By the way, that business about Churchill sleeping soundly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor only refers to the fact that the UK was unlikely to be defeated by Germany once the US entered the war.
It hardly meant that defeat of Germany was well in hand. In fact, Russians largely consider that Churchill delayed D-Day in order to put more of the battle against Germany in the hands of the Soviets. Likely true … from Churchill’s viewpoint, why should any single US or UK solider die in order to spare the life of even 20 or more Soviet soldiers?
Ref the point about 400.000 males leaving school every year most school leavers at that time were aged fourteen so that the class of “39” would for the most part not be eighteen(plucking a figure out of the air)until1943 or there abouts.
Automatic firepower and mobility did relieve the hunger for manpower to a degree(but not logistical support)but industry in Britainwas still"manned" mostly by women except for some skilled trades and mining as was agriculture a situation that in those times would not have been adopted unless the situation demanded it.
Britain had unwisely attempted to fight in Norway,mainland Greece and Crete early on in the war as well as France and the low countries and
Africa,Italy,India,Burma and Malaya later on.
All of which took their toll in killed,maimed and captured.
The sheer geographical scale of the conflict outweighed efficiencies elsewhere.
(And I havent even mentioned the far flung Royal Navy or the bombing offensive.)
To address some points made by other posters,yes without Radar there was a good chance that the R.A.F would have been overwhelmed(so its a good job we invented it then)but what really saved our necks was the incredibly efficient integrated air reporting and directing network that was operated by the R.A.F. so yes the R.A.F. did win the B of B wether you look at aircraft or ground personell.
Also great though Radar is it doesn’t actually shoot down planes,men with guns do that.
As to Churchill delaying the invasion of the continent because he wasn’t concerned about Russian losses that wasn’t the case although I can quite easily sympathise with that outlook.
The cross Channel invasion was pretty much a one off operation,if it had of failed there is a pretty good chance that the war would have finished before we could have had a second attempt.
Apart from the size of it and the logistical complexity of it,it was an incredibly risky venture even leaving out variables like the weather.
Good post RickJay, much better than I could have said it.
you too, Gone The Sun, but jeez, you better watch your posting, you’re into double digits and it’s only been 5 years. Turn off the computor and step outside for once OK?
When Germany decided to stop attacking Britain’s radar installations and instead concentrate on civilian targets. Germany lost the Battle of Britain and thus giving the United States a toehold on Europe. (Germany’s declaration of war would of been more meaningful if Germany had control over all of Europe.)
I’m not a historian either, but am full of anecdotes.
A couple of things: I know a few old Latvians - they married into my family. They regarded the Germans as “liberators” and to his dying day my sister’s father-in-law cursed the name of Winston Churchill.
The earlier post in which someone said that his mother and her co-workers feared defeat and speculated as to which nation the US should surrender to – that one struck me as very odd. I have dozens of relatives who were around during the war, some are veterans, some only veterans of the home front, and they say they were always certain of victory, but not of the time frame. And while the Brits in my family joke about the Yanks who were, you know, “overpaid, oversexed and over here”, nonetheless they remain grateful to America for stepping in to help defeat Hitler. But that’s how they view it: helping defeat Hitler. They could have done it on their own, is their view.
Some years ago I met an old Russian man who had spent the war years on the docks of Murmansk. He told us that when the LendLease tanks from America arrived they were repainted immediately with the Russian Star over the American markings. Of course, in Russia and the rest of the former USSR the Second World War is called The Great Patriotic War and their history books do not mention LendLease or the Allied men who died on the Murmansk run.
I also met two remarkable old women who had been partisans, one in Stalingrad. She had been raised a Mennonite. The sad thing is, when she came here to end her days, no one ever got her story written down. I wish I had. Everyone suffers who goes to war, but we Canadians and Americans never had the war brought to us - except for Pearl Harbour. Awful though it was, it cannot be compared to what the USSR suffered, or Britain, or the nations that Hitler and the Japanese invaded.
I think that the war in Europe began to end when Hitler invaded the USSR, if we are choosing a specific time.
Actually, I’m addicted to the Straight Dope, but had pretty much ignored the Message Board.
I do maintain a blog on Russian and former Soviet Union topics, and while I can’t profess to be an “expert” in that field, I’ve traveled a good bit in Russia and Central Asia and speak something more than basic Russian.
One of the first things I learned when visiting and talking to Russians is just how warped the typical American’s viewpoint is regarding World War II. You want to start an argument with a Russian, tell them that American won World War II. You’ll lose the argument, unless you are clever enough to expand the discussion to include the war efforts in North Africa and the war in the Pacific. The Russian viewpoint is distorted as well, most particularly they sort of ignore any contributions in the war outside of the European theater.
In fact, they call the European portion of the war Великая Отечественная война or “The Great Patriotic War” and it certainly outshines the remaining battlefronts in World War II. When you consider the number of Soviet citizens that died in that war, it is probably a justifiable point of view.
I utterly disagree. The manhattan project had well over 100,000 people working directly on it, not to mention all the ancilliary construction and logistics resources. Whole towns were built around it, and not everyone had doctorates in nuclear physics. Take a look at the last picture and caption on this page. Most of the workers could just as well have been working an assembly line, and if you are constructing an industrial facility like this in empty farmland, as part of a single complex that will use 1/6 of the entire US electricity production, there is considerable flexibility as to what its for, whether it be a tank factory or a nuke factory. The US defense budget in 1944 (the peak) was $97 billion, so the $2 billion for the Manhattan project wasn’t that big a deal, but it would still have bought a lot of useful materiel.
