A Victorious Nazi Germany with Lebensraum would...

A Victorious Nazi Germany with Lebensraum would...

  • Be a Hyperpower

    Votes: 11 4.7%
  • Be a Superpower

    Votes: 63 26.9%
  • Be a Great Power

    Votes: 31 13.2%
  • Be a Regular Power

    Votes: 4 1.7%
  • Collapse in on itself

    Votes: 125 53.4%

  • Total voters
    234

Deleted member 1487

And when is Britain going to make such a deal with Germany? What will be the reaction domestically? In the US?
Probably July-August 1940. That's presupposing Churchill is out of the picture so Halifax is the only option that's available for PM and he asks for terms and gets out, probably hoping the Nazis and Soviets fall out and attack each other. Britain is going to be a mess post-war politically. Labor is going to force elections, probably topple the Conservatives, and try and rearm as fast as finances allow while forgoing a lot of their platform in favor of national defense. There is probably going to be panic for a while that an invasion is coming eventually until the USSR is invaded, but in the meantime the economy is going to be problematic because of the trade structure Germany creates in Europe; they will probably including Britain to a degree to keep them passive and out of necessity, you can't just leave Britain out of European trade without consequences for the European economy, and with it that trade and potential loss thereof will limit British options in terms of confronting Hitler. Plus of course the Indian issue is going to come to a head once the peace deal is signed.

In the US there is probably a lot of concern that now that Germany controls European trade its going to effect the US economy and that will be right, as Germany will structure trade to its favor and small and middle size US businesses will lose out, while big corporations like Standard Oil (in cartel with IG Farben) will make a killing. US big business will use their political influence to make sure the US doesn't do things to end their profit machine. Probably what ends of happening is the US writes off Europe politically and focuses on Asia and rearmament, as Japan looks more vulnerable. If and when the Axis pact happens ITTL (iOTL it was in September 1940 but might be butterflied ITTL) that will probably freak out the US, as they know DoWing any of the Axis will mean war with a big alliance system. Politically starting a war is now out as an option, while economic concerns around trade with Europe limit political options to try and undermine the Axis. Likely Europe continues trading with Japan, which mostly undoes the US embargo in impact, so they can keep going in Asia as long as they can keep it up. So its going to be that the US focuses on its hemisphere and defending it from intrusion by the Axis, rather than projecting power abroad. Probably some talks with the UK about common defense, but given how London without Churchill and Washington have differing interests and expectations (London does not want to be subordinated to the US, the US won't accept anything less if they are going to be the heavy lifter in any defense deal, and with it as per OTL will require that the British end imperial preference for trade in the colonies to give the US market access, which the British will never allow if not at war and desperate).
 
You mean the way the Soviets weren't willing to let Germany overrun France?

Stalin was nastily shocked that France crumbled so quickly. He was expecting a long drawn out war which would lead to the Anglo-French, not for Germany to finish off the French in 4 weeks.

How? What is the US going to do, send volunteer units to the Eastern Front?
Send the Soviets food, supplies, raw materials, and so-on. Basically, lend-lease. Probably start out with low-interest loans like they did IOTL.

Whatever the exact figure, the point is that substantial numbers of AFVs had to be located to fronts other than that against the USSR because of the fighting with the Wallies.
Except the figures don't reflect that. The majority of those AFVs not in the East were there for reserves, repair, training, or in transit, not for combat. The only AFVs fighting the WAllies in June 1942 were the few hundred in the North Africa desert.

With peace in the west, the proportion of economic resources devoted to fighting the Soviet Union doubles.
Not until it's too late. More probably the Germans decide to save on the resources since taking over the Soviet Union would just be a few month job. By the time they realize it won't be, it's too late.

Depends if Japan still takes over Indochina.
Is the Pope Catholic? Germany isn't going to stop them or even complain any more then they did IOTL. They weren't interested in overseas colonies.

The momentum towards the embargo had been building well before Indochina. If anything, an invasion of the USSR would be enough to trigger it.

The "premier" arm or not, the air and naval war against the Wallies soaked up huge resources which would have made a difference if they had been used against the Soviet Union. For example, more steel was used for U-Boats than for tanks until 1943.
And even when more steel was being used for tanks, the Germans were unable to match Soviet weapons production.

Let isn't the issue, they lacked the funds without LL to rearm rapidly. In 1941-42 just going on their own funds and resources to ensure they maintain some foreign exchange stocks they'd only be able a level to defend the Home Isles after the Dunkirk losses.

Never mind that they were able to launch major offensives and inflict heavy defeats against the Italians in late-1940. :rolleyes:

India would be highly restive and would refuse to reenter the conflict; they were on the verge of revolt after being forced into it in 1939.
You have yet to prove that anything about India's restiveness would have been complicating to the British. The wiki post you made earlier is rather unimpressive: 100,000 people needing to be arrested over the course of 2-years in a region with a population of nearly 320 million? As revolts go, it's pretty pathetic. If the 2.7 million strong Indian Volunteer Army (and hey, there was enough support for the British Empire to raise a 2.7 million man volunteer army) was enough to suppress that while Britain was fighting a major war in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific then it will certainly be enough to suppress whatever ITTL revolt occurs when Britain is just preparing to fight a war in Europa and North Africa.

I'm reminded of that time you tried to represent several thousand American draft dodgers as indicating that the US population was dissatisfied with fighting OTLs WW2... except for the fact that the US drafted millions of men.

The US government being upset at war in Europe certainly started with Poland in 1939, but active violence and lurch toward war with Germany was a function of LL and getting supplies to Britain in 1940-41; without Britain being in the war the US public is going to have little interest in any combat with the Germans.
The fall of France alone was enough for the US public and Congress was panicked enough to begin a massive military rearmament and start offering aid to Britain right there in June of 1940.

No one would trust the British to reenter the conflict any time soon,
Pretty much anyone who understood the history of British involvement on the European continent would be able to trust the British to reenter the conflict some time soon.

while the USSR was not well liked in the US outside the far left after they allied with the Nazis.
And that rapidly underwent a 180 degree shift following June 22nd 1941. By the end of November 1941, the American media and public were applauding the Soviets successful defense of Moscow.

In 1941 the feeling first was that the Soviets would collapse by the end of 1941 and that Stalin and Hitler were both horrible dictators that should kill each other while the US focused on rearming and ensuring its sector of the world was safe. The US public pre-LL wasn't interested in getting involved in Europe and good luck getting Congress to supply the Communists who they feared greatly, enough to keep Jewish refugees out of the country lest they bring Socialist values to the US. Also the impression is going to be without allies the Soviets aren't going to survive, so any free aid will just end up going to the Axis.
None of this is reflected in American actions following Barbarossa: literally the day after the Soviet Union was invaded, the US was already offering all sorts of aid including stuff like near-zero-interest loans. Lend-lease was officially extended to them by October, a full two months before the Pearl Harbour. Thus, the US was both officially and unofficially committing itself to support of the Soviet Union long before American entry into the war.

Quite frankly, if the US was willing to send massive food aid shipments to the Soviet Union in the early-20s when the red scare was at it's height then their damn well going to be willing to aid the Soviet Union against an unprovoked invasion when their own propaganda arm (and the British one as well) is portraying the USSR as the valiant defenders of freedom against the tyrannical fascist hordes.

And if the Japanese enter the war there is no way to get it to the Soviets reliably anyway.
Persia and Murmansk.

Also if the British aren't in the war the 12 month period from 1940-41 that Europe is at peace then would seen Uboat construction ended and those resources and labor used for armor production, which would continue into 1942 and beyond as needed.
More likely the Germans decide to cash those savings since they don't think they need them beyond 1941.

