The US was already supplying half of the U.S.S.R.'s aviation fuel needs, including 90% of all high-octane fuel used during the war by the U.S.S.R. Baku's own production wasn't as big a deal as the convoys going to Arkhangelsk, Vladivostok, and around Africa to Iran, and thence up to Russia.
I'm not sure how the Germans would have managed to extract and refine the Baku oil, given the massive distances involved, but I'm not an expert.
TBH, it seems to me that the Germans still might have won had the U.S. not been quite so enthusiastic with lend-lease, or had the Japanese army's "northern plan," which would have involved attacking north into siberia and pinning down Russian troops there, prevailed over the IJN's "strike south" plan...or if Japan had tried to interdict the US/Canadian trans-pacific shipments to Vladivostok at all.
Where? I spot-checked his newsletter and what little he says outside the paywall is hedged well enough, e.g.
[June 22, 2023]
> Of the two ways are looking at this conflict so far, the silliest is that we have any idea of how the Ukrainian campaign this year is going to unfold. It has now been approximately 2 weeks since the first significant western-equipped and trained Ukrainian forces showed up in the front lines (and suffered losses). What have we seen since. Well, the Ukrainians first suffered some losses in engaging with Russian front line forces—though after a few days they changed what they were doing and since then the losses of their most important equipment seems to have slowed significantly. Instead, Ukraine seems to have made the first of what will probably be a number of tactical adjustments this summer. They are now being careful about sending vehicles forward, and instead seem to be focussing on destroying Russian forces from the front lines back to the rear.
Historically all the countries involved in WWII had to carefully balance how many people they drafted versus how many they left home to engage in industrial production, sometimes doing things like taking away men and replacing them with woman who had to be trained up in things like riveting before they could be fully productive. Some countries, like Russia, had to cut much deeper than others like the US.
It seems the book is arguing that this was a mistake and that if they'd just gathered up whatever spare manpower was unemployed they'd have been better off? I'm skeptical.
Does the book argue that the US should have rounded up unemployed people for factory work, rather than lessening the draft? Im not getting that from the review.
WWI was different. There was basically no possibility of bombing factories. The only way to affect production as such was to blockade overseas shipments.
Not sure what your point is, but at the war's peak over a third of factory workers in the US were women. The unemployment rate dropped to about 1 percent by 1944. Behind the lines, there were more jobs to do than people to do them. Not sure what the numbers of work-capable males in the US who weren't in the military, and who remained unemployed, but I doubt they could have picked up the slack if all the women workers were told to go home and keep house.
Employment of the critical 18-55 YO males was around 98%. Which means everyone except the truly handicapped were working. It was a pride thing. There was almost no social safety net in those days, and if you were begging for food, no one would feed you, they'd point you to the war effort.
During the war, if you were driving through the Sierra Nevada, the US Forest Service rangers would stop cars and 'press the males' into service fighting fires. In the same way, technically its legal for a trial court bailiff to press people right off the street to serve on a jury.
I think we didn't need the draft, we had volunteers who almost didn't make it in to fight the war. An elderly man I knew in the 90s told me that he went down and joined line at the Navy recruiting office on December 8th. He was called up, completed training, and served just one mission as a submariner when the war ended.
Reading this with Ukraine in mind makes me even more pessimistic. Russia’s industrial power is out of reach for Ukraine (the West makes that a condition of aid). Technically, a significant part of Ukraine’s industry is out of reach for Russia, since we’re making their shells, but we’re an unreliable partner.
The minor waggling of the front costs a lot of lives but can’t win the war.
The western economy is much much larger than Russia's, but not mobilized in any meaningful way. Neither Germany nor the US is likely to prioritize fighting Russia over maintaining social insurance schemes or green energy.
It would be very helpful if we *really* tried to defeat the Russians by increasing our production and getting serious about harming Russian military production (and logistics) by hitting targets in Russia. The one saving grace of the current strategy of "give Ukraine just enough stuff to slow down the Russian advance to a crawl" is that Russia is rapidly burning through its immense Soviet stockpiles. Those stockpiles will run low starting in mid-to-late 2025 (see: Covert Cabal videos). After that, the continued (pyrrhic) success of Putin's invasion will depend on whether he can boost Russia's domestic production enough to exceed the West's half-hearted efforts. (Hopefully, of course, he just says f**k it and makes a much more reasonable peace offer than he's willing to do at the moment)
I can’t see this war lasting beyond 2025. Ukraine is spent. I was hoping the political cost to Putin would be enough to force him to cry off or even topple him entirely. I don’t believe that anymore.
I suspect that the West (including the Biden Admin) isn't really committed to a Ukrainian victory/Russian defeat. Russia losing the war might destabilize the government, which would be a very dangerous situation with unpredictable risks for the West. I think they would be content with a forever war that permanently weakened the Russian military without actually toppling them. So--just enough aid to keep the war going, but not enough to bring it to an end.
I agree. Rumor has it that Antony Blinken in particular has been extremely concerned about nuclear escalation for the whole war, leading to a very slow increase in things Ukraine is allowed to do, e.g. only after Russia re-invaded near Kharkiv this year did the U.S. allow Ukraine to hit Russian territory with U.S. weapons, and even then only to a depth of ~80 km or something. So they want Russia not to lose too badly lest Putin follow through on his vague nuclear threats, or lest Putin be toppled by less predictable people who could also do something... nuclear.
But this approach puts Ukraine in a very tough spot. A loss of aid could be much worse[1], but in the current situation a lot of Ukrainians die for want of an armored APC, or of permission to hit airfields that launch planes that vaporize Ukrainians with KAB-500 glide bombs, or of enough shells to hit available targets.
[1] Remember the ICC's initial indictment for kidnapping children en masse? Or Bucha or the devastation in Mariupol (and Russia's claims that Bucha didn't happen, that they don't fire on civilian targets, etc)? Or consider this Z-warrior's commentary on the need to kill 10% of Ukrainians on Russian State TV (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5yvjyJdDW0). No, most Ukrainians really really REALLY don't want Russia on their land, and western weapons mostly stop them, if only barely.
The Russians certainly know about the second strike *capabilities* of the West. They probably also have strong opinions backed up by professional intelligence about the *will* of the West to engage in a second strike.
In your opinion, what sort of second strike do you actually think the West would actually implement, if Putin were to launch half a dozen thermonuclear missiles against logistical centers in Ukraine, while telling the West, "Note that we have carefully not attacked any targets in the United States, France, or England. And we won't, so long as none of you attack any targets in Russia. Otherwise your cities burn with ours"?
Would it change if Russia attacked logistics targets in Poland or Romania? Do you think the US is going to trade San Diego for Katowice?
How confident are you that Vladimir Putin shares your opinion and your certainty on this?
Zelensky has openly complained about it a few times.
It's not an especially radical idea: anyone looking at the amount of military equipment Western countries sent compared to their available stocks can see that Ukraine's allies are doing the bare minimum to keep it alive.
For quick comparison, Al Jazeera claimed that NATO had spent roughly $80 billion on total aid in February 2023 (so after on year of war). NATO's 2022 budget was $1.18 *trillion*. That's 6% of NATO's yearly budget spent on defending Ukraine, a lot of it in the form of surplus equipment that would have been replaced anyway.
That's not nothing, but it's nowhere near "existential war" levels of expenditure. If I was Ukrainian, I would have some fair amount of resentment towards my supposed allies.
Ukraine isn’t in NATO, so NATO Allies doing the equivalent spending of 6% of the NATO budget to aid Ukraine is pretty generous.
I don’t really think Ukraine could govern those eastern provinces (without some nasty ethnic cleansing), and a push by Russia towards Kiev would cause escalation, so probably inevitable the war ends somewhere along the lines Kissinger predicted in 2022, no matter when it ends. Dragging this out just to set Russia back a few more years, when they weren’t much of a real rival to begin with, seems rather dubious. But I suppose the western leaders may have thought Russia was poised to become more important in the near future. Or everyone’s crooked and Ukraine is a grift, like some on the American right say. In most of those scenarios, a Ukrainian would certainly feel used and abused by the West, more so than had we pushed for a quick peace to my way of thinking, but national pride is important so maybe there was no great option.
NATO is spending 6% of the NATO budget to help Ukraine destroy the Russian Army, without any NATO blood being shed. Since more like 60% of the NATO budget is devoted to making sure NATO can destroy the Russian Army at need, and with much bloodshed, that's actually a bargain.
> more so than had we pushed for a quick peace to my way of thinking
Let's not mince words here: when you say "pushed for a quick peace", you mean "either strongarmed Ukraine into accepting massive loss of territory or refused so send them weapons and let Russia annex them".
This isn't a "both sides are making this worse" situation, despite how much nationalists like to pretend it is. Russia could have had peace at any point by pulling its troops out. Ukraine is fighting an existential war.
Do you think Biden/Harris is possibly capable of calibrating aid with that degree of precision? The problem with complex machinations is that they assume levels of competence rarely found in practice
Under existing conditions, neither side can materially affect production of war materiel for the other side. Nor can they affect shipping and distribution of the materiel to the front. Note that a lot of the battles have centered over just that.
The remaining means of changing the balance in a large way would be to kill or otherwise render unusable enough of the fighting population (mostly men) on one side or the other that the materiel goes unused for lack of operators.
More like 1/7, last official census was in 2001, and population was steadily declining (due to migration and low birth rates) since the collapse of the USSR
Let me stand corrected - below I would argue that the total population ration is 1:5.
The 1:7 ratio is (my opinion) applies to 'fighting population / men ages 18-60' (and thus more relevant to this discussion; but harder prove with easily accessible sources).
So, the data:
- The most recent census in Russia was in 2020, and so 2023 Russian statistical yearbook (https://eng.rosstat.gov.ru/Publications/document/74811) is fairly accurate; it puts Russian population at 146.5 million, notably excluding Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions.
Per Russian census, Crimea (+ Sevastopol) is about 2.4 million, we can estimate Donetsk + Luhansk (+ other Donbass towns) population at ~2 million, and subtract it from Ukraine total: 35.6 - 2.4 - 2 = 31.2 m
Then, there are a lot of refugees - Germany and Poland have about 1 m each, other EU countries combined probably have another million (source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1312584/ukrainian-refugees-by-country/). So seems fairly reasonable to subtract at least ~3 m (out of total ~4.5 refugees who went to countries other than Russia) from Ukrainian total: 31.2 - 3 = 28.2
Also we need to add Donetsk+Luhansk to Russian side: 146.5 + 2 = 148.5 m
Thus, the total population ratio (within the country / on the government-controlled territory) is 1 : 5.2
As to why I think (but can't prove) that 'fighting age' population ratios are closer to 1:7:
1) war losses - probably, both Ukraine and Russia lost ~0.7m men each (killed and severely wounded), which percentage-wise affects Ukraine more
2) a lot of Ukrainians were semi-permanently/seasonally working (sometimes, illegally) in the EU, with their families living in Ukraine - so the population (and men population in particular) probably was over-estimated in the first place
Worth noting not all Western countries have given that same set of conditions - some say Ukraine can do whatever it wants with their weapons/equipment - and the US has already relaxed their guidelines somewhat.
If you got such America, in 10 years you'd be ranting about how invading Iran was a globalist neocon dream, *real* conservatives have always been isolationists, "just asking questions" on whether pride parades is Teheran was worth killing so many country boys, talk about globohomo etc.
The state dept mostly acts on the premise that you can't just fight your way to your desired outcome, bc such is reality, and when people like you chose to ignore it, it went so badly you had to rewrite history and pretend it was never your idea
No, they are not. Russia bought a certain type of drone (Shaheed) earlier in the war, then improved the design and started producing the more advanced versions (Geran) domestically.
Or the West could say to Iran "instead of selling to Russia, sell them to us, we'll pay 20% more". This not only reduces Russian supplies but increased Ukrainian supplies at the same time.
"This just gives Iran money it can use to build more factories" -- this is not true, as "just" implies that it's the only effect it has. Clearly it has other effects too, such as reducing the supply of weapons to Russia and increasing it to Ukraine.
" In general giving your enemies money to make missiles is a bad idea."
Russia is *right now* invading a European country. The last time Iran did that was over 2400 years ago. I don't see Iran as an enemy of Europe, certainly not as much as Russia is. I see it as a country currently loosely aligned with Russia and China but which could possibly be persuaded to act differently. That's why it was non-optimal when Trump tore up the Iran unclear deal.
You think the country that calls America "the great Satan", bombs American troops across the world, bombs American allies and (via proxies) western container ships in the red sea, and has ceremonial government "death to America" chants isn't an enemy? Whut
>Russia is *right now* invading a European country.
Iran attacked Israel with drones in April and gearing up for the real deal right now. Yes, here in Europe Ukraine seems more important than Israel, but I think seen from the US it is not so.
...and Hitler could have said to Roosevelt "Don't ship stuff to the Brits. We'll pay more for it."
No, I don't think that would work. Some elements in the West are fine with Iran having more money, but a lot aren't. I mean, why have sanctions against Iran if you're just going to give them money instead?
In fact they were such good friends the Soviets parked their army in Iran to make sure they had access to allied lend-lease goods, killing hundreds of Iranians in the process. Then they trained and supplied Kurdish and Azerbaijanian separatists who killed several thousand more Iranians. Only after the Allies applied significant political pressure did the Soviets pull out.
google it ... my college prof who grew up in a Siberian Gulag when released to fight against the west, was taken to Iran where the Soviets planned to assemble an army. He promptly defected to the west.
The Ukraine-Russia war looks more like WW1. Both parties can feed new armies into the meat grinder forever. Since none are able to take out the other's production of new war material, or the delivery systems (roads and rail mainly).
With the important difference from WW1 that none of the antagonists has the ability to starve the population on the other side into submission, either.
Estimates I've seen posit that at the current rate of attrition, Russia will run out of even Soviet-era tanks within two years.
The war will not last forever simply because the belligerents don't have the resources to keep it up. Ukraine can compensate by leaning on foreign donations (and so far western powers have managed to prop it up with mostly spare equipment), Russia has no such luck.
What Russia has in excess is *manpower*, but once they run out of air defense systems that will only mean more meat for the meat grinder.
Only in the sense that Putin considers mobilization politically sensitive and so is relying mostly on "volunteers" (who are willing to fight because they're poor, and are paid $2000/month plus bonuses -- so concepts akin to Bryan Caplan's "make desertion fast" may still be relevant even today). If you're trusting Ukraine's numbers for Russian casualties―don't. This video provides good casualty estimates:
(Edit: hopefully Putin is either correct about mobilization destabilizing Russia, or believes it strongly enough to not do very much of it and to stop the war in the next year or two. If Putin does destabilize Russia via mobilization though, that could be a major future headache, e.g. due to nukes falling into the hands of random Russian rebels)
Yes, agreed. Though it might be wishful thinking, I also wonder how many if any Russian nukes are operational, given Russia's problems with maintenance and corruption.
Believing that requires believing that the side with a huge overmatch in artillery, both by barrel count and shell production, is taking ~3x as many casualties. Artillery has been the single biggest cause of casualties in modern war, and the Ukraine war is much more stationary and advantageous to artillery bombardment than most modern wars. By the same token, if you believe Russian sources, they are inflicting something along the lines of 6-10:1 casualty ratios, which would mean something like ~1 million dead Ukrainians. The point being you shouldn't believe official estimates from either side, especially when they are contradicted by well known evidence.
NATO artillery has longer range and higher precision than Russian artillery.
This is (part of) why Russia has been shelling cities that hard: they don't have the accuracy to hit a single target reliably, so they need saturation bombing to reliably destroy enemy positions.
By contrast, NATO 155mm canons often fire rounds which deploy guided submunitions (eg BONUS shells) which can accurately hit small targets at long distances.
The artillery gap does exist (especially during the period where Ukraine suffered from a shell shortage), but the accuracy difference makes up for it.
As for the casualty ratios, I don't know what to tell you. There have been extensive OSINT reviews on the subject. Photos of blown up tanks on Twitter don't leave much to interpretation. Neither do filed inheritance claims on deceased Russian soldiers.
According to OSINT loss ratios, Ukraine was inflicting massive disproportionate casualties while defending in Bakhmut. But then it needed to carry out the 2023 summer offensive because this gave it an opportunity to inflict disproportionate casualties on the Russians. But then it made more sense to be on the defensive because Ukraine was inflicting massive, disproportionate casualties defending in the Donbass. But actually they needed to attack near Kursk because that let them inflict way more casualties than in Adviika.
Have you looked at Russian-collected data on Ukrainian losses? And Ukrainian claims for inheritance / petitions to award medals posthumously (which incidentally makes family eligible for higher payout)?
Also note that Ukraine has a strictly enforced ban on publishing anything that can help the enemy (including any losses), and that Twitter/Facebook are not easy to access from Russia (so for Russian drone footage you need to go to Telegram / subscribe to the right channels there).
My personal impression is that losses are roughly 1:1, with Ukraine having less (but somewhat better) artillery and more drones, and Russia having cruise/ballistic missiles that can strike anywhere in Ukraine, plus JDAMs close to front lines...
This is misleading for several reasons. Russia is obviously using up old stockpiles(why wouldn't you?), but they are also steadily increasing production of new tanks. They are already producing huge numbers, and so by the time the old soviet stockpiles run out, they are already meeting the demands with new production. Secondly, the demand is highly flexible. Tanks are useful, but not as essential as things like drones and artillery. Russia has a ton of tanks, so it's happy to spend them generously. They'd rather lose tanks than men. If tanks became scarce, a more conservative use of tanks on the frontline would not be disasterous.
This is all assuming that the war will last for years, which I highly doubt. The Kursk offensive is the ukrainian battle of the bulge. Unless something massive happens, the ukrainians are pretty much done.
"They are already producing huge numbers, and so by the time the old soviet stockpiles run out, they are already meeting the demands with new production"
If you think those sources you are providing are credible, then I'm not sure there is really any point in talking to you. I will make one attempt though.
If we stick to western propaganda, I have seen western propaganda ridiculing Russia for only producing 250 new and 600 refurbished tanks per year in 2022. These were not Russian numbers, they were western propaganda, and the lowest estimates I can remember seeing. Even assuming that was accurate, they have since opened new production lines and are working on increasing production further. Tens of tanks a year is like a stupid joke.
If you look at whatever source of losses you want, disregard the numbers, but look at the proportions. What you are seeing is that more and more of the tanks lost are new T-90M. So Russia is still throwing tanks around like candy, unlike the Ukrainians who rarely use them, but they are increasingly of new production. This should tell you all you need to know.
As to the exact number of losses, it's hard to know for sure, but keep in mind that you can take a picture of a banana and send it to oryx, and they will count it as a russian tank lost, not just once, but multiple times.
The Ukrainians make sure to publish videos of any and all destruction of Russian material they have video of. Furthermore, most destruction is done by FPV drones, and so they do have footage of most if not all. Btw, it often requires multiple FPV drones to destroy a tank, and they often publish multiple videos of the same tank. Many tanks that are seemingly destroyed are later recovered and repaired. Anyway, judging from this footage, it seems the Russians lose a few tanks a week. They almost certainly lost at a higher rate early in the war, when Ukraine had more weapons left, such as javelins.
All things considered, it seems highly likely that the losses are proportional to production, which would fit well with the Russian strategy of waging a long term, limited, war of attrition.
As a more neutral party, I have to say links were provided, and the pages don't seem to be grossly wrong in any way I can see. Perhaps it is obvious to those more familiar with them, but I don't know that Oryx or IISS have reputations which one should take into account, such as tabloid sites. Are they tabloids?
On the other hand, you're saying, un-cited, that Russia is producing 250 new tanks per year. Could you cite something that has a different number?
It makes sense, of course, for Russia to use its least useful tanks first, if they will do the job, so you have more useful types in reserve.
Here is the source for the 250 + 600 claim. Note that I do not believe this to be accurate even for 2022, certainly not in 2024, but as you can see from the article, this is a very anti-Russian article. If even these kind of articles claim these numbers, then suggesting anything lower is pretty ridiculous.
Oryx is purportedly keeping track of losses, but they are explicitly anti-Russian. They famously require very little evidence to count something as a Russian loss.
Lostarmour is the Russian equivalent, not sure how accurate they are.
The IISS page you linked states the annual Russian production of new tanks is between 250-350, depending on how many are refurbished from stocks that can't be verified by satellite imagery. Top of the line T90Ms are not the only tank that exists in the Russian arsenal. Pre-war figures show Uralvagonzavod MBT production at 1,291 units from 2007-2014, or ~160 per year. So I think roughly doubling that for war time production is reasonable.
Every reliable source I've looked at also says that Russia's production of new armored vehicles is far lower than their loss rates in Ukraine. Once Russia runs out of old Soviet era tanks, they won't be able to launch any more major ground offensives, so militarily, it makes sense to prolong the Ukraine War because the tide could turn in 1 - 2 years.
Putin is very reluctant to use conscripts in his war. He's no doubt aware of what happened to a previous Russian leader 3 years into an unpopular war in 1917.
I think you're overestimating Russia's production capabilities right now. Russia is heavily reliant on North Korea for shells, China for microelectronics, and Iran for drones. Their industrial power is in shambles due to neglect, corruption, and no access to Western talent and capital to fix it thanks to the sanctions. There is no question Russia has much more people and Soviet equipment, but their economic dysfunction is quite apparent.
This is pure delusion, western propaganda of the worst sort. China, yes, everyone is dependant on china, especially the US. This is only a problem in so far as your relationship with China is poor, or your supply lines to China are vulnerable.
North Korea? Russia bought some artillery shells. Definetly useful, yes, but not vital.
Iran and Turkey, no. They bought a few Iranian drones early on. That's about it. They are sending weapons to Iran now, not recieving them.
Overall, Russian millitary production is far superior in efficiency to the western one. Look at the recent example of the 52 000 dollar thrash bin. The MIC is made to suck money out of governments and transfer it to shareholders. They produce ridiculously expensive boondoggles in tiny amounts. This is why NATO is out of artillery shells and unable to produce them in sufficient quantities.
The sanctions are a minor incovenience at worst. In many ways, it has helped improve things in Russia. The 2014 sanctions were more of a problem, then, but now sanctions are a non-issue for the millitary.
Not a net good, no. But there has been positive effects as well as negative. Overall, the 2022 sanctions have not had a very significant effect, in part because the 2014 sanctions warned and helped prepare and train Russia in how to deal with them. Ultimately, Russia has every natural resource there is, as well as a large, well educated work force. There is very little they can't make themselves, and they share a land border with China. Sanctions are never going to break them, certainly not while non-NATO countries keep trading as usual.
Apparently, Russia can't produce semiconductor chips, and next year they may be able to produce chips equivalent to those we made in 1996. This seems like a significant thing they can't make themselves.
It's true that they can't produce the state of the art chips used in the newest phones and PCs. Afaik, they are only produced a couple of places in the world. These kind of chips are irrelevant to the war. They do produce the kind of chips used in their weapons though. Additionally, so does China.
Well, whatever truth there might be to it, it certainly isn't enough of a crisis to stop them from being very effective on the frontline. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and so on. If there were so many troubles with production and transport, you would think it would have an effect on the battlefield. I guess you can argue that it is having an affect, and that they would would defeat the Ukrainians even quicker if it didn't have.
I lean towards most of these supposed issues being vastly exaggerated by wishful thinking from western propagandists.
Set aside the unreliability of the West for a moment. If the industrial capacity of both sides is out of reach, then the question is which threshold is reached first: (1) Russia killing so many Ukrainian soldiers that Ukraine literally can’t fight anymore, or (2) Ukraine killing so many Russian soldiers that Russia folds for political reasons. I would think (2) happens quicker than (1) if industrial capacity is out of reach.
Of course, the West IS unreliable, so the real question is whether Russia can outlast Western support before it must fold for political reasons. A lot of that turns on the next US election (IMO) and not on any other consideration.
Huh? The question is which side suffers enough manpower losses that it loses the will to fight any more. Why would Russia politically collapse before Ukraine, a country that has 1/3rd the fighting age male population? Western support is also largely secondary to this, because the West is not supplying Ukraine with the most critical resource in a war of attrition, manpower.
“Folding for political reasons” doesn’t require outright collapse. Compare with the Vietnam War - the US’s position was still viable when it exited, but political pressure at home led it to fold earlier than its position in the war dictated.
Ukraine’s threshold for losing the will to fight is necessarily much higher than Russia’s, because the war is an existential risk for Ukraine and mere empire building for Russia. Russia’s large manpower advantage counteracts this, but only so far.
The west is not able to supply a number of important systems regardless of willingness. Stocks have been depleted, and production is designed for peacetime, with very low volumes. The US is out of effective, low investment methods of supporting Ukraine. They either have to do some very serious escalation, or give up.
Ukrainians are now losing 5 men for every Russian, and "recruiting" is so unpopular that recruiters are attacked and harassed by civilians, and hundreds of military veichles are being burned by them. While Russian attitudes towards the war have been somewhat tepid so far, the Ukrainian incursion in Kursk is really helping bolster Russian support for the war. There is little chance of Ukraine outlasting Russia in any way that matters.
I have no idea why you would think this unreasonable, unless you are ideologically motivated and bought into the frankly racist idea of the slavic untermensch mindlessly throwing themselves into the meat grinder in endless meatwaves or whatever you call it.
As for evidence, well, very roughly 5:1 seems to be where a number of different sources and approaches converge, although it should be said that there are large error bars, and obviously it also varies somewhat over time.
The best evidence is probably from sources that study things like the names on war memorials, mentions in social media, graves in graveyards, data from hospitals etc. This alone would be a little weak perhaps, but it matches well with numbers of dead bodies exchanged, proportions of POWs on each side etc, numbers of casualties in various units given by ukrainians in interviews, official Ukrainian numbers given combined with the fact that about 9 in 10 are listed as MIA instead of KIA, and someone who did the math on the budget for payment to wounded and dead soldiers in Ukraine. It also what you would expect given the relative disparity in firepower, with the Russians having at least a 5 to 1 advantage in artillery and drones, which together produce the large majority of casualties. Add to this the well known difficulties of the Ukrainians in evacuating wounded from the frontline.
Finally, all this lines up with a statement from Putin in a recent interview. Now I know you are not going to take his word for it, many people genuinely seem to think that everything said in Russia is a lie, but he actually has a pretty good record of being truthful in direct statements of facts like this. I would perhaps not place too much emphasis on it alone, but in this case everything adds up.
Which part? Putin being honest? "They're not there" (Russian troops in Ukraine in 2014), "We're not going to invade, what garbage is that" - that Putin? "Western propaganda", "racism" as the first "argument" he goes for?
There's no argument there, just a gish gallop of shit, which is typical for a pro-Russian troll. They are not here to have a reasoned back-and-forth with you, they are here to keep throwing shit at the wall until everything is covered in it and you no longer know where up or down is. The only way to win is not to play.
"the West makes that a condition of aid" -- Britain doesn't. Britain is quite happy fro Ukraine to fire Storm Shadow missiles into Russia, for example.
The burn rate of Russian AFVs is an order of magnitude higher than their current production capacity though. Or their estimated 2025 production capacity.
Especially tanks are nowhere near as dominant or indestructible on the battlefield as they were in WW2. They are vastly more vulnerable now.
A high burn rate of tanks ultimately means that a high tempo offensive would simply have to be paused until more tanks are built up. Few commentators consider it this way and assume a temporary tank shortage would mean an immediate end to the war.
At current production rates, rebuilding even half of their tank losses would take Russia about thirty years. If a "temporary" tank shortage results in an immediate thirty-year pause in the war, I think Ukraine would count that as a win.
> A high burn rate of tanks ultimately means that a high tempo offensive would simply have to be paused until more tanks are built up.
Unless Ukraine forces the tempo to stay up. The Kursk offensive is a good example of a maneuver that *imposes* a high-tempo response from Russian forces.
Nothing from the Ukrainian side suggests they were benefiting from enduring high tempo operations either, given their material and manpower constraints.
But Ru is highly dependent on RRs. Notice that Ukraine has systematically been attacking transport and communication infrastructure in western Ru. Also, Ru has focused on extractive technologies. They don't make their own machine tools. And they don't have the capabilities to manufacture critical items like ball bearings. They were getting machine tools and ball bearings from Europe, especially Germany, until the embargo took effect. They're still getting machine tools through a chain of cutout countries and companies, but their manufacturing capacity can't keep up with their war needs (witness them bringing 1950s-era tanks out of mothballs to push into the meat grinder).
It will be interesting to monitor what will happen with Ukrainian invasion into Kursk.
From one side no one expects a miracle. Ukrainians probably will be expelled. But it hasn't happened immediately so it opens more cans of worms.
Russia cannot leave it as it is. It needs to relocate significant resources to stop this fire burning. It can lead to less resources available for direct attacks in Ukraine and that is a benefit to Ukraine.
The psychological benefits can be questionable but they are very impressive. All this talk about the first non-nuclear country to actually attacking a nuclear power and getting away with it without nuclear retaliation. It threatens to overthrow the whole doctrine. Of course, only happening due to specific circumstances. And yet, it shows that the threat of nuclear weapons can be limited in certain circumstances.
So far Ru appears to through great contortions to avoid calling it “invasion”. First they declared “emergency” in Kursk region, then “counter-terrorist operation”. If it’s not a foreign invasion but just a bunch of terrorists, no “red lines” crossed, no nukes need to be involved.
Let me remind you that the United States did not use nuclear weapons to attack Iraq or Vietnam... Even if Mexico had attacked the United States, it is unlikely that the United States would have used nuclear weapons...
Which strongly suggests that if they are forced to withdraw from the Donbas, they'll go through great contortions to avoid calling it a "defeat", rather than going nuclear.
This is a very important thing for the world to know.
Ukraine is threatened with extinction. I'm not sure it matters to them whether the extinction would be accomplished through nuclear weapons or conventional. So in their circumstances, attacking a nuclear power in an attempt to show the war is too expensive, and thus has a chance to stop it, seems rational.
The North Vietnamese had no hope of bombing the US but they still won in the end. There's decades and decades of Cold War proxy wars which are a much better analogy for Ukraine than WW2 would be.
The question that occurred to my is: What could the west do to make it much more difficult for Russia to supply its troops fighting in Ukraine? Why are any bridges still standing? Why isn’t every Russian controlled road or port mined using remotely deployed mines? The US had the technology to mine Japanese ports remotely in WWII, we should have it or be able to develop it very quickly today. It does not matter how many tanks and artillery shells that Russia can produce, if they cannot deploy them to Ukraine.
Russian production is unreachable for the Ukrainians bc we refuse to give them long distance weapons.
Ultimately it relies on very few, foreign built factories. A missile could easily destroy them, and seriously enforcing sanctions could make them truly irreplaceable.
Similarly, we are unreliable partners bc we insist to deliver our surplus stock rather than cash, and even that in small tranches. Congress could have wired the Ukrainians some huge sum before the 2022 election and let them shop around the world for shells, drones, tanks etc, thus making the support Republican-proof
I like the review! It has interesting facts, presented clearly.
When I try to think of how to apply this to other wars, what I'm left with is: "Wow, it's actually pretty bad to have bombers dropping bombs on your factories! Try not to get in that situation!" which seems sort of obvious, but it sounds like there was a prevailing view that disagreed with it. (And it sounds like the Germans' bombing campaign against the British wasn't very effective; is that just because there were fewer bombers?)
As I understand it, German bombing raids during the Battle of Britain were mainly focused on trying to harm civilian targets more generally, as opposed to directly attacking industrial or military infrastructure, partially because attacking a specific target with World War II-era bomber technology is pretty difficult to do. As Bret Devereaux notes on his blog, "in 1944 the allies attempted from May to November in a series of raids to destroy an oil plant in Leuna, Germany. The plant was 1.2 square miles in total size and yet 84% of all bombs missed."
I think that blog post and this are actually in quite a lot of tension, since the conclusion there is that strategic airpower is severely overrated in its ability to win wars via halting production, whereas the entire thesis here seems to rest on the use of strategic airpower to do that.
I think we can, if not square the circle, at least soften the edges, but noting that Devereaux is mostly arguing that moral bombing is ineffective, with mention of destroying industry being more equivocal - Devereaux says "The opponent could, after all, react, dispersing and protecting industry, limiting the impact of bombing campaigns. Industrial bombing thus achieved something, but it is unclear if it achieved anything to be worth the tremendous investment in vast fleets of bombers necessary to do it", while O'Brien seems to have a higher estimate of the costs of hardening against bombing, and so judges it worth the investment. Devereaux also gives more focus to worries about later proxy wars, where the industrial base may be politically out of reach, which wasn't an issue during WWII.
I think they're also in agreement about the value of tactical/operational airpower
I think that tension is less an actual disagreement on the facts and more about the particular way Devereaux defines "strategic airpower;" a definition that seems to be something of an Isolated Demand for Rigour in many cases.
In particular, he's very focused on airpower accomplishing things *all on its own.* It must win the war, or at least produce significant shifts at the strategic level to properly count as "strategic airpower" by his lights; furthermore it must do it with little to no help from naval or land forces. Thus the things that matter generally don't count, and the things that count generally don't matter.
To be fair, this is actually a perfectly reasonable frame when talking about terror bombing. Terror bombing almost universally seems to occur in isolation from land or naval operations. If you were bombing civilian centres because you, for example, wanted to displace civilians so as to interfere with your enemies operations in advance of a ground assault, that would neither be terror bombing nor strategic airpower. It's only terror bombing if the impact on civilian morale is the entire goal: a purely strategic effect, not a operational or tactical one.
It's a less reasonable frame when talking about industrial production, which appears to be the focus of HTWWW. While it's pretty obvious that disruptions to production can have major strategical effects, those effects are generally felt (in some distance and attenuated sense) on the battlefield. You don't disrupt tank production because your opponent having fewer tanks is a terminal goal, you disrupt tank production they don't have those tanks at their disposal, meaning they're operationally limited to actions that require fewer tanks, meaning you can create a tactical advantage where the rubber meets the road (or the tread meets the mud as the case may be). In Devereaux's sense, it only seem to count as "strategic airpower" if the bombing substantially alters the wartime economy on its own, without relying on how the alterations ramify down to the battlefield. The bombing campaigns were part of a broader strategic array along with naval shipping disruptions and battlefield attrition, and thus not "pure" airpower.
Perhaps I'm doing Devereaux a disservice here: I'm very fond of that blog in general and that post in particular, but I think the discussion of bombing to target industry is the weakest part of it. He also focuses almost exclusively on Europe while largely ignoring the Pacific where, (for obvious reasons) aircraft's effects on supply chains were apt to be much more pronounced.
So I don't really consider that post the book (as reported by this review) to be so much in tension as talking past each other. It's not clear to me that there's an actual substantive disagreement so much as different ways of conceptualizing similar sets of facts.
Devereaux's main argument is specifically against the alarmingly prevalent position that a war can be won by, in essence, terror bombing alone. Degrading industrial production makes the conventional land battles much easier to win, but they do still need to happen, so back when air forces were a new idea, that sort of benefit was a less useful argument for demanding budget and clout than the dream of making other branches of the military completely irrelevant.
I don't think it is really possible to win most wars through the use of nuclear weapons alone unless you are trying to destroy Monaco or the Vatican. The number of bombs you would need to use to actually destroy the productivity of most nations would just mean everyone loses.
Thesis (post ww1 thinking): wars will be won primarily by strategic bombing, because bombers will be so terrible and unstoppable that they will compel the bombed nation to surrender. Sort of like how we think about nuclear missiles today.
Antithesis: despite all the heavy bombing, Germany did not surrender, and in fact increased its arms production as the war went on. The nation which most directly effected the war in Europe was the USSR, which made no attempt at all to do strategic bombing. Strategic bombing was tried again in Vietnam, even more heavily, and again failed. It was all a complete waste.
Synthesis: Strategic bombing alone can't force people to surrender, but it can dramatically affect their industrial production, to the point where their ground army loses effectiveness. That is (as I understand it) basically the argument made in this book.
Some of his arguments are about labelling airpower as "strategic". Namely, using it as a separate arm of the military with its own strategy.
But airpower, and especially "strategic airpower" isn't strategic in the sense of e.g. the naval blockade in the Napoleonic wars. It is at most operational, in that it affects the logistics of any given operation.
"Strategic" airpower does come into play in e.g. the American Strategic Air Command, whose mission was to drop nuclear bombs on the USSR. That was the whole strategy as far as I can tell; a follow up land invasion wasn't really planned as such.
I think German bombing raids weren't focused at all. The Luftwaffe had no staff to identify and prioritize targets for bombing. Before the war, Luftwaffe planning and training had focused on supporting army operations. Goering gave little guidance, while prewar doctrine called for targeting airfields, aircraft industry, ports, shipping, and harbor facilities. Luftflotte 2 under Kesselring mostly followed the doctrine, while Luftflotte 3 (Sperrle) focused on general industrial targets in the London area. Neither seems to have paid any attention to attacking Royal Navy bases or ships, even though defeat of the Royal Navy would be essential to an invasion, which was supposedly the objective of the whole operation.
"As I understand it, German bombing raids during the Battle of Britain were mainly focused on trying to harm civilian targets more generally, as opposed to directly attacking industrial or military infrastructure"
During the Battle of Britain, bombing raids were specifically directed at RAF airfields with the intention of gaining air superiority for the Sealion invasion. The story goes (but I see we are in the mode of saying all we know is wrong) that a British raid on Berlin stung Goering so much (the "you may call me Meyer" story) that he ordered a switch to bombing London, thus relieving the pressure on the RAF and starting the Blitz. This has been seen as fortuitous, as the RAF could not have lasted much longer.
My understanding was that the Berlin raid was specifically intended as a stunt to provoke the Germans into switching to targeting cities rather than airfields. I can't remember where I saw that, though.
The high-level feint and counter-feint behind a lot of the actions taken during the war makes figuring out precisely who intended what a hard task.
It’s a lot easier if you aren’t dodging AA and fighters! If you have total air superiority you can vaporize specific stuff pretty easily. Hence, I imagine, why Germany spent all its money on fighters.
From what I've read they started off by bombing ports, as being big enough targets.
But the ports were pretty well defended. They did manage to badly damage a couple of them though.
Then (via what most think of as accident), cities got bombed. And they switched to attacking the cities, mostly London. Churchill at the time was quite relieved, because doing significant damage to London with what they could bring over was more or less impossible. If they had kept up on the ports and the radar stations, it would have had a much larger effect on the war.
Leuna was a critical production hub and the largest chemical factory in Germany. It required all of the biggest chemical companies in Germany to enter a cartel to afford building it, in addition to funding from the Nazi government. Leuna produced a quarter of all synthetic gasoline in Germany and the majority of aviation fuel, in addition to synthetic rubber and nitrogen compounds used in explosives. In short, it was the single most important strategic target in Germany, and both sides knew it.
Leuna had a large Luftwaffe detachment to protect it, thick blast walls, and camouflage smoke screens. There were dummy factory buildings that increased the total area to about 3 square miles. German flak positions usually consisted of 6-12 flak guns that operated independently. Leuna had what the Germans called "grossbatteries." These were batteries of 32 flak guns, all radar controlled that fired not at individual planes but at zones of the sky. There are reports from Allied bomber crews that the sky around Leuna was so dark and smoky from all the flak that they had to drop their bombs completely blind. The crew responsible for defending and repairing the facilities at Leuna was composed of 350,000 personnel.
The gist of this is Leuna was the single best defended point in Germany against Allied air power. Even the protection of Berlin received less resources. So I don't think the lack of success by the Allies is particularly representative of air power in general.
Also, the air crews were trying to survive. Dropping bombs randomly to be lighter and make evasive action easier - or not being blown up if an AA shrapnel hits a bomb.
No. First they did the rational thing - bombed the RAF airports. Because if they can off the RAF, after that they can bomb whatever they want. Besides, they were preparing for an invasion and needed air superiority so that they can bomb the fleet.
So Churchill made a ruthlessly calculated move. Bombed Berlin. Hitler reacted exactly as he predicted - got enraged and wanted revenge and shifted the bombing to London and other cities.
And this is why dictatorships are not effective. I am sure the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine knew it is stupid - but did not dare to tell him or at any rate could not convince him.
But in democratic Britain Churchill had to put up with a lot of stuff he did not like at all. One of them was, for example, Charles de Gaulle.
There is probably something to be said about British radar (Chain Home) and command-and-control for the Battle of Britain. This article[1] for example mentions a thesis that German strategy to stop attacking radar systems (alone) cost the battle and "perhaps the war". Notwithstanding this it also points to Hitler's order to switch from bombing airfields to London -- supposedly the British were under serious pressure at this point from infrastructure damage, although perhaps this is all a myth compared to the overall production situation (per the book review).
My understanding is that Iran learned that lesson very well from Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak facility, so a bombing campaign to destroy their nuclear capacity would be fruitless.
Speaking of Israel, has their campaign against Hamas been effective? I guess the lessons learned from fighting the Nazis might not generalize SO easily to fighting guerillas. You capture Berlin and the Nazis are done for. You capture downtown Gaza City and then what happens?
Well, if the fighting won't stop and you're willing to be kind of a bastard, you do what the British did in the Second Boer War: round up the civilian population, disarm them, and put them into camps away from where the fighters are. (Anyone who refuses to leave is a fighter. Shoot them.)
If you're willing to be a *major* bastard, you emulate what the ancient Romans did and either level the city with artillery (as happened in the Syrian city of Hama in 1982) or kill the population with poison gas (as Saddam Hussein did in 1988).
Guerrillas can't hide among civilians in a place where there are no civilians.
The same thing that happens when you capture Berlin. The Nazis weren't done for because the Nazis politely surrendered. The Nazis were done for because, once the Russian Army is patrolling the streets of Berlin, how does anyone go on being a Nazi? What does it even mean to *be* a Nazi, when you can't even show a swastika in public without getting shot?
Yes, you and three of your friends can have secret "we're still Really Nazis!" meetings in your basement, rolling the dice each time that you won't all get shot. So what, and why would you do that when you could just say "I was never a Nazi, I swear!" and get on with your life? Or try to emigrate to Argentina or something.
Understanding that, the head Nazis politely surrendered, but it wouldn't have made any great difference if they hadn't.
No, you just need to eliminate pro-Hamas *activity*. Eliminating the sentiment is one way to do that. But denying it the opportunity for useful or rewarding expression, and killing or imprisoning the people fool enough to do it anyway, also works.
Allied strategic bombing in Europe was largely ineffective as well, except to the extent that it diverted the German airforce away from the eastern front and made Hitler waste money on V2s.
Keep in mind that with WW2 era bombing tech, the situation was more "having bombers dropping bombs in the same town as your factories" than *on* your factories.
The US was also sending Tiger Force to China to take directly part in the war under the fig leaf that they were volunteers despite them being airmen from the armed forces flying american war planes.
On this subject, what were the Japanese thinking would happen? Did they think the US would sue for peace, or that they would conquer San Francisco or what? How did they think this would all end?
