In Percentage, How Big are the Contributions of USA, UK, and USSR during WWII?

Contributions during WWII in percentage?

  • USA 33.33%, UK 33.33%, USSR 33.33% (or approximately)

    Votes: 37 21.1%
  • USA 50% (or more), followed by UK, and then USSR

    Votes: 5 2.9%
  • USA 50% (or more), followed by USSR, and then UK

    Votes: 21 12.0%
  • UK 50% (or more), followed by USA, and then USSR

    Votes: 2 1.1%
  • UK 50% (or more), followed by USSR, and then USA

    Votes: 8 4.6%
  • USSR 50% (or more), followed by USA, and then UK

    Votes: 67 38.3%
  • USSR 50% (or more), followed by UK, and then USA

    Votes: 35 20.0%

  • Total voters
    175
The only reason I see the US getting a higher contribution in the Pacific is because they shafted help from everyone else aside. Australia and to a lesser extent China were more then willing to help on the march to Japan but the pushed them aside.


The Pacific was a personal vendetta. The only reason the US was in WWII was pearl harbor. This personal goal was why they did so much on their own.
 
This is so true it hurts. The WWII army used more horses than the WWI army did (can't recall figures off the top of my head, will check).

I think miniscule might be a tad harsh, but its still true that the overwhelming majority of German divisions were at least mostly horse powered. If Germany was half as mechanized as popular image, it'd either collapse from lack of fuel entirely or overrun Asiatic Russia, your call. :eek:

Presumably the mechanization and more fuel would go together, though this being Nazi Germany one never can tell. It's hard for me to see them being more mechanized and this hurt their war effort as simply devoting the attention to logistics alone required to enhance modernized forces would in itself be a source of strength.
 
wcv215 said:
weitze and I posted sources that talked about U.S. shipments through Lend-Lease.

Here is a source for what the Soviets produced:

http://www.enotes.com/topic/Military...g_World_War_II

Thank you. No one had posted a source on Russian production, just lend-lease.

Presumably the mechanization and more fuel would go together, though this being Nazi Germany one never can tell. It's hard for me to see them being more mechanized and this hurt their war effort as simply devoting the attention to logistics alone required to enhance modernized forces would in itself be a source of strength.

This is true.

Germany would have been far better off with fewer troops and more effort made to make the teeth that much sharper, which would probably be the best way to increase mechanization with the resources it had.
 
This is true.

Germany would have been far better off with fewer troops and more effort made to make the teeth that much sharper, which would probably be the best way to increase mechanization with the resources it had.

On the other hand, the flip side of that is the German economy would be even more dependent on oil ITTL and this means it would be more, not less, voracious in terms of conquest. On the other other hand the logistical complications from a still-more mechanized force might still backfire over the sheer space of Russia anyway and the USSR deals a major bitch-slap the first time the German motorized formations have fuel problems.
 
On the other hand, the flip side of that is the German economy would be even more dependent on oil ITTL and this means it would be more, not less, voracious in terms of conquest. On the other other hand the logistical complications from a still-more mechanized force might still backfire over the sheer space of Russia anyway and the USSR deals a major bitch-slap the first time the German motorized formations have fuel problems.

There's always that.

And honestly, as long as Germany is trying to bite off so much as it did OTL (or more), it can't win.

Not vs. all three major Allies as long as they're determined to bring it down.
 
I thought the concensous was that the USSR could "win" alone, it just wouldn't be a pretty peace. Same for the USA ending it all in atomic fire.

I think that depends on what you count as a "win."

The easiest thing to factor in the UK's role in WWII is to ask what if Britain made peace in 1940 after the Fall of France. What would have happened?

Certainly the US never enters the war. And Germany can harness all the power of occupied Europe, its allies, and world access to trade (since there is no British blockade) during its invasion of the Soviet Union. Instead of dealing with the bulk of the German armed forces, it has to deal with all of them. Germany doesn't need to devote any production to AA guns or put much of its fighter strength to defend it from bombing. It doesn't need to worry about diverting troops to garrison France or Norway, send to Africa, or anywhere else. The Soviets probably receive zero Lend Lease aide as FDR won't be able to convince Congress to given Stalin alone help as opposed to an existing anti-Hitler alliance. The Soviet Union cannot expect any help either. There will be no second front. No strategic bombing. No invasion of Italy. No intelligence reports sent to Stalin based on ULTRA, MAGIC, or other Allied codebreaking. Possible intervention by the Japanese once German successes reach a certain level.