That's the thing, IOTL they had to cancel the planned upgrades to the rail infrastructure in Poland to pursue industrial/weapons plans that won't be needed here, so they could be carried out and end the Polish bottleneck in the supply chain, plus then free up more resources for rail conversion without a blockade.
Except properly building up infrastructure like that is a process that takes years. Even as late as 1943, the Germans were facing constrictions in rail supply out East.

The supply lines are the choke chain for any advance, so when they get too far even if that is a shorter distance in then they have to stop.
Given that you clearly don't know what the metaphorical choke chain (what is referred in the military as "") looks like. It doesn't look like a simple "stop" of the advance. It looks like what happened to the Germans late-October/November 1941, when the German attacks slowed to a crawl and practically gained them nothing but more casualties.

But the Soviets are going to get much more mangled in the process,
Because, magically, the Soviets aren't going to realize that with Britain out of the war their next and plan to meet an attack in 1941 instead of 1942 like they did IOTL.

A big part of the success of the December-January offensive was the removal of 2nd Air Fleet to the Mediterranean in November leaving 3 operational aircraft for AG-Center by early December.
Given that the Germans found itself incapable of supporting any more then 3 aircraft, that was probably a good decision.

Once the Luftwaffe got its operational numbers back up in January the Soviet offensive bogged down.
Except they didn't. Luftwaffe operational numbers remained pitiful throughout the winter 1941-42.

Plus given that Leningrad is going to fall
By magic, apparently.

and then with it Murmansk
By more magic.

the Soviet winter counteroffensive is going to be a LOT weaker without those LL weapons
The fact that 25% of Soviet armor during the counter-offensive (the defensive operations was conducted before the lend-lease tanks could reach the front) was British ignores the reality that armor wasn't that important at Moscow. The counter-offensive relied overwhelmingly on Soviet infantry, cavalry, and artillery with armor and aircraft being used sparingly due to their rarity. Even if one factors in that consideration, one finds that the LL still didn't make much of a difference: the Soviets rapidly found themselves relying more on their own tanks because the British tanks, which were as unsuited to the conditions as the German ones, kept breaking down from the cold.

The loss of LL would not have changed anything in the Battle for Moscow, assuming the battle even occurs like OTL.

the KV production facilities lost in Leningrad
Evacuation was ordered June 23rd and part of the planet had already transferred to .

The Japanese already did their job by cutting off the Pacific trade routes. Its not a vital front to the Soviets other than being a critical trade conduit.
And they got nothing for it except several hundred thousand dead (minimum). In return, they'll be facing economic collapse in a year.

What a great trade. :rolleyes:

The Japanese wouldn't then have to worry about the ABCD embargo, as Germany would rule the Dutch homeland and they'd be able to ensure the flow of oil from the DEI.
Which, as someone pointed out earlier in the thread to you, turned out to be inadequate.

IOTL the Dutch joined the oil embargo because they were a government in exile, which meant they were dependent on US LL largess, which wouldn't be the case here, so they'd do as they did when they weren't dependent on Washington or London: trade with Japan to avoid pissing them off.
Given that Britain would be interested in reentering the war, that Germany has no capacity to exert military control out into the Pacific, and that Hitler intended to maintain the occupation of the Netherlands for eventual annexation of the Netherlands, the reality is that the Dutch Government would still be a Government-in-Exile and still dependent on the British and US for their security.

Britain doesn't have enough themselves to give anything
Supposition without evidence.

So the US saves a lot of money and gear for their own rearmament and makes money on the Soviets.
Until someone observes that the aiding the Soviets in their fight against Germany means that not as many American boys would have to die. Given that the US actually cared about most of their citizens lives far more then they cared about money and gear, it would have been seen as worth it to ship the excess stuff produced in their rearmament program off to the Soviets. Just like it was IOTL.

No, due to Axis action when not having to face any other opponents. If Vladivostok and Murmansk are out of the picture you can't get foreign trade in.
Vladivostok and Murmansk are only out of the picture by your handwaving and flat-out ignoring of operational factors, strategic considerations, Nazi ideology, Japan's own considerations, and geopolitical causality.

So again, by magic.

Their manpower and production could have been turned to army or air force use if they were not needed in 1940-41 or beyond.
They started doing that as early as 1942, using Kriegsmarine sailors (and Luftwaffe personnel) as infantry replacements. It contributed to the catastrophic decline in quality among infantry personnel.

Unlikely given the combat mission and losses anticipated in the East.
The Germans did not anticipate a severe combat mission and heavy losses in the East, although for some strange reason you seem to think they did.

What ideological views? They wanted to have a captive European market to insulate their economy from external markets, but still weren't against trade for things they needed or made their lives easier. The entire period leading up to the war saw them buying and trading abroad and did so throughout WW2 where they could (Turkey, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, even Vichy).
[/QUOTE]Their ideological view was of this little ideology you might know as "Naziism". The Nazi view of economics was ultimately autarkic in nature: first a temporary Autarky based on domestic production emphasization to sustain rearmament so as to build an army that would launch a war of annihilation for the adequate living space needed for true autarky. This, in turn, was driven by a racist conspiracy theory that the global markets were dominated by the "Judeo-Capitalist" through the Jewish domination of America. And yeah, the Germans were doing some trading before and during the war. What the facile "they were doing it" ignores though is that they were not relying upon it nor is there any indication that they wanted to. To rely on international trade would mean to become vulnerable to the international Jewish conspiracy and their thralls. As a direct result of this, both imports and exports constantly fell throughout the 1933-1945 period. There was a brief boost of imports in 1940, a result of forcing the conquered countries wholesale to sell to Germany at cutthroat prices, but only back to 90% of 1932 levels before this steadily fell again to 50% by June of 1941.

Have Rommel move up into Estonia and clear out the Baltic coastal flank to open it months earlier to shipping instead of relying on 18th army to do so (stymied until August-September in that) uses different roads and supply than the rest of the 4th Panzer Army
Given that there are not enough roads for that, this is impossible from the outset. The result of this is just going to be an even bigger traffic jams (and the traffic jams of OTL were bad enough) between Rommels Panzer Corp, the supply columns of 4th Panzergruppe, and the troops of 18th Army that takes even longer to unsnarl and leaves the out-of-fuel Panzergruppe lounging around the Luga for even longer. The Soviets have additional time to dig-in, deploy and train additional troops, evacuate more industry, prepare the city for siege, and maybe even launch a few attacks to attrit the static panzer divisions.

With all the extra Ju52 transport and the captured ports in Estonia supply would be open for a much earlier thrust on Leningrad with at least a reinforced Panzer corps.
Except at no point in World War 2 was air resupply enough to sustain an operational-significant advance except in the total absence of enemy resistance and the captured ports were never a significant factor in the supply of Army Group North in '41 or '42, in addition to the problems I covered above.

As to the Soviet preparing more without the British in the war, realistically what more could they really do?
Full mobilization, switch the economy into war production, deploy their strategic echelons in-depth, bring their forces to combat readiness, conduct a maintenance overhaul on their mechanized and air forces so as to ensure all of their vehicles are combat-ready, brief personnel on the situation, begin evacuation of industry from Western Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltics, bring air defenses to full readiness, deploy their troops in defensive positions, start air patrols, interfere with German air reconnaissance flights, put up minefields and obstacles, man fighting positions, distribute ammunition to soldiers, mobilize the relevant reserve vehicles, organize the logistics chains, and probably more then a hundred other things...

All of these were measures which were either not taken IOTL 1941 or in a few cases taken only in a few places by various commanders who disobeyed orders on their own initiative (these locations did better when the war come, although their isolation among the sea of surprise meant they were ultimately swamped).