Anyone knows a good book on this, or has read one and can summarize it for me, much appreciated.
My understanding is that they believed the US would declare war if Japan conquered the Dutch East Indies (which they were planning to do to get more oil). So they figured they'd wipe out the US Pacific fleet with a surprise attack, conquer a bunch of islands (not American islands, just specific Pacific islands), fortify those islands and build airstrips to create air superiority, and then those fortified islands would prevent the US from invading Japan directly. Then they basically hoped that the US would then be willing to sign a peace treaty because it would be too difficult for them to invade.
It was a bad plan! But at no point did they expect to, say, conquer the US or annex US territory outside of a few little islands in the west Pacific. And the Philippines, I guess.
The Japanese knew they would fight under serious disadvantages. Their plan was to seize several rings of islands between Hawaii and Japan, build airstrips on them, and deploy significant air forces that would keep the US Navy from approaching Japan. They hoped the US would then agree to a negotiated settlement that would let Japan keep enough of its conquests to be essentially self-sufficient industrially.
They don't seem to have thought about the threat of the US submarine force to their logistical operations - they considered submarines to be part of the battle fleet, to find the enemy fleet and perhaps weaken it before the decisive battle. They also don't seem to have considered the possibility that the US could deploy overwhelming airpower through the use of aircraft carriers - I doubt they imagined facing 24 Essex-class carriers, in addition to light carriers and escort carriers. Ultimately, the US deployed 105 aircraft carriers (not all at the same time) vs. 18 for Japan.
"they considered submarines to be part of the battle fleet, to find the enemy fleet and perhaps weaken it before the decisive battle"
I don't think so. In the 1930's it was believed subs are for coastal defense, because they had short range. Later on their range rapidly increased, and maybe they did not notice.
They thought winning a decisive naval battle would force the US to come to the negotiating table. Just ~35 years before, they had defeated the Russians that way. They had also decisively defeated China a decade before that. Having defeated much larger countries like China and Russia(which by raw economic and military numbers, were also much stronger than Japan), they probably thought they could do the same to the US as well.
Japan hadn't taken part in much of the fighting in WW1. They still thought they could win via banzai charges (and their victories against Tsarist Russia & China using that seemed confirmation to them).
This. The Japanese leadership were mesmerised by their stunning naval victory of Tsushima in 1905 whereby one decisive naval battle knocked out an unfriendly empire (of white people). They thought they could repeat the trick with the USA in 1941 but failed to see the difference between a tottering, backward imperial power (Russia) and an immensely productive industrial democracy (the USA). The thinking was that they were both just paper tigers who didn’t have the samurai code to stiffen their resolve. We know how that turned out.
Keep in mind that in 1941 Hawai'i was NOT a United States state. Think of this as the modern equivalent of attacking Guam.
And the "keep the US out of the war" sentiment in the US was loud and visible.
Clearly the Japanese massively miscalculated the US response (and the timing of the Pearl Harbor attack vs the declaration of war *REALLY* didn't help ...) but it wasn't 100% insane. From a Japanese perspective, anyway.
And don't forget that Japan "won" the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, so if the Japanese sorta binned all westerners together they had an example to point to for what would happen.
Japan started off winning the Russo-Japanese war with some brilliant victories, but Russia's immensity started to matter as the war dragged on, and the Russians wound up getting a surprisingly not too bad of a peace deal at Portsmouth, NH.
My sense is Japan was counting on a decisive knockout blow at Pearl Harbor to give them enough time to achieve objectives in the pacific region. Some were aware they had awakened a sleeping giant. A long time ago I think I read something like that in a journal from a Japanese Naval Officer - perhaps Admiral Yamamoto. It was from some source material (that had been translated into English) in the library where I went to college. If I recall correctly he seemed aware this was a huge gamble likely to not end well.
There's also this bit from the diary of Horikoshi Jiro (the designer of the Mitsubishi Zero, who I believe visisted the US):
> When we awoke on the morning of December 8, 1941, we found ourselves — without any foreknowledge — to be embroiled in war... Since then, the majority of us who had truly understood the awesome industrial strength of the United States never really believed that Japan would win this war.
Yamamoto had misgivings about attacking the USA but as a loyal officer he developed the Pearl Harbour plan. Others in the Japanese leadership who hadn’t visited the USA (Yamamoto had) were more gung ho.
Read Shattered Sword, which discusses this a bit by way of setting up Midway. The Japanese government essentially hoped to knock the Americans back in a way that would keep them out of the fight for years, then take and fortify a defensive ring of islands to force an attrition battle. In the process, they hoped to wear the Americans down enough to sue for a 19th-century style great power peace settlement.
I have a thought now. In the 19th century war was "the continuation of diplomacy by other means". It was a businesslike, cool and calculating. But by 1940 somehow everybody is a fanatic. Of course the Japanese themselves the most, but there was plenty of it in the US too. No deal whatsoever, unconditional surrender. The whole thing having a holy war, crusade feel.
Late to this, but "A War It Was Always Going to Lose" by Jeffrey Record has a pretty good overview of the strategic discussions of the Japanese going into WW2 (although you can also find the monograph its based on online for free if you want to be cheap).
TLDR: the Japanese absolutely knew about US Naval production capability (the Two-Ocean Navy Act was passed in July of 1940), and they knew were unlikely to win a war launched in 1941; however, they *knew* they would absolutely be defeated if they launched the war in 1942, and viewed war as inevitable anyway. They hoped that knocking the US Navy out of the war in one decisive stroke would make the US be willing to come to a diplomatic solution that acknowledged Japanese sovereignty in Asia. There was no plan for them to invade the US (there was no plan to invade Australia, which was much closer!).
Worth noting that Record argued the Japan made the decision to go to war with the US *before* the oil embargo, in that they had already decided to invade Malaya and the DEI before the embargo was announced (and they viewed invading those two regions would cause the US to declare war on them, something they were almost certainly wrong about).
Also worth noting that the Imperial Japanese Navy pushed for invasion of Malaya/DEI (and thus war with America) to further war against the Imperial Japanese Army (who was pushing for an expansion of the war in China and another invasion of the Soviet Union instead).
It is a mistake to see nations as one person. They had a lot of problems with the military assassinating politicians, going to war without orders (much of what the Kwantung Army did in China and what they tried to do against the Soviet Union was without orders) and just being a generally uncontrollable bunch. Sometimes they did not obey their own officers either, General Matsui explicitly ordered them to treat the civilians in Nanjing right, but they just had no respect for an elderly, sickly man pulled back from retirement so they killed the locals anyway.
The situation was much like between a pitbull and its owner.
They could not not go to war with China. The army would have killed any politician trying that and would have done it anyway.
So what they could do is to send the pit bulls against America and see what happens. Worst case they lose, but then they are also rid of the pit bulls and can have a proper civilian government. Which happened.
It didn't even NEED to attack the Philippines in order to seize the Dutch & British colonies in southeast Asia. They feared the US would attack from the Philippines otherwise, but attacking the US guaranteed we'd attack them (albeit, from further away).
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_note#Content demanded "inviolability of territorial integrity and sovereignty of each and all nations" i.e. a complete and utter end to Japanese imperialism (maybe except Korea as it was not explicitly mentioned), in a period of history when British and French colonial empires were big, and even America had a bit of that (Philippines). Does this sound like a reasonable demand?
I was surprised to learn that Pearl Harbor began to stockpile stuff in mid 1940 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor#Background). I can completely understand Japan considering this an unfriendly act, and took a year and a half to plan and execute an audacious preemptive attack on it, since they were kind of already at war with the US.
If you want to go to war with Japan, why wouldn't you strike first? Or, at minimum, not keep better watch over your naval assets that are closest to Japan and would be the most likely to face the attack you're trying to goad?
Roosevelt had to consider the political impact at home of launching a first strike (unpopular!). It's a good question, though, why Pearl Harbor was so poorly prepared.
I think the facts better match the theory that Roosevelt wanted to put pressure on the Japanese with his oil embargo, but did not seriously expect Japan to go to war with the US. It was a pretty terrible strategic decision on the part of the Japanese.
Agreed. Didn't mean to imply Roosevelt was itching to start a war with Japan or anything, just that even if he was, public opinion would have been a big constraint.
Japan didn't just attack Pearl Harbor. They also destroyed the Far East Air Force in the Philippines. Roosevelt didn't need both destroyed to justify a war, a surprise attack on American servicemen in either place would suffice.
I'm not sure. Public opinion was strongly against entering the war...until Pearl Harbor, and then it immediately switched. And air bases in the Philippines might not have had that effect.
In the war for Eurasia begun by the Axis in 1941, the Germans attacked to the north and the Japanese to the south. Not surprisingly, the Soviet Union survived its one-front war and so did British India survive its own one-front war. If the Axis had coordinated and picked a single axis of assault, either northern or southern, they might have come closer to winning. But Hitler had his own idiosyncratic reason for why he wanted to take the northern route (Jews), which the Japanese didn't care about. They needed oil, which was on the southern route.
The Germans needed oil to, and they could get to it in Azerbaijan either on the northern or the southern route. What nobody except the Americans knew about (not even the British) was the oil of Saudi Arabia, which a geologist sent by FDR in 1944 reported was the greatest prize in human history.
Timothy Snyder claimed in Bloodlands that Hitler was happy the Japanese adopted the Navy-favored southern route over the Army-favored northern one because it meant he didn't have to share conquered Russian territory he was sure he'd obtain with them.
I think an important reason why Germany's attacks were north of Japan's is that Germany is located in the north and didn't have the naval power to reach the south that well (even their invasion of Norway was an incredible stroke of luck that caught the Royal Navy off-guard). The reason Japan took the southern route rather than the northern one ("Hokushin-ron") was because of their setback against the Soviets (also, the failure of the February 26 incident).
Hitler claiming he was guaranteed to win after Pearl Harbor because the Japanese have never lost a war is one of the crazier things he said. It's real "Fort Knox doesn't need guards" kind of logic.
I'm also reminded of how different military thinkers reacted to the Prussians using a Dreyse rifle in the Dano-Prussian War. Austria was still sure that "shock tactics" with bayonets was the way to go, while their southern German allies realized that fire tactics were more important and they need to bank on the longer range of their rifled muskets. Both of them ultimately lost to the Prussians in the Austro-Prussian War, but some of them were just ignoring reality when inconvenient for them.
>Timothy Snyder claimed in Bloodlands that Hitler was happy the Japanese adopted the Navy-favored southern route over the Army-favored northern one because it meant he didn't have to share conquered Russian territory he was sure he'd obtain with them.
I don't see anything there about Japan having Siberia. Japan's non-aggression pact with the USSR was public knowledge. Also, part of the plan for replacing Slavs was to deport many of them to Siberia (before the "Final Solution" that was also considered a possible destination for Jews), where Germans wouldn't have to settle but could still potentially control.
The US was closely aligned with China and objected to Japan's invasion. The US also had a military presence in China and the Japanese attacked and killed US service members. Notably the crew of the Panay who were helping to evacuate a city in front of a Japanese advance. This incident was so severe the US almost declared war. Instead the president got a wide variety of embargo powers which he used to tighten or loosen flows depending on how cooperative Japan was being.
The US and Japan then engaged in negotiations. The US goal was to separate Japan from the Axis so that the war would be contained to Europe and avoid a war on two fronts. The Japanese were actually willing to concede this and many other things. The negotiations had a sticking point: China. The US demanded Japan withdraw from China. The Japanese army said it would overthrow the government if they ordered a withdrawal. Unable to make the necessary concessions, Japan decided to attack the US in the hopes it could destroy enough of the US fleet and draw out a naval campaign long enough that the US would eventually agree to more favorable terms. This did not work.
FDR was a product of America's high Protestant elite. Some of its leading individuals were WASP missionaries in China (such as the parents of Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines). FDR sympathized with his missionary peers and with their Chinese friends against the Japanese aggressors.
This led the American elite (e.g., the Democrat FDR and the Republican Luce) to overestimate the nominally Christian Chiang Kai-shek.
I recall reading a Young Adult novel where the main character dropped out of college and took a job on an oil tanker to rescue his parents, who I believe were missionaries in Shanghai. Much of the book is concerned with the morality of selling oil to Japan, and of course the cargo is sabotaged just as the ship reaches China.
I've heard this theory. While Christian missionaries were important in East Asia (although there were Catholics as well) there are more prosaic reasons that I tend to weigh more. America took its treaty obligations to China more seriously than their European counterparts. They were also principled anti-colonialists due to American ideology. There was also a longstanding fear that anyone who conquered China would be able to use it to cross the Pacific and attack the US. This started with a fear of the British but it transferred to the Japanese quite smoothly.
Meanwhile the Christian view of Chiang Kai-shek was actually rather low. They saw him as a corrupt warlord. They had a higher opinion of his wife but didn't think she controlled him. The US supported him because he was the acknowledged and legal government of China and because of anti-communism.
There were good reasons why the Old China Hands were morally prestigious in the U.S., as were the similar WASP Arabists who founded the American University of Beirut.
Watching Steve Kerr coach the U.S. Olympic basketball team today, I was reminded that when I was at UCLA in c. 1982, his father Malcolm Kerr had a really good job as vice-chancellor of UCLA. But in the middle of the Lebanese civil war he resigned his job in lovely Westwood to become president of the American University of Beirut because he felt that was his obligation to his Arabist ancestors who had found AUB.
I remember hearing a couple of things about Japanese flight training problems beyond the oil issue:
-Japan, unlike the US, did not routinely rotate experienced combat pilots back to Japan to serve as instructors. The exceptions, such as Saburo Sakai and Masaaki Shimakawa, were men who were in Japan *anyway* as they'd been sent back for medical reasons.
-The Zero was slower and more lightly armed than Allied fighters, but more manoeuvrable. This was fine at the start of the war with very well-trained, experienced pilots, but when Japan had to shorten its training programs during the war (both because of fuel shortages and because they needed pilots *now* not next year) it was at a disadvantage.
Not sure how true either of these explanations is, but they seem to be widely believed.
The Zero was a very good fighter plane at the start of the War, but was below average by the end. The Japanese had actually developed better fighter planes than the Zero, but they didn't have the resources to produce them in significant numbers. That's why they kept making Zeroes up until the end.
One thing that made the Zero such a good fighter in the beginning was it was made of an advanced aluminum alloy that made it lighter than U.S. fighters.
Overall enjoyed the reviews but I would say that the Google metaphor rings false to me - Google's success is overwhelmingly built off of the interlocking search/ads combo, which is still a majority of revenue even after decades of trying to build up other businesses. Google Search is therefore absolutely still the "killer app" that overwhelmingly explains the company's success.
Amazon is a more complex picture, where two-thirds of revenue comes from shopping but a majority of the actual profit comes from AWS thanks to its better margins.
Apple is relatively diversified, but about half their revenue has come from the iPhone for at least the last ten years. Although clearly other product lines have a lot of significance and they were around for a while before the iPhone existed.
Yeah before the iPhone (and especially before the iPod) Apple really was not doing well at all. I don't think they're a good example for the point OP was trying to make.
I find it funny how the narratives around ww2 keep avoiding the fact of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet union started ww2 with Germany. They were allies until the soviets wanted to take control of the Romanian oil and Germany decided they can't have that. You can literally find on YouTube Hitler talking about it with the Finnish counterpart. (search for Hitler talking in a normal voice)
The lebensraum argument is theoretical in nature and would only have come into play after the war.
"Theoretical in nature"? It's right there in Mein Kampf. Hitler was always intending to go East, France was just an annoying menace he had to take care of first. He tried to make a separate peace with Britain afterwards to concentrate on the Soviet Union, but Churchill wouldn't hear of it.
The Soviets were in the "Axis" - a close and effective ally to Hitler anyway - until "Unternehmen Barbarossa". Why Russians still remember 1941 as the first year of the "great patriotic war".
I stand by Stalin/CCCP was "a close and effective ally to Hitler anyway". While "axis" was first used by Mussolini in regard to Berlin/Germany - Fun fact: the axis did not stay tri-partite long: The Tripartite Pact was signed by Germany, Italy, and Japan on 27 September 1940, in Berlin. The pact was subsequently joined by Hungary (20 November 1940), Romania (23 November 1940), Slovakia (24 November 1940), and Bulgaria (1 March 1941) - as the real intention of Japan was to be reassured against Russia, there was no point to admit the Soviets.
I think the standard narrative is that both Hitler and Stalin were opportunistic and saw an advantage to making deal with an enemy. Hitler planned to attack both west and east, but was practical enough to make temporary deals with either side. Working with the Soviets expanded German influence eastwards and avoided (or delayed) a two-front war while attacking France. Stalin was also planning for an eventual war between the USSR and Germany, but was concerned that he would not get the support of western powers. By working with the Nazis, he was able to expand into the Baltic states and Finland without British or French interference and delay fighting Germany until the UK was involved. This is both the narrative today and the narrative at the time. Consider reading Orwell's review of Mein Kampf for a contemporary perspective. Orwell believed that Hitler was planning to attack east before west, but happened to find the USSR easier to bribe for a delay. Or any of the many political cartoons showing things like this:
In short, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is incorporated in most narratives of WWII. It is simply a brief interruption of open hostility between the two countries while they manipulated the western democracies.
If you think that's a whitewashed narrative, where are you getting the "true" narrative from? Do you have an article or book recommendation that describes your beliefs more in-depth? I'm still a little confused about what you think is being left out.
Stalin was more paranoid than Hitler (as demonstrated by the vast numbers of his own supporters he had shot on the ground that there was a small chance they were plotting against him), while Hitler was a gambler who was skeptical of his supporters but vastly less homicidal toward them (as demonstrated by the remarkable number of assassination attempts he survived).
Hence their opportunism in foreign policy manifested differently. Paranoid Stalin hoped that Hitler would invade France like in 1914, get bogged down, and then the tanned, rested and ready Soviets could eventually, years later, enter the stalemated war and overwhelm exhausted Germany and perhaps France and Britain too.
Optimistic Hitler's opportunism was flavored by his extreme dynamism. After his enormous diplomatic triumph in the fall of 1938 in getting the Sudetenland without a shot fired, he then took Prague in March 1939 because he could, turning Britain and France against him. In contrast, when Stalin took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, it was after three years of ambiguous maneuvering.
Stalin was startled and depressed by how Hitler conquered Paris in 6 weeks in 1940.
Its always funny reading about the Western communists during that period. Here's one example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Trumbo. Dude goes from being an isolationist to being John Bolton, the moment the Germans invade the Soviets. The previous 2 years of war against all of Europe didn't matter to them in the slightest.
Loyal Stalinists in Hollywood had been impressively anti-Hitler and pro-American military build-up until August 23, 1939, then switched to being anti-war (effectively, pro-Hitler), then on June 22, 1941 switched back to being pro-war.
I remember reading that the British government knew about Barbarossa from Enigma intercepts and when the attack came, Churchill rapidly declared his support for the Soviets (commenting famously to an aide "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons") while the British communists were still stuck getting off their anti-war talking points.
Not just Hollywood but practically anyone with a brain and influence in those days. Its astounding how the bureaucracy, sciences, arts, even businesses was thouroughly filled with communists and fellow travellers.
What's this about the Soviets wanting to take control of Romanian oil? They seized Bessarabia from Romania, but they weren't about to invade more of it than Germany had already ceded.
Stalin tended to obey his foreign policy agreements, unlike his domestic political alignments. While he could have his internal rivals shot, he couldn't have foreign Hitler or Churchill shot, so he tended to stick to his foreign policy treaties, or at least subvert them only slowly.
He eventually violated his neutrality pact with Japan. He also tried to blockade West Berlin after agreeing to let the Western Allies have it. But I guess that could be considered "slowly" relative to Hitler.
Right. Stalin followed his 5-year 1941 neutrality pact with Japan for 4 years, then announced the end of it in April 1945 in order to keep his promise to FDR and Churchill at Yalta to attack Japan in Manchuria within 3 months of the end of the war against Germany, which Stalin upheld to the day on August 8, 1945.
You should have linked to the text of the pact and article 3 itself:
"The present Pact comes into force from the day of its ratification by both Contracting Parties and remains valid for five years. In case neither of the Contracting Parties denounces the Pact one year before the expiration of the term, it will be considered automatically prolonged for the next five years."
Denunciation only prevents the prolonging of the pact, not its validity. And the denunciation came on April 5 rather than April 13 (when the pact was signed), because the time limit was for preventing its extension.
100% agree. The Molotov-Ribbentrop friendship pact dividing Eastern Europe between russia and germany has been white-washed and not given enough attention.
I've never run across any reference that took that pact seriously. Not recently, and not from that period of time. It was always seen as tactical maneuvering intended to be discarded when convenient.
Maybe you should read books by better qualified historians - or even wikipedia. The pact was central. And Stalin certainly took it seriously. While Hitler was rubbing his hands.
And the part where the invasions of Finland, part of Poland, Besarabia, the Baltic states by russia and other part of Poland by germany happened exactly as described in the pact didn't give you pause?
The problem Hitler faced was his belief that Stalin was building up the Russian army, and was inevitably going to attack Germany at some point in the mid-future. Better to attack them sooner while they were relatively weak than be attacked later when the Red Army would be stronger. And who knows, Hitler may even have been right.
Very interesting. I'm also a WWII buff and have a few things to add:
1) As the Allied bombing campaign forced the Germans to relocate factories to caves, defects became much more common due to the uncontrolled climates of the caves. Dampness and dust wreaked havoc on machines and on quality control.
2) The American submarine campaign against Japanese shipping was undermined during the first half of the war by defective torpedoes. It's scandalous that such poor weapons were approved for service, and even worse that the Navy's top guys ignored so many complaints from submarine captains that they were nearly useless.
3) I'm skeptical of the claim that carpet bombing was a decisive factor that enabled the Anglo-American breakout from Normandy. The German accounts that I've read depicted Allied airpower as very annoying, but something they could endure by moving around only at night and camouflaging their positions during the day. Generally speaking, the tactical use of attack planes against tanks and troops in the field was not very effective in WWII, and pilots always exaggerated how many targets they hit.
4) I totally agree that the Battle of the Bulge looms larger in the imagination than it should. In reality, the Germans had no hope of winning the War by December 1944, and even had they accomplished the objective, which was capturing the port of Antwerp and inflicting heavy losses on the British and Americans, it would not have led to them giving up. Furthermore, the Germans started falling behind their campaign objectives almost immediately after the Battle started, and they never made up for it.
5) I couldn't agree more about MacArthur. He was a criminally overrated general and he also screwed up in 1950 by ignoring repeated intelligence warnings that China might send troops across the border to help North Korea. His plan to use nuclear weapons against China in response and to spread radioactive waste across North Korea to block enemy troop movements showed how out-of-touch he had become, and Truman was right to fire him.
True, though the Incheon Landing was an operation that the North Koreans should have anticipated given how effective it would be and how obvious the target site was (a port far behind the front lines). By the time the Landing happened, North Korea's army was also badly weakened from combat. Given their inferior numbers and small economy, their only chance to win the war was to quickly conquer the whole peninsula before U.N. troops showed up, and they failed to do that.
I've also read that the Incheon Landing was an amateurish version of the late WWII amphibious landings. The U.N. forces failed to keep it a secret, and North Korean spies simply listening to military guys talking in bars and restaurants in Incheon would have heard about it. The landing operation itself had all kinds of problems due to inexperience and forgotten lessons from WWII, but succeeded anyway because the North Koreans were so unprepared at Incheon.
I don't know the current opinion, but at the time I was there (as a dependent) the Japanese appeared to think highly of MacArthur. Of course, this was just a couple of years before we ended the occupation, which may have something to do with it. Also the people who worked with us were probably more favorably biased towards the US than the average. But wandering around the city and countryside, I didn't feel any hostility. (A bit of humor as how I couldn't speak Japanese, but that was about all.)
So I think MacArthur was an excellent "dictator of Japan". (I'm not so pleased about the way he inspired them to go in for whaling, which they hadn't really be into before.)
This is also well covered in Victor Davis Hanson's "The Second World Wars" which covers the productive capacity dynamic along with the technological and strategic differences between the different sides. Highly recommend Hanson. I'm not sure how unconventional this view is anymore but everything is unconventional for those who have not yet read it, which was all of us at some point :)
Perfect to mention VDH - he's an American conversative who started from the preferred outcome of minimizing Soviet importance and restoring the false American propaganda that he grew up with. And I suspect the same is true of this book.
When I say that (I'm not allowed to say the Ra word here, Scott will ban me) the kind of people who congregate here are selectively naive, this is what I mean - this review has no consideration of the author's motivations because the author's conclusions support the reviewer's priors.
Are the reviewer's priors that you have in mind that the US really won the war?
Or something more abstract, about how the people that congregate here like to believe that the established narratives are wrong (because of irrationality) - and looking at the cold, hard data reveals a wildly different story, the details of which don't matter so much as that they disagree with the established narrative?
The author’s motivations are irrelevant if the evidence he adduces support his argument. The quality of evidence and the chain of inferences from that evidence is what matters. I suspect that you are inclined to be skeptical because, being a communist, you are sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and your priors are that they were the decisive victors.
> The author’s motivations are irrelevant if the evidence he adduces support his argument.
Unless his motivations lead him to leave out or overlook some of the evidence. This would not be obvious simply from reading the conclusions, but require independent review by subject matter experts.
Not that I'm accusing the book author of that. Just saying that "if a work's presented evidence supports the work's conclusions, it's sound research" is not a complete argument.
VDH is conservative, but he is a honest if clearly biased (like all humans) historian, not a mere propagandist. The Soviet manpower importance was huge, but also the Western industrial importance, much of it shipped to the Soviets.
Seems like an extreme case of historical revisionism. Lendlease may have been key in the Soviets being able to turn the tide early on, but by 1944 there was no stopping them rolling over Germany, the question was how quickly. Did the author try to twist the narrative to match his preconceptions? Sure seems like it. I agree that the data dug up to support it are very interesting.
US material support to the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom were critical to both countries' effects on the course of the war. The Soviet Union, in particular, might have collapsed, while the UK would have been rendered impotent, and might have accepted Germany's repeated offers of a generous peace. Would have had to absent US direct involvement.
As I said, Lendlease may have been key, so I think we don't disagree on much. It's the US military campaign in Europe that was useful but not a deciding factor.
It was very important to the geopolitics of the post-war order, though. Which, as far as I've read, was very well understood by the parties at the time.
O'Brien is exceedingly loose in his data analysis. Although there are many interesting observations, I think a closer look at the actual data would likely under'mine' some (or more) of his conclusions. I highlight but one. The flawed conclusion about aerial mining of Japanese ports ... "the aerial mining of Japanese ports... didn’t start until March 1945, but it still sank more tonnage than U.S. submarines did in the entire war." [FALSE]
It's possible that aerial mines may have had a better ROI in achieving the strategic outcome, but earlier in the war it wasn't even an option.
All of which may not change the conclusions of his book, but it does call into question the level of research he employed, and possibly some of the conclusions.
I wondered about that. Economist Robert Kuenne's The Attack Submarine has a very nice operations-research analysis of anti-merchant submarine warfare, where he shows that in the Pacific the U.S. was able to use a strategy of completely eliminating the stock of the Japanese merchant-marine fleet, whereas the German U-Boat campaign in the Atlantic was forced to pursue a flow-reduction strategy to try to starve out Britain and the Western front.
I find this claim: "... Japan was not just a small island power easily subsumed by American production. The Japanese economy, at its peak, produced about as much as the Soviet Union. Its industrial base was mostly untouched until mid-1944. In 1943, it produced as much steel as the Soviet Union. The Japanese navy’s planes doubled between 1943 and 1944." interesting.
I charted out US and Japanese "large" aircraft carrier production a bit back and the differences are staggering.
I had the exact same thought and I'd like to see the thoughts of someone who read the book. The only thing I can think is that Japan had to dedicate a lot of its production to building ships to ship production to and from the home islands.
The Battle of Kursk casualties mentioned only include losses from Operation Citadel (Germany's initial offensive) and not the Russian counteroffensive. Aircraft losses on Germany's side are more than 4x what is quoted here (681 vs 159) when including the entire battle rather than just the first offensive.
The 80% figure seems like a lot, most figures seem to suggest 26% of people who served in the red army in the war died. Even if those born in 1923 were the most likely to die I doubt they were three times more likely to be lost than other red army soldiers and not every man born in 1923 would serve, many would be engineers, farmers, factory workers, exempt etc who would have a higher survival rate.
The USSR had mandatory conscription for all men starting at age 17 since 1939. Nearly all men born in 1923 were in the army/navy/air force when the war started, which was the most disastrous period of the war for the Soviet Union. Given that, 80% sounds quite plausible.
The Soviet Union conducted censuses (censi?) in 1937 and 1959. If the population by age and sex is granular enough and they collected that data then this should be solvable (assuming one trusts the Soviet data ... in this case it is probably okay-ish if they gathered what we want).
I looked it up, it seems to actually be 68% and only about a third were war deaths (https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/was_the_soviet/). Infant mortality was still high in the 1923 USSR and then there was the Holodomor and Great Purge to kill off a bunch of extra people.
I've been wrong before, but I suspect that the 2024 Battle of Kursk will be on a smaller scale than the 1943 Battle of Kursk. Humanity just isn't as serious about war as it used to be.
On the contrary - we now contort ourselves into stupendously weird pretzels in order to avoid serious wars. See all the caveats attached to the weapons shipments to Ukraine.
> People want to believe that individual effort matters
Same thing annoys me about the space program. People love talking about Neil Armstrong and other astronauts. Almost no one talks about the engineers who actually made those flights possible. We can and still do numerous spacecraft launches without humans, proving that astronauts are not at all crucial for space exploration. But the public narrative is focused on individuals to the point where Mark Kelly (commander of the last Space Shuttle launch) almost became a Vice Presidential candidate quite recently.
Individual effort does matter - it's just far, far less than society wants to believe it does. Most accomplishments of any magnitude - and increasingly so in our complex world - are achieved through teams, not individuals. However, different individuals also have different roles to play. Neil Armstrong did put his life on the line more than the engineer with a slide rule did in Houston.
Neil Armstrong is a fine example of The System Working. The feds picked a really good guy with an impressive track record in a number of life or death situations. In the crisis when approaching the moon's rough surface with fuel running low, he made the right decisions.
He returned to Earth and lived out his years in a dignified manner.
He wasn't the greatest man of his age, but he turned out to be the right guy at the right time.
The main sphere where individual effort is significant in impact is in its ability to lead / motivate large groups of others to focus on / support a goal. In the sense that Neil Armstrong motivates the American people to continue to support the space program, and hence help ensure funds from congress continue to flow, his efforts were impactful (and more so than a backroom engineer who individually, rightly or wrongly, is not inspiring much of the US population).
Battles are where the effects of industrial effort are displayed.
There are two kinds of battles:
1. The ones where the underdog force wins (e.g., Midway, where the US had 3 aircraft carriers to the Japanese 4)
2. The ones where the industrial overdog wins (e.g., Stalingrad, Normandy, etc etc). The Allies won on D-Day because they'd assembled a vast mechanized force.
Most WWII victories are of the second kind, but not every victory.
I think this is more because people can empathize with specific people more than they can the faceless masses. It's the same reason why in fiction, everything important is done by a small number of named heroes and villains, regardless of what happens in reality.
Individual effort matters a great deal when looking at the past, because we can see what effect those specific individuals who were important actually had--think of it as bifurcation effects on system performance. It's basically the butterfly effect. And the problem with historical accounts is that looking backward is a lot easier than looking forward. There are approx 8 billion individual humans on the planet, and knowing exactly *which* individual efforts are going to matter in the future is basically impossible.
It was not always like this. Up till 1914 engineers ranked with medical doctors as modern-day heroes. Just read 19th century science fiction. Jules Verne for example.
But then came the Great War . And it turned out engineers were just av good at destroying stuff as when creating stuff.
The graph of destroyed German aircraft doesn't tell me what *percentage* of production was destroyed. The German war production famously peaked in 1944. This was not because the Allied bombing slacked off just then, it was because Hitler was refusing to shift the industry to the war footing. And by that point, they had clearly no way to win the war any more. So colour me skeptical about the bombing impact. Germany lost the war because they didn't seriously prepare for a long war. Hitler kept gambling on quick victories, and the Barbarossa bet is the first one he lost.
I think it's good to have an alternative focus on the WW2 history, but I'm going to be suspicious of any book that revises history so it conforms with the favoured views in the present. This book was published in 2015, right after the present war on Russia started cooking.
Wages of Destruction, which also got a review submitted, digs into the the "war footing" narrative about Germany and is critical of it. To tl;dr what is a very long and thorough book:
-Germany had to gamble repeatedly on quick victories precisely because it was so enormously overmatched economically by the Allies.
-Regardless, it's largely a myth that, for instance, the Germans refused to mobilize women for war industries due to conservative patriarchal values and the like. Rather, a major reason Germany had fewer women than Britain in war industries was because Germany had a significantly larger % of its population still engaged in peasant agriculture.
-Overall, Germany DID go to a war footing, and any slowness in doing so was significantly because it simply lacked the economic strength to pivot faster.
Even taking the resource-centric view, the battles in the East are no less important. If the Soviet Union had collapsed the Germans would have got oil from Baku, other resources and plenty of territory outside of the effective range of the American and British bombers. They would also be able to mess with the middle Eastern oil supply as they would be on the bordersof Iran
The German seizure of Soviet territory early in the war included some oil fields... but the Soviets sabotaged them when it was clear they were about to be lost, so the Germans were still getting much less oil from them than they had been under Molotov-Ribbentrop.
I'm not sure I understand your point. My beef was with the claim "American and British bombing mattered far more to the war’s outcome than the battles of the Eastern Front". If the Germans had been victorious in the east they would have got all the resources, territory and slave manpower and that would likely be quite important for the war effort elsewhere.
The Soviet Union had two major oil-producing region: Baku and Grozny (94% of the total in 1937), out of these two Baku was much bigger even though I can't find the exact %. The Germans did not occupy any of those, they got really close to Grozny in mid-1942 but didn't reach it.
My point is that even if the Germans had gotten further, the larger effect would be to deprive the Soviets of that oil than to give it to the Germans. It would have taken time to repair oil facilities (which would then become a target for Allied bombing), and the Germans had been banking on winning quickly.
This is an important point. People assume that, had the Germans captured the Caucuses region in 1943, they would have "gotten all the oil," making them unstoppable. In reality, the retreating Soviets would have blown up every major oil well and all the refineries. It would have taken many months or longer for the German to fix the damage and start extracting large amounts of oil.
Strategic bombing of german factories didn't had much of an impact before some key battles including the landing in Normandy which punched a huge hole in Luftwaffe's early warning line of coastal radars.
I've been planning to read this book based on other mentions. Sounds fascinating. From this review, a few caveats seem to be indicated:
1. The "center of gravity" of the enemy is not always industrial production. That is precisely because the rate of materiel expenditure at the front may not be high enough to rate-limit their activities, depending on how they conduct warfare and the environment. That would be the case with the NVA and VC in Vietnam, for example. Probably also true for the Taliban.
2. The review seems to be arguing that the USAF's daylight strategic bombing of factories and such using "precision" bombing was actually effective. But much recent scholarship has argued that the Norden bombsight was a propaganda fraud and that the bombs dropped by daylight didn't really go where they were supposed to, nor did they reduce German production very much (although the effects mentioned about less-efficient factories and lower-quality output would matter).
But the "conventional" story is that the Luftwaffe didn't really suffer much until the P-51s came in and shot all the quality German fighter pilots out of the sky, at which point the inability to train new ones (partly due to fuel shortages, but also the dearth of living experienced pilots) caused the death spiral. Ditto for Japanese naval aviation, which supposedly did not rotate experienced pilots back to train new ones, instead keeping the same people who bombed Pearl Harbor together all the way through the Battle of Midway. That made for an uber-competent air wing at Midway--note the ability of the Hiryu's outnumbered force to take out the Yorktown once they had it located--but once those pilots were gone, so was the future prospect of developing quality naval aviators under wartime conditions.
3. The land fighting on the Eastern Front was crucial because control of the people, not the equipment or natural resources, was crucial. Stalin would lose if the people of the affected territories stopped following his commands and started following Hitler's. That's why all the behind-the-lines atrocities were pursued so expensively by both sides--that was the go-to method for those regimes to establish legitimacy, via fear. If you control the people who live in a territory, you control the resources and whatever capital might be there.
"(although the effects mentioned about less-efficient factories and lower-quality output would matter)."
Yes, that's really the crux of the book, as I understood it. Everyone agrees that the Norden bombsight was a disappointment, but it's not like the bombs just disappeared. The conventional argument is that they did very little, at least until late in the war, because they were so inaccurate. The book argues that they did *enough*, forcing the Germans to focus on air defense, that it effectively removed more of their arms production than any land battle. It's complicated because the Germans were steadily ramping up their war production as the war went on (see the Wages of Destruction review), so you have to think about counterfactuals rather than simple production numbers.
The argument that the industrial fundamentals are a better way of understanding WWII than the ebb and flow of individual battles is generally correct. It's been a pretty popular view since Adam Tooze published The Wages of Destruction, although personally I found Tooze's book almost unreadable. For people who are interested in this angle, I'd also recommend:
Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (If this is the part you're interested in, you can skip ahead to Speer's appointment as Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, and gloss past the Nazi party intrigues)
Michael Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War
Alan Milward, The German Economy at War
My only minor disagreement with this review's claims is that it somewhat overstates the impact of air power on destroying armies in the field. The impact of bombing on production and logistics, however, was immense. The main way that Allied bombing won the Battle of the Bulge (which was indeed a completely doomed attack launched after the point when a sane leader of Germany would have surrendered) was by denying supplies of fuel to German vehicles, both by knocking out railroads and supply convoys moving supplies to the front, and by crippling Nazi oil production.
for those looking for this type of content in a more podcasty format, i would also heavily recommend OSINT military procurement analyst Perun, who makes youtube versions of his powerpoints that have been frankly phenomenal since the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict
he mostly focuses on contemporary conflict, but he did a fantastic analysis of the effect of strategic bombing versus tactical bombing on axis industrial output during ww2, in the context of trying to predict the consequences of strategic bombing in the ukraine conflict https://youtu.be/CE6RINU8JLg?si=9Skfca_0NPOe5T9j
...huh. I don't think I actually know what you're talking about? The only time I can remember him making a joke was in the video on corruption, where he named the private in the example 'private kleptovich' or something like that
And I mean, that's barely even a joke
But maybe I just don't remember them because they landed for me
Good read, but I don't know if the thesis of this book is quite as revisionist as the author seems to think. The role of industrial production was something very much on the minds of the war's participants as it was going on. This was a lesson they'd all taken from the Great War, with the importance of railroads for moving people and stuff around, the shells per square meter of front calculations each army was doing prior to launching an offensive, and the eventual success of Britain's naval blockade leading to a collapse on Germany's home front.
I don't know if I agree with the idea of battles being unimportant, either. If you think of soldiers as human capital, eighteen years in the making, you have to consider them important targets if for no other reason than to degrade the enemy's capability to defend its other, non-human capital. You also have to consider the effects on morale when heavy losses occur. Eg, consider the Russian Empire's losses in the first World War, and how they helped hasten the collapse of the provisional government. Democracies, in particular, are pretty sensitive about suffering heavy casualties. That's been true since ancient Greece at least.
Side note: Stephen Kotkin I recall once made the argument that the Nazi's best hope for defeating the Soviet Union lay in taking Moscow and in so doing killing or capturing the Soviet leadership, because the Soviet government had invested so much power in so few people that to decapitate it would have created a power vacuum so large that it likely would have crippled the Soviet war effort. I take that as a plausible argument in favor of the idea that at least in some times and places, individuals still matter.
> Good read, but I don't know if the thesis of this book is quite as revisionist as the author seems to think.
It reminds me of when I read "Lies My Teacher Told Me", which spent the whole book beating up on some textbooks from the 70s that didn't resemble anything I learned in school.
Sure, everyone knew that industrial production mattered. That was rather obvious, at least since WW1.
I think modern historians have struggled to square a few seemingly-contradictory facts:
-The USSR and Nazi Germany had by far the largest armies and did most of the actual killing.
-Both of those countries had rather rinky-dink economies, much smaller than the USA or even the UK. They were still relying on horses to run their farms.
-The USA, despite their massive industrial advantage, could do little to directly affect the war in Europe except strategic bombing
-Despite all the carpet bombing, Axis industrial production didn't fall apart, but instead *increased* as the war went on, leading many to wonder whether all that bombing was really worth the effort, or whether it was largely just an expensive sideshow to the "real war" on the eastern front.
The thesis of this book, as I understand it, is that yes, all that bombing really *was* worth it. It cost them heavily in lost resources, which led directly to them being outmatched on the eastern front. In terms of money, they spent a lot more fighting the air and sea war than they did on land.
Overall I'd say this book had a bit of a "back to the 1950s" feel, arguing for the old-fashioned view of the war that it was the Western allies who really won it, as opposed to the post-cold war, David Glantz et al view that it was the USSR who really won it.
"-Despite all the carpet bombing, Axis industrial production didn't fall apart, but instead *increased* as the war went on, leading many to wonder whether all that bombing was really worth the effort, or whether it was largely just an expensive sideshow to the "real war" on the eastern front."
German industrial production increased due to their massive use of slave labor and to rationalization and simplification of most of their weapons. Albert Speer was directly responsible for both measures. He was a cold, amoral genius if there ever was one.
You should read "Wages of Destruction," or at least the forthcoming review. It really takes down the myth of Albert Speer being some kind of genius, or that slave labor was some amazingly efficient source of industrial production. It argues instead that they simply invested heavily in factories and resource production at the start of the war, but it took time for those factories to come online.
It has been my understanding for a while now that those bullet points were common knowledge. Some of that was in my middle school history classes. Is that not the majority understanding on WWII history?
the argument that western bombing mattered more than the battles on the eastern front (which accounted for 80% of german casulties!) is certainly pretty out there
I think it's pretty manifestly an interaction. The performance of the German army against the Russians was probably impacted by Allied bombing. The effect of the Allied bombing probably mattered more the better the Red Army did.
Air power by itself can't win wars, it takes an army occupying the enemy's territory to do that and that requires winning battles. An army with air superiority has a much easier time winning those battles.
yeah- it's worth bearing mind the *dramatic* turnaround in the performance of the Axis against the USSR from Barbarossa to Kursk. The soviets started the war disastrously, losing something like 4 million against 1 million, as well as a huge chunk of territory. But 1 year later, they were able to not only hold the line, but also counterattack, and lose "only" 2 million against 1 million. It's not normal for an army to suddenly increase its quality that much while all its most experienced soldiers are getting killed off. It seems plausable to me that a lot of that turnaround was due to the Axis being bombed to hell, suffering a huge drop in the quantity and quality of their material.
> the United States all devoted between 65 and 80 percent of their economic output to the making and arming of aircraft, naval vessels, and anti-aircraft equipment.