What are the prospects of the Soviet Union in this case? Not very good. While Hitler probably won't achieve his goal of causing the collapse of the Soviet government and the utter destruction of the Soviet Union, he still looks headed towards a victory of some kind. Best case scenario, most of Russia west of the Urals or at least the Volga. Worst case scenario is a negotiated peace giving him the Baltics, Belarus, and Ukraine - the industrial heartland and breadbasket of Russia. That seems like a pretty good "win" to me even though the Soviet Union still exists and has 70% or so of its territory remaining. The idea that the USSR could march into Berlin alone is absurd.
 
I think that depends on what you count as a "win."

The easiest thing to factor in the UK's role in WWII is to ask what if Britain made peace in 1940 after the Fall of France. What would have happened?

Certainly the US never enters the war. And Germany can harness all the power of occupied Europe, its allies, and world access to trade (since there is no British blockade) during its invasion of the Soviet Union. Instead of dealing with the bulk of the German armed forces, it has to deal with all of them. Germany doesn't need to devote any production to AA guns or put much of its fighter strength to defend it from bombing. It doesn't need to worry about diverting troops to garrison France or Norway, send to Africa, or anywhere else. The Soviets probably receive zero Lend Lease aide as FDR won't be able to convince Congress to given Stalin alone help as opposed to an existing anti-Hitler alliance. The Soviet Union cannot expect any help either. There will be no second front. No strategic bombing. No invasion of Italy. No intelligence reports sent to Stalin based on ULTRA, MAGIC, or other Allied codebreaking. Possible intervention by the Japanese once German successes reach a certain level.

What are the prospects of the Soviet Union in this case? Not very good. While Hitler probably won't achieve his goal of causing the collapse of the Soviet government and the utter destruction of the Soviet Union, he still looks headed towards a victory of some kind. Best case scenario, most of Russia west of the Urals or at least the Volga. Worst case scenario is a negotiated peace giving him the Baltics, Belarus, and Ukraine - the industrial heartland and breadbasket of Russia. That seems like a pretty good "win" to me even though the Soviet Union still exists and has 70% or so of its territory remaining. The idea that the USSR could march into Berlin alone is absurd.

Hitler would never make peace, he'd seek the complete annihilation of the Slavs. With the difficulty in terms of deception of building up an enormous army in terms of both logistics and in trying to ensure the USSR would be taken by surprise, both would take Hitler perhaps until the Soviets at least are aware that he'd only be attacking them and then he has to bang through Soviet border defenses the hard way and he slithers to a crawl far short of Moscow after the Battle of the Frontier and the subsequent fighting overstretches the non-existent German concept of logistics.

For the USA, the same basic desire to prevent a Nazi conquest of Europe will still be there, and if the only people fighting the Nazis are the Soviets, well, there's still one bunch fighting the Nazis. The alliance of convenience would be even more transparently one than IOTL but Europe's "liberty" would be bought in Russian blood and paid in spam as per OTL, perhaps with the USSR somewhat less industrially damaged than IOTL.
 

Replicator

Banned
According to...? So far we have wikipedia and...something read somewhere.
I'm not saying its all false, but I would like to know what its from.

Mark Harrison Soviet planning in peace and War

The US delivered 173 000 trucks from 1941-1943 and another 190 000 from 1944 to 1945. Total 363 000 trucks. page 260

33 000 Jeeps from 1941-1943, 13 000 in 1944 and 6000 in 1945. Total jeeps 52 000. page 260

35 000 motorcycles from 41-45. page 258

And locomotives 1981 + 11 155 freight cars. page 258

That Russia produced only 92 locomotives and 2000 freight cars and
200 000 truck..... the 200 000 trucks number I have from John Elliv WW2 Databook and the locomotives + freight car from Richard Overy russias war.
 
