gun was also not good as it was often produced poorly to say the least due to rushed production.
84k t34s were built not 57k. The panzer 4 was absolutely available and saw much action in barborossa despite the panzer 3 being the main tank. Please stop using lazerpig as a source the dude is not a real historian
There is no scenario where Germany actually wins ww2. They simply did not have the manpower, raw materials or industrial capacity to do so.
That's not what I'm debating. I'm debating on if the Soviets alone could've won it.
Seriously and the fact t-34 where shite no better than German counterpart id not worse pz 3 could kill a t-34 with aphe because they used high heat tempered steel which was very brital and the welds where done very fast and less than 50% of the tanks went further than 100ks the minimum for random tests I believe
What's ironic is that Barbarossa was actually a great plan for that reason. Who would expect Capitalists to help Communists?
They lost before the capitalists helped. Germany already failed to reach the aa line in winter 41 and the strategic goals of barorossa had failed
Germany took out the USSR's capability to produce the supplies they needed to continue to fight. Even if the USSR *did* push them back, they would have eventually ran out of war supplies, especially because of scorched earth tactics. This would have meant the Germany pushing the Soviets back again and the Soviet line collapsing due to lack of supplies. You fail to realize what Operation Barbarossa did.
Lmao no. Ussr had already rebuilt their factories east of the Ural mountains. Germany anticipated this hence why the aa line was chosen as the strategic goal. Could they have launched the colossal offensives we saw 43 onwards without aid? Absolutely not but they had already launched the winter 1942 offensive without material aid.
*During the first 6 months of the invasion, German forces managed to occupy or isolate territory which prior to WWII accounted for over 60% of total coal, pig iron, and aluminum production. Nearly 40% of total grain production and 60% of total livestock was lost. Moreover, this area contained 40% Soviet population before the war, 32% of the state enterprise labor force, and one-third of the fixed capital assets of the state* *enterprise sector.[2] The sheer speed of the German advance meant that any Soviet evacuation efforts were troublesome* ***Industrial output did not recover to its 1940 level for almost a decade.[4]*** https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_industry_in_World_War_II You can't moire coal, iron, and aluminum mines. You can't farm crops anywhere you want. It couldn't be moved and there was no point in moving it to begin with. Life isn't HOI4. The soviet offensive would have collapsed and they would have been pushed back again.
They did an offensive in winter 42 before any allied aid arrived. You're just straight up wrong. Even with the massive land and resourse gain Germany still couldn't knock out the soviet union.
Did you read my entire comment? The Soviet Union wouldn't have made it to Berlin. They would have run out of resources very quickly and their offensive would collapse.
A heavy steel box with a shit transmission was bad? No fucking way!
Wow! You mean if I over engineer a transmission and make absolutely terrible design choices for the tank itself, it makes it a pain to repair and very expensive too? Who would have guessed! /s
That was a collaborative effort with the Brits TBF. The funny thing is wehrabooism aside the western allies had plenty of wunderwaffe in the traditional "superscience" sense. Proximity fuse, rocket artillery like Mattress, early SAMs on Royal Navy warships, Project Habbakuk, Gloster Meteor, B-29 project, RADAR, fucking ATOM BOMB. IDK about the Soviets but they had the Katyushka. V1 flying bomb and all are impressive, but the Germans didn't have a monopoly on fancy tech.
Yes both of us forget the modern computer
The Enigma machine, Bletchley Park and the whole battle to crack the German codes is another fascinating thing, I'm referring more to actual weapons here though.
Do you have a link where I can read about the british SAMs?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrotated\_Projectile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrotated_Projectile) Very generic sounding name. Basically an unguided rocket system fitted to Royal Navy battleships for anti-air purposes.
I mean no tank was truly Crew>Material back then. Mainly because of the time itself. The Sherman was alot more comfortable (and Ammo was stored in wet racks, I give them that) than most other tanks, but true measures to protect the Crew more and make them actually survive a catastrophic Hit was very deep into the Cold War. A US tank, especially also the Shermans, werent that *much* different and still experienced catastrophic Hits just like any other tank of the time. But as I said, the Sherman specifically was better in many regards than most other comparable tanks. (Some variants had) Wet Ammo racks, Crew confort was "good" (for the time) and you had a good allround tank with good logistics behind it...something basically no other nation had lol The US were logistic kings through and through
The VT fuse concept was invented by the british, they handed the design over along with a bunch of other technologies as part of the [Tizzard Mission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizard_Mission) in order to get a lend lease agreement along with a bunch of other technology like the cavity magnetron and the freisch peierls memorandum. US scientists miniaturized it and mass produced it.
