re: Economics: Soviet Industrial Power in WWII (Cameron Sawyer, Russia)

Cameron Sawyer responds to Istvan Simon’s post of 4 December:

A few quibbles to Istvan Simon’s points:

1. Istvan wrote: “I disagree with Cameron’s statement [that the industrial power of the Soviet Union was the main factor in Hitler's defeat], and more importantly, every major historian on the war that I have read disagrees with him as well.”

I have two problems with this statement: a) it’s not an argument–it’s an appeal to authority; b) it is not descriptive of modern scholarship.

The most eminent military authority of our age, at least in the English-speaking world, is probably John Keegan, who taught military history at Sandhurst for 36 years. It was Keegan’s masterful *History of WWII*, which I’ve read two or three times, which got me thinking about the war in an Eastern Front-centric way. Keegan wrote a separate book on the war in the East, *Barbarossa*. I’ve read a lot more on the war since then, but many of my theses come from Keegan–the importance of Soviet trucks versus German horses; Soviet production overwhelming the Germans; the Germans’ having lost the war by December, 1941. Quite a lot of further reading, including in German and in Russian, has convinced me of the rightness of Keegan’s arguments.

According to the *Oxford Encyclopedia of WWII* (one of the few sources of mine which are not packed up in boxes while my new house is being built), “The German-Soviet War, known in the USSR as the Great Patriotic War, ranks as the greatest armed conflict ever fought on a single front. Statistically and strategically, it dominates the Second World War. For most of four years, on average, more than 9 million troops were continuously engaged. . . Germany at no time had less than 55% of its divisions committed. . . 13.6 million Soviet and 3 million German dead in the military category alone account for over two-thirds of the world total [and nearly 90% of military deaths in the European theatre].” *Oxford Encyclopedia of World War II*, page 341.

Concerning Soviet war production, the *Oxford Encyclopedia* has this to say:

“Figures for overall production are unreliable, but it is clear that during 1941 Soviet military production was already surpassing Germany’s. Even during the second half of 1941 production of aircraft and tanks nearly equaled Germany’s for the whole year. . .

“Soviet war production was also supplemented by the Allied Lend-Lease programme. Altogether, during the years 1941 to 1945, 21,621 combat aircraft and 12,439 tanks and self-propelled guns arrived in the USSR. Compared to overall Soviet production during the same period of 136,364 aircraft and 99,507 tanks, Allied supplies seem insignificant. But during the critical year 1942 they provided the margin which allowed the USSR to have adequate aircraft and tank forces. Of acknowledged importance was the delivery of trucks and jeeps. . .” op. cit. p. 950.

Present scholarship is also well-represented, in my opinion, by the excellent Wikipedia article on the Eastern Front, which says:

“Industrial output.

“The Soviet victory owed a great deal to the ability of her war industry to outperform the German economy, despite the enormous loss of population and land. Stalin’s five-year plans of the 1930s had resulted in the industrialization of the Urals and central Asia. In 1941, the trains that shipped troops to the front were used to evacuate thousands of factories from Belarus and Ukraine to safe areas far from the front lines.

“As the Soviet Union’s manpower reserves ran low from 1943 onwards, the great Soviet offensives had to depend more on equipment and less on the expenditure of lives. The increases in production of war materiel were achieved at the expense of civilian living standards–the most thorough application of the principle of total war–and with the help of Lend-Lease supplies from the United Kingdom and the United States. The Germans, on the other hand, could rely on a large slave workforce from the conquered countries and Soviet POWs.

“Germany’s raw material production was higher than the Soviets’ and her labour force was far greater, but the Soviets were more efficient at using what resources they had and chose to build low-cost, low-maintenance vehicles whilst the Germans built high-cost, high-maintenance vehicles.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II)

Soviet achievements in production are even more impressive in view of the large advantage the Germans had in terms of labor. A table from the above-cited Wikipedia article is a bit of a stereotype-buster, for those who think that the Soviet Union overwhelmed Germany with masses of people.