This seems impossible to me. This doesn't include all other military-related expenditures like tanks, which means that total military spending was even higher. This would leave less than 1/5 of GDP for all other uses, like civilian consumption. Prior to the war, government spending was around 10% of GDP, so this would imply something along the lines of a 4x drop in individual spending. Based on https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2018/08/14/todays-graph-us-real-gdp-per-capita/ and its underlying source (https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/usgdp/) it seems like this must have knocked living standards back to around 1900 or earlier.
https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_usxrecxspendxgdp.htm indicates that total US government spending peaked at about 42% of GDP. Maybe this statistic is true for Germany and Japan near the end of the war but I strongly doubt it was ever true for the US.
This is a nice review, and the book sounds interesting. I'm somewhat baffled, though, that the only statistics mentioned deal with industrial production. At least as important was manpower - Germany and Japan quickly ran out of manpower reserves to replace losses. Roughly one-third of German combat forces in Normandy in June 1944 were "ost" battalions - troops recruited from occupied territories in Poland, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, or other non-German lands, because Germany was at the limits of manpower. They even tried unsuccessfully to recruit American and British soldiers from POW camps. This also seriously affected the ability of the Luftwaffe to continue operating. Germany also made very questionable allocations of its available manpower, for instance keeping roughly 300,000 soldiers in Norway through the end of the war, where they served no purpose other than to protect rail shipment of Swedish iron ore to Narvik. The manpower limitations forced Germany to rely on slave labor (non-Germans) to man the factories; these workers were less trained than the Germans they replaced, had short working lives due to malnutrition and abuse, and were sometimes looking for opportunities to sabotage the production.
Japan's manpower situation was not as stark - they were able to recruit new soldiers through the end of the war, but they didn't have the time to train pilots, which meant their army and naval air forces became ineffective even though thousands of planes were available.
Another critical weakness, hinted at in your review, was logistics. The Germans never planned for a logistical effort to support their territorial ambitions. They famously dispatched the Army into the Soviet Union without even planning for winter clothing. They made no real effort to extend rail transportation into captured territory in the Soviet Union, which meant the huge forces deployed were chronically short of food, ammunition, fuel, and spare parts. They had grandiose ambitions to drive through the Caucasus, across Persia, and meet up with the Japanese in India, but they had nothing resembling a logistical organization that could support even the opening phases of this concept. The Allied air offensive's (eventual) focus on oil supplies exacerbated the Germans' logistical problems, but the Germans did plenty of damage to their own cause through their single-minded focus on winning battles on the battlefield.
Likewise, the Japanese were woefully unprepared to logistically support their far-flung operations. Units dispatched to China, New Guinea, and Pacific islands were blithely told to obtain "local subsistence", which meant stealing food from the civilian population. In most areas, there wasn't enough food production to support the Japanese, even if the population had been willing, and Japanese brutality killed any chance of real cooperation. Food shortages led to cannibalism in many cases. The American submarine campaign obviously exacerbated this problem, but the Japanese were grossly unprepared to support the operations they started.
In the end, the Germans and Japanese were greatly outmatched in industrial output, but the real limiting factors in their ability to wage war were manpower and logistics. Air and naval power fed into the logistical problems, but lack of Axis capability came from poor preparation.
> They made no real effort to extend rail transportation into captured territory in the Soviet Union
That's not what I heard. My understanding is that a different railroad gauge was used in Germany vs the USSR so the Germans had to build new tracks, and replace ones that partisans would damage. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/02/23/gauge-transformation/
That claim doesn't make sense on its face. The Eastern Front was operating around 2,000 km away from Germany at certain points. Without a rail network the Germans wouldn't have been there at all. They certainly weren't going to transport their supplies by driving that far, and only a minority of their forces were even mechanized. Operation Barbarossa was wildly unrealistic for a number of reasons, but "supply the army 2,000 km away with mostly horses" wasn't one of them.
I didn't claim that the Germans made no use of railroads in Soviet territory. I said they made "no real effort to extend rail transportation." As TGGP said, the Soviets used a different rail gauge than Germany, so it would have taken significant effort to extend the rail network. Some of this was done, but not nearly enough to support forces operating 2000 km from German territory. The German military didn't even set up organizations to run the railroads in Soviet territory until March 1941, 3 months before the start of Barbarossa, but only 2 months before the scheduled start.
https://www.hgwdavie.com/blog/2018/3/9/the-influence-of-railways-on-military-operations-in-the-russo-german-war-19411945. In 1941, the armies quickly ran beyond the range the trains could support. But, the railroad units supporting the armies didn't have the manpower or equipment to replace, repair, and maintain signals, telecommunications, and rail depots. They did not plan on sufficient facilities, equipment, or manpower to unload trains to support the armies. They could not keep trains operating through the winter. The linked article has lots more detail, but the overall point is: the Germans put little thought and effort into supporting large-scale operations over the distances that would be required in the Soviet campaign.
By contrast, US planning for the invasion of France included stockpiling locomotives and cars, prepared for European rail gauges, and deploying them to liberated territory, with railroad battalions to operate them and engineer units to repair damaged and destroyed rails, bridges, and marshalling yards.
When German forces approached Baku, they were a long way from usable railroads. In some cases, fuel supplies were delivered to front-line units by camels.
The blog post identifies as an article published in "Journal of Slavic Military Studies", April 2017. It includes 87 footnotes. Do you deny any of the specific points I made relative to the Germans' preparations and operations?
"The underlying problem was clearly identified by General Halder on 3 August 1941 as being the Eisenbahntruppen conflict of interest, between building low-capacity lines quickly behind the advancing armies or building high-capacity lines capable of supporting Generalquartiermeister Wagner in his objective of building up a Supply District behind each Heerengruppe. The Eisenbahnpioniere had been rapidly changing the gauge and undertaking basic repairs of bridges but were not repairing signaling or telephone communications or restoring the engine depots because they were focused on keeping within seven days of the advancing armies. These tasks were being left to the FED and the HBD, who did not possess sufficient equipment to build this infrastructure nor an organizational structure to manage the work. [...] With the distance from Terespol on the Polish border to Moscow being 1,070 km, there was sufficient Standard gauge track converted to support the advance using German railway stock."
So it seems they were extending rail infrastructure onto captured territory, but didn't invest enough in that effort to use it very effectively.
The passage you quote refers to summer of 1941 - the first few months of Barbarossa. I think it's a mistake to think of infrastructure as only re-gauged rail. The rail wasn't much use without telecommunications to control it, signaling facilities, engine sheds, and depots for loading/unloading. The real weaknesses showed up in the winter, and on into 1942.
For all their vaunted organizational excellence, the German military leadership focused on training and equipping units to win battles on the battlefield. In keeping with the Prussian tradition, strategy was left to the political leadership (this is why so many of the top military leadership were unprepared to be accused of war crimes for participating in aggressive war). There were logistics staff officers, but they didn't take nearly as broad a view as their American and British counterparts.
Since the time of Frederick the Great, the Prussian military had focused on winning decisive battles quickly by destroying the enemy army with minimal casualties. They did not focus on long-term operations because they aimed for a quick and favorable settlement. You'd think that World War I would have been enough to get them to expand their focus, but you'd be wrong.
I'm pretty sure Albert Speer said in "Inside the Third Reich" that he proposed to Hitler in late 1941 that the construction workers who were building the grand monuments and buildings in Berlin be temporarily sent to the USSR to work on the railroads. Hitler rejected the idea because he didn't want his megalomaniacal building projects to be paused and because sending the men away would have signaled to the German people that his promise of a quick victory in the East was false.
There seems to be a huge gap in the argument. It treats armies as if they were made out of tanks.
But how about -- people? Infantry? Manpower?
The review states:
"Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom (including the British Empire), and the United States all devoted between 65 and 80 percent of their economic output to the making and arming of aircraft, naval vessels, and anti-aircraft equipment."
But how is that economic output calculated? I suspect that the time spent by a worker in a factory gets counted, but the time spent by a soldier on the front does not get counted. Isn't that a paradox?
"during the war, the Germans had 2.33 million workers building aircraft"
which is a lot less than the total number of Germans who were sent to fight on the front over the course of the war, which suggests that the ground war was a priority over the air war.
From Wikipedia: "the total number of soldiers who served in the Wehrmacht during its existence from 1935 to 1945 is believed to have approached 18.2 million".
Surely all those millions must have been considered a powerful weapon on the frontline, or else they would have been kept at home building planes!
And if the soldiers themselves were a big and powerful part of the German forces, that is a problem for the argument summarized in the review, which considers the impact of battles versus aerial campaigns only on things like the amount of tanks or planes, ignoring soldiers.
Bombing infrastructures may have diminished the production of German tanks and planes, but surely didn't do much to diminish the number of German soldiers.
Men are needed to fight large-scale conventional war, but so is materiel. If a country runs low on either one, they fight poorly. So if the Allies had a way to make the Axis run low on materiel, we need not address the question of making them run low on men. (the answer to the latter question is horrible btw. It's nukes.)
Obviously materiel matters, but if you're trying to figure out which one is more important between battle and strategic bombardment, then it's "dishonest", or a least a mistake, to take into account materiel and ignore infantry.
Using the same method, you could say that only battles matter, strategic bombardment doesn't matter, because only battles can take out soldiers.
It always depends on the circumstances. The whole advantage of the island-hopping strategy in the Pacific was that the Japanese infantry on most of the islands was literally irrelevant without a fleet. You could safely let them starve without supplies while you skipped past them, only taking the islands you needed to serve as strategic bases.
Appreciate the perspective, but I thought the idea that WW2 was ultimately decided by resources, production, and logistics (and to some extent military technology) was completely accepted. The idea that there is a "conventional narrative" that focuses on battles is just wrong. A lot of popular fiction / popular history focuses on battles because they're fun and sexy (so to speak), and logistics is super nerdy and boring.
For example, Churchill identified the Battle of the Atlantic as the most important part of the war, both during it and not long after it ended.
Battles were important in allowing control over strategic points, supply routes, etc, not for the specific casualties that each one inflicted. I think that's the conventional understanding.
US campaigns against Japanese shipping are well understood at this point (though not so well in the postwar scholarship due to security restrictions on research). O'Brien's view of the relative value of the Allied strategic campaign to the resource balance is different from conventional understanding.
The challenge I have with a pure logistics based view of warfare is there is no accounting for a people's willingness to fight, kill, and endure casualties. I don't think it's controversial to state that a leading cause for WW2 was that Germans didn't feel like they lost WW1 but that they felt betrayed. Japan was motivated by the way of the samurai, a belief that fanatical devotion to the Emperor and war was the highest honor in society. As a thought experiment, if the Allies had a neutron bomb that disarmed every piece of enemy tech but left them all alive, would a people with these ideologies have stopped fighting? Would the war have ended on the spot? Assuming it ended, would those ideologies have persisted after the war (remember, Japan was doing charges with swords against machine guns)? Or would it persist with the belief they just needed a neutron bomb to accomplish their goals? In terms of casualties, they were very willing to endure massive casualties and continue fighting, even with technology that could not compare. I want to draw a parallel to Vietnam, but of course they did have extensive logistics flowing in. I expect the confidence of logistics, ability to defend yourself and pursue your aggression, and confidence in the national ideology are all deeply intertwined and correlated to a degree that may be difficult to stop. I am hesitant to say that casualties alone broke these ideologies, but maybe it's best to leave it at: breaking the Axis' ability to continue fighting won the war, breaking the Axis' ideology won the peace after.
> if the Allies had a neutron bomb that disarmed every piece of enemy tech but left them all alive
Sorry, I can't help but note that this is the exact opposite of what a blast of neutrons would do.
Fighting a conventional war isn't possible without heavy weapons. Try to fight conventionally with only small arms and you'll be largely annihilated. With light weapons you can do guerrilla warfare, but... that doesn't usually work outside home turf? As in, guerrilla Nazis could have theoretically been a massive headache for the Allied forces in Germany, but they wouldn't have stopped Allied tanks from rolling in, and they wouldn't be able to retake France, Poland, Ukraine, etc. Modern example: Taliban/Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Yeah, the neutron bomb that only disarms tech is a sci-fi plot device that I'm referencing, not an actual bomb.
RE: heavy weapons, yes, that's my point. It's no longer a conventional war, but the desire to fight remains. Taliban controls Afghanistan right now because they wanted to keep fighting long after the US did. Their logistics were extremely simple and didn't require building any large scale vehicles. They simply never stopped being willing to kill and die for their cause, so the war never really ended despite the lack of battles or factory building.
I think you may be homogenizing both countries to an unhelpful degree. IIRC at the height of their power the Nazi party had maybe 8-10 million members, out of a total population of ~80 million Germans[1]. The largest number of votes they ever got in the Weimar era was slightly under 14 million, 37% of the total. So even if we assume that every single member was a zealous believer in Aryan Greatness and fully believed in the Stab in the Back theory (as opposed to being a party member for opportunistic reasons), and everybody who ever cast a vote for them was at least somewhat on board, that still lives tens of millions of Germans who weren't ideologically behind the NSDAP.
Now there's room for Germans to feel aggrieved by the outcome of WWI without buying into wacky Nazi race "science" or whatever, so one could argue that most of them were spoiling for a fight regardless, but they were probably not ride-or-die fanatics. And the waters are muddied considerably by what the NSDAP did with their political and technological power once they had it. The first victims of the Nazis were other Germans[2], in many cases *other Nazis.* Given the ideological diversity of the Weimar era, it seems pretty certain that a large number of Germans fell in line behind the Reich as much for reasons of self-preservation as for any fanatical desire to revenge the insults of WWI. And of course, the Nazis had 6 years before the war, and another 6 during the war in which to use their control of the information climate to propagandize: one presumes at least some Germans bought more heavily into the war than they otherwise would have thanks to Nazi messaging warping their views of reality.
What does this have to do with the view of the war as being based on economics, logistics and tech? Well, those things aren't just good for winning battles, they're also important factors in maintaining political control over the civilian population. In your techbane-bomb hypothetical, Germany would indeed have stopped fighting immediately because Germany would have stopped EXISTING immediately. There would have been land, the land would have had people in it, but they collectively would not have been Germany. As a nation it was tied together by road and rail, boat and plane, radio and telegraph, TV broadcast and broadsheet. The Nazi systems of control were inextricably intertwined with the technology and economics of the early 20th century: take those away and Germany can't act as a unified political entity anymore[3]. Realistically they can't even feed themselves, as modern populations require modern agriculture and transport infrastructure to support. They certainly can't do anything as complex and coordinated as waging war.
Even if you downgrade your bomb and stipulate that it only impacts weapons specifically, that it leaves all the communication and transportation and necessary economic production and food supply intact, I still don't think the Reich keeps fighting, or even existing. Certainly there'd be some number of die-hard Nazis willing to charge Allied positions with nothing but Säbel und Dolche, though probably less than you think. But all those *other* Germans? The ones who weren't totally gung-ho for the war effort, the people only working and/or fighting for the Reich because their neighbours were, and because of the very real possibility of being shot if they don't? Those people experience a *dramatic* change to their personal calculus. You've simultaneously made declining to fight a bit safer (the Nazis have no guns) and fighting near suicidal. Standing up to the Reich becomes easier, standing up to literally anyone outside of Germany becomes harder. This gets even more stark when you remember that the Nazis were also using actual slave labour. I think even if the allies just drop the bomb and hold defensive positions at the current front lines, there's a very good chance the Reich would have disintegrated all on its own at that point.
I've talked all about Germany here because I know less about Japan, but I gather that "not getting shot" was a motivator for at least some fraction of the Japanese labour force and soldiery as well, and that they also used slave labour. But ultimately, I don't care to guess whether the Japan would have retained more will to fight than Germany in similar situation.
Elsewhere in the comments somebody linked to the ACOUP blog entry on Strategic Airpower. The author blogs on many history-related topics, but there's a strong emphasis on military history. At various points he talks in quite a bit of detail about how different armies are constituted and what principles they use to keep their soldiers actually fighting: it varies A LOT from army to army. I wish I could link a specific post, but I don't remember for sure where it is, and it might be somewhat scattered around. I think it's discussed at various points in the Helm's Deep series, but maybe also somewhat in the Universal Warrior series, where he's getting into different notions of courage. It's certainly an interesting topic.
[1] Of which, to be fair, many were not eligible for membership even if they had wanted it.
[2] Or at least other people living within the borders of pre-war Germany.
[3] Of course it's possible to build a nation--even a Germany sized nation--on a simpler technological basis than that. But it requires very different systems of social and political control, which aren't going to spring into place the moment your techbane bomb goes off. The predictable result is just...complete collapse.
> O’Brien goes to great lengths to illustrate that Japan was not just a small island power easily subsumed by American production. The Japanese economy, at its peak, produced about as much as the Soviet Union
This seems like a weird claim. The US was already clearly the economic hegemon, with double or more the GDP of anyone else. Even a large island nation was easily subsumed by American production!
"Double or more the GDP", does not mean everyone else is "easily subsumed". Especially if they're on the far side of an ocean. O'Brien may be right that if it had just been a matter of both sides building ships and planes and training pilots as fast as they could unimpeded, Japan might have held out long enough to force a negotiated settlement(*). But US attacks were designed to cut in to Japanese production, and even more so pilot training, in ways that Japan could not reciprocate.
* Or wound up eating way more than two atom bombs, of course.
My point is that saying "they were as big as the Soviet Union!" (which I think is an exaggeration / using some pretty heavy rounding) is not very meaningful when the important comparison point is the United States.
Well, the Red Army was pretty good at tying down and destroying a crucial non-renewable resource that the Third Reich had and that is not mentioned here: German men of fighting age.
Yes, every history and diary of the war I’ve read brings up the old men and boys filling out the German ranks by 1944.
This might also be relevant to the Philippines campaign mentioned in the article- taking out a few hundred thousand Japanese troops was important in itself, not just a side-show for the air-sea campaign towards Japan.
Possibly. Maintaining a fleet large enough to blockade the Philippines would have been a significant use of resources, though not necessarily more than the invasion. If the blockade slipped, the army might have been evacuated to southern China, if they could muster transport. As Nimitz had planned an attack on Formosa instead of the Philippines, this would have been tricky at best, but enemy airbases in the Philippines would have complicated the Nimitz plan.
The local population and American remnants would not have fared well under continued occupation, famine, and guerrilla warfare, though again this has to be contrasted with their fate during a grueling military campaign which leveled cities. MacArthur seems to have anticipated a faster collapse of opposition.
I wonder if the author (and the other WWII buffs here) have read The Second World War, by Antony Beevor, and what they think of it in contrast to the reviewed book. It also took an economic perspective on WWII, and I found it fascinating. It was also released a few years earlier and may be the more known book.
I feel like we must distinguish between "forced errors," and unforced errors, when evaluating strategic effects. Eg:
Yes, strategic bombing caused the destruction of Germany's best factories and forced them into inefficient small underground factories. That was a direct, forced result, which caused much more damage than any individual battle.
On the other hand: germany investing so much into the V2 was an unforced error. It was a pure psychological error, much like Japan's overreaction to the Doolittle raid (or America's reaction to 9/11...). This book showed that Germany invested a massive amount into their air force, much more than their army, and got little return from it. Even late in the war, they continued investing in a fantasy of a strategic bomber that could bomb America or the deep Russian factories.
We tend to think of the USSR as this industrial juggernaut because they built the most tanks. But they weren't, they were far behind the world powers in tital economy. They were just the one that actually focused entirely on the army, while the others invested disproportionately in air and sea. The book had some interesting graphs to that effect, which I wish this review could have included.
To me, this book did a lot to dissuade me from the old "historical materialistic, allied victory was inevitable" way of thinking. If the Allies had stopped the bombing program, or if they had continued to bomb cities instead of factories, or if the Germans had given up trying to build their own air force and just built tanks, the war would have looked very different.
> or if the Germans had given up trying to build their own air force and just built tanks
I'm not so sure. Germany primarily relied on gas-to-oil conversion plants for their petrol, as the Allied naval supremacy drastically reduced their ability to import petrol. Controlling the Caucasian oil fields was one of the primary aims of the invasion of the USSR, to expand the petrol supply. The synthetic petrol plants were large targets for air raids; they had to be built at that scale for operations to be economically feasible. Building a horde of tanks isn't very useful when the petrol supply is being bombed into rubble because you don't have an air force.
It's a complex issue, more complicated than I feel like getting into in a comment. But broadly:
-Germany always knew that oil would be an issue. They stockpiled oil in advance of the war, importing it from... the USSR and USA (oops). They had enough for a quick war, like the invasion of France and the initial push into the USSR. But after 1941 their stockpile had mostly run out, and they were relying on the thin trickle they could produce from synthetic oil and romanian fields. This greatly limited any kind of large offensive maneuvers, but was enough to keep them going for static defensive attritional warfare.
-I know I said "tanks," but I meant it as a shorthand for all sorts of army material. Towed artillery, antitank guns, machine guns, flak cannons, etc. Much of that could be moved by railway or horses with very little oil used, especially on the defense. We should note how *odd* it is that the USSR was able to outproduce them so drastically in army material despite starting with a lower level of industrial production, especially when they themselves were having to relocate and rebuild their factories.
Sorry, but I don't understand what you mean with this comment. Tougher technologically to build? Tougher to destroy? More expensive?
The aircraft of the time were massively more expensive to build than tanks, especially the heavy bombers. The B-29 in particular was a huge expense, much more expensive than the Manhattan project for example. Of course you can't directly compare tanks to planes 1:1 (eg you can't take a highly trained aerospace engineer and convert him into 10 tank factory workers), but there were some resource tradeoffs there.
That's a myth, or at least heavily exaggerated. The US sent lend-lease mostly to the UK ($30 billion vs $10 billion to the USSR), and what they did send came mostly in 1943 and later. It made up a relatively small amount of the USSR economy, something like 5%. It did aid greatly in certain categories like trucks and aviation fuel, but "providing their logistics for free" is just a myth the US says to make themselves feel more important.
Do you have a source? I'm inclined to believe McMeekin et al on this, and he's very much of the "U.S. Lend Lease was vitally important and basically saved the USSR" school.
"Lend-lease supplied the USSR with 1.9% of all artillery, 7% of all tanks, 13% of all aircraft, 5.4% of transport in 1943, 19% transport in 1944 and 32.8% in 1945. Lend-lease deliveries amounted to 4% of Russia’s wartime production."
You could of course argue over what exactly it means to be "vitally important." Perhaps that extra 4% was just enough to tip the balance, or perhaps it supplied some critical gaps that the USSR was incapable of producing (most notably 57% of aviation fuel). But it simply wasn't the overwhelming flood of material the way that Americans perhaps like to think it was. Also note that battles of Stalingrad and Kursk happened in 1942 and 1943, respectively, so shipping in aid in 1944 and 1945 was very unlikely to have "won the war."
It seems to me that as important and underestimated air and sea power might have been, in the end they still needed land power to actually capture and occupy the enemy territory whose industrial capabilities they were degrading. If we just imagine a counterfactual where only air and sea power were used, then as degraded as German and Japanese industrial capacity might have become, their empires wouldn't have been defeated if there were no boots to walk in and take the land. So some relative level of land power is still needed, and it seems worthwhile noting just how disproportionately it was supplied by the Soviets on the eastern front, even while the western front was supplying most of the air and sea based attacks. So I think some level of hedging the claim of the ultimate importance of air and sea power relative to land power is needed.
The USSR was supplying lots of manpower and taking lots of casualties, but part of that is how inefficiently they used said manpower. They consistently took higher casualties than the Germans both on the strategic defensive (when Germany was taking their territory) and offensive (when they were taking it back). Better equipped allied divisions were more effective than comparable numbers of Soviets against Axis forces: https://youtu.be/BnIv7S_q57Q?t=713
On the flip side, comparing late war offensives, Operation Bagration's deep penetration offensive looks more efficient as far as ending the war goes than Market Garden in the West, even had the drive into Holland been successful. A lot of books I've read come down hard on Montgomery in particular as inefficient as a commander. The overall losses per time might be less than the Soviets, but if you're not making any progress, the end result isn't any better.
The books I've read suggest Bagration as something of an outlier as far as Soviet strategic efficiency goes, though. On the other hand, you can't blame them for going back to brute force when it comes to taking Berlin when that's a definitive end point for the war in Europe.
I usually hear Bagration compared to Overlord, since the former took place just two weeks after the latter. Bagration also covered a wider area of the front compared to the relatively narrow one pursued by Montgomery, and Eisenhower never came around to his narrow-front strategy to quickly win the war either.
Overlord, as an amphibious invasion, is hard to compare to as far as offensives go. Relevant to the discussion, though, is that the real triumph of the invasion was the ability to bypass the need to capture a harbor by bringing two Mulberry harbors with them.
Market Garden isn't the only place where the Western Allies bogged down with a narrow or shallow offensive; the fighting around Caen after Overlord and the prolonged amount of time it took to bypass Monte Cassino (including the effectively failed Anzio landings) show similar issues.
You go to war with the army you have. The Soviets were always going to take more casualties than the Germans due to the poorer training and leadership (the fault of Soviet pre-war planning and governance, mind you, but not necessarily the fault of their command at the time). Yes, there was some stupidity and some ruthless indifference to losses there, but Bagration and the encirclement of Stalingrad show that they could be quite effective when given the chance.
"Airpower [..] compelled the Germans to waste tremendous resources on [..] exorbitant, ultimately ineffective vengeance weapons."
Only under the assumption that terror-bombing civilians is an effective strategy. The correct conclusion is that such emotionally driven strategies are doomed to fail. If you're going to call a weapon literally "vengeance weapon", you have to wonder how much rational calculation really went into its development and deployment.
Even the United States Strategic Bombing Survey conceded that bombing German civilians was ineffective as a morale weapon. While they conveniently credited the German police state repression for that, Londoners during the Blitz showed that neither side's civilians much blamed their own government for the hardships and destruction brought upon them by the respective enemy, and hardened resolve to win the war.
> The amount of concrete devoted just to protecting Hitler personally from air attack was almost a third of the entire total for fortifications on the Eastern Front.
This appears to be a very important point to the author, as it's been bolded in the review. But what does that really mean in context? The tremendous amount of concrete and steel that went into the Atlantic Wall made military sense, as France had been fully occupied and the Atlantic coast was a natural border and obvious point of attack for the Allies. But the Eastern Front was vast and far from decided, so what was there to even fortify? Drawing some arbitrary line across Russia and digging in with lots of concrete bunkers would have been the opposite of the German goals in the East.
So yes, Hitler's personal safety requiring a third of Eastern Front concrete is a curious factoid, but tells me nothing in what way that was a bad decision. Was it too much concrete for Hitler's safety, again testifying to his emotional strategies? Or was it too little for the Eastern Front? Could be both, could be neither.
Germany may have planned on always being on the offensive rather than defensive on the eastern front, but they would up having to play defense, so fortifying an area like Sevastopol was necessary.
It's not about whether Hitler needed this much concrete to protect him. The point is that strategic bombing not only destroyed the best factories, but also caused a huge fraction of remaining resources to be redirected from efficient production to reducing further losses.
""Airpower [..] compelled the Germans to waste tremendous resources on [..] exorbitant, ultimately ineffective vengeance weapons."
Only under the assumption that terror-bombing civilians is an effective strategy. The correct conclusion is that such emotionally driven strategies are doomed to fail. If you're going to call a weapon literally "vengeance weapon", you have to wonder how much rational calculation really went into its development and deployment. "
I assume that Hitler feared to lose too much public support if he didn't come up with anything about the bombings, efficient or not.
"Launched primarily against UK cities, the V-2s killed several thousand civilians"
Not that it matters much, but my recollection is that about half of the V-2s were launched against the port of Antwerp, which made somewhat more sense. But they weren't accurate enough to do much damage to the actual port facilities.
I haven't read this one yet, though I've followed O'Brien's work for years and he's usually pretty good. I should appreciate this book, because the role of logistics and industrial capacity in war is usually underrated. But I don't need this book, because I already know that and having better statistics about old history is of only marginal value to me. Maybe it will be helpful to others.
I do have some criticisms, at least of O'Brien as interpreted by Finalist #8.
Most notably, "Does the occupation or non-occupation of that point on the map affect the ability of a combatant to keep fighting? In some limited cases, yes."
Those "limited cases", if we're limiting it just to World War II, would seem to be Poland, Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Yugoslavia, the Phillipines, Indonesia, New Guinea, Malaya and Singapore, about a zillion Pacific islands, and very nearly Soviet Russia.
And, as noted in passing, there's room for more of that in naval wars, where you can sometimes lock in a victory by destroying the enemy's prewar fleet in battle and securing dominion of the seas. Like Japan almost did to the United States, until they pissed it away by losing the core of their prewar fleet in fair and open battle with the remnant of ours.
Those "limited cases", look kind of like the most important parts of WWII to me. And there are many, many industrial-age wars, from Franco-Prussian to Arab-Israeli to the Falklands and Desert Storm, where that's all there is to it.
The production war, is I think mostly a thing that happens *before* the shooting war. Intrawar production is just a tiebreaker when the whole "win battles and conquer the enemy" thing turns into a draw. Which can happen if the weapons and tactics of the day strongly favor the defense (WWI but not so much WWII), or if the two sides are separated by a logistically severe barrier (the Pacific Ocean or a thousand miles of Eurasian steppe), or if a third party is supplying just enough aid to maintain the stalemate (early Lend-Lease). But at least if you can see those coming, there are usually better ways to deal with them than to try and outbuild the enemy in the middle of a war.
On to the specifics:
O'Brien seems to be focusing on the Battle of Britain as a sort of "production war", with the Germans trying to overcome the UK's aircraft production. But Germany wasn't bombing aircraft factories, or really trying to disrupt *production* at all. The Battle of Britain proper, was intended as a quick decisive battle that would destroy the RAF and establish German air supremacy on a timescale too short for intrawar production to matter. When that failed, it basically turned into an early version of the Terror Warfare that would be later carried out by the V-weapons.
The German attempt at knocking out Britain by a production war, was the Battle of the Atlantic. That also failed, but it was a much closer thing and it was well suited to play Germany's strengths against Britain's vulnerabilities on the military-industrial front. Britain's productivity wasn't local to Britain, rather it was distributed across an Empire (plus alliances) tied together by sea lanes vast even by the scale of the Royal Navy. and so very hard to defend. But it seems like O'Brien is only talking about the Battle of the Atlantic in terms of its effect on *American* productivity? Even though he *does* emphasize the US submarine war against Japan? Weird.
I think he overstates the importance of Allied air power in Normandy, and France in general. Very good for impeding German reinforcement and counterattack, but it wasn't a matter of carpet-bombing the German army out of existence so the Allies could walk across France. That required, yep, actual battles of fire and maneuver.
There doesn't seem to be much discussion of manpower, recruitment, and training, except in the specific context of oil supplies impeding flight training. But all the fancy (or simple) weapons in the world won't help without men to wield them, and on the flip side "we don't have any of that but we do have a few million veterans with rifles" was still viable in WWII - see e.g. China mostly holding off Japan for eight years. And the American recipe for turning a few hundred veterans and twenty thousand fresh conscripts into a combat-ready infantry division in nine months, was probably at least as important as Kaiser's ability to build a Liberty Ship in three.
And, yeah, psychological factors *matter*, If your factories are turning out bignum guns and shells but your army believes itself beaten, you lose. Battles are perhaps not the best way to tilt the *material* balance of war, but they're very, very good at convincing the enemy they are beaten. Then they sue for peace, and maybe you get those nice factories as part of the terms.
If Midway had been reversed (all the US carriers sunk vs only one Japanese), and if the US had not effectively attacked Japanese production. the US would not have reached parity with the IJN until sometime in 1944, and would not have had 2:1 naval superiority until early 1945 at best.
And in that hypothetical, the Japanese navy's ships are backed by thousands of very capable aircraft with highly trained pilots operating from unsinkable aircraft carriers. Whereas the US would have only what it could bring with it by sea, to the far end of a very long supply line.
That's a pretty good recipe for a stalemate, with neither side able to decisively project power into the other's core territory. Well, except for the atom bombs, of course. But if the argument is going to be that the United States won because only the United States was rich enough to develop the atom bomb while fighting a major war, then we don't really need a book for that (and we do need to talk about the ideological factors that had all the Martians working at Los Alamos).
But what were the odds of Midway having a perfectly reversed outcome? Wouldn't an outcome where both sides suffered roughly equal damage be more likely? If that had happened, the U.S. would have not gained naval supremacy as late as you calculate.
Draws are the exception rather than the rule. And in carrier battles specifically, if the forces are even close to balanced, the first side to have a clear understanding of what it's up against and where the enemy actually is, tends to have an overwhelming advantage. There are reasons why it was more likely to be the United States that achieved that advantage at Midway, but it was not a sure thing.
I think the quality of the writing here sits comfortably above the other reviewers so far, and that helps to make this a very interesting read.
I'm left wondering how much the combatants in the war understood this stuff. I mean, the Allies must have known that bombing German munitions factories was effective - that's why they did it. Each side must have had a fairly clear idea of how much of their production was getting through into effective use at the front. And they knew they had to produce a lot of stuff, hence Rosie the Riveter. So if the combatants knew the importance of production; and O'Brien knows the importance of production, then all those military historians in between, who were apparently concentrating on the battles, were... just writing history-flavoured entertainment for the masses? This is perhaps a rather damning assessment of a whole branch of history, isn't it?
I thought the review over-stated how revolutionary “emphasising the importance of production” actually is, for a book written in 2015…
As for how much the combatants understood this stuff, I think there was quite high variance there. Obviously the V-2 programme is an example of inefficiency arising out of a poor/deranged understanding. On the allied side, Alanbrooke had to fight tooth and nail to get the relevant figures to agree to invading Italy before northern France (and also to delay any second front until the logistics were truly ready). It was obvious to him that clearing the Med would free up a several million tons of shipping and that this was critical, but others were more focused on things like liberating France and honouring commitments to Russia asap. (A lot of decisions like this could have gone differently, which does make me wonder a bit about the reviewer’s dismissal of those sections of the book that focus on the people making them.)
I think you might be substantially overestimating the ease and simplicity of the issue from the perspective of someone mired in the middle of a war. "Knowing production is important" in a generic sense is pretty useless. HOW important is it? What are you willing to trade it off against? You have 300 new fighters that just came into deployment: how many of them do you assign to intercept bombers threatening your factories and railroads vs how many of them do you send to the front to support your bombers or protect your ground units? How many of your bombers to you assign to attack enemy production vs trying to produce more immediate (operational or tactical) effects on the battlefield?
Fundamentally this is about trade offs between different time frames. Deploying resources to the front lines helps your position *right now.* Deploying resources to protect your production or harm your enemy's doesn't help you until months or even years later. Can you afford to wait months or years? Is losing the battle right in front of you going to introduce even bigger production penalties? Is there a strategic objective within short-term reach that might make up for the long-term hit of getting your factories bombed? Is getting that convoy sunk going to have ripple effects that force you to make bad choices later on? I think even a leader with nearly perfect god's-eye view of the theatre of war isn't going to be able to make these choices perfectly: nobody knows the future, every choice is a risk, and your ability to reason through the ramifications in such a complex system is sharply limited. And of course no such leader existed: the relevant information was split between dozens, hundreds or thousands of officers and civilian managers, with the usual friction of inter-group communication dialed up to 11 by the chaos of war.
I can't comment on the use of this book in particular without reading it (which I am now somewhat tempted to do), but the obvious value of this sort of historianship is producing quantitative answers to these questions now that the conflict is no longer in motion. How important *were* the various pieces of production infrastructure ultimately? How consequential were the battles happening at the same time? Which things turned out to be more or less important than expected? Of course, we can't re-run the war 1000 times with different decisions made, but digging into the data as it exists hardly seems like a worthless exercise.
Thanks - I'm sure all that's right. And it certainly seems that there's a lot of nuance and subtlety in the book that is still way above my head. I'm not a historian at all, and certainly not of the 20th century.
But the review is fairly categorical about this:
"battles are overrated" "This focus is silly" "military historians and the broader public have focused inordinately on battles" - it adds up to a fairly damning critique of the whole genre of military history, fairly or unfairly.
Weeeeell… although….. take away the broader relevance to the outcome of the war, and there’s still a huge amount of human interest in what goes on in battle, at every level. How do people behave under that kind of pressure? To what extent are we all savage beasts, or cowards, or heroes or anything in between, when the chips are down? What qualities enable leadership under those circumstances? Etc etc. Neither of us is likely ever to actually need to deploy the lessons of strategic procurement *or* battlefield tactics as practiced in WWII or anywhere else. If there’s any value beyond entertainment to reading about such things, it’s in terms of some generalised, transferable principles that might inform our understanding of all sorts of stuff. (And then, of course, knowing things is amusing and valuable in itself.)
Very good comment. I think the book did a good job showing how that decision "what do we focus on" was made very differently by the different countries. The US and UK focused heavily on air and naval power, which took a long time to pay off, but eventually it paid off big. The USSR was a little late to do anything, but it was able to ramp up quickly by focusing on very simple tank and artillery designs, but then stagnated. Germany and the other Axis powers were doing a strange mix of everything, with a huge variance in results.
Eh...felt like reading a combined Wikipedia article and PowerPoint bulleted presentation. Some posts can make war Exciting(tm) even to a skeptical audience, perhaps by focusing on the shiny battles (an obvious explanation for their salience), or being written by Bret Devereaux. This was just kinda shrug. I do appreciate the relatively well-edited brevity and low rate of tpyos though, those have really dogged some other reviews. Plus no awkward OT tangents for pandering points. Ctrl-F for AI = 0!
The dull 20% about Great Man Theory: is it just that the sections are boring, or the arguments themselves are bad? It certainly seems worth exploring how the decisions of key authority figures had large impacts on entire theatres (like with Tippecanoe and MacArthur Too, or the Coulda Had a V-2) in a book about root causes of WWII victory. Not like mere logistics are never influenced by politics, vibes, and other illogical noneconomic concerns. Which is one of the main roadblocks to any school of Materialism All The Way Down: homo economicus being on the Endangered Species List.
Good point. I like the Right Stuff because it explores this tension between how the Project Mercury astronauts were seen and promoted as heros when from a tech point of view they were 'spam in a can'. But tech is relatively simple compared to how the human brain deals with a crisis-rich situation. That is inherently more interesting for most people. Would we rather watch the Olympics or tune in to a livestream of a top Sports Nutrition clinic?
A fascinating but perplexing review. UK opinion hasn't been kind to Bomber Harris, I initially thought the book was moving towards a re-appraisal of his aerial campaign, but then the evil of morale bombing comes back again. But Harris himself was interviewed in the World at War and my takeaway was that the distinction between morale bombing and strategic bombing was moot because navigation wasn't perfect and bombing happened in the dark. Bombers would set off with a target in mind but after 2 hours flight in the dark they could be in practice be some way off. Harris may just have been trying to justify himself and cherry-picking, of course.
My other thought was if you just play whack-a-mole with aeroplanes and subs, you stop the axis from spreading but you don't recover the territory you've lost, and you certainly don't get unconditional surrender. Colossus shortened the war by two years they reckon but obviously codebreaking alone doesn't win a war. At some point you have to get soldiers on the ground - with air support, sure. Anyway, perhaps these issues are dealt with in the book. Thanks!
"Bombers would set off with a target in mind but after 2 hours flight in the dark they could be in practice be some way off."
This seems like a very poor defence even if completely true because...well...you also have another option. If you can't have confidence that your night-time bombing runs are going to hit anything useful, you can just NOT DO THEM. Deploy your bombers for operation or tactical effects. Or produce fewer bombers and put the resources elsewhere. Or launch a smaller number of daytime raids (to limit casualties), destroying less total stuff but forcing the Luftwaffe to stay deployed in positions to intercept you.
The only way "it was dark, we didn't know what we were bombing" is actually a sound justification is if one target is very nearly as good as another. But that's just the terror bombing question all over again, and history has been pretty definitive on that one.
I'd happily read a book discussing the morality of WW2 allied bombing and/or its effectiveness, but those are different discussions which often end up bleeding into each other. There was a thread recently about how people misdirect discussions about e.g torture by saying "you know, this bad thing is actually ineffective", rather than addressing the moral question of whether you should do the bad thing, effective or not. And I feel there's a culture of "actually strategic bombing a la Harris was ineffective" which seems lazy and I thought the book was challenging this, then suddenly it wasn't (this may be a problem with the review, not the book).
Whether effectiveness and morality are, in fact, separate depends on your ethical system. To utilitarians (and others of a strongly consequentiality bent) the lack of effectiveness is very much a moral argument: you can justify deliberately causing bad consequences, but only if you strong enough good consequences to counterbalance them. Of course, not everyone tends towards consequentialism, but it seems FAR more common in war than in other aspects of life. And one hopes anyone taking a more deontological view would *already* be strongly against both torture and terror bombing, so attacking the effectiveness ought to be a very efficient way to convince the holdouts.
Night raids were designed to reduce bomber losses, and I believe were quite effective at that. The Allies would have needed far more planes than they had (especially earlier) and would have sustained huge losses trying to bomb during the day. It's a calculation at that point - how much saved in bombers compared to how much worse the aim on the bombs. I don't know the math, but it's certainly believable that the night raids were the right strategic decision. Especially if you value (as Harris clearly did) Allied lives and equipment more than the enemy's.
Yes. That's why I specified "a smaller number of daytime raids" as one alternative. Because you can launch more total raids and drop more total bombs by going at night, at the expense of having close to zero targeting capability.
Which again, I addressed. For "drop a lot more bombs, with a lot less accuracy" to be strategically sound, you need to have a pretty flat target priority curve: hitting residences or shops or cultural cites or other civilian infrastructure needs to have positive strategic value, value not too much lower than whatever you would target if you could actually aim. Otherwise you are paying a very large opportunity cost for an operation that mostly produces effects that you don't value, which is obviously unsound. Harris, in particular, was quite explicit that deliberately targeting civilians *was* sound strategy and a worthwhile use of military resources.
In theory it might be possible to thread the needle, to have the lower casualty rates alone make up for the increased usage of man-hours and materiel. If bombing at night merely cut your accuracy in half, for example, if you *only* needed twice to drop twice as many bombs to reliably hit the same target at night, then taking fewer causalities might well justify doubling the resources you expend to achieve the same strategic objective. But that is emphatically NOT my understanding of how things worked with WWII technology. As I understand it, nighttime bombing was MASSIVELY less accurate, that allied raids were mostly targeting large areas rather than trying to destroy specific facilities. And that is certainly well beyond the point where hitting civilian targets must be a *goal* not a *side effect* in order for the practice to justify the expense.
That's fair. I think there's an argument that he might have thought the tradeoff to preserve bombers and crews was worth it, but he also seemed to genuinely think that bombing civilians was somewhere between fully acceptable and a separate goal.
