Who Could Have Won WWII? [Archive]

aspqrz

11-14-2015, 06:36 PM

Of course I can not speak for all of the refugees, but ISIS is one of the reasons these people are running.

My $0.02

Mike

Consider this. Several years (i.e. less than five) ago a whine by one of our local far lefty idiot types about the fact that she and her Palestinian companion(s) took five-eight hours to get through security at Tel Aviv Airport when leaving the country was published in (IIRC) the Sydney Morning Herald (the Aussie equivalent of The Times or The New York Times) … she complained that it was racist and anti-muslim.

The SMH sought comment from an Israeli Security expert who made this point – 100% of terrorist attacks in Israel or directed at Israeli interests are carried out by Palestinians or Muslims (or a tiny cohort of crazy deluded westerners who are known to blindly support Palestinian terrorists). Stringent security measures aimed specifically at Palestinians and known pro-Palestinian activists is, therefore, a sensible precaution … and, as a result, there have been no terrorist attacks in Israeli airports since the measures were instituted.

'But, but, but!' the whiny idiot lefty complained, 'It's racial profiling!'

'Yes, but it's effective racial profiling' was the response.

Now, being of a generally left political perspective myself (socialist, not communist … something like Eurosocialist, but not the nonexistent Tranzi nonsense spouted by some people), but also being a long time supporter of Israel and of common sense, I could only shake my head at the outright lunacy of said lefty whiner.

So, consider this – close to 100% of recent terrorist attacks have been carried out by Muslims, often of Arab or other Middle Eastern or North African origin. While one can reasonably assume, based on the evidence, that they do not have widespread active support amongst the Muslim community, though they may have somewhat wider sympathy from same (way less than 1%, I'd guess, for the former, at least in the Western muslim diaspora) – but the fact remains that close to 100% of recent terrorists were muslims.

So, is it racism or racial profiling to direct the vast, overwhelming, majority of your security resources at muslims in general, and at muslim sympathisers amongst the more idiotic non-muslim elements of your society? Or is it common sense?

Likewise, is it racist to exclude muslims fleeing from undoubtedly repressive and violent regimes in the Middle East from non-muslim countries in the west that are many hundred, or even thousands, of klicks from their homelands, after having passed through (or bypassed) safe muslim countries on the basis that muslims are the source of close to 100% of recent terrorists?

Yes, racists will use this as an excuse to demonise many innocent muslims.

That, however, doesn't change the reality that it makes sense to target the root source of the problem – and, since it is seemingly impossible (and certainly is impossible with finite resources) to determine whether a muslim refugee is an actual terrorist plant or will, at some future time, become radicalised and commit terrorist acts, then doesn't it make sense to exclude all muslim would be refugees from non-muslim majority countries?

Isn't that common sense? Unpalatable, indeed, but common sense nonetheless.

Phil McGregor

stormlion1

11-14-2015, 06:38 PM

Issue is that among the refugee's are members of ISIS looking to expand there war into Europe. The hard fact is, Europe and the US cannot afford to allow them entry if this could happen. And I think France will close its borders soon to refugee's and pressure its neighbors to do the same.

pmulcahy11b

11-14-2015, 09:05 PM

Of course I can not speak for all of the refugees, but ISIS is one of the reasons these people are running.

My $0.02

Mike

But don't forget, ISIS is some of those coming in with the refugees.

RN7

11-15-2015, 12:24 AM

Now 166 dead.
And there's a report of a bomb at Gatwick airport in the UK.

British police have cleared Gatwick. French national (probably Muslim) under arrest. Undercover and armed police all over London with British Army SRR Regiment on patrol. London's barracks on high alert, SAS on standby and Para/Gurkha contingent 30 minutes away on helicopters. If ISIS vermin think London is a soft target there in for a very unpleasant surprise.

Targan

11-15-2015, 01:17 AM

Legbreaker

11-15-2015, 03:28 AM

Could you maybe move here and vote!

I'm having enough trouble with the loonie lefties here!

aspqrz

11-15-2015, 05:03 AM

As many have pointed out in the past, security at Airports simply creates a huge bottleneck of people outside security who would be perfect targets for a suicide bomber ... why waste time trying to get on a plane with a bomb when half a dozen terrs can simply roll up to the unsecured public areas of your local regional or international airport ... hell, your local bus or train station ... and set themselves off.

The attack in Paris could be a nasty sign of things to come ... and such attacks are effectively impossible to detect.

Even wiping out ISIS in Syria won't necessarily stop them.

Phil

Legbreaker

11-15-2015, 06:20 AM

There's been an attack now in Turkey I hear. Not that it's really anything out of the ordinary there though....

pmulcahy11b

11-15-2015, 07:32 AM

I'm having enough trouble with the loonie lefties here!

Hey, I am one of those loony lefties! Though I consider myself an enlightened liberal -- I disagree with the right on most things, but not all.

Legbreaker

11-15-2015, 07:36 AM

You may be a leftie Paul, but you're certainly no loon! :)

Cdnwolf

11-15-2015, 09:55 AM

Anyone else see a lot of the timeline in Twilight 2013 coming true?

raketenjagdpanzer

11-15-2015, 11:25 AM

Back on the 5th of November, German police pulled a guy over and found a grenade, two pistols, four AKs and 200kg of TNT in his car. They looked over his GPS and the route programmed in, and running at the time was to have taken the driver straight into Paris.

Nobody said a word.

Imagine if this fucker had linked up with the rest of his unit.

It's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better. All Europe can do (which they won't) is deport everyone in the "refugee camps", and keep a very close eye on those who've settled already, and close their borders. But, again, they won't.

PS Islam isn't a race. Saying you hate Islam isn't racist. I'd hate Islam if it was practiced exclusively by blonde-haired, blue-eyed specimens of pure Nordic extraction. Saying "I hate Islam" is as racist against people from the ME as saying "I hate Nazism" is racist against Germans. "Being anti-Islam is racist" is a pernicious lie spread by the perpetual victim PR front for terrorists, known as CAIR.

Legbreaker

11-15-2015, 06:10 PM

PS Islam isn't a race. Saying you hate Islam isn't racist. I'd hate Islam if it was practiced exclusively by blonde-haired, blue-eyed specimens of pure Nordic extraction. Saying "I hate Islam" is as racist against people from the ME as saying "I hate Nazism" is racist against Germans. "Being anti-Islam is racist" is a pernicious lie spread by the perpetual victim PR front for terrorists, known as CAIR.

Hear hear!

StainlessSteelCynic

11-15-2015, 06:37 PM

All of this is nothing new, there were many leftist terrorist groups active in Europe during the 1960s-1980s and they pulled the same attacks as being seen now.
The scariest part though, is that many of the ISIS/ISIL jihadists are not ignorant peasants from the poorer parts of the Middle East and Asia looking for a way out of poverty, many of them are middle-class and educated and seeking a way to force regime changes to what they think will be better for the middle classes - they typically don't think too much about the poor (unless it's for propaganda).

Cdnwolf

11-15-2015, 08:49 PM

The terrorists are already in the country. The tighter you make security the angrier you make the home grown extremists. Remember not one of the top non 911 terrorist/massacres were committed by "arab foreigners". Oklahoma City Bombing, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook comes to mind.

kato13

11-15-2015, 09:26 PM

Remember not one of the top non 911 terrorist/massacres were committed by "arab foreigners". Oklahoma City Bombing, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook comes to mind.

If we are talking recent attacks the Boston Bombing comes to mind. Yes Kyrgyzstan would not generally be considered "arab" but they were certainly foreign born Islamic terrorists.

Cdnwolf

11-15-2015, 10:08 PM

This is true...

rcaf_777

11-16-2015, 12:38 PM

I saw this happening

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/mosque-peterborough-fire-1.3320013

Nowhere Man 1966

11-16-2015, 12:48 PM

Consider this. Several years (i.e. less than five) ago a whine by one of our local far lefty idiot types about the fact that she and her Palestinian companion(s) took five-eight hours to get through security at Tel Aviv Airport when leaving the country was published in (IIRC) the Sydney Morning Herald (the Aussie equivalent of The Times or The New York Times) … she complained that it was racist and anti-muslim.

The SMH sought comment from an Israeli Security expert who made this point – 100% of terrorist attacks in Israel or directed at Israeli interests are carried out by Palestinians or Muslims (or a tiny cohort of crazy deluded westerners who are known to blindly support Palestinian terrorists). Stringent security measures aimed specifically at Palestinians and known pro-Palestinian activists is, therefore, a sensible precaution … and, as a result, there have been no terrorist attacks in Israeli airports since the measures were instituted.

'But, but, but!' the whiny idiot lefty complained, 'It's racial profiling!'

'Yes, but it's effective racial profiling' was the response.

Now, being of a generally left political perspective myself (socialist, not communist … something like Eurosocialist, but not the nonexistent Tranzi nonsense spouted by some people), but also being a long time supporter of Israel and of common sense, I could only shake my head at the outright lunacy of said lefty whiner.

So, consider this – close to 100% of recent terrorist attacks have been carried out by Muslims, often of Arab or other Middle Eastern or North African origin. While one can reasonably assume, based on the evidence, that they do not have widespread active support amongst the Muslim community, though they may have somewhat wider sympathy from same (way less than 1%, I'd guess, for the former, at least in the Western muslim diaspora) – but the fact remains that close to 100% of recent terrorists were muslims.

So, is it racism or racial profiling to direct the vast, overwhelming, majority of your security resources at muslims in general, and at muslim sympathisers amongst the more idiotic non-muslim elements of your society? Or is it common sense?

Likewise, is it racist to exclude muslims fleeing from undoubtedly repressive and violent regimes in the Middle East from non-muslim countries in the west that are many hundred, or even thousands, of klicks from their homelands, after having passed through (or bypassed) safe muslim countries on the basis that muslims are the source of close to 100% of recent terrorists?

Yes, racists will use this as an excuse to demonise many innocent muslims.

That, however, doesn't change the reality that it makes sense to target the root source of the problem – and, since it is seemingly impossible (and certainly is impossible with finite resources) to determine whether a muslim refugee is an actual terrorist plant or will, at some future time, become radicalised and commit terrorist acts, then doesn't it make sense to exclude all muslim would be refugees from non-muslim majority countries?

Isn't that common sense? Unpalatable, indeed, but common sense nonetheless.

Phil McGregor

Agreed. I tend to be center-right if you add me up. Well, on some things I've very right on, I'm "Mr. NRA" are for example but I would be more of a representation of the libertarian wing of our Tea party over here. Heck, on one forum, after posting for 17 years, I'm been kicked off for being "too liberal" but the guy who runs it now claims to be on a "mission from God." (When people say things like that, I find that scary) To quote Michael Savage, the talkshow host, I'm for "Borders, Language and Culture" and you made a good case out of protecting your nation and people and the methods that need to be done. I'm for profiling if it is for our protection, I don't care if it is on the lookout for Moslems or if the majority of perps were Amish (for sake of argument, I'd be for the same thing.

Sure, I think there will be some things we disagree on, but at least there are liberals who have good principles and not kow-tow to the ogic where it goes too far into national or Western Civ suicide.

Nowhere Man 1966

11-16-2015, 12:58 PM

These attacks are all too easy to perpetrate. We absolutely have to use military responses to individual threats, but if that's the only type of response we use, this shit is going to continue for a long time. The problem is twisted versions of religion, and violent ideologies. Many jihadis have had little to no formal education save what they can get for free in a Saudi-funded madrasa, and what sort of education do you think that would be? Then you've got deluded young westerners who have bought into the increasingly sophisticated jihadist propaganda that's all to easy to spread via social media.

If we don't find a way to drag out of miserable, abject poverty and ignorance the large parts of the Islamic world where all too many people basically have bugger all to live for, if we don't find a way to provide more secular, western-style education to those people, if we don't find better ways to support and de-radicalise disaffected Islamic youth inside our own countries, this "War on Terror" is going to continue for ever.

You do have good points although if I may add that the only way they know over there is to keep peace, you generally need a strongman with a good army/henchmen force if you will. As bad as Saddam Hussein was, he kept a lid on things of this type but he did play into the Islamic radical side to stick it, or try to, to the Wet as the two Gulf Wars carried on. Assad, the same way and so on. I think you're right, again, the problem is that we need the will, the money and resources. We can't afford it, not we cannot afford it either. I know we have to do the same thing to Germany and Japan after World War II but we were king of the world then, not so much now and we have a lot of problems here. The only way I can see this remotely happening is a coalition as my cousin pointed out yesterday. Even so, the people we need to change will want to change, will they want to do it? That's the $64 billion question.

Nowhere Man 1966

11-16-2015, 01:01 PM

This is true...

It's like the snake chasing it's tail, but in the end, we might have to end up fighting anyhoo, we might be past the point of no return, maybe, and it will mean we have to defeat them or they defeat us. Hopefully if that happens, we will get to the point where they will have to "say uncle" at some point. Don't know much about the Twilight: 2013 timeline but it does not sound good. I'm not gung ho, I hate confrontation but I'm just saying that we might have little or no choice but to fight.

.45cultist

11-16-2015, 02:08 PM

aspqrz

11-16-2015, 05:02 PM

I've noticed 5 or so events which seemed to come from the T2013 timeline. And laugh inside at the memory of the critics of the timeline who said it was too fake. Now we can "bump the timeline back a couple of years and still play T2K2.2 or T2013. AS for RL, France will pound ISIS members to dust to my cheering. A Western military that isn't going to issue arrest cards or what ever I found in the duffle at my friend's surplus store.

It was not only fake (of course) it was ridiculous - as I said somewhere else, to believe it you not only had to have no knowledge whatsoever of military tactics and strategy, logistics, economics and geopolitical realities you had to actively reject any semblance of such knowledge.

That didn't, and doesn't, mean that everything in it, especially if considered in isolation, is impossible, but a whole hell of a lot of it, and the whole thing overall, is ... ridiculous.

Is WW3 possible? Sure. Is it likely to go nuclear if it occurs? Yes. We can debate how possible and how likely it is to go nuclear, but wishful thinking won't change my answers.

But not a one of the TW:2000 or TW:2013 backgrounds were believable, certainly not based on what we knew at the time, or even based on what we know how ... especially based on what we know now, in fact. Of course, we also know how close we came on a couple of occasions - mostly in the form of an actual nuclear attack by accident or mistake, rather than a conventional war that escalates.

How could WW3 occur - best guess, at the moment, is a mis-step by Putin somewhere ... he seems dead set on reviving the Cold War singlehanded and is not as smart as he seems to think he is. It is possible that he could push things too far ...

Another possibility, but probably a lower order one, is conflict with the PRC over the South China Sea ... again, it would likely be accidental. And it could well remain limited and regional even if conflict did occur ... but the chance of escalation and opportunistic actions, and resulting accidents, in Europe or elsewhere is, of course, always a possibility.

ISIS/Islamic Terrorists, probably not gonna cause it themselves, as much as they'd like you to believe it ... and I suspect that the less idiotic amongst the leadership know that ... but they could trigger it by being a source of possible conflict between the West and Russia.

Even if they did a Franz Ferdinand, the worst that's likely to happen would be a quick military crushing of them in a limited regional (and entirely conventional) conflict ... though, of course, it wouldn't stop the terrorism.

But if Russia and the West didn't agree on how to carry out such crushing, that could lead to nasty things.

YMMV.

Phil

Cdnwolf

11-16-2015, 09:55 PM

Targan

11-17-2015, 12:21 AM

ISIS/Islamic Terrorists, probably not gonna cause it themselves, as much as they'd like you to believe it ... and I suspect that the less idiotic amongst the leadership know that ... but they could trigger it by being a source of possible conflict between the West and Russia.

Even if they did a Franz Ferdinand, the worst that's likely to happen would be a quick military crushing of them in a limited regional (and entirely conventional) conflict ... though, of course, it wouldn't stop the terrorism.

But if Russia and the West didn't agree on how to carry out such crushing, that could lead to nasty things.

If Pakistan either finally collapses into the failed state that it's been teetering on the brink of for some time, or it finally goes full-Islamist like Iran, I will become very, very nervous. Their control over their nukes has to be pretty suspect even now. Imagine the risks if things went either of those two directions I described.

aspqrz

11-17-2015, 02:40 AM

Need I go on?

2007

* EU Military Battlegroups. Common EU military. Nope. No hope thereof.
* Centrist shift in US politics. Nope, not even close.
* Tainted food recalls in US linked to China. Nope.
* British and French elections ... what were they smoking?
* Iraq, well ... they had to get something right(ish)
* Afghan government pressures US to assist with law enforcement. Again, what were they smoking?
* Pakistan - well, again, something OK.
* Australia. Fantasy. Every. Single. Australian. PM (Labor and Liberal). Since 1941 has sucked up to the US in every way possible. The supposition here is ludicrous.
* Worldwide drought in 'rich farm countries' ... like China (ROTFL) comparing ot to the US. Hallucinogens? We've never. ever. had a worldwide drought. Anyone with a basic knowledge of history would know that, and anyone with a basic understanding of climate science would understand why.
* Solomon Islands quake puts pressure on worldwide food resources! Do these guys know what the population of the SI actually is?

Given that the book was published in 2008, they could at least have gotten more of the above at least vaguely resembling reality.

2009
* Iraqi politicians 'begin to find ways to make their government work for all Iraqis' ... again, whatever it is they were smoking would have made them more money than the book did.
* Worldwide heatwave destroys crops. Again, not the slightest understanding of science, or even where food crops are grown. As for the economics, very few of the countries likely to be affected are significant exporters and make little or no money from exporting food. Those that are and do don't rely so much on it that it would have an impact unless the ridiculously anti-scientific drought lasted for several years.
* Libya. Yeah. Right. ROTFL.
* Darfur conflict spreads. Again, not the slightest understanding of the local and geopolitical realities.
* EU Battlegroups (the nonexistent ones) in Central Africa roaming around. Logistically this is simply insane - they'd be worse off than Rommel. Their base in N'Djamena ... well, Chad had no paved roads outside of the capital, no railways anywhere, no river that is more than intermittent (and, in any case, goes nowhere relevant) and their airfields are overwhelmingly dirt strips.

Oh, and in 2010 the EU sends in more nonexistent and unsuppliable BGs into Sudan and Central Africa.

I could go on. And on. And on.

Now, granted, not a lot of Americans (Australians would probably have a clew about some of the US and EU stuff, but be no better informed on the rest and UK/EU types would probably have a better handle on the Russian/Ukranian stuff, but also be clewless of most of the rest ... we all have our national blindspots) would probably have a clew as to why many of these things are, frankly, insanely ludicrous ... but if the authors had bothered, oh, I don't know, to check Wikipedia or even the old CIA Country books on some of the places involved, they could, at least, have clewed themselves in.

It gets progressively worse and worse.

Like, oh, the Oakland Flu.
Or the Israelis giving their nuclear arsenal (they have a hell of a lot more bombs than one, probably more than their neighbours have major cities and military targets - and, frankly, even with Tel Aviv hit by Dirty Bombs, I'd back the Israelie military against their neighbours any day of the week) to Egypt for some desert in Libya.

Now, yes, the bits about Pakistan and the Middle East in general are, mostly, not ridiculously unlikely, but so much of the rest is that it makes the whole progression ... ROTFLMAO ridiculous.

YMMV.

Phil

.45cultist

11-17-2015, 05:09 AM

It was not only fake (of course) it was ridiculous - as I said somewhere else, to believe it you not only had to have no knowledge whatsoever of military tactics and strategy, logistics, economics and geopolitical realities you had to actively reject any semblance of such knowledge.

That didn't, and doesn't, mean that everything in it, especially if considered in isolation, is impossible, but a whole hell of a lot of it, and the whole thing overall, is ... ridiculous.

Is WW3 possible? Sure. Is it likely to go nuclear if it occurs? Yes. We can debate how possible and how likely it is to go nuclear, but wishful thinking won't change my answers.

But not a one of the TW:2000 or TW:2013 backgrounds were believable, certainly not based on what we knew at the time, or even based on what we know how ... especially based on what we know now, in fact. Of course, we also know how close we came on a couple of occasions - mostly in the form of an actual nuclear attack by accident or mistake, rather than a conventional war that escalates.

How could WW3 occur - best guess, at the moment, is a mis-step by Putin somewhere ... he seems dead set on reviving the Cold War singlehanded and is not as smart as he seems to think he is. It is possible that he could push things too far ...

Another possibility, but probably a lower order one, is conflict with the PRC over the South China Sea ... again, it would likely be accidental. And it could well remain limited and regional even if conflict did occur ... but the chance of escalation and opportunistic actions, and resulting accidents, in Europe or elsewhere is, of course, always a possibility.

ISIS/Islamic Terrorists, probably not gonna cause it themselves, as much as they'd like you to believe it ... and I suspect that the less idiotic amongst the leadership know that ... but they could trigger it by being a source of possible conflict between the West and Russia.

Even if they did a Franz Ferdinand, the worst that's likely to happen would be a quick military crushing of them in a limited regional (and entirely conventional) conflict ... though, of course, it wouldn't stop the terrorism.

But if Russia and the West didn't agree on how to carry out such crushing, that could lead to nasty things.

YMMV.

Phil

Even the beloved first edition had moments of that. But I'd take your list and try to redo those if/ when the campaign ever went to those regions to a more plausible end(as much as a TEOTWAWKI premise allows). As was mentioned in the "Timelines" thread, one doesn't need a complete timeline. As infrastructure collapses,PC's wouldn't have the complete picture anyway.

Legbreaker

11-17-2015, 06:35 AM

As infrastructure collapses, PC's wouldn't have the complete picture anyway.

Absolutely agree with that and I've mentioned something like it in other threads before.
No need to detail every last thing when PCs will never, EVER even hear so much as a rumour about it. A bit of uncertainty is a great tool a GM should never give up.

Anyway, getting back on topic, it would seem there's more to come with Isis issuing a list of cities they intend to attack shortly. I can't see any way that they don't have the resources in place to do it either.

.45cultist

11-17-2015, 07:08 AM

Absolutely agree with that and I've mentioned something like it in other threads before.
No need to detail every last thing when PCs will never, EVER even hear so much as a rumour about it. A bit of uncertainty is a great tool a GM should never give up.

Anyway, getting back on topic, it would seem there's more to come with Isis issuing a list of cities they intend to attack shortly. I can't see any way that they don't have the resources in place to do it either.

It must have been your post that stuck in my mind.

StainlessSteelCynic

11-17-2015, 06:24 PM

Olefin

11-17-2015, 06:32 PM

it comes down to if the timeline is necessary to understand the other information you have presented

I did a highly detailed timeline in the East African sourcebook because many people are unfamiliar with the area - so it helped flesh it out and show how the 2001 situation got to where it was instead of just jumping in at April 2001

Very different in places like Korea or Europe - there have been so many alternate WWIII books and other things written let alone the real news in those areas that you can play without much more than the war started here, some general dates as a timeline and ok now we are at the start of the game

Olefin

11-17-2015, 06:38 PM

the timelines in the original game were good ones (and by that I mean the ones in the original version 1) - they may have had the US taking it on the chin too much to satisfy the reality that somehow France became the great world power of Twilight 2300 - but in general they made sense (Pakistan and India nuking themselves out of existence and the Soviets and Chinese going to war, based on what was going on in the earlly to mid 80's was pretty plausible to those of us who were adults at the time - even Iran possibly going moderate after what the mullahs were doing was reasonable)

I think that was part of what made the game background so plausible at the time and why that game had a bigger appeal to me than say Gamma World

aspqrz

11-17-2015, 06:54 PM

And as I've mentioned a few times, most people playing RPGs aren't that interested in reading through a highly detailed history/timeline. If it's going to be ignored by, for example, four out of five players, it's probably not worth going to all the extra effort to develop the timeline much past the most significant events.
And that way you also avoid some of the less-believable moments quoted here.

Exactly.

If they'd only made some comments like 'Hotspots in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Eastern Europe grew in intensity and eventually devolved into local, then regional conflicts that sucked in even the major powers and led to a worldwide war.' they'd have been home and hosed!

They wouldn't have annoyed the few people like me who have enough of a clew to know what was so wrong with their detailed timeline and, as you say, most of the players couldn't have cared less.

To paraphrase J W Campbell, 'Grant the trigger and go ...'

As it was, they picked the worst possible way of doing things. :(

YMMV

Phil

aspqrz

11-17-2015, 06:57 PM

the timelines in the original game were good ones

Well, yes, once you ignore the idiocy of Germany going to war unilaterally without the US having any warning whatsoever (or at all, really), or was that V2? Anyway, while the rest made sense, the trigger was ROTFLMAO stuff.

YMMV

Phil

RN7

11-18-2015, 07:56 AM

Well, yes, once you ignore the idiocy of Germany going to war unilaterally without the US having any warning whatsoever (or at all, really), or was that V2? Anyway, while the rest made sense, the trigger was ROTFLMAO stuff.

YMMV

Phil

Well Germany going to war is pretty much the central theme of T2K, after all there probably would have been no war in Europe if they hadn't.

unkated

11-18-2015, 05:46 PM

Consider this. Several years (i.e. less than five) ago a whine by one of our local far lefty idiot types about the fact that she and her Palestinian companion(s) took five-eight hours to get through security at Tel Aviv Airport when leaving the country was published in (IIRC) the Sydney Morning Herald (the Aussie equivalent of The Times or The New York Times) … she complained that it was racist and anti-muslim.

The SMH sought comment from an Israeli Security expert who made this point – 100% of terrorist attacks in Israel or directed at Israeli interests are carried out by Palestinians or Muslims (or a tiny cohort of crazy deluded westerners who are known to blindly support Palestinian terrorists). Stringent security measures aimed specifically at Palestinians and known pro-Palestinian activists is, therefore, a sensible precaution … and, as a result, there have been no terrorist attacks in Israeli airports since the measures were instituted.

'But, but, but!' the whiny idiot lefty complained, 'It's racial profiling!'

'Yes, but it's effective racial profiling' was the response.

Now, being of a generally left political perspective myself (socialist, not communist … something like Eurosocialist, but not the nonexistent Tranzi nonsense spouted by some people), but also being a long time supporter of Israel and of common sense, I could only shake my head at the outright lunacy of said lefty whiner.

So, consider this – close to 100% of recent terrorist attacks have been carried out by Muslims, often of Arab or other Middle Eastern or North African origin.
While one can reasonably assume, based on the evidence, that they do not have widespread active support amongst the Muslim community, though they may have somewhat wider sympathy from same (way less than 1%, I'd guess, for the former, at least in the Western muslim diaspora) – but the fact remains that close to 100% of recent terrorists were muslims.

While I have no disagreement with what was said above, this statement I cannot accept:

Timothy McVeigh, and his assistants, who blew up the Morruh Federal Building in Oklahoma City were nice white christian terrorists, born and raised in the United States.

The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, was a nice white christian terrorist, born and raised in the United States.

Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park bomber was a nice nice white christian terrorist, born and raised in the United States.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber is Muslim, but is a naturalized US citizen, having lived in the US since he was 9. He certainly does not look particularly arab.

Dylan Roof, a nice nice white christian terrorist, born and raised in the United States, killed 9 people in a Charleston, SC church this past June (2015) hoping to start a race war by his own admission.

This list does not include the nice christian white people in the US who seem to have gone off their rocker, taken guns and opened up in classrooms (college to grade school), movie theatres or elsewhere for some mental illness.

So, shall we put a watch on all those nice white christian folk, too?

So, yes, it is racist blindness (IMHO) to concentrate your security efforts on one set of potential targets while ignoring others with no better track record.