One of my favorite internet resources on the military history of the 20th century is www.feldgrau.com, dedicated to the amassing of all possible data on the German military forces of WWI and WWII. The authors are unabashed enthusiasts of the German military, but the materials are reasonably objective, very comprehensive, and very interesting. Feldgrau.com has an article on this subject called “A Germany-Soviet Military-Economic Comparison,” by Arvo Vecamer. The article starts out with this:

“The Soviet Union was the single most important factor in the defeat of Nationalist Socialist Germany. Germany essentially lost the Second World War on the Eastern Front and the key to that loss can be directly attributed to the different economic and industrial factors of both the Soviet Union and the Third Reich.”

http://www.feldgrau.com/econo.html

Most interesting and objective are probably the German sources. This insightful post by Dr. Erhardt Sanio is fairly typical of the German scholarly opinion which I have encountered in my readings:

Die Lieferungen aller Westalliierten
an die UdSSR lagen unter 10% der eigenen sowjetischen Kriegsproduktion,
waren aber in einzelnen Bereichen deutlich hoeher. So wurden zehnmal so
viele Lastwagen geliefert wie in der UdSSR produziert, der Kautschukbedarf
wurde praktisch vollstaendig aus diesen Lieferungen gedeckt. Wichtig waren
auch die Lebensmittellieferungen, die einen bedeutenden Beitrag dazu
lieferten, dass es vor allem in den Jahren 1942 und 1943 trotz des Verlusts
von Agrarueberschussgebieten nicht zu groesseren Ernaehrungsproblemen kam.

The deliveries of all of the Western allies to the USSR made less than 10% of the Soviets’ own war production, but were in several distinct areas much higher. Thus there were ten times as many trucks delivered as were produced inside the USSR [that figure is not quite accurate--CS], and the demand for rubber was practically completely covered from these deliveries. Important also were the deliveries of foodstuffs, which made a substantial contribution to the fact that in 1942 and 1943 there were no big nutrition problems [in the USSR] despite the loss of agricultural regions.

Die sowjetische Kriegsgeschichtsschreibung hat die Bedeutung der Lieferungen
stets heruntergespielt, waehrend im Westen eine Tendenz bestand, ihre
Bedeutung zu uebertreiben. Ganz gewiss haben sie eine Rolle gespielt, ob
ohne sie ein Sieg der UdSSR wahrscheinlich gewesen waere, ist schwer zu
sagen. Die Lieferungen der Westalliierten bis Ende 1941 betrugen aber
nur etwa ein Hundertstel aller Lieferungen an die UdSSR 1941-45. Wenn sie
eine Rolle spielten, dann eher eine moralische. Die Geleitzuege nach Murmansk
mit ihrer seestrategischen Infrastruktur nutzten dabei auch Grossbritannien,
da sie deutsche Flottenkraefte banden, die nicht im Atlantik oder im
Mittelmeer zum Einsatz kommen konnten.

The Soviet war historiography has always underplayed the importance of the [lend-lease] deliveries, while in the West there arose a tendency, to exaggerate their importance [emphasis added]. Quite definitely they played a role, but whether or not the Soviet victory would have been probable without the deliveries is hard to say. The deliveries of the Western allies up until the end of 1941 [when the outcome of the war was more or less decided] made only about one-hundredth part of all of the deliveries to the USSR in 1941-45 [the point being that Lend-Lease played no significant role in the decisive Battle of Moscow]. If they played a role, then it was more a moral one. The convoys to Murmansk with their sea-strategic infrastructure were useful also to Great Britain, because they tied up German naval power, which were thus unable to be deployed in the Atlantic or Mediterranean.

Fuer die militaerische Entwicklung bis Ende 1941 haben westliche Lieferungen
mit Sicherheit keine messbare Rolle gespielt. Das folgt schon daraus, dass
jegliche neue Waffentechnik fuer die Einfuehrung in militaerischen Verbaenden
Zeit braucht, und zwar selbst im Frieden Monate. Dazu kam, dass bei den Waffen-
gattungen, die fuer die Erfolge der Roten Armee am bedeutendsten waren,
naemlich Panzerwaffe und Artillerie, die sowjetische Waffentechnik der
westlichen gleichwertig, zum Teil ueberlegen war und kein wirklicher Mangel
an dieser Waffentechnik herrschte. Die moderneren, sowohl den sowjetischen
als auch den deutschen Systemen ueberlegenen britischen und amerikanischen
Flugzeuge wurden nicht an die UdSSR geliefert.

For the military development up to the end of 1941 [when the outcome of the war was effectively decided] the Western deliveries with certainty played no measurable role. That follows already from the fact that introduction of any new weapon technology [weapons system] in the military formations takes time, and even in peacetime, months. On top of that, in those weapons systems which were most important for the success of the Red Army, namely tanks and artillery, the Soviet weapons technology was equal to and in part superior to Western technology, and there was no lack [for the Red Army] in these weapons systems. The modern British and American aircraft, superior to both Soviet and German systems, were not delivered to the USSR.

http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/De/de.sci.geschichte/2005-12/msg00895.html

The conversation between German historians continues:

Du uebersiehst hier etwas Grundlegendes. Es ging um den symbolischen
Wert und um die A u f g a b e der Neutralitaet der U S A auf Europas
Schlachtfeld. Desweiteren hat Stalin die Alliierten damit unter Druck
gesetzt, Moskau einfach aufzugeben, weil es sich hinter dem Ural dann
sicherer lebt. Und genau *das* wollte man keinesfalls, man wollte in
erster Linie zwei Diktatoren ausbluten lassen (Churchill’s Memoiren).

