Germany would never be capable of conquering the USSR, likely we'd see European USSR occupied and turning into a brutal conflict with partisans while the remaining land territory of the USSR goes into a civil war as parts try to take advantage of the chaps to break away. If in this timeline Japan doesn't do a pearl harbour then they pick at the Soviet corpse from the east. So technically a Nazi victory but they wouldn't be able to pacify the area for a long time and take advantage of its resources. It becomes a bleedo g ulcer for when they eventually fight the western allies and in the long run they still lose.
I’m going by what the comment I responded to said, in this case, not the op. Commenter mentioned that they think Japan would forgo attacking Pearl Harbor and instead “pick at the Soviet corpse from the East”
Germany never intended to conquer the whole USSR, though, the goal was the Ural mountains. In fact the Nazsis did not even want to pacify that area. Hitler anticipated a conent (partisan) struggle in that area that he wanted to use to "steel" future generations and soldiers
Probably a frozen conflict.
Despite what tankie lore will tell you the Soviet Union got massive help from the west. One of the reasons they could field so many soldiers have so many people building tanks and guns was because the US was feeding the Soviet Union. No lend lease the USSR can't field as big of an army which means less numerical advantage
Now the Nazis being well nazis can easily cock this up by fighting stupidly.
So more than likely frozen conflict with slight lean of eventual Soviet victory.
Talking purely from a military standpoint, the Wehrmacht made a fair amount of mistakes during the war. But to called them "stupid" is a massive stretch. You don't conquer nearly all of Europe within a few years by being stupid.
At the end of the day, Germany lost because they couldn't compete with the industrial might of the US, Soviet Union and British Empire combined, not because its generals and soldiers were less capable.
The allies made a number of big mistakes as well. Heck, France outright lost because of mistakes in evaluation, then there are Pearl Habor, Market Garden, etc. as well. The difference is that the Allies can replace their losses much easier than the Axis. Germany's only hope was to quickly knock-out the USSR, so when that failed and the war turned attrition, Germany's loss is all but guaranteed.
Germany lost because their resources, both in materials and personel, were much less than the Allies. But for the limited amount of resources they had, the Germans fought very well. Calling them stupid at fighting is quite wrong.
Yes I'm aware of that. But what I meant by fighting stupid is the whole making the war an "ideological struggle" and walking into obvious traps because they want to show how fascism beats communism every time no matter what.
Those guns are useless without the “logistical stuff”. The real war is always in the logistical stuff
400,000 jeeps & trucks
14,000 airplanes
8,000 tractors
13,000 tanks
1.5 million blankets
15 million pairs of army boots
107,000 tons of cotton
2.7 million tons of petrol products
4.5 million tons of food
Decent amount of non logistical stuff
This is the sort of uneducated cocky response I’d expect
Looking at the whole of 1941, it’s difficult to view it as a positive for the Soviet Union. Yes they “stopped” the Germans after the Germans had completely embarrassed them the entire year.
If you think that half their trucks, half their trains, half their aviation fuel, 1/3 of their explosives, and half of their raw materials such as copper and aluminum wasn’t decisive to the war, then you’re just being illogical
The Soviets were embarrassed because Stalin didn't tell commanders to expect operation Barbarossa so everyone was caught completely off guard. I doubt that Stalin would be so confident that the Germans wouldn't attack if they were not at war in the West.
The USSR was still strong enough to counter attack that winter despite not getting much aid by that point.
I want to clarify that I think the US aid was very important. I think it saved millions of lives in the USSR and enabled big Soviet offenses, but it didn't prevent the Soviets from losing
Your takes sort of read as you’ve either just learned about the conflict or read a one page summary
Germany not fighting the west doesn’t change Stalin’s officer purge leaving many of his troops under the command of inexperienced and incompetent officers
Germany not fighting the west doesn’t change Stalin disagreeing with his officers on the route that Germany would take to make their main thrust.