Uncle Ted

Olefin

11-18-2015, 06:13 PM

Ted Kaczynski was an atheist not a Christian

Eric Rudolph is a member of a cult sect of the Mormons, not a Christian

As for McVeigh - In a 1996 interview, McVeigh professed belief in "a God", although he said he had "sort of lost touch with" Catholicism and "I never really picked it up, however I do maintain core beliefs." In McVeigh's biography American Terrorist, released in 2002, he stated that he did not believe in a hell and that science is his religion. In June 2001, a day before the execution, McVeigh wrote a letter to the Buffalo News identifying himself as agnostic

so lets give it a rest shall we

RN7

11-18-2015, 10:04 PM

While I have no disagreement with what was said above, this statement I cannot accept:

Timothy McVeigh, and his assistants, who blew up the Morruh Federal Building in Oklahoma City were nice white christian terrorists, born and raised in the United States.

The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, was a nice white christian terrorist, born and raised in the United States.

Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park bomber was a nice nice white christian terrorist, born and raised in the United States.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber is Muslim, but is a naturalized US citizen, having lived in the US since he was 9. He certainly does not look particularly arab.

Dylan Roof, a nice nice white christian terrorist, born and raised in the United States, killed 9 people in a Charleston, SC church this past June (2015) hoping to start a race war by his own admission.

This list does not include the nice christian white people in the US who seem to have gone off their rocker, taken guns and opened up in classrooms (college to grade school), movie theatres or elsewhere for some mental illness.

So, shall we put a watch on all those nice white christian folk, too?

So, yes, it is racist blindness (IMHO) to concentrate your security efforts on one set of potential targets while ignoring others with no better track record.

Uncle Ted

This is a very valid point, although as Olefin has pointed out many of these people weren't really Christian. However these individuals in America acted alone or did to a large extent, whereas the Islamic ISIS supporters (and Al Qaeda) were part of an organised multi-national extremist network with funding and support. Most of them were also indoctrinated/brainwashed into this type of rapid anti-everything not Islamic thinking by so called religious people, and they have legions of potential supporters in the Islamic world and among people of certain ethnic backgrounds in the Western world.

unkated

11-18-2015, 10:57 PM

aspqrz

11-19-2015, 01:48 AM

While I have no disagreement with what was said above, this statement I cannot accept:

Timothy McVeigh, and his assistants, who blew up the Morruh Federal Building in Oklahoma City were nice white christian terrorists, born and raised in the United States.

The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, was a nice white christian terrorist, born and raised in the United States.

Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park bomber was a nice nice white christian terrorist, born and raised in the United States.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber is Muslim, but is a naturalized US citizen, having lived in the US since he was 9. He certainly does not look particularly arab.

Dylan Roof, a nice nice white christian terrorist, born and raised in the United States, killed 9 people in a Charleston, SC church this past June (2015) hoping to start a race war by his own admission.

This list does not include the nice christian white people in the US who seem to have gone off their rocker, taken guns and opened up in classrooms (college to grade school), movie theatres or elsewhere for some mental illness.

So, shall we put a watch on all those nice white christian folk, too?

So, yes, it is racist blindness (IMHO) to concentrate your security efforts on one set of potential targets while ignoring others with no better track record.

Uncle Ted

Hmmm.

You did note the bit about 'recent' - and the specificity of 'terrorist attacks'

McVeigh and Kaczynski are hardly recent, even if one bends the definition beyond breaking point.

As for the loons going on shooting rampages in the US, well, they are serial or spree killers and not terrorists. Yes, even Roof.

Which leaves the Tsarnaevs, who are both muslim and terrorists ... and should, therefore, have been profiled.

YMMV

Phil

LT. Ox

11-19-2015, 04:55 AM

No, I cannot "let it rest."

When untruths are presented as facts, and used as a justification for mistreatment or repression, I don't let it rest.

Oh, and don't tell Moromons they are aren't christians unless you want to hear a long lecture.

Uncle Ted
As was pointed out by Olefin YOUR naming on YOUR list of several persons that acted in what were acts of terror as "nice white Christians" is somewhat in error or downright untruth.
Which?
The job of finding and deterring criminal behavior is tuff, not using available information about who is doing what makes it a lot tougher, further giving those that are being closely scrutinized a defense is adding to the smoke screen.
IMHO

aspqrz

11-19-2015, 07:08 PM

The job of finding and deterring criminal behavior is tuff, not using available information about who is doing what makes it a lot tougher, further giving those that are being closely scrutinized a defense is adding to the smoke screen.
IMHO

Exactly.

Phil

aspqrz

11-19-2015, 07:09 PM

Well Germany going to war is pretty much the central theme of T2K, after all there probably would have been no war in Europe if they hadn't.

Indeed it was. However to believe that the Germans could blithely go to war without any intelligence leaks to the US is ... downright silly.

YMMV

Phil

Legbreaker

11-19-2015, 07:46 PM

However to believe that the Germans could blithely go to war without any intelligence leaks to the US is ... downright

Stranger things have happened.
Although they might like to think it, the US isn't infallible.

LT. Ox

11-19-2015, 09:28 PM

Stranger things have happened.
Although they might like to think it, the US isn't infallible.

Yes we are...pffft

aspqrz

11-20-2015, 01:35 AM

Although they might like to think it, the US isn't infallible.

Sshhhhh!!!

We don't want to let them in on the secret :D

Of course, the US did, at least, win two major world wars in the 20th century - Germany ... didn't ...

Phil

Legbreaker

11-20-2015, 03:23 AM

Of course, the US did, at least, win two major world wars in the 20th century

No they didn't, they assisted. :)
You've been watching too many American war movies.

Jason Weiser

11-20-2015, 07:42 AM

And now...Mali, it appears.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/20/africa/mali-shooting/index.html

Legbreaker

11-20-2015, 07:49 AM

Doesn't anyone use anything besides AK-47s?
Funny how we'll soon be hearing how it's nothing to do with islam and it's all Israel's fault...

3563

Olefin

11-20-2015, 10:37 AM

No they didn't, they assisted. :)
You've been watching too many American war movies.

They did a lot more than just assist - without the huge amount of supplies we sent the Russians they would have, at best, managed a tie on the Eastern Front - they had the bodies but we put them on wheels and those wheels are what they used for the offensives of 43-45 that destroyed the Germans

As for the Pacifc War - yes we got help from Australia and others but the war against Japan was basically an American show from 1943 on

RN7

11-20-2015, 11:51 AM

Indeed it was. However to believe that the Germans could blithely go to war without any intelligence leaks to the US is ... downright silly.

YMMV

Phil

Not when you look at the context of the T2K timeline. And I think that keeping intelligence leaks from the Soviets and the East German government would be more relevant as I don't think the US was against German Reunification.

Raellus

11-20-2015, 01:14 PM

WWII was a team effort. Without any one of the Big Three, the Allies couldn't have won.

They did a lot more than just assist - without the huge amount of supplies we sent the Russians they would have, at best, managed a tie on the Eastern Front - they had the bodies but we put them on wheels and those wheels are what they used for the offensives of 43-45 that destroyed the Germans

The amounts of war material shipped by the U.S. to many of its allies during and even before its official entry to the war is simply staggering. If any factor can be singled out for doing the most to win the war, it's allied war production, and the U.S., hands down, produced the most.

As for the Pacifc War - yes we got help from Australia and others but the war against Japan was basically an American show from 1943 on

This is partially valid if you're just looking at offensive operations that regained territory. It ignores the huge role that Chinese, British, and ANZAC forces played in tying down Japanese troops in China, Burma, and New Guinea. If those Japanese troops had been free to deploy elsewhere, the U.S.A.'s island hopping would have taken A LOT longer to reach the Japanese home islands.

Legbreaker

11-20-2015, 06:28 PM

WWII was a team effort. Without any one of the Big Three, the Allies couldn't have won.

Absolutely. Boils my blood when Americans (and others) state the US won the war. They didn't even enter it until December 1941, nearly two years after it commenced, and would have been nearly impossible without the use of Australia as a base.
It is in fact rather insulting to the rest of the world.

aspqrz

11-20-2015, 07:00 PM

Absolutely. Boils my blood when Americans (and others) state the US won the war. They didn't even enter it until December 1941, nearly two years after it commenced, and would have been nearly impossible without the use of Australia as a base.
It is in fact rather insulting to the rest of the world.

Tell it to the Chinese, who had been at war with the Japs since 1937.

As for the US winning the war, well, while the UK probably could have hung on, and probably supported the USSR just enough for it to hang on as well, the reality is that, even as weak as the Germans were (economically speaking), the war would have been much much much longer without the direct involvement of the US ... but the 'allies' would probably have won ... eventually ... think the Napoleonic Wars (1789-1812/15) ... so, 1939-1961 ... or, more likely, the UK would have managed an A Bomb (as they had an actual Atomic program, which the Germans really didn't ... and were on the right track, which the Germans patently weren't) by the late 1940s or early to mid 1950s.

It would have been a much nastier war.

(And, no, it is unlikely that the UK would have been crippled economically any more than she was by the demands of the Napoleonic and earlier World Wars ... historically speaking the Brits have managed to manage the economic side of their wars very well for the last 2-3 centuries at least, including WW1 and WW2)

So, yes, US involvement certainly meant that the war was much shorter, much less nasty (!) and more certain in its outcome, but they were, indeed, an assist rather than the decisive factor.

Of course, I expect US School History Books tell a different story, if they cover WW2 at all. I know Aussie schoolbooks have changed dramatically over my teaching career - when I started teaching in 1977 they covered WW2 in broad worldwide strokes, mentioning Australia peripherally ... when I finished in 2013/4 they covered Australia in New Guinea with peripheral mention of our involvement in Singapore and the Western Desert and even less coverage of the war as a whole.

Phil

Raellus

11-20-2015, 07:18 PM

I teach history in an American high school. I make it a point to explain that the U.S.A. did not win WWII on its own, not by a long shot. I show my students how many enemy combatant casualties each of the major allies caused. The Russians destroyed more German divisions and killed/captured more German soldiers than the rest of the Allies combined. I show them how the U.S. could not have participated in the liberation of western Europe without a secure base on Europe's doorstep (i.e. Great Britain). I need to make more of a point of stressing Australia's similar importance in the PTO.

That said, my students also learn that the other Allies could not have won the war without direct U.S. involvement. I show the students production figures from all of the main combatants. I don't need to say much- the numbers tell most of the story. The U.S. out-produced most other combatants combined in ship tonnage (warships and merchant shipping), aircraft, and ammunition. Much of that production went to Great Britain and the U.S.S.R., helping to keep them afloat in their darkest hours. The U.S.A. narrowly beat the Soviets in tank production. The Soviets contributed more manpower than any of the other Allies and they also took far more casualties.

Without USN assistance, the Royal Navy wouldn't have been able to win the Battle of the Atlantic. Cut off from its global empire by German U-Boats, Great Britain would have been in much worse shape, economically, than it was during the Napoleonic Wars. It's unlikely that they could have carried on the war on their own. The German threat to Egypt wasn't truly eliminated until the U.S. contributed to Allied operations in North Africa. Although it's not impossible, it's highly unlikely that an economically isolated Great Britain could have developed and delivered its own atomic weapons before being forced to sue for peace with the Axis.

Guys, the numbers really don't lie. It was a team effort. As I said before, without any one of the Big Three, and arguably China, the Allies could not have won WWII.

aspqrz

11-20-2015, 08:28 PM

Without USN assistance, the Royal Navy wouldn't have been able to win the Battle of the Atlantic. Cut off from its global empire by German U-Boats, Great Britain would have been in much worse shape, economically, than it was during the Napoleonic Wars. It's unlikely that they could have carried on the war on their own. The German threat to Egypt wasn't truly eliminated until the U.S. contributed to Allied operations in North Africa. Although it's not impossible, it's highly unlikely that an economically isolated Great Britain could have developed and delivered its own atomic weapons before being forced to sue for peace with the Axis.

Guys, the numbers really don't lie. It was a team effort. As I said before, without any one of the Big Three, and arguably China, the Allies could not have won WWII.

Could the Germans have won the Battle of the Atlantic?

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: They could (and did) do a lot of damage, but even before the US involvement they weren't winning it. In fact, US involvement (and idiots like Adm. King) meant that the Germans actually sank more shipping after the US became involved than before.

The things that put the final nail in the coffin of the U-Boat threat, such as that threat was, was the allocation of about 50 Long Range Bombers to close the Mid-Atlantic gap ... something the UK could have done at any time, if it had been rammed home to them that it was needful. As it was, they figured it out eventually, and did so by themselves.

Could (indeed, would!) the Germans have done more damage if there had been no direct US assistance?

Sure, but they never had the resources to expand their U-Boat fleet enough to keep ahead of their losses and ramp up numbers to the point where, overall, they were winning.

As for North Africa - it was a peripheral theater of no real importance. Rommel had no real chance of doing more than he actually managed - it was just a resource sink that made German efforts on the East Front more difficult (the DAK had the truck-borne logistics element of an entire Army Group, like Army Group Center, for example).

The best the Germans had hoped for was that they could delay an inevitable Allied victory (aka British Commonwealth victory) of materiel superiority ... Rommel was a flash in the pan who dazzled Hitler into committing forces that could have been better used elsewhere.

Phil

Olefin

11-20-2015, 08:47 PM

Sorry guys but without the US being involved in the war the Allies lose or best case fight the Germans and Italians to a tie in Europe as Japan takes what it wants in Asia and get the resources she needs to go from just dangerous to very very dangerous - especially considering that there is no way the UK alone had the resources to take on the Italian Fleet, the Germans and the Japanese - and the Soviet navy was a joke

As Churchill said the moment he knew they had won the war was when Hitler declared war on the US - up until then it was a fight for national survival - after that he knew it was just a matter of time.

Keep in mind that what stopped Rommel in the end was the fact that the US entering the war allowed the British to be able to commit troops and resources that they couldn't have otherwise.

As for Australia - yes we needed them as a base as we needed the UK as well - but if the US hadn't entered the war Australia and New Zealand would have had no choice but to evacuate everything they had back home to defend themselves against Japan - take the New Zealanders and the 9th division out of the line for the British in 1942 and Rommel ends up in Cairo and Alexandria, let alone the almost 400 US tanks that got there in time that would never have been shipped if we weren't in the war

Yes we didn't win it on our own - but without us being in it I highly doubt you would have ever seen an Allied victory of any sort where Germany, Italy and Japan surrender - the more likely situation would have been a very long and drawn out war ending with both sides becoming too exhausted to fight any longer and mutually deciding to end it

Legbreaker

11-20-2015, 08:51 PM

And the Germans were only in Africa because the Italian "brilliance" of Mussolini. Attacking Egypt in 1940 and failing miserably forced the Germans to help out if only to stop their ally from collapsing. Even then the Italians developed a reputation of surrendering en masse whenever faced with stiff opposition. Of course being issued with obsolescent WWI equipment certainly didn't help their cause...

Raellus

11-20-2015, 08:54 PM

You assume that the UK, ON ITS OWN, could have inflicted enough casualties on the German U-Boat fleet to stay ahead of U-Boat production AND keep enough of its own merchant tonnage at sea to support its own domestic needs and defend its global empire. I'd like to see credible numbers to back that assertion. You also assume that the UK's military production could have covered its own losses on land, at sea, and in the air, let alone create a materiel advantage versus the Axis. No, it could not. Production figures back that up. If you look at the correlation of forces, simply based on domestic production during 1939-1945, the Germans were beating the British in most key categories. This also takes into account any curtailment of Axis production caused by Allied strategic bombing operations (which included tens of thousands of U.S. made and/or operated aircraft). Add in the other European Axis powers, and the divide widens. Look at the populations of the UK and the Greater German Reich. Once again, Germany had a significant numerical advantage. I don't think any serious professional historian on either side of the Atlantic would stake his/her reputation on the assertion that the UK could have beaten the Axis, or even just the European Axis Powers, without substantial U.S. assistance.

Second, although North Africa was a peripheral theatre, it was as mush a resource sink for the UK as it was for Germany. Furthermore, if the Germans hadn't had to worry about a possible invasion of western Europe, they would have been free to send more troops and tanks to Rommel. They also could have covered their transportation across the Med with fighters. It's entirely within the realm of possibility that, thus reinforced, the Germans could have defeated the Commonwealth forces in North Africa, thus taking control of the Suez Canal and thereby complicating things even further for the UK.

Anyway, if you believe that the UK could have done it alone, then there's probably nothing I can present that will change your mind.

Olefin

11-20-2015, 09:02 PM

The UK by herself basically was able to barely keep herself fed while holding the Germans in the Middle East by the skin of their teeth - and only because Hitler was so busy obsessing about the Soviet Union that he never put the forces that could have won the Middle East for Germany into action in Africa - if you take a look at the history of the fighting in the Middle East in 1941 and mid 42 you see just how close it was for the British - if the New Zealand troops hadn't broken out at Mersa Matruh Rommel might have broken thru at First El Alamein

and the only reason the British didn't get their fleet exterminated in the IO by the Japanese was that they got damn lucky and didn't get spotted - otherwise Nagumo would have put three aircraft carriers and 5 battleships on the bottom of the IO instead of just Hermes and two heavy cruisers and you can pretty much kiss the British fleet outside of Home Waters and the Med goodbye

(now this is fun - been years since I last had a good WWII discussion - where is Roel and RN7 when we need them?)

RN7

11-21-2015, 12:19 AM

Not wanting to offend anybody's national honour here about WW2 but I think I would be on the side of those who think that America's contribution was the key element in defeating Germany and Japan. Sometimes wish we had some Russian members on this site, or even better some Germans and Japanese to give their views.

As Raellus has stated American war material production figures were simply staggering, and the US economy was barely affected by the war. It is just impossible to ignore the contribution of the US economy to the Allied victory.

Some points.

Soviet manpower and war production beat the German Army in Europe. Soviet war production matched America in many statistics, although generally not in technology. It has been pointed out that America (and to a lesser extent Britain and Canada) mechanised the Soviet Army through Lend Lease, but the Germans were also far less mechanised than the US and British Army and they devoted the lion share of their land and air forces to fighting the Soviets on the Eastern Front. The concentration of manpower and materials in battles on the Eastern Front were larger than the west after 1940 and until 1945.

Soviet mechanised forces and tactics in China in the late 1930's shocked the Japanese Army so much that Japan never attacked Soviet forces again for the remainder of the Second World War..

The British Empire was vulnerable to disruption by a powerful and determined foe. The British Empire was not industrialised outside of Canada, and contributed manpower and raw materials that were reliant on British shipping to transport it. Also the British-Indian Army raised over 2 million troops in the war but contributed far less than ANZAC, Canadian and South African forces. I don't think the British trusted or rated the Indian Army that highly.

The North African Theatre was only peripheral in material terms compared with the Eastern Front and Western Europe after D-Day. If the Germans had taken Suez then they would have marched into the Middle East with its oil reserves, or the southern Soviet Union with its oil reserves.

British technology greatly contributed to the Allied victory. Britain invented radar and sonar (ASDIC) and remained ahead of the curve in computers and electronics, and they were the only ones even near the Germans in jet engines.

After D-Day statically something like 70% of the Allied divisions in North-West Europe were American, but British armoured divisions were bigger than their American counterparts and the British also had a number of independent armoured brigades that were about half the size of an American armoured divisions but were not counted in the statistics.

The British largely won the Battle of Atlantic despite the later contribution of the US Navy. German tactics and advances in submarine and torpedo technology were consistently countered by British advances in anti-submarine technology.

The Pacific War was won by America, and the fact that it was a sideshow compared to the war in Europe makes it all the more remarkable. Most of America's war effort was directed against Germany and supporting the UK and USSR. Burma, China and New Guinea were important theatres but the war at sea and in the air was won by American military power. After 1941 the Royal Navy disappeared from the Pacific Ocean and no heavy British warships were sent back to the Pacific until 1944.

Legbreaker

11-21-2015, 01:11 AM

Macarthur went out of his way to purposely sideline all non-American forces in the Pacific. Any unit which wasn't US Marines or Army, even navy or air force was relegated to containment and clean up duties far behind the front - take Bougainville in 1944-45 for example.

He did that precisely so he could claim America won the war and in particular, HE won it. Always had an eye on self promotion and it would seem (in my opinion at least) was aiming to take a run at US President at some point. Of course his screw up(s) in Korea put paid to that.

Legbreaker

11-21-2015, 01:12 AM

Hmm, I think we've completely thread jacked this... :o

StainlessSteelCynic

11-21-2015, 03:43 AM

LT. Ox

11-21-2015, 07:11 AM

please start a new and different thread for this rehash and chest pounding.
Several hundred innocent people were murdered by thugs.
Let us remember them and what THAT attack was about and what it might mean perhaps but this is not right.
IMHO
Harry O

aspqrz

11-21-2015, 08:19 AM

Sorry guys but without the US being involved in the war the Allies lose or best case fight the Germans and Italians to a tie in Europe as Japan takes what it wants in Asia and get the resources she needs to go from just dangerous to very very dangerous

Interesting assumption(s).

The ones that are simply unsupportable on any level you care to name are -

* Japan runs wild in Asia and the US does nothing.

* The Japanese actively ally with the Germans.

Yes, it is, I suppose, possible that the US would not get involved with a European war, but she showed herself willing to push the Japanese to the wire and (from their insane, but consistent, point of view) forced them to attack Pearl Harbour.

The moment that happens, even if the US does a 'Pacific First' or, indeed, a 'Pacific Only', strategy, Japan is doomed and irrelevant.

That single fact makes the possibility of any active Japanese alliance with the German both so unlikely as to be not worth considering, and if they did, it would merely draw the US into the European war ... maybe only as a co-Belligerent rather than as an ally.

The German economy didn't have enough raw materials, and couldn't get them. They simply could. not. get. them. They were either on different continents and couldn't be shipped because the Commonwealth Navies prevented it or they weren't present in the quantities needed in locations the Germans could access ... or they were, possibly, available in significant (but still inadequate) quantities, and ther Germans could, theoretically, have reached those locations but, if they did, there was no way of transporting them from those locations back to where they were actually needed in any quantity.

And, again, the U-Boats never managed to consistently sink enough merchant shipping to overwhelm the Commonwealth and did not have the resources to produce the number of U-Boats and crews to do so in the face of relatively simple and cheap fixes such as the LRB patrols across the mid-Atlantic gap.

I do not say, and never did, that the Commonwealth would have had an easy victory - merely that, as shown by the Napoleonic Wars (and the earlier world wars against the French), a continental power cannot defeat a naval power and, as long as the naval power maintains its blockade and foments rebellion and alliances against said continental power, they will eventually win.

And, gee, economically speaking the Brits always managed to pay down the debt wars that were longer and (relatively) more expensive in terms of GDP than WW2 quite quickly.

Now, you could make a political argument and claim that the Brits couldn't maintain the rage, so to speak, and that they would eventually throw up a Quisling and sue for some sort of peace ... good luck with finding historical examples for that.

Phil

aspqrz

11-21-2015, 08:32 AM

Soviet manpower and war production beat the German Army in Europe. Soviet war production matched America in many statistics, although generally not in technology. I

Interestingly enough, this is the line the old USSR managed to sell the West hook, line and sinker during WW2 and during the following Cold War through to the late 1980s.

If you read more recent economic histories of the Soviet War Effort, especially (of course) by Western economists and historians you will find that it is now widely accepted amongst specialist circles that -

* Lend Lease was the enabler of the Soviet War effort. No ifs, no buts, no ands, no maybes.

* Whole segments of the Soviet War Economy simply produced only a fraction of what the Red Army required, and the bulk was actually provided by the Allies ... and this was in key areas (for example, something like 60% of all explosives produced in the USSR was produced from precursors shipped there from the west ... 100% of Soviet Rolling Stock, Rail and Locomotive requirements during 42-45 were provided by the allies ... most of the telephone wire [and all of the waterproof stuff] for field phones was produced by the allies ... 80% of all Tank Radios were supplied by the Western Allies ... most of the Boots and Uniforms, ditto ... something like half of the field rations ... etc. etc.)

* The manpower that Stalin's incompetence continually wasted was only available because Lend Lease provided all the above ... if it hadn't, assuming that the Soviets could have produced it at all, or in the quantities needed, they would have had to strip men out of the army to do it ... and, indeed, had to do exactly that on at least one occasion (1942?) if not more.

Could the Russians have held on without US Lend Lease? Probably. At much greater cost. Commonwealth LL would probably have been enough to stave off defeat ...

But the few popular histories that actually delve into economic realities are almost all stuck in a pre-1980's time warp and still spout the propaganda that the Sovs sold the West for so long.

Dig deeper and you'll find a different story.

Phil

aspqrz

11-21-2015, 08:45 AM

The British Empire was not industrialised outside of Canada, and contributed manpower and raw materials that were reliant on British shipping to transport it.

Australia had an industrial base as well. Of course, our population in 1939 was, IIRC, around 7 million people.

We had an iron and steel industry and considerable engineering and production plant for a country of our size. We produced Corvettes, Fighter Bombers, Fighters, Tanks almost all of our small arms (Rifles, SMGs, Machineguns etc.) and ammunition.

No, we didn't have the same level of industrialisation as Canada, but that was mostly because of the small population.

The Kiwis, on the other hand, had virtually nothing, and that's still the case ... look at the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlton_Automatic_Rifle

for how hard up they were.

There was also a NZ movie some years ago about a loner in rural NZ during WW2 who refused to hand in his privately owned SMLE when the government confiscated all of them (I don't suppose there could have been more than several hundred all over NZ at the time, certainly not several thousand) because they were so short.

Phil

RN7

11-21-2015, 08:49 AM

I would dispute that America's contribution to WW2 was the key element in defeating Germany and Japan.
I would argue that the people who really "won" WW2 for us, were the Chinese.

The Chinese held up many thousands of Japanese troops, troops that would have been available to advance Japanese agendas in the Pacific. Troops that would have been free to tie up half the Soviet forces and keep them from being used against Germany.

I just can't agree with this statement. Germany was by far the most powerful Axis state, and what about the contribution of the Soviets to Allied victory. Also the Soviets didn't have half their army in the Far East for the duration of the war, they only redeployed large forces to Asia after the defeat of Germany.

The Pacific War was a sideshow in WW2 compared with the war in Europe, although it may not have felt that way to those who fought in it. China could barely arm its own army, and it made little headway against Japanese forces who occupied China for the duration of the war. The Japanese Army was also inferior in material, technology and tactics to the German Army, and its largest army in China was simply bulldozed by the Soviets in the last few weeks of the war.

RN7

11-21-2015, 09:52 AM

Interestingly enough, this is the line the old USSR managed to sell the West hook, line and sinker during WW2 and during the following Cold War through to the late 1980s.

On the contrary Western history emphasise the importance of the Anglo-American contribution to defeat of the Axis, and overlooks the importance of the Soviet war effort.

If you read more recent economic histories of the Soviet War Effort, especially (of course) by Western economists and historians you will find that it is now widely accepted amongst specialist circles that -

* Lend Lease was the enabler of the Soviet War effort. No ifs, no buts, no ands, no maybes.

Yet the United States supplied the Soviet Union with 10,982 million dollars worth of Lend Lease while the British Commonwealth received 31,387 million dollars worth of Lend Lease

* Whole segments of the Soviet War Economy simply produced only a fraction of what the Red Army required, and the bulk was actually provided by the Allies ... and this was in key areas (for example, something like 60% of all explosives produced in the USSR was produced from precursors shipped there from the west ... 100% of Soviet Rolling Stock, Rail and Locomotive requirements during 42-45 were provided by the allies ... most of the telephone wire [and all of the waterproof stuff] for field phones was produced by the allies ... 80% of all Tank Radios were supplied by the Western Allies ... most of the Boots and Uniforms, ditto ... something like half of the field rations ... etc. etc.)