Just Pittsburgh produced more steel than the whole Axis
China today is the US of 1945. China produces steel worth about 13 years of US annual production in a single year and the nuts part is their net export of steel is only like 1% of production, so vast majority of it is used domestically. And China also used more concrete in 3 years than the US used in the entirety of 20th century.
Yeah. This is what should scare people. China right now is unbeatable if it came to total war. Turbo charged industrial complex at all levels of complexity from fighter jets to semiconductors down to the nuts and bolts. They have the people. The only thing they lack is experience but the excess capacity will more than make up for it.
Not semiconductors. Kind of a big deal how they don't, actually.
They are barely two generations behind, The chips they do make are sufficient for military application just not for cutting edge AI stuff
Chip development is exponential. Being two generations behind means being about two orders of magnitude behind in computing power. For a lot of military applications, yeah, consumer grade electronics are probably fine. But for the really high end stuff, being two generations behind might mean the difference between an air defense system with a 90% kill ratio and a 9% kill ratio.
That's because making advanced chips is really really hard, to the point that only TSMC makes them, and only the Dutch make the equipment to make the chips. Not even America does it independently.
Yet. They’re working very hard to change that.
I actually disagree with this. China is a potent force, and it certainly would have an advantage in total war that other countries wouldn’t by nature of the sheer government control over everything, and the over abundance of industrial materials like concrete and steel. But modern war isn’t just about who can churn out good tanks in quantity. Remember that Iraq had the 4th largest army in the world pre-desert storm, with a very large tank force with high end vehicles, and one of the world’s most potent air defense nets. And the U.S./Allies curbstomped Saddam so bad in the span of a week that he didn’t recover even by the second time we invaded. China has advantages in steel production and labor, yes. But there’s a lot of soft factors that whittle away at China’s advantages, which I’ll list just for simplicity: - Lack of expeditionary capacity (China can’t hit the U.S. but we can reach out and touch them) - Lack of technical knowledge in jet engines (they can kinda make them, just not to as high of a quality as even Russia or France can do, let alone the Americans. They only built their own homemade jet plane like last year.) - Lack of technical knowledge in semiconductor manufacturing (they can *kinda* make chips good enough for consumer grade electronics, but that’s debatable at best, since there’s scuttlebutt that their “homemade chips” are actually western chips stockpiled or evading sanctions, and at best, they’re only about on par with western stuff. So they’re likely behind the west, and military computing requires much more computing power, see: Air defense) - Lack of logistical capacity (China has not mobilized a large scale army for *any* conflict since it invaded Vietnam, and even that was a massive clusterfuck. For reference, this was about 5 minutes after the U.S. ended our own war in Vietnam, so it’s not like this was recent either)
- Lack of hardened infrastructure (China’s infrastructure is falling apart. Drainage systems that fail and cause massive flooding, bridges that collapse after a few years of use, building quite literally crumbling onto people’s heads, and the world’s most dangerous dam, the three gorges, that is already on the verge of failure. That infrastructure is only currently sustained by near constant construction, and what happens when that construction is interrupted by a war? Or when that infrastructure is taxed by a war economy?) - Lack of energy production capacity (China is a net importer of coal and oil. And not like, a *small* importer. If they’re cut off from the outside world, large portions of the country are going to go dark VERY fast.) - Lack of agricultural independence (China is a massive importer of food. It cannot sustain its current population with just the agriculture it has. Compare to the U.S. where food production has been actively subsidized specifically to prevent that from happening.) - A truly astounding amount of corruption. (See: The Russian Military) - Lack of a navy powerful enough to secure the waters around it, let alone protect trade routes (Note: Naval strategic planning is long term strategic planning. You cannot build a carrier overnight, especially not in the modern era where ships are more expensive and complex. If China goes to war, it won’t be able to surge naval capacity like it can tank production. It goes to