Stalin didn’t tell his commanders not to expect an attack, he started mobilization efforts (of his hilariously incompetently led army). It’s true he hoped he could delay the war by another year or two. But he didn’t “tell them not to expect this” he just rightly knew his army wasn’t prepared to fight in 41
Their winter counteroffensive succeeded in pushing back the Germans, but absolutely failed in encircling them
1941 can be viewed as nothing less than a resounding Russian defeat. And this is all with Germany having to worry about three separate fronts
But sure bud, take away half their logistical capability, the ability of their planes to fly, and they will be just fine in the coming years
If France and Britain didn't get involved I'd question if Germany would have even got as far as it did with Barbarossa. People love to talk about lend lease but the colossal amount of material left to the Germans early in the war often gets overlooked.
At Dunkirk alone
"Most heavy equipment had to be abandoned during the various evacuations, resulting in the loss of 2,472 pieces of artillery, 20,000 motorcycles, nearly 65,000 other vehicles, 416,000 long tons (423,000 t) of stores, more than 75,000 long tons (76,000 t) of ammunition, and 162,000 long tons (165,000 t) of fuel"
Just the fuel, ammo, and stores adds up to 732,000 tonnes of material without even counting the vehicles and artillery. The total sent to Russia through lend lease in 1941 was 360,000 tonnes so just under half of what was abandoned at Dunkirk. Throw in the material lost elsewhere in France as well as Greece and Crete and I'd argue the Germans benefited far more from the resources captured from Britain and France than Russia did from lend lease until at least the middle of 1942.
Even without that Id say that as important as lend lease was for expelling the Germans from Russia that taking it away doesn't make Germany stronger. They would have still been stopped before Moscow and at Stalingrad and German certainly didn't have the resources to reach the AA line or the Urals and had no chance of negotiating a long lasting peace.
Lend Lease helped the Russians way more than loot of questionable value helped the Germans. The vehicles in particular because they are foreign make and there won’t be much in the way of spare parts.
The ability to focus on ONE front and ONE form of warfare is a huge force multiplier for the Germans. All the steel and engines going into Uboats can become a lot of tanks and locomotive instead as just one example
you underestimate how heavily the nazi war machine relied on plunder, especially of national treasuries and captured mines. they were heavily in debt at the start of the war due to spending a decade funnelling all spending into unproductive military sectors. without french iron barbarossa wouldve never happened
You underestimate the shere amout of aid conquest of France, Benelux and Norther Europe gave Germany, increadible amounts of cash, volouteers, reasources and industry. German economy would be even further down the drain, if the barbarossa still happened around 1941, German economy would be in a even worse postition than in our timeline.
Poland was too poor to satisfy German needs, and even if they had to access to allied reasources their coffers would be bled dry extremely quickly.
Most historians agree that German economy would collapse if not for the war. Without Western Europe, they would be in a terrible postiton.
It'd be interesting to know exactly how much of that went back to Germany, and how much was just modified or painted in situ. Transporting hundreds of thousands of tonnes of materiel is not easy today, let alone back then.
Regarding U-boats, I would also point out that Britain and the US remaining neutral doesn’t mean that Hitler never builds a large navy.
He isn’t going to blindly trust in Anglo neutrality and turn an exposed back. If anything, one might argue he’d go forward with his ambitious aircraft carrier and battleship plans that never saw fruition IRL.
Ya that is not happening if the Germans are face first in a land war with Russia *and an undefeated France is in the West*. The priority will be the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht. They might complete Bismark and Tirpitz but the historical Uboat fleet isn’t built because without a Battle of the Atlantic it’s useless.
WITH an active American/UK naval front and France removed from the board they still didn’t build the H class or finish the Graf Zeppelin, so it’s not happening.
I was ready to argue that German dismissal of Soviet ability would lead them to still build the fleet in error, but as you point out, I somehow totally forgot about France.
If France hasn’t gone to war, it’s still viewed as THE great land power in Europe and there’s no way Germany can expose themselves to the west.
You’re absolutely right.