Yet the Soviets were able to produce 92,595 tanks, 105,251 anti-tank and self-propelled guns, 516,648 artillery and anti-aircraft guns, 403,300 mortars, 1,477,400 machine guns, 197,100 trucks and lorries, 63,087 fighter aircraft, 37,549 ground attack aircraft, 21,116 bomber aircraft, 17,332 transport aircraft, 4,061 training aircraft, 25 destroyers and 52 submarines, and from 1937-1945 produced 9.3% of the world's oil, 10.6% of the world's coal, 14.3% of the world's iron ore, 40.5% of the worlds manganese ore, 15.3% of the world's chrome ore, 24.5% of the world's phosphates, 26.5% of the world's wheat, 22,7% of the world's sugar beet and 15% of the world's meat all by themselves.

* The manpower that Stalin's incompetence continually wasted was only available because Lend Lease provided all the above ... if it hadn't, assuming that the Soviets could have produced it at all, or in the quantities needed, they would have had to strip men out of the army to do it ... and, indeed, had to do exactly that on at least one occasion (1942?) if not more.

The Soviets unlike the Germans for example (and the Japanese) hadn't got the luxury of employing slave labour to work in its factories and mines, or like the United States who was never physically threatened in WW2 wasn't able to cherry pick its physically most able and healthy manpower for military service.

*Could the Russians have held on without US Lend Lease? Probably. At much greater cost. Commonwealth LL would probably have been enough to stave off defeat ...

British Lend Lease to the Soviet Union: 7,000 aircraft, 27 warships, 5,218 tanks, 5,000 anti-tank guns, 6,900 vehicles, aircraft engines, radar sets and boots. Useful but a drop in the pan when you consider that the Soviets produced on average 25,000 tanks a year after 1942 (and better armed and armoured than what Britain supplied), 125,000 artillery guns a year on average after 1942, and over 30,000 aircraft a year after 1942.

RN7

11-21-2015, 10:17 AM

Australia had an industrial base as well. Of course, our population in 1939 was, IIRC, around 7 million people.

We had an iron and steel industry and considerable engineering and production plant for a country of our size. We produced Corvettes, Fighter Bombers, Fighters, Tanks almost all of our small arms (Rifles, SMGs, Machineguns etc.) and ammunition.

No, we didn't have the same level of industrialisation as Canada, but that was mostly because of the small population.

The Kiwis, on the other hand, had virtually nothing, and that's still the case ... look at the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlton_Automatic_Rifle

for how hard up they were.

There was also a NZ movie some years ago about a loner in rural NZ during WW2 who refused to hand in his privately owned SMLE when the government confiscated all of them (I don't suppose there could have been more than several hundred all over NZ at the time, certainly not several thousand) because they were so short.

Phil

Australia was essentially an agricultural and mining economy in the Second World War with some small scale engineering and metal processing in its cities in the southeast strip. It still is today to a large extent. Australia did produce war material (Sentinel tanks, scout cars, rifles, training aircraft, 16 escorts) but most if it never left Australia. Practically all of its combat aircraft, warships and tanks and artillery were supplied by Britain and America.

Raellus

11-21-2015, 10:34 AM

RN7

11-21-2015, 12:36 PM

(And, no, it is unlikely that the UK would have been crippled economically any more than she was by the demands of the Napoleonic and earlier World Wars ... historically speaking the Brits have managed to manage the economic side of their wars very well for the last 2-3 centuries at least, including WW1 and WW2)

And what of the Luftwaffe bombing campaign or the later V-2 rocket attacks on the UK?

Olefin

11-21-2015, 04:58 PM

I'll say it a third time, the Allies would not have defeated the Axis Powers without any one of the Big Three, and possibly China.

The numbers don't lie. Simply looking at war production figures, the Commonwealth did not, and almost certainly could not, out-produce the Axis. GB could not have produced enough to cover it's own losses AND supply the Soviet Union. The Soviet mechanized offensives of 1943-'45 would not have been possible without American-made trucks, tractors, and armored vehicles. Without the USN, GB did not stand any chance at regaining it's empire in Asia. The Coral Sea battle and the Guadalcanal campaign (land and sea) quite possibly saved Australia from a Japanese invasion.

A lot of the arguments that the Commonwealth could have won the war without direct American involvement smacks of fantasist jingoism. It's one thing to not like America- fair play, there- but it's another to assert that it did not play a crucial role in the Allied victory.

As an aside, I will agree that MacArthur was a total ass-hat. He and Montgomery are two of the most overrated senior generals of the Western allies. Both were egomaniacs and, at best, average field commanders. If they hadn't been such great self-promoters with allies in the press, it's hard to see how either could have risen as high as they need. It's debatable as to who was worse, but if I had to pick one of them for my team, I'd probably go with Monty. I can't think of one redeeming quality of MacArthur. The only good thing he did in his career was supervise the occupation and rebuilding of Japan. Everything else, before and after WWII, is a study in mediocrity.

Both of them had their total screw-ups for sure

Monty had Arnhem and letting Rommel get away and prolong the war in Africa by at least four months

MacArthur let his air force get caught on the ground in Luzon (but even if he hadnt I doubt it would have changed things much) and managed to totally screw up getting Bataan supplied correctly (that was criminal in my mind - he had almost three weeks to get food, ammo and fuel there and didnt do the job at all - properly supplied they might have held out even longer then they did and hurt the Japanese even more)

As for the Chinese - look at what happened in 44-45 to them - the Japanese are completely getting their heads handed to them in the Central and Southwest Pacific and the Chinese lose a huge chunk of China, including a lot of important US Army Air Force bases, to a Japanese offensive - yes they occupied a lot of Army troops - but frankly they were a bigger hindrance than help

As for the Soviets - keep in mind that without the US going to a war footing as to production the Soviets may not have survived the 1942 German offensive - that it took a total screw up on Hitler's part (i.e. ordering the 6th to directly assault Stalingrad and get chewed up in city fighting along with the wheel south that cost the Germans time to bag what turned out to be only about 40,000 Russians) and a lot of American supplies to give them a fighting chance to stop that offensive

once they got thru 1942 and into 43 they had the ability to turn the game around - but it was US and British help that let them do it

And keep in mind that the Japanese made a huge mistake attacking the US at all - there was very little enthusiasm for going to war over the Dutch East Indies or Malaya - a Japanese attack without hitting the US may very well have seen Roosevelt unable to get a declaration of war thru Congress

remember how anti-war the US was - the draft vote that took place after Hitler invaded Russia passed by one vote

StainlessSteelCynic

11-21-2015, 06:27 PM

I just can't agree with this statement. Germany was by far the most powerful Axis state, and what about the contribution of the Soviets to Allied victory. Also the Soviets didn't have half their army in the Far East for the duration of the war, they only redeployed large forces to Asia after the defeat of Germany.

The Pacific War was a sideshow in WW2 compared with the war in Europe, although it may not have felt that way to those who fought in it. China could barely arm its own army, and it made little headway against Japanese forces who occupied China for the duration of the war. The Japanese Army was also inferior in material, technology and tactics to the German Army, and its largest army in China was simply bulldozed by the Soviets in the last few weeks of the war.

A sideshow that diverted hundreds of ships, thousands of aircraft and tens of thousands of troops away from the ETO with the Chinese resisting the Japanese for eight years suffering something in the order of 10-20 million casualties. When you decide to kill off that many people, it takes a fair bit of your time and your troops to do it.

That Soviet army that bulldozed the Japanese forces in China, the one that had benefited from all those years of fighting the Germans, what did they face? The remnants of a nation on the edge of surrender. And as for half the Soviet army, I never said that half the Soviet army was deployed in Asia. What I said was "Troops that would have been free to tie up half the Soviet forces and keep them from being used against Germany.", it was a generalized statement meaning that the Soviets would have had another Front to fight on.

That poor little Chinese army managed to hold the Japanese up to the point where they both faced stalemate but in the process the Japanese invasion of China held up something like 4 million Japanese personnel. Four million.

The war in Asia began two years before the war in Europe but we're all taught that WW2 didn't start until the Germans invaded Poland.
The fact remains that if the Japanese had been able to overrun China and get to the borders of the Soviet Union in sufficient numbers, the Soviets would have had to divert troops away from the ETO.
The Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation helped to prevent that.
The vast majority of what we are taught about the war in the English speaking world is decidedly Euro- and Americano-centric with even historians paying scant attention to much of the war in Asia and specifically the Japanese campaigns against other Asian nations - as if whatever happened between Asians wasn't really important to anyone or anything.

RN7

11-22-2015, 12:00 AM

A sideshow that diverted hundreds of ships, thousands of aircraft and tens of thousands of troops away from the ETO with the Chinese resisting the Japanese for eight years suffering something in the order of 10-20 million casualties. When you decide to kill off that many people, it takes a fair bit of your time and your troops to do it.

You just cannot compare the level of warfare in Asia with that in Europe. In every statistic involving manpower, material and casualties the war in Europe was far bigger excluding the use of aircraft carriers and the use of atomic bombs. Chinese military deaths in WW2 were 3-3.75 million,. This figure is less than German military losses and perhaps one third of Soviet military losses.

That Soviet army that bulldozed the Japanese forces in China, the one that had benefited from all those years of fighting the Germans, what did they face? The remnants of a nation on the edge of surrender. And as for half the Soviet army, I never said that half the Soviet army was deployed in Asia. What I said was "Troops that would have been free to tie up half the Soviet forces and keep them from being used against Germany.", it was a generalized statement meaning that the Soviets would have had another Front to fight on.

The Soviet Army beat the Japanese Army at Khalkhin Gol in Manchuria in 1939 with far inferior material than what they had in 1945. As a result of this battle the Japanese signed a neutrality pact with the USSR in April 1941 and the Japanese Army lost their influence over war planning to the Japanese Navy who favoured a Pacific War against the Western powers. The Japanese Army in China was and remained the most powerful of Japan's armies for the duration of the war. Chinese forces did not and were not capable of defeating it for the duration of the Second World War. The Soviets returned to Manchuria in 1945 after the Atomic bombing of Japan and they did the same again to the Japanese Army that they did in 1939 but on a much larger scale.

That poor little Chinese army managed to hold the Japanese up to the point where they both faced stalemate but in the process the Japanese invasion of China held up something like 4 million Japanese personnel. Four million.

The Chinese Army was actually bigger on paper than the Japanese Army so I presume that the four million figure includes the total of Japanese troops who were in China from 1937-45 and not at the one time. The Chinese Army was also chronically short of all war material and weapons, had more in common with a 19th Century army than a 20th Century one, and rarely defeated the Japanese. This is some feat considering the Japanese Army was woefully under-armed and un-mechanised compared with Allied, Soviet and German forces. The fact that the Japanese Army remained intact for so long was probably largely due to the fact that the Chinese were its main opponents outside of Allied island hopping in the Pacific were logistics and terrain restricted the Allies from using modern mechanised warfare against the Japanese. The Soviet did in 1945 and guess what happened.

The war in Asia began two years before the war in Europe but we're all taught that WW2 didn't start until the Germans invaded Poland.
The fact remains that if the Japanese had been able to overrun China and get to the borders of the Soviet Union in sufficient numbers, the Soviets would have had to divert troops away from the ETO.
The Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation helped to prevent that.
The vast majority of what we are taught about the war in the English speaking world is decidedly Euro- and Americano-centric with even historians paying scant attention to much of the war in Asia and specifically the Japanese campaigns against other Asian nations - as if whatever happened between Asians wasn't really important to anyone or anything.

That would be after 1941 for America and the Soviet Union.

Also the Soviets were fighting the Japanese in China/Manchuria from 1935,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_border_conflicts

Japan signed a neutrality pact with the Soviets in 1939 and by and large observed it as they did not want to go to war with the Soviets even after the Germans invaded.

Every country has their own interpretation of history.

StainlessSteelCynic

11-22-2015, 05:12 AM

Who said anything about comparing the level of warfare in Asia to that in Europe?
It's blatantly obvious that a war in Asia with it's tropical climate, vast tracts of ocean with many scattered small land masses is going to be radically different to a war in the densely urbanized, temperate climate, singular land mass of Europe.

To relegate the war in the Pacific as nothing but a sideshow to the war in Europe ignores the strategic impact that the PTO had and further to that, it belittles or worse, denies, the strategic impact it had.

RN7

11-22-2015, 08:21 AM

Legbreaker

11-22-2015, 04:08 PM

The war in Asia not the countries were a sideshow to the warfare in Europe were the dominant Axis threat

Tell that to the millions of people from many, many nations who fought and died there. To imply it was nothing but a "sideshow" is downright insulting!

Raellus

11-22-2015, 06:21 PM

The war in Asia not the countries were a sideshow to the warfare in Europe were the dominant Axis threat was.

Threat to who? I don't understand this argument. It can only be valid from a very Eurocentric point of view.

Granted, the Japanese didn't ever really pose a serious threat to CONUS, but, without the USN to hold (and then push) them back, the rest of the Pacific world was in serious danger of Japanese conquest and domination. I'm that a vast majority of the billions of people in Asia would strenuously disagree with your "sideshow" assessment.

-

aspqrz

11-22-2015, 07:20 PM

aspqrz

11-22-2015, 07:36 PM

Australia was essentially an agricultural and mining economy in the Second World War with some small scale engineering and metal processing in its cities in the southeast strip. It still is today to a large extent. Australia did produce war material (Sentinel tanks, scout cars, rifles, training aircraft, 16 escorts) but most if it never left Australia. Practically all of its combat aircraft, warships and tanks and artillery were supplied by Britain and America.

SMGs, Machineguns, Mortars, 25 pdr artillery. Ammunition and Artillery rounds.

Oh, and sixty Bathurst class Corvettes alone were built in Australia. Six Tribal Class Destroyers were built in Australia.

And we built RR Aero engines for a variety of, yes, imported aircraft.

However, we built around 700 Beauforts locally, too, around 400 Beaufighters, 700 odd Wirraway Trainers, 250 Boomerang Fighters etc.

Yes, not much in the greater scheme of things, but much more than most people, even most Australians, realise!

And rather more than you claimed.

Phil

aspqrz

11-22-2015, 07:43 PM

I'll say it a third time ... [snip] ... A lot of the arguments that the Commonwealth could have won the war without direct American involvement smacks of fantasist jingoism.

And I'll say it again, too. There is nothing fantasist about it.

The Germans had no way of defeating the Commonwealth ... no, their U-Boat Campaign didn't ever manage it, either, and it is wishful thinking to believe it could have ... the Commonwealth could not easily have defeated the Germans, either, however, as I noted, on a historical basis, the UK has taken on powers as strong as she is/was and defeated them even if it took decades.

And the UK had an Atomic Weapons program and the werewithal to, slowly, bring it to fruition ... the Germans had none, and even their pathetic nuclear power programs were working the wrong direction.

Would a Commonwealth/Russian victory have been quick? No. Would it have been easy? Hell no! But there is no evidence that the Germans could have won, and the Commonwealth have that historical track record of sticking to it!

YMMV.

Phil

Raellus

11-23-2015, 05:15 PM

Aspqrz, I can't tell if you're just trolling us here or if you really believe what you're asserting. If this is a troll, bravo- you suckered me right in. However, assuming that you are being sincere...

The Germans had no way of defeating the Commonwealth ... no, their U-Boat Campaign didn't ever manage it, either, and it is wishful thinking to believe it could have ... the Commonwealth could not easily have defeated the Germans, either, however, as I noted, on a historical basis, the UK has taken on powers as strong as she is/was and defeated them even if it took decades.

Perhaps, if the Axis Powers just sat still and left the UK alone to do it, sure. When did GB test its first nuclear weapons? 1952. That's 13 years after the war started; 7 years after it ended. Could it have developed, tested, and deployed its own nuclear weapon/s under the constant pressure of a partial naval blockade and constant air and V-weapon attacks?

You also conveniently ignore the fact that UK had lost almost all of its East Asian empire by 1942 and did not have the means to both get it back and hold off the Germans at the same time. Without the Americans, could the British have defeated the Axis in the ETO [I]and recovered its East Asian real estate?

As for your second point, past success does not guarantee future results. If so, every invasion of GB after the Norman Conquest would have succeeded.

I've read extensively on WWII, as I suspect you have too. I have never come across a single analysis of the war that even attempted to assert that the British Commonwealth could have won WWII on its own. Even noted British WWII historians like John Keegan, Max Hastings, and Antony Beevor concede that the UK could not have won the war without direct American intervention.

If your point is that the Commonwealth could have prevented its defeat without American help, then I concede the possibility. If you are arguing that the Commonwealth could have defeated the Axis Powers without American help...

I suppose we will have to agree to disagree.

Legbreaker

11-23-2015, 07:58 PM

Perhaps, if the Axis Powers just sat still and left the UK alone to do it, sure. When did GB test its first nuclear weapons? 1952. That's 13 years after the war started; 7 years after it ended. Could it have developed, tested, and deployed its own nuclear weapon/s under the constant pressure of a partial naval blockade and constant air and V-weapon attacks?
Note where it was tested. Certainly wasn't in the UK!!!
Middle of Australia, Woomera to be exact.

You also conveniently ignore the fact that UK had lost almost all of its East Asian empire by 1942 and did not have the means to both get it back and hold off the Germans at the same time. Without the Americans, could the British have defeated the Axis in the ETO [I]and recovered its East Asian real estate?
India was still in the fight as was Australia and New Zealand, not to mention South Africa as well as a number of other countries of somewhat lesser strategic importance (although able to supply troops and materials). Although at the time there was a great deal of fear that the Japanese would continue southward and roll over Australia and New Zealand, there was in reality little need for them to do that, nor did they really have the available forces anyway. Australia is HUGE. They'd need hundreds of thousands of troops to take it in the 1940s (more today with our greater population), troops they simply didn't have as it turned out.

With the constant threat of German aerial attack it's likely much of the UKs industrial production would be shifted to safer colonies (such as South Africa) with finished products shipped in via convoys. Eygpt and the suez canal would likely have become even more important with Commonwealth efforts against the Axis forces concentrated there while the UK itself carried out only holding actions to prevent invasion. Instead of D-Day landings being in France, the main thrust (when it finally came, likely several years later) may have been up through the middle east in an attempt to link up with the Soviets.

All in all though it's really impossible to say what might have happened, but it is foolish to say the UK would definitely have been defeated without the US.

If you are arguing that the Commonwealth could have defeated the Axis Powers without American help...

It was possible. Even with the multiple fronts the Commonwealth were holding their own using substandard equipment (mainly god awful tanks with underpowered guns and dodgy tactics). It may have taken a few years but the Commonwealth may have been able to strangle Germany just enough to force a stalemate, and eventually, after another decade or two, maybe even take back some areas.

It would be a radically different world that which we live in today, one I imagine would somewhat resemble that shown in the George Orwell book, 1984 with war a constant background and the people generally living in poverty.

aspqrz

11-23-2015, 09:05 PM

It was possible. Even with the multiple fronts the Commonwealth were holding their own using substandard equipment (mainly god awful tanks with underpowered guns and dodgy tactics). It may have taken a few years but the Commonwealth may have been able to strangle Germany just enough to force a stalemate, and eventually, after another decade or two, maybe even take back some areas.

It would be a radically different world that which we live in today, one I imagine would somewhat resemble that shown in the George Orwell book, 1984 with war a constant background and the people generally living in poverty.

My point exactly. And, to other posters, no, I am not trolling and the fact that Historians don't suggest that the Commonwealth could have won alone is unsurprising. Historians document what did happen, generally speaking, and shy away from explaining what could have happened except in the shortest of short terms, maybe medium term if they stretch it.

And, of course, many Historians, even respected ones, don't actually do a lot of (and, in some cases, any at all) original research ... they simply rehash what is available in secondary sources and seldom check to see whether those secondary sources are based on reliable primary sources.

This is one of the reasons why our understanding of the war in the East has so radically changed in the last quarter century ... decades of Soviet lies and misinformation is gradually being chipped away at by people like Glantz (good researcher, terrible writer btw). But even before that by people such as Barber and Harrison in books such as "The Soviet Home Front, 1941-5: a Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II" and in others of their extensive writings on the Soviet economy.

Unfortunately, this material has yet to make its way into the wider historical context, especially in generalist histories and histories aimed at a non-specialist audience.

Similar material is increasingly available in specialist economic and historical circles that debunks many of the more ludicrous claims about such things as the U Boat campaign bringing the UK to its knees or that it could have defeated her single handedly.

As for the Japanese - well, as I noted elsewhere, the US and Japanese were on a path to conflict without the UK anywhere. If the Japs decided to steal all the resources they needed because of the US embargoes, they will, indeed, almost certainly go to war with the UK etc. Unfortunately, military reality, and their own unique and not entirely crazy (but always consistent within its own crazy logic) take on reality meant that, to take and secure the resources of Malaya, Borneo, the DEI and elsewhere they needed to take out the US forces in the PI. Which meant war with the US.

Now, if the US decides to ignore Europe and simply fight the Japs, the Japs are not a major problem for the Commonwealth for more than a year, maybe a year and a bit ... after all, as we all know, the US put 80% of its war effort into Europe and only 20% into the Pacific. If they had put 100% into the Pacific they would have swamped the Japs at least a year, and more likely 1.5-2 years, earlier ... though without the A-Bomb, of course.

And the A-Bomb. Tubealloys provided a lot of the theoretical and engineering underpinning for the US program on the, mistaken, understanding that the US would share the fruits of such ... so the UK didn't expend resources on it. If the US was not involved, then the program would have continued ... granted, much less quickly than the Manhattan Engineering District did, but I never suggested it would.

And, of course, I note you completely ignore the historical stick-to-it-ivity of the British Empire at war over the last several centuries and her ability to fund and pay off such wars within extremely short periods of time.

I just get annoyed at people trotting out 'facts' that are now known to not be such in specialist circles and pooh-poohing anyone who disagrees with those disproven assertions.

Not trolling at all.

Phil

aspqrz

11-23-2015, 09:12 PM

With the constant threat of German aerial attack it's likely much of the UKs industrial production would be shifted to safer colonies (such as South Africa) with finished products shipped in via convoys.

Probably not. The UK had large underground factory complexes for all sorts of things and, indeed, much of their industry was actually completely beyond the range of German bombers and more was beyond the range of unescorted German bombers (aka 'sitting ducks').

And, as we know from German experiences with the Bombing Campaign, factory buildings are easy(ish) to destroy, but the machine tools in them ... not so much. It was common for 'destroyed' factories to be back in production in days or weeks with, at best, only temporary shelter above the workers heads (if any at all) ... the Russians found much the same with the factories they relocated east of the Urals, they were back in production as soon as the machines were on firm footings, even in winter, and way before anything more than temporary shelter was erected over them.

If the Germans and Russians could manage it, no reason why the Brits couldn't.

Phil

Raellus

11-23-2015, 09:39 PM

And, of course, I note you completely ignore the historical stick-to-it-ivity of the British Empire at war over the last several centuries and her ability to fund and pay off such wars within extremely short periods of time.

No, I don't. I was simply pointing out the false logic of stating that GB would have won WWII alone because "it had done so before". First off, that is a non sequitur. Second, you overstate GB's record. The Seven Year's War nearly bankrupted the British government, leading to an arrogant tax policy which eventually led to the American Revolution and consequent loss of GB's 13 North American colonies. That's non an unqualified win, economically or militarily. GB's ultimate victory in the Napoleonic Wars (which, I might add, took more or less 30 years to complete) was at the head of a pan-European coalition. GB did not defeat Napoleon on its own, yet this part of your argument hinges upon that assertion.

If GB was so potent, why did it lose most of its empire after WWII? GB was in bad shape after winning WWII (with American help). It did NOT fund and pay off its defense spending from WWII (having received billions of dollars in Cash and Carry and Lend Lease aid from the U.S.) in an extremely "short period of time". In fact, it received Marshall Plan monies from the U.S. after the war. Its economy took decades to recover. If it was strong enough to defeat the Axis on its own, why wasn't strong enough to hold on to its colonies? Why did it struggle with years of post-war economic recession? Perhaps this is a post hoc, ergo propter hoc argument on my part, but I think it's a valid question, considering how capable, militarily and financially, you argue that the Commonwealth was 1939-1952.

I just get annoyed at people trotting out 'facts' that are now known to not be such in specialist circles and pooh-poohing anyone who disagrees with those disproven assertions.

I guess I don't have access to the font of "specialist" knowledge that you apparently do. And I get annoyed at "special pleading" arguments. Somehow, mainstream historians have all gotten it wrong for a half-century and you and a few cutting edge historians in "specialist circles" (most of whom you neglect to name) have the [secret] knowledge that disproves years of careful scholarship? What "facts" that I've trotted out have been "disproven"? Perhaps I overstated the efficacy of the German U-Boat blockade, but what else? Where do your "facts" come from? Don't tell me they're classified or I'll know you're trolling.

aspqrz

11-23-2015, 11:35 PM

I guess I don't have access to the font of "specialist" knowledge that you apparently do. And I get annoyed at "special pleading" arguments. Somehow, mainstream historians have all gotten it wrong for a half-century and you and a few cutting edge historians in "specialist circles" (most of whom you neglect to name) have the [secret] knowledge that disproves years of careful scholarship? What "facts" that I've trotted out have been "disproven"? Perhaps I overstated the efficacy of the German U-Boat blockade, but what else? Where do your "facts" come from? Don't tell me they're classified or I'll know you're trolling.

Of course you have access to the specialist knowledge - all you have to do is some research and your local library will be able to get the relevant books through interlibrary loans. Me? I either buy the books (Amazon and Book Depository are great) or use Sydney University Library (where I did my degree, but I could use the Mitchell Library/State Library of NSW or even interlibrary loans from Warringah Shire Library, my local library).

I mentioned one book previously, by Harrison and Barber, but any of their books are worth reading.

Harrison's books ...

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/public/

... many of which he co-authored with John Barber (King's College, Cambridge, not London)

You can see a sample of his/their work at -

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/public/

... which has interesting tables from their other works, including those on the WW2 economies of the Great Powers, which is in and of itself especially interesting.

I have also mentioned Glantz's work which is more specifically on the Eastern Front but, unfortunately, not widely enough read because, as I indicated, he is a horrible writer. It is only in the last 5-10 years that more readable accounts of the Eastern Front and Soviet era misinformation and lies have become more mainstream in the hands of historians with greater communications skills than Glantz (one of my colleagues refers to Glantz's writing style as 'mere typing'). His works done with Jonathan House are the most readable ("When Titans Clashed" etc.)

For Bombing, Overy's 'The Bombing War' is showing more recent scholarship, and his 'Why the Allies Won' is getting somewhat dated, but basic still good (and readable).

Kershaw's 'Fateful Choices' is interesting, as it is about as close to a realistic assessment of 'alternate history' as a real specialist goes.

Blair's two volume work on the U-Boat War places a spotlight on the shortcomings of the German U-Boat campaign, supplement figures that can be found in Tarrant's "The U-Boat Offensive 1914-1945".

For overall logistics, look at Van Creveld's 'Supplying War', especially the last three chapters which are relevant to WW2 (East Front, Med, Western Europe).

To understand the political and economic realities faced by all major powers involved, and why the Allies (and Russians) had so much difficulty in matching initial German production, you couldn't go far wrong with Maiolo's 'Cry Havoc'

For the Strategic Bombing Campaign, reading the USAAF's 'Strategic Bombing Survey' with a critical eye, and looking at the actual figures presented which often belie some of the conclusions made then, and later, is always valuable.