You are overlooking here something basic. This had to do with the symbolic value and with the giving up of the neutrality of the USA on Europe’s battlefield. Further Stalin with that put the Allies under pressure [not] to simply give up Moscow, because it was simpler to live behind the Urals. And exactly *that* one wanted on no account, one wanted in the first place for the two dictators to bleed each other to death (Churchill’s memoirs).

Glaub mir, der Strom der Lieferungen bis zur Invasion befriedigte nur
die Ungeduld Stalins auf die fruehzeitige zweite F-r-o-n-t, die ihn
haette entlasten koennen! Die wollte man aber nicht realisieren, und
da die Deutschen nach der Winterschlacht den Krieg gegen die S-Union
nicht mehr gewinnen konnten, denn das war Stalin da schon klar, gab
er sich nach langem Ringen mit einer Front in Italien zufrieden. Die
zu Stalins Gunsten die letzten Reserven der eh schon angeschlagenen
deutschen Oststreitkraefte banden. Nun ja, die Alliierten haben sich
nicht gerade beeilt.

Believe me, the stream of deliveries prior to the invasion satisfied only the impatience of Stalin for an early second front, which could unburden him! That, however, one didn’t want to realize, and since the Germans after the Winter Battle [Battle of Moscow in December 1941 and January 1942] could no longer win the war against the Soviet Union [emphasis added], and this was already clear to Stalin, he after long complaining satisfied himself with a front in Italy. Which to Stalin’s benefit bound up the last reserves of the already beaten German Eastern Forces [emphasis added]. Well yes–the Allies were not exactly in a hurry.

http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/De/de.sci.geschichte/2005-12/msg00897.html

And indeed, other than outproducing the Germans, how could the Soviets have won? Stalin murdered the Soviet officer corps in 1937 en masse, together with the one great general of the Civil War, Tukhachevsky, with the result that the Soviets had no Heinz Guderian; no Manstein, no Hoth, no Hoepner. The Soviet forces were, at the beginning of the war, in the hands of such stupid brutes as Budenny and Voroshilov, who threw away the lives of as many as a million Soviet soldiers at Kiev and Uman and other debacles. In time Budenny and his type were replaced by cleverer brutes like Timoshenko, Konev and Zhukov, but at no time did the Soviet have military leadership of any quality comparable to what the Germans had (the great Soviet general Rokossovsky, whose role was downplayed by Soviet historiography because he was a Pole, was one of the few exceptions). The courage and resilience of the Soviet soldiers is legendary, but I really don’t believe that the soldiers of any one country are inherently any better than the soldiers of any other country. Lend-Lease helped enormously, more–as I have written–than the 10% statistic would leave one to believe. But the deciding factor? Soviet industry. The war was extremely complex, as David Pike and others have pointed out, with a great mass of interesting details (which is why it is so interesting to study). But that does not exclude the existence of root causes and fundamental factors, and there is nothing wrong with searching for these, in my opinion. Economic factors are particularly interesting because they are relatively unknown to the public mind–popular culture shows brave soldiers and key weapons and fatal mistakes of leadership; economic causes don’t make good movies so we hardly know about them.

2. Istvan Simon also wrote: “This [that there were not two fronts in the European theatre] is another absurd statement, very much based on Stalin’s views of the war, but at odds with the view of major historians. It ignores everything else that happened in World War II as peripheral to the Eastern Front. It ignores the battle of the Atlantic, which was crucial for England’s defense and the participation of the United States in the war. It ignores the war in the Pacific, which the United States was engaged in without any help from Russia–the Russians declared war on Japan a few days before the end of World War II. It ignores the crucial war in North Africa.”

I have already said that the war between the U.S. and Japan–a big, important, interesting war–was a different war from the one in Europe. I was not discounting nor indeed even writing about that–my thesis was about the war in Europe. My thesis was that the war in Europe was primarily between Germany and the USSR, where most of the forces were engaged, where nearly 90% of the combat deaths occurred, with the other conflicts being very much minor and peripheral, in comparison, by any measure, as major historical sources including the *Oxford Encyclopedia* do say.

For the significance of the North African campaign, one only has to look at the table of allocation of German divisions during the war, available at the following link:

http://www.angelfire.com/ct/ww2europe/stats.html

In division/years of military commitment, North Africa was not even equal to Denmark. It was a great adventure with romantic heroes like Rommel, giving birth to tons of novels and movies, and being very much in the center of the popular Western mind. But historically, the war in North Africa was a mere footnote.