No, they really absolutely never did and never had to do so. At a crude level the Allies did not enter mainland Europe until the fall of 1943, where the Soviet Union spent that time being the only Ally with troops on European soil at all.



Last I checked Tunisia was not in Europe but in Africa.



This is a self-serving myth meeting psychological needs of German and democratic soldiers of the time with precious little relevance to the reality of Operation Citadel-Kutuzov-Rumiantsev. The Nazis would have kept the battle going only insofar as they were willing to set up even worse problems than otherwise, as their major successes in the south had no impact whatsoever on the Soviet victory against the northern pincer and opening of their own offensive against Orel. Three divisions were proposed to be withdrawn, only one was, the other two remained involved in the fighting up to the Dnepr River.



No, the invasion bogged down a good number of Allied troops as it was poorly-led and worse-conceived, meeting primarily the need to avoid following up Tunisia with another few months of a Soviets-only war in continental Europe, and then it was downhill from the failure of Montgomery and Clark to fight a single campaign and the pattern of a US war in Italy and a UK war in Italy. The invasion tied down no significant number of German troops, nor did it show anything beyond that the Allies were able to make judicious use of firepower as a means to paper over the inability of either Alexander or Clark to fight a war.



Not at all, this would have happened regardless as Tito was the only Yugoslav leader interested in actually fighting the Germans. More aid to Tito would have meant more Germans sent against him with or without Italy, and Tito was as a Communist hardly the kind of ally the democracies would really want to emphasize.



True, and this really does testify to the ability of the democracies to engage in successful deception warfare, shown by the German inability to comprehend Overlord was the real landing three weeks into the fighting.



All of them would be skirmishes by the standard of the Axis-Soviet War where the "small" battles like Krivoi Rog, Brody, Debrecen, and others were with forces that size.



I was actually being generous to the democracies in rating their contributions at 5%, in terms of defeating the Wehrmacht their ground contribution is really for both around 2.5%, the USA still above the UK in that at least US generals could turn overwhelming advantages into actual victories in contrast to the immense difficulties the British had in say, Crete and North Africa where competent handling of either would have produced much simpler wars for the democracies.



Also nonsense, the bulk of the German army was always a 1918 force with horse-drawn artillery and logistics, the ultra-modern core was always a miniscule amount of Nazi forces. This never changed at any point during the Nazis' period of strength, a Nazi force with somewhat better motorization would have turned Barbarossa into a full victory.



Given the Soviets were able to win the Battle of Moscow with infantrymen against airplanes and panzers, I really doubt the one caused the other or had any impact on Soviet lethality. The Soviets were able to use a quarter-million men to curbstomp the Nazis and gain 100 miles when overwhelming numerical and firepower advantages took the British deep into Egypt against numerically inferior and logistically shrimpy forces commanded by Rommel.



Bollocks, the Soviet role in the naval war is non-existent, the Soviet Navy played no role in Allied naval policy.



Again, I don't think this quite works out this way. The Soviets, after all, had partitioned Poland and engaged in cheap, easy annexations of the three Baltic states and run into a buzzsaw in Finland *before* Barbarossa, where the British and the USA were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to actually avoid fighting, including preferring leaflets over German cities when the Germans were slaughtering Polish civilians and detonating synagogues left and right. In the war as it turned out the combination of decisive democratic victory on sea and in the air and Soviet ground power was more than sufficient to obliterate German military power. Without any of that triumvirate, a Soviet-Nazi war would be a horrific bloodbath, as would an Anglo-American/Nazi War.



Leaving aside the whole starving 3 million Bengalis willfully and purposefully and British decisions to deliberately target civilians in Germany at the expense of saving their own shipping when they had the technology to do so but Bomber Harris's hard-on for area bombing would not permit it.



Eh, no. The Soviets really did need the trucks and radios and railroads. They were the key element in the difference between the 1943 and 1941 Red Armies, and the Soviet economy's primary focus was on tools of war. There the Soviets accomplished an economic miracle but without Allied lend-lease in the form of food, trucks, and railroads I highly doubt the USSR would have wound up with more than a stalemate that would have meant clearing their borders of the Nazis who would also be bled white in the fighting that would have been the case. The 1941 invasion took a lot of the USSR's best land for this and deprived it equally of a lot of food, while one of the real Soviet saving graces here is that the Nazis were much worse at economics than the none-too-brilliant Stalinist system was.