I haven't found a single source that breaks down the various national contributions to Lend Lease and Reverse Lend Lease, or breakdowns of actual composition of Lend Lease shipments by specific type (most sources have only general categories and don't always even attempt to break it down by nation of origin), but if you dig around in a lot of the better Economic histories, you can find a lot (Harrison and Barber do deal with it in some places, for example).

As for Britain's stick-to-it-ivity, I haven't mentioned the books on the Napoleonic Wars, well, Knight's 'Britain Against Napoleon: The Organisation of Victory, 1793-1815' explains it in more detail than you'd probably care for, but any book about the invention of the National Debt/Creation of the Bank of England is also valuable (aka France lost because she couldn't organise herself efficiently to pay for the wars).

And that's just the stuff I can see from my Office, without going into my Lounge, which is lined, floor to ceiling on one long wall and a third of the other with bookshelves ... and without consulting the sheafs of notes I have taken over the years.

:D

Phil

StainlessSteelCynic

11-24-2015, 02:12 AM

Actually the British had done initial research in an atomic bomb in 1940 under the MAUD Committee and much of this research was given to the USA to help convince the US to develop atomic weapons. It was a joint British-American team that worked on the Manhattan Project.

The two nations had an agreement to collaborate on nuclear weapons after the war but the US was deliberately reluctant (justifiably given the circumstances) to share the information gained, mostly due to the discovery that one of the British researchers, Klaus Fuchs (a Jewish German who fled when the Nazis took power) was also a communist.
British scientists then built up their atomic weapons programme with little outside assistance to the point where they were able to test their first weapon in the 1950s.

If the British had continued their own programme instead of halting it to give their information and their researchers to the US, they likely would have had a bomb available to them around the same time as the Manhattan Project delivered its first weapon and possibly before.

For more information on how the US atomic bomb was just as much a British weapon and how the US froze out the British, refer to pages 24 to 30 of Between Heaven and Hell by Alan Rimmer
The specific pages can be read here courtesy of Google Books
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=T2sCBAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Legbreaker

11-24-2015, 03:24 AM

Raellus

11-24-2015, 01:19 PM

ASPQRZ, you are clearly widely and well-read. I respect that. I too have a fairly respectable library of WWII scholarship. I have a degree in history and have taught it for nearly a decade now.

I've read some of the books and authors that you mentioned*. I will look into the ones that I have not. AFAIK, none of the works we have common experience with assert that the UK/Commonwealth didn't need U.S. assistance or speculate that they could defeated all of the Axis Powers without it. Apparently, we are drawing different conclusions from much the same information. Fair play there. I am just not seeing direct academic support- raw data, analysis, or synthesis- that supports your interpretations. I see a lot of picking and choosing of evidence to support your position. However, in my professional opinion, the preponderance of the evidence does not. In other words, I think that you are missing the forest for the trees.

But, at this point, I think that we are both beating a horse that is well and truly dead. I don't think either of us are prepared to change our respective points of view on the matter either. I am fine with agreeing to disagree.

That said, I'm interested in reading your response to my counterarguments to your allegations that GB had a track record of spanking larger continental powers (you implied that they did so on their own) and then quickly and easily paying off the financial burdens incurred during those wars. I cited two widely known examples refuting those assertions. I also mentioned GB's economic struggles during and after WWII- a historical reality despite substantial American material and financial aid, both during and after the war. Neither precedence nor the events of WWII support your argument that GB and the Commonwealth were ever in a position, militarily or financially, to defeat the Axis on their own.

I like speculative fiction and alternate histories as much as the next guy, but that's really all that this is.

*I am not sure why you keep citing Glantz. I've read several works by Glantz and, IIRC, if anything, he stresses the critical importance of Lend-Lease aid (from the USA and UK) in the Soviet Union both weathering the early storm and making possible its successes of 1943-'45.

Olefin

11-24-2015, 04:40 PM

without the Lend Lease the Brits and Soviets lose the war - thats pretty much a fact -

however there is losing a war where you end up totally occupied and under enemy domination - and losing a war where you lose territory and resources and population but still stay independent

If you read what Hitler's goals were he never had the occupation of the entire UK and British Empire as one of those goals or the occupation of all of the Soviet Union

what he wanted was basically the European areas of the Soviet Union and the old German colonies in Africa

if that is what the UK and the Soviet Union would be trying to prevent then yes they could "win" a war against Germany and Italy and Japan without direct US participation as a combatant - however if what you mean by winning is that they defeat the Axis and they surrender that isnt possible - at best they fight them to a draw

and short of actually going to war itself there is no way the US ever would have switched its industrial production enough to give the Allies what they needed to win and actually beat the Axis to a surrender

however they would have given them enough to take the Axis to the negotiation table eventually for an armistice (probably like the one in Korea where the borders are armed camps full of mines and machine gun nests)

in that way the UK and Russians could have "won" the war without us - winning meaning frustrating Hitler's aims and surviving

aspqrz

11-24-2015, 05:43 PM

ASPQRZ, you are clearly widely and well-read. I respect that. I too have a fairly respectable library of WWII scholarship. I have a degree in history and have taught it for nearly a decade now.

Double Major, Ancient/Medieval/Modern. 37 years teaching it. FWIW.

I've read some of the books and authors that you mentioned*. I will look into the ones that I have not. AFAIK, none of the works we have common experience with assert that the UK/Commonwealth didn't need U.S. assistance or speculate that they could defeated all of the Axis Powers without it.

Of course they don't. For the obvious reason, as I noted, that they are historians writing history, not alternate history. Indeed, when historians write alternate history it is (in my experience) almost universally awful.

However, they also deal in facts ... and, as I could point out (and as you undoubtedly understand), interpretation of facts changes over time, especially as new research brings new facts to light, or shines a different light on things that 'everyone knows' ... responsibility for WW1, for example. When I started Uni, pretty much entirely Germany's fault with a tinge of automaticity (train timetables) ... these days? Everyone's fault, with a rising tide of 'blame the idiot pollies who didn't grasp the seriousness of a potential war' ... which is, of course, grossly simplifying things to give a generalised trend.

The facts have, by and large, not changed ... and relatively few new facts have come to light, but reinterpretation of existing facts has brought forward several generations of revisionism.

ISTR some historian (forget who) making the lucid observation that the definitive histories of WW1/WW2 wouldn't (indeed, couldn't) be written for at least a couple of centuries ... and we can see the process occurring as I type this, almost.

Apparently, we are drawing different conclusions from much the same information. Fair play there. I am just not seeing direct academic support- raw data, analysis, or synthesis- that supports your interpretations. I see a lot of picking and choosing of evidence to support your position. However, in my professional opinion, the preponderance of the evidence does not. In other words, I think that you are missing the forest for the trees.

And in my professional opinion you are ignoring clear evidence as well, evidence which makes it clear that Germany, as a continental power, did not have the wherewithal to take on a naval power given that she had a clear inferiority in overall economic capacity ... in exactly the same way that Napoleonic France was unable to overcome Britain.

And, of course, you seem to be ignoring, or not grasping, that I have repeatedly pointed out it would not have been an easy Commonwealth victory ... but a slow, grinding, attritional one (at least until the Atomic Bombs start dropping from the Lancaster follow-ons in the early to mid-50's), and that the world resulting would be a very different one to the one that actually occurred.

I also feel that you are cherry picking your objections ... indeed, creating them where they simply cannot stand, as in the matter of Japan in the Far East, ignoring the reality that if they attacked the Commonwealth and her allies they had to attack the US. I am not aware of any mainstream historian who supports that line of thought ... unless they're conspiracy theorists.

But, at this point, I think that we are both beating a horse that is well and truly dead. I don't think either of us are prepared to change our respective points of view on the matter either. I am fine with agreeing to disagree.

Indeed, as I said to someone earlier on ... or should have if I didn't ... YMMV.

That said, I'm interested in reading your response to my counterarguments to your allegations that GB had a track record of spanking larger continental powers (you implied that they did so on their own) and then quickly and easily paying off the financial burdens incurred during those wars. I cited two widely known examples refuting those assertions. I also mentioned GB's economic struggles during and after WWII- a historical reality despite substantial American material and financial aid, both during and after the war. Neither precedence nor the events of WWII support your argument that GB and the Commonwealth were ever in a position, militarily or financially, to defeat the Axis on their own.

And I provided a source that shows your argument to be wrong, or at the very least not entirely supportable ...

And your reading of the 7 Years War and its outcome is ... unusual ... as pretty much every historian I have read on the subject makes the point that it led to British pre-eminence and France being reduced to a second rate power (or, really, finally recognised as such) ...

For example, British defence spending as a percentage of government revenue averaged ~70% or so (min. 62%, max. 89%) during the entirety of the 18th Century, while France managed only a max. of 41% ... reflecting, of course, the capital intensive nature of naval warfare ... and, yes, the Brits eventually lost the American colonies. So what?

They won the 7 Years War. They defeated Napoleon. They gained effective control of more territory than they lost in both conflicts. And they paid down the debt incurred in fighting those wars effectively ... as, as I indicated, any study of the National Debt plainly shows. They emerged as the pre-eminent world and european power and retained that status right through to WW1 (though, yes, WW1 showed that things had been changing ...). Aka, they 'won' despite the short term costs ... hell, despite even the medium term costs!

As far as a non-US WW2 goes, could the Commonwealth have won? Obviously, based on economics, the answer is yes. As I have repeatedly pointed out, and which you still don't seem to have fully understood, such a victory would have been neither fast nor cheap. Would it have caused economic stresses that could have had similar consequences to the American Revolution ... hell yes. Would that change the fact that the Commonwealth could/would have defeated Germany (aka 'won the war') ... IMO, no.

This is obviously where our main point of difference is.

Phil

aspqrz

11-24-2015, 05:44 PM

without the Lend Lease the Brits and Soviets lose the war - thats pretty much a fact

An interesting assertion not borne out by the facts on the ground.

Phil

Olefin

11-24-2015, 06:03 PM

the facts on the ground are that without US participation in the war the UK and the Soviets in the end could have outlasted the Germans and Italians and Japanese but only if their populations were ready to basically face a very very very long war - and while that was possible in the Soviet Union it was not in the UK

dictatorships can harness people in ways that democracy's cannot - look at what happened to Churchill when he said we are done in Europe now we have to finish the job in Asia as an example

if it had become clear that Hitler was ready to leave the UK alone and sue for a seperate peace with the UK and you had the right political climate then its just Hitler versus the Soviets - and Germany's industrial base with no bombing to slow it down, especially of its oil production and the Soviets would not have been able to win - survive yes, win no

especially imagine how much difference it would have made in 1942 after Tobruk without the US ready and willing to pour in planes and tanks to save their position in Africa - something Roosevelt could not have done if he wasnt commander in chief of a nation at war

StainlessSteelCynic

11-24-2015, 07:21 PM

You make a big assumption.
The British public would not have automatically said no to a prolonged war in Europe like they did for the war in Asia. The war in Europe had an immediacy for the British public that the war in Asia did not, the war in Europe was on their doorstep and it's highly unlikely that any population under those circumstances would have "just given up" the fight because it was going to last a few years longer than they liked.

Raellus

11-24-2015, 07:51 PM

OK, Aspqrz, now you're getting nasty. I am well aware of historiography. You don't have to explain to me how historical interpretations change. You may have more teaching experience than I do (kudos to you sir) but you needn't talk down to me.

Since we're now cataloguing what our opposite is choosing to ignore, or "not grasping", let's list a few major points that you are ignoring or not grasping.

GB did not win the 7 Years War alone.

GB was on the winning side in the 7 Years War but lost her most prosperous N. American colonies in the balance, in large part do to mismanagement prompted by the massive debt taken on during said conflict. I'm referring now to the American Revolution. I understand that serious Anglophiles would probably like to pretend that it didn't happen, but it did.

GB did not win the Napoleonic Wars on her own either.

Oh, and she did not win WWI OR WWII alone either. You see a pattern here. So do I: Britain doesn't have a track record of defeated Continental Powers on its own or easily or cheaply.

GB's economy was strained to the breaking point during WWII (6 years). She received millions of dollars (billions, adjusted) in material and monetary aid from the U.S. during and immediately after the war. GB's economy was depressed after WWII ended, for quite some time. This does not speak of economic strength or staying power. See my next point.

GB lost most of its overseas empire in the three decades following WWII. As far as I understand it, this was, in large part, due to its military weakness and inability to sustain its imperial holdings financially.

Three of these four points, here repeated for the third time, put paid to your central argument that the British Commonwealth, on its own, could have won the war against the Axis Powers without American assistance, even in a long, drawn out conflict. I'm not ignoring or failing to grasp that bolded point. I just disagree with it, and I have made arguments against it.

Also, why did Japan have to attack U.S. possessions in the Asia and Pacific (i.e. the Philippines) in order to complete its conquest of French, Dutch, and British possessions in the region? You treat this as an inevitability but I don't see it as such. Would you care to explain your reasoning?

Legbreaker

11-24-2015, 08:26 PM

OK, Aspqrz, now you're getting nasty.

Doesn't look that way to me. Perhaps a bit of a break from the keyboard is in order for all those intimately involved with the discussion?

aspqrz

11-24-2015, 08:41 PM

aspqrz

11-24-2015, 09:15 PM

OK, Aspqrz, now you're getting nasty. I am well aware of historiography. You don't have to explain to me how historical interpretations change. You may have more teaching experience than I do (kudos to you sir) but you needn't talk down to me.

I am sorry that you believe that I was talking down to you, as I was most definitely not. I was merely giving an example that is well known, and one I have had first hand experience of teaching, as an example ... nothing more, nothing less.

Since we're now cataloguing what our opposite is choosing to ignore, or "not grasping", let's list a few major points that you are ignoring or not grasping.

GB did not win the 7 Years War alone.

GB was on the winning side in the 7 Years War but lost her most prosperous N. American colonies in the balance, in large part do to mismanagement prompted by the massive debt taken on during said conflict. I'm referring now to the American Revolution. I understand that serious Anglophiles would probably like to pretend that it didn't happen, but it did.

The UK lost the North American colonies, some of them anyway, well after the end of the 7YW ... as a consequence, quite probably, but so what? I never said that there were none ... nor did I say that there would not be consequences of the Commonwealth and Russia fighting alone against Germany ... in fact, I alluded to the likelihood that the world would be a very different place.

The fact is, the UK won the 7YW and came out of it better than their principal allies who were, at best, able to manage regaining/holding the status quo ante.

As for them having allies, yes. So? Again, I never said that the UK could have won alone, and clearly indicated that it would fight alongside the Russians. As allies. Or co-belligerents. Or whatever.

Also note that the UK supported governments in exile in WW2 in the same way as it fomented rebellion/alternative governments in the 7YW and the Napoleonic Wars ... something she has had a long historical track record of doing.

GB did not win the Napoleonic Wars on her own either.

Oh, and she did not win WWI OR WWII alone either. You see a pattern here. So do I: Britain doesn't have a track record of defeated Continental Powers on its own or easily or cheaply.

Indeed I see a pattern. But it is a strawman argument, I pointed out that the UK (assisting/assisted by) Russia could have won the war without US assistance and, at no point, claimed that it would be easy.

GB's economy was strained to the breaking point during WWII (6 years). She received millions of dollars (billions, adjusted) in material and monetary aid from the U.S. during and immediately after the war. GB's economy was depressed after WWII ended, for quite some time. This does not speak of economic strength or staying power. See my next point.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/UK_GDP.png

Despite the fact that WW1 and WW2 were fought almost back to back, the National Debt never reached the heights that it did during the Napoleonic Wars ... and was paid down to pre-war levels in 40 years after the postwar peak rather than the century it took to do the same after the Napoleonic postwar peak.

Much stronger, in fact, than earlier.

As for the economic assistance, yes, again, so what? The Brits suffered more relative pain during the Napoleonic period and took longer to pay the debt down ... and could have done so again.

Note: This is not saying that it would be easy. Not at all. Merely that, based on their historical track record, it was possible.

GB lost most of its overseas empire in the three decades following WWII. As far as I understand it, this was, in large part, due to its military weakness and inability to sustain its imperial holdings financially.

Something that was known and being prepared for well before WW2.

In fact, it was known and understood well before WW1. Indeed, it was known and understood, but trumped by immediate jingoistic politics, as far back as the 1830s and pretty much definitively by the late 19th century.

It may, or may not, on a case by case basis, have been accellerated by WW1 and WW2, but it was a process underway even before them.

Three of these four points, here repeated for the third time, put paid to your central argument that the British Commonwealth could have won the war against the Axis Powers without American assistance, even in a long, drawn out conflict. I'm not ignoring or failing to grasp that bolded point. I just disagree with it, and I have made arguments against it.

Well, you've arguably put paid to an argument - unfortunately none of them are arguments I made, or they are based on assumptions that clearly were not part of the arguments I made.

Also, why did Japan have to attack U.S. possessions in the Asia and Pacific (i.e. the Philippines) in order to complete its conquest of French, Dutch, and British possessions in the region? You treat this as an inevitability but I don't see it as such. Would you care to explain your reasoning?

Easy Peasy.

1) The US was seen by the Japanese as a threat regardless of what was going on in Europe (you could argue that this was a complete misreading of the US and her intentions, though many historians would hem and haw about such an interpretation ... but that is what we know the Japanese believed).

2) Japan didn't have the merchant fleet, especially tankers, to do anything but the most direct route from the Home islands to the British and Dutch possessions ... which meant they had to sail close to the PI, which the US were seen to be militarising, and which militarisation was seen to be directed at Japan by the Japanese (again, you could argue they were wrong in that belief, with the same hemming and hawing by historians as mentioned previously but, again, we know this is what the Japanese believed).

3) Ergo, there was an imminent military threat against their plans on the part of what they believed to be a hostile power ... so, given the military domination of Japanese politics and the world view, correct or incorrect, that the military had, to protect their supply lines for the invasions and, then, more importantly, prevent interference with their shipping bringing the spoils home, they believed that the only option they had was to attack the US, take out the Pacific Fleet, take the PI etc. etc.

Was this based on crazy reasoning and false assumptions? At least partly. But, within their craziness, they were reasoning consistently ... ergo, unless you assume a US run by political and economic forces that are completely different to what actually existed then and there and also assume a sane, rational and logical (not to mention conciliatory) Japanese leadership, then a Japanese attack = the perceived necessity of attacking the US.

Easy peasy, as I said.

Phil

Raellus

11-24-2015, 09:47 PM

I'm finding this debate rather frustrating. You're clearly an intelligent and well-read fellow. I bear you no ill will. This shouldn't be so painful, but it is. I was enjoying intellectual the tete-a-tete, but now I am not.

First off, I don't like arguing against GB. I consider myself an Anglophile. I graduated from a British secondary in Montevideo, Uruguay. I enjoy watching football (come on, Arsenal!), the Mighty Boosh, and Doctor Who (Tom Baker is the Doctor, for my money). I've been to England twice in the last four years.

Also, I'm one of the most reasonable and least jingoistic Americans on this board. I'll be the first to call out my country on foreign policy stumbles (I was opposed to the invasion of Iraq from the get-go) and regularly find myself as the sole American apologist for our biggest military rivals, Russia and China. I'm not trying to give the U.S.A. undue credit here.

That's just part of it, though. The other part of it is that it's almost impossible to debate someone who resorts to "yeah, so what?" as a response to legitimate arguments. I could just as easily respond "yeah, so what?" to your entire thesis!

So, I'll let you have the last word. This will be my last post in this thread. When your doctoral dissertation, How the British Commonwealth and the Soviet Union Could/Would have defeated the Axis Powers in Europe and Asia without any direct American Assistance* is vetted and accepted by the senior history faculty of a reputable university, then I will concede defeat. Until that time, "so what?" :rolleyes:

*Although I am sure you will qualify your position again before then.

aspqrz

11-24-2015, 11:01 PM

Just as, indeed, I find it disconcerting to have someone tell me that I am arguing a position I patently am not now, nor ever have.

Likewise I await the chance to read your doctoral thesis as well.

YMMV.

Phil

Legbreaker

11-25-2015, 08:31 PM

I think this is rather telling. http://www.g2mil.com/thompson.htm
In the first six months of 1942, there was “an aggregate of 397 ships sunk in U.S. Navy-protected waters. And the totals do not include the many ships damaged. Overall, the numbers represent one of the greatest maritime disasters in history and the American nation’s worst-ever defeat at sea.” In return, the US Navy was only able to sink six U-boats! (During the same period, the British et al. were credited with 32 U-boat kills.) So dire was the situation that at one point General George C. Marshall, US Army, wrote to Admiral King to say “‘another month or so of this’ would so cripple their means of transport they would be unable to bring US forces to bear against the enemy.” Indeed, the Germans had a very good chance of disabling the entire US east coast, as Hickam told us, if only Hitler had permitted Doenitz to have the required numbers of U-boats, and the time to do it. If that had happened, Hickam speculated that the losses to the US “might have proven terminal.” During those deadly months of 1942, “The American Atlantic coast no longer belonged to the Americans. It quite literally had become the safe hunting ground for the U-boats of Nazi Germany,” said Hickam, with U-boats destroying US ships “just a few miles off Norfolk, practically within sight of the American fleet.” Admiral Doenitz told a reporter in 1942 “Our submarines are operating close inshore along the coast of the United States of America, so that bathers and sometimes entire coastal cities are witnesses to that drama of war, whose visual climaxes are constituted by the red glorioles of blazing tankers.” By the end of June, Captain Wilder D. Baker, US Navy, finally said something about his Navy’s poor showing in the Atlantic – “‘The Battle of the Atlantic is being lost.’”
Reading that it would seem quite possible for the US to have been knocked out of the war, at least in Europe, leaving the Commonwealth to go it alone.

A few paragraphs earlier it mentioned the Japanese never really bothered sending their subs to attack US shipping in the Pacific (even though the Germans constantly urged them to) and if they'd done so right from the beginning (December 1941), the US would have been extremely hard pressed to achieve anything there as well.

As I read more and more of this, which was written by an American using primarily American sources, the more it shows the US did not contribute as much to the survival of the Commonwealth as it claimed. I find one particular paragraph of great interest:

It is also ironic to note that the US Navy also apprompted or bought warships from Canada and the UK (including an aircraft carrier, HMS Victorious). This last comment is a minor, perhaps trivial point of course, but it, along with the U-boat hunting statistics mentioned above and the reality that Canadian and British ships had to escort allied shipping through American waters, surprises many who espouse the traditional “If it weren’t for us, you’d all be speaking German” polemics so often recited in certain lay circles. Actually, when the British deployed some two dozen ASW trawlers to the US east coast in 1942, the British viewed it as a “rescue mission.”

StainlessSteelCynic

11-25-2015, 09:56 PM

I'd say that what this really shows us, is that the reality is often a complex beast that few historians have managed to capture in its entirety. That is to say, there's a lot of events that have escaped general attention and even for historians and researchers, people don't often have a 100% full picture of the event.

For example, I've found in my own research on Cold War era military vehicles that many well known and credible authors have made some simple errors that should not have happened and the reason for this is that many, under a deadline, don't research the topic as well as they should and they fall back on earlier authors and the body of work they produced as the primary source material.

As an illustration of this, I have a book by Greenhill, a company just as reputable as Jane's Information Group. The book claims to list "Over 800 vehicles from 1915 to the present, every armoured fighting vehicle that has ever existed". Ignoring the bit about "to the present" as the book was published in 2000 but within 10 minutes reading I found at least five vehicles that were not even referenced let alone included and I don't mean such things as obscure one-offs from some design group in Nazi German.
They failed to list significant vehicles like the Canadian Bobcat APC, the Swiss MOWAG Typhoon or the US airportable T92 light tank.

The point being, they didn't dig deep enough and they instead used earlier sources that were themselves incomplete. They were then unable to present a full picture but they themselves were also apparently unaware of this lack of knowledge.

Legbreaker

11-26-2015, 12:48 AM

So far I've spent about 5-6 hours reading through the thesis mentioned above and I'm still only about 70% of the way through. It's big and absolutely comprehensive covering just about every detail.
The more I read, the more I believe the T2K timeline wasn't just possible, but likely (with regard to naval operations). In fact it would seem the US navy would have been hard pressed to even achieve a result as good as they did off the coast of Norway in 1996 (virtual destruction) given the wide ranging failures of the navy command structure and absolute resistance to either change or acknowledging any problems. Anyone who raised/raises an issue it would seem is very quickly shut down an censured, their careers stalled. That is if they're not turned into a scapegoat and dismissed from service at the first opportunity.

The US Navy appears to have a culture of cover up. Lessons learned through experience are ignored to protect the careers of those at the top.

I STRONGLY encourage everyone to read it if they can (I know it's a big job, but well worth the effort).

RN7

11-27-2015, 09:45 AM

Tell that to the millions of people from many, many nations who fought and died there. To imply it was nothing but a "sideshow" is downright insulting!

So more people lost their life on the Eastern Front alone between 1941 and 1945 than the whole of Asia between 1937 and 1945, but we should ignore that fact and not call the war in Asia a sideshow compared to events in Europe as some in Asian might find that insulting. How insulted would the Russians be?

RN7

11-27-2015, 09:58 AM

Threat to who? I don't understand this argument. It can only be valid from a very Eurocentric point of view.

Granted, the Japanese didn't ever really pose a serious threat to CONUS, but, without the USN to hold (and then push) them back, the rest of the Pacific world was in serious danger of Japanese conquest and domination. I'm that a vast majority of the billions of people in Asia would strenuously disagree with your "sideshow" assessment.

-

Not a direct physical threat to America at the time perhaps but certainly a threat to everyone in Europe.

In 1941-45 who was Japan's opposition in Asia? China, the British and Dutch colonies and dominions and America across the Pacific Ocean.

In 1939-45 who was Germany's opposition, and were the forces assembled in the Far East against Japan comparable to those assembled against Germany.

Did Japan compare favourably in industrial and technological terms to Germany? Was the Japanese Army as well equipped or as large as the German Army? Did Japan engage in the industrial scale murder of millions of civilians in Asia? Did Japan field jet fighters and ballistic missiles in 1944?

RN7

11-27-2015, 10:17 AM

And you miss the point entirely.

The USSR was able to produce as much of pretty much anything it actually did produce because they didn't have to produce a lot of the stuff that the Allies provided to them. They could survive Butcher Stalin's squandering of their manpower and still field massive armies because they didn't have to have as many factory workers as they would have required without Lend Lease.

It is widely understood by specialists (and, afaict, never mentioned in non-specialist works) that Soviet Industry was wildly inefficient compared to Western Industry and that the fact that they were supplied by Lend Lease meant they could comb out far more now redundant workers than the Lend Lease supplies actually represented.

The fact that they produced a lot of stuff is ... nice ... but irrelevant.

And a lot of what they produced was, compared to allied stuff, crap ... they had to produce a lot of it because it wore out, broke down, or was unserviceable most of the time.

Allied Tanks, for example, were operational around 80% of the time. Russian Tanks? About 30-40%. So the Russians had to field twice as many tanks as an Allied Force to simply have the same number operational.

Russian tanks wore out faster, too. T-34s typically went into battle with extra Transmissions loaded on their back deck because they were so unreliable and the MTBF of a T-34 was around 100 hours, or 250 klicks, before it required a major rebuild ... and after another 100 hours or 250 klicks it was more often than not uneconomic to repair.

A lot of Russian equipment was like that ... so if they produced a lot of it, that is not an indicator of the actual value of the stuff, or even how much of it was usable or survived the war.

Phil

So if I understand correctly you are saying that the USSR was only able to build so many tanks, artillery, munitions, aircraft etc in WW2 because Allied Lend Lease supplied them with everything else. Also unlike Britain for example the Soviets didn't have the specialised industrial expertise, machinery and tools to mass produce material that they would have needed to support themselves. Well if that is the case how come the Soviet Union was supplied with 10,982 millions dollars worth of Lend Lease and the British Empire was supplied with 31,387 million dollars worth of Lend Lease (3 times as much as the USSR)? Also can you compare the difference between the material that the United States supplied to the Soviet Union and the British Empire for comparison to support that statement?