You've made the facile argument that Stalin would adopt a totally foreign strategy of holding deep and not constantly counterattacking in wargamey tactics that did not match what STAVKA thought was the right way to conduct a defense against Blitzkrieg.
Primarily because STAVKA thought that war would not come until 1942, when they would have the tools and skilled personnel to implement their plans. IOTL they adopted a plan that assumed such and when war came there was no other plan so they attempted to implement it regardless of the fact that it had rendered defunct the moment the war started. If they accept that war is coming in 1941, they would be force to toss out their current plans and doctrine in recognition of the fact that their going to be going to war with the army they have instead of the army they want.

They'd mobilize their 2nd and 3rd strategic echelon, but it get wiped out like IOTL due to lack of weapons.
You only claim that they'd get wiped out and that they would have a more serious (or just as serious) lack of weapons. The second consideration ignores that earlier mobilization would involve organizing the supply chains into coherency and distributing stocks of weapons and ammunition that IOTL were overrun while still sitting in their armories. They would still not be as equipped as the Soviets would like, but they would be better equipped. The first assumption ignores that some of those counter-offensives came damn close to succeeding in their purpose of totally derailing the German advance. The August 30-September 10th El'nia offensive is a case-in-point: while it was ultimately a failure, David Glantz notes in Barbarossa Derailed that (himself quoting Guderian) it was a "close thing" and had the Soviets incapacitated one or two more infantry division it would have forced the deployment of the SS Das Reich, depriving Guderian of the necessary reserve to salvage 10th Motorized Division's when Eremenko's Bryansk Front struck. This in turn would have destroyed the 10th Motorized, forcing Guderian to make the choice of either abandoning his drive towards Koropets or being cut-off. This basically would have meant no Kiev encirclement, with all that entails.

With earlier mobilization and, hence, the improvements I've noticed above, it's entirely conceivable they might have been able to do just that.

That also supposes Stalin takes the hint and doesn't think he can buy off Hitler for another year.
He might, he might not. What's telling though, is you just assume he doesn't. Probably because it would be inconvenient if you had to contemplate what it would mean if he did.

Of course, it's entirely possible that Stalin recognizes that Hitler is coming for him and bones it up even worse then IOTL, like with a pre-emptive strike. That would certainly lose the Soviet Union the war. OTL indicates, though, that he was aware of how unprepared the Red Army was for it. Although, "OTL indicates" that he knew is not the same as "OTL shows", so obviously no guarantees there.

There is a full list of things he could do between full preparation as best he could to OTL, none of which is certain.
But none of which is not guaranteed either.

Sure the Soviet people supplemented food by their own production on off hours,
Which was what saved them from starvation, not lend-lease. They could take the hit in official rations, because most of their food wasn't coming from official rations in the first place.

Relative to 1941-42 1943 saw larger tonnage coming in, but LL provided in 1941-42 was critical to stabilizing the Soviet economy in that period before even bigger stuff could come in.
Except it didn't. As you yourself noted, the Soviet economy was overheating at the end of 1942 despite the fact that LL was coming in. Furthermore, of the things you listed, none were arriving in significant quantity which was something that elicited endless Soviet complaints.

Aircraft and tank production in 1942 was a function of the critical high value items that could not be made in the USSR, namely high capacity machine tools.
The Soviet armaments industry in 1942 was overwhelmingly running off of machine tools (see below) which had been acquired before the war, not via LL. The British and Americans supplied a few more in 1942, but not a significant number in the overall context.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics. In terms of stats it certainly looks like they did, but when you did into the details much of Soviet industrial recovery in 1941-42 was a function of LL machine tools and weapons and critical moments that helped defend important areas like Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad.
Except Harrison doesn't actually say any of that. In late-1942, the Soviet economy was overheating when according to you the LL of 1941-42 should have been stabilizing it. But stabilization did not start to occur until after the victory at Stalingrad which was after the arrival. Harrison says that no, significant foreign aid did not start arriving until 1943. Harrison also directly contradicts your assertion that LL was important to the Soviet armaments industrial recovering in 1942, saying that the Soviet adoption of mass production methods and technology occurred over the course of the 1930s in the five-year plans. "Using the techniques of mass production and standardization embedded before the war," he writes, "by 1943 Soviet industry was delivering weapons to the Red Army at 60 percent of the average unit costs of 1940. That these were based on real resource savings is demonstrated in Chart 5, which shows the reduction in hours worked per unit of various items produced. It was because of this that, in the decisive years of the war, Soviet industry was able to produce larger numbers of tanks and aeroplanes in fewer models and longer runs than its German adversary."

In his discussion on the Soviet stabilization of their war industry by 1943 in his work "Resource mobilization for World War II: the U.S.A., U.K., U.S.S.R., and Germany, 1938-1945" he attributes the stabilization to administrative reforms conducted in the latter-half of 1942, not to lend-lease:

Individual initiative based on rule by decree was not, however, sufficient for a prolonged resource mobilization. This is convincingly demonstrated by the state of the Soviet economy at the end of 1941. Defence plant had been saved and defence output multiplied. But everything else was in an utter shambles. The resulting imbalances soon became a vital threat to continuation of the war effort. Steel, coal, electricity, machinery and transport capacities, workers to staff these industries, housing and food for the workers, all became priorities of equal weight to war production. The resulting complex allocation problem could only be resolved by reassertion of bureaucratic order; “rule by decree” had to give way to law-governed administration. By the end of 1942 this transition had been achieved. Victory at Stalingrad was in sight. Within the crisis-torn economy a working balance had been roughly restored. Within the war cabinet the responsibility for economic priorities formerly divided between leading individuals had been centralized in a new Operations Bureau. From now on the role of political leadership was no longer crucial to Soviet survival, for the system as a whole was now fully mobilized for a war which it could no longer lose.
When he was discussing lend-lease in that paper, he also notes that "throughout the war the Soviets were able to meet their own armament and shell needs, but, later on, American shipments of trucks, tractors, and tinned food provided the Red Army with decisive mobility in its westward pursuit of the retreating Wehrmacht." Thus, essentially, he agrees with what I've said before: Lend-Lease to the Soviets in WW2 was more important in facilitating victory then staving off defeat.
 
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Too big an industrial base? The 1941 attack had wiped out half of it and it was only LL that kept it from imploding, coupled with the additional fronts that the Allies added on Germany and the blockade of Europe stunting the economic potential of the continent. The initial invasion also took out about 45% of pre-war agriculture and 40-50 million Soviet citizens that were stuck behind German lines and denied to the Soviet economy and war effort. That brought them down to about 140 million people, which was less than the European Axis populations combined (80 million Germans, >40 million Italians, and tens of millions of Romanians, Finns, Hungarians, Slovaks, and over 1 million Russian that joined the German armed forces). Japan adds another 70 million people. German GDP alone despite the blockade was about twice that of the USSR by late 1942 WITH LL.

The other Axis nations were only marginally effective on the Eastern Front, and according to Harrison (table 1-3, https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/public/ww2overview1998.pdf) the USSR's GDP never dropped below 70% of Germany's. In terms of attrition the casualty ratio on the Eastern front (2.5 : 1 in favor of Germany) when applied to the population of those respective countries is not enough to guarantee a German victory, especially considering the commitments necessary on the German side for various occupation, service and anti-partisan duties.

As to Leningrad they didn't need to claw through it street by street; if they got there by mid-July the city didn't have defenses built and had virtually no defenders in the city, they were trying to man the Luga line and defend it from the Finns to the north. If they bog down on the Luga like IOTL then without the Wallied political pressure on the Finns and greater German leverage due to having gotten the British out of the war they could attack from the north with some of that extra manpower in September and take the city because it was virtually impossible to defend from the lines the Finns had obtained. IOTL the Finns didn't want to attack or let the Germans use their territory to do so because of wanting to keep their war effort separate from the Germans so as not to piss off the Anglo-American alliance in the war; they hedged their bets with that, but that wouldn't happens if the US/UK alliance isn't in the war in 1941.