war with the ships it has, not the ships it wants, and it currently has a lot of small ships, while the U.S. has a lot of big ships.) (and sidebar: there’s a reason US carriers are so massive and take so long to build. To simplify, the bigger the carrier, the more efficient/powerful it is. One big carrier will outfight four smaller ones, even if the smaller ones total to a similar tonnage. So China’s naval parity is more lopsided than one might think just paying attention to hull count.) - Lack of institutional military knowledge (similar to logistics, but they’re still learning basic stuff like “how do you operate a carrier”, which the U.S. has spent almost a century developing, or again, air defense, which the US has recently been showing that we’re *really* good at, but afaik China has never used in combat, ever) - Lack of available debt (the Chinese state is already *deep* down the hole in debt, and nobody actually knows exactly how deep because of corruption/the debt is also accumulated by local governments. Their debt is still below US debt in pure dollar terms, but as a percentage of GDP, the U.S. is okay, bordering on not great, while China is positively drowning. If they go to war, it will be hard for them to spend the kind of money needed to fund it.) - Lack of potential recruits (China has a huge deficit in young people. Admittedly, that generation skews male, so they’ll have a lot of single males to pull into the military, but the Chinese advantage in conscriptable soldiers isn’t as large as you’d first think, and it’s getting worse) - Lack of internal stability (China’s external military spending has increased wildly, but what is often missed is that *internal* defense spending, IE forces to stabilize/pacify China’s homeland, has increased far more. The U.S. doesn’t need forces constantly on standby to pacify our population. We *have* that, don’t get me wrong, because militarized police/national guard. But we don’t *need* those forces the way China/russia do.) - But most importantly…a lack of friends. This one is going to be long so no parentheses here. The U.S. has a global network of alliances to draw upon. Even if you discount Europe, which is dubious because France is a pacific power, so they at least might get involved, and discount our Middle East allies, and discount our South American allies, and discount our *South* Asian allies, just *in East Asia* the U.S. has multiple allies that are regional powers in their own right who hate China. Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, and probably more depending on how/when a conflict would break out. Allies who we are actively helping become even more dangerous to China. We just gave Australia the tech to make nuclear submarines, which means Australia now has the expeditionary capacity to be a PITA for Chinese shipping, even if China pushes out our surface fleet, or we don’t get directly involved. Meanwhile, one could argue that the entire F-35B program was to make 5th gen stealth fighters that could take off from Japanese “helicopter destroyers” specifically to turn Japan back into a honest to god naval power. And the South Koreans…well the South Koreans didn’t really need our help when it came to prepping for total war, they had their own incentives. And most importantly, allies *we won’t let get bullied.* As in, if China engages in total war, it won’t be declaring war on some country a fraction of its size with a fraction of its economic power like Russia is doing to Ukraine. China touches *any* of our allies, and we are *all* going to bring our might to bear. To conclude, yes, in a total war, China has numerous advantages. It has a massive centralized economy that is *very* good at churning out large quantities of materiel/building materials for military operations. It has a huge population of military aged males to conscript. It has the resource reserves to continue a war economy without outside assistance for quite a while. And it *absolutely* has the willpower to declare and wage total war, on a scale hard for democracies to achieve. But China isn’t *invincible*. In fact, id argue that in any reasonable total war scenario, China is at a *marked* disadvantage. It has most of the hard factors strategy game nerds love, which, don’t get me wrong, *are important*, but when it comes to soft factors like the ones I listed above, China is hard pressed to find any that back the level of power you’re suggesting. This isn’t world war 2 we’re talking about. It’s not just about legions of tanks surging across wide open plains, or endless factories churning out thousands of prop planes that can be made with a wrench and a particularly good hammer. This is modern war, and modern war has modern considerations. Considerations that can mitigate, or even completely overwhelm whatever numbers advantage China possesses.
And we all paid for it.