RN7

11-27-2015, 10:53 AM

SMGs, Machineguns, Mortars, 25 pdr artillery. Ammunition and Artillery rounds.

Oh, and sixty Bathurst class Corvettes alone were built in Australia. Six Tribal Class Destroyers were built in Australia.

And we built RR Aero engines for a variety of, yes, imported aircraft.

However, we built around 700 Beauforts locally, too, around 400 Beaufighters, 700 odd Wirraway Trainers, 250 Boomerang Fighters etc.

Yes, not much in the greater scheme of things, but much more than most people, even most Australians, realise!

And rather more than you claimed.

Phil

Outside of small arms and munitions which almost every country in WW2 produced how much of Australia's war production was sent outside of Australia and the South West Pacific Area theatre?

I stated that Australia produced 16 escorts in WW2. I included the Tribal Class Destroyers as escorts as that is the type of warship they are; escorts to larger fleet warships such as cruisers, capitol ships and aircraft carriers; But on closer examination I overstated that figure. Between 1939 and the end of the war Australia only produced 11 escorts (2 Grimsby Class Sloops, 6 River Class Frigates and 3 Tribal Class destroyers, and one of the Tribal Class was commissioned in May 1945).

I didn't include the Bathurst Class as escorts as they were originally classed as minesweepers, later re-designated corvettes and then classed again as minesweepers depending on their deployment. Incidentally 4 ships in the class were involved in mutinous activity due to the poor working and living conditions aboard these vessels, a record for a single class I think.

The Bristol Beaufort and Beaufighter were British designs. The 700 Beaufort's license built in Australia used American engines. The 365 Beaufighters were only built from 1944, and the Wirraway and Boomerang used American engines.

RN7

11-27-2015, 11:43 AM

The Bristol Beaufort and Beaufighter were British designs. The 700 Beaufort's license built in Australia used American engines. The 365 Beaufighters were only built from 1944, and the Wirraway and Boomerang used American engines.

Although some of the Beaufort's and Boomerang's engines were built under license in Lidcombe NSW by General Motor's Holden subsidiary.

Cdnwolf

11-27-2015, 05:47 PM

GODZILLA WON!

Can we now lock this thread?

StainlessSteelCynic

11-27-2015, 06:05 PM

GODZILLA WON!

Can we now lock this thread?

I have a suggestion for you. Stop reading this thread.

Is it argumentative? Yes it is, (in the proper sense of arguing a point).
Is it polarizing? Yes it is.
Is it combatative? Yeah we've seen that too.
Is it divisive? No it isn't, not to the point of hostility.
I will agree that it has the potential to get heated and hostile but then so do many other threads were people argue from opposite sides.

RN7

11-27-2015, 06:16 PM

And I'll say it again, too. There is nothing fantasist about it.

The Germans had no way of defeating the Commonwealth ... no, their U-Boat Campaign didn't ever manage it, either, and it is wishful thinking to believe it could have ... the Commonwealth could not easily have defeated the Germans, either, however, as I noted, on a historical basis, the UK has taken on powers as strong as she is/was and defeated them even if it took decades.

Germany wasn't at war with the Commonwealth, it was at war with Britain in Europe (also in the Atlantic and North Africa) and only fought Commonwealth forces who were deployed in these areas to support British forces. I doubt Germany even had any realistic plans for a war with the Commonwealth that was separate from plans directed against Britain.

And the UK had an Atomic Weapons program and the werewithal to, slowly, bring it to fruition ... the Germans had none, and even their pathetic nuclear power programs were working the wrong direction.

Britain had an atomic weapons programme but it wouldn't have independently produced an atomic bomb before 1950 without American involvement.

Would a Commonwealth/Russian victory have been quick? No. Would it have been easy? Hell no! But there is no evidence that the Germans could have won, and the Commonwealth have that historical track record of sticking to it!

How exactly would Britain have established air superiority over the English Channel and Northern France and Low Countries, and cleared German submarine forces from the North Sea, Western Approaches and North Atlantic, and then assemble an army the size of what was assembled during D-Day and then mount an invasion of Western Europe without the involvement of America?

RN7

11-27-2015, 06:59 PM

Note where it was tested. Certainly wasn't in the UK!!!
Middle of Australia, Woomera to be exact.

India was still in the fight as was Australia and New Zealand, not to mention South Africa as well as a number of other countries of somewhat lesser strategic importance (although able to supply troops and materials). Although at the time there was a great deal of fear that the Japanese would continue southward and roll over Australia and New Zealand, there was in reality little need for them to do that, nor did they really have the available forces anyway. Australia is HUGE. They'd need hundreds of thousands of troops to take it in the 1940s (more today with our greater population), troops they simply didn't have as it turned out.

With the constant threat of German aerial attack it's likely much of the UKs industrial production would be shifted to safer colonies (such as South Africa) with finished products shipped in via convoys. Eygpt and the suez canal would likely have become even more important with Commonwealth efforts against the Axis forces concentrated there while the UK itself carried out only holding actions to prevent invasion. Instead of D-Day landings being in France, the main thrust (when it finally came, likely several years later) may have been up through the middle east in an attempt to link up with the Soviets.

All in all though it's really impossible to say what might have happened, but it is foolish to say the UK would definitely have been defeated without the US.

It was possible. Even with the multiple fronts the Commonwealth were holding their own using substandard equipment (mainly god awful tanks with underpowered guns and dodgy tactics). It may have taken a few years but the Commonwealth may have been able to strangle Germany just enough to force a stalemate, and eventually, after another decade or two, maybe even take back some areas.

It would be a radically different world that which we live in today, one I imagine would somewhat resemble that shown in the George Orwell book, 1984 with war a constant background and the people generally living in poverty.

Although it is doubtful that Germany would have beaten Britain through military invasion, if America wasn't involved in the war and German progress in submarine warfare, jet aircraft and rocket technology had continued at the pace it did in reality there is also a strong possibility that Germany might have beaten Britain into submission.

Relocating British industry to other parts of the Commonwealth to fight on is however wishful thinking. Canada (mainly Ontario and Quebec) were the only part of the British Empire outside the UK that were heavily industrialised before the war, and that is the only place were any continuation of British military and industrial power would remain due to the fact that it is also protected by its proximity to the United States. It is possible to transplant factories and use blueprints to restart war production but only to a point. In WW2 arms and related industrial factories were only built on a limited scale in the British Empire outside of Canada, and that was when the British Empire was allied with and under the protection of the United States. With Britain defeated how long will India and the non-white colonies remain part of the British Empire, or in fact would Afrikaaner dominated South Africa remain British? Also with no alliance with America and Britain knocked out, were will the technical expertise and the finance to support a Commonwealth led British Empire come from?

RN7

11-27-2015, 07:38 PM

My point exactly. And, to other posters, no, I am not trolling and the fact that Historians don't suggest that the Commonwealth could have won alone is unsurprising. Historians document what did happen, generally speaking, and shy away from explaining what could have happened except in the shortest of short terms, maybe medium term if they stretch it.

And, of course, many Historians, even respected ones, don't actually do a lot of (and, in some cases, any at all) original research ... they simply rehash what is available in secondary sources and seldom check to see whether those secondary sources are based on reliable primary sources.

This is one of the reasons why our understanding of the war in the East has so radically changed in the last quarter century ... decades of Soviet lies and misinformation is gradually being chipped away at by people like Glantz (good researcher, terrible writer btw). But even before that by people such as Barber and Harrison in books such as "The Soviet Home Front, 1941-5: a Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II" and in others of their extensive writings on the Soviet economy.

Unfortunately, this material has yet to make its way into the wider historical context, especially in generalist histories and histories aimed at a non-specialist audience.

So are you implying that the Soviets (and the Germans) lied about the Eastern Front in the Second World War, and that we should discount the forces listed as being present in the campaigns and battles on the Eastern Front and the casualty rates incurred during them?

Similar material is increasingly available in specialist economic and historical circles that debunks many of the more ludicrous claims about such things as the U Boat campaign bringing the UK to its knees or that it could have defeated her single handedly.

And what should we make of the naval losses statistics during the battle of the Atlantic?

As for the Japanese - well, as I noted elsewhere, the US and Japanese were on a path to conflict without the UK anywhere. If the Japs decided to steal all the resources they needed because of the US embargoes, they will, indeed, almost certainly go to war with the UK etc. Unfortunately, military reality, and their own unique and not entirely crazy (but always consistent within its own crazy logic) take on reality meant that, to take and secure the resources of Malaya, Borneo, the DEI and elsewhere they needed to take out the US forces in the PI. Which meant war with the US.

Although Japan's actions may have been guided by the fact that Germany had taken control over most of Europe, pinned Britain against the wall and declared war on the Soviet Union.

Now, if the US decides to ignore Europe and simply fight the Japs, the Japs are not a major problem for the Commonwealth for more than a year, maybe a year and a bit ... after all, as we all know, the US put 80% of its war effort into Europe and only 20% into the Pacific. If they had put 100% into the Pacific they would have swamped the Japs at least a year, and more likely 1.5-2 years, earlier ... though without the A-Bomb, of course.

Well the US would have had to have beaten the Imperial Japanese Navy and also mobilise its manpower and industry to create military forces capable of clearing the Japanese from the Pacific which would have taken longer than a year or two.

And the A-Bomb. Tubealloys provided a lot of the theoretical and engineering underpinning for the US program on the, mistaken, understanding that the US would share the fruits of such ... so the UK didn't expend resources on it. If the US was not involved, then the program would have continued ... granted, much less quickly than the Manhattan Engineering District did, but I never suggested it would.

Well if the UK and US didn't cooperate in Atomic research and Britain went ahead alone I don't think we would have seen Atomic bomb's until the 1950's

And, of course, I note you completely ignore the historical stick-to-it-ivity of the British Empire at war over the last several centuries and her ability to fund and pay off such wars within extremely short periods of time.

I just get annoyed at people trotting out 'facts' that are now known to not be such in specialist circles and pooh-poohing anyone who disagrees with those disproven assertions.

Not trolling at all.

Phil

Although the relevance of history is important to us all I think the logistics, tactics, technology and cost of mechanised warfare of the mid-20th Century would differ somewhat to warfare and realities fought by the British Empire during the Seven years War and Napoleonic wars, when armies used gunpowder and muskets and navies were dependent on sail and wind.

RN7

11-27-2015, 07:47 PM

Probably not. The UK had large underground factory complexes for all sorts of things and, indeed, much of their industry was actually completely beyond the range of German bombers and more was beyond the range of unescorted German bombers (aka 'sitting ducks').

And, as we know from German experiences with the Bombing Campaign, factory buildings are easy(ish) to destroy, but the machine tools in them ... not so much. It was common for 'destroyed' factories to be back in production in days or weeks with, at best, only temporary shelter above the workers heads (if any at all) ... the Russians found much the same with the factories they relocated east of the Urals, they were back in production as soon as the machines were on firm footings, even in winter, and way before anything more than temporary shelter was erected over them.

If the Germans and Russians could manage it, no reason why the Brits couldn't.

Phil

No part of Britain was outside the range of German bombers. The Soviet Union had the vast expanses of Siberia to relocate its factories to, and Germany was geographically larger than Britain and even more so when you add the territory it conquered and annexed in Eastern Europe during the war.

StainlessSteelCynic

11-27-2015, 08:04 PM

Britain had an atomic weapons programme but it wouldn't have independently produced an atomic bomb before 1950 without American involvement.

That's not the interpretation I gained from reading about Britain's nuclear weapons research. In fact it appears completely opposite what you state here. Britain was conducting atomic weapons research in 1940. It sent it's data and it's researchers to the US to encourage and assist the US in building atomic weapons.
The US was supposed to share all its findings with the UK but didn't due to security concerns. Britain essentially rebuilt its atomic weapons programme from scratch without any outside assistance so that approximately five years after wars end, they had working technology.

Edit: for more, refer to my post here http://forum.juhlin.com/showpost.php?p=68505&postcount=97

RN7

11-27-2015, 08:23 PM

If the British had continued their own programme instead of halting it to give their information and their researchers to the US, they likely would have had a bomb available to them around the same time as the Manhattan Project delivered its first weapon and possibly before.

Not a chance.

When America and Britain started to cooperate in 1940 they compared their work, and it was discovered that British research was more advanced and that Britain was spending more on research.

Once America put its full resources into the project the roles soon reversed heavily in favour of America. By 1942 Britain was spending about $2 million on R&D compare with America who was spending about $30 million on R&D, plus another $100 million on construction projects related to atomic research. This unequal balance remained if not increased until 1945. After the completion of the Manhattan Project the US conceded that early British research and scientists were helpful but not vital to the project, and that the US would have built an atomic bomb without British assistance. Although the US also conceded that without ongoing active British assistance they would not have had an atomic device by 1945.

For Britain to have built an atomic bomb without US cooperation it was estimated that it would have cost $12 million in R&D, and a nuclear reactor would have had to have been built (probably in Canada) costing $20 million and taking 5 years to construct, while industrial facilities, heavy water and uranium metal would have cost another $40 million. The project would involve over 20,000 highly skilled workers, half a million tons of steel and 500,000 kw of electricity, and all this during WW2 without any disruption. British participation in the Manhattan Project gave it a lot of data and expertise that it would have taken a lot longer to compile without its cooperation with the US, and even the success of Hurricane in 1952 was not without gaps in technology.

Legbreaker

11-28-2015, 02:30 AM

GODZILLA WON!

Can we now lock this thread?
Why censor debate? Happens all too often already without yet another thread being shut down just because somebody's ego is bruised.
As long as the insults are kept out of it, where's the problem?

RN7

11-28-2015, 03:56 AM

It's also worth noting the British had an aircraft more than capable to carrying an atomic bomb several years before the US - the Avro Lancaster.
With a payload of 22,000lbs, it was also capable of carrying nearly a ton more than the US B-29.

True British bombers had larger payloads compared with US bombers, but the B-29 was faster and had a longer range than the Lancaster and also had a greatly superior service ceiling height.

RN7

11-28-2015, 04:12 AM

I also feel that you are cherry picking your objections ... indeed, creating them where they simply cannot stand, as in the matter of Japan in the Far East, ignoring the reality that if they attacked the Commonwealth and her allies they had to attack the US. I am not aware of any mainstream historian who supports that line of thought ... unless they're conspiracy theorists.

They attacked the Commonwealth in Asia/Pacific because they could see that Britain was unlikely to be able to significantly oppose Japanese forces or significantly reinforce the Commonwealth due to being heavily engaged against Germany and Italy in Europe, North Africa and the Med. They were in retrospect very accurate with that assessment, and their major blunder was to seriously underestimate American resolve and resources.

As far as a non-US WW2 goes, could the Commonwealth have won? Obviously, based on economics, the answer is yes. As I have repeatedly pointed out, and which you still don't seem to have fully understood, such a victory would have been neither fast nor cheap. Would it have caused economic stresses that could have had similar consequences to the American Revolution ... hell yes. Would that change the fact that the Commonwealth could/would have defeated Germany (aka 'won the war') ... IMO, no.

This is obviously where our main point of difference is.

Phil

The British Commonwealth could not have beaten Germany on its own.

Legbreaker

11-28-2015, 04:42 AM

True British bombers had larger payloads compared with US bombers, but the B-29 was faster and had a longer range than the Lancaster and also had a greatly superior service ceiling height.

True, but the point is the British had the capability, perhaps moreso than the US and certainly earlier. The range difference wouldn't have been much of a factor in Europe although speed may have.

Legbreaker

11-28-2015, 04:48 AM

dragoon500ly

11-28-2015, 07:19 AM

Lets look at this from another angle.

Could the US have won without the Commonwealth. My money is firmly on "not a chance in hell".

Also, could Germany have won if a) they didn't have to bail out Italy in Africa, and/or b) they left the USSR alone for another year?

What if Spain had joined in on the side of the Axis?

What if Japan had coordinated their submarine war with Germany?

I don't believe that the U.S. or the Commonwealth could have the war without each other's support.

Could Germany have won the war if they hadn't had to intervene in Africa? Tough to call, since Africa would later prove to be essential for air and sea bases as well as a logistical base for later operations in Italy and Southern Europe. Without invading Russia, the Germans should have been to send in additional troops and support making the British operations much more difficult...hmmm how would Eighth Army performed against one of the first line field marshals?

I doubt that Spain would have able to enter the war as Franco was still rebuilding after the civil war, if he did enter the war, Gibraltar would have been besieged and almost certainly taken, sealing the Mediterranean at one end and making it far more likely that Malta would have been invaded.

Japan's submarine offensive would be harder to pull off, IJN doctrine had its subs primary mission as anti-warship, would they have modified their doctrine?

RN7

11-28-2015, 01:02 PM

True, but the point is the British had the capability, perhaps moreso than the US and certainly earlier. The range difference wouldn't have been much of a factor in Europe although speed may have.

But they had to have an atomic bomb to load on a Lancaster.

RN7

11-28-2015, 01:20 PM

Lets look at this from another angle.

Could the US have won without the Commonwealth. My money is firmly on "not a chance in hell".

It would have been difficult for them to do so in the early part of the war without Australia in the Pacific, and near impossible in Europe without Britain.

Also, could Germany have won if a) they didn't have to bail out Italy in Africa, and/or b) they left the USSR alone for another year?"

It would have been easier for them to do so but the more likely outcome would have been that the Germans reached an armistice with Britain in Europe and the Med.

What if Spain had joined in on the side of the Axis??"

It would have created problems for the Allies in North Africa and the Med, but more to do with enabling German forces to use Spanish ports and airbases than any great threat from Spanish forces. The Canary Islands and Spanish North Africa wouldn't last too long from Allied invasion and they would have been useful as bases against the Axis. Gibraltar probably would have been invaded but Spain would also have been wide open to attack and invasion from the Med and may have been an easier route to an Allied invade Europe than Italy and the South of France.

What if Japan had coordinated their submarine war with Germany?

It would have undoubtedly caused some problems but anti-submarine tactics used in the Atlantic could have countered it. Japanese submarines in the Atlantic and German U-boats in the Pacific might have been interesting.

aspqrz

11-28-2015, 05:49 PM

No part of Britain was outside the range of German bombers. The Soviet Union had the vast expanses of Siberia to relocate its factories to, and Germany was geographically larger than Britain and even more so when you add the territory it conquered and annexed in Eastern Europe during the war.

Really.

Possibly true, depending on where said German Bombers were based.

Utterly misleading, however.

As I noted in a previous post, IIRC, unescorted German Bombers could reach most of the UK.

Unescorted German Bombers = dead meat.

55% of the RAF was north of the maximum range line for escorted German Bombers ... which is, also, one reason why the Germans were never going to be able to win the Battle of Britain with the resources they had available.

Phil

aspqrz

11-28-2015, 06:12 PM

Germany wasn't at war with the Commonwealth, it was at war with Britain in Europe (also in the Atlantic and North Africa) and only fought Commonwealth forces who were deployed in these areas to support British forces. I doubt Germany even had any realistic plans for a war with the Commonwealth that was separate from plans directed against Britain. ]

That's an interesting ... assertion ... the Commonwealth Nations, Australia, Canada and New Zealand ... would have found it ... unusual ... as they believed they were at war with Germany as part of the Commonwealth (or Empire, or whatever you wish to call it).

Certainly Menzies made it plain that Australia was an integral part of it ...

Fellow Australians, it is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that, in consequence of the persistence of Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her, and that, as a result, Australia is also at war. No harder task can fall to the lot of a democratic leader than to make such an announcement. Great Britain and France, with the cooperation of the British Dominions, have struggled to avoid this tragedy.

... and the NZ and Canadian governments felt the same.

(Yes, I know all about the Statute of Westminster [1931] etc. But it is not relevant that the Commonwealth was in it under UK leadership)

Britain had an atomic weapons programme but it wouldn't have independently produced an atomic bomb before 1950 without American involvement.

Indeed. If I had said differently, there might be some point to this statement. Sadly, however, I have never said such, so it is irrelevant in and of itself.

How exactly would Britain have established air superiority over the English Channel and Northern France and Low Countries, and cleared German submarine forces from the North Sea, Western Approaches and North Atlantic, and then assemble an army the size of what was assembled during D-Day and then mount an invasion of Western Europe without the involvement of America?

Air Superiority over the English Channel etc. With the RAF, RCAF, RNZAF, RSAAF, and RAAF and probably the RIAF. As they did historically.

(Note: The definition of 'air superiority' is rather different to that of 'air supremacy' which is what I assume you really mean)

German U Boats in North Sea. Well, since this wasn't their prime operational area and was relatively shallow, relatively easily.

As for the Western Approaches etc. Clearing the areas of U-Boats is not necessary as long as you are building more merchant ships than are being sunk. Which, overall, the British Commonwealth was until the US entered the war and decided that convoys weren't necessary, and the loss rate went through the roof thanks to that piece of idiocy.

You might like to read about Operational Research and the weapons and tactics it allowed to be developed that nobbled the U-Boat threat.

And, of course, the allocation of more air power to LR ASW Patrols historically put the final nails in the coffin of any chance the U-Boats had ... and required 25-50 LRBs. Could have been done at any time, except that Harris was too focussed on the Bombing Campaign ... and, really, it wasn't desperately needed until the US stuffed things up.

And as for a land invasion of Western Europe with an Army the size of that which took part in Overlord ... where did I ever say that that would happen?

Or, to put it another way, there's more than one way to skin a cat.

I specifically referred to Britain's efforts in the Napoleonic and 7YW ... which were coalition building efforts, and were won as part of a British encouraged and often paid for coalition and where most of the troops involved were not British.

And, of course, since I made it clear that it would take much longer than with the US, the British A-Bombs come into play alongside with whatever coalition the Commonwealth manages to cobble together.

Phil

aspqrz

11-28-2015, 06:21 PM

So are you implying that the Soviets (and the Germans) lied about the Eastern Front in the Second World War, and that we should discount the forces listed as being present in the campaigns and battles on the Eastern Front and the casualty rates incurred during them?

You seem hell bent on telling me that I said things that I most patently did not say.

I mentioned nothing about whether the Germans lied about their experiences on the Eastern Front at all, ever, anywhere.

As for the Soviets lying. Have you read Glantz and other, less well known, post-89 historians of the Eastern Front?

Did the Soviets dissembled, obfuscate, mislead, misdirect, fabricate and outright lie about much of what actually happened on the Eastern Front and in Russia during the war?

Hell yes.

And what should we make of the naval losses statistics during the battle of the Atlantic?

Um. That the U-Boats, overall, weren't sinking enough tonnage to exceed the build/repair rate? Or not until the US entered and insisted that Convoys weren't necessary? And that even the US were eventually forced to realise that they actually were? And that thereafter the losses dropped back way below dangerous levels?

Yep. That would cover it.

Phil

aspqrz

11-28-2015, 06:28 PM

The British Commonwealth could not have beaten Germany on its own.

Indeed, that is correct ... but not in the way I strongly suspect you mean it.

What I suspect you mean is that 'The British Commonwealth could not have beaten Germany without active US intervention.'

The US was already selling arms to the UK, even before Lend Lease, and was rearming herself because she saw the Axis as a threat. Even if they do not enter the war one can reasonably assume that they will continue to sell to the UK out of simple self interest ... making money, stripping the Commonwealth of as much as they can.

As for the rest, well, as I have noted, you need to compare a non-US WW2 with the Napoleonic and 7YW ... where Britain built a series of coalitions that eventually won those wars. And that is what would likely have happened again.

So, yes, the Commonwealth would have had to build a coalition to win ... but not necessarily with the US ...

Phil

aspqrz

11-28-2015, 06:35 PM

German U-boats in the Pacific might have been interesting.

You realise, of course, that there were German U-Boats in the Pacific? Operating out of Penang?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsun_Gruppe

And that Japanese Subs operated in the Atlantic?

(Well, a Sub, and 'operated' in a loose sense ... the I-8)

Phil

aspqrz

11-28-2015, 06:55 PM

Could Germany have won the war if they hadn't had to intervene in Africa? Tough to call, since Africa would later prove to be essential for air and sea bases as well as a logistical base for later operations in Italy and Southern Europe. Without invading Russia, the Germans should have been to send in additional troops and support making the British operations much more difficult...hmmm how would Eighth Army performed against one of the first line field marshals?

There are, as they say, only three things that matter in War.

Logistics, Logistics and Logistics.

For a good understanding of why the Germans simply could not have done better (or supplied more troops) in North Africa than they did historically, read Van Creveld's "Supplying War" which details all the insurmountable problems.

Some of which include ...

* Inadequate Port Facilities throughout the operational area. Not enough wharf space, not enough harbour space etc. Even in the main ports. And that applied both in Italy (it could take over a month to load a Merchant Ship in the ports the Italians were using) and in North Africa ... and was vastly worse in North Africa. The main Italian port could handle, IIRC, 4-8 ships at a time ... and there was usually in excess of a month backlog to unload cargoes.

* Inadequate Merchant Shipping. The Italians lost something like 60% of their Merchant Marine (which was tiny, anyway) at the outbreak of the war ... and almost all of their tankers.

* Inadequate Fuel. The reason the Regia Marina did damn all was because it had no oil. What it did have had to be, and this had to be ordered by Hitler directly, taken out of Kriegsmarine Stocks ... most Italian ships had barely enough bunkerage to keep their engines ticking over in port. This, of course, had an impact on their merchant ships (they took oil away from the navy) and on escort availability.

* Inadequate Coastal Lighterage. To supply the front, use of small, extremely limited capacity, coastal ports was needed ... and the Germans and Italians didn't have more than a fraction (20% or less, IIRC) of the required tonnage of shallow draft small capacity coastal craft that could use those ports.

* Inadequate Motorised Transport. The DAK was provided with the same amount of motor transport as the Grosstransportraum of an entire Army Group on the Eastern Front ... unless you want to strip, say, Army Group Centre of its motor transport to help out the DAK, there is no more transport.

These trucks could barely supply the DAK when it was close to its supply heads ... the closer they got to Egypt, the worse the supply situation. They wore out quickly, too, as the road net was virtually nonexistent and, worse, the Germans used something like 2000 (yes, that's right, two thousand) different makes and models of trucks, many of them war booty, which made maintaining them a nightmare.

* Inadequate Air Support. The DAK did its best work when Hitler redeployed an entire Luftwaffe Air Group from Russia (or from reinforcing Russia) ... but it had to be withdrawn for use in Russia. After that it was all downhill.

There's more, but read 'Supplying War' of the more recent 'The Lifeblood of War' by Thompson and you'll get the full skinny, not the 'Rommel was a genius' coffee table book version.

Phil

Legbreaker

11-28-2015, 07:15 PM

I think it's also worth noting that the US Navy and Coast Guard were so utterly woeful at ASW that the Canadians with their tiny, obsolete navy had to step in and protect them (the coastline from New York northwards, including NY harbour itself).
Also, the UK sent ships over to protect the east coast of the US (because the US simply had no idea how, nor the equipment to do it), even though they were under great pressure at home. The UK considered it a "rescue mission". Makes you think doesn't it.

With regards to Africa, I should have made my question a little clearer - what if (and I know it's a stretch) the Italians had actually been capable of looking after themselves and achieving their goals without Germany military assistance? How would that have effected the other fronts?

aspqrz

11-28-2015, 10:44 PM

With regards to Africa, I should have made my question a little clearer - what if (and I know it's a stretch) the Italians had actually been capable of looking after themselves and achieving their goals without Germany military assistance? How would that have effected the other fronts?