3. Istvan wrote: “There is another reason why it [the Battle of El Alamein] will survive. It marked in fact the turning of the ‘Hinge of Fate.’ It may almost be said, ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat.’”

Churchill was writing about the war between Britain and Germany. Not about WWII as a whole. He did not say that Al Alamein was the turning point of the whole war. The war between Britain and Germany was not, by any measure, the main or even a major theater of the war.

I will cite Andrew Nagorski’s *The Greatest Battle* for the Battle of Moscow–specifically, December 5, 1941–being the turning point of the war; a view shared by German (see the cites above) and Russian historians, not to mention Keegan, Beevor, and other Western historians. The Germans never again had the initiative after the failure of the assault on Moscow and the winter battles during which the exhausted German forces were smashed by Stalin’s fresh Siberian reserve troops. After December 5, 1941, the Blitzkrieg* was over, and the war turned into something totally different–an immense war of attrition, which the Germans did not have the productive capacity to win. After that, they never again came even close to striking distance of winning; for the entire rest of the war the Germans were just losing, step by step. It is odd that Hitler, the archetypical advocate of bold, aggressive military strikes, would start to wage war in this slow, half-hearted way, after Moscow.

4. Istvan Simon: “But my point was that it [the German jet fighter, the Me 262] *could* have been a game-changing technology if it came earlier and when German productive capacity was less hindered than towards the end of the war. Had the Germans had many jet fighters, rather than just a handful, and had they still enough air power to protect them from being destroyed by the British and American bombers on the ground, they could have in fact reversed the air superiority of the Allies.”

What air superiority? The Germans had air superiority on the Eastern Front almost to the very end. The Germans flew in and out of even the Stalingrad “Kessel” to the very end, almost unhindered. Despite the great advantage of the Soviet Air Force in numbers of aircraft, they were never able to compete with the Luftwaffe. The Germans shot down Soviet aircraft as fast as they could be produced, although the aircraft themselves were not inferior to German models. I guess the difference must have been tactics and pilot training. But in any case, German air superiority didn’t prevent or even slow down the German defeat. Massive numbers of Me-262s would not have changed anything at all. Anyway, the Me-262 was used as a strategic bomber-killer and would not have had much use on the Eastern Front. My uncle Jim Hill, a B-17 navigator, spoke of the terror of B-17 crews in front of the Me-262s. But the Germans and Soviets didn’t bomb each other much. Their respective air forces were used almost exclusively for close air support of ground forces, a role for which the Me-262 would have been entirely useless.

Massive quantities of Me-262s might have hindered strategic bombing of German cities by the British and Americans. That would have been perhaps even a desirable outcome–I do think that the carpet-bombing of German cities was inhuman; a crime. Besides saving German cities, a big German success against U.S. and British strategic bombers might have protected German production better. But that would have had very little impact on the outcome of the war; the Germans were not close enough to producing enough to win.

5. Concerning Winston Churchill’s drinking habits–it has been said that the whiskies which were ever in his hand were 90% water and were nursed for hours. I don’t think that he could have been drunk all the time, and so extremely productive. Anyway, Churchill didn’t save the world from tyranny [JE's words--JE]. The world wasn’t saved from tyranny at all. The European part of WWII resulted in one form of tyranny–the Soviet kind–beating another form of tyranny–the Nazi kind. Until 1989, half of Europe, including a goodly part of Germany itself, was behind the Iron Curtain, which was quite as bad–and very similar–to being under Nazi rule.

*For a long time, I followed Western historians in avoiding the word “Blitzkrieg” as the product of popular journalists and not really descriptive. The more I read the works of German historians, the less sound this advice has seemed to me–the word is widely used in German to describe Hitler’s deep penetration, highly mobile, shock war tactics.

JE comments: Very exhaustive and convincing analysis. My apologies to Cameron Sawyer for providing only the links to the two tables he cites above. Although they were very neatly reproduced in the original message sent to my inbox, technical limitations (ignorance?) have not allowed me to post them.

One followup question: Cameron Sawyer writes, “I really don’t believe that the soldiers of any one country are inherently any better than the soldiers of any other country.” By this statement, I believe Cameron is suggesting that a soldier’s effectiveness hinges on how well he is equipped, trained and led. No doubt the moral factor (i.e., motivation) is also crucial. Still, there seems to be some validity to the (romantic?) reputation of the Wehrmacht soldier, or the Japanese warrior, or the American Marine. Contrast this to, say, the Italians in WWII or the Portuguese on the Western Front in the Great War. I understand that national pride is at stake here. WAISer thoughts?

–

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John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA