Well a lot hinges on assumptions. Would a noncombatant USSR have supported Germany by selling oil? Would the noncombatant Americans have supported the combatant Soviets by sending them food?
I have read a couple of different perspectives on this recently and none of them indicate the reason was oil. I have read it was a function of Hitler’s desire to wipe out the communists and to get access to the fertile areas of Ukraine for food production because he was worried about Germans starving.
Wikipedia seems to agree, including the following as reasons:
he anticipated compensatory benefits such as the demobilisation of entire divisions to relieve the acute labour shortage in German industry, the exploitation of Ukraine as a reliable and immense source of agricultural products, the use of forced labour to stimulate Germany’s overall economy and the expansion of territory to improve Germany’s efforts to isolate the United Kingdom.
1 Like
It might be more accurate to say that the “Soviet winter” killed most of those soldiers, not direct combat.
However, there is no argument that casualties on the Western front would’ve been far higher if Germany had only one front to fight. However, the US could replace those casualties far more easily than Germany could replace their casualties. IMO, at the end of the war in this scenario, there would be just as many casualties that were actually realized, but the difference would be which country the fallen came from (i.e., fewer USSR losses and more Allied (especially US) losses).
It should also be considered that German morale fell tremendously when the Allies were able to provide an effective resistance to German advancement. In fact, consider there were many in Germany’s military leadership (Colonel Stauffenberg, for example) that felt that Hitler needed to be removed. And it wasn’t because these Germans felt that they were losing the war.
It’s perhaps also worth mentioning that the Soviets lost 27,000,000 whereas the US lost 400,000. Even if you assume that we could have accomplished what the Soviets did more efficiently and only lost 1/10th what they lost… that’s still a staggering 2,700,000 deaths, which is nearly 7x our actual death toll.
A number of those losses were civilian… we probably wouldn’t have lost nearly as many civilians. But their military losses were astronomical too.
2 things I found on the subject:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/r8go2t/could_the_ussr_have_won_ww2_without_lend_lease_or/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pa76y/comment/cw4yywc/?context=3
Both are saying that militarily the USSR probably would have won at some point (or have been motivated to make another peace deal ala WW1) but w/o the lend-lease act it is not so clear that the USSR would have been able to win.
Probably truer than we would like to think. Textbooks back in the day didn’t get replace but about once a decade. I graduated HS in 81 and I’m pretty sure there wasn’t much about Vietnam in it if any. I think it pretty much ended with JFK’s assassination. And we probably started WWII in late March or early April in a school year that ended about Memorial Day.
Post Civil War was probably 4 out of 25 chapters.
History was a lot older and slower when we were kids.
But seriously, consider that it probably took 5 or more years to produce a new history textbook so you won’t have much of anything from that period of time and then to have much of anything to condense into a history text you have to have books written about that stuff to research from and those are going to be 10 to 20 years after it actually happened.
And I was serious about how often the books were replaced. You would write your name in the list on either the front or back cover to identify whose book it was and I remember seeing names of people who went to school with my older siblings (4-10 years older than me).
2 Likes
Same. Some books had ten names before mine.
2 Likes
Hitler never played Risk when he was a kid…
4 Likes
I always hated history as a subject and avoided it as much as possible. Now that I’m older and wiser I avoid it just as much
2 Likes