The problem remains the same. Logistics. Logistics. Logistics.

The Italians, apart from not having many trucks and, indeed, not having many motorised/mechanised units anyway, suffer from the exact same problems.

Made worse by the fact that ...

* Mussolini was a clewless fool. Of the first water. And didn't have a clew what his strategic aims were ... or what they should be if they were to be achievable with the resources available.

* The Italian army was, largely, a joke ... poorly led, poorly trained, with a huge social gulf between officers and men ... and riven with political problems ... and the Fascist Militia Brigades and Divisions were, if possible, worse, as their officers were chosen for political pull and reliability.

* The Italian air force had only obsolete or obsolescent planes, and didn't have the capacity to produce many anyway.

* The Regia Marina was actually quite good. On Paper. In action? Badly commanded and badly organised. And, of course, almost no fuel ... barely enough to keep the boilers ticking over in port.

* The Italian High Command, and the Commander of Italian forces in North Africa ... well, they bring a whole new meaning to the phrase 'grossly incompetent.

The problem is that the Italians had no solutions to any of those problems once they went to war. None.

The only way the Italians could win WW2, in North Africa or anywhere else, is if she had remained neutral ... even siding with the Allies, until probably 1943 or so, would have been a bad choice.

Unfortunately that requires Mussolini to be Not Mussolini and the entire Italian senior military, political and industrial leadership to be lined up against the wall and shot ... and for the shooting to continue until they find someone competent. Probably a Lance Corporal somewhere.

(For anyone who may be interested, this sort of thing is regularly dealt with over at soc.history.what-if on Google Groups ... where I've been arguing back and forth with the denizens there since the early 90s ;) so I have picked up a thing or two)

Phil

Legbreaker

11-28-2015, 11:28 PM

While I agree with all your points completely, what I was asking was, assuming the Italians sorted themselves out, how would the war go elsewhere given the Germans didn't need to even glance in that direction?

Africa was only a sideshow for the Germans as far as manpower and resourced dedicated to it (compared to the other fronts), but still a big headache for them. Without having to worry about that area, and with the ability to redirect those resources, would there have been a significant impact on the other front(s)?
Would Operation Barbarossa have kicked of on time, thereby enabling the Germans to secure Moscow before the snows?
Could more resources have been devoted to the U boats allowing more allied shipping to be sunk and possibly forcing the UK to negotiate?
Could more time and effort be devoted to ironing out the problems with say the Tiger tanks (amongst other technological advances)?

RN7

11-29-2015, 12:49 AM

Really.

Possibly true, depending on where said German Bombers were based.

Utterly misleading, however.

As I noted in a previous post, IIRC, unescorted German Bombers could reach most of the UK.

Unescorted German Bombers = dead meat.

55% of the RAF was north of the maximum range line for escorted German Bombers ... which is, also, one reason why the Germans were never going to be able to win the Battle of Britain with the resources they had available.

The Battle of Britain occurred in 1940

Distance from Berlin to London: 933 km
Distance from Berlin to Glasgow: 1,205 km
Distance from Berlin to Cardiff: 1,140 km
Distance from Hamburg to London: 721 km
Distance from Hamburg to Glasgow: 949 km
Distance from Hamburg to Cardiff: 920 km

Heinkel He 177 heavy bomber range 1,540 km.
Arado Ar 234 jet bomber range 1,556 km, maximum speed 742 km/h.

The principle escort fighter for Allied bombing raids on Germany was the P-51 Mustang, an American aircraft. The P-51 escorted USAAC bombing raids during daylight not RAF bombers who preferred night bombing. RAF bombers when accompanied by escort fighters were escorted by the Mosquito night fighter. The Luftwaffe would have had had similar concerns to the RAF about heavy air defences during daylight.

The He 219 night fighter had a range of 1,540 km.
The Bf110F-4/G-4 night fighter had a range of 2,410 km.
The Me-262 jet fighter which was used as a day and night fighter had a range of 1,050 km which was superior to a de Havilland Mosquito F Mk. II and about the same as a Hawker Tempest V without drop tanks but a lot faster.

RN7

11-29-2015, 02:02 AM

] That's an interesting ... assertion ... the Commonwealth Nations, Australia, Canada and New Zealand ... would have found it ... unusual ... as they believed they were at war with Germany as part of the Commonwealth (or Empire, or whatever you wish to call it).

Certainly Menzies made it plain that Australia was an integral part of it ...

... and the NZ and Canadian governments felt the same.

(Yes, I know all about the Statute of Westminster [1931] etc. But it is not relevant that the Commonwealth was in it under UK leadership)

I don't think Hitler or the rest of Germany gave two hoots about the Commonwealth as they were concerned with Europe not the affairs of British colonies and dominions on other continents. I don't think Hitler lost to much sleep when Menzies declared war on him!

Indeed. If I had said differently, there might be some point to this statement. Sadly, however, I have never said such, so it is irrelevant in and of itself.)

But you did say......

"And the UK had an Atomic Weapons program and the werewithal to, slowly, bring it to fruition ... the Germans had none, and even their pathetic nuclear power programs were working the wrong direction"

" or, more likely, the UK would have managed an A Bomb (as they had an actual Atomic program, which the Germans really didn't ... and were on the right track, which the Germans patently weren't) by the late 1940s or early to mid 1950s."

Air Superiority over the English Channel etc. With the RAF, RCAF, RNZAF, RSAAF, and RAAF and probably the RIAF. As they did historically.

All this was achieved all on their own without any help from the USAAC or without the diversion of Luftwaffe air resources to the Eastern Front

Note: The definition of 'air superiority' is rather different to that of 'air supremacy' which is what I assume you really mean).

!?!

That would be to be superior in the air, to have air superiority, controlling the air to make air attacks on the enemy without serious opposition and be free from the serious enemy air incursions.

Is that clearer?

German U Boats in North Sea. Well, since this wasn't their prime operational area and was relatively shallow, relatively easily.

No but it would have been in their interest to eradicate U-Boat activity in the North Sea which borders the English Channel and the entire east coast of Great Britain all the same.

] As for the Western Approaches etc. Clearing the areas of U-Boats is not necessary as long as you are building more merchant ships than are being sunk. Which, overall, the British Commonwealth was until the US entered the war and decided that convoys weren't necessary, and the loss rate went through the roof thanks to that piece of idiocy.

Gee that's some logic. Don't bother clearing the U-Boats from the area as we can just build more ships than they can sink! Where did you read that?

You might like to read about Operational Research and the weapons and tactics it allowed to be developed that nobbled the U-Boat threat.

And, of course, the allocation of more air power to LR ASW Patrols historically put the final nails in the coffin of any chance the U-Boats had ... and required 25-50 LRBs. Could have been done at any time, except that Harris was too focussed on the Bombing Campaign ... and, really, it wasn't desperately needed until the US stuffed things up.

It's not a topic I am unfamiliar with

And as for a land invasion of Western Europe with an Army the size of that which took part in Overlord ... where did I ever say that that would happen?

Well you have been banging on about a British Commonwealth victory..

" As for the US winning the war, well, while the UK probably could have hung on, and probably supported the USSR just enough for it to hang on as well, the reality is that, even as weak as the Germans were (economically speaking), the war would have been much much much longer without the direct involvement of the US ... but the 'allies' would probably have won ... eventually ... think the Napoleonic Wars (1789-1812/15)".

" the Commonwealth could not easily have defeated the Germans, either, however, as I noted, on a historical basis, the UK has taken on powers as strong as she is/was and defeated them even if it took decades".

" I do not say, and never did, that the Commonwealth would have had an easy victory - merely that, as shown by the Napoleonic Wars (and the earlier world wars against the French), a continental power cannot defeat a naval power and, as long as the naval power maintains its blockade and foments rebellion and alliances against said continental power, they will eventually win".

" And, of course, you seem to be ignoring, or not grasping, that I have repeatedly pointed out it would not have been an easy Commonwealth victory ... but a slow, grinding, attritional one",

So I'd like to know how exactly it would be achieved without a direct assault on German controlled Europe without US support?

Or, to put it another way, there's more than one way to skin a cat.

I specifically referred to Britain's efforts in the Napoleonic and 7YW ... which were coalition building efforts, and were won as part of a British encouraged and often paid for coalition and where most of the troops involved were not British.

And, of course, since I made it clear that it would take much longer than with the US, the British A-Bombs come into play alongside with whatever coalition the Commonwealth manages to cobble together.

You won't be see any British A-Bombs before 1950

RN7

11-29-2015, 02:49 AM

You seem hell bent on telling me that I said things that I most patently did not say.

Well you said "decades of Soviet lies and misinformation is gradually being chipped away at by people like Glantz"

I mentioned nothing about whether the Germans lied about their experiences on the Eastern Front at all, ever, anywhere.

But the Germans were fighting the Soviets so they might be better placed to judge whether the Soviets were spinning lies.

As for the Soviets lying. Have you read Glantz and other, less well known, post-89 historians of the Eastern Front?

I like to read but I also like to analyse what I read and reach my own conclusion.

Did the Soviets dissembled, obfuscate, mislead, misdirect, fabricate and outright lie about much of what actually happened on the Eastern Front and in Russia during the war?

Hell yes.

So what were the Soviet lies? Were they deceiving everyone about the size of the forces involved in the campaigns on the Eastern Front, their war production figures, their dependency on Lend Lease or their casualty rates?

Um. That the U-Boats, overall, weren't sinking enough tonnage to exceed the build/repair rate? Or not until the US entered and insisted that Convoys weren't necessary? And that even the US were eventually forced to realise that they actually were? And that thereafter the losses dropped back way below dangerous levels?

Yep. That would cover it.

And which year are we talking about and does this relate to what actually hapended or some hypothetical scenario about the Commonwealth.

If we are talking about what actually happened then.....

Commonwealth ship building
1940: 880,000 tons
1941: 1,276,500 tons
1942: 1,990,800 tons
1943: 1,136,804 tons
1944: 2,139,600 tons
1945: 535,400 tons

Allied Shipping losses in Atlantic
1940: 3,654,500 tons
1941: 3,295,900 tons
1942: 6,150,340 tons
1943: 2,170,400 tons
1944: 505,700 tons
1945: 366,800 tons

So its a good job the Americans were building so many ships.

RN7

11-29-2015, 02:51 AM

Indeed, that is correct ... but not in the way I strongly suspect you mean it.

What I suspect you mean is that 'The British Commonwealth could not have beaten Germany without active US intervention.'

No I mean that the British Commonwealth could not have beaten Germany on its own

RN7

11-29-2015, 02:54 AM

You realise, of course, that there were German U-Boats in the Pacific? Operating out of Penang?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsun_Gruppe

And that Japanese Subs operated in the Atlantic?

(Well, a Sub, and 'operated' in a loose sense ... the I-8)

It's not a secret. And were the German U-Boats in the Pacific operating in wolf packs off the coast of California and Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal were they could have done the most damage?

Legbreaker

11-29-2015, 03:09 AM

aspqrz

11-29-2015, 07:57 AM

The Battle of Britain occurred in 1940

Indeed it did.

Distance from Berlin to London: 933 km
Distance from Berlin to Glasgow: 1,205 km
Distance from Berlin to Cardiff: 1,140 km
Distance from Hamburg to London: 721 km
Distance from Hamburg to Glasgow: 949 km
Distance from Hamburg to Cardiff: 920 km

Heinkel He 177 heavy bomber range 1,540 km.
Arado Ar 234 jet bomber range 1,556 km, maximum speed 742 km/h.

Heinkel He-177: Aka Luftwaffenfeuerzeug ('Luftwaffe Lighter') because, like the B-29, it kept bursting into flame at exactly the most embarrassing moments possible.

Only available after September 42 as a semi-usable aircraft, and only in small numbers (~600 built in the next 20 months, about 30 per month, and from then to August 44, when production ceased, the rate was around ~34 a month ... as a comparison, ~7300 Lancasters were produced from 1941, and ~11400 Wellingtons from 1936, and ~6100 Halifaxes from 1940.

Arado Ar-234: Only 210 produced, and only operational from September 1944. They were also hangar queens ... 'The Jumo 004 engines were always the real problem; they suffered constant flameouts and required overhaul or replacement after about 10 hours of operation.'

Why? The problem with the Nazi jet engine program is well known - lack of tungsten. Something they could. not. get.

And, oh. deer. The actual operational radius (the 'there and back' range for non-suicide non-one way missions) for the Ar-234 was 800 klicks, not ~1500 (that's the one way suicide mission range).

The Commonwealth managed to produce 26,000+ bombers to the piddling 1000 you think are so great.

The principle escort fighter for Allied bombing raids on Germany was the P-51 Mustang, an American aircraft.

Which wasn't worth spit until it was fitted with BRITISH RR Merlin engines.

The He 219 night fighter had a range of 1,540 km.
The Bf110F-4/G-4 night fighter had a range of 2,410 km.
The Me-262 jet fighter which was used as a day and night fighter had a range of 1,050 km which was superior to a de Havilland Mosquito F Mk. II and about the same as a Hawker Tempest V without drop tanks but a lot faster.

HE-219: Only 300 built, from mid 43. Mincemeat during the daytime.
Bfe-110: ROTFL! A worthless aircraft except as a Night Fighter ... where, quite properly, it remained over Germany.
Me-262: Operational from April 44, ~1400 produced. Another hangar queen ... for the same reason. Worse, in fact, did you know that the Jumo engines had a tendency to, without any warning whatsoever, catastrophically self destruct and shed turbine blades ... which is why they were mounted under the wings (to provide some protection for the pilot) ... and they were, like the jets in the Arados, good for about 10-12 hours before needing a complete rebuild, then another 10-12 hours before they were junked ... if, of course, they didn't catastrophically fail first.

Bf-109: Rather more common than any of the above. Operational Radius = 850 klicks.
Fw-190: Again, more common than any of the above. Operational Radius = ~835 klicks.

Operational Radius = This is the 'there and back again' range ... half the maximum combat range, in effect ... and this is the actual maximum escort range. Practically, escort range will be much much less than half the operational radius because, oh, y'know, there's an actual need to have fuel to fight off those attacking RAF fighters?

The Brits produced ~132,000 aircraft, a large proportion of which were complex multi-engine types. Canada produced another ~16000.

The Russians built ~158,000.

Germany built ~120,000 and the Italians ~18,000. Mostly simpler single engine types.

And British jet engines didn't catastrophically fail or need to be junked after 20 flight hours.

So your point is, what, exactly?

Phil

aspqrz

11-29-2015, 08:05 AM

I don't think Hitler or the rest of Germany gave two hoots about the Commonwealth as they were concerned with Europe not the affairs of British colonies and dominions on other continents. I don't think Hitler lost to much sleep when Menzies declared war on him!"

Interesting. Did you or did you not say, and I quote ...

[QUOTE=RN7;68659]IOriginally Posted by RN7
Germany wasn't at war with the Commonwealth

???

It really doesn't matter what Hitler or Germany thought about things, the reality was that they were at war with the Commonwealth.

As I demonsrtrated. Sure, I get it, you don't like it. Fine. Doesn't change the facts.

But you did say......

"And the UK had an Atomic Weapons program and the werewithal to, slowly, bring it to fruition ... the Germans had none, and even their pathetic nuclear power programs were working the wrong direction"

" or, more likely, the UK would have managed an A Bomb (as they had an actual Atomic program, which the Germans really didn't ... and were on the right track, which the Germans patently weren't) by the late 1940s or early to mid 1950s."

Indeed I did.

You won't be see any British A-Bombs before 1950

Um, you realise that you are contradicting yourself here? You initially seem to grasp that I did, indeed, say that the UK would have A-Bombs 'by the late 1940's or early to mid 1950's' and then rapidly ... forget ... and seem to make a claim that would imply I didn't say exactly that.

Phil

aspqrz

11-29-2015, 08:39 AM

Commonwealth ship building
1940: 880,000 tons
1941: 1,276,500 tons
1942: 1,990,800 tons
1943: 1,136,804 tons
1944: 2,139,600 tons
1945: 535,400 tons

Allied Shipping losses in Atlantic
1940: 3,654,500 tons
1941: 3,295,900 tons
1942: 6,150,340 tons
1943: 2,170,400 tons
1944: 505,700 tons
1945: 366,800 tons

So its a good job the Americans were building so many ships.

Allied Shipping Losses in the ETO
1939: ~500,000 tons
1940: ~2,380,000 tons
1941: ~2,300,000 tons
1942: ~6,600,000 tons
1943: ~2,600,000 tons
1944: ~650,000 tons
1945: ~275,000 tons

Figures are from V E Tarrant, "The U-Boat Offensive 1914-1945" and are approximate only because he breaks figures down by month and named period of the U-Boat war, not by calendar year.

I have no idea where your figures come from, but Tarrant is regarded as pretty reliable, and your figures seem way way out for the early war years.

British Merchant Navy at the beginning of the war, ~20 million grt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nortraship#/media/File:WW2_war_losses_allied_neutral_merchant_ships. jpg

Note to this you add the 1000 ships of the Norwegian Merchant Navy, the fourth biggest in the world at the time, plus the Dutch and Belgian merchant fleets and some of the French, and around 60% of the Italian (captured by the Allies in port or outside of Italy on Italian DoW).

Commonwealth/Allied losses were on the down trend until the idiots of the US Navy decided that, in 1942, they didn't need no steenkin convoys ... and were entirely responsible for that spike. Thanks Admiral King. Not.

Because of Admiral King and his ilk it was, indeed, a good thing that the US built so many ships to replace the unneccessary losses his idiotic tactics caused.

Phil

aspqrz

11-29-2015, 08:50 AM

Well you said "decades of Soviet lies and misinformation is gradually being chipped away at by people like Glantz"

Indeed I did. Of course, you left out the context. So I'll put it back in.

Originally Posted by RN7
So are you implying that the Soviets (and the Germans) lied about the Eastern Front in the Second World War, and that we should discount the forces listed as being present in the campaigns and battles on the Eastern Front and the casualty rates incurred during them?

I replied with ... "You seem hell bent on telling me that I said things that I most patently did not say.

I mentioned nothing about whether the Germans lied about their experiences on the Eastern Front at all, ever, anywhere.

As for the Soviets lying. Have you read Glantz and other, less well known, post-89 historians of the Eastern Front?

Did the Soviets dissembled, obfuscate, mislead, misdirect, fabricate and outright lie about much of what actually happened on the Eastern Front and in Russia during the war?

Hell yes.

Which is demonstrably true. If, indeed, you have read the post 1989 works by Glantz and others.

But the Germans were fighting the Soviets so they might be better placed to judge whether the Soviets were spinning lies.

Seriously?

I mean, seriously?

ROTFL!

It is well understood, indeed, it was well understood even a couple of decades before Glantz started his publication of work based on the Soviet archives, that the Germans never. ever. had. a. clew. of the actual Soviet numbers. Not before Barbarossa and not at any stage during it.

Heck, the apologist Generals writing for the US at the end of the war admitted as much themselves.

I like to read but I also like to analyse what I read and reach my own conclusion.

Interesting that you have come to a conclusion that is not held by pretty much any serious scholar of the topic.

So what were the Soviet lies? Were they deceiving everyone about the size of the forces involved in the campaigns on the Eastern Front, their war production figures, their dependency on Lend Lease or their casualty rates?

You haven't read Glantz or any post-89 scholarship, have you?

When Titans Clashed is a good overview, you might like to start there. You evidently wouldn't believe anything I might tell you anyway, so go and read for yourself.

Phil

aspqrz

11-29-2015, 08:53 AM

Just because escort fighters may have had the theoretical range, doesn't mean they would. Fighters tend to use a LOT of fuel in a dog fight, and, depending on the plane and armament, usually only carried somewhere between 5 and 20 seconds of ammunition (maximum of about 40 bursts if the pilot was careful, more likely about 20 or less). I'm sure there's a few rare exceptions to that general rule, but they're not all that relevant for the point I'm making.
Therefore it would be suicidal for fighters to fly out to anything like their maximum range, especially if they might need to fight their way back home again.

And, of course, the Germans didn't have Drop Tanks early in the war, and they were scarce even later ... and even if they did, DTs don't actually give full value, as you have to drop them as soon as you;re in combat. Resource Shortages ... Like pretty much anything and everything the Germans did.

Phil

RN7

11-29-2015, 12:37 PM

Heinkel He-177: Aka Luftwaffenfeuerzeug ('Luftwaffe Lighter') because, like the B-29, it kept bursting into flame at exactly the most embarrassing moments possible.

Sorry but did you not state " The UK had large underground factory complexes for all sorts of things and, indeed, much of their industry was actually completely beyond the range of German bombers and more was beyond the range of unescorted German bombers (aka 'sitting ducks')".

The He-177 was available despite its limitations, and it could hit any part of the UK. Unlike the USAAC and RAF who were focused on developing strategic air power, the Luftwaffe was primarily a tactical force used to support the Wehrmacht and remained one due to occupying most of Europe in the early war and the later necessities of the Eastern front. Also could British bombers have attacked Japan like the B-29?

Only available after September 42 as a semi-usable aircraft, and only in small numbers (~600 built in the next 20 months, about 30 per month, and from then to August 44, when production ceased, the rate was around ~34 a month ... as a comparison, ~7300 Lancasters were produced from 1941, and ~11400 Wellingtons from 1936, and ~6100 Halifaxes from 1940.

But still available and were are talking about the real war not a war between the British Commonwealth (with or without the USSR) against Germany without American involvement. Also the Halifax was not without its critics and the Wellington was not a heavy bomber. The Wellington was a twin engine medium bomber with good range but very low ceiling height, and the Germans also produced nearly 27,000 medium bombers in various guises.

Arado Ar-234: Only 210 produced, and only operational from September 1944. They were also hangar queens ... 'The Jumo 004 engines were always the real problem; they suffered constant flameouts and required overhaul or replacement after about 10 hours of operation.'.

But it still existed and it was almost impossible to intercept and showed the potential that Germany had to produce relevant aircraft in the real world and a hypothetical war.

Why? The problem with the Nazi jet engine program is well known - lack of tungsten. Something they could. not. get.

Although they did get some from supposedly neutral Portugal and Spain.

And, oh. deer. The actual operational radius (the 'there and back' range for non-suicide non-one way missions) for the Ar-234 was 800 klicks, not ~1500 (that's the one way suicide mission range).

What was the operational range from occupied northern France and the Low Countries to British industrial centres? Also is there some reason why you feel that you have to lecture people about military terms or is it that you just feel that you have a monopoly on knowledge?

The Commonwealth managed to produce 26,000+ bombers to the piddling 1000 you think are so great.

The UK actually produced 34,689 bombers of all types, plus another 3,967 reconnaissance aircraft. The German produced 18,235 bombers of all types plus 12,539 ground attack aircraft and 6,299 reconnaissance aircraft.

Which wasn't worth spit until it was fitted with BRITISH RR Merlin engines.

A well known fact and did the RAF use the Mustang to escort its bombers on raids against Germany?

HE-219: Only 300 built, from mid 43. Mincemeat during the daytime.

Which is why the Luftwaffe used than at night like RAF night fighters.

Bfe-110: ROTFL! A worthless aircraft except as a Night Fighter ... where, quite properly, it remained over Germany.

But still available in large numbers and it was considered a potent night fighter. Its weaponry could cripple or destroy any Allied bomber in seconds and was capable of wreaking immense destruction, but it was vulnerable to Allied escort fighters. It was partially replaced by the better Me-210 and Me-410.

Me-262: Operational from April 44, ~1400 produced. Another hangar queen ... for the same reason. Worse, in fact, did you know that the Jumo engines had a tendency to, without any warning whatsoever, catastrophically self destruct and shed turbine blades ... which is why they were mounted under the wings (to provide some protection for the pilot) ... and they were, like the jets in the Arados, good for about 10-12 hours before needing a complete rebuild, then another 10-12 hours before they were junked ... if, of course, they didn't catastrophically fail first..

Well the Jumo 004 was the world's first turbojet jet engine that was placed in production and operationally used so you can't expect it to have been perfect. And a lot of its flaws were to do with the scarcity or raw materials and the design that had to take into account the shortages of strategic materials. Because of the lower quality steels and alloys available the Jumo 004 had a service life of between 10-25 hours, although maybe twice that in the hands of skilled pilot who knew the limitations of the power plant. That incidentally is more than the service life of modern Chinese built knock offs of Russian jet engines. At the end of the war Germany was building 1,500 Jumo 004 a month and it was considered possible that they could build up to a 100,000 a year by mid-1946. Also the Me-262 was still a very potent and versatile fighter aircraft was it not?

Bf-109: Rather more common than any of the above. Operational Radius = 850 klicks.
Fw-190: Again, more common than any of the above. Operational Radius = ~835 klicks..

Well if we are talking about daylight German bombing raids from occupied France and the Low Countries then we can use a whole load of different types of German fighters including the Me-262 than can reach Britain.

Operational Radius = This is the 'there and back again' range ... half the maximum combat range, in effect ... and this is the actual maximum escort range. Practically, escort range will be much much less than half the operational radius because, oh, y'know, there's an actual need to have fuel to fight off those attacking RAF fighters?.

Why the lecture again? What is the operational combat radius from any number of points along the coast of occupied Europe to British industrial centres? And where did Britain gets its fuel from?

The Brits produced ~132,000 aircraft, a large proportion of which were complex multi-engine types. Canada produced another ~16000.?

The Russians built ~158,000.

Germany built ~120,000 and the Italians ~18,000. Mostly simpler single engine types..

Soviet Union
100,636: Fighters and Ground-Attack Aircraft
021,116: Bombers of all type

Britain
49,422: Fighters and Ground-Attack Aircraft
34,689: Bombers of all type

Germany
068,266: Fighters and Ground-Attack Aircraft
018,235: Bombers of all type

Incidentally in 1944 Germany produced nearly as many fighters as Britain and Russia combined (26,326 versus 28,643)

And British jet engines didn't catastrophically fail or need to be junked after 20 flight hours.?

But British industry had not the same constraints placed on it through material shortages as Germany and had the availability of American resources and technology

So your point is, what, exactly?

You know I just dunno what to make of you.

RN7

11-29-2015, 12:55 PM

[QUOTE=RN7;68659]I don't think Hitler or the rest of Germany gave two hoots about the Commonwealth as they were concerned with Europe not the affairs of British colonies and dominions on other continents. I don't think Hitler lost to much sleep when Menzies declared war on him!"

Interesting. Did you or did you not say, and I quote ...

It really doesn't matter what Hitler or Germany thought about things, the reality was that they were at war with the Commonwealth.

As I demonsrtrated. Sure, I get it, you don't like it. Fine. Doesn't change the facts.

Germany declared war on Britain, or should we say that Britain decaled war on Germany after it invaded Poland. The commonwealth by appendix also declared war on Germany, but I don't think Hitler gave two hoots about the fact that the Commonwealth declared war on Germany as it was irrelevant to him, and I don't think Germany had any coherent plan to ever tackle Commonwealth forces outside of Europe or related theatres in the Med and North Africa. If this point is important to you that is fine, but in the scheme of things its not a major event.

Indeed I did.

Um, you realise that you are contradicting yourself here? You initially seem to grasp that I did, indeed, say that the UK would have A-Bombs 'by the late 1940's or early to mid 1950's' and then rapidly ... forget ... and seem to make a claim that would imply I didn't say exactly that.

I'm actually finding your train of though tedious. You claim that the British Commonwealth and the Soviet (or maybe without them) could have beaten Germany without American help, and you imply that Britain could have built an atomic bomb by itself when all the evidence points to the fact that Britain could not have built an atomic bomb by itself any earlier than the 1950's and that would only happen if Britain devoted a huge amount of resources to a project that it could ill afford to fund by itself in wartime.