Once Leningrad falls that frees up 200k or more Finns to attack the Murmansk rail line. Once that falls Murmansk gets rolled up, as it is isolated from reinforcements and vulnerable from the south as 200k extra Finns march on it.

Who says the Finns are launching an all-out invasion? Historically they only blocked the city from the north and had little in the way of an offensive capacity as it was. As far as I'm concerned Mannerheim's objective was never to grab off significant amounts of Soviet territory, he only wanted to preserve his country's sovereignty. Even with the state of the Leningrad defenses the city itself was several hundred square miles and millions of people with an entire Soviet Front assigned to its defense. There was no way AGN could have overcome all that and still have taken or isolated Murmansk.

As to the claim that the Soviets had greater industrial output than Germany, that's just false and only appears that way by cherrypicking a handful of stats:
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=201813

I actually did not know that. Conceded on the overall industrial strength, but that doesn't mean Germany could have conquered the USSR for the reasons already mentioned by myself and others above. The Soviet Union was too big, too populous, and too united in its resistance.

Now the US was an interesting case; they didn't believe the Soviets were good guys until the US actually entered the war. Getting them LL without it first having been authorized for Britain is just not an option to get it through congress. With Britain out of the war the US public is going to be all for rearmament, but is not interested in starting foreign wars or sending free aid to the USSR which looks like its going to fall, especially if Japan joins in. They will of course allow the Soviets to buy whatever they can afford and receive via cash and carry, but the Germans will be far better customers. Once the war with Britain is over and the British stop spending huge sums in the US, but Germany, now in control of Europe's trade, which was a huge market for the US, they will start buying. The economy trumps political grandstanding and with the Axis being hugely important customers during the period right after the Great Depression officially ended and the economy is not particularly stables (see the Roosevelt depression in 1937-38) its not as if they can afford the loss of trade by explicitly thumbing the eye of Hitler. They will allow the Soviets to buy as per OTL and keep things fair, but with the loss of Murmansk and Vladivostok the Soviets really cannot import much unless the Iranians are into it or the Brits invade as per OTL and enable the trans-shipping of trade. US public opinion is going to evolve differently ITTL with Britain exiting the war early and without the conflict in the Atlantic in 1940-41, rather instead there is peace in Europe and the Axis is buying internationally to ensure the steady flow of oil and other imports to keep the European economy running.

The US preferred Russia over Germany any day. Even prior to Pearl Harbor G-2 recommended increased aid to the Soviet Union so that the latter might continue to offer active resistance to Germany. The United States recognized that Soviet Russia was an ally as long as Germany was her enemy.

An example of such a recommendation (https://www.ibiblio.org/pha/timeline/411021amie.html)

How does any of that happen if the Axis doesn't DoW first? The Soviets are going to lose by having their industry collapse due to the lack of supplies for it and falling agricultural outputs resulting in a restive and hungry populace.

Lend-Lease can help make up for domestic deficiencies and war between Germany and the United States was virtually inevitable. Both Hitler and FDR saw it coming a mile away.
 
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Wiking, you have so far failed to take into account the ramifications of a British exit. With a British-German peace deal in mid 1940, Stalin's immediate reaction will be to conclude that the west and the Germans are aligning against him - just as he feared they could cut a deal behind his back throughout the war.

His next moves will be to cut the delivery of raw materials to Germany and return to making overtures to the British, which perhaps to his surprise will be well received.

In OTL, when German-Soviet relations cooled in summer 1940 and the Soviets delayed shipments, it was a huge problem for Germany.

To quote wiki, for what that's worth: (feel free to point out what's wrong)

In the Summer of 1940, Germany grew even more dependent on Soviet imports.[62] German occupations of France, the Netherlands, and Belgium created additional demand while decreasing avenues for indirect supply.[62]Compared to 1938 figures, the expanded "Greater Germany" and its sphere of influence lacked, among other items, 500,000 tons of manganese, 3.3 million tons of raw phosphate, 200,000 tons of rubber and 9.5 million tons of oil.[62] Hitler believed that an eventual invasion of the Soviet Union increasingly looked like the only way in which Germany could solve its resource crisis.[62] The Soviet invasion of Lithuania, Estoniaand Latvia[27][63] in June 1940 resulted in the Soviet occupation of states on which Germany had relied for 96.7 million Reichsmarks of imports in 1938.[13] While no concrete plans were yet made, Hitler told one of his generals in June that the victories in western Europe "finally freed his hands for his important real task: the showdown with Bolshevism",[64] though German generals told Hitler that occupying Western Russia would create "more of a drain than a relief for Germany's economic situation."[65]
In August 1940, the Soviet Union briefly suspended its deliveries after their relations were strained following disagreement over policy in the Balkans, the Soviet Union's war with Finland (from which Germany had imported 88.9 million Reichsmarks in goods in 1938[13]), Germany falling behind in its deliveries of goods under the pact and with Stalin worried that Hitler's war with the West might end quickly after France signed an armistice.[66] By the end of August, relations improved again as the countries had redrawn the Hungarian and Romanian borders, settled Bulgarian claims and Stalin was again convinced that Germany would face a long war in the west with Britain's improvement in its air battle with Germanyand the execution of an agreement between the United States and Britain regarding destroyers and bases.[67] Soviet raw material deliveries increased well over prior figures.[64].

As Geoffrey Roberts quotes Edward E. Ericson (one of the authors quoted above) in Stalin's Wars:

without Soviet deliveries...Germany could barely have attacked the Soviet Union, let alone come close to victory. Germany's stockpiles of oil, manganese, and grain would have been completely exhausted by the late summer of 1941. And Germany's rubber supply would have run out half a year earlier... In other words, Hitler had been almost completely dependent on Stalin to provide him the resources he needed to attack the Soviet Union. It was no wonder that Hitler repeatedly insisted Germany fulfill the terms of the economic treaties. He could not conquer any Soviet territory until he first received enough Soviet raw materials.

Basically, your scenario where Germany gets to throw everything at the Soviets is impossible. All the tanks, planes and troops Hitler could import from an alternate universe in addition to what he could produce wouldn't matter without enough oil.

If, for the sake of argument, Germany still invaded Russia on schedule, the forces at their disposal would be fewer, not greater, unless they want to exhaust all their resources in a big push. That's not a very interesting TL for obvious reasons.

The problem here is that any universe where the Soviets get stuck by themselves with no LL is also a universe where the Germans don't have the resources to carry on their war effort.

This debate is pointless.
 
Stalin was nastily shocked that France crumbled so quickly. He was expecting a long drawn out war which would lead to the Anglo-French, not for Germany to finish off the French in 4 weeks.

And he was perfectly willing to then sit back and let Germany defeat Britain.

Send the Soviets food, supplies, raw materials, and so-on. Basically, lend-lease. Probably start out with low-interest loans like they did IOTL.

They won't if they think (as they will) the Soviet Union is going to fall in three months and the aid is going to end up in German hands.

Except the figures don't reflect that. The majority of those AFVs not in the East were there for reserves, repair, training, or in transit, not for combat. The only AFVs fighting the WAllies in June 1942 were the few hundred in the North Africa desert.

Since when is this discussion limited to June 1942?

Not until it's too late. More probably the Germans decide to save on the resources since taking over the Soviet Union would just be a few month job. By the time they realize it won't be, it's too late.

They realized they'd underestimated the USSR a few months into the invasion. Besides, with no naval war or strategic bombing to fend off, what else would they use them for?

Is the Pope Catholic? Germany isn't going to stop them or even complain any more then they did IOTL. They weren't interested in overseas colonies.

The momentum towards the embargo had been building well before Indochina. If anything, an invasion of the USSR would be enough to trigger it.