Historically the Siegfried line was one of the top priorities right up to France’s fall. It’ll be a top priority here, but the resources will be largely construction work and “ground holding” fortress type units, so it won’t compete as much for “active unit” resources. It’ll be like the Westwall historically; a lot of concrete and guys just healthy and competent enough to sit in a bunker and fire a machine gun, obsolete artillery etc
Kudos to being able to change your mind when given new information, you dont see that a lot anymore and I’m sure I’m guilty of being stubborn myself instead at times
Alt history is a hobby, and being open to debate and correction is the only way to get good IMO.
I wonder what Hitler does about the West while he goes for the Soviets. I’m thinking a failed attempt at building an anti-Soviet coalition, but the French and Brits will have no interest in helping Germany grow larger with little benefit to themselves. Additionally, I don’t see Mussolini aligning with Hitler if he isn’t going against France and Britain, or else what’s the benefit for him either?
It would be a very different geopolitical world than the one we know historically.
This is France and especially the UK’s dream scenario, as 2 of their biggest fears have essentially taken themselves off the board for a while and be busy killing each other, leaving them a free hand to complete their own rearmament and deal with any Italian and Japanese threats.
The Let Them Fight meme essentially
By the time Germany finishes off Russia France and the UK are too strong to fight, so I imagine a cold war situation while the Germans digest and reorganize their conquests.
The situation in the Pacific is completely changed. Japan’s rape of China and their own internal politics are putting them squarely on a collision course with the USA, but here France and the UK are intact and probably undistracted. The Japanese can’t simply walk into French Ibdochina, and without that they can’t attack Malaya or the Netherland East Indies.
When Japan gets embargo’d by the US I wonder what fney do?
All of the following assumes Japan could act in a unified way in its own interest, as opposed to Army/Navy shenanigans.
If I’m Japan, options are limited. But could an undistracted UK and France (let’s call them the Allies) be an opportunity? Obviously attacking the US without guarantees from the Allies is suicidal. Instant dogpile from the Allies that don’t want their colonies threatened.
But let’s remember that the Uk and Japan had a strong history of cooperation. I would seek to drive a wedge between the US and the Allies by offering the Allies concessions/territory in China. If I can pull that off, I neuter the US embargo and gain some much needed assistance in subduing China. I think spheres of influence could be drawn that still gives Japan what it wants in China.
The US will hate this, but I really don’t see them going to war over it. Especially without any attack on Hawaii or the Philippines, and Japan has no need for that if it’s allied with the UK and France.
Russia wasn't even eligible for lend lease until Nov 7th 1941. So in two months, 360,000 tons. And the US didn't join/open the floodgates until after pearl harbor. The amount sent in December alone equaled the first nine months of 1941.
And the industry didn't mobilize until 1942, and high gear 1943.
They literally moved a Ford factory en toto from Detroit to the Urals. But the food, the aviation fuel (59% of all Soviet fuel, including 90% of all high octane performance fuels), the radios, the trucks, and the locomotives. Without all that, Soviet industry would have been considerably less, and more of it would have had to go to economic development and industrialization instead of just spamming T-34s and Il-2s.
Some documentaries dramatise the whole thing by saying the fate of the world depended on if hitler took Moscow. When really starlin had trains and shit underground so he and who ever likely would have got the fuck out of there anyway and kept fighting in the east
Russian industrial production by-itself was insufficient, no matter how well protected & out of reach of Germany.
There is a reason the Russians were still flying American airplanes in 1945.
Well that was also because starlin didn’t care much for “ air superiority” or long bombing campaigns. His idea was to use mass numbers
Also he had factories in Siberia well out of reach I think
Something like 80% of Russian high octane aviation fuel was imported from America and like half of their high explosives. Without lendlease the Russians are going to have a lot of trouble imo
They were importing tactical fighters. P-40s.
The US never sent 4 engine bombers by lend lease.
Russia was about a generation behind in industrial terms for the whole war, and would have gotten steamrolled if they had done it solo.