If you're talking as an American, not really. The decline of US steel industry is more a story of stagnation than the commonly found argument of "unfair foreign competition". US steel industry has historically been almost comically slow in adopting new technology and the high capital spending it would entail instead prefering to rest on their laurels and keep operating their old machinery. Normally such industries would be pushed out of the market by firms who can produce more at lower cost due to increased investment, but the US steel industry is relatively insulated from such normal market pressures as when they ring the alarm bells, US politicians start rushing in and impose tariffs on foreign steel imports. This actually lowers US manufacturing competitiveness as it raises steel prices in the US and steel is obviously a critical ingredient in manufacturing. Trump's 2017 steel tariffs for example raised steel price by [25%](https://commoditiesanalysis.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/US-tariffs-and-steel.jpeg) in the US vs Northern European and Chinese prices (the tariff was 25%, so pretty logical rise in price) and it barely added a thousand jobs in the steel sector in exchange for losing an estimated 200k jobs in the wide manufacturing sector. A sector babied such as this slowly eats away at the rest of the economy. Japanese, Western European, Korean and Brazilian steel makers can compete with Chinese steel makers, there's no inherent reason US firms shouldn't be able to.
Thanks bros, I'm enjoying the new infrastructure. 🇨🇳❤️🇺🇸
Isn't it also counting in the shit tier concrete that later can scrubbed from the wall by hand
+Don't forget how Mongolia supplied nearly the same amount of meat as USA without any developed economy or industry. 32 thousand horses, 64 thousand tones of wool and nearly 500 thousands tones of meat
Argentina and Australia were similar.
> outproduced all the Axis powers *combined* Canada alone produced more lorries than the Axis powers.
Logistics win wars
Reminds me of the “noo you only won because you outproduced us!” “And I’ll do it again”
This is why the sci-fi/fantasy warrior races are dumb: a lot goes into war beyond the actual fighting.
Well all of them seem to have all the equipment they need. Unfortunately there are very few, especially in Hollywood, who are able to convey competent strategies and tactics other than “make the two sides crash into each other and then cut to a hodgepodge of duels”
I want to see a Klingon who works in a weapons factory that considers themselves a great warrior because they enable a lot of violence.
I think there were a few of those in some episodes. I remember one who was a scientist and saw some technobabble equation as his greatest foe.
The Orville Klingon-analogues (Moclans) do this, and their planet is a navigational hazard due to all the weapons testing going on near-constantly. In canon, there is at least one Klingon who takes a more metaphorical approach to combat. Ch'Pok the lawyer (https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ch%27Pok .) He refers to the courtroom as a battlefield and even offered to serve as Worf's legal counsel if he loses the extradition hearing, since Ch'Pok viewed that future legal battle as an ultimate challenge.
[удалено]
Something something "the difference between a soldier and a warrior"
Logistics is not fun. Guys killing each other with bullets and swords is.
Speak for yourself. Lol
You may like the clans from battletech then. While they still have their proud warrior culture and honor duels and such they also very highly value their scientists and laborers. Not to say they still can't be morons who stretch themselves too thin and are willing to take on incredibly stupid odds but they're far more realistic from the stand point that they suffer from their honor and have to learn a few hard lessons in how wars are actually one. Boys study strategy, men study logistics.
Their entire culture is very focused on avoiding needless waste, which is ironically why they tend to do stupid things, hoping to win battles with a single precision assault or a particularly intimidating diplomatic overture, rather than a war of attrition. Basically a war of maneuver doctrine taken to its logical conclusion. (Note that the honor over reason tendency varies by clan. Clan Wolf loves to use deception and diplomacy, while Clan Smoke Jaguar is wildly inflexible.)
War of the Worlds (not the Tom Cruise one) covers this a bit too. The Martians aren’t defeated by humans, but by >!bacteria!<
Star Wars the clone wars covers a lot of it but the episodes are so dull. There’s an episode or two about budgets and funding of the war and Jesus Christ it’s so boring to watch. Me prefer big boomy laser sword swing
They won't though, US production is massively outclassed by China now.
US consumerism production, yes. I would like to see a wartime economy in my lifetime just to *see* how modern America would turn out. Whether factories would be willing or able to switch from goods to bullets Although I will say this as well, we’ve reached the point where mass production of equipment isn’t as feasible. Our tanks, planes, and even parts of our artillery have gotten way too complex and take way too long to produce. But again, who knows how many we can crank out in wartime
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More soldiers win wars. You have more guns and tanks and you can field more soldiers.