Its not the German reaction I'm thinking of, its that of the British. If the latter is at peace with Germany, the fact that Britain would be free to concentrate against Japan might make the Japanese think twice.


And even when more steel was being used for tanks, the Germans were unable to match Soviet weapons production.

Did I say they would? What I said was the Germans would be able to more than double their production vs OTL. Given their qualitative superiority which even you acknowledge, they don't need to match Soviet output tank for tank to keep advancing, as the events of 1941 and 1942 showed.
 
And he was perfectly willing to then sit back and let Germany defeat Britain.

Well, it's unclear whether he knew if Germany would be unable to take down the British before the Americans came in (at which point Germany simply wouldn't be able to take Britain down). It was definitely clear to him that it would take the Germans long enough that the Red Army would be fully rearmed and reformed by the time they turned East. In the mean time, once the winter of '41/'42 rolled around, he would probably start demanding that Germany pay-up for all the stuff he was sending them.

They won't if they think (as they will) the Soviet Union is going to fall in three months and the aid is going to end up in German hands.
IOTL they figured that and went ahead with it anyways. They were pleasantly surprised that the Soviet Union was still fighting in by the winter of 1941/42.

Since when is this discussion limited to June 1942?

It's the time period Wiking claims that less then 50% of German AFVs were in the East. Although if we want to go elsewhere: in June 1944, there were 2,200 AFVs deployed against the Anglo-Americans in Normandy. In Italy, there were something like several hundred to a thousand (still pulling up this information). In the East, the Germans had 4,200. According to Steven Zaloga (I've heard there have been some issues with his numbers but then kill counts have always been something which has been endlessely debated) the Germans lost ~3,000 tanks in the East in the summer of 1944.

They realized they'd underestimated the USSR a few months into the invasion.
And it took them more then a year to reorient production.

Besides, with no naval war or strategic bombing to fend off, what else would they use them for?
Longer term investments. Probably some goes into building that fleet Hitler thought he needs to take on the US (the whole point of seizing the European USSR up to the Urals was to acquire the resources Germany needs to take on the US), others go into industrial expansions of the economy, raising the standards of living, things like that.

Its not the German reaction I'm thinking of, its that of the British. If the latter is at peace with Germany, the fact that Britain would be free to concentrate against Japan might make the Japanese think twice.
A fair point. Then the embargo comes down when Japan attacks the USSR. Or when they do something else outrageous in China. Or attack another US boat in the region. The point is that the embargo was coming, Indochina or no, as it was the natural culmination of the steady deterioration . This was largely a function of Japan's war in China.

Did I say they would? What I said was the Germans would be able to more than double their production vs OTL.
By the time 1943 rolls around and Germany's mobilization starts to pay off, it's too late. The Soviets already have built-up a tremendous stock of war material. Kursk is a good case-in-point on this: the actually had more men and machines in the field after the battle then before it. And this is a point when German AFV production had doubled! Plus, the British will be guaranteed to be back in the war at this point, possibly with the US behind them, those theoretical productive advantages go back out the window.

This is all assuming the German invasion plays out like it did OTL, mind.
 
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Well, it's unclear whether he knew if Germany would be unable to take down the British before the Americans came in (at which point Germany simply wouldn't be able to take Britain down). It was definitely clear to him that it would take the Germans long enough that the Red Army would be fully rearmed and reformed by the time they turned East. In the mean time, once the winter of '41/'42 rolled around, he would probably start demanding that Germany pay-up for all the stuff he was sending them.

The point I'm making is that the Soviets showed no sign of going to war with Germany even if it looked like the Germans were going to defeat Britain.

IOTL they figured that and went ahead with it anyways. They were pleasantly surprised that the Soviet Union was still fighting in by the winter of 1941/42.

Fair enough.

It's the time period Wiking claims that less then 50% of German AFVs were in the East. Although if we want to go elsewhere: in June 1944, there were 2,200 AFVs deployed against the Anglo-Americans in Normandy. In Italy, there were something like several hundred to a thousand (still pulling up this information). In the East, the Germans had 4,200. According to Steven Zaloga (I've heard there have been some issues with his numbers but then kill counts have always been something which has been endlessely debated) the Germans lost ~3,000 tanks in the East in the summer of 1944.

In that case, I can't really comment further on this issue until he replies with his source.

A fair point. Then the embargo comes down when Japan attacks the USSR. Or when they do something else outrageous in China. Or attack another US boat in the region. The point is that the embargo was coming, Indochina or no, as it was the natural culmination of the steady deterioration . This was largely a function of Japan's war in China.

Okay, but in that circumstance Japan is already committed to the strike north , the Vladivostok L-L route is going to be cut, and Pearl Harbor is canceled.

And it took them more then a year to reorient production.

Longer term investments. Probably some goes into building that fleet Hitler thought he needs to take on the US (the whole point of seizing the European USSR up to the Urals was to acquire the resources Germany needs to take on the US), others go into industrial expansions of the economy, raising the standards of living, things like that.

By the time 1943 rolls around and Germany's mobilization starts to pay off, it's too late. The Soviets already have built-up a tremendous stock of war material. Kursk is a good case-in-point on this: the actually had more men and machines in the field after the battle then before it. And this is a point when German AFV production had doubled! Plus, the British will be guaranteed to be back in the war at this point, possibly with the US behind them, those theoretical productive advantages go back out the window.

All of these things happened under the circumstance of fighting the Wallies and Soviets simultaneously from late 1941 on. If the Germans had not been fighting the air and naval war against the US and Britain, the resources they devoted to fighting those countries would have been devoted to the Eastern Front throughout that time period.
 

Deleted member 1487

Wiking, you have so far failed to take into account the ramifications of a British exit. With a British-German peace deal in mid 1940, Stalin's immediate reaction will be to conclude that the west and the Germans are aligning against him - just as he feared they could cut a deal behind his back throughout the war.

His next moves will be to cut the delivery of raw materials to Germany and return to making overtures to the British, which perhaps to his surprise will be well received.

In OTL, when German-Soviet relations cooled in summer 1940 and the Soviets delayed shipments, it was a huge problem for Germany.
Why is it guaranteed that he would think the West is aligning with Germany against him? He was already aligned with Germany against them. And after having done that and opposed the British in the interwar period, why would he turn to them if he thinks they are aligning against him? That's just not logically consistent.

Stalin also increased shipments to Germany when he was afraid of their potential to invade him in 1941, so when Germany makes peace with Britain and gets access to world markets again, not needing Soviet trade, Stalin if anything is going to be more fearful and restart and keep trade going to buy off Hitler until he was ready to fight, just like IOTL. As Germany can buy things abroad with captured gold stocks, they don't need Soviet trade or the USSR and Stalin knew the USSR was not ready to fight in 1941, the earliest possible date for war, so would if anything adopt the OTL position of making his trade indispensible to Hitler and show is belly to avoid invasion as long as possible.


To quote wiki, for what that's worth: (feel free to point out what's wrong)

As Geoffrey Roberts quotes Edward E. Ericson (one of the authors quoted above) in Stalin's Wars:
Yeah that is true when Germany is blockaded by the British, but with peace comes the end of blockade and access to billion of dollars of gold and other assets that could be spent abroad to make up for any loss of Soviet trade. But given that Stalin knows his military is not ready for war, having just concluded the draining conflict with the Finns and occupied several parts of Eastern Europe (and has yet to make demands on Romania), so it likely to keep up shipments to make his trade cheaper than foreign goods so he is indispensible to Hitler, rather than piss him off by cutting trade and ensuring invasion. The thing is Stalin doesn't know if Germany is coming for sure in 1941 and IOTL thought he could buy Hitler off by being overly friendly, he'd likely keep that up given how little confidence he had in his how military.

Basically, your scenario where Germany gets to throw everything at the Soviets is impossible. All the tanks, planes and troops Hitler could import from an alternate universe in addition to what he could produce wouldn't matter without enough oil.