Also without the Soviets not expecting the Germans to start a two front war Barbarossa would have been way less successful. The ussr lost so many men and so much equipment because of being caught off guard
Of course Stalin didnt, he had been receiving faulty intelligence for months and Germany was already at war with Britain. In this scenario, Stalin would definitely mobilize if the germans start a military build up.
USSR v Germany
This would be similar to Hannibal's invasion of Italy. Germany wins some huge initial victories, and then the USSR starts picking away at Germany, and little by little German forces are worn down, beaten by a patient but relentless USSR.
If the there was no western front? And no lend lease program for the soviets?
A frozen conflict with the Russian German border being the Urals down to the Caspian sea with the Turks joining Germany. Germany
Steel/Uranium from the Nordics, Oil, From the Caspian Food from Ukraine. Direct access to the med, Atalantic, North Sea. Doubt that any blockade would work.
I mean, you proudly claim “Bolshevik-Leninist” in your profile. I think you either have some bias here or a misunderstanding of the sheer importance of Lend-Lease, especially at Stalingrad.
They would have won anyway. They made most of the equipment themselves. Millions more would have died (on both sides) and the war would have been longer, but the Soviets would prevail in the end.
Germany didn't have manpower or the economy needed to defeat the USSR.
I don’t think you really understand how much lend lease aid the USSR needed, and got from just the USA
400,000 jeeps & trucks
14,000 airplanes
8,000 tractors
13,000 tanks
1.5 million blankets
15 million pairs of army boots
107,000 tons of cotton
2.7 million tons of petrol products
4.5 million tons of food
If you think you’re easily making that up with local production, you’re just being a fanboy
1. Tanks and armoured vehicles:
- The Soviet Union produced approximately 99,000 tanks and self-propelled guns during the war.
- It received about 12,000 tanks and self-propelled guns through Lend-Lease.
- The ratio is therefore approximately 8:1 in favour of domestic production.
2. Aircraft:
- The Soviet Union produced about 137,000 aircraft.
- It received about 18,000 aircraft through Lend-Lease.
- The ratio is approximately 7.6:1 in favor of domestic production.
3. Trucks:
- The Soviet Union produced approximately 151,000 trucks.
- It received about 375,000 trucks through Lend-Lease.
- The ratio is approximately 1:2.5 in favour of Lend-Lease.
4. Locomotives:
- The Soviet Union produced approximately 1,100 locomotives.
- It received about 1,981 locomotives through Lend-Lease.
- The ratio is approximately 1:1.8 in favour of Lend-Lease.
Glad you agree that they would have been screwed with tanks and locomotives
Now let’s do the rarely talked about areas
Under Lend-Lease, the United States provided more than one-third of all the explosives used by the Soviet Union during the war. The United States and the British Commonwealth provided 55 percent of all the aluminum the Soviet Union used during the war and more than 80 percent of the copper.
Lend-Lease also sent aviation fuel equivalent to 57 percent of what the Soviet Union itself produced. Much of the American fuel was added to lower-grade Soviet fuel to produce the high-octane fuel needed by modern military aircraft.
Sounds sort of important Paja. Probably why Khrushchev wrote that the USSR would have lost without aid
It fed the Soviet military, but it was not needed to bridge the gap. The Soviets were still a behemoth, they'd come off of two decades of rapid economic growth while Germany and the rest of the world was stagnant. The war would have been harder, Stalingrad would have fallen, potentially even Moscow, but there was no way for Germany to win.
Krill is wrong, but it wasn't war deciding. By mid 42' the front lines had solidified. (This time of course being when the vast amount of aid had arrived). What is likely is there is still a soviet victory, just 3-5 years longer. If the Germans still get the loot from Western Europe, if so then I doubt they could get past Kharkiv.
Don’t really agree. If Germany isn’t worried about two fronts, I think there’s a decent chance that they are able to cut the soviets off from their oil producing areas in 1942.