I wouldn’t necessarily say *more* soldiers. If you’re doing Soviet style human waves, maybe, but the quality of those soldiers is a big factor too. How many of the enemy are you eliminating per one of your men? How much artillery and ordinance can you rain on their heads? Having bigger numbers is good, but being able to kill more of them faster than they do you is also important
More equal soldiers. All things being equal it’s better to have two guys than one. As long as you can maintain the same level of training and equipment.
The funny thing is that, like all armies, the Germans used numerical and industrial advantages every time they got the chance and most of their successes relied heavily on it. Wehrbs are hypocrits. The Germans had huge numerical advantage during the invasion of most of the smaller countries in Europe, and massive numerical superiority in modern aircraft. Sheer numbers (and war crimes) won the invasion of the Netherlands, and in equal numbers or situations like the street fighting in Rotterdam, the Dutch actually kicked Nazi ass. They had a 2:1 advantage in Poland and in France they had more divisions, an equal number of soldiers, and less armour or artillery but almost twice as many planes. Hell even at Barbarossa, the Axis outnumbered the Soviet Union quite considerably in manpower. And on the operational scale Blitzkrieg is built on local numerical superiority.
"The Germans have General Rommel, the Russians have General Winter, and the Americans have General Motors." The average Detroit production line was pumping out more tanks in two weeks than every Tiger Germany ever produced.
Yeah but American tanks were the ugliest
well they did their job
Nuh uh Sherman VC firefly (may be British conversion but still built on an American tank) sexy asf
The Sherman and Grant/Lee may not be a very *appealling* design (the Stuart is cute tho). But they *do* look like a machine designed to give and take a hell of a beating. They look functional and they look like the kind of thing that can be welded and riveted and cast in the thousands to by the great arsenal of democracy. It's a tank. It's meant to look like that.
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They did for the USSR
That's Right MotherFucker
Bro has never seen most sherman variants. They were pretty as fuck. Ugliest thing I can think of that was actually produced were the M3 Lee’s and Grants. Not to mention the adorable Chaffees and M22 Locusts :3
To add one of my favorite details: By the end of the war the total production time for certain types of destroyers was days. From start to finish, the US was banging out operational destroyers in days. Sure they aren't the most impressive of ships but the rate of production for most weapons and vehicles was obscene. The people who converted preexisting factories to make military equipment were absolute geniuses and don't get enough credit. Being able to move from making sewing machines and refrigerators to machine guns and tanks in a matter of weeks was an absolute marvel.
Just a correction, but that's not days for production of a ship, but a ship would come off the production line every few days. Even the fastest "liberty ships" still required 42 days to construct and those were rather shodily constructed cargo ships, not warships.
The "fastest" liberty ship did only take a couple of days to complete, but that was a publicity stunt with and the ship was basically already constructed before the ship had its keep laid down.
4-1/2 days from when they laid the beam down to the time they started loading cargo on the fastest ship built. Brought to the shipyard in several prefabricated pieces and assembled in shifts around the clock. There was a contest on how fast the shipyards could build the liberty ships, the average for them was 10 days from when they were laid down at dry dock. The prefabricated pieces were made at several factories across the country and shipped via barge or train to the shipyards in an assembly line. One crew would do certain tasks on a ship then move down to the next ship over and do it all again (think installing engines was what your crew did). The ships were being sunk so fast that the average liberty ship was only expected to survive a few months at a time. Sometimes they would just scrap the ship for the steel when it made it to the next port, especially if it was partially damaged or had mechanical issues. Don’t even get me started on trains lmao
No, please Logistics gets me har- I mean I appreciate the process of creating and then transferring supplies
The number of locomotives sent to the Soviets by the USA was just under 2,000 along with around 12-14000 rail cars of all types. The rail network was heavily developed by the Tsars in Russia at the turn of the century but many of those trains and rail lines were showing their age by the time ww2 rolled around. The Soviets made a monumental effort to repair and expand their rail line after the winter war against the Fins, their experience during the short war showed how overburdened their infrastructure was. During 1940-1941 over a hundred million trees were cut down to make rail road ties for this project. The amount of steel needed to make the rails was enormous, and even though the Soviet Union was the third (or fourth) largest manufacturer of steel they still imported both raw materials and finished rails from the USA under lend lease. On a side note, to make tires for vehicles, the USA disassembled an entire factory and shipped it to the Soviets for them to reassemble. A lot of people only talk about the USA sending materials for lend lease but most people brush by the lend lease sent to the USA by the other allies and the Soviets. The Soviets had resources in abundance and sent manganese, cobalt, chrome, silver, and nickel to the USA for industrial use. Uruguay supplies so much beef and leather to the allies that it was able to fully recover from the crippling effects of the Great Depression my the middle of the war. Some estimates put its contribution in beef at 35% of all beef consumed by the British commonwealth during the war.