If, for the sake of argument, Germany still invaded Russia on schedule, the forces at their disposal would be fewer, not greater, unless they want to exhaust all their resources in a big push. That's not a very interesting TL for obvious reasons.

The problem here is that any universe where the Soviets get stuck by themselves with no LL is also a universe where the Germans don't have the resources to carry on their war effort.
See above, basically this argument relies on the faulty assumption that Germany is still blockaded once Britain is out of the war; that's not the case and in fact Germany has access to world trade and European gold stocks to make purchases for whatever goods are needed to run the European economy. Soviet trade then is unnecessary, but Stalin, fearful of Germany then not needing him and having every reason to invade before he is ready to fight is more likely to increase trade like IOTL hoping to buy off Hitler until 1942 when the Soviets are more prepared to fight. A war in 1941 after a year of peace with the West is a very bad situation for the Soviets and Stalin knows that, so he's going to do whatever he can to convince Hitler not to invade and IOTL that was by sending him whatever was requested without inquiring about payment.

In that case, I can't really comment further on this issue until he replies with his source.
Already did earlier, its John Ellis "Brute Force". The author has a table that averages AFV percentages on the Eastern Front for the entire year of 1942 and came up with a yearly average of about 47%. The monthly averages of June-July are peak for the year AFAIK, so picking those as a snapshot is disengenuous. Same with ON picking just summer 1944 front totals without including what was back in Germany or in areas other than the Western Front, Italy, and the Eastern Front or realizing that the number Ellis is stating is a yearly average, not a quarterly average.
 
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Deleted member 1487

The other Axis nations were only marginally effective on the Eastern Front, and according to Harrison (table 1-3, https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/public/ww2overview1998.pdf) the USSR's GDP never dropped below 70% of Germany's. In terms of attrition the casualty ratio on the Eastern front (2.5 : 1 in favor of Germany) when applied to the population of those respective countries is not enough to guarantee a German victory, especially considering the commitments necessary on the German side for various occupation, service and anti-partisan duties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#GDP
These numbers, from Harrison , show 61% of German GDP for the Soviets in 1942. I underestimated the Soviets by 11%. That is Germany+Austria, but I don't know if that includes Czech GDP; if not then the ratio for the Soviets is even worse. Of course that is IOTL when German GDP and overall Axis European GDP was stunted by the blockade, while Soviet GDP was benefiting from LL.

As to the 1941-42 casualty ratio before the Stalingrad pocket the casualty ratio was actually much worse for the Soviets. The final 2.5:1 ratio (which is incorrect by the way, only the death toll, the actual casualties inflicted was more lopsided) was achieved due to Wallied contributions (overall Soviet casualties to overall German casualties), who inflicted at least 800k or more deaths on the Germans and as many as 1.1 million came from those that disappeared and were probably killed as PoWs in the last 18 months of the war or even after the war (the Soviets only admit to about 450k deaths as PoWs).

Edit: in 1941 alone the Germans lost about 850k-900k total casualties of which less than 300k were killed. Meanwhile the Soviet official figures are about 5 million casualties, but that's a severe under count, because the Germans took over 3 million PoWs and easily killed and wounded several million Soviets on top of that. The official figures are likely just what could be reported, but like Germany in the last 6 months of the war the official reporting system broke down, so actual totals are likely quite a bit higher. I think all told killed+wounded+PoWs is over 8 million for the Soviets in 1941 alone. Even if some of the 3 million PoWs of 1941 were just military aged male civilians in the battle zone, its very likely there were a lot of civilians drafted to fight and hastily mobilized reservists that were not properly reported as combatants in the chaos of the invasion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union#Criticism_of_Krivosheev
Its likely the Soviet death toll was in fact at least 11 million if not 14 million Soviet combatants rather than the official 8.5 million.


Without a Wallied front, no strategic bombing, no naval war, and no blockade the casualty ratios are going to remain 1941-42 lopsided due to the increasing firepower of the Axis forces and the worsening food and industrial output situation of the Soviets sans 75% of LL/imports and worse losses of territory like Leningrad and Murmank and Vladivostok.

Who says the Finns are launching an all-out invasion? Historically they only blocked the city from the north and had little in the way of an offensive capacity as it was. As far as I'm concerned Mannerheim's objective was never to grab off significant amounts of Soviet territory, he only wanted to preserve his country's sovereignty. Even with the state of the Leningrad defenses the city itself was several hundred square miles and millions of people with an entire Soviet Front assigned to its defense. There was no way AGN could have overcome all that and still have taken or isolated Murmansk.
The Finns don't really need to, but I am asserting it because IOTL they were pressured to hold back for political reasons. They don't need to make an all out effort though, just let the Germans do it from their territory, which they refused to do IOTL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finni..._to_attack_Leningrad_and_the_end_of_offensive
In 1941 Leningrad was highly vulnerable and not nearly as well defended as it would be in 1942-44 due to lack of defensive preparation and the destruction of much of the Soviet military further west, leaving only militias to be organized. Even then the city doesn't need to be taken directly, just attacked from the north from Finnish positions to cut it off from Lake Lagoda and starve it out if street fighting was deemed too likely. With 3 million people the city would starve pretty fast without Lagoda supply and the fact that early in the siege in 1941 major food stores were destroyed by artillery.

But once Leningrad falls then Finland is making an all out effort for Karelia, which means the fall of Murmansk, as that was their plan for Greater Finland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation_War#Political_development

I actually did not know that. Conceded on the overall industrial strength, but that doesn't mean Germany could have conquered the USSR for the reasons already mentioned by myself and others above. The Soviet Union was too big, too populous, and too united in its resistance.
I mean you can repeat that mantra, but without Wallied help the USSR is too vulnerable and damaged by the invasion to hold out on its own.

The US preferred Russia over Germany any day. Even prior to Pearl Harbor G-2 recommended increased aid to the Soviet Union so that the latter might continue to offer active resistance to Germany. The United States recognized that Soviet Russia was an ally as long as Germany was her enemy.

An example of such a recommendation (https://www.ibiblio.org/pha/timeline/411021amie.html)
You do realize that was made after the US had committed to LL and was preparing for war entry, right? ITTL there is no LL to Britain, not undeclared shooting war in the Atlantic, no tacit alliance with Britain, no Churchill cultivating relations, and the US public not brought to feelings of war by the Battle of Britain/Blitz and the resulting imagery of the bombing. The US public would have pretty much written off Europe without any of that and focused on its own defense rather than that of Europe. Plus with the Axis ganging up on the USSR everyone is pretty much going to assume its going to lose sooner or later before the US could get involved in any way, so free stuff is just going to go to Germany.

That said I do believe the US would do what it did prior to extending LL IOTL: allow cash and carry to the USSR and perhaps prioritize its orders. The Soviets could spend whatever they wanted in the US, but that's hard to get to the USSR once Murmansk and Vladivostok are lost; the Persian route depends on the British invading Iran and toppling the Shah, who was friendly to the Nazis. That might not happen ITTL, especially if India is restive and not providing trustworthy troops. If Persia not an option than the Soviets are pretty much without import ability by the end of 1941.