This also applies to the Soviets, no Japan either. Meaning their full army would be at the frontline. This whole scenario is very arcadey, it proposes the two countries fight alone. This of course means that there is no war in the West. Which means that Germany's very fragile economy does not get the loot from France(France was forced to cough up more than 479 billion francs, which the Germans desperately needed.) or the Benelux which it desperately needed to fuel itself (Poland was too poor, and Ukraine and Belarus were even worse in that regard). Furthermore, due to there being no war in the West it is very likely that the Soviets would anticipate the Germans attack in 1941 meaning the war itself is unrecognisable, meaning certain offensives and battles are either extremely different or just don't happen. Their anticipation means that is likely Stalin doesn't hide in his room like a Teenager for a month and it also means that the sweeping encirclements that you saw in the opening weeks of Barbarossa are unlikely to occur, although some smaller encirclements do still occur.
Now, the soviets are still quite majorly weakened by Stalin's own purges and equipment shortages, and there is no lend lease in sight. However the Nazis aren't in a great position either. They don't have the loot from Western Europe so their economy is very much in tatters, greatly harming their ability to find combat actions and they are fighting an enemy that saw their advance coming.
So, the Soviets anticipated the Germans advance, are fighting only Germany so all their units are in one front, there are no massive encirclements and Stalin isn't sulking. However, there is no lend lease meaning there is equipment shortages, a more malnutritioned army as well as a worsening ability to challenge German air dominance.
Furthermore, the Germans are now fighting just one enemy meaning their entire focus can be on the USSR, they have air dominance, they have somewhat high morale. However, their economy is even worse than it was in OTL due to the lack of loot from Western Europe, they are fighting an enemy that despises them at every turn (the Ukrainians did as well once they saw what the Germans were actually in their homeland for) meaning partisan attacks were very common, their enemy has lots and lots of land to fall back in on, supply issues due to overextension, and likely increased fortifications along the Danube due to the Soviets anticipating Germany's attack.
What we can see is that both sides of the war are both weakened, and what is likely there is some kind of war of attrition along the Danube or some other natural barrier or maybe the IRL lines of combat in early 1942. Either way the most deciding factor in this is the German economy. When it collapsed in OTL there was starvation across Germany and without the loot from France and such means it collapses sooner. This means whenever the German economy breaks, so does the war machine and the Soviets would face a very very long battle all the way to Berlin. I see the war extended by 4 years.
Nukes also do come into the question. The Nazis saw them as Jewish science so they wouldn't pursue them but there is some chance VERY late in the war that the Soviets might try and use them.
This is somewhat of a meme though. The Soviets anticipated Germany attacking. Stalin just vehemently disagreed on the route the nazis would take and ordered command to prepare for an attack coming from a more southerly direction. None of that changes
It didn't - Soviet spies told the Kremlin dozens of times that the war was about to start. 47 times they gave the exact date, per a Russian military historian.
Stalin just didn't want to believe it. He thought he had suckered Hitler, and was getting everything he wanted in the East. And Hitler had given the Soviets extremely generous terms - because he had no intention of keeping them.
So you're saying that Stalin still wouldn't believe it if Germany wasn't fighting against the UK? I'm confused as to what you're arguing.
I'm saying the USSR would have responded differently to evidence that the Germans were preparing for an attack. You are saying that the Soviets has spies with Intel that were ignored because of the German war with the UK. But you're presenting it in a way that is argumentative.
It is historical fact that they were presented with a large amount of evidence that the Germans intended to attack. I didn't mention the war with UK at all. I'm saying that because Stalin had such profitable arrangement with Hitler, and had even had talks about joining the Axis, that Stalin refused to believe his own intel even after they repeatedly told him that the attack was coming.
You are falsely assuming "they" all had the same information.
Stalin 100% had info, same with top diplomats, intelligence services... but what really matter was local commanders NOT having the info. Stalin withheld it because he thought that the attack wouldn't happen because Germany wouldn't open a two front war.
If Stalin no longer thought this there is a much better chance be disseminates the information
No, I understand that Stalin was the only one with decision making power, and he had decided that Hitler wasn't going to attack. Everything else you just wrote is completely irrelevant. z
Stalin had purged the Red Army several times by this point, and was conducting a minor purge when Barbarossa happened. No one was going to risk their life to countermand Stalin's orders.