If I were in charge of Allied bombing at the time (even knowing what I know now), I wouldn't rule out night raids, but I also would try very hard to avoid pointless civilian deaths. He doesn't seem to have cared as much so I'm not going to defend him on that.
"If I were in charge of Allied bombing at the time (even knowing what I know now), I wouldn't rule out night raids..."
Fair. I wouldn't rule them out either, I'd evaluate them against all the other options in terms of their cost-effectiveness. I just have the very strong intuition that they'd generally weight in well below most other options, even if I were valuing the lives of German civilians at precisely zero (which, TBF, in the midst of WWII I very well might do).
> A perfect companion book to HtWWW would examine why military historians and the broader public have focused inordinately on battles
Check out Cathal Nolan's The Allure of Battle.
I read it many years ago so my recollection is fuzzy enough that I don't know if it is a "perfect" but I seem to recall the thesis is what you're talking about.
To oversimplify, his thesis is that the legend of Cannae (a single decisive battle that determines the war while also making you famous for thousands of years) has basically shaped Western thinking every since.
And, as he points out, not even Cannae or Teutoberg were acutally decisive.
Interesting thesis but is it new? HTWWW publication date 2015. Here's Max Hastings summing up the war in All Hell Let Loose 2011: "America’s industrial might contributed more to victory than did its armies." (And that is the thesis of the whole book). Same point surely?
I feel that the book builds up a straw man, that people believe that major wars between great powers are won on the battlefield, when in fact military historians have always known that factors of size, logistics, economics and military-related production are vital in long-term wars.
This is especially true in the modern world, but it was also true in the past, e.g. Carthage won a great battle against Rome at Cannae, but it didn't do them any good as Rome could just simply build more armies.
There seems to be a glaring issue with the thesis presented in the book as summarized in the review.
"By 1945, the Japanese economy was so desperate for fuel that the government set up more than 34,000 small stills in the home islands to distill the oil from pine needles into aviation fuel."
This jibes with what I've read elsewhere about the Japanese economy during the late war; outside of a few major things that require heavy machinery, a lot of it was decentralized into small factories. Now, you're an American strategic planner. How do you go about wrecking this sort of economy as efficiently as possible? You level the major population centers. Nagasaki, specifically, was one of the major remaining industrial areas. So, regardless of what LeMay says about the motivation, the result is the same.
The other part of this is that it ties into the major question of 'why did the Japanese surrender?' You have three events in close succession immediately before hand: Hiroshima, the Soviet declaration of war, and Nagasaki. If you want to argue that it was the Soviet declaration of war that was the deciding factor, you have have a reason why. The Soviets would be able to supply a lot of troops, but did not bring significant strategic bombing capabilities to effect the Japanese economy or the amphibious capabilities necessary to threaten the home islands.
Both the book, and this article, needs a much more detailed discussion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop friendship pact (with the secret addendum!) between the communist russian empire and the nazi german empire, which divided Eastern Europe between them, and thus began WW2.
The complicity of russia in starting WW2, and enabling germany, has been white-washed and forgotten.
Interesting review. James D Hornfischer’s “The Fleet at Flood Tide” provides (in my opinion) a compelling argument that Japan wouldn’t have surrendered without the atomic bombs being dropped. Well worth a read. Clearly Japan would’ve lost anyway, but it would’ve been awfully bloody.
I will never forget William Manchester’s book “Goodbye Darkness” about his time fighting as a Marine in the Pacific. “Thank God for the atom bomb,” he wrote. The grunts on the ground had already seen how hard the Japanese would fight to defend their own ground in Okinawa and they knew American casualties would be enormous if they had to invade the Japanese homeland.
Even if the atomic bombs might - with the benefit of hindsight - perhaps have been unneccessary to force a Japanese surrender (the Soviet declaration of war was perhaps sufficient), that would be beside the point when considering the decision problem facing Truman in late July 1945.
Since any president not using the atomic bomb as soon as technically possible would have risked been crucified by public opinion, if more US servicemen than necessary had died as a consequence of not-use.
Yeah the whole viewpoint that America was wrong to drop the atomic bombs is symptomatic of the backwards modern viewpoint that refuses to blame the perpetrators of violence and instead blames the victims. Japan attacked the US without even declaring war and committed the most heinous war crimes imaginable, justifying functionally any level of violence in return.
You see a similar dynamic with the Manchester airport armed police attack. Some visitors to the UK attack armed police but when they fight back the police have apparently gone overboard? No they’re protecting the lethal weapons they carry, overwhelming force is sensible in that situation. Don’t wanna get kicked? Don’t attack police.
You don't have to consider morals to reach the conclusion that the most rational solution to Truman's decision problem was to drop the bombs.
All that is needed is to place yourself in his position. He was acting, as we all are, under uncertainty:
"Maybe the bombs are unneccessary to force a surrender. However, it is at least likely that the Japanese will fight some weeks or months longer if I do not drop the bombs. During those additional weeks or months, maybe no US servicemen will die. But that is highly unlikely, and quite likely thousands more will die. Add to this that I know with close to 100 percent certainty what everyone in the US will say if it is revealed I had a weapon that quite likely would have limited further US causalties, which I did not use."
Double-yes to the Manchester situation! The keyboard warriors' response to real violence, in which they would instantly collapse into a sniveling heap of trembling flesh (I should know, I've been there) - is to pretend there's an exact response level to a vicious assault that keeps everybody looking clean and unharmed. Police should have some magic method to subdue violent attackers! The method cannot include any of: guns, tasers, chokes, holds, kicks, punches, anything, really, that looks "violent" to a bystander with a phone.
Great review. I'm glad that I know about this book, and the thesis seems pretty convincing.
I immediately wonder how this framework applies to the balance of power between China and the US and its allies. China obviously has dramatically higher manufacturing capacity and is working hard to increase coal to oil capacity. The US can project power more globally and could perhaps cut off much of Chinese trade in the event of a war, but I'm not sure how relevant that would be. I'm hoping we never have to find out how a US-China conflict would go, but I'm concerned about the manufacturing base disparity.
"The stupidity and expense of building the V-2 probably saved tens of thousands of lives elsewhere, which is ultimately yet another benefit of the Allied bombing campaign."
So really Werner von Braun was a war hero who did more to serve the Allied cause than almost any other person alive during that time?
But seriously I love these type of history books with numbers and statistics. They speak to me much more than "so and so general fought brilliantly and bravely in X or Y battle".
Kind of squares too with my experience playing various strategy games. The game is often a stale mate, or will take a long long time to win unless you kill the other sides economy. The only way a game is usually decided on the battlefield is in how well you are protecting your economy.
Great read. I was confused, though, by the negative criticism of O’Brien’s attention to eg the American decision to focus on naval and air production. Given that these turned out to be the keys to victory, isn’t it fascinating, and a necessary part of the story, to point out that the decision could have gone the other way, and hence that individual decisions at the highest levels can and do make a critical difference even in the context of modern industrial warfare?
I wonder how much of an effect European resistance fighters had on all this?
As often success is framed in how much military capacity is destroyed (and role of resistance is downplayed as they destroyed little), but not so much in success at destroying logistics and production.
Stalin remarked that the war would be won by whoever could build the most engines and have the fuel to run them.
Looking at Germany after the Fall of France, they need to either:
1) Convince the Brits to make peace
2) Conquer enough of the Soviet Union to stalemate the Anglos, which can only be done with a political collapse of the USSR due to a devastating Blitzkrieg campaign
Both of these are essentially out of reach, though this isn't 100% known at the time (it could be predicted, but it wasn't known).
The biggest problem is that Nazi Germany couldn't run a peacetime economy. Probably the best outcome, offering some kind of radical peace with Britain that withdrew from everywhere except say Poland (and whose to say the UK would go for that) would still have left Germany having an economic crisis within a decade (probably still a crisis if they conquer the western SU, but at least autarky is more plausible in that case).
And anyway, I think the Nazi's just liked war. They weren't trying to achieve some kind of dominant security position like the Kaiser, they enjoyed fighting. They probably would have started a war with the Anglos and lost even if they won in Russia.
I would really like to see an extended analysis of this logic applied to the wars like the US in Vietnam and/or Afghanistan. The key thing I want to see tackled is how there is a lack of energy, transport, and manufacturing infrastructure to attack in these cases, and what the focus of American resource investment should have been in order to stop the movement of personnel and availability of weapons.
Guerilla warfare is a completely different kind of warfare, and involves different incentives. The US could have conquered North Vietnam pretty easily, and even easier it could have destroyed its industrial capacity. It didn't do that for a number of reasons, but one of the key reasons was that Vietnam was being supplied by China and Russia, so even with 0 industry left in the north, they could have fought on. The US didn't want to drag China into the war, which would have been necessary to stop the actual wartime production feeding the war.
The same is true today with Hamas and Iran. Israel can easily defeat Hamas on the battlefield, but because Iran is supplying the weapons, there's no way for Israel to destroy the industry that makes the weapons.
The only way for a more powerful army to win in those circumstances is for them to completely occupy the target for a long time. This is expensive in terms of both cash and personnel, and puts a large strain on the homefront population (i.e. Vietnam war protestors as the war dragged on). The goal of guerilla warfare is for the occupying nation to have to put lots of troops in harms way, and then for the guerillas to pick the easiest targets in order to harm morale. The guerillas aren't trying to take land or industry, but just make occupation untenable.
My view is completely different. Guerrilla warfare is a strategy for responding to conventional warfare; consider that it depends utterly on exploiting the conventional warfare incentives to work.
The presence of outside supply in the Vietnam and Israel/Hamas cases are very like the cases in WWII: the entire problem with U-boats was that they interfered with supply from the US to Britain; the most impactful strategy the US deployed against Japan was port mining which stopped supply from the conquered territories and fishing; against Germany the destruction of trains and forcing aircraft production underground (which I note reduced, but did not stop, their supply of aircraft). I claim that Japanese ships and German trains are conceptually the same as the trucks used by Hamas and the Ho Chi Minh trail used by North Vietnam.
Lastly I note that guerrilla warfare tends to focus on precisely these kinds targets. We usually talk about this in terms of the guerrilla force's opportunities because they are softer targets, but if we instead ask the question of why this would ever work, I claim that it is a fundamental rule of modern warfare that it cannot progress without access to the modern tools which define it. This is true regardless of conflict intensity or the type of belligerents.
I notice that despite how many books have been written about WW2 before this thesis was coherently expressed, the two most relevant/popular boardgames (Axis & Allies and Diplomacy) are strictly about control of production centers. Axis & Allies is ~40 years old, and Diplomacy is 65 years old (though granted it is about WW1 rather than WW2).
I agree that the materials based focus by O'Brien is a much better approach than the Hollywood movie based memes prevalent in the West, but it is still not clear that Mr. O'Brien's analysis is accurate.
In particular: the assertion is made that Allied air force bombing of Germany was the largest factor in the defeat of the Axis as evidenced by aircraft production - whereas battles such as Stalingrad were not so much.
We can see that the US production of planes really peaked in 1943 and 1944. Given that the planes needed crews, needed to be transferred to the UK, etc etc - it is safe to say that the crest of the tidal wave of American airplanes did not really begin until the latter half of 1943 at the earliest.
The problem is: Stalingrad was over by the beginning of 1943. The battle of Kursk was July 1943. Even Wikipedia notes that the "turning point of the bombing" was March 1943 - i.e. after Stalingrad was already over and mere months before Kursk.
Or put another way: whatever Germany's economic focus was, later in WW2 (i.e. after Kursk) - it is much more difficult to argue that the Nazi war effort was not fully focused on winning the Eastern Front culminating in the battle of Stalingrad (which started in July 1942); that this focus failed resulting in Germany suffering strategic defeat due to both failure to defeat Russia and also failure to secure additional oil supplies.
In this context, the Allied bombing effort is reasonably positioned as accelerating Germany's defeat but is not the primary driver of it.
As for Japan: whatever the relative production Japan had compared to the Soviet Union - the comparison is not apples to apples. Naval warfare is obviously far more steel tonnage focused than land warfare - for which food and transport is a far bigger issue. For another, the bulk of Japan's land forces were focused on occupying parts of China for almost the entire duration of World War 2 - and was ultimately defeated by a massive Soviet army of 2 million plus that was transported across the entire Eurasian continent and smashed Japan's primary land army in about 2 months.
Lastly: it is not clear to me from your description, that Mr. O'Brien takes into account the fact that Germany and Japan, put together, were much smaller in population, in manufacturing, in wealth, in pretty much any economic measure you can think of as compared to the United States - much less the rest of the Allies. This, to me, is the glossed over critical factor: the United States was the big boy beating up on smaller kids, not the plucky upstart.
My own work has exposed me to one specific critical disadvantage that both Germany and Japan suffered from: explosives manufacturing. Prior to WW1 - the primary source of nitrates was literally bird poop from South America. Nitrates are critical to all manner of explosives starting with TNT (tri-nitro-toluene). The advent of the Haber Bosch process was actually driven by Germany's need to replace these bird poop nitrate sources with fossil fuel ones(coal at the time). Japan in turn has pretty much zero fossil fuels of any kind - so likely had enormous problems just producing explosives internally - they probably had to import coal from what is now North Korea to do so. Japan's lack of natural resources also put caps on just how much steel they could produce; while I can believe Japan produced more steel than the Soviet Union just prior to WW2 - I equally would disbelieve that this situation continued after the conflict began. Even in 1965 - Japan was importing in the order of 88% of its iron ore and 65% of its coking coal: https://www.resources.org/archives/steel-is-where-you-make-it-in-japan/
Great comment. Germany was already losing by the beginning of 1943 and didn't really have the resources to stop the mounting Soviet counteroffensive. However, the Japanese occupation force in China was a sad imitation of an actual army. It was mostly composed of untrained and poorly equipped conscripts and local militias. Veteran troops and heavy equipment was continually stripped from China to help fight the US. Not to mention the ~900K troops were seriously outnumbered by the Soviets. Also, the Haber-Bosch process was primarily interested in producing synthetic fertilizer. Using it for coal-to-oil didn't happen until decades later.
I have not studied Japan's land force much, but it seems highly unlikely that whatever tanks and so forth utilized by the Japanese army were sent to various Pacific islands. The troops, certainly possible. Be that as it may: my primary point was that Japan's military strength was certainly not in its land forces - and so it seems likely that Japan's military industrial focus was completely different than the Soviet Union's.
As for Haber Bosch: it is a process that converts natural gas/methane to ammonia. To use coal, just gasify it first. Your reference to fertilizer is to the ammonia output, but the munitions aspect is because of the 2nd stage Ostwald process.
The Ostwald process converts ammonia to nitric acid. Ostwald is actually older; it was just not very useful in and of itself without Haber Bosch to enable mass ammonia production. Nitrating Ammonia (i.e. adding nitric acid) = ammonium nitrate = ANFO explosives as well as a stable fixed fertilizer whereas nitrating toluene is what results in TNT.
Ironically, the US tried to switch off TNT to a new, "more stable" form of base explosive but that factory literally has not produced anything to date (10 years and counting I think), and there is exactly 1 TNT plant in the entire West today in Poland. The backup plant was in an area of Ukraine which is now Russian...
As for coal to oil - actually the Germans did do that. Or more precisely, coal to gasoline. The process is called Fischer Tropsch. There are a dozen or so FT plants around the world today but the process is horrifically expensive, inefficient and complex. Dubai spent at least $18B building its bigger one; a $7B plant was just recently build in Texas to handle Permian gas and Pennsylvania is talking about doing the same for the Marcellus. The capital cost is so brutal though, and the process inherently loses ~40% of the energy from the inputs, that this tech is pretty much a dead end until oil prices go over $140/barrel for a significant period of time.
One thing missing from the discussion of steel production is that comparing Japan to the USSR misses the scale of everything else. Germany had 150%-180% the steel production of the USSR or Japan. The US city of Pittsburgh produced more steel than the entire Axis combined. Comparing Japanese steel production to the USSR feels like an attempt to be intentionally misleading, or missing the forest for the trees.
Yes, very good point although again: Japan has neither iron nor energy resources - it had to import everything which is why the not-so-secret-anymore US embargo on Japan prior to WW2 was a literal declaration of war.
Germany has lots of iron and coal, but very little oil.
Combine the above with the US having more manufacturing than the entire rest of the world - a position China enjoys today - plus the enormous population and wealth differences, and it should be no surprise to anyone that the Axis was doomed to fail.
Oh definitely, but at that point I'm confused why he didn't just say "The Allies had X times more steel production than the Axis" rather than comparing Japan (with no native iron or coal) and the USSR (with very poor infrastructure generally) - not literally the lowest steel production in their respective alliances, but definitely low compared to any thoughtful comparison.
Well, that would detract from the heroic Hollywood movie meme of how plucky America beat up big bad Adolf and Hirohito - as opposed to a juggernaut squashing inferior opponents.
I've read a number of books on how World War 2 was won, principally in search of information about the planners and the planning. Who planned the war and what exactly was the thought process behind the plan. How were the decisions made that ultimately won the war for the Allies. In doing that research I have come to believe that the war was won in 1942.
Stated briefly: in 1942 the Soviet Union cut the heart of the German army out at Stalingrad. The Germans lost about a million men. This was manpower they could not replace. Failure to win at Stalingrad meant failure to capture the oil rich Caucasus region which meant, ultimately a failure to capture enough oil resources to win the war. The American general staff was pessimistic about the Soviet's chances to stay in the war in 1942 and they believed that if the Nazi's grabbed the Caucasus then their position would become unassailable.
Also in 1942 the Empire of Japan was beaten. By losing at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal the heart of the IJN was cut out. They lost ships, planes, and pilots that they would not be able to replace. By losing at sea they lost the ability to control the resource rich parts of the Emipire they had gone to war for. By 1944 US submarine warfare had so crippled the IJN's ability to refuel that they used dirty fuel to fill their new carrier and one torpedo was enough to send it to the bottom at the Battle of the Philippine Sea.
Battles are important because they mean getting ahold of important resources. And since the waning days of World War I the role in seizing oil production has become more and more important in winning wars. It was once said that an army marches on its stomach. But also an army runs on oil.
A few books that have shaped my thinking are: Master of Sea Power; 1942: The Year that Doomed the Axis; The Second Most Powerful Man in the World; Keep From All Thoughtful Men; and The Mantle of Command.
This book, then, is a counter argument to that since the bombings were largely in 1943-1944. I am dubious of the claim that bombing was effective, because the Axis' defeat seemed inevitable by this time but I'll give this book a try.
The stuff about MacArthur is spot on. He was a media darling, especially among the Republicans that owned newspapers and had a lot of clout. He also inspired America with his swashbuckling tales and demeanor but the war planners knew he was piffle which is why the navy wouldn't give him any ships or control. I think Ernest King hate him, and Admiral King was the God-Emperor of the navy.
I'm in the market for a good book about Admiral Nimitz because I get the sense that his leadership won the war in the Pacific for us. The claim I've read in Master of Sea Power is that Nimitz's team cracked the Japanese Code and Ernest King thought the main attack was the Aleutians but Nimitz knew better and directed Midway. It is an interesting question: if you knew the enemy was set to attack with superior numbers (4 carriers to 3, plus battleships and support) what would you do? Would you be tempted to evacuate Midway and secede without a fight? Wait for more ships in 1943 to stage a fight? Or try and get the jump on them. In 1942 the answer was not obvious, though getting the jump on your enemy was the correct one in hindsight.
It was like a starcraft game on a gigantic map one player starts with a larger army but has 4 bases to the enemy's 20 bases. There just isn't time to press that advantage before the difference in production becomes decisive. Military units are only useful insofar as they enable you to eventually shut down enemy production, but distance is a huge defensive advantage for 20 base side. Economic advantages compound but force advantages generally don't unless you can quickly destroy the enemy base.
To be fair, Russian communists first collaborated with fascism and provided it with enormous material and strategic help in subjugating millions of people.
In the 7th grade I was our class bully's running buddy as he terrorized the entire class. Then in 8th grade he got around to picking me as his victim du jour which was extremely unpleasant. By the time 9th grade started I'd healed up from that beating and also had a growth spurt and I made common cause with a couple of his other targets. One day after school we caught him in the yard and pounded him senseless while the rest of the class cheered.
Guess I don't _mind_ if at the reunions people remember it as me standing up to the class bully....but I don't let it distort the truth, nor the self-realization that I eventually gained from middle school.
My apologies to the audience, but that level of accidental mistake deserves some sort of response.
It's amazing the things you don't see in the history books! Do you have any pictures of the exploits of the glorious Extremely Western Front? The troops of the 1917th Motor Rifle brigade assaulting Monte-Cassino, perhaps? Or any of T-34's from the 85th Guards Tank breaching the Gothic Line?
I mean, yes, the Soviets did destroy the Italian army in Russia and take Berlin, as well as score glorious victories against Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the half of Poland the Germans didn't take, and, well, I can't say a glorious victory, but they did score an 'at least you tried' against Finland.
No, American capitalists brought forth miracles of industrial, agricultural, and logistical production previously thought impossible in order to arm, clothe, feed, and fuel the irresponsibly-led peasant conscripts that the cruel tyrants of the Soviet empire insisted on throwing away like cattle.
The U.S. provided 2/3rds of the trucks, 1/4 of the armored combat vehicles (tanks, SPGs, tank destroyers, etc.), 15% of all aircraft, 50% of the aviation fuel (including 90% of high-octane fuel), nearly all of the locomotives and rail cars, and nearly all of the copper, aluminum, and other necessary industrial inputs used by the soviets during the war, as well as enough food to keep the Soviets from collapsing into famine in 1942 and 1943 and millions of boots, coats, and other basic necessities. Without the U.S. and Britain (but mostly the U.S.), the Soviets would have collapsed like a house of cards in a tornado.
Soviet decisionmaking was disastrous. The Russians started the war by agreeing to the illegal division of Poland with the Nazis (committing war crimes along the way like the Katyn forest massacre), then thought they could get away with a sneaky backstab of their erstwhile-totalitarian ally, but got caught with their pants around their ankles. Seriously, the only reason that the Wehrmacht was able to effect such stunning destruction of Soviet men and material during the early days of Barbarossa was that the Red Army and Air Force were all forward positioned on the border, building up for an offensive into Germany. And the Soviets weren't even *good* at backstabbing; Stalin famously repeatedly ignored the correct reports of his own spies regarding the German build-up and war plans. Even the British tried to warn him, but he would not be moved.
Soviet "generalship" during the early war was also disastrous and hugely wasteful of human life, and much more concerned with looking good - i.e. being able to report large numbers of men, guns, and tanks mobilized - than actually supporting the fighting capacity of those men. The famous "one rifle for every two soldiers" scene from Enemy At the Gates happened repeatedly to Soviet units within shouting distance of huge arsenals full of weaponry because the Soviets put so little thought and effort into logistics.
Even the stuff they made suffered catastrophically from Goodhart's Law and the indifference of the communist system to the wellbeing of the individual soldier and factory worker. Decrees that so many tanks had to be made just resulted in production quality nose-diving off a cliff, such that huge numbers of the vaunted T-34 tank irreparably broke down before ever seeing combat, or killed their crews due to faulty armor, malfunctioning gunsights, or lack of basic necessities in combat zones such as road lamps, radios, or even seats. Even late in the war the Soviets were losing between 3-5 tanks for each German tank they destroyed in combat. They were also death-traps for their crew; Soviet crew losses per tank destroyed were far higher than American and British levels, because the westerners actually cared about things like survivability and ergonomics in their designs. Of course when Stalin was told about this, he assumed it had to be capitalist sabotage and so ordered factory workers punished and quotas increased.
The sad fact is that world communism at every step owed its continued existence almost entirely to the surplus production and charity of the capitalist west, led by the U.S.
This book sounds pretty disappointing. It's debunking an overly simplistic view of the war that I doubt many people here held in the first place, and it has its own flaws in its arguments.
For example, as you observe, the disdain for decisive battles falls flat when that in fact *did* happen in the Pacific Theater. Between Midway, Eastern Solomons, and Santa Cruz, the Japanese carrier fleet was effectively wiped out, and that had a profound effect on the course of the war.
All that strategic bombing of Japan that he lauds so much? It would have never been possible in the first place until the Japanese navy was neutralized! Of course, the US had a massive economic advantage that meant they were likely to win in the long-run regardless of the outcome of individual battles, but it is still important to admit how much of a role Midway played in the course of the war. This book feels too much like reversed stupidity.
Also, when criticizing the in-retrospect pointless land battles of the late Pacific campaign, it's easy to forget that at the time, nobody knew that Japan would surrender soon. Maybe they were still mistakes even without that knowledge, but it's not quite so obvious as it is in hindsight.
Yeah, there’s a weird disconnect between “tank production important” and “battles are not”. Tank production wouldn’t be needed if it weren’t for battles wherein said tanks were being destroyed.
I liked the review, but there have definitely been econ analysis of the war before this book. I reviewed Wage of Destruction for the contest which is heavily econ-centric, had a lot of influence and came out 2006.
Judging from this review the econ analysis in WoD did revisionism more compellingly as well.
This was a decent review on a topic of obvious relevance to the right-now. I appreciate the systems perspective the reviewer takes - or describes O'Brien taking - and the acknowledgement that there was no "one thing" that won the war. This point is almost buried under a heap of "industrial capacity is the one thing that won the war." The reviewer doesn't resolve that contradiction, they press on with it. It ought to be obvious that you need to win battles to achieve objectives; objectives being the objects which must be destroyed, secured, or retained in order for the other side to quit the fight. Industrial capacity and logistics crucially create the necessary conditions for winning battles, but that doesn't make battles irrelevant.
Stockpiling medicine doesn't cure the disease, you have to actually use it. Having more materiel (and personnel who can employ it) matters a lot, but only if they're actually deployed against the adversary. Had the Allies bombed Axis economies into ruin without massive land operations to take back ground and population centres, then the war would not have been won. Everything described in this review was important, certainly a necessary condition for decisive land operations, but the land domain was decisive. The domains of war are mutually supporting, each succeeds "if and only if" the others do. To say "this was the THE THING that won the war" is, at this advanced stage in WWII historiography, practically clickbait.
O’Brien’s take on logistics winning WWII really made me think about how we view our own military history in Australia. We glorify the heroics at Gallipoli and the endurance on the Kokoda Track, but what if the real power lay in the behind-the-scenes logistics, just as O’Brien argues? Could the ANZAC myth be overshadowing the importance of supply chains and air support that were just as crucial? It’s worth questioning how we honor our past and whether we might be missing the full picture.
You have to have someone fighting at the front in order for the logistics efforts to have a chance to work. Otherwise there's no need for the complicated supply chains to be built up in the first place, or for all the industry to be diverted to making the war material which is then shipped or flown to the front.
Arguably, just making and sending the supplies is what the US wanted to do in Afghanistan and why the plan could never work. Sure, we had troops there as well, but they were often hiding in well-fortified bases in a couple of areas. The Afghanis were not willing to be the users of that military surplus the way the Ukrainians are right now. Without a fighting force, you could produce 100X what your opponents produce and it wouldn't make a difference.
BTW this here topic has an unfortunate tendency to attract a certain species of Russian trolls who just can’t let any wrongthink about the WWII and/or the Motherland stand unchallenged. They’re sleeping right now, but one would expect an influx to start in a few hours.
What a puzzling post. The author first summarises the "conventional" narrative as "the Soviet and American production capacity won them the war, despite disastrous early battlefield defeats". And immediately after he proclaims "But the conventional narrative is all wrong! It is really the production capacity that was important!!!"
I think the argument is that it's not production numbers that counts, but supply chains. Even "small" economies were able to produce massive amounts of hardware that, on paper, were enough to keep fighting the war. But bombing German supply lines (and sinking Japanese ones) strangled them by preventing that production from getting to the front in any organized way. Also, it's arguing that strategic bombing was in fact very effective, and I think the conventional narrative is that strategic bombing was mostly a waste of effort.
I'm not sure I'm convinced, especially since a lot of people in the thread are disputing the facts supporting this, but it's an interesting take.
A bit of an outsider perspective and a question. I am Hungarian, and the perspective is that you are in a small and weak country, and you will get occupied by one of the three huge powers, the Nazis, the Soviets or the Anglo-Americans. Everybody (aside from those who were themselves Nazi) thought the Anglo-American occupation would be least bad because they are the most humane culture of these three. And it is usually true.
But sometimes a switch flips in the Anglo-American mind and then they are capable of immense brutality. The firebombings of Hamburg and Dresden, timed so to kill the civilians who are trying to dig other civilians from the ruins (source: this book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Smoke ). Recent examples: the destruction of Raqqa and just whatever happened in Iraq.
What flips this switch? Raqqa is clear: they did not want to lose a single soldier.
Is it so that democracies are very sensitive to their own soldiers dying and are willing to sacrifice any number of foreign civilians to make it not happen? Clearly, voters hated body bags coming back, while they did not even hear about Raqqa, they believed the "surgical strike" lies. Reality: 80% of the city gone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Raqqa_(2017)#Aftermath
Urban operations follow a pattern of "destroying the city in order to save it." Exceptions to this are battles where the defender surrenders or cedes the ground ahead of the attackers. Precision and guided weapons enhance the shooter's ability to hit their intended target, that has no bearing on the number of targets engaged over time. The effects on the environment of so many small strikes can be similar to a few big ones.
"For example, it is modestly interesting that Franklin Roosevelt, consistent with advice from Harry Hopkins and Admiral Ernest King, focused America’s productive effort on air and sea power. It is not at all central to the argument that air and sea power won the war."
Huh, I have very different ideas about what would be interesting. Seems like this reviewer is interested in war but not at all in how political decisions that affect war get made.
"Arthur Harris, leader of the British bombing campaign, resisted attempts to shift bombing away from cities generally and toward fuel or transportation targets..."
Would have liked to read more about why this person supported bombing cities.
I find the argument as presented here to be somewhat confusing. A little of what the reviewer presents as new is new, but most is part of the standard history, as can be seen by the presentation of the standard history as including these points about attacks on productive capacity.
Second, since in several cases the result of the attacks on productive capacity was to diminish the attackee's ability to win battles, battles can't be all that unimportant after all.
One of the points presented as new, but which isn't, is that the bombing of Japan had basically destroyed the country's industrial capacity even before the A-bomb was deployed. This is true, and in fact the biggest challenge for the planners deciding where to drop the A-bomb was to find Japanese cities with industrial capacity (thus making them worth bombing) which still had enough of it left for an A-bomb to have any effect on.
Thank you. This was my read as well and I wasn't sure why anyone thought this was new. More in depth than "popular" history, sure. But it makes sense for popular history to focus on the cool battles (which, as you mention, were still necessary and important), even if everyone knows industrial capacity was the more important metric.
I mean, the standard line about Japan in even pop sources is that Japan knew it couldn't compete with American industry and was hoping for a stalemate or some kind of negotiated peace.
The review is quite interesting, although I do fear both the author and the reviewer buy "amateurs talk battles, professionals talk logistics" hook, line and sinker. Things like Stalingrad or Kursk didn't matter because of how many losses happened there; they mattered because who holds the battlefield is a strong psychological statement. Indeed, productive capacity is powerful and important, but it also requires willpower to actually use it.
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"O’Brien discusses the Battle of Midway, where the Japanese lost four aircraft carriers (37 percent of their navy’s aircraft carriers at the time, 22 percent of all carriers they had during the war). "
Mathematically, 11 (well, ~10.8) and 18, respectively. The first one is more like “6, plus 2 that kinda sucked, plus 3 that *really* sucked.” You have to knock off a few fractions of carriers to account for quality.
"The U.S. mostly fought alone against Japan, which won a series of impressive early victories (e.g., Pearl Harbor, the conquest of Singapore) until the decisive Battle of Midway, after which the vastly larger US industrial base outproduced Japan into oblivion."
WTF? This would be news to Australian, New Zealand and British Imperial soldiers who fought in the Pacific, Asia and particularly in Burma. Who do you think the Japanese were imprisoning in Singapore? Oh let's not forget the Chinese holding down a lot of Japanese troops in their country and while they were poorly led they did help the war effort.
"Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom (including the British Empire), and the United States all devoted between 65 and 80 percent of their economic output to the making and arming of aircraft, naval vessels, and anti-aircraft equipment."
This just cannot possibly be true. Total American military spending never reached 65 percent of the economy, much less just the portion devoted to those subsets of military spending.
I enjoyed this review and also the contents of the book itself. Particularly the opportunity cost inflicted on Germany to contest the Allied air campaign is often unappreciated in terms of how many aircraft, how much concrete, and especially how much artillery ended up being of the anti-air variety. Ops losses, too, often go very unappreciated.
Which brings me to something I think I can contribute: a little additional color on the "why battles?" question. I think comparing the lost equipment in specific battles with the total available equipment misleads how we ought to be thinking about that issue and this has been known academically for a couple centuries at least.
Clausewitz, in On War, grappled with that very paradox: "If we only think of the trifling difference which there usually is between victor and vanquished in killed, wounded, prisoners, and artillery lost on the field of battle itself, the consequences which are developed out of this insignificant point seem often quite incomprehensible."
Napoleon explained it thusly: "Frederick took 5,000-6,000 prisoners and captured guns [at the Battle of Leuthen in 1757], but nothing the next day. I did the opposite. ... At Jena [in 1806], basically, what I captured on the battlefield was not much -- somewhere over sixty cannon -- but the following day, at Weimar, at Erfurt, etc. ... This army, beaten and pursued with a sword in its back for more than fifty leagues, is today without artillery, baggage, officers, is reduced to less than two-thirds of what it was eight days ago - worse still - has lost its morale and any confidence in itself."
This is also the conclusion Clausewitz reached. Great battles determine the results of wars not because they cause differential material damage on the battlefield itself, but because they reveal facts that had previously been ambiguous (that one army is stronger than another) which causes certain behaviors to occur that damage the loser of the battle much more than the winner.
In other words, a battle creates circumstances in which you must either win or be destroyed. When you conclude you can't win then you can't keep fighting, since you'll be destroyed. If the enemy persists in trying to fight you then you therefore have no choice but to retreat until circumstances improve.
If you retreat then you must move your forces long distances. If you move your forces long distances then you undergo operational attrition. These ops losses - discarded vehicles and sick and wounded soldiers - are left behind to fall into the enemy's clutches while the enemy pursuing you leaves his own operational losses easily recoverable in his own backfield. This pursuit continues until the defeated force becomes willing to try fighting again, usually not until some time has passed and reinforcements are injected to bolster their strength, or the pursuing force gives up the pursuit (generally because their own ops losses have become intolerably high until their logistical support catches up to them).
So, for instance, the reason decisive battlefield results in France in WW1 were impossible wasn't because "they were only focused on battlefield victories," but because the conqueror on the battlefield couldn't create this kind of pursuit. Local victories were frequently won but could never be converted into an enemy retreat of this type since the victorious pursuer quickly lost force as they went (they couldn't bring their artillery support over the broken terrain after them and their forces marched at the speed of human legs) while the defender could quickly rally themselves in reserve defenses with the delivery of additional troops and guns by train. If anything it's much easier to understand the Western Front through this dynamic (of trying to solve the "can't pursue beaten enemy" problem) than through the dynamic of material production and attrition. After all, the English blockaded Germany's imports quite thoroughly with sea power for several years and yet the deadlock remained.
Discarding the notion of "battles determine the results of wars" as a myth or fairy tale to me seems to go quite too far. Even in the age of decisive battles we see very similar dynamics at play. Austerlitz is universally heralded as one of the most decisive battles ever fought. Yet it was conducted with only 70,000 of the 400,000 men in Napoleon's army, of whom only 2% died in the battle.
To me the great wonder of a book like this isn't that it supplants the traditional narrative, but rather that it reveals some of the mystery of how the traditional narrative has actually always worked without our knowledge. It's not that battles are irrelevant and we've fooled ourselves into thinking they matter. But they are only a small (if very dramatic!) part of a much larger system and only produce their incredible effects in symbiosis with that system. When this symbiosis breaks down (as it did in France in World War One) the battles are, as Ney remarked of Eylau in 1807, "What a massacre! And without result!"
The US was already supplying half of the U.S.S.R.'s aviation fuel needs, including 90% of all high-octane fuel used during the war by the U.S.S.R. Baku's own production wasn't as big a deal as the convoys going to Arkhangelsk, Vladivostok, and around Africa to Iran, and thence up to Russia.
I'm not sure how the Germans would have managed to extract and refine the Baku oil, given the massive distances involved, but I'm not an expert.
TBH, it seems to me that the Germans still might have won had the U.S. not been quite so enthusiastic with lend-lease, or had the Japanese army's "northern plan," which would have involved attacking north into siberia and pinning down Russian troops there, prevailed over the IJN's "strike south" plan...or if Japan had tried to interdict the US/Canadian trans-pacific shipments to Vladivostok at all.
Completely concur that choice matters.
Where? I spot-checked his newsletter and what little he says outside the paywall is hedged well enough, e.g.
[June 22, 2023]
> Of the two ways are looking at this conflict so far, the silliest is that we have any idea of how the Ukrainian campaign this year is going to unfold. It has now been approximately 2 weeks since the first significant western-equipped and trained Ukrainian forces showed up in the front lines (and suffered losses). What have we seen since. Well, the Ukrainians first suffered some losses in engaging with Russian front line forces—though after a few days they changed what they were doing and since then the losses of their most important equipment seems to have slowed significantly. Instead, Ukraine seems to have made the first of what will probably be a number of tactical adjustments this summer. They are now being careful about sending vehicles forward, and instead seem to be focussing on destroying Russian forces from the front lines back to the rear.
Historically all the countries involved in WWII had to carefully balance how many people they drafted versus how many they left home to engage in industrial production, sometimes doing things like taking away men and replacing them with woman who had to be trained up in things like riveting before they could be fully productive. Some countries, like Russia, had to cut much deeper than others like the US.
It seems the book is arguing that this was a mistake and that if they'd just gathered up whatever spare manpower was unemployed they'd have been better off? I'm skeptical.
Does the book argue that the US should have rounded up unemployed people for factory work, rather than lessening the draft? Im not getting that from the review.
This happened from time to time in WWI.
WWI was different. There was basically no possibility of bombing factories. The only way to affect production as such was to blockade overseas shipments.
Not sure what your point is, but at the war's peak over a third of factory workers in the US were women. The unemployment rate dropped to about 1 percent by 1944. Behind the lines, there were more jobs to do than people to do them. Not sure what the numbers of work-capable males in the US who weren't in the military, and who remained unemployed, but I doubt they could have picked up the slack if all the women workers were told to go home and keep house.
Employment of the critical 18-55 YO males was around 98%. Which means everyone except the truly handicapped were working. It was a pride thing. There was almost no social safety net in those days, and if you were begging for food, no one would feed you, they'd point you to the war effort.
During the war, if you were driving through the Sierra Nevada, the US Forest Service rangers would stop cars and 'press the males' into service fighting fires. In the same way, technically its legal for a trial court bailiff to press people right off the street to serve on a jury.
I think we didn't need the draft, we had volunteers who almost didn't make it in to fight the war. An elderly man I knew in the 90s told me that he went down and joined line at the Navy recruiting office on December 8th. He was called up, completed training, and served just one mission as a submariner when the war ended.
Reading this with Ukraine in mind makes me even more pessimistic. Russia’s industrial power is out of reach for Ukraine (the West makes that a condition of aid). Technically, a significant part of Ukraine’s industry is out of reach for Russia, since we’re making their shells, but we’re an unreliable partner.
The minor waggling of the front costs a lot of lives but can’t win the war.
Isnt it rather helpful, because the western economy is much much larger than the russian one?
The western economy is much much larger than Russia's, but not mobilized in any meaningful way. Neither Germany nor the US is likely to prioritize fighting Russia over maintaining social insurance schemes or green energy.
A lot of that gdp advantage is tied up in cheese exports and real estate rather than productive industry.
You don’t think production of cheese is productive?
I don’t think anything in the cheese production process can be easily turned into manufacturing weapons.
Maybe not, but it can be turned into money, which can be turned into weapons.
Weapons made by whom, exactly?
It would be very helpful if we *really* tried to defeat the Russians by increasing our production and getting serious about harming Russian military production (and logistics) by hitting targets in Russia. The one saving grace of the current strategy of "give Ukraine just enough stuff to slow down the Russian advance to a crawl" is that Russia is rapidly burning through its immense Soviet stockpiles. Those stockpiles will run low starting in mid-to-late 2025 (see: Covert Cabal videos). After that, the continued (pyrrhic) success of Putin's invasion will depend on whether he can boost Russia's domestic production enough to exceed the West's half-hearted efforts. (Hopefully, of course, he just says f**k it and makes a much more reasonable peace offer than he's willing to do at the moment)
I can’t see this war lasting beyond 2025. Ukraine is spent. I was hoping the political cost to Putin would be enough to force him to cry off or even topple him entirely. I don’t believe that anymore.
I suspect that the West (including the Biden Admin) isn't really committed to a Ukrainian victory/Russian defeat. Russia losing the war might destabilize the government, which would be a very dangerous situation with unpredictable risks for the West. I think they would be content with a forever war that permanently weakened the Russian military without actually toppling them. So--just enough aid to keep the war going, but not enough to bring it to an end.
This is just speculation on my part, though.
I agree. Rumor has it that Antony Blinken in particular has been extremely concerned about nuclear escalation for the whole war, leading to a very slow increase in things Ukraine is allowed to do, e.g. only after Russia re-invaded near Kharkiv this year did the U.S. allow Ukraine to hit Russian territory with U.S. weapons, and even then only to a depth of ~80 km or something. So they want Russia not to lose too badly lest Putin follow through on his vague nuclear threats, or lest Putin be toppled by less predictable people who could also do something... nuclear.
But this approach puts Ukraine in a very tough spot. A loss of aid could be much worse[1], but in the current situation a lot of Ukrainians die for want of an armored APC, or of permission to hit airfields that launch planes that vaporize Ukrainians with KAB-500 glide bombs, or of enough shells to hit available targets.
[1] Remember the ICC's initial indictment for kidnapping children en masse? Or Bucha or the devastation in Mariupol (and Russia's claims that Bucha didn't happen, that they don't fire on civilian targets, etc)? Or consider this Z-warrior's commentary on the need to kill 10% of Ukrainians on Russian State TV (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5yvjyJdDW0). No, most Ukrainians really really REALLY don't want Russia on their land, and western weapons mostly stop them, if only barely.
Do you think the Russians do not know about Second Strike capabilities of the West?
The Russians certainly know about the second strike *capabilities* of the West. They probably also have strong opinions backed up by professional intelligence about the *will* of the West to engage in a second strike.
In your opinion, what sort of second strike do you actually think the West would actually implement, if Putin were to launch half a dozen thermonuclear missiles against logistical centers in Ukraine, while telling the West, "Note that we have carefully not attacked any targets in the United States, France, or England. And we won't, so long as none of you attack any targets in Russia. Otherwise your cities burn with ours"?
Would it change if Russia attacked logistics targets in Poland or Romania? Do you think the US is going to trade San Diego for Katowice?