Lend-Lease can help make up for domestic deficiencies and war between Germany and the United States was virtually inevitable. Both Hitler and FDR saw it coming a mile away.
IOTL when Britain remained in the war and FDR was picking a fight. Hitler actually was trying to avoid war with the US and was growing increasingly pissed by US aggressive action in the Atlantic and support for Germany's enemies. Of course FDR was only able to do that politically because the British remained in the war and provided to necessary propaganda for US consumption that convinced the US public to get increasingly involved in supplying the British. ITTL that never happens, the British drop out, the situation in Europe is the new normal until the USSR is invaded and then the Soviets aren't exactly open to the West in letting their journalists come in and provide propaganda for US consumption like the British were and created themselves for the US. The assumption for everyone in the US is that the Soviets are going to collapse by the end of 1941 at the latest. If that doesn't happen once the Germans, Italians, and Japanese invade and the war continues into 1942 then the assumption is that the Soviets will likely fall in 1942, so while selling to the USSR is good policy, providing them free stuff only to have to go to the Germans is not. By the end of 1942 its unlikely the USSR is going to be in a position to continue major resistance, but if they do they will fall apart in 1943. The problem is that there is no way to get into the war. The US cannot declare war on the Axis for domestic political reasons, that would require at a minimum British reentry, which in unlikely to happen for reasons I mentioned in previous posts, namely cost and unwillingness to bear the brunt of Axis firepower once the Soviets fall, only to then be an appendage of US foreign policy and be heavily indebted to her financially as the empire slips away. Staying out and building up defenses, while trying to leverage free US aid is the far more likely and prudent plan from the British perspective as they try and keep whatever they can from the Empire and hope the war with the Soviets wears down the Axis in a long occupation. The US then is stuck watching from the sidelines.
 
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Deleted member 1487

I'll try and respond to the rest later.
Which was what saved them from starvation, not lend-lease. They could take the hit in official rations, because most of their food wasn't coming from official rations in the first place.
Can you prove that with a source? I've provided sources in the past that show 38% of Soviet civilian calories would have been cut without LL food. Now you're making the claim that most of their calories came from 'victory gardens'?

Except it didn't. As you yourself noted, the Soviet economy was overheating at the end of 1942 despite the fact that LL was coming in. Furthermore, of the things you listed, none were arriving in significant quantity which was something that elicited endless Soviet complaints.
LL kept them from collapse as they lost even more territory and used up stocks held in 1941-42. The economy kept declining due to Axis gains on the battlefield in 1942 despite LL, because they were losing important agricultural and industrial areas. LL kept that from hurting even worse than it did and allowed them to recover enough from the losses in 1941-42 to build enough to counterattack in late 1942. Remember in the Caucasus something like 40% of tanks were LL, about the same ratio as around Moscow during the counteroffensive in 1941. Of course the Soviets wanted more, they were suffering major losses, but without that LL they would have suffered far worse than they already were and would be unlikely to have enough material produced on their own to launch the major offensives of the Autumn of 1942. Keep in mind the context too, that was with major allied efforts in 1942, including operation torch which drew off major combat formations from potentially being in the East (also the Afrika Korps and occupation forces in western Europe defending it against invasion, plus the increasing share of the Luftwaffe and air defense). Without the Wallies in the war in 1942 the Axis will be far stronger in the East thanks to 100% of the Axis war economy being spent on beating the Soviets, rather than 50% or less, plus no blockade stunting their economies and at least 90% of their total forces being in the East rather than ~60% by late 1942.


The Soviet armaments industry in 1942 was overwhelmingly running off of machine tools (see below) which had been acquired before the war, not via LL. The British and Americans supplied a few more in 1942, but not a significant number in the overall context.
In raw numbers sure, but the vital US complex machinery the Soviets couldn't make for themselves that were labor and raw material saving and high capacity were critical for Soviet industry. Overall output would have been significantly lower without it. Again it wasn't so much the numbers of machines its the type and capacity of the machines, which Harrison points out allowed the Soviets to employ less people in industry than the Germans did.

Except Harrison doesn't actually say any of that. In late-1942, the Soviet economy was overheating when according to you the LL of 1941-42 should have been stabilizing it. But stabilization did not start to occur until after the victory at Stalingrad which was after the arrival. Harrison says that no, significant foreign aid did not start arriving until 1943. Harrison also directly contradicts your assertion that LL was important to the Soviet armaments industrial recovering in 1942, saying that the Soviet adoption of mass production methods and technology occurred over the course of the 1930s in the five-year plans. "Using the techniques of mass production and standardization embedded before the war," he writes, "by 1943 Soviet industry was delivering weapons to the Red Army at 60 percent of the average unit costs of 1940. That these were based on real resource savings is demonstrated in Chart 5, which shows the reduction in hours worked per unit of various items produced. It was because of this that, in the decisive years of the war, Soviet industry was able to produce larger numbers of tanks and aeroplanes in fewer models and longer runs than its German adversary."
Define significant. In terms of raw tonnage the majority came after 1942, but the types of things coming in in 1941-42 were vital to keeping a collapsing system going as the Axis overran 40% of the Soviet pre-war GDP and 57% of its pre-war agriculture. The continued territorial losses were collapsing the economy in 1941-42 and the end of the territorial losses in 1942 stopped the bleeding there; the losses were so vast that even LL couldn't arrest the industrial decline, but they helped blunt it and allow for the Soviet industry to continue despite critical losses. In fact those contributions enabled Soviet industry to rise in output in several critical weapons categories despite those losses. Add in the Wallied combat contributions and that helped siphon off Axis combat strength that would have made losses to the Soviets even worse (strategic bombing, naval war, blockade, ground/air fronts); that also created an industrial distortion in the Axis war effort that prevented over half of it by 1942 from being focused on weapons/equipment to fight the Soviets; with one front to worry about the Axis would have created economies of scale in weapons/equipment categories to fight in the East that did not and could not exist in a multifront war. IOTL the Soviets were able to concentrate on a few categories of weapons due to having one front, while their enemy fought with one arm and leg tied behind his back.

Your quoted passage doesn't contradict what I was saying; by dropping all categories other than a handful immediately necessary they outsourced the other stuff to LL and used LL machinery that was vital and not available otherwise due to its complexity to specialize in mass production of a few types of weapons.

Just to cherrypick a few quotes below about just the British contribution:
http://www.historynet.com/did-russi...ase-helped-the-soviets-defeat-the-germans.htm
Even aid that might seem like a drop in the bucket in the larger context of Soviet production for the war played a crucial role in filling gaps at important moments during this period. At a time when Soviet industry was in disarray—many of their industrial plants were destroyed or captured by the advancing Nazi troops or in the process of evacuation east—battlefield losses of specific equipment approached or even exceeded the rate at which Soviet domestic production could replace them during this crucial period. Under these circumstances even small quantities of aid took on far greater significance.

Given the disruption to Soviet production and Red Army losses, the Soviet Union was understandably eager to put British armor into action as soon as possible. According to Biriukov’s service diary, the first 20 British tanks arrived at the Soviet tank training school in Kazan on October 28, 1941, at which point a further 120 tanks were unloaded at the port of Archangel in northern Russia. Courses on the British tanks for Soviet crews started during November as the first tanks, with British assistance, were being assembled from their in-transit states and undergoing testing by Soviet specialists.


The tanks reached the front lines with extraordinary speed. Extrapolating from available statistics, researchers estimate that British-supplied tanks made up 30 to 40 percent of the entire heavy and medium tank strength of Soviet forces before Moscow at the beginning of December 1941, and certainly made up a significant proportion of tanks available as reinforcements at this critical point in the fighting. By the end of 1941 Britain had delivered 466 tanks out of the 750 promised.



A total of 699 Lend-Lease aircraft had been delivered to Archangel by the time the Arctic convoys switched to Murmansk in December 1941. Of these, 99 Hurricanes and 39 Tomahawks were in service with the Soviet air defense forces on January 1, 1942, out of a total of 1,470 fighters. About 15 percent of the aircraft of the 6th Fighter Air Corps defending Moscow were Tomahawks or Hurricanes.