The battle of Normandy was just a "skirmish" by Eastern Front standards? Only if you ignore the fact that it involved the greatest armada in human history and the use of strategic air power on a scale that dwarfed everything in Eastern Europe. Much of the above is just plain delusional, reflecting the Soviet line that the Allies were shirking (good way to evade talking about Stalin's blunders). And what does it matter if Tunisia is in Africa; a quarter million Axis troops were bagged. As to Italy, the Germans suffered over 335,000 casualties and on May 2, 1945 one million Germans surrendered in Italy. That's not peanuts.
 
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The battle of Normandy was just a "skirmish" by Eastern Front standards? Only if you ignore the fact that it involved the greatest armada in human history and the use of strategic air power on a scale that dwarfed everything in Eastern Europe. Much of the above is just plain delusional, reflecting the Soviet line that the Allies were shirking (good way to evade talking about Stalin's blunders). And what does it matter if Tunisia is in Africa; a quarter million Axis troops were bagged. As to Italy, the Germans suffered over 335,000 casualties and on May 2, 1945 one million Germans surrendered in Italy. That's not peanuts.

Yes, it was a skirmish. 100,000 people crossing the Channel due to effective deception plans that lead to them smashing a paltry few leaderless divisions and then being bogged down in the Bocage v. the contemporary Operation Bagration where the Soviets used 2,000,000 men against 1,000,000 Germans, approximate numbers on both, to rout the Germans and destroy the largest single intact bit of German military power, over the distance of Minsk-Warsaw....

I never said the democracies shirked, either. I did say that they fought an entirely separate war from the Soviet war and that it was not until the landings at Messina and Salerno that the others of the Big 2 were actually fighting in mainland Europe. To the Soviets this was shirking, to the democracies it was logistical reality, and it was logistics.

If you've got an argument that the Western Front was at all decisive or large-scale from a military point of view, show it. Calling those statements delusional does not qualify as that, however, I am afraid.
 

Replicator

Banned
Norman Davies use the term "Man months" to calculate the magnitued of campaigns.

If I recall correctly its works something like this:

Roughly 3 million German soldiers and 5 million Russian soldiers were fighting on the eastern front and that for a total of 46 months.
8 million times 46 months = 368 million man months.

Roughly 3 million allied and 1 million German soliders were fighting on the western front and that for a total of 11 months.
4 million times 11 months= 44 million man months.

So the battle in the West was 12% of the battle in the east.

PS: I didnt look it up just writing down how I remember it so the calculations may bee a little bit wrong.
 
If Germany was half as mechanized as popular image, it'd either collapse from lack of fuel entirely or overrun Asiatic Russia, your call. :eek:
Collapse for lack of fuel, since it was so damn marginal even OTL.:rolleyes: Much as I like the idea, even the "Rommel romp" is a fantasy. There just wasn't the fuel, nor the ability to deliver it.

For the USA, the same basic desire to prevent a Nazi conquest of Europe will still be there
Correct. More to the point, Hitler would still be there. He's still convinced the U.S. is weak & decadent. When Japan attacks, does he still take the shot & declare war? I'd say he probably does. Which means the U.S. is in for one hell of a fight in the Atlantic. (This is presuming the Commonwealth agrees to sign off on a surrender...) It also means the odds for an abortive Dieppe-style attack in Southern France, based out of Tunisia or somewhere, is pretty likely in '42, along with an extended & stupid campaign in Northwest Africa (to provide a base for a successful op against France). IMO, it also means B-29s over Europe & Dresden & Hamburg & Essen (or two other major German cities) being radioactive craters, but not Hiroshima or Nagasaki. (By the time the U.S. is ready for that, the Pacific Fleet Sub Force will have the Japanese economy in ruin, if Halsey & Spruance haven't dropped the tunnels & bridges cutting Japan into isolated zones {which was more than possible}, so the Japanese are eating each other.:eek:)

It does mean the Iron Curtain is nearer the prewar Sov-Polish border...:cool:

BTW, wietze, love that sig.:cool::cool::D
 
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Collapse for lack of fuel, since it was so damn marginal even OTL.:rolleyes: Much as I like the idea, even the "Rommel romp" is a fantasy. There just wasn't the fuel, nor the ability to deliver it.