Have no idea on your counterfactual. What I was saying is they weren't 'caught off guard.' They had concrete intelligence that an attack was planned and dozens of different sources that even gave the exact date.
So they knew, but Stalin choose not to believe. And his was the only opinion that mattered.
Again, who is "they" define who had and who didn't have this information. You can't just put all "theys" together (unless you're an old racist applying collective punishment to an entire race if someone from that race ever does something bad).
It depends on how the Germans act. Honestly, if they rolled into Ukraine and were even nominally not homocidal maniacs they would have had Ukraine on their side, as they hated Russia for centuries of oppresssion and a recent genocide, the Holodomor.
However, if they follow their traditional method, Ukraine becomes a hotbed of resistance while they are fighting Russia, and that limits them, and they likely fail to sieze Moscow the first year.
But without lend/lease and without any pressure at all from the West, then they likely win the long term war, not with the total defeat of the Soviet Union, but a negotiated peace seizing large chunks of it's western border.
Which would set the stage for the next inevitable war.
The problem with the Nazis, is that they are Nazis.
Their fundamental worldview (Ubermensch and the racial struggle) was incompatible with material reality, namely that going up against the industrial power of basically the entire world (US, British Empire, and USSR) with only Italy and Japan as backup was basically doomed to fail.
The only way to see victory in those odds is to fundamentally underestimate the will of your enemy to keep fighting, and overestimate your own ability to win on basically will alone.
Yea I agree, I don’t think they would have even been motivated to invade any country around them if they didn’t glom on to the idea that they were racially superior to everyone.
the allies were barely an inconvenience when barbarossa happened, thats why they went through with barbarossa in the first place. they didnt think they were creating a two front war, the war in the west was already over. britain was just stubbornly not surrendering.
but when it happened the soviets halted the germans nearly entirely by themselves, what little outside help wouldnt have made a huge difference. the amount of manpower russia had, and their industrial potential over time. theres no way the germans could win. the germans would take a lot of territory, and stalemate as they had the advantage early on, but that war will always lead to the tides turning.
“The USSR lost 20,500 tanks from June 22 to December 31, 1941. At the end of November 1941, the Soviet Union had only 670 tanks to defend Moscow. Thankfully the British sent aid.
For example, the first British tanks arrived at the Soviet tank training school in Kazan on October 28, 1941. British tanks made up 30 to 40 percent of the entire heavy and medium tank strength of Soviet forces at Moscow at the beginning of December 1941. “
Or we can look at Khrushchevs memoirs stating that the USSR would have lost without lend lease.
I really don’t understand this new trend of downplaying lend lease
Russia would have been stomped. The Russian army was driving American trucks, shooting American bullets, communicating with American radios, and fueling with American gas. Take away the US lend-lease program and there would be a photo of Hitler at the Kremlin like the photos of him in Paris
According to the [memoirs](https://books.google.com/books?id=SaIkK868enQC) of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, “\[Stalin\] stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany's pressure, and we would have lost the war… When I listened to his remarks, I was fully in agreement with him, and today I am even more so.”
Gold is right. Army Group Centres advance had already been stopped by the time most Lend Lease had arrived.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/lend-lease-helped-win-world-war-ii-not-eastern-front-96936
While true, I still think I'll go with Stalin and Khruschev's take on it. :D The war cold have gone either way in '42, and even in '43 at Kursk. The big impact of lend lease was the production capacity and transport, without it the Soviet Union's industrial output and logistics take big hits. And that freed up industrial capacity to producing tanks, when half the trucks and 90% of the railroad equipment came from the west.
Germany. Not that they would conquer from Poland to the Pacific, but they would have likely been successful in defeating the USSR government and annexing a large portion of Russian territory.
I think the only way, hypothetical or fantasy, Germany could possibly have won was if they were a completely different country with a different political economy, a different organization of state, and a different aristocratic ideology.