How confident are you that Vladimir Putin shares your opinion and your certainty on this?
ETA: Obligatory Yes Minister Ref: https://youtu.be/QgkUVIj3KWY
Zelensky has openly complained about it a few times.
It's not an especially radical idea: anyone looking at the amount of military equipment Western countries sent compared to their available stocks can see that Ukraine's allies are doing the bare minimum to keep it alive.
For quick comparison, Al Jazeera claimed that NATO had spent roughly $80 billion on total aid in February 2023 (so after on year of war). NATO's 2022 budget was $1.18 *trillion*. That's 6% of NATO's yearly budget spent on defending Ukraine, a lot of it in the form of surplus equipment that would have been replaced anyway.
That's not nothing, but it's nowhere near "existential war" levels of expenditure. If I was Ukrainian, I would have some fair amount of resentment towards my supposed allies.
Ukraine isn’t in NATO, so NATO Allies doing the equivalent spending of 6% of the NATO budget to aid Ukraine is pretty generous.
I don’t really think Ukraine could govern those eastern provinces (without some nasty ethnic cleansing), and a push by Russia towards Kiev would cause escalation, so probably inevitable the war ends somewhere along the lines Kissinger predicted in 2022, no matter when it ends. Dragging this out just to set Russia back a few more years, when they weren’t much of a real rival to begin with, seems rather dubious. But I suppose the western leaders may have thought Russia was poised to become more important in the near future. Or everyone’s crooked and Ukraine is a grift, like some on the American right say. In most of those scenarios, a Ukrainian would certainly feel used and abused by the West, more so than had we pushed for a quick peace to my way of thinking, but national pride is important so maybe there was no great option.
NATO is spending 6% of the NATO budget to help Ukraine destroy the Russian Army, without any NATO blood being shed. Since more like 60% of the NATO budget is devoted to making sure NATO can destroy the Russian Army at need, and with much bloodshed, that's actually a bargain.
> more so than had we pushed for a quick peace to my way of thinking
Let's not mince words here: when you say "pushed for a quick peace", you mean "either strongarmed Ukraine into accepting massive loss of territory or refused so send them weapons and let Russia annex them".
This isn't a "both sides are making this worse" situation, despite how much nationalists like to pretend it is. Russia could have had peace at any point by pulling its troops out. Ukraine is fighting an existential war.
Do you think Biden/Harris is possibly capable of calibrating aid with that degree of precision? The problem with complex machinations is that they assume levels of competence rarely found in practice
There are some very smart people working in the field of military intelligence.
No it just makes the war last much longer.
Under existing conditions, neither side can materially affect production of war materiel for the other side. Nor can they affect shipping and distribution of the materiel to the front. Note that a lot of the battles have centered over just that.
The remaining means of changing the balance in a large way would be to kill or otherwise render unusable enough of the fighting population (mostly men) on one side or the other that the materiel goes unused for lack of operators.
Which is a problem for Ukraine because its population is 1/4 that of Russia.
More like 1/7, last official census was in 2001, and population was steadily declining (due to migration and low birth rates) since the collapse of the USSR
Source?
Both Russia and Ukraine have been losing population the past couple decades, but I don't believe either has lost 15% of their population and I'm skeptical that the decline has been significantly greater for Ukraine. The CIA World Factbook, which I am pretty sure does not just quote 20-year-old census reports, gives Russia's prewar population as 142,320,790 (https://web.archive.org/web/20220218220950/https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/russia/) and Ukraine's as 43,745,640 (https://web.archive.org/web/20220220235402/https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/ukraine/)
That's 3.3:1 in Russia's favor, not 7:1.
Let me stand corrected - below I would argue that the total population ration is 1:5.
The 1:7 ratio is (my opinion) applies to 'fighting population / men ages 18-60' (and thus more relevant to this discussion; but harder prove with easily accessible sources).
So, the data:
- The most recent census in Russia was in 2020, and so 2023 Russian statistical yearbook (https://eng.rosstat.gov.ru/Publications/document/74811) is fairly accurate; it puts Russian population at 146.5 million, notably excluding Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions.
The CIA Factbook for Ukraine (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/ukraine/#people-and-society) gives total population as 35.6 mullion - but that seems to include Crimea (footnote for the population pyramid), as well as Donetsk / Luhansk ('Major urban areas - Population' section).
Per Russian census, Crimea (+ Sevastopol) is about 2.4 million, we can estimate Donetsk + Luhansk (+ other Donbass towns) population at ~2 million, and subtract it from Ukraine total: 35.6 - 2.4 - 2 = 31.2 m
Then, there are a lot of refugees - Germany and Poland have about 1 m each, other EU countries combined probably have another million (source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1312584/ukrainian-refugees-by-country/). So seems fairly reasonable to subtract at least ~3 m (out of total ~4.5 refugees who went to countries other than Russia) from Ukrainian total: 31.2 - 3 = 28.2
Also we need to add Donetsk+Luhansk to Russian side: 146.5 + 2 = 148.5 m
Thus, the total population ratio (within the country / on the government-controlled territory) is 1 : 5.2
As to why I think (but can't prove) that 'fighting age' population ratios are closer to 1:7:
1) war losses - probably, both Ukraine and Russia lost ~0.7m men each (killed and severely wounded), which percentage-wise affects Ukraine more
2) a lot of Ukrainians were semi-permanently/seasonally working (sometimes, illegally) in the EU, with their families living in Ukraine - so the population (and men population in particular) probably was over-estimated in the first place
Worth noting not all Western countries have given that same set of conditions - some say Ukraine can do whatever it wants with their weapons/equipment - and the US has already relaxed their guidelines somewhat.
A lot of Russia's drones and missiles are actually made in Iran, which is out of reach for Ukraine but not the US, if it chooses.
We can dream of an America where the state department actually acts against America's enemies.
If you got such America, in 10 years you'd be ranting about how invading Iran was a globalist neocon dream, *real* conservatives have always been isolationists, "just asking questions" on whether pride parades is Teheran was worth killing so many country boys, talk about globohomo etc.
The state dept mostly acts on the premise that you can't just fight your way to your desired outcome, bc such is reality, and when people like you chose to ignore it, it went so badly you had to rewrite history and pretend it was never your idea
No, they are not. Russia bought a certain type of drone (Shaheed) earlier in the war, then improved the design and started producing the more advanced versions (Geran) domestically.
FWIW I did a blog post about this: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/scottish-defence-policy-4-drones
https://m.jpost.com/international/article-814085
Or the West could say to Iran "instead of selling to Russia, sell them to us, we'll pay 20% more". This not only reduces Russian supplies but increased Ukrainian supplies at the same time.
The Islamic Republic of Iran exists, and the west has not tried to overthrow it by force, thus accepting its existence.
This just gives Iran money it can use to build more factories. In general giving your enemies money to make missiles is a bad idea.
"This just gives Iran money it can use to build more factories" -- this is not true, as "just" implies that it's the only effect it has. Clearly it has other effects too, such as reducing the supply of weapons to Russia and increasing it to Ukraine.
" In general giving your enemies money to make missiles is a bad idea."
Russia is *right now* invading a European country. The last time Iran did that was over 2400 years ago. I don't see Iran as an enemy of Europe, certainly not as much as Russia is. I see it as a country currently loosely aligned with Russia and China but which could possibly be persuaded to act differently. That's why it was non-optimal when Trump tore up the Iran unclear deal.
You think the country that calls America "the great Satan", bombs American troops across the world, bombs American allies and (via proxies) western container ships in the red sea, and has ceremonial government "death to America" chants isn't an enemy? Whut
I believe I was being clear when I used the phrase "enemy of Europe". America isn't Europe.
>Russia is *right now* invading a European country.
Iran attacked Israel with drones in April and gearing up for the real deal right now. Yes, here in Europe Ukraine seems more important than Israel, but I think seen from the US it is not so.
...and Hitler could have said to Roosevelt "Don't ship stuff to the Brits. We'll pay more for it."
No, I don't think that would work. Some elements in the West are fine with Iran having more money, but a lot aren't. I mean, why have sanctions against Iran if you're just going to give them money instead?
Iran and Russia are very old allies, going back before WWII.
In fact they were such good friends the Soviets parked their army in Iran to make sure they had access to allied lend-lease goods, killing hundreds of Iranians in the process. Then they trained and supplied Kurdish and Azerbaijanian separatists who killed several thousand more Iranians. Only after the Allies applied significant political pressure did the Soviets pull out.
Really? When's the last time they fought on the same side in a war, then?
google it ... my college prof who grew up in a Siberian Gulag when released to fight against the west, was taken to Iran where the Soviets planned to assemble an army. He promptly defected to the west.
I was thinking the same thing.
The Ukraine-Russia war looks more like WW1. Both parties can feed new armies into the meat grinder forever. Since none are able to take out the other's production of new war material, or the delivery systems (roads and rail mainly).
With the important difference from WW1 that none of the antagonists has the ability to starve the population on the other side into submission, either.
> Both parties can feed new armies into the meat grinder forever.
Both parties have a below-replacement fertility rate (even if we don't count the losses in war), so they can't.
Estimates I've seen posit that at the current rate of attrition, Russia will run out of even Soviet-era tanks within two years.
The war will not last forever simply because the belligerents don't have the resources to keep it up. Ukraine can compensate by leaning on foreign donations (and so far western powers have managed to prop it up with mostly spare equipment), Russia has no such luck.
What Russia has in excess is *manpower*, but once they run out of air defense systems that will only mean more meat for the meat grinder.
China has refused to sell Russia weapons for use in Ukraine.
Read this:
https://www.bbc.com/news/60571253
https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2024/05/behind-the-scenes-chinas-increasing-role-in-russias-defense-industry?lang=en
Crazy as it sounds, trends would have Russians running out of men first.
Those “trends” sounding suspiciously similar to old Wehrmacht propaganda about loss ratios.
Only in the sense that Putin considers mobilization politically sensitive and so is relying mostly on "volunteers" (who are willing to fight because they're poor, and are paid $2000/month plus bonuses -- so concepts akin to Bryan Caplan's "make desertion fast" may still be relevant even today). If you're trusting Ukraine's numbers for Russian casualties―don't. This video provides good casualty estimates:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeB4OLF14lw
(Edit: hopefully Putin is either correct about mobilization destabilizing Russia, or believes it strongly enough to not do very much of it and to stop the war in the next year or two. If Putin does destabilize Russia via mobilization though, that could be a major future headache, e.g. due to nukes falling into the hands of random Russian rebels)
Edit 2: another video on casualties & stuff just dropped on a different channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bnuUy71Qik
Yes, agreed. Though it might be wishful thinking, I also wonder how many if any Russian nukes are operational, given Russia's problems with maintenance and corruption.
I do wonder how much they would have to worry about mobilization being the occasion for a coup.
Believing that requires believing that the side with a huge overmatch in artillery, both by barrel count and shell production, is taking ~3x as many casualties. Artillery has been the single biggest cause of casualties in modern war, and the Ukraine war is much more stationary and advantageous to artillery bombardment than most modern wars. By the same token, if you believe Russian sources, they are inflicting something along the lines of 6-10:1 casualty ratios, which would mean something like ~1 million dead Ukrainians. The point being you shouldn't believe official estimates from either side, especially when they are contradicted by well known evidence.
NATO artillery has longer range and higher precision than Russian artillery.
This is (part of) why Russia has been shelling cities that hard: they don't have the accuracy to hit a single target reliably, so they need saturation bombing to reliably destroy enemy positions.
By contrast, NATO 155mm canons often fire rounds which deploy guided submunitions (eg BONUS shells) which can accurately hit small targets at long distances.
The artillery gap does exist (especially during the period where Ukraine suffered from a shell shortage), but the accuracy difference makes up for it.
As for the casualty ratios, I don't know what to tell you. There have been extensive OSINT reviews on the subject. Photos of blown up tanks on Twitter don't leave much to interpretation. Neither do filed inheritance claims on deceased Russian soldiers.
According to OSINT loss ratios, Ukraine was inflicting massive disproportionate casualties while defending in Bakhmut. But then it needed to carry out the 2023 summer offensive because this gave it an opportunity to inflict disproportionate casualties on the Russians. But then it made more sense to be on the defensive because Ukraine was inflicting massive, disproportionate casualties defending in the Donbass. But actually they needed to attack near Kursk because that let them inflict way more casualties than in Adviika.
Have you looked at Russian-collected data on Ukrainian losses? And Ukrainian claims for inheritance / petitions to award medals posthumously (which incidentally makes family eligible for higher payout)?
Also note that Ukraine has a strictly enforced ban on publishing anything that can help the enemy (including any losses), and that Twitter/Facebook are not easy to access from Russia (so for Russian drone footage you need to go to Telegram / subscribe to the right channels there).
My personal impression is that losses are roughly 1:1, with Ukraine having less (but somewhat better) artillery and more drones, and Russia having cruise/ballistic missiles that can strike anywhere in Ukraine, plus JDAMs close to front lines...
This is misleading for several reasons. Russia is obviously using up old stockpiles(why wouldn't you?), but they are also steadily increasing production of new tanks. They are already producing huge numbers, and so by the time the old soviet stockpiles run out, they are already meeting the demands with new production. Secondly, the demand is highly flexible. Tanks are useful, but not as essential as things like drones and artillery. Russia has a ton of tanks, so it's happy to spend them generously. They'd rather lose tanks than men. If tanks became scarce, a more conservative use of tanks on the frontline would not be disasterous.
This is all assuming that the war will last for years, which I highly doubt. The Kursk offensive is the ukrainian battle of the bulge. Unless something massive happens, the ukrainians are pretty much done.
"They are already producing huge numbers, and so by the time the old soviet stockpiles run out, they are already meeting the demands with new production"
Citation very much needed. Everything I've seen, says that Russian tank production is in the low to mid *tens* per year. E.g. https://www.iiss.org/en/online-analysis/military-balance/2024/06/russian-t-90m-production-less-than-meets-the-eye/
Meanwhile, photographically confirmed Russian tank losses now stand at 3,309. https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html
If you think those sources you are providing are credible, then I'm not sure there is really any point in talking to you. I will make one attempt though.
If we stick to western propaganda, I have seen western propaganda ridiculing Russia for only producing 250 new and 600 refurbished tanks per year in 2022. These were not Russian numbers, they were western propaganda, and the lowest estimates I can remember seeing. Even assuming that was accurate, they have since opened new production lines and are working on increasing production further. Tens of tanks a year is like a stupid joke.
If you look at whatever source of losses you want, disregard the numbers, but look at the proportions. What you are seeing is that more and more of the tanks lost are new T-90M. So Russia is still throwing tanks around like candy, unlike the Ukrainians who rarely use them, but they are increasingly of new production. This should tell you all you need to know.
As to the exact number of losses, it's hard to know for sure, but keep in mind that you can take a picture of a banana and send it to oryx, and they will count it as a russian tank lost, not just once, but multiple times.
The Ukrainians make sure to publish videos of any and all destruction of Russian material they have video of. Furthermore, most destruction is done by FPV drones, and so they do have footage of most if not all. Btw, it often requires multiple FPV drones to destroy a tank, and they often publish multiple videos of the same tank. Many tanks that are seemingly destroyed are later recovered and repaired. Anyway, judging from this footage, it seems the Russians lose a few tanks a week. They almost certainly lost at a higher rate early in the war, when Ukraine had more weapons left, such as javelins.
All things considered, it seems highly likely that the losses are proportional to production, which would fit well with the Russian strategy of waging a long term, limited, war of attrition.
As a more neutral party, I have to say links were provided, and the pages don't seem to be grossly wrong in any way I can see. Perhaps it is obvious to those more familiar with them, but I don't know that Oryx or IISS have reputations which one should take into account, such as tabloid sites. Are they tabloids?
On the other hand, you're saying, un-cited, that Russia is producing 250 new tanks per year. Could you cite something that has a different number?
It makes sense, of course, for Russia to use its least useful tanks first, if they will do the job, so you have more useful types in reserve.
https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2022/11/02/the-barren-barrels-en
Here is the source for the 250 + 600 claim. Note that I do not believe this to be accurate even for 2022, certainly not in 2024, but as you can see from the article, this is a very anti-Russian article. If even these kind of articles claim these numbers, then suggesting anything lower is pretty ridiculous.
Oryx is purportedly keeping track of losses, but they are explicitly anti-Russian. They famously require very little evidence to count something as a Russian loss.
Lostarmour is the Russian equivalent, not sure how accurate they are.
The IISS page you linked states the annual Russian production of new tanks is between 250-350, depending on how many are refurbished from stocks that can't be verified by satellite imagery. Top of the line T90Ms are not the only tank that exists in the Russian arsenal. Pre-war figures show Uralvagonzavod MBT production at 1,291 units from 2007-2014, or ~160 per year. So I think roughly doubling that for war time production is reasonable.
Every reliable source I've looked at also says that Russia's production of new armored vehicles is far lower than their loss rates in Ukraine. Once Russia runs out of old Soviet era tanks, they won't be able to launch any more major ground offensives, so militarily, it makes sense to prolong the Ukraine War because the tide could turn in 1 - 2 years.
Putin is very reluctant to use conscripts in his war. He's no doubt aware of what happened to a previous Russian leader 3 years into an unpopular war in 1917.
I think you're overestimating Russia's production capabilities right now. Russia is heavily reliant on North Korea for shells, China for microelectronics, and Iran for drones. Their industrial power is in shambles due to neglect, corruption, and no access to Western talent and capital to fix it thanks to the sanctions. There is no question Russia has much more people and Soviet equipment, but their economic dysfunction is quite apparent.
This is pure delusion, western propaganda of the worst sort. China, yes, everyone is dependant on china, especially the US. This is only a problem in so far as your relationship with China is poor, or your supply lines to China are vulnerable.
North Korea? Russia bought some artillery shells. Definetly useful, yes, but not vital.
Iran and Turkey, no. They bought a few Iranian drones early on. That's about it. They are sending weapons to Iran now, not recieving them.
Overall, Russian millitary production is far superior in efficiency to the western one. Look at the recent example of the 52 000 dollar thrash bin. The MIC is made to suck money out of governments and transfer it to shareholders. They produce ridiculously expensive boondoggles in tiny amounts. This is why NATO is out of artillery shells and unable to produce them in sufficient quantities.
"and Iran and Turkey for drones" -- which drones is Turkey supplying Russia with?
That was a dumb mistake, Turkey is only supplying Ukraine with drones. I updated the post.
Strongly disagree. The West can --- and has --- limited Russia's production. Not with bombs, but with sanctions.
The sanctions are a minor incovenience at worst. In many ways, it has helped improve things in Russia. The 2014 sanctions were more of a problem, then, but now sanctions are a non-issue for the millitary.
Wait your argument is that sanctions have been GOOD for Russia?
Not a net good, no. But there has been positive effects as well as negative. Overall, the 2022 sanctions have not had a very significant effect, in part because the 2014 sanctions warned and helped prepare and train Russia in how to deal with them. Ultimately, Russia has every natural resource there is, as well as a large, well educated work force. There is very little they can't make themselves, and they share a land border with China. Sanctions are never going to break them, certainly not while non-NATO countries keep trading as usual.
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2024/01/14/7437218/
Apparently, Russia can't produce semiconductor chips, and next year they may be able to produce chips equivalent to those we made in 1996. This seems like a significant thing they can't make themselves.
It's true that they can't produce the state of the art chips used in the newest phones and PCs. Afaik, they are only produced a couple of places in the world. These kind of chips are irrelevant to the war. They do produce the kind of chips used in their weapons though. Additionally, so does China.
Sanctions haven't even stopped them from being an energy exporter. To *Europe*, even, as well as the rest of the world.
Look up the ball bearing crisis that is crippling Russian railroads. They have shit for roads, so that is massively important.
Well, whatever truth there might be to it, it certainly isn't enough of a crisis to stop them from being very effective on the frontline. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and so on. If there were so many troubles with production and transport, you would think it would have an effect on the battlefield. I guess you can argue that it is having an affect, and that they would would defeat the Ukrainians even quicker if it didn't have.
I lean towards most of these supposed issues being vastly exaggerated by wishful thinking from western propagandists.
Set aside the unreliability of the West for a moment. If the industrial capacity of both sides is out of reach, then the question is which threshold is reached first: (1) Russia killing so many Ukrainian soldiers that Ukraine literally can’t fight anymore, or (2) Ukraine killing so many Russian soldiers that Russia folds for political reasons. I would think (2) happens quicker than (1) if industrial capacity is out of reach.
Of course, the West IS unreliable, so the real question is whether Russia can outlast Western support before it must fold for political reasons. A lot of that turns on the next US election (IMO) and not on any other consideration.
Huh? The question is which side suffers enough manpower losses that it loses the will to fight any more. Why would Russia politically collapse before Ukraine, a country that has 1/3rd the fighting age male population? Western support is also largely secondary to this, because the West is not supplying Ukraine with the most critical resource in a war of attrition, manpower.
“Folding for political reasons” doesn’t require outright collapse. Compare with the Vietnam War - the US’s position was still viable when it exited, but political pressure at home led it to fold earlier than its position in the war dictated.
Ukraine’s threshold for losing the will to fight is necessarily much higher than Russia’s, because the war is an existential risk for Ukraine and mere empire building for Russia. Russia’s large manpower advantage counteracts this, but only so far.
The west is not able to supply a number of important systems regardless of willingness. Stocks have been depleted, and production is designed for peacetime, with very low volumes. The US is out of effective, low investment methods of supporting Ukraine. They either have to do some very serious escalation, or give up.
Ukrainians are now losing 5 men for every Russian, and "recruiting" is so unpopular that recruiters are attacked and harassed by civilians, and hundreds of military veichles are being burned by them. While Russian attitudes towards the war have been somewhat tepid so far, the Ukrainian incursion in Kursk is really helping bolster Russian support for the war. There is little chance of Ukraine outlasting Russia in any way that matters.
"Ukrainians are now losing 5 men for every Russian"
This is unbelievable, in a literal sense - not to be believed. Got a source for this outrageous statistic?
I have no idea why you would think this unreasonable, unless you are ideologically motivated and bought into the frankly racist idea of the slavic untermensch mindlessly throwing themselves into the meat grinder in endless meatwaves or whatever you call it.
As for evidence, well, very roughly 5:1 seems to be where a number of different sources and approaches converge, although it should be said that there are large error bars, and obviously it also varies somewhat over time.
The best evidence is probably from sources that study things like the names on war memorials, mentions in social media, graves in graveyards, data from hospitals etc. This alone would be a little weak perhaps, but it matches well with numbers of dead bodies exchanged, proportions of POWs on each side etc, numbers of casualties in various units given by ukrainians in interviews, official Ukrainian numbers given combined with the fact that about 9 in 10 are listed as MIA instead of KIA, and someone who did the math on the budget for payment to wounded and dead soldiers in Ukraine. It also what you would expect given the relative disparity in firepower, with the Russians having at least a 5 to 1 advantage in artillery and drones, which together produce the large majority of casualties. Add to this the well known difficulties of the Ukrainians in evacuating wounded from the frontline.
Finally, all this lines up with a statement from Putin in a recent interview. Now I know you are not going to take his word for it, many people genuinely seem to think that everything said in Russia is a lie, but he actually has a pretty good record of being truthful in direct statements of facts like this. I would perhaps not place too much emphasis on it alone, but in this case everything adds up.
I don't have the time to give you links for everything, but here is a discussion of some of it: https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/bombshell-report-claims-russian-casualties
Oh, ok. No further questions.
If it would have been 1:1 loss ratio, what would you think of the rest of the argument?
Which part? Putin being honest? "They're not there" (Russian troops in Ukraine in 2014), "We're not going to invade, what garbage is that" - that Putin? "Western propaganda", "racism" as the first "argument" he goes for?
There's no argument there, just a gish gallop of shit, which is typical for a pro-Russian troll. They are not here to have a reasoned back-and-forth with you, they are here to keep throwing shit at the wall until everything is covered in it and you no longer know where up or down is. The only way to win is not to play.
"the West makes that a condition of aid" -- Britain doesn't. Britain is quite happy fro Ukraine to fire Storm Shadow missiles into Russia, for example.
The burn rate of Russian AFVs is an order of magnitude higher than their current production capacity though. Or their estimated 2025 production capacity.
Especially tanks are nowhere near as dominant or indestructible on the battlefield as they were in WW2. They are vastly more vulnerable now.
A high burn rate of tanks ultimately means that a high tempo offensive would simply have to be paused until more tanks are built up. Few commentators consider it this way and assume a temporary tank shortage would mean an immediate end to the war.
At current production rates, rebuilding even half of their tank losses would take Russia about thirty years. If a "temporary" tank shortage results in an immediate thirty-year pause in the war, I think Ukraine would count that as a win.
Going by OSINT predictions Russia has already lost the war three times from their “massive losses”.
> A high burn rate of tanks ultimately means that a high tempo offensive would simply have to be paused until more tanks are built up.
Unless Ukraine forces the tempo to stay up. The Kursk offensive is a good example of a maneuver that *imposes* a high-tempo response from Russian forces.
Nothing from the Ukrainian side suggests they were benefiting from enduring high tempo operations either, given their material and manpower constraints.
But Ru is highly dependent on RRs. Notice that Ukraine has systematically been attacking transport and communication infrastructure in western Ru. Also, Ru has focused on extractive technologies. They don't make their own machine tools. And they don't have the capabilities to manufacture critical items like ball bearings. They were getting machine tools and ball bearings from Europe, especially Germany, until the embargo took effect. They're still getting machine tools through a chain of cutout countries and companies, but their manufacturing capacity can't keep up with their war needs (witness them bringing 1950s-era tanks out of mothballs to push into the meat grinder).
https://www.newsweek.com/russian-railway-collapse-sanctions-ukraine-war-1935049
Ukraine has invaded a significant chunk of Kursk (Russia). And blown up several oil refineries.
Many Russian attacks now seem to contain more civilian trucks painted green than actual military kit.
It will be interesting to monitor what will happen with Ukrainian invasion into Kursk.
From one side no one expects a miracle. Ukrainians probably will be expelled. But it hasn't happened immediately so it opens more cans of worms.
Russia cannot leave it as it is. It needs to relocate significant resources to stop this fire burning. It can lead to less resources available for direct attacks in Ukraine and that is a benefit to Ukraine.
The psychological benefits can be questionable but they are very impressive. All this talk about the first non-nuclear country to actually attacking a nuclear power and getting away with it without nuclear retaliation. It threatens to overthrow the whole doctrine. Of course, only happening due to specific circumstances. And yet, it shows that the threat of nuclear weapons can be limited in certain circumstances.
So far Ru appears to through great contortions to avoid calling it “invasion”. First they declared “emergency” in Kursk region, then “counter-terrorist operation”. If it’s not a foreign invasion but just a bunch of terrorists, no “red lines” crossed, no nukes need to be involved.
Let me remind you that the United States did not use nuclear weapons to attack Iraq or Vietnam... Even if Mexico had attacked the United States, it is unlikely that the United States would have used nuclear weapons...
“Let me remind you”
No, please don’t. I know what you are and why you’re here and have no interest in any conversation with you. Good bye.
Which strongly suggests that if they are forced to withdraw from the Donbas, they'll go through great contortions to avoid calling it a "defeat", rather than going nuclear.
This is a very important thing for the world to know.
Yes, this was likely one of many reasons Zelenskyy took this huge risk. To make the Cowardly Lion of the West feel less cowardly.
Ukraine is threatened with extinction. I'm not sure it matters to them whether the extinction would be accomplished through nuclear weapons or conventional. So in their circumstances, attacking a nuclear power in an attempt to show the war is too expensive, and thus has a chance to stop it, seems rational.
The North Vietnamese had no hope of bombing the US but they still won in the end. There's decades and decades of Cold War proxy wars which are a much better analogy for Ukraine than WW2 would be.
Ukraine doesn't have to win. It just has to *not lose* for long enough to make Russia decide it's not worth it.
The question that occurred to my is: What could the west do to make it much more difficult for Russia to supply its troops fighting in Ukraine? Why are any bridges still standing? Why isn’t every Russian controlled road or port mined using remotely deployed mines? The US had the technology to mine Japanese ports remotely in WWII, we should have it or be able to develop it very quickly today. It does not matter how many tanks and artillery shells that Russia can produce, if they cannot deploy them to Ukraine.
The question you are asking is, "why has the West not declared war on Russia?". The things you describe, are all acts of war.
The answer to the question you are asking, should be really blindingly obvious. In the "brighter than ten thousand suns" sense of the word "obvious".
Russian production is unreachable for the Ukrainians bc we refuse to give them long distance weapons.
Ultimately it relies on very few, foreign built factories. A missile could easily destroy them, and seriously enforcing sanctions could make them truly irreplaceable.
Similarly, we are unreliable partners bc we insist to deliver our surplus stock rather than cash, and even that in small tranches. Congress could have wired the Ukrainians some huge sum before the 2022 election and let them shop around the world for shells, drones, tanks etc, thus making the support Republican-proof
I like the review! It has interesting facts, presented clearly.
When I try to think of how to apply this to other wars, what I'm left with is: "Wow, it's actually pretty bad to have bombers dropping bombs on your factories! Try not to get in that situation!" which seems sort of obvious, but it sounds like there was a prevailing view that disagreed with it. (And it sounds like the Germans' bombing campaign against the British wasn't very effective; is that just because there were fewer bombers?)
As I understand it, German bombing raids during the Battle of Britain were mainly focused on trying to harm civilian targets more generally, as opposed to directly attacking industrial or military infrastructure, partially because attacking a specific target with World War II-era bomber technology is pretty difficult to do. As Bret Devereaux notes on his blog, "in 1944 the allies attempted from May to November in a series of raids to destroy an oil plant in Leuna, Germany. The plant was 1.2 square miles in total size and yet 84% of all bombs missed."
https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/
I think that blog post and this are actually in quite a lot of tension, since the conclusion there is that strategic airpower is severely overrated in its ability to win wars via halting production, whereas the entire thesis here seems to rest on the use of strategic airpower to do that.
I think we can, if not square the circle, at least soften the edges, but noting that Devereaux is mostly arguing that moral bombing is ineffective, with mention of destroying industry being more equivocal - Devereaux says "The opponent could, after all, react, dispersing and protecting industry, limiting the impact of bombing campaigns. Industrial bombing thus achieved something, but it is unclear if it achieved anything to be worth the tremendous investment in vast fleets of bombers necessary to do it", while O'Brien seems to have a higher estimate of the costs of hardening against bombing, and so judges it worth the investment. Devereaux also gives more focus to worries about later proxy wars, where the industrial base may be politically out of reach, which wasn't an issue during WWII.
I think they're also in agreement about the value of tactical/operational airpower
I think that tension is less an actual disagreement on the facts and more about the particular way Devereaux defines "strategic airpower;" a definition that seems to be something of an Isolated Demand for Rigour in many cases.
In particular, he's very focused on airpower accomplishing things *all on its own.* It must win the war, or at least produce significant shifts at the strategic level to properly count as "strategic airpower" by his lights; furthermore it must do it with little to no help from naval or land forces. Thus the things that matter generally don't count, and the things that count generally don't matter.
To be fair, this is actually a perfectly reasonable frame when talking about terror bombing. Terror bombing almost universally seems to occur in isolation from land or naval operations. If you were bombing civilian centres because you, for example, wanted to displace civilians so as to interfere with your enemies operations in advance of a ground assault, that would neither be terror bombing nor strategic airpower. It's only terror bombing if the impact on civilian morale is the entire goal: a purely strategic effect, not a operational or tactical one.
It's a less reasonable frame when talking about industrial production, which appears to be the focus of HTWWW. While it's pretty obvious that disruptions to production can have major strategical effects, those effects are generally felt (in some distance and attenuated sense) on the battlefield. You don't disrupt tank production because your opponent having fewer tanks is a terminal goal, you disrupt tank production they don't have those tanks at their disposal, meaning they're operationally limited to actions that require fewer tanks, meaning you can create a tactical advantage where the rubber meets the road (or the tread meets the mud as the case may be). In Devereaux's sense, it only seem to count as "strategic airpower" if the bombing substantially alters the wartime economy on its own, without relying on how the alterations ramify down to the battlefield. The bombing campaigns were part of a broader strategic array along with naval shipping disruptions and battlefield attrition, and thus not "pure" airpower.
Perhaps I'm doing Devereaux a disservice here: I'm very fond of that blog in general and that post in particular, but I think the discussion of bombing to target industry is the weakest part of it. He also focuses almost exclusively on Europe while largely ignoring the Pacific where, (for obvious reasons) aircraft's effects on supply chains were apt to be much more pronounced.
So I don't really consider that post the book (as reported by this review) to be so much in tension as talking past each other. It's not clear to me that there's an actual substantive disagreement so much as different ways of conceptualizing similar sets of facts.
Devereaux's main argument is specifically against the alarmingly prevalent position that a war can be won by, in essence, terror bombing alone. Degrading industrial production makes the conventional land battles much easier to win, but they do still need to happen, so back when air forces were a new idea, that sort of benefit was a less useful argument for demanding budget and clout than the dream of making other branches of the military completely irrelevant.
You probably could win a war by terror bombing alone if you used nuclear weapons to do it. Hard to fight back when everyone's dead. :/
I don't think it is really possible to win most wars through the use of nuclear weapons alone unless you are trying to destroy Monaco or the Vatican. The number of bombs you would need to use to actually destroy the productivity of most nations would just mean everyone loses.
here's how I see it:
Thesis (post ww1 thinking): wars will be won primarily by strategic bombing, because bombers will be so terrible and unstoppable that they will compel the bombed nation to surrender. Sort of like how we think about nuclear missiles today.
Antithesis: despite all the heavy bombing, Germany did not surrender, and in fact increased its arms production as the war went on. The nation which most directly effected the war in Europe was the USSR, which made no attempt at all to do strategic bombing. Strategic bombing was tried again in Vietnam, even more heavily, and again failed. It was all a complete waste.
Synthesis: Strategic bombing alone can't force people to surrender, but it can dramatically affect their industrial production, to the point where their ground army loses effectiveness. That is (as I understand it) basically the argument made in this book.
Some of his arguments are about labelling airpower as "strategic". Namely, using it as a separate arm of the military with its own strategy.
But airpower, and especially "strategic airpower" isn't strategic in the sense of e.g. the naval blockade in the Napoleonic wars. It is at most operational, in that it affects the logistics of any given operation.
"Strategic" airpower does come into play in e.g. the American Strategic Air Command, whose mission was to drop nuclear bombs on the USSR. That was the whole strategy as far as I can tell; a follow up land invasion wasn't really planned as such.
I think German bombing raids weren't focused at all. The Luftwaffe had no staff to identify and prioritize targets for bombing. Before the war, Luftwaffe planning and training had focused on supporting army operations. Goering gave little guidance, while prewar doctrine called for targeting airfields, aircraft industry, ports, shipping, and harbor facilities. Luftflotte 2 under Kesselring mostly followed the doctrine, while Luftflotte 3 (Sperrle) focused on general industrial targets in the London area. Neither seems to have paid any attention to attacking Royal Navy bases or ships, even though defeat of the Royal Navy would be essential to an invasion, which was supposedly the objective of the whole operation.
"As I understand it, German bombing raids during the Battle of Britain were mainly focused on trying to harm civilian targets more generally, as opposed to directly attacking industrial or military infrastructure"
During the Battle of Britain, bombing raids were specifically directed at RAF airfields with the intention of gaining air superiority for the Sealion invasion. The story goes (but I see we are in the mode of saying all we know is wrong) that a British raid on Berlin stung Goering so much (the "you may call me Meyer" story) that he ordered a switch to bombing London, thus relieving the pressure on the RAF and starting the Blitz. This has been seen as fortuitous, as the RAF could not have lasted much longer.
My understanding was that the Berlin raid was specifically intended as a stunt to provoke the Germans into switching to targeting cities rather than airfields. I can't remember where I saw that, though.
The high-level feint and counter-feint behind a lot of the actions taken during the war makes figuring out precisely who intended what a hard task.
It’s a lot easier if you aren’t dodging AA and fighters! If you have total air superiority you can vaporize specific stuff pretty easily. Hence, I imagine, why Germany spent all its money on fighters.
From what I've read they started off by bombing ports, as being big enough targets.
But the ports were pretty well defended. They did manage to badly damage a couple of them though.
Then (via what most think of as accident), cities got bombed. And they switched to attacking the cities, mostly London. Churchill at the time was quite relieved, because doing significant damage to London with what they could bring over was more or less impossible. If they had kept up on the ports and the radar stations, it would have had a much larger effect on the war.
Leuna was a critical production hub and the largest chemical factory in Germany. It required all of the biggest chemical companies in Germany to enter a cartel to afford building it, in addition to funding from the Nazi government. Leuna produced a quarter of all synthetic gasoline in Germany and the majority of aviation fuel, in addition to synthetic rubber and nitrogen compounds used in explosives. In short, it was the single most important strategic target in Germany, and both sides knew it.
Leuna had a large Luftwaffe detachment to protect it, thick blast walls, and camouflage smoke screens. There were dummy factory buildings that increased the total area to about 3 square miles. German flak positions usually consisted of 6-12 flak guns that operated independently. Leuna had what the Germans called "grossbatteries." These were batteries of 32 flak guns, all radar controlled that fired not at individual planes but at zones of the sky. There are reports from Allied bomber crews that the sky around Leuna was so dark and smoky from all the flak that they had to drop their bombs completely blind. The crew responsible for defending and repairing the facilities at Leuna was composed of 350,000 personnel.
The gist of this is Leuna was the single best defended point in Germany against Allied air power. Even the protection of Berlin received less resources. So I don't think the lack of success by the Allies is particularly representative of air power in general.
Also, the air crews were trying to survive. Dropping bombs randomly to be lighter and make evasive action easier - or not being blown up if an AA shrapnel hits a bomb.
No. First they did the rational thing - bombed the RAF airports. Because if they can off the RAF, after that they can bomb whatever they want. Besides, they were preparing for an invasion and needed air superiority so that they can bomb the fleet.
So Churchill made a ruthlessly calculated move. Bombed Berlin. Hitler reacted exactly as he predicted - got enraged and wanted revenge and shifted the bombing to London and other cities.
And this is why dictatorships are not effective. I am sure the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine knew it is stupid - but did not dare to tell him or at any rate could not convince him.
But in democratic Britain Churchill had to put up with a lot of stuff he did not like at all. One of them was, for example, Charles de Gaulle.
There is probably something to be said about British radar (Chain Home) and command-and-control for the Battle of Britain. This article[1] for example mentions a thesis that German strategy to stop attacking radar systems (alone) cost the battle and "perhaps the war". Notwithstanding this it also points to Hitler's order to switch from bombing airfields to London -- supposedly the British were under serious pressure at this point from infrastructure damage, although perhaps this is all a myth compared to the overall production situation (per the book review).
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/air-force/corporate/reports-publications/royal-canadian-air-force-journal/2016-vol5-iss1-07-technological-intelligence-and-the-radar-war-in-world-war-ii.html
My understanding is that Iran learned that lesson very well from Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak facility, so a bombing campaign to destroy their nuclear capacity would be fruitless.
Speaking of Israel, has their campaign against Hamas been effective? I guess the lessons learned from fighting the Nazis might not generalize SO easily to fighting guerillas. You capture Berlin and the Nazis are done for. You capture downtown Gaza City and then what happens?
Well, if the fighting won't stop and you're willing to be kind of a bastard, you do what the British did in the Second Boer War: round up the civilian population, disarm them, and put them into camps away from where the fighters are. (Anyone who refuses to leave is a fighter. Shoot them.)
If you're willing to be a *major* bastard, you emulate what the ancient Romans did and either level the city with artillery (as happened in the Syrian city of Hama in 1982) or kill the population with poison gas (as Saddam Hussein did in 1988).
Guerrillas can't hide among civilians in a place where there are no civilians.
The same thing that happens when you capture Berlin. The Nazis weren't done for because the Nazis politely surrendered. The Nazis were done for because, once the Russian Army is patrolling the streets of Berlin, how does anyone go on being a Nazi? What does it even mean to *be* a Nazi, when you can't even show a swastika in public without getting shot?
Yes, you and three of your friends can have secret "we're still Really Nazis!" meetings in your basement, rolling the dice each time that you won't all get shot. So what, and why would you do that when you could just say "I was never a Nazi, I swear!" and get on with your life? Or try to emigrate to Argentina or something.
Understanding that, the head Nazis politely surrendered, but it wouldn't have made any great difference if they hadn't.
Yeah that's right, you need to CRUSH all pro-Hamas sentiment in Gaza, revamp the education system, and so on.
No, you just need to eliminate pro-Hamas *activity*. Eliminating the sentiment is one way to do that. But denying it the opportunity for useful or rewarding expression, and killing or imprisoning the people fool enough to do it anyway, also works.
Allied strategic bombing in Europe was largely ineffective as well, except to the extent that it diverted the German airforce away from the eastern front and made Hitler waste money on V2s.
Keep in mind that with WW2 era bombing tech, the situation was more "having bombers dropping bombs in the same town as your factories" than *on* your factories.
> The Japanese had gone to war with the United States in no small part because the U.S. cut off oil exports to Japan.
Why did the US cut off oil exports to Japan?
So Japan would stop its conquests of China.
Or maybe to goad Japan into attacking the US, thus forcing entry into the war.
The USA had no obligation to enable Japan’s conquest of China.
Tokyo had options beyond bombing Hawaii to support its attack on the Philippines to support its attack on Indonesia to support its attack on China.
It chose not to exercise them.
The US was also sending Tiger Force to China to take directly part in the war under the fig leaf that they were volunteers despite them being airmen from the armed forces flying american war planes.
On this subject, what were the Japanese thinking would happen? Did they think the US would sue for peace, or that they would conquer San Francisco or what? How did they think this would all end?
Anyone knows a good book on this, or has read one and can summarize it for me, much appreciated.
My understanding is that they believed the US would declare war if Japan conquered the Dutch East Indies (which they were planning to do to get more oil). So they figured they'd wipe out the US Pacific fleet with a surprise attack, conquer a bunch of islands (not American islands, just specific Pacific islands), fortify those islands and build airstrips to create air superiority, and then those fortified islands would prevent the US from invading Japan directly. Then they basically hoped that the US would then be willing to sign a peace treaty because it would be too difficult for them to invade.
It was a bad plan! But at no point did they expect to, say, conquer the US or annex US territory outside of a few little islands in the west Pacific. And the Philippines, I guess.
The Japanese knew they would fight under serious disadvantages. Their plan was to seize several rings of islands between Hawaii and Japan, build airstrips on them, and deploy significant air forces that would keep the US Navy from approaching Japan. They hoped the US would then agree to a negotiated settlement that would let Japan keep enough of its conquests to be essentially self-sufficient industrially.