Yeah. The only way I can think of to mechanize the German army more than OTL would be concentrating the same assets in fewer divisions, and Hitler loved moar divisions almost as badly as Mussolini.

What is the Rommel romp?
 
Yes, it was a skirmish. 100,000 people crossing the Channel due to effective deception plans that lead to them smashing a paltry few leaderless divisions and then being bogged down in the Bocage v. the contemporary Operation Bagration where the Soviets used 2,000,000 men against 1,000,000 Germans, approximate numbers on both, to rout the Germans and destroy the largest single intact bit of German military power, over the distance of Minsk-Warsaw....

I never said the democracies shirked, either. I did say that they fought an entirely separate war from the Soviet war and that it was not until the landings at Messina and Salerno that the others of the Big 2 were actually fighting in mainland Europe. To the Soviets this was shirking, to the democracies it was logistical reality, and it was logistics.

If you've got an argument that the Western Front was at all decisive or large-scale from a military point of view, show it. Calling those statements delusional does not qualify as that, however, I am afraid.

Calling Normany a skirmish defies every history of World War Two that I've ever read. And your use of figures is misleading, you are counting only the troops who came ashore in the first few days. Soon the hundred thousand would become over a million. And you can't judge only by numbers of troops or number of man-hours. U.S. and British bombers and fighter-bombers provided a multiplier effect, as did the mobility provided by U.S. military trucks. The Western allies drove the Germans almost completely out of France in three months thanks to both the Battle of Normandy and the invasion of southern France.The Red Army's Operation Bagration helped in a major way to make this possible, but still the battle for France was a HUGE victory for the European theater as a whole. To say otherwise IS delusional.
 
Calling Normany a skirmish defies every history of World War Two that I've ever read. And your use of figures is misleading, you are counting only the troops who came ashore in the first few days. Soon the hundred thousand would become over a million. And you can't judge only by numbers of troops or number of man-hours. U.S. and British bombers and fighter-bombers provided a multiplier effect, as did the mobility provided by U.S. military trucks. The Western allies drove the Germans almost completely out of France in three months thanks to both the Battle of Normandy and the invasion of southern France.The Red Army's Operation Bagration helped in a major way to make this possible, but still the battle for France was a HUGE victory for the European theater as a whole. To say otherwise IS delusional.

It is indeed a huge victory, but in terms of both numbers and overall impact on the war, it, like the rest of the Western Front had no impact whatsoever on the East, where the bulk of the Nazi armies fought, bled, died, and lost without any effect from the West. Without Bagration and the USSR absorbing the great bulk of Nazi armor, the democracies would have to steel themselves to take all the casualties the Soviets did to win their great victories, and with the deliberate manpower cap and amphibious focus what they had just wasn't going to cut it.

Logistically Overlord was an amazing, awesome, brilliant undertaking, tactically the Germans failed to stop the landings but kept the Allies in the West struggling in the Bocage for three weeks where by contrast the USSR went from Minsk-Warsaw in four weeks. While the democracies were struggling to handle their breakout and finding that the Nazis were fanatical beyond all good sense, the Soviets used this to wipe out Army Group Center. When the Allies overran France to run into a logistical buzzsaw, the Soviets gained the Balkans in a single campaign and were to be within 100 Km of Berlin when the Germans surprised the Allies using the same terrain they'd surprised them with in 1940 to do so again 4 years later.

The ground war in the West was not decisive, the democracies did nothing on the ground to decisively defeat Nazi Germany. On sea and in the air their contributions meant that the USSR didn't have to worry about providing its own trucks and food due to Lend-Lease or having to wear down the Luftwaffe's entire strength over the entirety of the front. Simultaneously the Battle of the Atlantic, the Pacific War, and the two strategic bombing offensives were something that after 22 June the Soviets would never have been able to do.

In any event, the democracies didn't exactly need to fight the decisive ground war when the bulk of the Wehrmacht was bleeding itself to death to try to stop the Red Army.
 
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