[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
I thought that was “Lie back, grit your teeth, and think of England.” 
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But hopefully not when shes giving you a blowjob.
[QUOTE=Lust4Life]
That said the French still have the edge over us on that score.
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:dubious:
[QUOTE=Argent Towers]
I’ve heard that there are little Middle Eastern and Indian take-out restaurants all over the place in England,
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I stand corrected. 
[QUOTE=Aquila Be]
With 400,000 males leaving British schools every year a shortage of “manpower” was never a problem, yet I keep seeing this piece of nonsense trotted out repeatedly. It doesn’t appear to be based on anything more than the fact that perhaps 100% of historians are economic illiterates.
The main restriction and increasing difficulty of maintaining a large land army was due primarily on the enormous increase in cost of supplying and equipping every branch of the armed services with equipment that was increasingly more technologically advanced, more costly and therefore more difficult to finance.
This does not just apply to the obvious increase in costs that applied to the air forces and navies, both in terms of quality and quantity, both of which strained every country’s resources, but also to something as apparently simple and basic as an army division which had to fight for its share of resources.
Unfortunately I’ve lost a link to an interesting article I read some time ago. It was a study that compared the costs of maintaining an army division in 1939 and in 1945 in constant monetary units. Going on my somewhat shaky memory, a basic infantry division (fully mechanised at war’s end) cost 3 times as much to equip and maintain, an armoured division 7 times as much and a specialised engineering division with road laying, bridge building capacity etc. cost 15 times as much. This does not take into account all the use once and discard items of equipment such as landing craft and artificial harbours.
I can’t find the link to the study I mentioned, but if anyone can help out I’d appreciate it.
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You are 100% correct. WWII started out as a low-tech war-both sides were working with updated WWI-type equipment (the vaunted German Army was 90% horse transport). This changed rapidlywith the advent of radar, high-precision weapons, tanks, etc. GB was in certain respects , well ahead of the curve-it was radar (as much as the efforts of the RAF) that saved England.
[QUOTE=ralph124c]
the vaunted German Army was 90% horse transport
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I didn’t realise that until I heard it on the History Channel (of all places), I can’t remember which series. All I had to go on before was the quite from the film “Patton” where the man himself mentions that he knows the war is over because the Germans have resorted to horse transport after Normandy and D-Day.
[QUOTE=Lust4Life]
I feel its a little sad to dismiss the hundreds of thousands of British military war dead,let alone the civilians killed in the blitz,let alone those too badly maimed to continue with military service as a" piece of nonsense" and then go on to price the cost of Britains fight in financial terms.
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I really don’t know where you got that from. It’s a complete misunderstanding of what I was trying to get across. I was not attacking you at all, although on re-reading my post it did come across as just a touch abrasive and, I suppose, it could explain why you took offense where none was intended.
My annoyance was directed exclusively at historians as a “profession”.
I still maintain that the manpower business that historians (not you) repeatedly bring up regarding the British war effort, in particular, is not valid and is not backed by the evidence. I also believe that it’s probably caused by a complete misunderstanding of economics on the part of that “profession”.
Man for man, any army division, infantry or armoured, of 1945, would demolish its 1939 equivalent. Manpower as such, was becoming less relevant as the war came to a close and high technology was becoming increasingly important.
The increasing economic burden, not manpower as such, had a far greater impact on the ability of allied countries to continue the war for the reasons I gave in a previous post.
I like Sam Stone’s analysis. One point of departure though…
I think people underestimate England and the Soviet Union. I think those 2 could have eventually taken out Germany themeselves. It would have taken a few more years(3-5?) but it would have happened.
Therefore, while I agree that bring the U.S. fully on board and all fired up spelled the death bells of the Axis…I think the FIRST for sure was when Germany fired up the Soviet population into a do or die struggle. When that happened, it was over and that happened in 1941.
I don’t think Germany could have taken out the Soviets, but they could have pushed them enough to negotiate a peace.
I don’t agree that the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union was the true death though. If Germany wouldn’t have invaded the Soviet Union when they did, they would have had to face them in 2-3 years when the Soviets attacked them. I am reasonably certain Stalin would have.
The best Germany could have done was to negotiate a peace with the Soviets in 1941-1942…and helping to do that by creating a mish-mash of independent but pro-German states in the Soviet Republics. Any attempt to annex these states would have pushed them into the Soviet camp and drive nails into the Axis coffin.
The fact that Hitler/Nazi party couldn’t think that way…means that, on second thought, Germany was screwed since Sept 1939.
“the success of both D-Day and Bagration,”
The sack lunch won WWII for us ?
[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
I would agree that the Sovuiets could definitely have lost.
But the problem is that all of these actions were essentially inevitable given the crazed Nazi ideology and especially Hitler’s personality. You can’t not have them without a completely different set of inputs.
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Indeed. And also assuming that they didn’t have too much bad luck, that the senior Loony Tunes didn’t meddle too much in military matters, and so on and so forth. But things being what they were, Allied victory was just a question of how long and how many lives.