They don't seem to have thought about the threat of the US submarine force to their logistical operations - they considered submarines to be part of the battle fleet, to find the enemy fleet and perhaps weaken it before the decisive battle. They also don't seem to have considered the possibility that the US could deploy overwhelming airpower through the use of aircraft carriers - I doubt they imagined facing 24 Essex-class carriers, in addition to light carriers and escort carriers. Ultimately, the US deployed 105 aircraft carriers (not all at the same time) vs. 18 for Japan.
"they considered submarines to be part of the battle fleet, to find the enemy fleet and perhaps weaken it before the decisive battle"
I don't think so. In the 1930's it was believed subs are for coastal defense, because they had short range. Later on their range rapidly increased, and maybe they did not notice.
They thought winning a decisive naval battle would force the US to come to the negotiating table. Just ~35 years before, they had defeated the Russians that way. They had also decisively defeated China a decade before that. Having defeated much larger countries like China and Russia(which by raw economic and military numbers, were also much stronger than Japan), they probably thought they could do the same to the US as well.
Japan hadn't taken part in much of the fighting in WW1. They still thought they could win via banzai charges (and their victories against Tsarist Russia & China using that seemed confirmation to them).
This. The Japanese leadership were mesmerised by their stunning naval victory of Tsushima in 1905 whereby one decisive naval battle knocked out an unfriendly empire (of white people). They thought they could repeat the trick with the USA in 1941 but failed to see the difference between a tottering, backward imperial power (Russia) and an immensely productive industrial democracy (the USA). The thinking was that they were both just paper tigers who didn’t have the samurai code to stiffen their resolve. We know how that turned out.
Keep in mind that in 1941 Hawai'i was NOT a United States state. Think of this as the modern equivalent of attacking Guam.
And the "keep the US out of the war" sentiment in the US was loud and visible.
Clearly the Japanese massively miscalculated the US response (and the timing of the Pearl Harbor attack vs the declaration of war *REALLY* didn't help ...) but it wasn't 100% insane. From a Japanese perspective, anyway.
And don't forget that Japan "won" the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, so if the Japanese sorta binned all westerners together they had an example to point to for what would happen.
Japan started off winning the Russo-Japanese war with some brilliant victories, but Russia's immensity started to matter as the war dragged on, and the Russians wound up getting a surprisingly not too bad of a peace deal at Portsmouth, NH.
My sense is Japan was counting on a decisive knockout blow at Pearl Harbor to give them enough time to achieve objectives in the pacific region. Some were aware they had awakened a sleeping giant. A long time ago I think I read something like that in a journal from a Japanese Naval Officer - perhaps Admiral Yamamoto. It was from some source material (that had been translated into English) in the library where I went to college. If I recall correctly he seemed aware this was a huge gamble likely to not end well.
There's also this bit from the diary of Horikoshi Jiro (the designer of the Mitsubishi Zero, who I believe visisted the US):
> When we awoke on the morning of December 8, 1941, we found ourselves — without any foreknowledge — to be embroiled in war... Since then, the majority of us who had truly understood the awesome industrial strength of the United States never really believed that Japan would win this war.
Yamamoto had misgivings about attacking the USA but as a loyal officer he developed the Pearl Harbour plan. Others in the Japanese leadership who hadn’t visited the USA (Yamamoto had) were more gung ho.
Read Shattered Sword, which discusses this a bit by way of setting up Midway. The Japanese government essentially hoped to knock the Americans back in a way that would keep them out of the fight for years, then take and fortify a defensive ring of islands to force an attrition battle. In the process, they hoped to wear the Americans down enough to sue for a 19th-century style great power peace settlement.
It... wasn't a great plan.
I have a thought now. In the 19th century war was "the continuation of diplomacy by other means". It was a businesslike, cool and calculating. But by 1940 somehow everybody is a fanatic. Of course the Japanese themselves the most, but there was plenty of it in the US too. No deal whatsoever, unconditional surrender. The whole thing having a holy war, crusade feel.
Is this because politics was religion by then?
Late to this, but "A War It Was Always Going to Lose" by Jeffrey Record has a pretty good overview of the strategic discussions of the Japanese going into WW2 (although you can also find the monograph its based on online for free if you want to be cheap).
TLDR: the Japanese absolutely knew about US Naval production capability (the Two-Ocean Navy Act was passed in July of 1940), and they knew were unlikely to win a war launched in 1941; however, they *knew* they would absolutely be defeated if they launched the war in 1942, and viewed war as inevitable anyway. They hoped that knocking the US Navy out of the war in one decisive stroke would make the US be willing to come to a diplomatic solution that acknowledged Japanese sovereignty in Asia. There was no plan for them to invade the US (there was no plan to invade Australia, which was much closer!).
Worth noting that Record argued the Japan made the decision to go to war with the US *before* the oil embargo, in that they had already decided to invade Malaya and the DEI before the embargo was announced (and they viewed invading those two regions would cause the US to declare war on them, something they were almost certainly wrong about).
Also worth noting that the Imperial Japanese Navy pushed for invasion of Malaya/DEI (and thus war with America) to further war against the Imperial Japanese Army (who was pushing for an expansion of the war in China and another invasion of the Soviet Union instead).
It is a mistake to see nations as one person. They had a lot of problems with the military assassinating politicians, going to war without orders (much of what the Kwantung Army did in China and what they tried to do against the Soviet Union was without orders) and just being a generally uncontrollable bunch. Sometimes they did not obey their own officers either, General Matsui explicitly ordered them to treat the civilians in Nanjing right, but they just had no respect for an elderly, sickly man pulled back from retirement so they killed the locals anyway.
The situation was much like between a pitbull and its owner.
They could not not go to war with China. The army would have killed any politician trying that and would have done it anyway.
So what they could do is to send the pit bulls against America and see what happens. Worst case they lose, but then they are also rid of the pit bulls and can have a proper civilian government. Which happened.
It didn't even NEED to attack the Philippines in order to seize the Dutch & British colonies in southeast Asia. They feared the US would attack from the Philippines otherwise, but attacking the US guaranteed we'd attack them (albeit, from further away).
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_note#Content demanded "inviolability of territorial integrity and sovereignty of each and all nations" i.e. a complete and utter end to Japanese imperialism (maybe except Korea as it was not explicitly mentioned), in a period of history when British and French colonial empires were big, and even America had a bit of that (Philippines). Does this sound like a reasonable demand?
I was surprised to learn that Pearl Harbor began to stockpile stuff in mid 1940 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor#Background). I can completely understand Japan considering this an unfriendly act, and took a year and a half to plan and execute an audacious preemptive attack on it, since they were kind of already at war with the US.
If you want to go to war with Japan, why wouldn't you strike first? Or, at minimum, not keep better watch over your naval assets that are closest to Japan and would be the most likely to face the attack you're trying to goad?
Roosevelt had to consider the political impact at home of launching a first strike (unpopular!). It's a good question, though, why Pearl Harbor was so poorly prepared.
I think the facts better match the theory that Roosevelt wanted to put pressure on the Japanese with his oil embargo, but did not seriously expect Japan to go to war with the US. It was a pretty terrible strategic decision on the part of the Japanese.
Agreed. Didn't mean to imply Roosevelt was itching to start a war with Japan or anything, just that even if he was, public opinion would have been a big constraint.
Philippines were filled to the brim with airplanes. War was expected there, not Pearl Harbor.
Japan didn't just attack Pearl Harbor. They also destroyed the Far East Air Force in the Philippines. Roosevelt didn't need both destroyed to justify a war, a surprise attack on American servicemen in either place would suffice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm-HkVO0UX4
I'm not sure. Public opinion was strongly against entering the war...until Pearl Harbor, and then it immediately switched. And air bases in the Philippines might not have had that effect.
Because Roosevelt expected the attack at the Philippines.
Japan was gunning for a pivot on Russia and the US could not abide Russia being forced into two fronts with how things were going in Europe.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691161594/economic-interdependence-and-war
Japan signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR between Khalkhin Gol and Pearl Harbor.
In the war for Eurasia begun by the Axis in 1941, the Germans attacked to the north and the Japanese to the south. Not surprisingly, the Soviet Union survived its one-front war and so did British India survive its own one-front war. If the Axis had coordinated and picked a single axis of assault, either northern or southern, they might have come closer to winning. But Hitler had his own idiosyncratic reason for why he wanted to take the northern route (Jews), which the Japanese didn't care about. They needed oil, which was on the southern route.
The Germans needed oil to, and they could get to it in Azerbaijan either on the northern or the southern route. What nobody except the Americans knew about (not even the British) was the oil of Saudi Arabia, which a geologist sent by FDR in 1944 reported was the greatest prize in human history.
Timothy Snyder claimed in Bloodlands that Hitler was happy the Japanese adopted the Navy-favored southern route over the Army-favored northern one because it meant he didn't have to share conquered Russian territory he was sure he'd obtain with them.
I think an important reason why Germany's attacks were north of Japan's is that Germany is located in the north and didn't have the naval power to reach the south that well (even their invasion of Norway was an incredible stroke of luck that caught the Royal Navy off-guard). The reason Japan took the southern route rather than the northern one ("Hokushin-ron") was because of their setback against the Soviets (also, the failure of the February 26 incident).
Good points.
Maybe Hitler should have learned from General Zhukov kicking his Japanese allies around in 1939?
Hitler claiming he was guaranteed to win after Pearl Harbor because the Japanese have never lost a war is one of the crazier things he said. It's real "Fort Knox doesn't need guards" kind of logic.
I'm also reminded of how different military thinkers reacted to the Prussians using a Dreyse rifle in the Dano-Prussian War. Austria was still sure that "shock tactics" with bayonets was the way to go, while their southern German allies realized that fire tactics were more important and they need to bank on the longer range of their rifled muskets. Both of them ultimately lost to the Prussians in the Austro-Prussian War, but some of them were just ignoring reality when inconvenient for them.
>Timothy Snyder claimed in Bloodlands that Hitler was happy the Japanese adopted the Navy-favored southern route over the Army-favored northern one because it meant he didn't have to share conquered Russian territory he was sure he'd obtain with them.
Nuts. Nazis wanted it roughly up to the Urals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum#/media/File:Greater_Germanic_Reich.png so Japan could have Siberia.
I don't see anything there about Japan having Siberia. Japan's non-aggression pact with the USSR was public knowledge. Also, part of the plan for replacing Slavs was to deport many of them to Siberia (before the "Final Solution" that was also considered a possible destination for Jews), where Germans wouldn't have to settle but could still potentially control.
The US was closely aligned with China and objected to Japan's invasion. The US also had a military presence in China and the Japanese attacked and killed US service members. Notably the crew of the Panay who were helping to evacuate a city in front of a Japanese advance. This incident was so severe the US almost declared war. Instead the president got a wide variety of embargo powers which he used to tighten or loosen flows depending on how cooperative Japan was being.
The US and Japan then engaged in negotiations. The US goal was to separate Japan from the Axis so that the war would be contained to Europe and avoid a war on two fronts. The Japanese were actually willing to concede this and many other things. The negotiations had a sticking point: China. The US demanded Japan withdraw from China. The Japanese army said it would overthrow the government if they ordered a withdrawal. Unable to make the necessary concessions, Japan decided to attack the US in the hopes it could destroy enough of the US fleet and draw out a naval campaign long enough that the US would eventually agree to more favorable terms. This did not work.
FDR was a product of America's high Protestant elite. Some of its leading individuals were WASP missionaries in China (such as the parents of Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines). FDR sympathized with his missionary peers and with their Chinese friends against the Japanese aggressors.
This led the American elite (e.g., the Democrat FDR and the Republican Luce) to overestimate the nominally Christian Chiang Kai-shek.
I recall reading a Young Adult novel where the main character dropped out of college and took a job on an oil tanker to rescue his parents, who I believe were missionaries in Shanghai. Much of the book is concerned with the morality of selling oil to Japan, and of course the cargo is sabotaged just as the ship reaches China.
I've heard this theory. While Christian missionaries were important in East Asia (although there were Catholics as well) there are more prosaic reasons that I tend to weigh more. America took its treaty obligations to China more seriously than their European counterparts. They were also principled anti-colonialists due to American ideology. There was also a longstanding fear that anyone who conquered China would be able to use it to cross the Pacific and attack the US. This started with a fear of the British but it transferred to the Japanese quite smoothly.
Meanwhile the Christian view of Chiang Kai-shek was actually rather low. They saw him as a corrupt warlord. They had a higher opinion of his wife but didn't think she controlled him. The US supported him because he was the acknowledged and legal government of China and because of anti-communism.
Well said.
There were good reasons why the Old China Hands were morally prestigious in the U.S., as were the similar WASP Arabists who founded the American University of Beirut.
Watching Steve Kerr coach the U.S. Olympic basketball team today, I was reminded that when I was at UCLA in c. 1982, his father Malcolm Kerr had a really good job as vice-chancellor of UCLA. But in the middle of the Lebanese civil war he resigned his job in lovely Westwood to become president of the American University of Beirut because he felt that was his obligation to his Arabist ancestors who had found AUB.
He was assassinated there 3 years later.
I remember hearing a couple of things about Japanese flight training problems beyond the oil issue:
-Japan, unlike the US, did not routinely rotate experienced combat pilots back to Japan to serve as instructors. The exceptions, such as Saburo Sakai and Masaaki Shimakawa, were men who were in Japan *anyway* as they'd been sent back for medical reasons.
-The Zero was slower and more lightly armed than Allied fighters, but more manoeuvrable. This was fine at the start of the war with very well-trained, experienced pilots, but when Japan had to shorten its training programs during the war (both because of fuel shortages and because they needed pilots *now* not next year) it was at a disadvantage.
Not sure how true either of these explanations is, but they seem to be widely believed.
The Zero was a very good fighter plane at the start of the War, but was below average by the end. The Japanese had actually developed better fighter planes than the Zero, but they didn't have the resources to produce them in significant numbers. That's why they kept making Zeroes up until the end.
One thing that made the Zero such a good fighter in the beginning was it was made of an advanced aluminum alloy that made it lighter than U.S. fighters.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344352786_Extra_Super_Duralumin_and_Zero_Fighter_-Why_was_Japan_able_to_develop_the_world's_strongest_aluminum_alloy
Overall enjoyed the reviews but I would say that the Google metaphor rings false to me - Google's success is overwhelmingly built off of the interlocking search/ads combo, which is still a majority of revenue even after decades of trying to build up other businesses. Google Search is therefore absolutely still the "killer app" that overwhelmingly explains the company's success.
Amazon is a more complex picture, where two-thirds of revenue comes from shopping but a majority of the actual profit comes from AWS thanks to its better margins.
Apple is relatively diversified, but about half their revenue has come from the iPhone for at least the last ten years. Although clearly other product lines have a lot of significance and they were around for a while before the iPhone existed.
Yeah before the iPhone (and especially before the iPod) Apple really was not doing well at all. I don't think they're a good example for the point OP was trying to make.
I find it funny how the narratives around ww2 keep avoiding the fact of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet union started ww2 with Germany. They were allies until the soviets wanted to take control of the Romanian oil and Germany decided they can't have that. You can literally find on YouTube Hitler talking about it with the Finnish counterpart. (search for Hitler talking in a normal voice)
The lebensraum argument is theoretical in nature and would only have come into play after the war.
"Theoretical in nature"? It's right there in Mein Kampf. Hitler was always intending to go East, France was just an annoying menace he had to take care of first. He tried to make a separate peace with Britain afterwards to concentrate on the Soviet Union, but Churchill wouldn't hear of it.
We can imagine a scenario where the soviets were allowed into the axis owing to Churchill not wanting a separate peace.
The Soviets were in the "Axis" - a close and effective ally to Hitler anyway - until "Unternehmen Barbarossa". Why Russians still remember 1941 as the first year of the "great patriotic war".
They had requested to join the tripartite pact, which gave the axis powers their name. Hitler turned them down.
I stand by Stalin/CCCP was "a close and effective ally to Hitler anyway". While "axis" was first used by Mussolini in regard to Berlin/Germany - Fun fact: the axis did not stay tri-partite long: The Tripartite Pact was signed by Germany, Italy, and Japan on 27 September 1940, in Berlin. The pact was subsequently joined by Hungary (20 November 1940), Romania (23 November 1940), Slovakia (24 November 1940), and Bulgaria (1 March 1941) - as the real intention of Japan was to be reassured against Russia, there was no point to admit the Soviets.
The primary reason for the Soviets not being let in the pact at the time was Stalin wanting concessions in romania, not anything to do with Japan.
I think the standard narrative is that both Hitler and Stalin were opportunistic and saw an advantage to making deal with an enemy. Hitler planned to attack both west and east, but was practical enough to make temporary deals with either side. Working with the Soviets expanded German influence eastwards and avoided (or delayed) a two-front war while attacking France. Stalin was also planning for an eventual war between the USSR and Germany, but was concerned that he would not get the support of western powers. By working with the Nazis, he was able to expand into the Baltic states and Finland without British or French interference and delay fighting Germany until the UK was involved. This is both the narrative today and the narrative at the time. Consider reading Orwell's review of Mein Kampf for a contemporary perspective. Orwell believed that Hitler was planning to attack east before west, but happened to find the USSR easier to bribe for a delay. Or any of the many political cartoons showing things like this:
https://magazine.punch.co.uk/image/I0000T_EDn.QW0ZA
In short, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is incorporated in most narratives of WWII. It is simply a brief interruption of open hostility between the two countries while they manipulated the western democracies.
See? Whitewashed.
If you think that's a whitewashed narrative, where are you getting the "true" narrative from? Do you have an article or book recommendation that describes your beliefs more in-depth? I'm still a little confused about what you think is being left out.
Stalin was more paranoid than Hitler (as demonstrated by the vast numbers of his own supporters he had shot on the ground that there was a small chance they were plotting against him), while Hitler was a gambler who was skeptical of his supporters but vastly less homicidal toward them (as demonstrated by the remarkable number of assassination attempts he survived).
Hence their opportunism in foreign policy manifested differently. Paranoid Stalin hoped that Hitler would invade France like in 1914, get bogged down, and then the tanned, rested and ready Soviets could eventually, years later, enter the stalemated war and overwhelm exhausted Germany and perhaps France and Britain too.
Optimistic Hitler's opportunism was flavored by his extreme dynamism. After his enormous diplomatic triumph in the fall of 1938 in getting the Sudetenland without a shot fired, he then took Prague in March 1939 because he could, turning Britain and France against him. In contrast, when Stalin took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, it was after three years of ambiguous maneuvering.
Stalin was startled and depressed by how Hitler conquered Paris in 6 weeks in 1940.
The cartoon is not bad, but this one is funnier: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9e/Davidlowrendezvous.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Low_(cartoonist)#Second_World_War
Its always funny reading about the Western communists during that period. Here's one example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Trumbo. Dude goes from being an isolationist to being John Bolton, the moment the Germans invade the Soviets. The previous 2 years of war against all of Europe didn't matter to them in the slightest.
Loyal Stalinists in Hollywood had been impressively anti-Hitler and pro-American military build-up until August 23, 1939, then switched to being anti-war (effectively, pro-Hitler), then on June 22, 1941 switched back to being pro-war.
I remember reading that the British government knew about Barbarossa from Enigma intercepts and when the attack came, Churchill rapidly declared his support for the Soviets (commenting famously to an aide "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons") while the British communists were still stuck getting off their anti-war talking points.
Not just Hollywood but practically anyone with a brain and influence in those days. Its astounding how the bureaucracy, sciences, arts, even businesses was thouroughly filled with communists and fellow travellers.
What's this about the Soviets wanting to take control of Romanian oil? They seized Bessarabia from Romania, but they weren't about to invade more of it than Germany had already ceded.
Stalin tended to obey his foreign policy agreements, unlike his domestic political alignments. While he could have his internal rivals shot, he couldn't have foreign Hitler or Churchill shot, so he tended to stick to his foreign policy treaties, or at least subvert them only slowly.
He eventually violated his neutrality pact with Japan. He also tried to blockade West Berlin after agreeing to let the Western Allies have it. But I guess that could be considered "slowly" relative to Hitler.
Right. Stalin followed his 5-year 1941 neutrality pact with Japan for 4 years, then announced the end of it in April 1945 in order to keep his promise to FDR and Churchill at Yalta to attack Japan in Manchuria within 3 months of the end of the war against Germany, which Stalin upheld to the day on August 8, 1945.
Article 3 explicitly allowed denunciation after 4 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_Neutrality_Pact#Text_of_denunciation
That's a myth. Article 3 explicitly allowed denounciation after 4 years, which is what Stalin did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_Neutrality_Pact#Text_of_denunciation
You should have linked to the text of the pact and article 3 itself:
"The present Pact comes into force from the day of its ratification by both Contracting Parties and remains valid for five years. In case neither of the Contracting Parties denounces the Pact one year before the expiration of the term, it will be considered automatically prolonged for the next five years."
Denunciation only prevents the prolonging of the pact, not its validity. And the denunciation came on April 5 rather than April 13 (when the pact was signed), because the time limit was for preventing its extension.
100% agree. The Molotov-Ribbentrop friendship pact dividing Eastern Europe between russia and germany has been white-washed and not given enough attention.
I've never run across any reference that took that pact seriously. Not recently, and not from that period of time. It was always seen as tactical maneuvering intended to be discarded when convenient.
Maybe you should read books by better qualified historians - or even wikipedia. The pact was central. And Stalin certainly took it seriously. While Hitler was rubbing his hands.
And the part where the invasions of Finland, part of Poland, Besarabia, the Baltic states by russia and other part of Poland by germany happened exactly as described in the pact didn't give you pause?
The problem Hitler faced was his belief that Stalin was building up the Russian army, and was inevitably going to attack Germany at some point in the mid-future. Better to attack them sooner while they were relatively weak than be attacked later when the Red Army would be stronger. And who knows, Hitler may even have been right.
Stalin may have had an eventual conflict in mind, but hitler chose to make the conflict life or death.
It isn't necessary that Hitler was right, only that he believed it, and believing it, he had no other choice.
Shooting officers is an interesting way to build up an army: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1941_Red_Army_Purge
Well, maybe pour encourager les autres.
Very interesting. I'm also a WWII buff and have a few things to add:
1) As the Allied bombing campaign forced the Germans to relocate factories to caves, defects became much more common due to the uncontrolled climates of the caves. Dampness and dust wreaked havoc on machines and on quality control.
2) The American submarine campaign against Japanese shipping was undermined during the first half of the war by defective torpedoes. It's scandalous that such poor weapons were approved for service, and even worse that the Navy's top guys ignored so many complaints from submarine captains that they were nearly useless.
https://archive.navalsubleague.org/1996/the-great-torpedo-scaodal-1941-43
3) I'm skeptical of the claim that carpet bombing was a decisive factor that enabled the Anglo-American breakout from Normandy. The German accounts that I've read depicted Allied airpower as very annoying, but something they could endure by moving around only at night and camouflaging their positions during the day. Generally speaking, the tactical use of attack planes against tanks and troops in the field was not very effective in WWII, and pilots always exaggerated how many targets they hit.
4) I totally agree that the Battle of the Bulge looms larger in the imagination than it should. In reality, the Germans had no hope of winning the War by December 1944, and even had they accomplished the objective, which was capturing the port of Antwerp and inflicting heavy losses on the British and Americans, it would not have led to them giving up. Furthermore, the Germans started falling behind their campaign objectives almost immediately after the Battle started, and they never made up for it.
5) I couldn't agree more about MacArthur. He was a criminally overrated general and he also screwed up in 1950 by ignoring repeated intelligence warnings that China might send troops across the border to help North Korea. His plan to use nuclear weapons against China in response and to spread radioactive waste across North Korea to block enemy troop movements showed how out-of-touch he had become, and Truman was right to fire him.
True, though the Incheon Landing was an operation that the North Koreans should have anticipated given how effective it would be and how obvious the target site was (a port far behind the front lines). By the time the Landing happened, North Korea's army was also badly weakened from combat. Given their inferior numbers and small economy, their only chance to win the war was to quickly conquer the whole peninsula before U.N. troops showed up, and they failed to do that.
I've also read that the Incheon Landing was an amateurish version of the late WWII amphibious landings. The U.N. forces failed to keep it a secret, and North Korean spies simply listening to military guys talking in bars and restaurants in Incheon would have heard about it. The landing operation itself had all kinds of problems due to inexperience and forgotten lessons from WWII, but succeeded anyway because the North Koreans were so unprepared at Incheon.
MacArthur: criminally overrated general, criminally underrated dictator of Japan.
I don't know the current opinion, but at the time I was there (as a dependent) the Japanese appeared to think highly of MacArthur. Of course, this was just a couple of years before we ended the occupation, which may have something to do with it. Also the people who worked with us were probably more favorably biased towards the US than the average. But wandering around the city and countryside, I didn't feel any hostility. (A bit of humor as how I couldn't speak Japanese, but that was about all.)
So I think MacArthur was an excellent "dictator of Japan". (I'm not so pleased about the way he inspired them to go in for whaling, which they hadn't really be into before.)
For those who like to consume info in video form, here's one on all the problems with the Mark 14 torpedo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ5Ru7Zu_1I
> Dampness and dust wreaked havoc on machines and on quality control
The urine didn't help either! Some work in these factories was by forced labor, and sabotage by weeing on sensitive parts was endemic.
This is also well covered in Victor Davis Hanson's "The Second World Wars" which covers the productive capacity dynamic along with the technological and strategic differences between the different sides. Highly recommend Hanson. I'm not sure how unconventional this view is anymore but everything is unconventional for those who have not yet read it, which was all of us at some point :)
Perfect to mention VDH - he's an American conversative who started from the preferred outcome of minimizing Soviet importance and restoring the false American propaganda that he grew up with. And I suspect the same is true of this book.
When I say that (I'm not allowed to say the Ra word here, Scott will ban me) the kind of people who congregate here are selectively naive, this is what I mean - this review has no consideration of the author's motivations because the author's conclusions support the reviewer's priors.
From a subscriber: it would be interesting to have you elaborate.
Are the reviewer's priors that you have in mind that the US really won the war?
Or something more abstract, about how the people that congregate here like to believe that the established narratives are wrong (because of irrationality) - and looking at the cold, hard data reveals a wildly different story, the details of which don't matter so much as that they disagree with the established narrative?
The author’s motivations are irrelevant if the evidence he adduces support his argument. The quality of evidence and the chain of inferences from that evidence is what matters. I suspect that you are inclined to be skeptical because, being a communist, you are sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and your priors are that they were the decisive victors.
> The author’s motivations are irrelevant if the evidence he adduces support his argument.
Unless his motivations lead him to leave out or overlook some of the evidence. This would not be obvious simply from reading the conclusions, but require independent review by subject matter experts.
Not that I'm accusing the book author of that. Just saying that "if a work's presented evidence supports the work's conclusions, it's sound research" is not a complete argument.
VDH is conservative, but he is a honest if clearly biased (like all humans) historian, not a mere propagandist. The Soviet manpower importance was huge, but also the Western industrial importance, much of it shipped to the Soviets.
Thought you were talking about this for a second
https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/20/ra.html
Seems like an extreme case of historical revisionism. Lendlease may have been key in the Soviets being able to turn the tide early on, but by 1944 there was no stopping them rolling over Germany, the question was how quickly. Did the author try to twist the narrative to match his preconceptions? Sure seems like it. I agree that the data dug up to support it are very interesting.
US material support to the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom were critical to both countries' effects on the course of the war. The Soviet Union, in particular, might have collapsed, while the UK would have been rendered impotent, and might have accepted Germany's repeated offers of a generous peace. Would have had to absent US direct involvement.
As I said, Lendlease may have been key, so I think we don't disagree on much. It's the US military campaign in Europe that was useful but not a deciding factor.
It was very important to the geopolitics of the post-war order, though. Which, as far as I've read, was very well understood by the parties at the time.
O'Brien is exceedingly loose in his data analysis. Although there are many interesting observations, I think a closer look at the actual data would likely under'mine' some (or more) of his conclusions. I highlight but one. The flawed conclusion about aerial mining of Japanese ports ... "the aerial mining of Japanese ports... didn’t start until March 1945, but it still sank more tonnage than U.S. submarines did in the entire war." [FALSE]
Wikipedia mistakenly arrives at the same incorrect conclusion based on a single Naval Institute Proceedings article. (here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Starvation)
However, the JANAC arrived at a far different conclusion (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Army%E2%80%93Navy_Assessment_Committee)
It's possible that aerial mines may have had a better ROI in achieving the strategic outcome, but earlier in the war it wasn't even an option.
All of which may not change the conclusions of his book, but it does call into question the level of research he employed, and possibly some of the conclusions.
I wondered about that. Economist Robert Kuenne's The Attack Submarine has a very nice operations-research analysis of anti-merchant submarine warfare, where he shows that in the Pacific the U.S. was able to use a strategy of completely eliminating the stock of the Japanese merchant-marine fleet, whereas the German U-Boat campaign in the Atlantic was forced to pursue a flow-reduction strategy to try to starve out Britain and the Western front.
Mutalisks killing SCVs and units in transit has been a broken strategy since WWII.
Modern war means we have sensor towers everywhere, plus cyclones roaming with 20+ range.
I find this claim: "... Japan was not just a small island power easily subsumed by American production. The Japanese economy, at its peak, produced about as much as the Soviet Union. Its industrial base was mostly untouched until mid-1944. In 1943, it produced as much steel as the Soviet Union. The Japanese navy’s planes doubled between 1943 and 1944." interesting.
I charted out US and Japanese "large" aircraft carrier production a bit back and the differences are staggering.
https://mistybeach.com/mark/WW2AircraftCarriers.html
I don't think we can argue that the Japanese thought aircraft carriers unimportant when fighting a naval war.
I had the exact same thought and I'd like to see the thoughts of someone who read the book. The only thing I can think is that Japan had to dedicate a lot of its production to building ships to ship production to and from the home islands.
Right. The US deliveries of aircraft carriers in the second half of the war were staggering.
The Battle of Kursk casualties mentioned only include losses from Operation Citadel (Germany's initial offensive) and not the Russian counteroffensive. Aircraft losses on Germany's side are more than 4x what is quoted here (681 vs 159) when including the entire battle rather than just the first offensive.
How reliable is the figure of 80% of Soviet men born in 1923 dying young? I see it quoted all the time, but I am not sure I find it credible.
It certainly seems like a lot, counting pre-war deaths... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union#Total_population_losses
The 80% figure seems like a lot, most figures seem to suggest 26% of people who served in the red army in the war died. Even if those born in 1923 were the most likely to die I doubt they were three times more likely to be lost than other red army soldiers and not every man born in 1923 would serve, many would be engineers, farmers, factory workers, exempt etc who would have a higher survival rate.
The USSR had mandatory conscription for all men starting at age 17 since 1939. Nearly all men born in 1923 were in the army/navy/air force when the war started, which was the most disastrous period of the war for the Soviet Union. Given that, 80% sounds quite plausible.
It seems like a lot to me.
The Soviet Union conducted censuses (censi?) in 1937 and 1959. If the population by age and sex is granular enough and they collected that data then this should be solvable (assuming one trusts the Soviet data ... in this case it is probably okay-ish if they gathered what we want).
I looked it up, it seems to actually be 68% and only about a third were war deaths (https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/was_the_soviet/). Infant mortality was still high in the 1923 USSR and then there was the Holodomor and Great Purge to kill off a bunch of extra people.
Thanks that is is interesting, interesting to see infant mortality was a bigger killer than WW2 even among that cohort.
Perfect timing, an article discussing the 1943 Battle of Kursk beung published three days into the 2024 Battle of Kursk.
I've been wrong before, but I suspect that the 2024 Battle of Kursk will be on a smaller scale than the 1943 Battle of Kursk. Humanity just isn't as serious about war as it used to be.
On the contrary - we now contort ourselves into stupendously weird pretzels in order to avoid serious wars. See all the caveats attached to the weapons shipments to Ukraine.
German tanks rolling into Kursk again in 2024 wasn't something I had on my bingo card.
> People want to believe that individual effort matters
Same thing annoys me about the space program. People love talking about Neil Armstrong and other astronauts. Almost no one talks about the engineers who actually made those flights possible. We can and still do numerous spacecraft launches without humans, proving that astronauts are not at all crucial for space exploration. But the public narrative is focused on individuals to the point where Mark Kelly (commander of the last Space Shuttle launch) almost became a Vice Presidential candidate quite recently.
Individual effort does matter - it's just far, far less than society wants to believe it does. Most accomplishments of any magnitude - and increasingly so in our complex world - are achieved through teams, not individuals. However, different individuals also have different roles to play. Neil Armstrong did put his life on the line more than the engineer with a slide rule did in Houston.
Neil Armstrong is a fine example of The System Working. The feds picked a really good guy with an impressive track record in a number of life or death situations. In the crisis when approaching the moon's rough surface with fuel running low, he made the right decisions.
He returned to Earth and lived out his years in a dignified manner.
He wasn't the greatest man of his age, but he turned out to be the right guy at the right time.
You might enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqHy11zWZA4
The main sphere where individual effort is significant in impact is in its ability to lead / motivate large groups of others to focus on / support a goal. In the sense that Neil Armstrong motivates the American people to continue to support the space program, and hence help ensure funds from congress continue to flow, his efforts were impactful (and more so than a backroom engineer who individually, rightly or wrongly, is not inspiring much of the US population).
Battles are where the effects of industrial effort are displayed.
There are two kinds of battles:
1. The ones where the underdog force wins (e.g., Midway, where the US had 3 aircraft carriers to the Japanese 4)
2. The ones where the industrial overdog wins (e.g., Stalingrad, Normandy, etc etc). The Allies won on D-Day because they'd assembled a vast mechanized force.
Most WWII victories are of the second kind, but not every victory.
I think this is more because people can empathize with specific people more than they can the faceless masses. It's the same reason why in fiction, everything important is done by a small number of named heroes and villains, regardless of what happens in reality.
Individual effort matters a great deal when looking at the past, because we can see what effect those specific individuals who were important actually had--think of it as bifurcation effects on system performance. It's basically the butterfly effect. And the problem with historical accounts is that looking backward is a lot easier than looking forward. There are approx 8 billion individual humans on the planet, and knowing exactly *which* individual efforts are going to matter in the future is basically impossible.
Individual effort mattered a lot in the space programme,it is just awkward to admit who the individual was given his prior work for Disney and the SS.
Engineers are the unsung heroes of modernity.
It was not always like this. Up till 1914 engineers ranked with medical doctors as modern-day heroes. Just read 19th century science fiction. Jules Verne for example.
But then came the Great War . And it turned out engineers were just av good at destroying stuff as when creating stuff.
The reputation of engineers never recovered.
The graph of destroyed German aircraft doesn't tell me what *percentage* of production was destroyed. The German war production famously peaked in 1944. This was not because the Allied bombing slacked off just then, it was because Hitler was refusing to shift the industry to the war footing. And by that point, they had clearly no way to win the war any more. So colour me skeptical about the bombing impact. Germany lost the war because they didn't seriously prepare for a long war. Hitler kept gambling on quick victories, and the Barbarossa bet is the first one he lost.
I think it's good to have an alternative focus on the WW2 history, but I'm going to be suspicious of any book that revises history so it conforms with the favoured views in the present. This book was published in 2015, right after the present war on Russia started cooking.
Wages of Destruction, which also got a review submitted, digs into the the "war footing" narrative about Germany and is critical of it. To tl;dr what is a very long and thorough book:
-Germany had to gamble repeatedly on quick victories precisely because it was so enormously overmatched economically by the Allies.
-Regardless, it's largely a myth that, for instance, the Germans refused to mobilize women for war industries due to conservative patriarchal values and the like. Rather, a major reason Germany had fewer women than Britain in war industries was because Germany had a significantly larger % of its population still engaged in peasant agriculture.
-Overall, Germany DID go to a war footing, and any slowness in doing so was significantly because it simply lacked the economic strength to pivot faster.
Here's a review of the book from anoter blog: https://raritania.blogspot.com/2017/09/review-wages-of-destruction-making-and.html
Typo: war oF Russia
Even taking the resource-centric view, the battles in the East are no less important. If the Soviet Union had collapsed the Germans would have got oil from Baku, other resources and plenty of territory outside of the effective range of the American and British bombers. They would also be able to mess with the middle Eastern oil supply as they would be on the bordersof Iran
The German seizure of Soviet territory early in the war included some oil fields... but the Soviets sabotaged them when it was clear they were about to be lost, so the Germans were still getting much less oil from them than they had been under Molotov-Ribbentrop.
I'm not sure I understand your point. My beef was with the claim "American and British bombing mattered far more to the war’s outcome than the battles of the Eastern Front". If the Germans had been victorious in the east they would have got all the resources, territory and slave manpower and that would likely be quite important for the war effort elsewhere.
The Soviet Union had two major oil-producing region: Baku and Grozny (94% of the total in 1937), out of these two Baku was much bigger even though I can't find the exact %. The Germans did not occupy any of those, they got really close to Grozny in mid-1942 but didn't reach it.
My point is that even if the Germans had gotten further, the larger effect would be to deprive the Soviets of that oil than to give it to the Germans. It would have taken time to repair oil facilities (which would then become a target for Allied bombing), and the Germans had been banking on winning quickly.
This is an important point. People assume that, had the Germans captured the Caucuses region in 1943, they would have "gotten all the oil," making them unstoppable. In reality, the retreating Soviets would have blown up every major oil well and all the refineries. It would have taken many months or longer for the German to fix the damage and start extracting large amounts of oil.
Strategic bombing of german factories didn't had much of an impact before some key battles including the landing in Normandy which punched a huge hole in Luftwaffe's early warning line of coastal radars.
I've been planning to read this book based on other mentions. Sounds fascinating. From this review, a few caveats seem to be indicated:
1. The "center of gravity" of the enemy is not always industrial production. That is precisely because the rate of materiel expenditure at the front may not be high enough to rate-limit their activities, depending on how they conduct warfare and the environment. That would be the case with the NVA and VC in Vietnam, for example. Probably also true for the Taliban.
2. The review seems to be arguing that the USAF's daylight strategic bombing of factories and such using "precision" bombing was actually effective. But much recent scholarship has argued that the Norden bombsight was a propaganda fraud and that the bombs dropped by daylight didn't really go where they were supposed to, nor did they reduce German production very much (although the effects mentioned about less-efficient factories and lower-quality output would matter).
But the "conventional" story is that the Luftwaffe didn't really suffer much until the P-51s came in and shot all the quality German fighter pilots out of the sky, at which point the inability to train new ones (partly due to fuel shortages, but also the dearth of living experienced pilots) caused the death spiral. Ditto for Japanese naval aviation, which supposedly did not rotate experienced pilots back to train new ones, instead keeping the same people who bombed Pearl Harbor together all the way through the Battle of Midway. That made for an uber-competent air wing at Midway--note the ability of the Hiryu's outnumbered force to take out the Yorktown once they had it located--but once those pilots were gone, so was the future prospect of developing quality naval aviators under wartime conditions.
3. The land fighting on the Eastern Front was crucial because control of the people, not the equipment or natural resources, was crucial. Stalin would lose if the people of the affected territories stopped following his commands and started following Hitler's. That's why all the behind-the-lines atrocities were pursued so expensively by both sides--that was the go-to method for those regimes to establish legitimacy, via fear. If you control the people who live in a territory, you control the resources and whatever capital might be there.
"(although the effects mentioned about less-efficient factories and lower-quality output would matter)."
Yes, that's really the crux of the book, as I understood it. Everyone agrees that the Norden bombsight was a disappointment, but it's not like the bombs just disappeared. The conventional argument is that they did very little, at least until late in the war, because they were so inaccurate. The book argues that they did *enough*, forcing the Germans to focus on air defense, that it effectively removed more of their arms production than any land battle. It's complicated because the Germans were steadily ramping up their war production as the war went on (see the Wages of Destruction review), so you have to think about counterfactuals rather than simple production numbers.
The argument that the industrial fundamentals are a better way of understanding WWII than the ebb and flow of individual battles is generally correct. It's been a pretty popular view since Adam Tooze published The Wages of Destruction, although personally I found Tooze's book almost unreadable. For people who are interested in this angle, I'd also recommend:
Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (If this is the part you're interested in, you can skip ahead to Speer's appointment as Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, and gloss past the Nazi party intrigues)
Michael Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War
Alan Milward, The German Economy at War
My only minor disagreement with this review's claims is that it somewhat overstates the impact of air power on destroying armies in the field. The impact of bombing on production and logistics, however, was immense. The main way that Allied bombing won the Battle of the Bulge (which was indeed a completely doomed attack launched after the point when a sane leader of Germany would have surrendered) was by denying supplies of fuel to German vehicles, both by knocking out railroads and supply convoys moving supplies to the front, and by crippling Nazi oil production.
for those looking for this type of content in a more podcasty format, i would also heavily recommend OSINT military procurement analyst Perun, who makes youtube versions of his powerpoints that have been frankly phenomenal since the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict
he mostly focuses on contemporary conflict, but he did a fantastic analysis of the effect of strategic bombing versus tactical bombing on axis industrial output during ww2, in the context of trying to predict the consequences of strategic bombing in the ukraine conflict https://youtu.be/CE6RINU8JLg?si=9Skfca_0NPOe5T9j
lots of yummy data
If Perun subtracted his long-winded, dry jokes, his videos would be 10% shorter.
...huh. I don't think I actually know what you're talking about? The only time I can remember him making a joke was in the video on corruption, where he named the private in the example 'private kleptovich' or something like that
And I mean, that's barely even a joke
But maybe I just don't remember them because they landed for me
Good read, but I don't know if the thesis of this book is quite as revisionist as the author seems to think. The role of industrial production was something very much on the minds of the war's participants as it was going on. This was a lesson they'd all taken from the Great War, with the importance of railroads for moving people and stuff around, the shells per square meter of front calculations each army was doing prior to launching an offensive, and the eventual success of Britain's naval blockade leading to a collapse on Germany's home front.
I don't know if I agree with the idea of battles being unimportant, either. If you think of soldiers as human capital, eighteen years in the making, you have to consider them important targets if for no other reason than to degrade the enemy's capability to defend its other, non-human capital. You also have to consider the effects on morale when heavy losses occur. Eg, consider the Russian Empire's losses in the first World War, and how they helped hasten the collapse of the provisional government. Democracies, in particular, are pretty sensitive about suffering heavy casualties. That's been true since ancient Greece at least.
Side note: Stephen Kotkin I recall once made the argument that the Nazi's best hope for defeating the Soviet Union lay in taking Moscow and in so doing killing or capturing the Soviet leadership, because the Soviet government had invested so much power in so few people that to decapitate it would have created a power vacuum so large that it likely would have crippled the Soviet war effort. I take that as a plausible argument in favor of the idea that at least in some times and places, individuals still matter.
The early 1940s term "Arsenal of Democracy" suggests that awareness of this book's argument was widespread at the time:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=arsenal+of+democracy&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=0&case_insensitive=false
> Good read, but I don't know if the thesis of this book is quite as revisionist as the author seems to think.
