Stardate 20031107.1207

(Captain's log): I seem to have gotten a lot of what-if letters in the last couple of days about WWII.

Evaluating what-if's is always perilous. Once you permit yourself to make changes to history, you can demonstrate that any outcome was possible just by adding as many more what-ifs as are needed to make it come about. So it's sometimes interesting to speculate about such things, but not always, because the speculations often prove more about your what-ifs than they do about any real historical possibilities.

However, analysis of what actually did happen can sometimes indicate what would happen if one major thing had been changed. Based on my post from a couple of days ago, some of the letters concerned what might have happened if the US had not gotten involved in WWII.

Zach writes:

Tonight, whilst discussing the role of religion in rule of law in the US, a friend and I moved onto a discussion of the US system vs. all others. Eventually I said that we had defeated fascism, communism, and will defeat Islamism. This started him explaining that the US did not defeat the Nazis, rather the Soviets did. My question to you is whether the US was necessary for Europe to be free of the Nazis, or whether the Soviets and the English would have eventually prevailed without us? I have no idea if this is your area of expertise, but your way of explaining things political and historical is certainly amongst the best I have come across on the internet. Anyway, your input on the topic would be much appreciated.

Any frank appraisal of WWII has to conclude that the USSR defeated the Germans, with substantial help from the US and UK. From the beginning of Barbarossa (the German code name for the plan to invade the USSR, with the expectation of defeating it as rapidly as Poland and France before it) until nearly the end of the war, the bulk of the German army was in the east facing the Red Army, and the Red Army caused far more casualties overall to the German military than the British and Americans combined. The Red Army paid for that in blood; it also lost far more killed and wounded than the US and UK, by a very large margin.

Trying to determine how much contribution each made is not all that easy, though. Even though the USSR primarily defeated the Germans, it is by no means clear that the UK and USSR would have won if the US had not become a co-belligerent.

The American involvement altered the situation on the Eastern Front in a lot of ways, but there are five ways which are particularly significant. (Don't write letters about the dozens of other ways I have deliberately left out!)

1. The US put its industry on a war footing. At the time, the US was the world's largest industrial power, and began pouring out war matériel at an awesome rate. It was the only major industrial power whose supplies of critical raw materials were secure or could easily be secured, especially in petroleum, and America's factories and shipyards were safe from significant enemy action.

So by the end of the war, the US was producing more combat aircraft than everyone else in the world combined, allies and enemies alike. American pilots flew a lot of those, but a lot more were given to allies. American industry was distinctive not only because of the sheer volume of production, but also because of its efficiency and quality and speed. So when the British designed an innovative short-wavelength radar system later in the war, the design was sent to the US to be manufactured. High frequency electronics are tricky to manufacture, and American industry could produce working units in quantity better than anyone else, including even the British.

Roosevelt referred to the United States as the "Arsenal of Democracy", and the mammoth production of war goods which eventually flowed out of the US was the single most important contribution this nation made, affecting every aspect of the war everywhere in the world. Everyone in the world knew that the biggest reason why America would be a formidable opponent was its immense and essentially invulnerable industrial capacity.

2. The US began shipping huge amounts of war matériel to the USSR, financed by Lend-Lease (i.e. given to the USSR for free). There had been some of that before Pearl Harbor, mostly transshipped via the UK, but the quantity increased drastically after Pearl Harbor. It included some kinds of things which the Soviets themselves could not produce, either because they were high tech or because they required excellent manufacturing quality. Some of what they sent seems prosaic but was far more important than it first appears.

For instance, the US sent the USSR large amounts of water-proof telephone wire, which was used on the front for non-radio communication. It could be laid on the ground where needed. Such wire is either waterproof or it isn't; any leak anywhere shorts the wire out. The USSR wasn't able to produce that kind of wire with quantity and quality high enough to be useful. If it had not been available they'd have had to use radio far more, and that would have given the Germans better ability to intercept Soviet transmissions, to read, if the codes had been cracked, or to do traffic analysis on if not.

We also sent the Soviets (and every other ally) large numbers of "deuce-and-a-halfs", the legendary American 2.5 ton truck, the finest and most reliable in the world which were pouring out of conve