The Soviet Northern Fleet was also a major and early recipient of British Hurricanes, receiving those flown by No. 151 Wing of the RAF, which operated briefly from Soviet airfields near Murmansk. As early as October 12, 1941, the Soviet 126th Fighter Air Regiment was operating with Tomahawks bought from the United States by Britain. Tomahawks also served in defense of the Doroga Zhizni or “Road of Life” across the ice of Lake Ladoga, which provided the only supply line to the besieged city of Leningrad during the winter of 1941–42. By spring and summer of 1942 the Hurricane had clearly become the principal fighter aircraft of the Northern Fleet’s air regiments; in all, 83 out of its 109 fighters were of foreign origin.


British and Commonwealth deliveries to the Soviet Union in late 1941 and early 1942 would not only assist in the Soviet defense of Moscow and subsequent counteroffensive, but also in increasing Soviet production for the next period of the war. Substantial quantities of machine tools and raw materials, such as aluminum and rubber, were supplied to help Soviet industry back on its feet: 312 metal-cutting machine tools were delivered by convoy PQ-12 alone, arriving in March 1942, along with a range of other items for Soviet factories such as machine presses and compressors.

Once again, raw figures do not tell the whole story. Although British shipments amounted to only a few percent of Soviet domestic production of machine tools, the Soviet Union could request specific items which it may not have been able to produce for itself. Additionally, many of the British tools arrived in early 1942, when Soviet tool production was still very low, resulting in a disproportionate impact. The handing over of forty imported machine tools to Aviation Factory No. 150 in July 1942, for example, was the critical factor in enabling the factory to reach projected capacity within two months.

In his discussion on the Soviet stabilization of their war industry by 1943 in his work "Resource mobilization for World War II: the U.S.A., U.K., U.S.S.R., and Germany, 1938-1945" he attributes the stabilization to administrative reforms conducted in the latter-half of 1942, not to lend-lease:
Surely that helped, but it was a combination of factors, such as the territorial losses stopping by Autumn 1942, LL, administrative reform, German strength being drawn off to other fronts, etc. Given that we are talking about an ATL where the Axis has its full strength to devote to the Eastern Front, its not simply a question of just LL being out of the picture, but of the Axis being far stronger in firepower and supply.


When he was discussing lend-lease in that paper, he also notes that "throughout the war the Soviets were able to meet their own armament and shell needs, but, later on, American shipments of trucks, tractors, and tinned food provided the Red Army with decisive mobility in its westward pursuit of the retreating Wehrmacht." Thus, essentially, he agrees with what I've said before: Lend-Lease to the Soviets in WW2 was more important in facilitating victory then staving off defeat.
In the context of meeting those shell and armament needs that was the result of US/UK LL machinery and raw materials that enabled that. Remember over half of Soviet explosives came via LL. Kind of hard to have shells with only 47% of historical explosives.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/260606?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Clearly LL was much more present by 1943 and beyond than in 1941-42, but its that early foundation that really helped enable Soviet recovery, even if said recovery was mostly done on internal resources. But don't forget that its not just LL that was a factor in that stabilization, it was the end of territorial losses due to the impact of Wallied military contributions in 1942 and earlier. Without those the territorial losses would have continued and been worse, with even worse casualties inflicted due to the Axis having greater firepower and supply in the East thanks to 100% of their war production being focused on beating the Soviets, rather than 50% or less. If the bleeding of territory doesn't end and military casualties are worse, there is not a 1942 roll back of the Axis that really was the primary reason for stabilization of the economy.
 

Martynn

Banned
Why are some people still believing that the USSR can defeat Germany?

German aircraft losses against the USSR and the Western Allies were

1941: 2500 to 800 (June to December)
1942: 3500 to 3500
1943: 4000 to 8700

In early 1944 some 2000 machines were stationed on the Eastern Front - compared to some 4000 stationed in the Med, France and Germany.

LL aircraft deliveries from 41-43 were 13 000 machines.

Thus even if the Soivets destroy an additional 10 000 German aircraft in the 41-43 period - and loose just an additional 15 000, then in early 1944 the Germans would have 7000 aircraft instead of 2000 and the Soviets just 4000 instead of 32 000.

And lets not even start to talk about food, tanks, trucks ect
 
Why is it guaranteed that he would think the West is aligning with Germany against him? He was already aligned with Germany against them. And after having done that and opposed the British in the interwar period, why would he turn to them if he thinks they are aligning against him? That's just not logically consistent.

Because that's how Stalin thought. He was only aligned with Germany as long as they were at war with Britain. Based on his reaction to the fall of France, a British peace deal with Germany will cause a meltdown, and Stalin will attempt to break up what he sees as a rapproachment.

Stalin also increased shipments to Germany when he was afraid of their potential to invade him in 1941, so when Germany makes peace with Britain and gets access to world markets again, not needing Soviet trade, Stalin if anything is going to be more fearful and restart and keep trade going to buy off Hitler until he was ready to fight, just like IOTL. As Germany can buy things abroad with captured gold stocks, they don't need Soviet trade or the USSR and Stalin knew the USSR was not ready to fight in 1941, the earliest possible date for war, so would if anything adopt the OTL position of making his trade indispensible to Hitler and show is belly to avoid invasion as long as possible.

You just claimed Soviet trade is not needed, so your last assertion isn't even logically consistent with the rest of your argument. Stalin paid Hitler off when Germany was committed to a long, drawn out war with the west. If Britain and Germany are at peace, this breaks down immediately. If there is even the prospect of Germany obtaining resources from abroad, Stalin will find an excuse to suspend trade indefinitely and approach the British.

Yeah that is true when Germany is blockaded by the British, but with peace comes the end of blockade and access to billion of dollars of gold and other assets that could be spent abroad to make up for any loss of Soviet trade. But given that Stalin knows his military is not ready for war, having just concluded the draining conflict with the Finns and occupied several parts of Eastern Europe (and has yet to make demands on Romania), so it likely to keep up shipments to make his trade cheaper than foreign goods so he is indispensible to Hitler, rather than piss him off by cutting trade and ensuring invasion. The thing is Stalin doesn't know if Germany is coming for sure in 1941 and IOTL thought he could buy Hitler off by being overly friendly, he'd likely keep that up given how little confidence he had in his how military.


See above, basically this argument relies on the faulty assumption that Germany is still blockaded once Britain is out of the war; that's not the case and in fact Germany has access to world trade and European gold stocks to make purchases for whatever goods are needed to run the European economy. Soviet trade then is unnecessary, but Stalin, fearful of Germany then not needing him and having every reason to invade before he is ready to fight is more likely to increase trade like IOTL hoping to buy off Hitler until 1942 when the Soviets are more prepared to fight. A war in 1941 after a year of peace with the West is a very bad situation for the Soviets and Stalin knows that, so he's going to do whatever he can to convince Hitler not to invade and IOTL that was by sending him whatever was requested without inquiring about payment.


This is full of inconsistencies and faulty assumptions, so let me make a list.

1. The Germans will not be able to procure those resources at the price and in the quantities that they got them from the Soviets in that timeframe. They will have to divide their spending and exhaust their gold. This assumes Britain stays out of the war after a period of build up. We can safely write off any other trade replacing the Molotov Ribbentrop trade by 1941.

2. Stalin wants to make his trade indispensable so Hitler continues to fight whom instead of him? You seem to not understand the raison d'être of Soviet participation in the MR pact at this stage. He will not supply Germany while there is a possibility (in his mind, as long as there's peace with the UK) the Germans could someday attack him with western blessing. He wanted the west and the Germans to be at each other's throats, so he'd be invaluable to Hitler and could build up his forces unmolested. If they're not...

3. Stalin is afraid but still doesn't believe Hitler will come for him in 1941 after feeding the beast for well over a year, but he doesn't want to "piss him off by cutting trade and ensuring invasion" in 1940? When Hitler has little oil? If anything German peace with Britain will spur Stalin to make the preparations from mid-1940 onwards that he neglected. That changes the ballgame entirely.
 
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