You seem to be disagreeing with yourself. Either there were not enough people to produce more (in which case you free up production resource by not bothering with the Manhattan project), or there were not enough soldiers to use what was already being produced (in which case you send everyone to the front or to free up eligible males from other industries, or you focus resources on building better materiel to get the most out of your limited combat manpower). In either instance the Manhattan Project never figures on the list of solutions, only as a problem. If you found yourself transported back in time to 1941, what would you tell Roosevelt? I’d tell him not to worry, the axis will never get their bomb to work, so forget about it. If he really wants to push the technology envelope, go for jets, radar, or even something as prosaic as getting 20mm cannon fitted to fighters.
I don’t believe US armed forces in WW2 (or in any other war) ever said “we have as much stuff as we can use, no need for more X or better Y”. Even if it was just to give every GI an ampoule of penicillin in his bandage pack, there’s ALWAYS a need for more stuff, and more trucks and ships and planes to carry it.
Yes, I said as much in my previous post. But the Manhattan project started in 1941, and the large-scale industrial stuff didn’t really kick in until mid-1943 or later, when they might perhaps have known better. Aside from that minor quibble, I have no issue with the decisions they took at the time given the information available, particularly since it wasn’t exactly a subject they could have a wide-ranging debate on. But I’m not at all convinced it had any effect on the war other than perhaps to lengthen it.
Even by early 1944 it was abundantly clear that Germany was going to lose. The only question was whether it was going to be before the end of 1944, or the end of 1945. The war running into 1946 was not really a likely scenario. And even if Overlord and Bagration had gone pear-shaped, would a handful of nukes come in more useful than e.g. doubling (or perhaps even trebling) the output of B-17s and B-29s? Boeing built 8,200 four-engined bombers with about 35,000 staff at two plants. Diverting all those Manhattan people and materials to tanks, ships, aircraft etc. would have made those imponderables you mention far more certain. Bagration with an extra 10,000 lend-lease tanks? Or perhaps Overlord with three or four mulberry harbours and a few thousand extra landing craft, or with Operation Dragoon mounted simultaneously? Pretty much as safe a bet as you will ever get in warfare. The sole justification for the Manhattan Project is that at the time they were ignorant of the enemy’s nuclear capabilities and the challenges involved in building a weapon, and so had to take out an expensive insurance policy just as they did with the production and transportation to operational theatres of chemical weapons - but in a hypothetical informed time-traveller scenario it would be pointless unless you felt it would be needed to face down the soviets later and easier to carry out during the war rather than afterwards.
But to return to the OP, which I never really adressed properly - I’d say it was all over as soon as Germany got embroiled in a two-front war. They could conceivably have taken down the British, and (even more implausibly) then done a number on the Soviets, but both at once was just never going to happen.
I am pretty sure that the Allies knw that the Axis was losing, by late 1943. So my question: knowing the huge amount of materiel being pumped out by American 9and British) factories, when did the Allied governments start cancelling war orders? I hears once, that FORD (who had converted their giant River Rouge plant from making cars to B-24 bombers), wanted to stop making planes in 1944-they figured that post-war demand for cars would be huge, and their own experts told them that the war economy was winding down. What did the governmen DO with all of the stuff made surplus? You can’t stop an economy running full tilt (on war production) dead in its tracks!
I can’t speak for the general case, but one specific example is that much of the production of P-38 Lightning planes ended up being destroyed when they were found to be surplus to current needs. I know that’s mostly the models delivered in theatre, but I imagine that includes some of the newly delivered models, as well.
AIUI, that wanton destruction is one of the reasons that the P-38 is one of the most rare warbirds today. And why the expense for recovering “Glacier Girl” was justified.
Actually the end of the war came unexpectedly early. Most people thought that we were going to have to invade Japan and didn’t expect the war to end until 1946 or 1947. So military production was still going on at full speed in what turned out to be the final weeks of the war. This was the reason for all that suddenly unnecessary military surplus that was destroyed. Obviously it was a loss of money to destroy these items but it would have meant more money to have put them into storage for some theoretical future use. And there was really no point in storing surplus items - existing military equipment was a glut on the market in 1945 and most of the stored items would have just turned obsolete in storage.
The British battleship (HMS Vanguard) was in final assembly/fitting out, when the war ended. I don’t know what was done with her, but the RN immediately started de-commisioning ships as soon as peace was declared. I wonder if the ship was sold off for cheap?
Also, Vanguard was a “quickie” build. One of the reasons they could finish her so quickly (and, yes, for the UK she was very quickly finished) was because they still had the turrets for Furious and Courageous? the two planned WWI R-class Battleships/Battlecruisers which were converted mid-construction to aircraft carriers. AIUI, for a battlewagon, the time limiting factors are either manufacture of the reduction gears, or for the barrels - both of which were made from some of the hardest metal available, and had to be machined to very fine tolerances.
What I never heard was the reason that those turrets weren’t proposed for use in some of the King George VI class ships, which were laid down as emergency builds to modernize the fleet - which explains the relatively modest 14" bore guns.
You might be interested in another factoid: the left-ver gun racks for the sister ship (of HMS Vanguard) was used to make the Jodrell Bank radio telescope.
It was smart thinking to have saved it!