It reminds me of when I read "Lies My Teacher Told Me", which spent the whole book beating up on some textbooks from the 70s that didn't resemble anything I learned in school.
Sure, everyone knew that industrial production mattered. That was rather obvious, at least since WW1.
I think modern historians have struggled to square a few seemingly-contradictory facts:
-The USSR and Nazi Germany had by far the largest armies and did most of the actual killing.
-Both of those countries had rather rinky-dink economies, much smaller than the USA or even the UK. They were still relying on horses to run their farms.
-The USA, despite their massive industrial advantage, could do little to directly affect the war in Europe except strategic bombing
-Despite all the carpet bombing, Axis industrial production didn't fall apart, but instead *increased* as the war went on, leading many to wonder whether all that bombing was really worth the effort, or whether it was largely just an expensive sideshow to the "real war" on the eastern front.
The thesis of this book, as I understand it, is that yes, all that bombing really *was* worth it. It cost them heavily in lost resources, which led directly to them being outmatched on the eastern front. In terms of money, they spent a lot more fighting the air and sea war than they did on land.
Overall I'd say this book had a bit of a "back to the 1950s" feel, arguing for the old-fashioned view of the war that it was the Western allies who really won it, as opposed to the post-cold war, David Glantz et al view that it was the USSR who really won it.
"-Despite all the carpet bombing, Axis industrial production didn't fall apart, but instead *increased* as the war went on, leading many to wonder whether all that bombing was really worth the effort, or whether it was largely just an expensive sideshow to the "real war" on the eastern front."
German industrial production increased due to their massive use of slave labor and to rationalization and simplification of most of their weapons. Albert Speer was directly responsible for both measures. He was a cold, amoral genius if there ever was one.
You should read "Wages of Destruction," or at least the forthcoming review. It really takes down the myth of Albert Speer being some kind of genius, or that slave labor was some amazingly efficient source of industrial production. It argues instead that they simply invested heavily in factories and resource production at the start of the war, but it took time for those factories to come online.
It has been my understanding for a while now that those bullet points were common knowledge. Some of that was in my middle school history classes. Is that not the majority understanding on WWII history?
Right.
the argument that western bombing mattered more than the battles on the eastern front (which accounted for 80% of german casulties!) is certainly pretty out there
I think it's pretty manifestly an interaction. The performance of the German army against the Russians was probably impacted by Allied bombing. The effect of the Allied bombing probably mattered more the better the Red Army did.
Air power by itself can't win wars, it takes an army occupying the enemy's territory to do that and that requires winning battles. An army with air superiority has a much easier time winning those battles.
yeah- it's worth bearing mind the *dramatic* turnaround in the performance of the Axis against the USSR from Barbarossa to Kursk. The soviets started the war disastrously, losing something like 4 million against 1 million, as well as a huge chunk of territory. But 1 year later, they were able to not only hold the line, but also counterattack, and lose "only" 2 million against 1 million. It's not normal for an army to suddenly increase its quality that much while all its most experienced soldiers are getting killed off. It seems plausable to me that a lot of that turnaround was due to the Axis being bombed to hell, suffering a huge drop in the quantity and quality of their material.
> the United States all devoted between 65 and 80 percent of their economic output to the making and arming of aircraft, naval vessels, and anti-aircraft equipment.
This seems impossible to me. This doesn't include all other military-related expenditures like tanks, which means that total military spending was even higher. This would leave less than 1/5 of GDP for all other uses, like civilian consumption. Prior to the war, government spending was around 10% of GDP, so this would imply something along the lines of a 4x drop in individual spending. Based on https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2018/08/14/todays-graph-us-real-gdp-per-capita/ and its underlying source (https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/usgdp/) it seems like this must have knocked living standards back to around 1900 or earlier.
https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_usxrecxspendxgdp.htm indicates that total US government spending peaked at about 42% of GDP. Maybe this statistic is true for Germany and Japan near the end of the war but I strongly doubt it was ever true for the US.
I think that was supposed to mean 65 to 80% of the defense budget, not total GDP.
This is super fascinating, thanks!
This is a nice review, and the book sounds interesting. I'm somewhat baffled, though, that the only statistics mentioned deal with industrial production. At least as important was manpower - Germany and Japan quickly ran out of manpower reserves to replace losses. Roughly one-third of German combat forces in Normandy in June 1944 were "ost" battalions - troops recruited from occupied territories in Poland, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, or other non-German lands, because Germany was at the limits of manpower. They even tried unsuccessfully to recruit American and British soldiers from POW camps. This also seriously affected the ability of the Luftwaffe to continue operating. Germany also made very questionable allocations of its available manpower, for instance keeping roughly 300,000 soldiers in Norway through the end of the war, where they served no purpose other than to protect rail shipment of Swedish iron ore to Narvik. The manpower limitations forced Germany to rely on slave labor (non-Germans) to man the factories; these workers were less trained than the Germans they replaced, had short working lives due to malnutrition and abuse, and were sometimes looking for opportunities to sabotage the production.
Japan's manpower situation was not as stark - they were able to recruit new soldiers through the end of the war, but they didn't have the time to train pilots, which meant their army and naval air forces became ineffective even though thousands of planes were available.
Another critical weakness, hinted at in your review, was logistics. The Germans never planned for a logistical effort to support their territorial ambitions. They famously dispatched the Army into the Soviet Union without even planning for winter clothing. They made no real effort to extend rail transportation into captured territory in the Soviet Union, which meant the huge forces deployed were chronically short of food, ammunition, fuel, and spare parts. They had grandiose ambitions to drive through the Caucasus, across Persia, and meet up with the Japanese in India, but they had nothing resembling a logistical organization that could support even the opening phases of this concept. The Allied air offensive's (eventual) focus on oil supplies exacerbated the Germans' logistical problems, but the Germans did plenty of damage to their own cause through their single-minded focus on winning battles on the battlefield.
Likewise, the Japanese were woefully unprepared to logistically support their far-flung operations. Units dispatched to China, New Guinea, and Pacific islands were blithely told to obtain "local subsistence", which meant stealing food from the civilian population. In most areas, there wasn't enough food production to support the Japanese, even if the population had been willing, and Japanese brutality killed any chance of real cooperation. Food shortages led to cannibalism in many cases. The American submarine campaign obviously exacerbated this problem, but the Japanese were grossly unprepared to support the operations they started.
In the end, the Germans and Japanese were greatly outmatched in industrial output, but the real limiting factors in their ability to wage war were manpower and logistics. Air and naval power fed into the logistical problems, but lack of Axis capability came from poor preparation.
> They made no real effort to extend rail transportation into captured territory in the Soviet Union
That's not what I heard. My understanding is that a different railroad gauge was used in Germany vs the USSR so the Germans had to build new tracks, and replace ones that partisans would damage. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/02/23/gauge-transformation/
That claim doesn't make sense on its face. The Eastern Front was operating around 2,000 km away from Germany at certain points. Without a rail network the Germans wouldn't have been there at all. They certainly weren't going to transport their supplies by driving that far, and only a minority of their forces were even mechanized. Operation Barbarossa was wildly unrealistic for a number of reasons, but "supply the army 2,000 km away with mostly horses" wasn't one of them.
So you agree they did use rail transportation on captured territory in the Soviet Union?
Ah I agree with you, I should have replied to the original comment instead.
I didn't claim that the Germans made no use of railroads in Soviet territory. I said they made "no real effort to extend rail transportation." As TGGP said, the Soviets used a different rail gauge than Germany, so it would have taken significant effort to extend the rail network. Some of this was done, but not nearly enough to support forces operating 2000 km from German territory. The German military didn't even set up organizations to run the railroads in Soviet territory until March 1941, 3 months before the start of Barbarossa, but only 2 months before the scheduled start.
https://www.hgwdavie.com/blog/2018/3/9/the-influence-of-railways-on-military-operations-in-the-russo-german-war-19411945. In 1941, the armies quickly ran beyond the range the trains could support. But, the railroad units supporting the armies didn't have the manpower or equipment to replace, repair, and maintain signals, telecommunications, and rail depots. They did not plan on sufficient facilities, equipment, or manpower to unload trains to support the armies. They could not keep trains operating through the winter. The linked article has lots more detail, but the overall point is: the Germans put little thought and effort into supporting large-scale operations over the distances that would be required in the Soviet campaign.
By contrast, US planning for the invasion of France included stockpiling locomotives and cars, prepared for European rail gauges, and deploying them to liberated territory, with railroad battalions to operate them and engineer units to repair damaged and destroyed rails, bridges, and marshalling yards.
When German forces approached Baku, they were a long way from usable railroads. In some cases, fuel supplies were delivered to front-line units by camels.
A lot of that blogpost is unsourced gibberish, with absolutely nonsensical claims like all Soviet trains running at 29km/h.
The blog post identifies as an article published in "Journal of Slavic Military Studies", April 2017. It includes 87 footnotes. Do you deny any of the specific points I made relative to the Germans' preparations and operations?
Many of its claims are not sourced.
"The underlying problem was clearly identified by General Halder on 3 August 1941 as being the Eisenbahntruppen conflict of interest, between building low-capacity lines quickly behind the advancing armies or building high-capacity lines capable of supporting Generalquartiermeister Wagner in his objective of building up a Supply District behind each Heerengruppe. The Eisenbahnpioniere had been rapidly changing the gauge and undertaking basic repairs of bridges but were not repairing signaling or telephone communications or restoring the engine depots because they were focused on keeping within seven days of the advancing armies. These tasks were being left to the FED and the HBD, who did not possess sufficient equipment to build this infrastructure nor an organizational structure to manage the work. [...] With the distance from Terespol on the Polish border to Moscow being 1,070 km, there was sufficient Standard gauge track converted to support the advance using German railway stock."
So it seems they were extending rail infrastructure onto captured territory, but didn't invest enough in that effort to use it very effectively.
The passage you quote refers to summer of 1941 - the first few months of Barbarossa. I think it's a mistake to think of infrastructure as only re-gauged rail. The rail wasn't much use without telecommunications to control it, signaling facilities, engine sheds, and depots for loading/unloading. The real weaknesses showed up in the winter, and on into 1942.
For all their vaunted organizational excellence, the German military leadership focused on training and equipping units to win battles on the battlefield. In keeping with the Prussian tradition, strategy was left to the political leadership (this is why so many of the top military leadership were unprepared to be accused of war crimes for participating in aggressive war). There were logistics staff officers, but they didn't take nearly as broad a view as their American and British counterparts.
Since the time of Frederick the Great, the Prussian military had focused on winning decisive battles quickly by destroying the enemy army with minimal casualties. They did not focus on long-term operations because they aimed for a quick and favorable settlement. You'd think that World War I would have been enough to get them to expand their focus, but you'd be wrong.
I'm pretty sure Albert Speer said in "Inside the Third Reich" that he proposed to Hitler in late 1941 that the construction workers who were building the grand monuments and buildings in Berlin be temporarily sent to the USSR to work on the railroads. Hitler rejected the idea because he didn't want his megalomaniacal building projects to be paused and because sending the men away would have signaled to the German people that his promise of a quick victory in the East was false.
Lol, they didn't build new tracks. The SU was trading with the world. This way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogie_exchange#Raising_or_lowering
There seems to be a huge gap in the argument. It treats armies as if they were made out of tanks.
But how about -- people? Infantry? Manpower?
The review states:
"Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom (including the British Empire), and the United States all devoted between 65 and 80 percent of their economic output to the making and arming of aircraft, naval vessels, and anti-aircraft equipment."
But how is that economic output calculated? I suspect that the time spent by a worker in a factory gets counted, but the time spent by a soldier on the front does not get counted. Isn't that a paradox?
"during the war, the Germans had 2.33 million workers building aircraft"
which is a lot less than the total number of Germans who were sent to fight on the front over the course of the war, which suggests that the ground war was a priority over the air war.
From Wikipedia: "the total number of soldiers who served in the Wehrmacht during its existence from 1935 to 1945 is believed to have approached 18.2 million".
Surely all those millions must have been considered a powerful weapon on the frontline, or else they would have been kept at home building planes!
And if the soldiers themselves were a big and powerful part of the German forces, that is a problem for the argument summarized in the review, which considers the impact of battles versus aerial campaigns only on things like the amount of tanks or planes, ignoring soldiers.
Bombing infrastructures may have diminished the production of German tanks and planes, but surely didn't do much to diminish the number of German soldiers.
Men are needed to fight large-scale conventional war, but so is materiel. If a country runs low on either one, they fight poorly. So if the Allies had a way to make the Axis run low on materiel, we need not address the question of making them run low on men. (the answer to the latter question is horrible btw. It's nukes.)
Obviously materiel matters, but if you're trying to figure out which one is more important between battle and strategic bombardment, then it's "dishonest", or a least a mistake, to take into account materiel and ignore infantry.
Using the same method, you could say that only battles matter, strategic bombardment doesn't matter, because only battles can take out soldiers.
It always depends on the circumstances. The whole advantage of the island-hopping strategy in the Pacific was that the Japanese infantry on most of the islands was literally irrelevant without a fleet. You could safely let them starve without supplies while you skipped past them, only taking the islands you needed to serve as strategic bases.
Note that they weren't *completely* ignored. E.g. the allies continued bombing Rabaul regularly all the way through the end of the war.
Appreciate the perspective, but I thought the idea that WW2 was ultimately decided by resources, production, and logistics (and to some extent military technology) was completely accepted. The idea that there is a "conventional narrative" that focuses on battles is just wrong. A lot of popular fiction / popular history focuses on battles because they're fun and sexy (so to speak), and logistics is super nerdy and boring.
For example, Churchill identified the Battle of the Atlantic as the most important part of the war, both during it and not long after it ended.
Battles were important in allowing control over strategic points, supply routes, etc, not for the specific casualties that each one inflicted. I think that's the conventional understanding.
US campaigns against Japanese shipping are well understood at this point (though not so well in the postwar scholarship due to security restrictions on research). O'Brien's view of the relative value of the Allied strategic campaign to the resource balance is different from conventional understanding.
> not for the specific casualties that each one inflicted.
Well, barring extreme cases like Midway or Stalingrad of course.
The challenge I have with a pure logistics based view of warfare is there is no accounting for a people's willingness to fight, kill, and endure casualties. I don't think it's controversial to state that a leading cause for WW2 was that Germans didn't feel like they lost WW1 but that they felt betrayed. Japan was motivated by the way of the samurai, a belief that fanatical devotion to the Emperor and war was the highest honor in society. As a thought experiment, if the Allies had a neutron bomb that disarmed every piece of enemy tech but left them all alive, would a people with these ideologies have stopped fighting? Would the war have ended on the spot? Assuming it ended, would those ideologies have persisted after the war (remember, Japan was doing charges with swords against machine guns)? Or would it persist with the belief they just needed a neutron bomb to accomplish their goals? In terms of casualties, they were very willing to endure massive casualties and continue fighting, even with technology that could not compare. I want to draw a parallel to Vietnam, but of course they did have extensive logistics flowing in. I expect the confidence of logistics, ability to defend yourself and pursue your aggression, and confidence in the national ideology are all deeply intertwined and correlated to a degree that may be difficult to stop. I am hesitant to say that casualties alone broke these ideologies, but maybe it's best to leave it at: breaking the Axis' ability to continue fighting won the war, breaking the Axis' ideology won the peace after.
> if the Allies had a neutron bomb that disarmed every piece of enemy tech but left them all alive
Sorry, I can't help but note that this is the exact opposite of what a blast of neutrons would do.
Fighting a conventional war isn't possible without heavy weapons. Try to fight conventionally with only small arms and you'll be largely annihilated. With light weapons you can do guerrilla warfare, but... that doesn't usually work outside home turf? As in, guerrilla Nazis could have theoretically been a massive headache for the Allied forces in Germany, but they wouldn't have stopped Allied tanks from rolling in, and they wouldn't be able to retake France, Poland, Ukraine, etc. Modern example: Taliban/Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Yeah, the neutron bomb that only disarms tech is a sci-fi plot device that I'm referencing, not an actual bomb.
RE: heavy weapons, yes, that's my point. It's no longer a conventional war, but the desire to fight remains. Taliban controls Afghanistan right now because they wanted to keep fighting long after the US did. Their logistics were extremely simple and didn't require building any large scale vehicles. They simply never stopped being willing to kill and die for their cause, so the war never really ended despite the lack of battles or factory building.
I think you may be homogenizing both countries to an unhelpful degree. IIRC at the height of their power the Nazi party had maybe 8-10 million members, out of a total population of ~80 million Germans[1]. The largest number of votes they ever got in the Weimar era was slightly under 14 million, 37% of the total. So even if we assume that every single member was a zealous believer in Aryan Greatness and fully believed in the Stab in the Back theory (as opposed to being a party member for opportunistic reasons), and everybody who ever cast a vote for them was at least somewhat on board, that still lives tens of millions of Germans who weren't ideologically behind the NSDAP.
Now there's room for Germans to feel aggrieved by the outcome of WWI without buying into wacky Nazi race "science" or whatever, so one could argue that most of them were spoiling for a fight regardless, but they were probably not ride-or-die fanatics. And the waters are muddied considerably by what the NSDAP did with their political and technological power once they had it. The first victims of the Nazis were other Germans[2], in many cases *other Nazis.* Given the ideological diversity of the Weimar era, it seems pretty certain that a large number of Germans fell in line behind the Reich as much for reasons of self-preservation as for any fanatical desire to revenge the insults of WWI. And of course, the Nazis had 6 years before the war, and another 6 during the war in which to use their control of the information climate to propagandize: one presumes at least some Germans bought more heavily into the war than they otherwise would have thanks to Nazi messaging warping their views of reality.
What does this have to do with the view of the war as being based on economics, logistics and tech? Well, those things aren't just good for winning battles, they're also important factors in maintaining political control over the civilian population. In your techbane-bomb hypothetical, Germany would indeed have stopped fighting immediately because Germany would have stopped EXISTING immediately. There would have been land, the land would have had people in it, but they collectively would not have been Germany. As a nation it was tied together by road and rail, boat and plane, radio and telegraph, TV broadcast and broadsheet. The Nazi systems of control were inextricably intertwined with the technology and economics of the early 20th century: take those away and Germany can't act as a unified political entity anymore[3]. Realistically they can't even feed themselves, as modern populations require modern agriculture and transport infrastructure to support. They certainly can't do anything as complex and coordinated as waging war.
Even if you downgrade your bomb and stipulate that it only impacts weapons specifically, that it leaves all the communication and transportation and necessary economic production and food supply intact, I still don't think the Reich keeps fighting, or even existing. Certainly there'd be some number of die-hard Nazis willing to charge Allied positions with nothing but Säbel und Dolche, though probably less than you think. But all those *other* Germans? The ones who weren't totally gung-ho for the war effort, the people only working and/or fighting for the Reich because their neighbours were, and because of the very real possibility of being shot if they don't? Those people experience a *dramatic* change to their personal calculus. You've simultaneously made declining to fight a bit safer (the Nazis have no guns) and fighting near suicidal. Standing up to the Reich becomes easier, standing up to literally anyone outside of Germany becomes harder. This gets even more stark when you remember that the Nazis were also using actual slave labour. I think even if the allies just drop the bomb and hold defensive positions at the current front lines, there's a very good chance the Reich would have disintegrated all on its own at that point.
I've talked all about Germany here because I know less about Japan, but I gather that "not getting shot" was a motivator for at least some fraction of the Japanese labour force and soldiery as well, and that they also used slave labour. But ultimately, I don't care to guess whether the Japan would have retained more will to fight than Germany in similar situation.
Elsewhere in the comments somebody linked to the ACOUP blog entry on Strategic Airpower. The author blogs on many history-related topics, but there's a strong emphasis on military history. At various points he talks in quite a bit of detail about how different armies are constituted and what principles they use to keep their soldiers actually fighting: it varies A LOT from army to army. I wish I could link a specific post, but I don't remember for sure where it is, and it might be somewhat scattered around. I think it's discussed at various points in the Helm's Deep series, but maybe also somewhat in the Universal Warrior series, where he's getting into different notions of courage. It's certainly an interesting topic.
[1] Of which, to be fair, many were not eligible for membership even if they had wanted it.
[2] Or at least other people living within the borders of pre-war Germany.
[3] Of course it's possible to build a nation--even a Germany sized nation--on a simpler technological basis than that. But it requires very different systems of social and political control, which aren't going to spring into place the moment your techbane bomb goes off. The predictable result is just...complete collapse.
> O’Brien goes to great lengths to illustrate that Japan was not just a small island power easily subsumed by American production. The Japanese economy, at its peak, produced about as much as the Soviet Union
This seems like a weird claim. The US was already clearly the economic hegemon, with double or more the GDP of anyone else. Even a large island nation was easily subsumed by American production!
"Double or more the GDP", does not mean everyone else is "easily subsumed". Especially if they're on the far side of an ocean. O'Brien may be right that if it had just been a matter of both sides building ships and planes and training pilots as fast as they could unimpeded, Japan might have held out long enough to force a negotiated settlement(*). But US attacks were designed to cut in to Japanese production, and even more so pilot training, in ways that Japan could not reciprocate.
* Or wound up eating way more than two atom bombs, of course.
My point is that saying "they were as big as the Soviet Union!" (which I think is an exaggeration / using some pretty heavy rounding) is not very meaningful when the important comparison point is the United States.
Well, the Red Army was pretty good at tying down and destroying a crucial non-renewable resource that the Third Reich had and that is not mentioned here: German men of fighting age.
Yes, every history and diary of the war I’ve read brings up the old men and boys filling out the German ranks by 1944.
This might also be relevant to the Philippines campaign mentioned in the article- taking out a few hundred thousand Japanese troops was important in itself, not just a side-show for the air-sea campaign towards Japan.
Couldn't the Philippines have just been blockaded, trapping the Japanese troops there for the rest of the War?
Possibly. Maintaining a fleet large enough to blockade the Philippines would have been a significant use of resources, though not necessarily more than the invasion. If the blockade slipped, the army might have been evacuated to southern China, if they could muster transport. As Nimitz had planned an attack on Formosa instead of the Philippines, this would have been tricky at best, but enemy airbases in the Philippines would have complicated the Nimitz plan.
The local population and American remnants would not have fared well under continued occupation, famine, and guerrilla warfare, though again this has to be contrasted with their fate during a grueling military campaign which leveled cities. MacArthur seems to have anticipated a faster collapse of opposition.
I wonder if the author (and the other WWII buffs here) have read The Second World War, by Antony Beevor, and what they think of it in contrast to the reviewed book. It also took an economic perspective on WWII, and I found it fascinating. It was also released a few years earlier and may be the more known book.
Great review of an interesting book!
I feel like we must distinguish between "forced errors," and unforced errors, when evaluating strategic effects. Eg:
Yes, strategic bombing caused the destruction of Germany's best factories and forced them into inefficient small underground factories. That was a direct, forced result, which caused much more damage than any individual battle.
On the other hand: germany investing so much into the V2 was an unforced error. It was a pure psychological error, much like Japan's overreaction to the Doolittle raid (or America's reaction to 9/11...). This book showed that Germany invested a massive amount into their air force, much more than their army, and got little return from it. Even late in the war, they continued investing in a fantasy of a strategic bomber that could bomb America or the deep Russian factories.
We tend to think of the USSR as this industrial juggernaut because they built the most tanks. But they weren't, they were far behind the world powers in tital economy. They were just the one that actually focused entirely on the army, while the others invested disproportionately in air and sea. The book had some interesting graphs to that effect, which I wish this review could have included.
To me, this book did a lot to dissuade me from the old "historical materialistic, allied victory was inevitable" way of thinking. If the Allies had stopped the bombing program, or if they had continued to bomb cities instead of factories, or if the Germans had given up trying to build their own air force and just built tanks, the war would have looked very different.
> or if the Germans had given up trying to build their own air force and just built tanks
I'm not so sure. Germany primarily relied on gas-to-oil conversion plants for their petrol, as the Allied naval supremacy drastically reduced their ability to import petrol. Controlling the Caucasian oil fields was one of the primary aims of the invasion of the USSR, to expand the petrol supply. The synthetic petrol plants were large targets for air raids; they had to be built at that scale for operations to be economically feasible. Building a horde of tanks isn't very useful when the petrol supply is being bombed into rubble because you don't have an air force.
It's a complex issue, more complicated than I feel like getting into in a comment. But broadly:
-Germany always knew that oil would be an issue. They stockpiled oil in advance of the war, importing it from... the USSR and USA (oops). They had enough for a quick war, like the invasion of France and the initial push into the USSR. But after 1941 their stockpile had mostly run out, and they were relying on the thin trickle they could produce from synthetic oil and romanian fields. This greatly limited any kind of large offensive maneuvers, but was enough to keep them going for static defensive attritional warfare.
-The Allies *tried* to bomb the oil plants, but it wasn't very successful. Notably the German oil production didn't significantly decrease until late in the war: https://ww2data.com/german-oil-production-by-source-1939-1945/ . An early attempt to bomb the refinery in Romania turned into a disaster: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tidal_Wave.
-I know I said "tanks," but I meant it as a shorthand for all sorts of army material. Towed artillery, antitank guns, machine guns, flak cannons, etc. Much of that could be moved by railway or horses with very little oil used, especially on the defense. We should note how *odd* it is that the USSR was able to outproduce them so drastically in army material despite starting with a lower level of industrial production, especially when they themselves were having to relocate and rebuild their factories.
As a general rule, I think, four tanks and a plane are going to be tougher than five tanks, all else being equal.
Sorry, but I don't understand what you mean with this comment. Tougher technologically to build? Tougher to destroy? More expensive?
The aircraft of the time were massively more expensive to build than tanks, especially the heavy bombers. The B-29 in particular was a huge expense, much more expensive than the Manhattan project for example. Of course you can't directly compare tanks to planes 1:1 (eg you can't take a highly trained aerospace engineer and convert him into 10 tank factory workers), but there were some resource tradeoffs there.
> They were just the one that actually focused entirely on the army,
Well that and they had the US providing their logistics for free, which is what allowed them to focus entirely on tanks.
That's a myth, or at least heavily exaggerated. The US sent lend-lease mostly to the UK ($30 billion vs $10 billion to the USSR), and what they did send came mostly in 1943 and later. It made up a relatively small amount of the USSR economy, something like 5%. It did aid greatly in certain categories like trucks and aviation fuel, but "providing their logistics for free" is just a myth the US says to make themselves feel more important.
Soviet tanks wouldn't have gotten far without an army of American trucks to carry their fuel and ammunition.
Do you have a source? I'm inclined to believe McMeekin et al on this, and he's very much of the "U.S. Lend Lease was vitally important and basically saved the USSR" school.
This site has some good statistics about the numbers of it: https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2020/06/08/lend-lease-to-the-ussr/
"Lend-lease supplied the USSR with 1.9% of all artillery, 7% of all tanks, 13% of all aircraft, 5.4% of transport in 1943, 19% transport in 1944 and 32.8% in 1945. Lend-lease deliveries amounted to 4% of Russia’s wartime production."
You could of course argue over what exactly it means to be "vitally important." Perhaps that extra 4% was just enough to tip the balance, or perhaps it supplied some critical gaps that the USSR was incapable of producing (most notably 57% of aviation fuel). But it simply wasn't the overwhelming flood of material the way that Americans perhaps like to think it was. Also note that battles of Stalingrad and Kursk happened in 1942 and 1943, respectively, so shipping in aid in 1944 and 1945 was very unlikely to have "won the war."
It seems to me that as important and underestimated air and sea power might have been, in the end they still needed land power to actually capture and occupy the enemy territory whose industrial capabilities they were degrading. If we just imagine a counterfactual where only air and sea power were used, then as degraded as German and Japanese industrial capacity might have become, their empires wouldn't have been defeated if there were no boots to walk in and take the land. So some relative level of land power is still needed, and it seems worthwhile noting just how disproportionately it was supplied by the Soviets on the eastern front, even while the western front was supplying most of the air and sea based attacks. So I think some level of hedging the claim of the ultimate importance of air and sea power relative to land power is needed.
The USSR was supplying lots of manpower and taking lots of casualties, but part of that is how inefficiently they used said manpower. They consistently took higher casualties than the Germans both on the strategic defensive (when Germany was taking their territory) and offensive (when they were taking it back). Better equipped allied divisions were more effective than comparable numbers of Soviets against Axis forces: https://youtu.be/BnIv7S_q57Q?t=713
On the flip side, comparing late war offensives, Operation Bagration's deep penetration offensive looks more efficient as far as ending the war goes than Market Garden in the West, even had the drive into Holland been successful. A lot of books I've read come down hard on Montgomery in particular as inefficient as a commander. The overall losses per time might be less than the Soviets, but if you're not making any progress, the end result isn't any better.
The books I've read suggest Bagration as something of an outlier as far as Soviet strategic efficiency goes, though. On the other hand, you can't blame them for going back to brute force when it comes to taking Berlin when that's a definitive end point for the war in Europe.
I usually hear Bagration compared to Overlord, since the former took place just two weeks after the latter. Bagration also covered a wider area of the front compared to the relatively narrow one pursued by Montgomery, and Eisenhower never came around to his narrow-front strategy to quickly win the war either.
Overlord, as an amphibious invasion, is hard to compare to as far as offensives go. Relevant to the discussion, though, is that the real triumph of the invasion was the ability to bypass the need to capture a harbor by bringing two Mulberry harbors with them.
Market Garden isn't the only place where the Western Allies bogged down with a narrow or shallow offensive; the fighting around Caen after Overlord and the prolonged amount of time it took to bypass Monte Cassino (including the effectively failed Anzio landings) show similar issues.
You go to war with the army you have. The Soviets were always going to take more casualties than the Germans due to the poorer training and leadership (the fault of Soviet pre-war planning and governance, mind you, but not necessarily the fault of their command at the time). Yes, there was some stupidity and some ruthless indifference to losses there, but Bagration and the encirclement of Stalingrad show that they could be quite effective when given the chance.
"Airpower [..] compelled the Germans to waste tremendous resources on [..] exorbitant, ultimately ineffective vengeance weapons."
Only under the assumption that terror-bombing civilians is an effective strategy. The correct conclusion is that such emotionally driven strategies are doomed to fail. If you're going to call a weapon literally "vengeance weapon", you have to wonder how much rational calculation really went into its development and deployment.
Even the United States Strategic Bombing Survey conceded that bombing German civilians was ineffective as a morale weapon. While they conveniently credited the German police state repression for that, Londoners during the Blitz showed that neither side's civilians much blamed their own government for the hardships and destruction brought upon them by the respective enemy, and hardened resolve to win the war.
> The amount of concrete devoted just to protecting Hitler personally from air attack was almost a third of the entire total for fortifications on the Eastern Front.
This appears to be a very important point to the author, as it's been bolded in the review. But what does that really mean in context? The tremendous amount of concrete and steel that went into the Atlantic Wall made military sense, as France had been fully occupied and the Atlantic coast was a natural border and obvious point of attack for the Allies. But the Eastern Front was vast and far from decided, so what was there to even fortify? Drawing some arbitrary line across Russia and digging in with lots of concrete bunkers would have been the opposite of the German goals in the East.
So yes, Hitler's personal safety requiring a third of Eastern Front concrete is a curious factoid, but tells me nothing in what way that was a bad decision. Was it too much concrete for Hitler's safety, again testifying to his emotional strategies? Or was it too little for the Eastern Front? Could be both, could be neither.
Germany may have planned on always being on the offensive rather than defensive on the eastern front, but they would up having to play defense, so fortifying an area like Sevastopol was necessary.
It's not about whether Hitler needed this much concrete to protect him. The point is that strategic bombing not only destroyed the best factories, but also caused a huge fraction of remaining resources to be redirected from efficient production to reducing further losses.
""Airpower [..] compelled the Germans to waste tremendous resources on [..] exorbitant, ultimately ineffective vengeance weapons."
Only under the assumption that terror-bombing civilians is an effective strategy. The correct conclusion is that such emotionally driven strategies are doomed to fail. If you're going to call a weapon literally "vengeance weapon", you have to wonder how much rational calculation really went into its development and deployment. "
I assume that Hitler feared to lose too much public support if he didn't come up with anything about the bombings, efficient or not.
"Launched primarily against UK cities, the V-2s killed several thousand civilians"
Not that it matters much, but my recollection is that about half of the V-2s were launched against the port of Antwerp, which made somewhat more sense. But they weren't accurate enough to do much damage to the actual port facilities.
I haven't read this one yet, though I've followed O'Brien's work for years and he's usually pretty good. I should appreciate this book, because the role of logistics and industrial capacity in war is usually underrated. But I don't need this book, because I already know that and having better statistics about old history is of only marginal value to me. Maybe it will be helpful to others.
I do have some criticisms, at least of O'Brien as interpreted by Finalist #8.
Most notably, "Does the occupation or non-occupation of that point on the map affect the ability of a combatant to keep fighting? In some limited cases, yes."
Those "limited cases", if we're limiting it just to World War II, would seem to be Poland, Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Yugoslavia, the Phillipines, Indonesia, New Guinea, Malaya and Singapore, about a zillion Pacific islands, and very nearly Soviet Russia.
And, as noted in passing, there's room for more of that in naval wars, where you can sometimes lock in a victory by destroying the enemy's prewar fleet in battle and securing dominion of the seas. Like Japan almost did to the United States, until they pissed it away by losing the core of their prewar fleet in fair and open battle with the remnant of ours.
Those "limited cases", look kind of like the most important parts of WWII to me. And there are many, many industrial-age wars, from Franco-Prussian to Arab-Israeli to the Falklands and Desert Storm, where that's all there is to it.
The production war, is I think mostly a thing that happens *before* the shooting war. Intrawar production is just a tiebreaker when the whole "win battles and conquer the enemy" thing turns into a draw. Which can happen if the weapons and tactics of the day strongly favor the defense (WWI but not so much WWII), or if the two sides are separated by a logistically severe barrier (the Pacific Ocean or a thousand miles of Eurasian steppe), or if a third party is supplying just enough aid to maintain the stalemate (early Lend-Lease). But at least if you can see those coming, there are usually better ways to deal with them than to try and outbuild the enemy in the middle of a war.
On to the specifics:
O'Brien seems to be focusing on the Battle of Britain as a sort of "production war", with the Germans trying to overcome the UK's aircraft production. But Germany wasn't bombing aircraft factories, or really trying to disrupt *production* at all. The Battle of Britain proper, was intended as a quick decisive battle that would destroy the RAF and establish German air supremacy on a timescale too short for intrawar production to matter. When that failed, it basically turned into an early version of the Terror Warfare that would be later carried out by the V-weapons.
The German attempt at knocking out Britain by a production war, was the Battle of the Atlantic. That also failed, but it was a much closer thing and it was well suited to play Germany's strengths against Britain's vulnerabilities on the military-industrial front. Britain's productivity wasn't local to Britain, rather it was distributed across an Empire (plus alliances) tied together by sea lanes vast even by the scale of the Royal Navy. and so very hard to defend. But it seems like O'Brien is only talking about the Battle of the Atlantic in terms of its effect on *American* productivity? Even though he *does* emphasize the US submarine war against Japan? Weird.
I think he overstates the importance of Allied air power in Normandy, and France in general. Very good for impeding German reinforcement and counterattack, but it wasn't a matter of carpet-bombing the German army out of existence so the Allies could walk across France. That required, yep, actual battles of fire and maneuver.
There doesn't seem to be much discussion of manpower, recruitment, and training, except in the specific context of oil supplies impeding flight training. But all the fancy (or simple) weapons in the world won't help without men to wield them, and on the flip side "we don't have any of that but we do have a few million veterans with rifles" was still viable in WWII - see e.g. China mostly holding off Japan for eight years. And the American recipe for turning a few hundred veterans and twenty thousand fresh conscripts into a combat-ready infantry division in nine months, was probably at least as important as Kaiser's ability to build a Liberty Ship in three.
And, yeah, psychological factors *matter*, If your factories are turning out bignum guns and shells but your army believes itself beaten, you lose. Battles are perhaps not the best way to tilt the *material* balance of war, but they're very, very good at convincing the enemy they are beaten. Then they sue for peace, and maybe you get those nice factories as part of the terms.
Even if Japan had destroyed more of the US fleet early on, we were able to produce enough ships to overwhelm them.
If Midway had been reversed (all the US carriers sunk vs only one Japanese), and if the US had not effectively attacked Japanese production. the US would not have reached parity with the IJN until sometime in 1944, and would not have had 2:1 naval superiority until early 1945 at best.
And in that hypothetical, the Japanese navy's ships are backed by thousands of very capable aircraft with highly trained pilots operating from unsinkable aircraft carriers. Whereas the US would have only what it could bring with it by sea, to the far end of a very long supply line.
That's a pretty good recipe for a stalemate, with neither side able to decisively project power into the other's core territory. Well, except for the atom bombs, of course. But if the argument is going to be that the United States won because only the United States was rich enough to develop the atom bomb while fighting a major war, then we don't really need a book for that (and we do need to talk about the ideological factors that had all the Martians working at Los Alamos).
But what were the odds of Midway having a perfectly reversed outcome? Wouldn't an outcome where both sides suffered roughly equal damage be more likely? If that had happened, the U.S. would have not gained naval supremacy as late as you calculate.
Draws are the exception rather than the rule. And in carrier battles specifically, if the forces are even close to balanced, the first side to have a clear understanding of what it's up against and where the enemy actually is, tends to have an overwhelming advantage. There are reasons why it was more likely to be the United States that achieved that advantage at Midway, but it was not a sure thing.
I think the quality of the writing here sits comfortably above the other reviewers so far, and that helps to make this a very interesting read.
I'm left wondering how much the combatants in the war understood this stuff. I mean, the Allies must have known that bombing German munitions factories was effective - that's why they did it. Each side must have had a fairly clear idea of how much of their production was getting through into effective use at the front. And they knew they had to produce a lot of stuff, hence Rosie the Riveter. So if the combatants knew the importance of production; and O'Brien knows the importance of production, then all those military historians in between, who were apparently concentrating on the battles, were... just writing history-flavoured entertainment for the masses? This is perhaps a rather damning assessment of a whole branch of history, isn't it?
I thought the review over-stated how revolutionary “emphasising the importance of production” actually is, for a book written in 2015…
As for how much the combatants understood this stuff, I think there was quite high variance there. Obviously the V-2 programme is an example of inefficiency arising out of a poor/deranged understanding. On the allied side, Alanbrooke had to fight tooth and nail to get the relevant figures to agree to invading Italy before northern France (and also to delay any second front until the logistics were truly ready). It was obvious to him that clearing the Med would free up a several million tons of shipping and that this was critical, but others were more focused on things like liberating France and honouring commitments to Russia asap. (A lot of decisions like this could have gone differently, which does make me wonder a bit about the reviewer’s dismissal of those sections of the book that focus on the people making them.)
Yeah, that makes sense.
I think you might be substantially overestimating the ease and simplicity of the issue from the perspective of someone mired in the middle of a war. "Knowing production is important" in a generic sense is pretty useless. HOW important is it? What are you willing to trade it off against? You have 300 new fighters that just came into deployment: how many of them do you assign to intercept bombers threatening your factories and railroads vs how many of them do you send to the front to support your bombers or protect your ground units? How many of your bombers to you assign to attack enemy production vs trying to produce more immediate (operational or tactical) effects on the battlefield?
Fundamentally this is about trade offs between different time frames. Deploying resources to the front lines helps your position *right now.* Deploying resources to protect your production or harm your enemy's doesn't help you until months or even years later. Can you afford to wait months or years? Is losing the battle right in front of you going to introduce even bigger production penalties? Is there a strategic objective within short-term reach that might make up for the long-term hit of getting your factories bombed? Is getting that convoy sunk going to have ripple effects that force you to make bad choices later on? I think even a leader with nearly perfect god's-eye view of the theatre of war isn't going to be able to make these choices perfectly: nobody knows the future, every choice is a risk, and your ability to reason through the ramifications in such a complex system is sharply limited. And of course no such leader existed: the relevant information was split between dozens, hundreds or thousands of officers and civilian managers, with the usual friction of inter-group communication dialed up to 11 by the chaos of war.
I can't comment on the use of this book in particular without reading it (which I am now somewhat tempted to do), but the obvious value of this sort of historianship is producing quantitative answers to these questions now that the conflict is no longer in motion. How important *were* the various pieces of production infrastructure ultimately? How consequential were the battles happening at the same time? Which things turned out to be more or less important than expected? Of course, we can't re-run the war 1000 times with different decisions made, but digging into the data as it exists hardly seems like a worthless exercise.
Thanks - I'm sure all that's right. And it certainly seems that there's a lot of nuance and subtlety in the book that is still way above my head. I'm not a historian at all, and certainly not of the 20th century.
But the review is fairly categorical about this:
"battles are overrated" "This focus is silly" "military historians and the broader public have focused inordinately on battles" - it adds up to a fairly damning critique of the whole genre of military history, fairly or unfairly.
Weeeeell… although….. take away the broader relevance to the outcome of the war, and there’s still a huge amount of human interest in what goes on in battle, at every level. How do people behave under that kind of pressure? To what extent are we all savage beasts, or cowards, or heroes or anything in between, when the chips are down? What qualities enable leadership under those circumstances? Etc etc. Neither of us is likely ever to actually need to deploy the lessons of strategic procurement *or* battlefield tactics as practiced in WWII or anywhere else. If there’s any value beyond entertainment to reading about such things, it’s in terms of some generalised, transferable principles that might inform our understanding of all sorts of stuff. (And then, of course, knowing things is amusing and valuable in itself.)
Good comment. In life, including life during war, everything is decision-making under uncertainty.
Add that there are multiple decision makers at many levels. All of which have imperfect information.
The aggregate result of their activity also depends to a considerable extent on impossible-to-predict-in-advance randomness and chance.
History, by contrast, is the story of life after all life has been taken out of it.
Very good comment. I think the book did a good job showing how that decision "what do we focus on" was made very differently by the different countries. The US and UK focused heavily on air and naval power, which took a long time to pay off, but eventually it paid off big. The USSR was a little late to do anything, but it was able to ramp up quickly by focusing on very simple tank and artillery designs, but then stagnated. Germany and the other Axis powers were doing a strange mix of everything, with a huge variance in results.
Eh...felt like reading a combined Wikipedia article and PowerPoint bulleted presentation. Some posts can make war Exciting(tm) even to a skeptical audience, perhaps by focusing on the shiny battles (an obvious explanation for their salience), or being written by Bret Devereaux. This was just kinda shrug. I do appreciate the relatively well-edited brevity and low rate of tpyos though, those have really dogged some other reviews. Plus no awkward OT tangents for pandering points. Ctrl-F for AI = 0!
The dull 20% about Great Man Theory: is it just that the sections are boring, or the arguments themselves are bad? It certainly seems worth exploring how the decisions of key authority figures had large impacts on entire theatres (like with Tippecanoe and MacArthur Too, or the Coulda Had a V-2) in a book about root causes of WWII victory. Not like mere logistics are never influenced by politics, vibes, and other illogical noneconomic concerns. Which is one of the main roadblocks to any school of Materialism All The Way Down: homo economicus being on the Endangered Species List.
Good point. I like the Right Stuff because it explores this tension between how the Project Mercury astronauts were seen and promoted as heros when from a tech point of view they were 'spam in a can'. But tech is relatively simple compared to how the human brain deals with a crisis-rich situation. That is inherently more interesting for most people. Would we rather watch the Olympics or tune in to a livestream of a top Sports Nutrition clinic?
A fascinating but perplexing review. UK opinion hasn't been kind to Bomber Harris, I initially thought the book was moving towards a re-appraisal of his aerial campaign, but then the evil of morale bombing comes back again. But Harris himself was interviewed in the World at War and my takeaway was that the distinction between morale bombing and strategic bombing was moot because navigation wasn't perfect and bombing happened in the dark. Bombers would set off with a target in mind but after 2 hours flight in the dark they could be in practice be some way off. Harris may just have been trying to justify himself and cherry-picking, of course.
My other thought was if you just play whack-a-mole with aeroplanes and subs, you stop the axis from spreading but you don't recover the territory you've lost, and you certainly don't get unconditional surrender. Colossus shortened the war by two years they reckon but obviously codebreaking alone doesn't win a war. At some point you have to get soldiers on the ground - with air support, sure. Anyway, perhaps these issues are dealt with in the book. Thanks!
"Bombers would set off with a target in mind but after 2 hours flight in the dark they could be in practice be some way off."
This seems like a very poor defence even if completely true because...well...you also have another option. If you can't have confidence that your night-time bombing runs are going to hit anything useful, you can just NOT DO THEM. Deploy your bombers for operation or tactical effects. Or produce fewer bombers and put the resources elsewhere. Or launch a smaller number of daytime raids (to limit casualties), destroying less total stuff but forcing the Luftwaffe to stay deployed in positions to intercept you.
The only way "it was dark, we didn't know what we were bombing" is actually a sound justification is if one target is very nearly as good as another. But that's just the terror bombing question all over again, and history has been pretty definitive on that one.
I'd happily read a book discussing the morality of WW2 allied bombing and/or its effectiveness, but those are different discussions which often end up bleeding into each other. There was a thread recently about how people misdirect discussions about e.g torture by saying "you know, this bad thing is actually ineffective", rather than addressing the moral question of whether you should do the bad thing, effective or not. And I feel there's a culture of "actually strategic bombing a la Harris was ineffective" which seems lazy and I thought the book was challenging this, then suddenly it wasn't (this may be a problem with the review, not the book).
Whether effectiveness and morality are, in fact, separate depends on your ethical system. To utilitarians (and others of a strongly consequentiality bent) the lack of effectiveness is very much a moral argument: you can justify deliberately causing bad consequences, but only if you strong enough good consequences to counterbalance them. Of course, not everyone tends towards consequentialism, but it seems FAR more common in war than in other aspects of life. And one hopes anyone taking a more deontological view would *already* be strongly against both torture and terror bombing, so attacking the effectiveness ought to be a very efficient way to convince the holdouts.
Night raids were designed to reduce bomber losses, and I believe were quite effective at that. The Allies would have needed far more planes than they had (especially earlier) and would have sustained huge losses trying to bomb during the day. It's a calculation at that point - how much saved in bombers compared to how much worse the aim on the bombs. I don't know the math, but it's certainly believable that the night raids were the right strategic decision. Especially if you value (as Harris clearly did) Allied lives and equipment more than the enemy's.
Yes. That's why I specified "a smaller number of daytime raids" as one alternative. Because you can launch more total raids and drop more total bombs by going at night, at the expense of having close to zero targeting capability.
Which again, I addressed. For "drop a lot more bombs, with a lot less accuracy" to be strategically sound, you need to have a pretty flat target priority curve: hitting residences or shops or cultural cites or other civilian infrastructure needs to have positive strategic value, value not too much lower than whatever you would target if you could actually aim. Otherwise you are paying a very large opportunity cost for an operation that mostly produces effects that you don't value, which is obviously unsound. Harris, in particular, was quite explicit that deliberately targeting civilians *was* sound strategy and a worthwhile use of military resources.
In theory it might be possible to thread the needle, to have the lower casualty rates alone make up for the increased usage of man-hours and materiel. If bombing at night merely cut your accuracy in half, for example, if you *only* needed twice to drop twice as many bombs to reliably hit the same target at night, then taking fewer causalities might well justify doubling the resources you expend to achieve the same strategic objective. But that is emphatically NOT my understanding of how things worked with WWII technology. As I understand it, nighttime bombing was MASSIVELY less accurate, that allied raids were mostly targeting large areas rather than trying to destroy specific facilities. And that is certainly well beyond the point where hitting civilian targets must be a *goal* not a *side effect* in order for the practice to justify the expense.
That's fair. I think there's an argument that he might have thought the tradeoff to preserve bombers and crews was worth it, but he also seemed to genuinely think that bombing civilians was somewhere between fully acceptable and a separate goal.
If I were in charge of Allied bombing at the time (even knowing what I know now), I wouldn't rule out night raids, but I also would try very hard to avoid pointless civilian deaths. He doesn't seem to have cared as much so I'm not going to defend him on that.
"If I were in charge of Allied bombing at the time (even knowing what I know now), I wouldn't rule out night raids..."
Fair. I wouldn't rule them out either, I'd evaluate them against all the other options in terms of their cost-effectiveness. I just have the very strong intuition that they'd generally weight in well below most other options, even if I were valuing the lives of German civilians at precisely zero (which, TBF, in the midst of WWII I very well might do).
> A perfect companion book to HtWWW would examine why military historians and the broader public have focused inordinately on battles
Check out Cathal Nolan's The Allure of Battle.
I read it many years ago so my recollection is fuzzy enough that I don't know if it is a "perfect" but I seem to recall the thesis is what you're talking about.
To oversimplify, his thesis is that the legend of Cannae (a single decisive battle that determines the war while also making you famous for thousands of years) has basically shaped Western thinking every since.
And, as he points out, not even Cannae or Teutoberg were acutally decisive.
Cannae was the opposite of that, Hannibal decisively defeated the Roman forces in detail but Carthage decisively lost the war.
Interesting thesis but is it new? HTWWW publication date 2015. Here's Max Hastings summing up the war in All Hell Let Loose 2011: "America’s industrial might contributed more to victory than did its armies." (And that is the thesis of the whole book). Same point surely?
A display in the American Military Museum in Normandy in 1984 was where I first saw that argument made.
I feel that the book builds up a straw man, that people believe that major wars between great powers are won on the battlefield, when in fact military historians have always known that factors of size, logistics, economics and military-related production are vital in long-term wars.
This is especially true in the modern world, but it was also true in the past, e.g. Carthage won a great battle against Rome at Cannae, but it didn't do them any good as Rome could just simply build more armies.
Yup, that, plus the idea that carpet bombing of civilians being a “sacred cow” bring bravely “gored”, didn’t seem quite current.
An even better example might be the FIRST Punic War, where Rome lost two entire fleets (to storms!), and STILL won.
There seems to be a glaring issue with the thesis presented in the book as summarized in the review.
"By 1945, the Japanese economy was so desperate for fuel that the government set up more than 34,000 small stills in the home islands to distill the oil from pine needles into aviation fuel."
This jibes with what I've read elsewhere about the Japanese economy during the late war; outside of a few major things that require heavy machinery, a lot of it was decentralized into small factories. Now, you're an American strategic planner. How do you go about wrecking this sort of economy as efficiently as possible? You level the major population centers. Nagasaki, specifically, was one of the major remaining industrial areas. So, regardless of what LeMay says about the motivation, the result is the same.
The other part of this is that it ties into the major question of 'why did the Japanese surrender?' You have three events in close succession immediately before hand: Hiroshima, the Soviet declaration of war, and Nagasaki. If you want to argue that it was the Soviet declaration of war that was the deciding factor, you have have a reason why. The Soviets would be able to supply a lot of troops, but did not bring significant strategic bombing capabilities to effect the Japanese economy or the amphibious capabilities necessary to threaten the home islands.
Both the book, and this article, needs a much more detailed discussion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop friendship pact (with the secret addendum!) between the communist russian empire and the nazi german empire, which divided Eastern Europe between them, and thus began WW2.
The complicity of russia in starting WW2, and enabling germany, has been white-washed and forgotten.
Interesting review. James D Hornfischer’s “The Fleet at Flood Tide” provides (in my opinion) a compelling argument that Japan wouldn’t have surrendered without the atomic bombs being dropped. Well worth a read. Clearly Japan would’ve lost anyway, but it would’ve been awfully bloody.
I will never forget William Manchester’s book “Goodbye Darkness” about his time fighting as a Marine in the Pacific. “Thank God for the atom bomb,” he wrote. The grunts on the ground had already seen how hard the Japanese would fight to defend their own ground in Okinawa and they knew American casualties would be enormous if they had to invade the Japanese homeland.
Even if the atomic bombs might - with the benefit of hindsight - perhaps have been unneccessary to force a Japanese surrender (the Soviet declaration of war was perhaps sufficient), that would be beside the point when considering the decision problem facing Truman in late July 1945.
Since any president not using the atomic bomb as soon as technically possible would have risked been crucified by public opinion, if more US servicemen than necessary had died as a consequence of not-use.
Yeah the whole viewpoint that America was wrong to drop the atomic bombs is symptomatic of the backwards modern viewpoint that refuses to blame the perpetrators of violence and instead blames the victims. Japan attacked the US without even declaring war and committed the most heinous war crimes imaginable, justifying functionally any level of violence in return.
You see a similar dynamic with the Manchester airport armed police attack. Some visitors to the UK attack armed police but when they fight back the police have apparently gone overboard? No they’re protecting the lethal weapons they carry, overwhelming force is sensible in that situation. Don’t wanna get kicked? Don’t attack police.
You don't have to consider morals to reach the conclusion that the most rational solution to Truman's decision problem was to drop the bombs.
All that is needed is to place yourself in his position. He was acting, as we all are, under uncertainty:
"Maybe the bombs are unneccessary to force a surrender. However, it is at least likely that the Japanese will fight some weeks or months longer if I do not drop the bombs. During those additional weeks or months, maybe no US servicemen will die. But that is highly unlikely, and quite likely thousands more will die. Add to this that I know with close to 100 percent certainty what everyone in the US will say if it is revealed I had a weapon that quite likely would have limited further US causalties, which I did not use."
Double-yes to the Manchester situation! The keyboard warriors' response to real violence, in which they would instantly collapse into a sniveling heap of trembling flesh (I should know, I've been there) - is to pretend there's an exact response level to a vicious assault that keeps everybody looking clean and unharmed. Police should have some magic method to subdue violent attackers! The method cannot include any of: guns, tasers, chokes, holds, kicks, punches, anything, really, that looks "violent" to a bystander with a phone.
Great review. I'm glad that I know about this book, and the thesis seems pretty convincing.
I immediately wonder how this framework applies to the balance of power between China and the US and its allies. China obviously has dramatically higher manufacturing capacity and is working hard to increase coal to oil capacity. The US can project power more globally and could perhaps cut off much of Chinese trade in the event of a war, but I'm not sure how relevant that would be. I'm hoping we never have to find out how a US-China conflict would go, but I'm concerned about the manufacturing base disparity.
"The stupidity and expense of building the V-2 probably saved tens of thousands of lives elsewhere, which is ultimately yet another benefit of the Allied bombing campaign."
So really Werner von Braun was a war hero who did more to serve the Allied cause than almost any other person alive during that time?
But seriously I love these type of history books with numbers and statistics. They speak to me much more than "so and so general fought brilliantly and bravely in X or Y battle".
Kind of squares too with my experience playing various strategy games. The game is often a stale mate, or will take a long long time to win unless you kill the other sides economy. The only way a game is usually decided on the battlefield is in how well you are protecting your economy.
Great read. I was confused, though, by the negative criticism of O’Brien’s attention to eg the American decision to focus on naval and air production. Given that these turned out to be the keys to victory, isn’t it fascinating, and a necessary part of the story, to point out that the decision could have gone the other way, and hence that individual decisions at the highest levels can and do make a critical difference even in the context of modern industrial warfare?
I wonder how much of an effect European resistance fighters had on all this?
As often success is framed in how much military capacity is destroyed (and role of resistance is downplayed as they destroyed little), but not so much in success at destroying logistics and production.
Stalin remarked that the war would be won by whoever could build the most engines and have the fuel to run them.
Looking at Germany after the Fall of France, they need to either:
1) Convince the Brits to make peace
2) Conquer enough of the Soviet Union to stalemate the Anglos, which can only be done with a political collapse of the USSR due to a devastating Blitzkrieg campaign
Both of these are essentially out of reach, though this isn't 100% known at the time (it could be predicted, but it wasn't known).
The biggest problem is that Nazi Germany couldn't run a peacetime economy. Probably the best outcome, offering some kind of radical peace with Britain that withdrew from everywhere except say Poland (and whose to say the UK would go for that) would still have left Germany having an economic crisis within a decade (probably still a crisis if they conquer the western SU, but at least autarky is more plausible in that case).
And anyway, I think the Nazi's just liked war. They weren't trying to achieve some kind of dominant security position like the Kaiser, they enjoyed fighting. They probably would have started a war with the Anglos and lost even if they won in Russia.
https://www.amazon.com/Festung-Europa-Jon-Kacer/dp/1976423236
Lastly, it does seem like the era of air superiority is over between peer competitors for now.
I would really like to see an extended analysis of this logic applied to the wars like the US in Vietnam and/or Afghanistan. The key thing I want to see tackled is how there is a lack of energy, transport, and manufacturing infrastructure to attack in these cases, and what the focus of American resource investment should have been in order to stop the movement of personnel and availability of weapons.
Guerilla warfare is a completely different kind of warfare, and involves different incentives. The US could have conquered North Vietnam pretty easily, and even easier it could have destroyed its industrial capacity. It didn't do that for a number of reasons, but one of the key reasons was that Vietnam was being supplied by China and Russia, so even with 0 industry left in the north, they could have fought on. The US didn't want to drag China into the war, which would have been necessary to stop the actual wartime production feeding the war.
The same is true today with Hamas and Iran. Israel can easily defeat Hamas on the battlefield, but because Iran is supplying the weapons, there's no way for Israel to destroy the industry that makes the weapons.
The only way for a more powerful army to win in those circumstances is for them to completely occupy the target for a long time. This is expensive in terms of both cash and personnel, and puts a large strain on the homefront population (i.e. Vietnam war protestors as the war dragged on). The goal of guerilla warfare is for the occupying nation to have to put lots of troops in harms way, and then for the guerillas to pick the easiest targets in order to harm morale. The guerillas aren't trying to take land or industry, but just make occupation untenable.
My view is completely different. Guerrilla warfare is a strategy for responding to conventional warfare; consider that it depends utterly on exploiting the conventional warfare incentives to work.
The presence of outside supply in the Vietnam and Israel/Hamas cases are very like the cases in WWII: the entire problem with U-boats was that they interfered with supply from the US to Britain; the most impactful strategy the US deployed against Japan was port mining which stopped supply from the conquered territories and fishing; against Germany the destruction of trains and forcing aircraft production underground (which I note reduced, but did not stop, their supply of aircraft). I claim that Japanese ships and German trains are conceptually the same as the trucks used by Hamas and the Ho Chi Minh trail used by North Vietnam.
Lastly I note that guerrilla warfare tends to focus on precisely these kinds targets. We usually talk about this in terms of the guerrilla force's opportunities because they are softer targets, but if we instead ask the question of why this would ever work, I claim that it is a fundamental rule of modern warfare that it cannot progress without access to the modern tools which define it. This is true regardless of conflict intensity or the type of belligerents.
I notice that despite how many books have been written about WW2 before this thesis was coherently expressed, the two most relevant/popular boardgames (Axis & Allies and Diplomacy) are strictly about control of production centers. Axis & Allies is ~40 years old, and Diplomacy is 65 years old (though granted it is about WW1 rather than WW2).
I agree that the materials based focus by O'Brien is a much better approach than the Hollywood movie based memes prevalent in the West, but it is still not clear that Mr. O'Brien's analysis is accurate.
In particular: the assertion is made that Allied air force bombing of Germany was the largest factor in the defeat of the Axis as evidenced by aircraft production - whereas battles such as Stalingrad were not so much.
The problem is timing. Referencing production numbers from this great writeup: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-to-build-300000-airplanes-in
We can see that the US production of planes really peaked in 1943 and 1944. Given that the planes needed crews, needed to be transferred to the UK, etc etc - it is safe to say that the crest of the tidal wave of American airplanes did not really begin until the latter half of 1943 at the earliest.
The problem is: Stalingrad was over by the beginning of 1943. The battle of Kursk was July 1943. Even Wikipedia notes that the "turning point of the bombing" was March 1943 - i.e. after Stalingrad was already over and mere months before Kursk.
Or put another way: whatever Germany's economic focus was, later in WW2 (i.e. after Kursk) - it is much more difficult to argue that the Nazi war effort was not fully focused on winning the Eastern Front culminating in the battle of Stalingrad (which started in July 1942); that this focus failed resulting in Germany suffering strategic defeat due to both failure to defeat Russia and also failure to secure additional oil supplies.
In this context, the Allied bombing effort is reasonably positioned as accelerating Germany's defeat but is not the primary driver of it.
As for Japan: whatever the relative production Japan had compared to the Soviet Union - the comparison is not apples to apples. Naval warfare is obviously far more steel tonnage focused than land warfare - for which food and transport is a far bigger issue. For another, the bulk of Japan's land forces were focused on occupying parts of China for almost the entire duration of World War 2 - and was ultimately defeated by a massive Soviet army of 2 million plus that was transported across the entire Eurasian continent and smashed Japan's primary land army in about 2 months.
Lastly: it is not clear to me from your description, that Mr. O'Brien takes into account the fact that Germany and Japan, put together, were much smaller in population, in manufacturing, in wealth, in pretty much any economic measure you can think of as compared to the United States - much less the rest of the Allies. This, to me, is the glossed over critical factor: the United States was the big boy beating up on smaller kids, not the plucky upstart.
My own work has exposed me to one specific critical disadvantage that both Germany and Japan suffered from: explosives manufacturing. Prior to WW1 - the primary source of nitrates was literally bird poop from South America. Nitrates are critical to all manner of explosives starting with TNT (tri-nitro-toluene). The advent of the Haber Bosch process was actually driven by Germany's need to replace these bird poop nitrate sources with fossil fuel ones(coal at the time). Japan in turn has pretty much zero fossil fuels of any kind - so likely had enormous problems just producing explosives internally - they probably had to import coal from what is now North Korea to do so. Japan's lack of natural resources also put caps on just how much steel they could produce; while I can believe Japan produced more steel than the Soviet Union just prior to WW2 - I equally would disbelieve that this situation continued after the conflict began. Even in 1965 - Japan was importing in the order of 88% of its iron ore and 65% of its coking coal: https://www.resources.org/archives/steel-is-where-you-make-it-in-japan/
Great comment. Germany was already losing by the beginning of 1943 and didn't really have the resources to stop the mounting Soviet counteroffensive. However, the Japanese occupation force in China was a sad imitation of an actual army. It was mostly composed of untrained and poorly equipped conscripts and local militias. Veteran troops and heavy equipment was continually stripped from China to help fight the US. Not to mention the ~900K troops were seriously outnumbered by the Soviets. Also, the Haber-Bosch process was primarily interested in producing synthetic fertilizer. Using it for coal-to-oil didn't happen until decades later.
Re: Japan
I have not studied Japan's land force much, but it seems highly unlikely that whatever tanks and so forth utilized by the Japanese army were sent to various Pacific islands. The troops, certainly possible. Be that as it may: my primary point was that Japan's military strength was certainly not in its land forces - and so it seems likely that Japan's military industrial focus was completely different than the Soviet Union's.
As for Haber Bosch: it is a process that converts natural gas/methane to ammonia. To use coal, just gasify it first. Your reference to fertilizer is to the ammonia output, but the munitions aspect is because of the 2nd stage Ostwald process.
The Ostwald process converts ammonia to nitric acid. Ostwald is actually older; it was just not very useful in and of itself without Haber Bosch to enable mass ammonia production. Nitrating Ammonia (i.e. adding nitric acid) = ammonium nitrate = ANFO explosives as well as a stable fixed fertilizer whereas nitrating toluene is what results in TNT.
Ironically, the US tried to switch off TNT to a new, "more stable" form of base explosive but that factory literally has not produced anything to date (10 years and counting I think), and there is exactly 1 TNT plant in the entire West today in Poland. The backup plant was in an area of Ukraine which is now Russian...
As for coal to oil - actually the Germans did do that. Or more precisely, coal to gasoline. The process is called Fischer Tropsch. There are a dozen or so FT plants around the world today but the process is horrifically expensive, inefficient and complex. Dubai spent at least $18B building its bigger one; a $7B plant was just recently build in Texas to handle Permian gas and Pennsylvania is talking about doing the same for the Marcellus. The capital cost is so brutal though, and the process inherently loses ~40% of the energy from the inputs, that this tech is pretty much a dead end until oil prices go over $140/barrel for a significant period of time.
One thing missing from the discussion of steel production is that comparing Japan to the USSR misses the scale of everything else. Germany had 150%-180% the steel production of the USSR or Japan. The US city of Pittsburgh produced more steel than the entire Axis combined. Comparing Japanese steel production to the USSR feels like an attempt to be intentionally misleading, or missing the forest for the trees.
Yes, very good point although again: Japan has neither iron nor energy resources - it had to import everything which is why the not-so-secret-anymore US embargo on Japan prior to WW2 was a literal declaration of war.
Germany has lots of iron and coal, but very little oil.
Combine the above with the US having more manufacturing than the entire rest of the world - a position China enjoys today - plus the enormous population and wealth differences, and it should be no surprise to anyone that the Axis was doomed to fail.
Oh definitely, but at that point I'm confused why he didn't just say "The Allies had X times more steel production than the Axis" rather than comparing Japan (with no native iron or coal) and the USSR (with very poor infrastructure generally) - not literally the lowest steel production in their respective alliances, but definitely low compared to any thoughtful comparison.
Well, that would detract from the heroic Hollywood movie meme of how plucky America beat up big bad Adolf and Hirohito - as opposed to a juggernaut squashing inferior opponents.
I've read a number of books on how World War 2 was won, principally in search of information about the planners and the planning. Who planned the war and what exactly was the thought process behind the plan. How were the decisions made that ultimately won the war for the Allies. In doing that research I have come to believe that the war was won in 1942.
Stated briefly: in 1942 the Soviet Union cut the heart of the German army out at Stalingrad. The Germans lost about a million men. This was manpower they could not replace. Failure to win at Stalingrad meant failure to capture the oil rich Caucasus region which meant, ultimately a failure to capture enough oil resources to win the war. The American general staff was pessimistic about the Soviet's chances to stay in the war in 1942 and they believed that if the Nazi's grabbed the Caucasus then their position would become unassailable.
Also in 1942 the Empire of Japan was beaten. By losing at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal the heart of the IJN was cut out. They lost ships, planes, and pilots that they would not be able to replace. By losing at sea they lost the ability to control the resource rich parts of the Emipire they had gone to war for. By 1944 US submarine warfare had so crippled the IJN's ability to refuel that they used dirty fuel to fill their new carrier and one torpedo was enough to send it to the bottom at the Battle of the Philippine Sea.
Battles are important because they mean getting ahold of important resources. And since the waning days of World War I the role in seizing oil production has become more and more important in winning wars. It was once said that an army marches on its stomach. But also an army runs on oil.
A few books that have shaped my thinking are: Master of Sea Power; 1942: The Year that Doomed the Axis; The Second Most Powerful Man in the World; Keep From All Thoughtful Men; and The Mantle of Command.
This book, then, is a counter argument to that since the bombings were largely in 1943-1944. I am dubious of the claim that bombing was effective, because the Axis' defeat seemed inevitable by this time but I'll give this book a try.
The stuff about MacArthur is spot on. He was a media darling, especially among the Republicans that owned newspapers and had a lot of clout. He also inspired America with his swashbuckling tales and demeanor but the war planners knew he was piffle which is why the navy wouldn't give him any ships or control. I think Ernest King hate him, and Admiral King was the God-Emperor of the navy.
I'm in the market for a good book about Admiral Nimitz because I get the sense that his leadership won the war in the Pacific for us. The claim I've read in Master of Sea Power is that Nimitz's team cracked the Japanese Code and Ernest King thought the main attack was the Aleutians but Nimitz knew better and directed Midway. It is an interesting question: if you knew the enemy was set to attack with superior numbers (4 carriers to 3, plus battleships and support) what would you do? Would you be tempted to evacuate Midway and secede without a fight? Wait for more ships in 1943 to stage a fight? Or try and get the jump on them. In 1942 the answer was not obvious, though getting the jump on your enemy was the correct one in hindsight.
It was like a starcraft game on a gigantic map one player starts with a larger army but has 4 bases to the enemy's 20 bases. There just isn't time to press that advantage before the difference in production becomes decisive. Military units are only useful insofar as they enable you to eventually shut down enemy production, but distance is a huge defensive advantage for 20 base side. Economic advantages compound but force advantages generally don't unless you can quickly destroy the enemy base.
Sounds like a great book for conservative contrarians eager to dispute the objective fact that Russian communists defeated fascism
It's natural that people care more about good vs evil than evil vs evil.
To be fair, Russian communists first collaborated with fascism and provided it with enormous material and strategic help in subjugating millions of people.
In the 7th grade I was our class bully's running buddy as he terrorized the entire class. Then in 8th grade he got around to picking me as his victim du jour which was extremely unpleasant. By the time 9th grade started I'd healed up from that beating and also had a growth spurt and I made common cause with a couple of his other targets. One day after school we caught him in the yard and pounded him senseless while the rest of the class cheered.
Guess I don't _mind_ if at the reunions people remember it as me standing up to the class bully....but I don't let it distort the truth, nor the self-realization that I eventually gained from middle school.
My apologies to the audience, but that level of accidental mistake deserves some sort of response.
It's amazing the things you don't see in the history books! Do you have any pictures of the exploits of the glorious Extremely Western Front? The troops of the 1917th Motor Rifle brigade assaulting Monte-Cassino, perhaps? Or any of T-34's from the 85th Guards Tank breaching the Gothic Line?
I mean, yes, the Soviets did destroy the Italian army in Russia and take Berlin, as well as score glorious victories against Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the half of Poland the Germans didn't take, and, well, I can't say a glorious victory, but they did score an 'at least you tried' against Finland.
Whatever response this may have deserved, this is not it.
No, American capitalists brought forth miracles of industrial, agricultural, and logistical production previously thought impossible in order to arm, clothe, feed, and fuel the irresponsibly-led peasant conscripts that the cruel tyrants of the Soviet empire insisted on throwing away like cattle.
The U.S. provided 2/3rds of the trucks, 1/4 of the armored combat vehicles (tanks, SPGs, tank destroyers, etc.), 15% of all aircraft, 50% of the aviation fuel (including 90% of high-octane fuel), nearly all of the locomotives and rail cars, and nearly all of the copper, aluminum, and other necessary industrial inputs used by the soviets during the war, as well as enough food to keep the Soviets from collapsing into famine in 1942 and 1943 and millions of boots, coats, and other basic necessities. Without the U.S. and Britain (but mostly the U.S.), the Soviets would have collapsed like a house of cards in a tornado.
Soviet decisionmaking was disastrous. The Russians started the war by agreeing to the illegal division of Poland with the Nazis (committing war crimes along the way like the Katyn forest massacre), then thought they could get away with a sneaky backstab of their erstwhile-totalitarian ally, but got caught with their pants around their ankles. Seriously, the only reason that the Wehrmacht was able to effect such stunning destruction of Soviet men and material during the early days of Barbarossa was that the Red Army and Air Force were all forward positioned on the border, building up for an offensive into Germany. And the Soviets weren't even *good* at backstabbing; Stalin famously repeatedly ignored the correct reports of his own spies regarding the German build-up and war plans. Even the British tried to warn him, but he would not be moved.
Soviet "generalship" during the early war was also disastrous and hugely wasteful of human life, and much more concerned with looking good - i.e. being able to report large numbers of men, guns, and tanks mobilized - than actually supporting the fighting capacity of those men. The famous "one rifle for every two soldiers" scene from Enemy At the Gates happened repeatedly to Soviet units within shouting distance of huge arsenals full of weaponry because the Soviets put so little thought and effort into logistics.
Even the stuff they made suffered catastrophically from Goodhart's Law and the indifference of the communist system to the wellbeing of the individual soldier and factory worker. Decrees that so many tanks had to be made just resulted in production quality nose-diving off a cliff, such that huge numbers of the vaunted T-34 tank irreparably broke down before ever seeing combat, or killed their crews due to faulty armor, malfunctioning gunsights, or lack of basic necessities in combat zones such as road lamps, radios, or even seats. Even late in the war the Soviets were losing between 3-5 tanks for each German tank they destroyed in combat. They were also death-traps for their crew; Soviet crew losses per tank destroyed were far higher than American and British levels, because the westerners actually cared about things like survivability and ergonomics in their designs. Of course when Stalin was told about this, he assumed it had to be capitalist sabotage and so ordered factory workers punished and quotas increased.
The sad fact is that world communism at every step owed its continued existence almost entirely to the surplus production and charity of the capitalist west, led by the U.S.
This book sounds pretty disappointing. It's debunking an overly simplistic view of the war that I doubt many people here held in the first place, and it has its own flaws in its arguments.
For example, as you observe, the disdain for decisive battles falls flat when that in fact *did* happen in the Pacific Theater. Between Midway, Eastern Solomons, and Santa Cruz, the Japanese carrier fleet was effectively wiped out, and that had a profound effect on the course of the war.
All that strategic bombing of Japan that he lauds so much? It would have never been possible in the first place until the Japanese navy was neutralized! Of course, the US had a massive economic advantage that meant they were likely to win in the long-run regardless of the outcome of individual battles, but it is still important to admit how much of a role Midway played in the course of the war. This book feels too much like reversed stupidity.
Also, when criticizing the in-retrospect pointless land battles of the late Pacific campaign, it's easy to forget that at the time, nobody knew that Japan would surrender soon. Maybe they were still mistakes even without that knowledge, but it's not quite so obvious as it is in hindsight.
Yeah, there’s a weird disconnect between “tank production important” and “battles are not”. Tank production wouldn’t be needed if it weren’t for battles wherein said tanks were being destroyed.
Yeah, the firebombing of Tokyo probably wasn't a big deal for Japanese morale, but it probably helped *American* morale. ;)
I liked the review, but there have definitely been econ analysis of the war before this book. I reviewed Wage of Destruction for the contest which is heavily econ-centric, had a lot of influence and came out 2006.
Judging from this review the econ analysis in WoD did revisionism more compellingly as well.
https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/book-review-wages-of-destruction
I came for the bullet point lists, I stayed for the fascinating insights. Definitely voting for this one.
Why aren't their amazon links in these book reviews?
Even if not for $$$- Scott should be tracking how many people buy the book based on the review as 1 input to the book review ratings.
This was a decent review on a topic of obvious relevance to the right-now. I appreciate the systems perspective the reviewer takes - or describes O'Brien taking - and the acknowledgement that there was no "one thing" that won the war. This point is almost buried under a heap of "industrial capacity is the one thing that won the war." The reviewer doesn't resolve that contradiction, they press on with it. It ought to be obvious that you need to win battles to achieve objectives; objectives being the objects which must be destroyed, secured, or retained in order for the other side to quit the fight. Industrial capacity and logistics crucially create the necessary conditions for winning battles, but that doesn't make battles irrelevant.
Stockpiling medicine doesn't cure the disease, you have to actually use it. Having more materiel (and personnel who can employ it) matters a lot, but only if they're actually deployed against the adversary. Had the Allies bombed Axis economies into ruin without massive land operations to take back ground and population centres, then the war would not have been won. Everything described in this review was important, certainly a necessary condition for decisive land operations, but the land domain was decisive. The domains of war are mutually supporting, each succeeds "if and only if" the others do. To say "this was the THE THING that won the war" is, at this advanced stage in WWII historiography, practically clickbait.
Agreed.
O’Brien’s take on logistics winning WWII really made me think about how we view our own military history in Australia. We glorify the heroics at Gallipoli and the endurance on the Kokoda Track, but what if the real power lay in the behind-the-scenes logistics, just as O’Brien argues? Could the ANZAC myth be overshadowing the importance of supply chains and air support that were just as crucial? It’s worth questioning how we honor our past and whether we might be missing the full picture.
You have to have someone fighting at the front in order for the logistics efforts to have a chance to work. Otherwise there's no need for the complicated supply chains to be built up in the first place, or for all the industry to be diverted to making the war material which is then shipped or flown to the front.
Arguably, just making and sending the supplies is what the US wanted to do in Afghanistan and why the plan could never work. Sure, we had troops there as well, but they were often hiding in well-fortified bases in a couple of areas. The Afghanis were not willing to be the users of that military surplus the way the Ukrainians are right now. Without a fighting force, you could produce 100X what your opponents produce and it wouldn't make a difference.
BTW this here topic has an unfortunate tendency to attract a certain species of Russian trolls who just can’t let any wrongthink about the WWII and/or the Motherland stand unchallenged. They’re sleeping right now, but one would expect an influx to start in a few hours.
What a puzzling post. The author first summarises the "conventional" narrative as "the Soviet and American production capacity won them the war, despite disastrous early battlefield defeats". And immediately after he proclaims "But the conventional narrative is all wrong! It is really the production capacity that was important!!!"
?
I think the argument is that it's not production numbers that counts, but supply chains. Even "small" economies were able to produce massive amounts of hardware that, on paper, were enough to keep fighting the war. But bombing German supply lines (and sinking Japanese ones) strangled them by preventing that production from getting to the front in any organized way. Also, it's arguing that strategic bombing was in fact very effective, and I think the conventional narrative is that strategic bombing was mostly a waste of effort.
I'm not sure I'm convinced, especially since a lot of people in the thread are disputing the facts supporting this, but it's an interesting take.
A bit of an outsider perspective and a question. I am Hungarian, and the perspective is that you are in a small and weak country, and you will get occupied by one of the three huge powers, the Nazis, the Soviets or the Anglo-Americans. Everybody (aside from those who were themselves Nazi) thought the Anglo-American occupation would be least bad because they are the most humane culture of these three. And it is usually true.
But sometimes a switch flips in the Anglo-American mind and then they are capable of immense brutality. The firebombings of Hamburg and Dresden, timed so to kill the civilians who are trying to dig other civilians from the ruins (source: this book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Smoke ). Recent examples: the destruction of Raqqa and just whatever happened in Iraq.
What flips this switch? Raqqa is clear: they did not want to lose a single soldier.
Is it so that democracies are very sensitive to their own soldiers dying and are willing to sacrifice any number of foreign civilians to make it not happen? Clearly, voters hated body bags coming back, while they did not even hear about Raqqa, they believed the "surgical strike" lies. Reality: 80% of the city gone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Raqqa_(2017)#Aftermath
You point to an interesting theory there. Namely, that democracies try to limit their own losses in a war, more that autocracies do.
It is a testable theory.
Urban operations follow a pattern of "destroying the city in order to save it." Exceptions to this are battles where the defender surrenders or cedes the ground ahead of the attackers. Precision and guided weapons enhance the shooter's ability to hit their intended target, that has no bearing on the number of targets engaged over time. The effects on the environment of so many small strikes can be similar to a few big ones.
"For example, it is modestly interesting that Franklin Roosevelt, consistent with advice from Harry Hopkins and Admiral Ernest King, focused America’s productive effort on air and sea power. It is not at all central to the argument that air and sea power won the war."
Huh, I have very different ideas about what would be interesting. Seems like this reviewer is interested in war but not at all in how political decisions that affect war get made.
"Arthur Harris, leader of the British bombing campaign, resisted attempts to shift bombing away from cities generally and toward fuel or transportation targets..."
Would have liked to read more about why this person supported bombing cities.
Bomber Mafia book has something on that.
I believe that fighting WW2 logically amounted to the following priorities:
First, destroy the enemy’s fuel supply chain. Second, and subordinated to the first priority, destroy the enemy’s general logistical capacity.
Everything else was a miscalculation or a vanity project of some sort.
The book is largely consistent with this view.
I find the argument as presented here to be somewhat confusing. A little of what the reviewer presents as new is new, but most is part of the standard history, as can be seen by the presentation of the standard history as including these points about attacks on productive capacity.
Second, since in several cases the result of the attacks on productive capacity was to diminish the attackee's ability to win battles, battles can't be all that unimportant after all.
One of the points presented as new, but which isn't, is that the bombing of Japan had basically destroyed the country's industrial capacity even before the A-bomb was deployed. This is true, and in fact the biggest challenge for the planners deciding where to drop the A-bomb was to find Japanese cities with industrial capacity (thus making them worth bombing) which still had enough of it left for an A-bomb to have any effect on.
Thank you. This was my read as well and I wasn't sure why anyone thought this was new. More in depth than "popular" history, sure. But it makes sense for popular history to focus on the cool battles (which, as you mention, were still necessary and important), even if everyone knows industrial capacity was the more important metric.
I mean, the standard line about Japan in even pop sources is that Japan knew it couldn't compete with American industry and was hoping for a stalemate or some kind of negotiated peace.
The review is quite interesting, although I do fear both the author and the reviewer buy "amateurs talk battles, professionals talk logistics" hook, line and sinker. Things like Stalingrad or Kursk didn't matter because of how many losses happened there; they mattered because who holds the battlefield is a strong psychological statement. Indeed, productive capacity is powerful and important, but it also requires willpower to actually use it.
Also, no land-lease?
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"O’Brien discusses the Battle of Midway, where the Japanese lost four aircraft carriers (37 percent of their navy’s aircraft carriers at the time, 22 percent of all carriers they had during the war). "
What number is four 37% of? 22% of?
Mathematically, 11 (well, ~10.8) and 18, respectively. The first one is more like “6, plus 2 that kinda sucked, plus 3 that *really* sucked.” You have to knock off a few fractions of carriers to account for quality.
"The U.S. mostly fought alone against Japan, which won a series of impressive early victories (e.g., Pearl Harbor, the conquest of Singapore) until the decisive Battle of Midway, after which the vastly larger US industrial base outproduced Japan into oblivion."
WTF? This would be news to Australian, New Zealand and British Imperial soldiers who fought in the Pacific, Asia and particularly in Burma. Who do you think the Japanese were imprisoning in Singapore? Oh let's not forget the Chinese holding down a lot of Japanese troops in their country and while they were poorly led they did help the war effort.
"Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom (including the British Empire), and the United States all devoted between 65 and 80 percent of their economic output to the making and arming of aircraft, naval vessels, and anti-aircraft equipment."
This just cannot possibly be true. Total American military spending never reached 65 percent of the economy, much less just the portion devoted to those subsets of military spending.
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-world-war-ii/
I enjoyed this review and also the contents of the book itself. Particularly the opportunity cost inflicted on Germany to contest the Allied air campaign is often unappreciated in terms of how many aircraft, how much concrete, and especially how much artillery ended up being of the anti-air variety. Ops losses, too, often go very unappreciated.
Which brings me to something I think I can contribute: a little additional color on the "why battles?" question. I think comparing the lost equipment in specific battles with the total available equipment misleads how we ought to be thinking about that issue and this has been known academically for a couple centuries at least.
Clausewitz, in On War, grappled with that very paradox: "If we only think of the trifling difference which there usually is between victor and vanquished in killed, wounded, prisoners, and artillery lost on the field of battle itself, the consequences which are developed out of this insignificant point seem often quite incomprehensible."
Napoleon explained it thusly: "Frederick took 5,000-6,000 prisoners and captured guns [at the Battle of Leuthen in 1757], but nothing the next day. I did the opposite. ... At Jena [in 1806], basically, what I captured on the battlefield was not much -- somewhere over sixty cannon -- but the following day, at Weimar, at Erfurt, etc. ... This army, beaten and pursued with a sword in its back for more than fifty leagues, is today without artillery, baggage, officers, is reduced to less than two-thirds of what it was eight days ago - worse still - has lost its morale and any confidence in itself."
This is also the conclusion Clausewitz reached. Great battles determine the results of wars not because they cause differential material damage on the battlefield itself, but because they reveal facts that had previously been ambiguous (that one army is stronger than another) which causes certain behaviors to occur that damage the loser of the battle much more than the winner.
In other words, a battle creates circumstances in which you must either win or be destroyed. When you conclude you can't win then you can't keep fighting, since you'll be destroyed. If the enemy persists in trying to fight you then you therefore have no choice but to retreat until circumstances improve.
If you retreat then you must move your forces long distances. If you move your forces long distances then you undergo operational attrition. These ops losses - discarded vehicles and sick and wounded soldiers - are left behind to fall into the enemy's clutches while the enemy pursuing you leaves his own operational losses easily recoverable in his own backfield. This pursuit continues until the defeated force becomes willing to try fighting again, usually not until some time has passed and reinforcements are injected to bolster their strength, or the pursuing force gives up the pursuit (generally because their own ops losses have become intolerably high until their logistical support catches up to them).
So, for instance, the reason decisive battlefield results in France in WW1 were impossible wasn't because "they were only focused on battlefield victories," but because the conqueror on the battlefield couldn't create this kind of pursuit. Local victories were frequently won but could never be converted into an enemy retreat of this type since the victorious pursuer quickly lost force as they went (they couldn't bring their artillery support over the broken terrain after them and their forces marched at the speed of human legs) while the defender could quickly rally themselves in reserve defenses with the delivery of additional troops and guns by train. If anything it's much easier to understand the Western Front through this dynamic (of trying to solve the "can't pursue beaten enemy" problem) than through the dynamic of material production and attrition. After all, the English blockaded Germany's imports quite thoroughly with sea power for several years and yet the deadlock remained.
Discarding the notion of "battles determine the results of wars" as a myth or fairy tale to me seems to go quite too far. Even in the age of decisive battles we see very similar dynamics at play. Austerlitz is universally heralded as one of the most decisive battles ever fought. Yet it was conducted with only 70,000 of the 400,000 men in Napoleon's army, of whom only 2% died in the battle.
To me the great wonder of a book like this isn't that it supplants the traditional narrative, but rather that it reveals some of the mystery of how the traditional narrative has actually always worked without our knowledge. It's not that battles are irrelevant and we've fooled ourselves into thinking they matter. But they are only a small (if very dramatic!) part of a much larger system and only produce their incredible effects in symbiosis with that system. When this symbiosis breaks down (as it did in France in World War One) the battles are, as Ney remarked of Eylau in 1807, "What a massacre! And without result!"
Annoying how the author isn’t included in the title