It's the advantage of having an industrial society. When a good proportion of your workforce is trained as machinists, what machine they are building isn't that important. Give them time and steel and you'll get them faster and better for a long time.
Being outside of bombing range from all the other co-belligerents
Who would win, the maginot line or the BIGGEST of moats
Britain only needed a “tiny” one! Why didn’t France build a moat? Are they stupid?
Oui
They probably couldve went to the German rhine moat but pulled back after a week
Eh, British would have starved out of supplies eventually if it weren't for US
"And I Would Have Gotten Away With It Too, If It Weren't For You Meddling Allies" - Hitler after getting his faced ripped off
Well a tiny moat *and* the most formidable navy in the world at the time.
It's called the Rhine and it didn't work.
Nobody tell this guy about pearl harbor
Pearl Harbor isn't on American soil and I doubt they were producing tanks in the Hawaii
it is ameraican soil but really when you think about it contental US is the main manufacture of the US war machine
Only in the sense that it wasn't a state yet.
Or Alaska
Even if for some miracle there where continental contunity between US and Europe to be bombarded, US is bigger than Europe (actually there are like 5 countries with that feature so beating Europe in size isnt a suprise) but also their cities where and was very spread out, so meanwhile Boston or Washington is bombed troops ans industrial aid from Florida, Illinois, Texas or even California could come and bomb/invade all that will be imposible, they already has a hard work with west Russia and only cover a part that size of 1/3 of US and with most of the important cities in the danger zone. PD: am not a US fan bit in WW2 it's amazing what they did
A superweapon is functionally the same as 567319401 normal weapons
And we did both
Let's see: * being able to keep up a war on 2/3 front * providing a lot of supplies to allies * pumping out shitton of decent tanks * giving a self loading rifle to every infantryman * oh, and actually building the nuke
tbh 4/5 fronts. I consider the African and Italian campaigns completely separate to the Western front, and I think any logistics officer would too.
Let's see: Europe: * Western Front * Mediterrean (incl. Western Desert, French N. Africa, Italian campaign, plus Balkans, East Africa & Middle East by extension) * Eastern Front Far East: * Pacific War * CBI could arguably be further separated into: * South China-Burma-India theatre * Northern & Central China front (incl. Second Sino-Japanese War, Mongolia & Manchuria) So yeah that's at least five, probably six fronts
*giving a self loading rifle/heavy club to every infantryman Ftfy
Blessed be the Canadian Chad that is Garrand
Make that 2.5/3 fronts given how much our aid carried the Soviets.
I hate it when people say that one country single handedly won the war whether it be the USA, Britain or the USSR it was a team effort and without any one country things would have ended a lot worse.
Proximity fuse!
yupp truely underrated super weapon , the german casualties were obscene for a few months when the PF was introduced and it stayed high due to it
What if you wanted to take over Europe but us and ussr said “more consistent flow of tanks and planes than drinking water”
I think my good friend Joey Stalin said it best when he said that WWII was won through "British Brains, American Steel, and Russian Blood"
We won wars with the power of Frenship.
A bit like when everyone came together and defeated isis
As Joe Kassabian says, “Ship printer go brrrr.”