RN7

11-29-2015, 01:31 PM

Figures are from V E Tarrant, [B]"The U-Boat Offensive 1914-1945" and are approximate only because he breaks figures down by month and named period of the U-Boat war, not by calendar year.

I have no idea where your figures come from, but Tarrant is regarded as pretty reliable, and your figures seem way way out for the early war years.

British Merchant Navy at the beginning of the war, ~20 million grt.

World War II A Statistical Survey by John Ellis. The most complete compilation of data related to all aspects of the Second World War that I have ever read and it is my most prized book and not cheap to buy.

Allied merchant fleet tonnage in 1939
17,891,134. Britain
03,110,791. British Commonwealth
08,909,892. United States
04,833,813. Norway
02,969,578. Netherlands
02,933,933. France
01,174,944. Denmark
00,408,014. Belgium
01,780,666. Greece

RN7

11-29-2015, 02:00 PM

Indeed I did. Of course, you left out the context. So I'll put it back in.

I replied with ... "

Which is demonstrably true. If, indeed, you have read the post 1989 works by Glantz and others.

Seriously?

I mean, seriously?

ROTFL!

It is well understood, indeed, it was well understood even a couple of decades before Glantz started his publication of work based on the Soviet archives, that the Germans never. ever. had. a. clew. of the actual Soviet numbers. Not before Barbarossa and not at any stage during it.

Heck, the apologist Generals writing for the US at the end of the war admitted as much themselves.

You know I actually asked you a question about how the Soviets lied in the Second World War, and I also asked you to explain your earlier remark about how Lend Lease allowed the Soviet to build armaments as unlike Britain they weren't capable of producing anything else by themselves. I also asked you for a comparison of Lend Lease supplies that Britain and the Soviet Union received from the United States. But you have dodged those question. How about you answer them.

Also you keep quoting "authors" to others and I to validate your argument. Do you believe that everyone else on here is not a well read as you? You would be surprised about how many well educated members we have on this board.

Interesting that you have come to a conclusion that is not held by pretty much any serious scholar of the topic.

And are you one of those scholars?

You haven't read Glantz or any post-89 scholarship, have you?

When Titans Clashed is a good overview, you might like to start there. You evidently wouldn't believe anything I might tell you anyway, so go and read for yourself.

Well if I did or did not I wouldn't be coming on here bragging about it.

aspqrz

11-29-2015, 06:22 PM

Quote:
Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
Heinkel He-177:*Aka*Luftwaffenfeuerzeug*('Luftwaffe Lighter') because, like the B-29, it kept bursting into flame at exactly the most embarrassing moments possible.

Originally posted by RN7
Sorry but did you not state " The UK had large underground factory complexes for all sorts of things and, indeed, much of their industry was actually completely beyond the range of German bombers and more was beyond the range of unescorted German bombers (aka 'sitting ducks')".

Indeed I did.

However, I fail to what that specific claim has to do with whether the He-177 was a piece of crap or not. And, indeed, I am sure everyone following this thread is as mystified by the non-connection as I am.

Because, of course, there is no connection.

Originally posted by RN7
The He-177 was available despite its limitations, and it could hit any part of the UK. Unlike the USAAC and RAF who were focused on developing strategic air power, the Luftwaffe was primarily a tactical force used to support the Wehrmacht and remained one due to occupying most of Europe in the early war and the later necessities of the Eastern front. Also could British bombers have attacked Japan like the B-29?*

And your point is what, exactly? That a pathetic failure as a bomber that was produced in tiny numbers late in the war existed. Sure. It did.

He-111: Combat Radius with Bombload (4400 kg), ~600 klicks.
Ju-88: Combat Radius with Bombload (2100 kg), ~832 klicks.
Do-17: Combat Radius with Bombload (1000 kg), ~660 klicks.

These were the actual 'bombers' (for want of a better term) the Luftwaffe had. None had the range needed. As I said. Your attempts to bring in furphies like the disastrous failure that was the He-177 and the Ar-234 which, despite your claims, did not have the required range, notwithstanding.

Note that they all fail to have the range to reach all of the UK.

Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
Arado Ar-234:*Only 210 produced, and only operational from September 1944. They were also hangar queens ...*'The Jumo 004 engines were always the real problem; they suffered constant flameouts and required overhaul or replacement*after about 10 hours of operation.'

Posted by RN7
But it still existed and it was almost impossible to intercept and showed the potential that Germany had to produce relevant aircraft in the real world and a hypothetical war.

It existed as a failure. It existed so late in the war as to be irrelevant.

And, most importantly of all, and I note you carefully snipped this pertinent fact from your reply, it did not have the range that you claimed.

It could not reach the whole of the UK.

Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
Why? The problem with the Nazi jet engine program is well known - lack of tungsten. Something they could. not. get.

Originally posted by RN7
Although they did get some from supposedly neutral Portugal and Spain.

Nowhere near enough. The UK bought almost all of it up, pricing Germany out of the market. Lack of Tungsten does not equal no Tungsten.

Something you would no doubt be aware of if you have done any research are the following facts ...

* The Squeeze Bore AT gun production was ended and widespread use also ceased as early as 1942 because the barrel and ammo required tungsten.

* Production of Tungsten cored AT ammo ceased around 1942 for the same reason

* The specific reason was (see Tooze, "Wages of Destruction") that Germany did not have enough even for industrial use (it was required for high speed machine tools vital for producing a lot of stuff like, oh, Tanks, Artillery, Smallarms, Submarines, Aircraft etc) and stockpiles were declining faster than the limited amounts smuggled in from Portugal and Spain could replace.

In any case, it explains the inconvenient fact that German Jet aircraft were ineffective toys in a strategic and operational sense (if not an immediate tactical sense) due to their pathetic engines ... and were always going to remain so.

Quote:
Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
And, oh. deer. The actual*operational radius*(the 'there and back' range for non-suicide non-one way missions) for the Ar-234 was*800 klicks, not ~1500 (that's the one way suicide mission range).

Originally posted by RN7
What was the operational range from occupied northern France and the Low Countries to British industrial centres?

Um. Logical error here. Operational Range does not change according to where an aircraft is based ... it is fixed. It remains 800 klicks regardless of whether it is based in Berlin, or Paris, or Boulogne.

And the Ar-234 didn't have the range you claimed.

Which I note you do not admit was an error on your part.

Originally posted by RN7
Also is there some reason why you feel that you have to lecture people about military terms or is it that you just feel that you have a monopoly on knowledge?*

In this specific instance I was merely pointing out, to you, that the figure you gave was for maximum one way range rather than operational radius. And, since you made the mistake, I felt it wise to explain what operational radius was and how it differs from maximum range.

I note that you still don't admit that your claim was wrong.

Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
Which wasn't worth spit until it was fitted with BRITISH RR Merlin engines.

Originally posted by RN7
A well known fact and did the RAF use the Mustang to escort its bombers on raids against Germany?

The Commonwealth Airforces mainly made night attacks against Germany. Overwhelmingly. They were not normally escorted for the obvious reason that escorts such as the USAAF required for its daylight precisionless bombing attacks were not needed because of, well, the darkness.

Did the Commonwealth Airforces in the UK use American aircraft? Sure. They bought a lot before Pearl Harbour and a lot after.

Did they use the RR Merlin engined Mustang. Yep.

So what?

The premise is that the Commonwealth can win the war without active US involvement, not that the US magically falls off the face of the earth.

Originally posted by RN7
Incidentally in 1944 Germany produced nearly as many fighters as Britain and Russia combined (26,326 versus 28,643)

Nope. All German late war production figures are heavily doctored by Speer. He deliberately double counted, counted remanufactured or repaired wrecked airframes as new production, included the last week of the previous month's production and the first week of the next month's production for a given month's production routinely (double counting again) ... as is detailed in a number of works on the German War Economy (see the work by Tooze mentioned above).

His deliberate obfuscation of records was so thorough that, though we know he was doing it and we know the scale of what he was doing, we cannot work out how much of the claimed production was real and how much was a lie. We just know that the figures for 44-45 are so tainted as to be close to worthless.

Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
And British jet engines didn't catastrophically fail or need to be junked after 20 flight hours.

Originally posted by RN7
But British industry had not the same constraints placed on it through material shortages as Germany and had the availability of American resources and technology*

And would continue to have even if the US did not actively enter the war. They would have bought it, and the US would have sold it, as it did before Pearl Harbour.

It is becoming increasingly clear that your knowledge of the war effort by all parties involved in WW2 is ... generously ... somewhat deficient ...

But feel free to continue to dig a deeper hole for yourself.

Phil

aspqrz

11-29-2015, 06:23 PM

World War II A Statistical Survey by John Ellis. The most complete compilation of data related to all aspects of the Second World War that I have ever read and it is my most prized book and not cheap to buy.

Allied merchant fleet tonnage in 1939
17,891,134. Britain
03,110,791. British Commonwealth
08,909,892. United States
04,833,813. Norway
02,969,578. Netherlands
02,933,933. France
01,174,944. Denmark
00,408,014. Belgium
01,780,666. Greece

Thank you for proving my point.

Phil

aspqrz

11-29-2015, 06:36 PM

You know I actually asked you a question about how the Soviets lied in the Second World War, and I also asked you to explain your earlier remark about how Lend Lease allowed the Soviet to build armaments as unlike Britain they weren't capable of producing anything else by themselves. I also asked you for a comparison of Lend Lease supplies that Britain and the Soviet Union received from the United States. But you have dodged those question. How about you answer them.

No. You have repeatedly asked what the Soviets lied about. And I have repeatedly explained.

Pretty much everything.

And you repeatedly fail to grasp that.

Barber and Harrison's works on the Soviet War Economy, previously cited, including the link to the online paper I provided, answer most of them. But you obviously haven't read them.

Maiolo's work 'Cry Havoc' explains some of the others. As does Tooze's "Wages of Destruction' ... but you don't seem to be aware of the former and haven't had time to consult the latter as I only mentioned it in a just posted response.

Also you keep quoting "authors" to others and I to validate your argument. Do you believe that everyone else on here is not a well read as you? You would be surprised about how many well educated members we have on this board.

Of course one quotes sources to support an argument. They are, in all ways, better than unsupported personal assertions.

As for whether people are as well read as I or not, I have no idea. I merely point them in the direction of sources that support the statements I have made so that they can check them out themselves.

This is especially important as you have made it plain that you do not believe a single thing I have said, even when incontrovertibly true ... so, obviously, it is necessary for me to provide the documentary evidence in the form of citations.

But you evidently don't even believe those, or can't be bothered to check them out ... and I'm giving you a free ride about many of the more ridiculous and provably incorrect unsupported personal assertions you have made, such as the ridiculous numbers for tonnages sunk by U-Boats or the lack of understanding of what Operational Radius for aircraft is (to name just two recent ones).

Feel free to provide your sources for those two furphies.

Phil

Legbreaker

11-29-2015, 07:17 PM

And I thought I was well read on the subject! So many new references I'm going to have to track down and digest! :D

aspqrz

11-29-2015, 07:59 PM

And I thought I was well read on the subject! So many new references I'm going to have to track down and digest! :D

Have you read Bergerud's 'Touched with Fire' and "Fire in the Sky' on, respectively, land and air warfare in the SW Pacific?

For an American author, he gives a surprisingly nuanced view of the war, and has nice (and demonstrably true) things to say about us Aussies ...

Phil

Legbreaker

11-29-2015, 09:10 PM

I'm afraid not. That'll be another one to find.

RN7

11-29-2015, 10:09 PM

Indeed I did.

However, I fail to what that specific claim has to do with whether the He-177 was a piece of crap or not. And, indeed, I am sure everyone following this thread is as mystified by the non-connection as I am.

Because, of course, there is no connection.

Well I think you are the only one who has claimed that. And if you can't see the connection with stating that British industry is beyond the range of German bombers, and yet then we have the He-177 with a combat radius of 1,540 km which can carry 6,000kg of ordinance internally and another 7,200 kg externally then I don't know what that says about your train of thought.

You know they were used over Britain in Operation Steinbock in 1944 which was a failure. But from the most easily accessible source "wikipedia" the tactics used by the He-177 pilots allowed for higher speed and constant change of altitude which made interceptions difficult, increasing the survivability of the aircraft but decreased accuracy. With an average loss rate of 60% for all types of bomber used in Operation Steinbock, the He 177's loss rate below 10% made them the most survivable bomber in the campaign.

And your point is what, exactly? That a pathetic failure as a bomber that was produced in tiny numbers late in the war existed. Sure. It did.

Well the point would be that the US and Britain concentrated on developing long ranged bombers from the early stages of the war because of the fact that Germany overran most of Europe, and to strike Germany by air they needed to. The Germans hadn't that priority in the early stages of the war, although it later proved a misguided strategy. However with no US involvement in the war would British bombing of Germany have been that successful, and of course there would have been no escort fighters for daylight bombers. Would in this scenario have Germany had time to develop long ranged bombers?

He-111: Combat Radius with Bombload (4400 kg), ~600 klicks.
Ju-88: Combat Radius with Bombload (2100 kg), ~832 klicks.
Do-17: Combat Radius with Bombload (1000 kg), ~660 klicks.

These were the actual 'bombers' (for want of a better term) the Luftwaffe had. None had the range needed. As I said. Your attempts to bring in furphies like the disastrous failure that was the He-177 and the Ar-234 which, despite your claims, did not have the required range, notwithstanding.

Note that they all fail to have the range to reach all of the UK.

He-111: Combat radius 1,200 km with a bombload (2,000 kg), less with heavier bombload
JU-88A: Combat radius 1,046 km with a bombload (2,000 kg), less with heavier bombload
Do-17: Combat radius 1,160 km with a bombload (500 kg), less with heavier bombload

Not heavy bombers granted but is a bomb is a bomb and Germany had a lot of these aircraft. What would the operational range of German bombers be to British industrial centres of from any of the Luftwaffe bases in occupied France and the Netherlands?

http://www.ww2.dk/Airfields%20-%20Netherlands.pdf
http://www.ww2.dk/Airfields%20-%20France.pdf

And Germany was also developing the Do 317, He-274 and Ju-290/390 at the end of the war. The technical merits of these aircraft may have been unproven or debatable but the intent was there, and in a scenario were the British Commonwealth is at war with Germany without American resources they may have been built.

It existed as a failure. It existed so late in the war as to be irrelevant.

And, most importantly of all, and I note you carefully snipped this pertinent fact from your reply, it did not have the range that you claimed.

It could not reach the whole of the UK.

What exactly did I snip. If you mean the range of the Arado Ar 234? Then its combat radius was 1,100 km with a bombload of (1,500 kg).

Nowhere near enough. The UK bought almost all of it up, pricing Germany out of the market. Lack of Tungsten does not equal no Tungsten.

Something you would no doubt be aware of if you have done any research are the following facts ...

* The Squeeze Bore AT gun production was ended and widespread use also ceased as early as 1942 because the barrel and ammo required tungsten.

* Production of Tungsten cored AT ammo ceased around 1942 for the same reason

* The specific reason was (see Tooze, "Wages of Destruction") that Germany did not have enough even for industrial use (it was required for high speed machine tools vital for producing a lot of stuff like, oh, Tanks, Artillery, Smallarms, Submarines, Aircraft etc) and stockpiles were declining faster than the limited amounts smuggled in from Portugal and Spain could replace.

I don't think it's any secret that Germany was affected by shortages of strategic materials and alloys. How do you know what secretive and fascist Spain and Portugal was secretly shipping to Nazi Germany? In 1944 Spain limited its official shipments of tungsten ore to Germany to 40 tons a month which ended after D-Day. Britain was so concerned with what Spain was supplying Germany that it stopped Spanish oil shipments throughout most of 1944. With no America involved in WW2 then we would have no D-Day in 1944 and far less restraint on what Spain and Portugal were willing to supply Germany.

Also did Britain develop this technology beyond the Littlejohn adaptor it used from 40mm anti-tank guns?

In any case, it explains the inconvenient fact that German Jet aircraft were ineffective toys in a strategic and operational sense (if not an immediate tactical sense) due to their pathetic engines ... and were always going to remain so.

But lethal ones all the same, and jets rapidly replaced turbo-props as frontline military aircraft in the mid-to-late 1940's.

Um. Logical error here. Operational Range does not change according to where an aircraft is based ... it is fixed. It remains 800 klicks regardless of whether it is based in Berlin, or Paris, or Boulogne.

But distance does change due to location, and an aircraft based in occupied France and the Netherlands would be a shorter distance from Britain than an aircraft based in Germany and that parameter would be relevant to the respective operational range in question.

And the Ar-234 didn't have the range you claimed.

Which I note you do not admit was an error on your part.

You mean the range of the Arado Ar 234? Then its combat radius was 1,100 km with a bombload of (1,500 kg).

In this specific instance I was merely pointing out, to you, that the figure you gave was for maximum one way range rather than operational radius. And, since you made the mistake, I felt it wise to explain what operational radius was and how it differs from maximum range.

I note that you still don't admit that your claim was wrong.

No I gave just you a rough range figures not based on operational range or variable distances. The ranges are open to debate based on location but a relatively basic term such as operational range is not something that I need to be lectured on.

The Commonwealth Airforces mainly made night attacks against Germany. Overwhelmingly. They were not normally escorted for the obvious reason that escorts such as the USAAF required for its daylight precisionless bombing attacks were not needed because of, well, the darkness.

And without USAAC daylight bombing would that not affect the amount of damage that could be inflicted on German industry

Did the Commonwealth Airforces in the UK use American aircraft? Sure. They bought a lot before Pearl Harbour and a lot after.

Did they use the RR Merlin engined Mustang. Yep.

So what?

The premise is that the Commonwealth can win the war without active US involvement, not that the US magically falls off the face of the earth.

But then we would have no US Eight Air Force based in England, or any other US army, air or navy forces in Europe, the Med and North Africa. Also no obligation to supply the British Commonwealth with state-of-the-art US weaponry.

Nope. All German late war production figures are heavily doctored by Speer. He deliberately double counted, counted remanufactured or repaired wrecked airframes as new production, included the last week of the previous month's production and the first week of the next month's production for a given month's production routinely (double counting again) ... as is detailed in a number of works on the German War Economy (see the work by Tooze mentioned above).

His deliberate obfuscation of records was so thorough that, though we know he was doing it and we know the scale of what he was doing, we cannot work out how much of the claimed production was real and how much was a lie. We just know that the figures for 44-45 are so tainted as to be close to worthless.

I've also heard that been stated about Speer in the past and as you say that we just don't know what the real figure are the best way to gauge the true figures would be to go by casualties. In 1944 US forces lost 11,618 aircraft in Europe (nearly ten times what they lost in the Pacific) and I've heard higher figures as well. US 8th Air Force and RAF Bomber Command losses in Europe also increased considerably in 1944 (I can break down the monthly losses from 1943-45) when German fighter production also spiked, so maybe there is some truth to it.

And would continue to have even if the US did not actively enter the war. They would have bought it, and the US would have sold it, as it did before Pearl Harbour.

But would not have shared everything (relatively speaking) with Britain either.

It is becoming increasingly clear that your knowledge of the war effort by all parties involved in WW2 is ... generously ... somewhat deficient ...

But feel free to continue to dig a deeper hole for yourself.

Is it and am I?

RN7

11-29-2015, 10:21 PM

Thank you for proving my point.

I just provided a list of available Allied Merchant shipping in 1939, I wasn't proving your point.

The Allies lost just under 22 million tons of shipping between 1939-45, and 17 million tons were lost in the Atlantic. Only the US and the British Commonwealth built new ships for the Allies during the war. The US built 34 million tons of shipping and the British Commonwealth built just over 9 million tons of shipping. Take out the US and you have an increasingly smaller and clapped out merchant fleet. Take out US Navy resources and you have a smaller Alllied naval fleet.

RN7

11-29-2015, 11:58 PM

No. You have repeatedly asked what the Soviets lied about. And I have repeatedly explained.

Pretty much everything.

And you repeatedly fail to grasp that.

No you haven't, you have not answered one question directly about what I asked you about how the Soviets lied in WW2, or how Lend Lease allowed the Soviet to build armaments as they weren't capable of producing anything else by themselves, or a comparison of Lend Lease supplies that Britain and the Soviet Union received from the United States. All you have done is quote the name of authors of books you say you have read or possess instead of giving a brief or detailed explanation as to whatever suits you. I don't know why you or for what reason you keep doing it but it would be helpful if you could just could answer what I asked you.

Barber and Harrison's works on the Soviet War Economy, previously cited, including the link to the online paper I provided, answer most of them. But you obviously haven't read them.

Maiolo's work 'Cry Havoc' explains some of the others. As does Tooze's "Wages of Destruction' ... but you don't seem to be aware of the former and haven't had time to consult the latter as I only mentioned it in a just posted response.

Well if you included a link I certainly missed it. And once again could you type or copy and paste in plain English no matter how brief about what you mean so we can debate it in a civil fashion.

Of course one quotes sources to support an argument. They are, in all ways, better than unsupported personal assertions.

You could just state your position with some supporting argument and then quote an author as well.

As for whether people are as well read as I or not, I have no idea. I merely point them in the direction of sources that support the statements I have made so that they can check them out themselves.

So your reasons for implying that I am not very well read, have a deficiency in knowledge or maybe am incapable of understanding your wisdom is what?

This is especially important as you have made it plain that you do not believe a single thing I have said, even when incontrovertibly true ... so, obviously, it is necessary for me to provide the documentary evidence in the form of citations

No not believing and not agreeing are two different thing. How about you just answer questions directly and then maybe quote one of your authors if you feel that you need to as its not a competition about who has read the most books.

[QUOTE=aspqrz;68678] But you evidently don't even believe those, or can't be bothered to check them out ... and I'm giving you a free ride about many of the more ridiculous and provably incorrect unsupported personal assertions you have made, such as the ridiculous numbers for tonnages sunk by U-Boats or the lack of understanding of what Operational Radius for aircraft is (to name just two recent ones).

I don't know what you are implying and I am trying to be polite despite your insulting tone and its becoming increasingly difficult to be polite. You claim you are giving me a free ride. About what exactly?

I've been collecting books for over 30 years and have compiled data for my own interest in the Second World War and other topics for as long. These days a lot of this information is also available on the internet. I'm comfortable with my numbers and I can give you a break down of losses by the month, tonnage and number for Allied and Axis merchant ship losses from 1939-45 if you want.

Feel free to provide your sources for those two furphies.

Whatever a furphies is you will note that I earlier supported in this threat the importance of British anti-submarine advances in WW2. I have a book collection in two different countries and it would take me weeks to list them. For naval data of the top of my head....

Allied Escort Ships of WWII: P. Elliott
Atlas of Naval Warfare : H. Pemsel
Britain's Sea War: a Diary of Ship Losses 1939-45: J.M Young
Chronology of the War at Sea 1939-45: J. Rohwer & G. Hummelchen
Submarines of World War Two: E. Bagnasco
The German Navy in WW2: J.C Taylor
The Liberty Ships: L.A Laywer W.H. Mitchell
The Mediterranean and the Middle East: I.S.O Playfair
The War at Sea: S.W. Roskill
U Boat war in the Atlantic 1939-45: MOD
Victory Ships and Tankers: David & Charles
Warships of the World: T. Lenton & J. J. Colledge

I can't at this late hour remember the titles and authors of the other ones I
have, some are more technical and relate to naval orbats, ship types etc and some are small magazine articles long forgotten about but still in my attic or two.

aspqrz

11-30-2015, 12:15 AM

Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
Indeed I did.

However, I fail to what that specific claim has to do with whether the He-177 was a piece of crap or not. And, indeed, I am sure everyone following this thread is as mystified by the non-connection as I am.

Because, of course, there*is*no connection.

Originally posted by RN7
Well I think you are the only one who has claimed that. And if you can't see the connection with stating that British industry is beyond the range of German bombers, and yet then we have the He-177 with a combat radius of 1,540 km which can carry 6,000kg of ordinance internally and another 7,200 kg externally then I don't know what that says about your train of thought.

And I think the entire rest of the world is mystified by your train of thought in thinking that a piece of crap that was produced in small numbers at the tail end of the war had of being relevant when the overwhelmingly vast majority of Nazi bomber production was of Medium and Light Bombers which did not have the range to bomb all of the UK. And didn't have the capacity, either.

They produced thousands of He-111s, Do-17s and Ju-88s and ~600 of the failed He-177.

As for their payload vs. range. You are operating under the common, and charming, delusion that maximum range, or even maximum operational radius, was achievable with maximum bombload.

For operation Steinbock, and you evidently read, but failed to comprehend, the Wikipedia article, they carried 5600 kilos, not 13200 kilos.

You also failed to note, or comprehend, that they had a greater than 50% operational failure rate during that campaign … 8 of the 14 (!) committed had to RTB with overheating or burning engines.

A monumental piece of crap.

If you're going to cite a source, at least read and comprehend it all.

You know they were used over Britain in Operation Steinbock in 1944 which was a failure. But from the most easily accessible source "wikipedia" the tactics used by the He-177 pilots allowed for higher speed and constant change of altitude which made interceptions difficult, increasing the survivability of the aircraft but decreased accuracy. With an average loss rate of 60% for all types of bomber used in Operation Steinbock, the He 177's loss rate below 10% made them the most survivable bomber in the campaign.

Um.

Ah.

From the Wikipedia article …

“Of the 14 He 177 sent out during*Operation Steinbock, one suffered a burst tire, and eight returned with overheating or burning engines. Of the four that reached London, one was lost to night fighters.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_177

Perhaps you didn't actually read the article, or perhaps you felt that no-one else would – or maybe you're just doing what the Soviets did so well …

I think the rest of the world would regard operational failure by 8 of the 14 brand new aircraft committed to be indicative.

And, of the four that managed to reach the target, carrying less than half the maximum bomb load (against London, mind, not the far north of England … unless you seriously expect us to believe that they could have carried more over a longer range?), they suffered 25% casualties.

Like massaging figures much?*

Quote:
Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
He-111:*Combat Radius with Bombload (4400 kg), ~600 klicks.
Ju-88:*Combat Radius with Bombload (2100 kg), ~832 klicks.
Do-17:*Combat Radius with Bombload (1000 kg), ~660 klicks.

These were the*actual*'bombers' (for want of a better term) the Luftwaffe had. None had the range needed. As I said. Your attempts to bring in furphies like the*disastrous*failure that was the He-177 and the Ar-234 which,*despite your claims, did*not*have the required range, notwithstanding.

Note that they*all*fail to have the range to reach all of the UK.

Originally posted by RN7
He-111: Combat radius 1,200 km with a bombload (2,000 kg), less with heavier bombload*
JU-88A: Combat radius 1,046 km with a bombload (2,000 kg), less with heavier bombload
Do-17: Combat radius 1,160 km with a bombload (500 kg), less with heavier bombload

I hear an echo.

And a failure to understand.

Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
It existed as a failure. It existed so late in the war as to be irrelevant.

And, most importantly of all, and I note you*carefully*snipped this pertinent fact from your reply,*it did not have the range that you claimed.*

It could*not*reach the whole of the UK.

What exactly did I snip. If you mean the range of the Arado Ar 234? Then its combat radius was 1,100 km with a bombload of (1,500 kg).

What exactly did you snip?

Oh, only the claim that it had a range of 1556 km.

Now down to 1100 km and still wrong.

The actual operational radius was 800 klicks.

Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
Nowhere near enough. The UK bought almost all of it up, pricing Germany out of the market. Lack of Tungsten does not equal no Tungsten.

Something you would no doubt be aware of if you have done any research are the following facts ...

* The Squeeze Bore AT gun production was ended and widespread use also ceased as early as 1942 because the barrel and ammo required tungsten.

