= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
CannibalSmith comments on Our society lacks good self-preservation mechanisms - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (105)
I can't find it, but there's an article explaining how the Axis was more or less doomed from the start. In short, United States had twice the production capacity than all other participants combined. I'm saying Hitler's mistakes only hastened the inevitable.
I'm not sure we should argue politics but... American intervention was not inevitable. Even merely materiale supply wasn't inevitable. There were a number of ways America could've been out of the picture or impotent; one of the cited turning points/mistakes was the failure of the Battle of Britain to bring England to terms, or the escape of their army at Dunkirk.
Letting America into the war was arguably one of Hitler's greatest mistakes (either by commission or omission, and there was even a historical parallel warning against America that Hitler was intimately familiar with - WWI).
America may've been tops in industry, but it's hard to see it launching a transoceanic invasion into Europe with no allied powers closer than... Africa? Asia?
Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II
I see that the US's GDP (a good proxy, I think, for industrial production, was 800 at the start of the war, while total Axis GDP was 685. The rest of the Allies represented 829. So by itself, the US was 17% more than the entire Axis alliance, and just under half of the Allies (ie. the rest of the world). Pretty impressive.
The last column has the USA at 1474, or >3x total Axis output (466), and is at 64% of Allies. Incidentally, this means at the end of the war, the US was >2x what the Axis were at the beginning of the war. So the US did not have twice what the rest of the world had; but it did have twice the Axis by the end, and presumably this was foreseeable. So we can change Smith's point from being that the USA could industrially epic pwn the Axis, to merely pwn them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II
(fixed link)
Thanks; edited.