As for the Manhattan Project, in hindsight it was an unnecessary diversion which probably made no difference or even prolonged the war. By some estimates it was soaking up as many resources by the end of the war as the entire US motor industry, all in order to make two big bangs. Putting all that effort towards more planes, tanks, artillery and ships would probably have been far more useful. It would certainly have built enough B29’s to crush Hiroshima and Nagasaki just as totally, and to repeat the effort on a weekly basis indefinitely.
[QUOTE=slaphead]
…As for the Manhattan Project, in hindsight it was an unnecessary diversion which probably made no difference or even prolonged the war. By some estimates it was soaking up as many resources by the end of the war as the entire US motor industry, all in order to make two big bangs. Putting all that effort towards more planes, tanks, artillery and ships would probably have been far more useful. It would certainly have built enough B29’s to crush Hiroshima and Nagasaki just as totally, and to repeat the effort on a weekly basis indefinitely.
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I strongly disagree.
The men on the ground at the time disagreed.
Geopolitical thinkers decades later disagree.
The surrender of Japan, resulting, in large part, from the shock of those “big bangs” probubly saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides.
But that’s been said many times on this board and in many forums. I question this hindsight of which you speak.
[QUOTE=T. Slothrop]
“the success of both D-Day and Bagration,”
The sack lunch won WWII for us ?
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An army marches on its stomach.
[QUOTE=BMalion]
I strongly disagree.
The men on the ground at the time disagreed.
Geopolitical thinkers decades later disagree.
The surrender of Japan, resulting, in large part, from the shock of those “big bangs” probubly saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides.
[/QUOTE]
He does have a point. Was it an efficient use of resources? While it did result in the surrender of Japan, that was not as obvious an outcome as it may seem to us after the fact. The Emperor could have decided not to interfere, or the military factions opposed to surrender could have been successful in their efforts to prevent the broadcast of the Emperor’s message. I think we were lucky that it ended when it did.
[QUOTE=BMalion]
I strongly disagree.
The men on the ground at the time disagreed.
Geopolitical thinkers decades later disagree.
The surrender of Japan, resulting, in large part, from the shock of those “big bangs” probubly saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides.
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Indeed. But the people on the ground at the time most certainly did not have all the facts to hand, geopolitical thinkers can be found to support almost any opinion about anything, and even the people involved in the Japanese surrender decision were perfectly aware that the Big New Bomb was just one more item in the unstoppable US war machine, of which no more than a handful can exist.
The manhattan project was started because it was felt to be absolutely necessary given what they knew at the time, but whether it was worth spending so much time, money and effort on a big firework that provided the Japanese with a convenient excuse to surrender is, ultimately, just an opinion. It’s not as if you can run an experiment on this to prove those opinions right or wrong.
Personally, I’ve never seen any arguments for it that I find really convincing - most of them strike me as being justifications for what turned out to be a giant white elephant in the context for WW2 but absolutely fundamental to how history played out after that war ended. In much the same way a surprising number of people place a lot of emphasis on things like jet aircraft that were basically irrelevant to the way WW2 played out.
BMalion does have a point though.
It was going to take a fundamentaly upsetting shock to shake the Japanese out of their fanatical mindset long enough to accept which way the wind was blowing.
I’m not saying the allies wouldn’t have won, because it’s been clearly shown that they were going to anyways. But only something new and freaky, that no one had ever seen before would have rattled them enough to think a quick, clean surrender was acceptable.
While I’m on about the Japanese, I have to ask, what was the thinking behind the Pearl Harbor attack?
Did they think the US would be warned off by it or was it believed that their hold on the pacific was strong enough to handle any backlash?
[QUOTE=Sockmunkey]
I’m not saying the allies wouldn’t have won, because it’s been clearly shown that they were going to anyways. But only something new and freaky, that no one had ever seen before would have rattled them enough
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There is the argument that it was not the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but Russia entering the war against Japan that prompted the surrender.
[QUOTE=Sockmunkey]
While I’m on about the Japanese, I have to ask, what was the thinking behind the Pearl Harbor attack?
Did they think the US would be warned off by it or was it believed that their hold on the pacific was strong enough to handle any backlash?
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It wasn’t that they thought the US would be warned off - it was that they expected to be able to make their territorial gains while the US had effectively no USN presence to project power in the Pacific, then sue for peace, with said gains intact.
The way I read it there are two things that prevented this from being a possible outcome.
First, the failure of the declaration of war to precede the attack - it infuriated the US to a degree that I don’t think that even 9/11 had done. It’s considered almost trite to quote Yamamoto’s famous line after he heard that the timing for the political maneuvers screwed up, but it doesn’t change the insight behind it: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
Secondly, and almost as importantly, US carrier power was completely unaffected. So, the naval assets most useful for projecting power were still intact.
Similarly, while it did take time to transfer USN assets to the Pacific, the needs of the USN missions in the Atlantic and Pacific were mostly complementary, not competitive. That is the sort of things needed for the Battle of the Atlantic - numerous small ASW platforms and, later on, the jeep carriers to build Hunter-Killer task groups around - were really taking nothing from the combat power being built up for the Pacific. An Essex class carrier in the Battle of the Atlantic would have been a sledgehammer looking for finishing nails. This isn’t to say that combatants from one theatre couldn’t be used in the other - just that the focus for the proper naval force for each theatre was different.
Finally, the industrial power of the US, at the time, is nearly impossible to overstate - even with the long lead times that modern capital ships required, by, I think, the middle of 1943, the USN’s ability to project power throughout the Pacific was several times greater than it had been as of 6 December, 1941.
The fundamental flaw in the Japanese strategic thinking was to believe that the Allies were ever going to be willing to accept a fait accompli. As early as The Atlantic Conference Churchill and Roosevelt were talking about a war goal of unconditional surrender.
[QUOTE=slaphead]
As for the Manhattan Project, in hindsight it was an unnecessary diversion which probably made no difference or even prolonged the war. By some estimates it was soaking up as many resources by the end of the war as the entire US motor industry, all in order to make two big bangs. Putting all that effort towards more planes, tanks, artillery and ships would probably have been far more useful. It would certainly have built enough B29’s to crush Hiroshima and Nagasaki just as totally, and to repeat the effort on a weekly basis indefinitely.
[/QUOTE]
There’s two rather glaring problems, or at least questionable assumptions:
- The resources devoted to the Manhattan Project are not perfectly liquid things that could have been turned into B-29s or howtizers. It’s not like you’re spending shields and gold in a game of “Civlization IV,” where you can just switch a city from making Bombers to making Missiles or vice versa. It’s true that SOME of the effort in one could have been put into the other, but there’s efficiencies of scale involved and the simple fact that people like Robert Oppenheimer would not have been used at their maximum efficiency doing arc welding on assembly lines.
The fact is that by 1944 the United States was probably pumping out as many planes and tanks as was humanly possible for it to produce and use. The amount of material being put out was already overwhelming Axis production by an absurd degree, and it was possible to train, equip and transport only so many human beings to use the weapons, equipment and vehicles you could make. The devotion of Manhattan Project resources to building totally different things would not have changed production figures by as much as you seem to be implying, and the marginal benefit of that production would not have been very great.
- You’re speaking with the benefit of hindsight. Obviously, at the time the Manhattan Project was conceived, the outcome of the war was NOT clear, no matter what anyone in the thread is saying. If D-Day fails, the Western Allies would not have been in a position to mount another invasion of France until 1945, and if Bagration had not been the wild success it was, Germany’s hold on Europe would have been secure through 1945 and possibly 1946. Given that the success of both operations hinged heavily on outright deception of German intelligence, and that that deception was successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, it’s simple fact that a few different rolls of the dice here or there could have had the U.S. in 1945 sitting in Britain, smarting after a crushing defeat at Normandy. And wouldn’t that shiny new bomb have been a wonderful thing to come up with.
Sure, in 1945 the issue was decided. For most of the time they were making the bomb, it wasn’t.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
Sure, in 1945 the issue was decided. For most of the time they were making the bomb, it wasn’t.
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Indeed, I recall that after the fall of Germany, Einstein and those who encouraged him to write about building the bomb no longer wanted to use it.
[QUOTE=Sockmunkey]
While I’m on about the Japanese, I have to ask, what was the thinking behind the Pearl Harbor attack?
Did they think the US would be warned off by it or was it believed that their hold on the pacific was strong enough to handle any backlash?
[/QUOTE]
It has been commented on the SDMB that Japan saw all of their own strengths & none of their own weaknesses, & saw America’s weaknesses clearly, but were blind to American strengths.
A great deal of strange ideas here.
First, the US was NOT a great world power before World War II. Our military was neither the largest, nor the most powerful, nor the best equipped.
Second, our resources and industrial capacity was not infinite nor was it extremely well developed. Money and funding for the war effort was a major issue throughout World War II. There was rationing and people were persuaded to skimp and save and give extra money to the US government in the form of war bonds.
Third, Russia won the war against Germany. Our entering the European War was more than a footnote, but was not the death knell for Germany.
Most historians lay the turning point in the war as being the Battle of Stalingrad, beginning in August of 1942. The US had barely entered the war at that point, it was sometime later before our war efforts really were at their peak. From that point on, Germany advanced no more and saw essentially only a series of defeats with marginal gains. However, you can also make a case that the turning point for Germany happened with their decision to advance upon Stalingrad.
For those interested, there is an presentation at this website:
http://english.pobediteli.ru/
For the Japanese, defeat was almost inevitable once the United States was provoked into war. Their strike on Pearl Harbor was preemptive, they were hoping to buy time and secure areas and resources. They actually did not cause as much damage to our Navy as they had hoped.