* Production of Tungsten cored AT ammo ceased around 1942 for the same reason

* The specific reason was (see Tooze,*"Wages of Destruction") that Germany did not have enough even for industrial use (it was required for high speed machine tools vital for producing a lot of stuff like, oh, Tanks, Artillery, Smallarms, Submarines, Aircraft etc) and stockpiles were declining faster than the limited amounts smuggled in from Portugal and Spain could replace.

Originally posted by RN7
How do you know what secretive and fascist Spain and Portugal was secretly shipping to Nazi Germany?

Oh deer. How do I know these things?

I read them in Books.

Hint: WW2 ended in 1945.

The Fascist regimes in Spain and Portugal have been gone for several decades.

The things they kept semi-secret during the war are now readily accessible in books that have been published since then. Many of which I have read or consulted.

Perhaps it might be an idea if you widened your reading list?

Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
In any case, it explains the inconvenient fact that German Jet aircraft were ineffective toys in a strategic and operational sense (if not an immediate tactical sense) due to their pathetic engines ... and were always going to remain so.

Originally posted by RN7
But lethal ones all the same, and jets rapidly replaced turbo-props as frontline military aircraft in the mid-to-late 1940's.

Well, Jets certainly were lethal. Just not German ones.

What happened after WW2 is nice, but irrelevant. As you well know.

Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
Um. Logical error here. Operational Range does not change according to where an aircraft is based ... it is*fixed. It remains 800 klicks regardless of whether it is based in Berlin, or Paris, or Boulogne.

The quote I was replying to, carefully excised by you, was … “Also is there some reason why you feel that you have to lecture people about military terms or is it that you just feel that you have a monopoly on knowledge?* “

Originally posted by RN7
But distance does change due to location, and an aircraft based in occupied France and the Netherlands would be a shorter distance from Britain than an aircraft based in Germany and that parameter would be relevant to the respective operational range in question.

Which is, of course, irrelevant to what their operational range was … your claim was that, with the fantasy ranges you cited, they could reach all of the UK … you didn't specify from which bases.

And the actual combat radius – half the combat range (or less) – well, you're still quoting the combat range (the one way range) rather than the combat radius (the there and back to base range) … you still haven't grasped it.

Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
Nope. All German late war production figures are heavily doctored by Speer. He deliberately double counted, counted remanufactured or repaired wrecked airframes as new production, included the last week of the previous month's production and the first week of the next month's production for a given month's production routinely (double counting again) ... as is detailed in a number of works on the German War Economy (see the work by*Tooze*mentioned above).

His deliberate obfuscation of records was so thorough that, though we know he was doing it and we know the scale of what he was doing, we cannot work out how much of the claimed production was real and how much was a lie. We just know that the figures for 44-45 are so tainted as to be close to worthless.

I've also heard that been stated about Speer in the past and as you say that we just don't know what the real figure are the best way to gauge the true figures would be to go by casualties ...

Twaddle.

ROTFLMAO level twaddle.

Phil

aspqrz

11-30-2015, 12:20 AM

Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
No. You have repeatedly asked what the Soviets lied about. And I have repeatedly explained.

Pretty much everything.

And you repeatedly failed to grasp that.

Originally posted by RN7
No you haven't, you have not answered one question directly about what I asked you about how the Soviets lied in WW2.

Um.

What part of 'pretty much everything' was unclear as an answer?

Phil

aspqrz

11-30-2015, 12:23 AM

Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
Barber and Harrison's works on the Soviet War Economy, previously cited, including the link to the online paper I provided, answer most of them. But you obviously haven't read them.

Maiolo's work 'Cry Havoc' explains some of the others. As does Tooze's "Wages of Destruction' ... but you don't seem to be aware of the former and haven't had time to consult the latter as I only mentioned it in a just posted response.

Originally posted by RN7
Well if you included a link I certainly missed it. And once again could you type or copy and paste in plain English no matter how brief about what you mean so we can debate it in a civil fashion.

Um.

I am not sure what you think I have been doing, but the books I cited support the arguments I have been making in plain English.

Which is why I cited them.

Phil

aspqrz

11-30-2015, 12:26 AM

Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
As for whether people are as well read as I or not,*I have no idea. I merely point them in the direction of sources that support the statements I have made so that they can check them out themselves.

So your reasons for implying that I am not very well read, have a deficiency in knowledge or maybe am incapable of understanding your wisdom is what?

I have no idea whether you are well read or not.

I post the cites partly so anyone and everyone can check that they say what I have said they say – and in the hope that they actually read them to ascertain just that.

Whether you know or don't know anything is neither here nor there with regards to the cites …

I have provided them since you have made it plain that you do not believe a single thing I have said …

Phil

aspqrz

11-30-2015, 12:29 AM

Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
But you evidently don't even believe those, or can't be bothered to check them out ... and I'm giving you a free ride about many of the more ridiculous and provably incorrect unsupported personal assertions you have made, such as the ridiculous numbers for tonnages sunk by U-Boats or the lack of understanding of what Operational Radius for aircraft is (to name just two recent ones).

Originally Posted by RN7
I don't know what you are implying and I am trying to be polite despite your insulting tone and its becoming increasingly difficult to be polite. You claim you are giving me a free ride. About what exactly?

Um.

The bits specifically mentioned?

I've highlighted them in bold text to be helpful.

Phil

RN7

11-30-2015, 12:43 AM

And I think the entire rest of the world is mystified by your train of thought in thinking that a piece of crap that was produced in small numbers at the tail end of the war had of being relevant when the overwhelmingly vast majority of Nazi bomber production was of Medium and Light Bombers which did not have the range to bomb all of the UK. And didn't have the capacity, either.

They produced thousands of He-111s, Do-17s and Ju-88s and ~600 of the failed He-177.

But I thought they built 1,168 He-177's from 1942.

As for their payload vs. range. You are operating under the common, and charming, delusion that maximum range, or even maximum operational radius, was achievable with maximum bombload.

Nope

For operation Steinbock, and you evidently read, but failed to comprehend, the Wikipedia article, they carried 5600 kilos, not 13200 kilos.

You also failed to note, or comprehend, that they had a greater than 50% operational failure rate during that campaign … 8 of the 14 (!) committed had to RTB with overheating or burning engines.

A monumental piece of crap.

If you're going to cite a source, at least read and comprehend it all.

Um.

Ah.

From the Wikipedia article …

“Of the 14 He 177 sent out during*Operation Steinbock, one suffered a burst tire, and eight returned with overheating or burning engines. Of the four that reached London, one was lost to night fighters.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_177

Perhaps you didn't actually read the article, or perhaps you felt that no-one else would – or maybe you're just doing what the Soviets did so well …

I think the rest of the world would regard operational failure by 8 of the 14 brand new aircraft committed to be indicative.

And, of the four that managed to reach the target, carrying less than half the maximum bomb load (against London, mind, not the far north of England … unless you seriously expect us to believe that they could have carried more over a longer range?), they suffered 25% casualties.

Like massaging figures much?*

And I did say failed did I not and I never stated what payload they were carrying, but they did reach their target.

Quote:

I hear an echo.

And a failure to understand.

What exactly did you snip?

Oh, only the claim that it had a range of 1556 km.

Now down to 1100 km and still wrong.

The actual operational radius was 800 klicks.

Not from my sources

Oh deer. How do I know these things?

I read them in Books.

Hint: WW2 ended in 1945.

The Fascist regimes in Spain and Portugal have been gone for several decades.

The things they kept semi-secret during the war are now readily accessible in books that have been published since then. Many of which I have read or consulted.

Perhaps it might be an idea if you widened your reading list?].

But they where still in existence in the Second World War. And yes you can find this information online too its not that hard

Well, Jets certainly were lethal. Just not German ones.

What happened after WW2 is nice, but irrelevant. As you well know.

The quote I was replying to, carefully excised by you, was … “Also is there some reason why you feel that you have to lecture people about military terms or is it that you just feel that you have a monopoly on knowledge?* “

Which is, of course, irrelevant to what their operational range was … your claim was that, with the fantasy ranges you cited, they could reach all of the UK … you didn't specify from which bases.

And the actual combat radius – half the combat range (or less) – well, you're still quoting the combat range (the one way range) rather than the combat radius (the there and back to base range) … you still haven't grasped it.

Twaddle.

ROTFLMAO level twaddle.

Phil

Well I think Raellus was right about you.

RN7

11-30-2015, 12:44 AM

Um.

I am not sure what you think I have been doing, but the books I cited support the arguments I have been making in plain English.

Which is why I cited them.

Phil

No they don't

aspqrz

11-30-2015, 12:54 AM

Originally Posted by*aspqrz*
Feel free to provide your sources for those two furphies.

Whatever a furphies is you will note that I earlier supported in this threat the importance of British anti-submarine advances in WW2. I have a book collection in two different countries and it would take me weeks to list them. For naval data of the top of my head....

Allied Escort Ships of WWII: P. Elliott
Atlas of Naval Warfare : H. Pemsel
Britain's Sea War: a Diary of Ship Losses 1939-45: J.M Young (1989)
Chronology of the War at Sea 1939-45: J. Rohwer & G. Hummelchen (1972)
Submarines of World War Two: E. Bagnasco
The German Navy in WW2: J.C Taylor*
The Liberty Ships: L.A Laywer W.H. Mitchell
The Mediterranean and the Middle East: I.S.O Playfair*
The War at Sea: S.W. Roskill (1954)
U Boat war in the Atlantic 1939-45: MOD*(1946)
Victory Ships and Tankers: David & Charles
Warships of the World: T. Lenton & J. J. Colledge

I've highlighted the ones that may be relevant.

The specific sources for losses that I used ...

The U-Boat Offensive: 1914-45 by VE Tarrant (Arms & Armour Press, 1989)
U-Boats: History, Development and Equipment, 1914-45 by David Miller (Conway Maritime Press, 2000)

Originally posted by RN7
Allied Shipping losses in Atlantic
1940: 3,654,500 tons
1941: 3,295,900 tons
1942: 6,150,340 tons
1943: 2,170,400 tons
1944: 505,700 tons
1945: 366,800 tons

Response by aspqrz from Tarrant
Allied Shipping Losses in the ETO
1939: ~500,000 tons
1940: ~2,380,000 tons
1941: ~2,300,000 tons
1942: ~6,600,000 tons
1943: ~2,600,000 tons
1944: ~650,000 tons
1945: ~275,000 tons

Further data from Miller (who, unlike Tarrant, gives losses by Calendar year)

Allied Shipping Losses in the ETO
1939: 509,321
1940: 2,435,586
1941: 2,235, 674
1942: 5,760,485
1943: 2,036,674
1944: 371,698
1945: 256,574

The losses you cite for 1940 and 41 are still way over the odds.

So. Which of the many books you mention are your figures from? The ones I have highlighted are all, except one, very outdated and that may be where the discrepancy comes from.

Volume 2 of Roskill is available online, for example, and its figures for 1942 are within a believable range (depending on whether the include losses to the Japanese or not) ... so where did the weird figures for 1940 + 1941 come from? Specific book, please.

Phil

aspqrz

11-30-2015, 12:57 AM

No they don't

So you say ... based on your unsupported personal assertions.

Please specify which books don't say which specific things.

Phil

aspqrz

11-30-2015, 01:04 AM

RN7 said
But I thought they built 1,168 He-177's from 1942.

1169 or 1137 according to Wikipedia to the end of August 44, when production ceased. Which means that the numbers are suspect because of Speer's known fiddling with actual production figures.

964 or so of the -A3 and -A5 models which had slightly reduced chances of their engines roman candling. Remember the more than 50% operational failure rate of the 14 that tried to bomb the UK?

I am sure you do.

Phil

aspqrz

11-30-2015, 01:10 AM

Originally posted by RN7
Not from my sources

Which you fail to cite.

AR-234 range, 1630 klicks (halve it for the ~800 klicks operational radius). From Complete Encyclopedia of Weapons of WW2.

Confirmed at ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arado_Ar_234
http://www.airvectors.net/avar234.html
http://www.aviation-history.com/arado/234.html

... and many many more.

By people who know the difference between maximum range and operational radius.

Phil

RN7

11-30-2015, 01:16 AM

Right aspqrz I am going to say this to you publically as I don't believe in going behind people backs as has been done before on this board when there are problems.

I do not like your patronising tone and I don't like your insults. I have had heated discussions with many others on this board, but they have always been amicable and civil and I always have the utmost respect for the opinions of the other members. But I will not sit here and listen to your consistent lack of respect for my intelligence and knowledge or any more of your childish insults.

I have complained to Kato about your conduct and you are the first person that I ever had to complain about on this board and that I think says it all.

Legbreaker

11-30-2015, 01:23 AM

So just cite your sources RN7 and prove him wrong! Surely it can't be that hard?
Isn't that what adults do when they disagree?

However, I do agree aspqrz's tone has become somewhat...abrasive, but perhaps that's because he's felt like he's been bashing his head against the same brick wall trying to get you to cite your sources?

aspqrz

11-30-2015, 01:49 AM

RN7

11-30-2015, 06:05 AM

In the interest of civility and probably my better judgement I will answer your questions to the best of my ability. I was actually enjoying this debate until the tone of your comments changed. I am being polite to you and I expect you to also be polite if you reply. Criticism is fine but moderate it.

Before I answer your questions I will inform you that I am in Ireland at the moment with some of my sources. The rest of my sources are in America on my book shelf, in my attic, burned to CD or on memory key and I cannot access them until I return to America at Christmas.

I already gave you my principle source for naval statistics but you overlooked it. That is World War II a Statistical Survey by John Ellis. It's my favourite reference book and you may have it, and if you do you will know what a good source of statistics it is. Its naval statistics are not infallible but they are good. Its land, air and industrial statistics are much better in my opinion, and its national army division listings are the most complete I have seen. Some of its references are sourced from US War Department and British MOD records.

If you want statistics for US Lend Lease supplies to the Soviet Union and the British Empire and other countries then I suggest you go online and google the following: http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/LL-Ship/index.html

You will find a complete and thorough listing of very item that the US shipped to other countries around the world. It's listing for the Soviet Union and British Empire is very complete.

If you want statistics on German aircraft and many other points I have argued with you over there are so many now sources online that it is pointless listing books from my memory I don't have on hand. I find it a bit tedious repeatedly going back and forth over small statistics and technical issues but I can access some of my books and a lot more if you are prepared to wait a month. But as you have used internet sites to support your argument and so have I as so much information is now online what is the point.

aspqrz

11-30-2015, 07:58 AM

WW2aSS is a fine book, indeed.

For one published 22 years ago.

And even those of us who use it know it has significant inaccuracies and omissions.

Specialised sources disagree with its figures in a number of areas - merchant losses and other naval data, for example, are known to be inaccurate and flawed.

Then, of course, the books I cited are examples of more recent scholarship as well as looking beneath and beyond the figures ...

Tooze, "Wages of Destruction", 2007. The entire economy of Nazi Germany from go to whoa, its problems and limitations and why it couldn't win the war it actually fought.
Maiolo, "Cry Havoc", 2010. The economic realities behind the war plans of all the major powers and why the Germans did so well initially, but were incapable of sustaining their initial faux lead.
Miller, "U-Boats [etc.]", 2007. A comprehensive examination of the U-Boats and up to date Merchant loss figures.
Glantz, "Colossus Reborn: The Red Army at War", 2005. A companion to Stumbling Colossus, more Soviet era lies exposed.
Overy, "The Bombing War", 2013. A classic by an acknowledged expert on the topic. Not everything the coffee table books tell you is, in fact, the actual truth - as Overy reveals.
Kershaw, "Fateful Choices", 2008. Examination of key decision points during WW2, not all involving the US.
Burleigh, "Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II", 2012. The moral underpinnings of why the allies won ... and, equally, the immorality that was at the basis of the Axis loss. And, yes, morality had a heck of a lot more to do with both than you might think at first.

And some, while older, look beneath and beyond the figures ...

Barber and Harrison, "The Soviet Home Front, 1941-5: a Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II", 1991. Details of Soviet lies, damn lies, and statistics ... and there is a lot more in later works by the pair, individually and severally.
Overy, "Russia's War: Blood on the Snow", 1997. One of the earliest books using post-glasnost access to secret Soviet sources, and good, if dated, revelation of more Soviet era lies.
Overy, "Why the Allies Won", 1997. And not all of the reasons have to do with active US entry, believe it or not!
Glantz & House, "When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler", 1995. More information about Soviet era lies and a good history of the War in the East from a Soviet PoV.
Glantz, "Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War 2", 1998. More on Soviet era lies and the problems the Soviets faced at the beginning of the war.

There are many more, some of which offer snippets and some which are more substantive.

All of the above have information that either supports the thesis I presented or answers questions you asked or refutes claims that you made.

I won't even bother with the technical books on Warships, Combat and other Aircraft and Combat and other vehicles, as they are legion. And many of them differentiate between Combat Range and Combat Radius.

Phil

aspqrz

11-30-2015, 08:15 AM

RN7

11-30-2015, 01:37 PM

If you are talking about a what/if scenario about Britain (and Russia) fighting Germany without the US then you also have to look at other consequences of that. The Allied bombing campaign will not be as effective without the USAAC or will Allied air superiority in the West occur as it did. It will also affect naval warfare in the Atlantic and changes in real world industrial figures and German strategies are also likely.

I am still convinced the Germany had the capacity to bomb Britain. The He-177 despite its limitations could reach industrial centres in the UK from many locations in occupied Europe, unless it was flown from eastern locations in Germany such as Berlin. Also if we are talking about a war where the US is not directly involved then we also have to look at the development of other German long ranged bombers which never got off the ground in reality due to the war ending in 1945.

Did you look at http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/LL-Ship/index.html

There is a lot of data about lend lease shipments to the Britain and the Commonwealth that needs to be examined.

Figures for merchant ship losses in the Atlantic don't completely match wherever you look. Some merchant ship losses data from WW2aSS may have been amalgamated with other theatres, and ships captured and damaged but not sunk may also have been included in loss figures.

Another decent site on line is.........

http://www.naval-history.net/WW2CampaignsAtlanticDev.htm

........although I'm not sure about his sources.

The link I gave you for US Lend Lease figures also has very good information about the Battle of the Atlantic

https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/Admin-Hist/173-ArmedGuards/index.html#index
https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/ETO/Ultra/SRH-009/index.html
https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/rep/ASW-51/index.html#contents
http://ibiblio.org/hyperwar/UN/UK/UK-RN-II/index.html#pagev

And a great many other topics as well......

http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/

Another good site about U-boats is http://uboat.net/index.html

RN7

11-30-2015, 01:52 PM

Re WW2aSS, also, the Divisional and Manpower data may be OK for the US and UK, but I am aware that there are considerable problems with its data compared to Australian, New Zealand and, I believe, Canadian and South African manpower and unit data which leads many to believe (including myself) that it may not be as reliable as you suggest for any but the major powers and, possibly, the major western allied powers

(Russian data available at the time of publication was, to be generous, wildly suspect ... I mean, Stalin managed to hide the actual population of the USSR before the war to the extent that everyone believed his figures [which is why the Germans were so surprised that they were still fighting new divisions in late 41 when they 'knew' they'd killed the entire manpower available to the Red Army a couple of times over], which gave it as only 2/3rds [or less] of what it actually was).

Phil

The Soviet divisional data is flawed but its still is a good source. I have not found to many problems with the other countries with the accuracy ranging from very good to fair with a few discrepancies. Its generally a good reliable source of information.

Another source I use for military forces and industrial output for 1939/40 and the lead up to WW2 are League of Nations statistics which are extremely detailed. I have the stats for every member of the League of Nations burned on to a CD but its over in America at the moment.

Damocles

11-30-2015, 03:06 PM

RN7

11-30-2015, 03:08 PM

aspqrz

11-30-2015, 06:27 PM

pmulcahy11b

11-30-2015, 07:16 PM

I think that the best thing to do with trolls is ignore them.

unkated

11-30-2015, 11:41 PM

The problem here is in how the question was put.

"Who won WWII" has an obvious historic answer based on how history played out: the Allies.

To discuss one of the allies as winning without the rest belittles the effort of the other nations, both behind and at the front lines.

The question you want to ask was "Who Could Have Won WW2?"

It is theoretical, does not deny anyone's actual effort, and can be a much calmer and reasoned discussion.

Nor does it require a single answer.

Uncle Ted

Legbreaker

12-01-2015, 04:51 PM

See gentlemen, that wasn't so hard to play nice. Thank you to all involved! :D
And yes unkated, I agree the thread title probably did unintentionally contribute to the tone (not that it could have been foreseen).
Very happy to see that with a little step back and a deep breath we can get our shit sorted in house like grown up boys and girls.

Shall we proceed as suggested that this entire discussion be treated as one great big "what if"?

In that spirit, how do you think WWII would have been different (if at all) if the Treaty of Versailles hadn't been so hard on Germany?
Would it perhaps be the USSR that were the aggressors and a complete different Germany an ally against them?

StainlessSteelCynic

12-01-2015, 07:04 PM

I can't be the only guy who thinks you are all retarded and from a farm for arguing shit that has already happened. I mean FFS, if you Google Yalta or Postsdam, you see everything you need to know about this issue. (Stalin, Roosevelt/Truman, and Churchill/Attlee-who-the-hellever).

Srrsly, you guys are pissing in the wind on this one. USA FTW.. because, if the UK or USSR could have done it on their own, they would have done it.

Wow.
Really dude? Could you be anymore insulting?
If you don't like the thread then don't read it, nobody is forcing you.

You make a mighty big presumption in that the war could never have been won by the Commonwealth and the Soviet Union. Simply because the USA showed up in the final two years of the European war doesn't mean that the USA "won it".

And then you go and call anyone debating this retarded.

This just makes you look like an ignorant 'Merican peasant who doesn't really have any opinions, only prejudices.
Next you'll be telling us that the USMC has never, ever run from a battle.

Raellus

12-01-2015, 07:26 PM

Guys, can we not make this about Americans versus Australians? There's too much parochialism and jingoism going on here. I bowed out of this debate because it was going nowhere and getting ugly. I apologize for my contributions to that.

Since recusing myself from this "debate", I've received complaints from forumites (no one directly involved in this particular thread) about the tone of some of the posts/posters here. Please keep it civil. I stopped posting in this thread because I was finding it too hard to do so. Please apply that to yourselves as well. If you can't follow the forum guidelines, don't post.

http://forum.juhlin.com/showthread.php?t=2961

If I receive any more complaints about this thread, I'll have to shut it down.

RN7

12-01-2015, 10:42 PM

All I want to say about those who think that the British Commonwealth/Empire and the Soviets could win the war by themselves without America is that you can't ignore the elephant in the room; ie US Lend Lease.

On paper the British Commonwealth looks like it had the manpower and resources to take on the Axis with the Soviets, but did it happen? The importance of US Lend Lease to the USSR is well known but a lot less is and has been said about US Lend Lease to Britain. They got over $31 billion worth of material, three times more than the Soviets. US War Department figures are all here.......http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/LL-Ship/index.html

And don't forget that the US industry supplied Britain, the USSR and other countries with this material while it was building the largest airforce and navy in history, and an army/marine force of 100 well equipped divisions. Lend Lease was an IOU ie pay it back after the war is won when you can manage it. If America stayed neutral then the British, Soviets and everyone else will be paying top dollar for all of this and America will have no obligation whatsoever of selling its best weaponry and technology to anyone.

RN7

12-02-2015, 11:48 AM

Found my League of Nations statistics on CD to my surprise.

Loads of detailed information about standing military forces just before the start of the war. Also government statistics for individual countries in a whole range of statistics from late 1920's through the 1930's by year up until 1939/40.

All agricultural statistics, and also raw materials such as antimony ore, bauxite, cadmium, chrome ore, coal, copper ore, crude petroleum & shale oil, gold, iron ore, lead ore, lignite, manganese, molybdenum ore, natural gas, nickel ore, nitrogen, phosphates, potash, pyrites, quicksilver, salt & industrial salt, silver, slag, sulphur, tin ore, tungsten ore, vanadium ore and zinc ore.

Also industrial production of aluminium, automobiles & trucks, benzol, cement, copper, electricity, lead, paper & paper board, petroleum products, pig iron, rayon, shipbuilding, staple fibre, steel, sulphuric acid, super-phosphates, tin, wood pulp and zinc. And merchant navy tonnage and trade statistics.

All highly relevant to WW2 I think. I'll type it up if anyone is interested.

Damocles

12-03-2015, 09:41 AM

Wow.
Really dude? Could you be anymore insulting?

Yes, I could be.

You make a mighty big presumption in that the war could never have been won by the Commonwealth and the Soviet Union. Simply because the USA showed up in the final two years of the European war doesn't mean that the USA "won it".

And then you go and call anyone debating this retarded.

This just makes you look like an ignorant 'Merican peasant who doesn't really have any opinions, only prejudices.
Next you'll be telling us that the USMC has never, ever run from a battle.

I would proffer that the United States' near total control of currency reserves over the past 70 years is a more clear signal of our status as the 'winners' of WW2 than any tactical withdraws performed by our amphibious force-in-readiness.

For more about American Primacy:

http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21590098-being-charge-hard-work-it-has-its-perks-if-i-ruled-world

rcaf_777

12-03-2015, 12:22 PM

You make a mighty big presumption in that the war could never have been won by the Commonwealth and the Soviet Union. Simply because the USA showed up in the final two years of the European war doesn't mean that the USA "won it".

Who ever made this assumption is wrong and needs to remember

1. The Permanent Joint Board on Defense (A Canada-US Board) was formed in 1940

2. The Lend-Lease policy, formally titled "An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States was enacted in March 1941

3. In April 1941 President Roosevelt extended the Pan-American Security Zone east almost as far as Iceland.

4. In August 1941 the USN begins to provide protection to Allied shipping as far as Iceland

5. In July 1941 USN TF 19 anchors off Reykjavík, Iceland and land a Brigade of Marines to secure the island from the British. The USN then deploys PBY Catalinas to patrol the area.

All these events prove that the US was active in the war in Europe prior to Jan 1942

RN7

12-03-2015, 01:01 PM

Who ever made this assumption is wrong and needs to remember

1. The Permanent Joint Board on Defense (A Canada-US Board) was formed in 1940

2. The Lend-Lease policy, formally titled "An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States was enacted in March 1941

3. In April 1941 President Roosevelt extended the Pan-American Security Zone east almost as far as Iceland.

4. In August 1941 the USN begins to provide protection to Allied shipping as far as Iceland

5. In July 1941 USN TF 19 anchors off Reykjavík, Iceland and land a Brigade of Marines to secure the island from the British. The USN then deploys PBY Catalinas to patrol the area.

All these events prove that the US was active in the war in Europe prior to Jan 1942

Also the US volunteers Eagle Squadrons; three fighter squadrons of the Royal Air Force formed between September 1940 and July 1941with volunteer pilots from the United States were operational in Britain. The 1st American Volunteer Group of the Chinese Air Force, nicknamed the Flying Tigers, was also operational in China prior to December 1941.

Also at the ABC-1 conference; secret discussions that took place between US and British military staff members on American, British and Canadian (ABC) military coordination in the event of U.S. entry into World War II. The conference took place in Washington, D.C. from January 29 to March 27, 1941; the U.S. and Britain agreed that their strategic objectives were:

(1) "The early defeat of Germany as the predominant member of the Axis with the principal military effort of the United States being exerted in the Atlantic and European area".

2) A strategic defensive in the Far East." Thus, the Americans concurred with the British in the grand strategy of "Europe first" in carrying out military operations in World War II. The UK feared that the United States might be diverted from its main focus in Europe to the Pacific if war broke out with Japan.