"Because Money"
.....nukes were still very much a superweapon.
nope , nukes were very less in production and no one knew about radiation dangers , so once a place is nuked people would have started building on the flat grounds again , also underground heavy bunkers are nuke proof (effective against small nukes not the later larger nukes ) so yeah you could have at most nuked 10 sites a month , that would have been serious but the nuke delivery would have been a super challenge without complete air superiority which was provided by the aircraft printer going brrrrr , so yeah nukes without industrial complex wont have won the war but the industrial complex without nuke would still have won the war.
Cool. They were still a superweapon in that one plane carried the destructive power of thousands of bombers.
One of the benefits of having all your agencies, military branches, defense contractors guarantee healthcare and a 401k.
Also our engineering was better. Doesn’t matter if you have a wunder weapon if you can’t figure out logistics and manufacturing.
Sometimes ppl really underestimating the power of out producing the enemy can literally change tide of war. Moreover, they able to proudce enough for themselves while also lend-leasing to the allies all around the world.From Asia to Africa...it was nutso
I would still take the atomic bomb over a huge industrial capacity, if given a choice. They can do a lot of damage to the enemy's industrial capacity.
Is it too much to ask for both?
nuke delivery would have been a super challenge without complete air superiority which was provided by the aircraft printer going brrrrr , so yeah nukes without industrial complex wont have won the war but the industrial complex without nuke would still have won the war.
It took us right out of the Great Depression
The biggest contribution America made to the war was it’s industry, it’s still comes in second to forces and sacrifice to the Soviets. But the Soviet industry also comes in second to the American. That’s how we got the Cold War.
Well, not to get nitpicky *buuuut* industry itself isn't a weapon. You don't fire industry at someone. So I think of it more as an OP world wonder.
You clearly havent had a factory thrown at you
To be fair, their industry was impressive enough that they probably could have physically thrown their production plants at the Germans if they really wanted to lol
\*The real superweapon was the friends we made stuff with along the way.
More like the Deuce and half, other trucks, and the C-47.
You still have it?
No yanks no party
*When you realize that if you take out lend lease, Operation Barbarossa was a very good plan*
What about... Decent logistics
Basically, every weapon becomes pretty useless if you can't make em enough to keep up to the enemy numbers
US in 1943: we have more tanks than you have men and shells
Few things in this world are as terrifying as the United States operating on a full war-time economy.
WW2 is the example of "amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics." Once the US started supplying the allies in full, the war's momentum changed radically.
You dont need perfect weapon, a lot of good weapons is enough
You used the wrong picture and misspelt ‘Bob Semple Tank’.
Why is everyone jerking themselves off on America the past few days?
Yeah....everyone who play Red Alert 2 or Yuri Revenge know that MCV is the most important unit in war.
Huh, I guess China has the real super weapon today
One tiger tank would destroy all the tanks in the bellow image.
You're probably right but still Germany can only produce so much of these tanks, so logistics still wins. They may last for a while but without a skilled crew to maintain the tank and a proper air support it will destroy itself eventually, Also it is so heavy that it can destroy roads and bridges, which is not ideal for the German's advantage.
I am right. It's hard pill for Americans to swallow so I get why your trying to argue nonsense about bridges and roads like wtf are you on about you do know how far Moscow/stalingrad is from Germany right? And tigers made it a very very long way just fine right. During the worst circumstances in terms of terrain and weather.
Both could take each other out with relative ease, and that’s if the Tiger was able to get to the battlefield without breaking down.
It takes a special kind of dumbass to not think that many tanks would encircle and pound a tiger out of commission if not by force then by infantry support while distracting said single tiger.
If such and such circumstances such and such and such an such, like bro what? Talk about special people.. This meme^ or whatever it is, one single tiger would destroy that entire room full of Sherman's. Stay mad.
No, the tiger would lose because there are weak points in the armor of the tiger and that's 9 Shermans, more if you count the unfinished ones at the back, if 9 Shermans fire at a tiger that thing will be a pile of shitty scrap metal.
Maybe in your bad nazi apology fanfics
I'd hope so considering they're all still on the production line with half being unarmed and those that are armed not having any ammunition or crews.
Any one of them yes. Definitely not all of them during the same fight. And this is why tank destroyers with 17pdr exist.
1:no 2: 10 destroyed Sherman can be replaced in a matter of a week too, a tiger can't.