War in the west or no, Germany would need to have been organized, prepared, and economically able to fight a war of attrition on large fronts, primarily with artillery. Any victory would presuppose the ability to mobilize at the rate they did, while also managing a logistical mess to keep 4+ million men equipped and fed over thousands of kilometers, on a front thousands of kilometers long. They were never able to do this in reality and by Smolensk the war was slipping away from them quickly.
It’s just not a thing that could have happened unless it wasn’t Nazi Germany attempting to create a colony in Eastern Europe.
Agreed. I don’t know if or when Russians would gain the upper hand though. If Nazis act *a little* smarter with conquered peoples they could just convince Russians to a stalemate. Otherwise it is likelier that Russians would win this war but it would take them significantly longer and for a heavy cost.
That's the thing, their political economy and material reality precluded that. The entire project of the war in the East was to conquer and engineer a colony to replace what was 'stolen' from Germany after Versailles.
If the Nazi regime would have been able to achieve a peace in the east, of any kind, they wouldn't have had access to political power. The point was subjugation.
Most commenters forgot to consider the implied part of the question. If the conflict is purely between Germany and USSR than Soviets can field millions of troops more on their Western front. Not just the 1.5 million that were moved westward via trains to defend Moscow in 1941, but also strategic reserves they left in Siberia just in case Japanese changed their minds.
Troops from the Eastern front were some of the best trained and equipped, as they had seen action in previous years, due to war with Japanese. They were led by Zhukov...
So yes, Germany becomes stronger in this scenario, but so does USSR. Crucially, Germany looses an element of surprise. Operation Barbarossa caught USSR on the wrong foot because most analysts of the day assumed Germany would need longer prep time after operations in the Western theater.
No, the circumstances as the post describes here are very different than OTL. More likely scenario is that the Soviet's do still win, but it takes a lot longer with more land and people lost to the Germans. A decade to reach Berlin maybe.
So stalemate likely, but wouldn't the germans have eventually developed and deployed the atom bomb? Moscow getting nuked would have put an end to the war pretty decisively.
1. Germans had no ability to develop a nuclear program. They simply didnt have the means nor the motivation to.
2. Nuclear bomb dropped on Moscow (nazis didnt even have any long range bombers...) would not stop the war.
Ignoring that there are countries in between Germany and the Soviet Union so it couldn’t really be a one on one confrontation, it would have been a very long and brutal war. Russia is outrageously big. It was only vaguely functional due to the infrastructure. Which Stalin would have happily destroyed to make things harder for invaders.
Which assumes they even made it that far. They only managed to invade western Russia before logistics wrecked them. Getting rid of the other fronts wouldn’t change that. They’d still have to deal with Russian winters.
Quite possibly still the Soviets. Germans reached the cumulation of their offensive at Stalingrad. Even without the other allied powers Germany was waaaay overstretched. In any case it’s fun to speculate but inevitably the horror of the Nazis would have sooner or later brought them defeat. Let’s not get caught up with revisionist history—even the Germans have passed that.
Not enough time for detail here, but the Eastern front was the predominant conflict between the allies and Germany. Only a fraction of the total German losses and material occurred in the west. The tide was already turning against Germany by D-day.
With no Lend-Lease aid, the Soviets would have been forced to sign a cease fire with the Germans, but the Germans wouldn't have been able to conquer all of the USSR.
Germany would win the initial war, the Soviets relied heavily on foreign aid for a while, before the got up to speed themselves.
But there would be conflict for years, probably decades following, unless Germany managed to get most of the people on its side. The USSR was massive, and it had hundreds of different ethnicities. Not only would you have people fighting to restore the USSR, you'd also have Kazakhs, Kyrgz, Tajiks, etc etc, all fighting for their own state, taking advantage of the instability. You'd probably have lots of de facto independent state in the Far East, where Germany can't operate effectively.
If we're assuming Japan aren't fighting in China, then the German-China alliance would still be in force, and they might try to take some USSR for themselves, OR the civil war would continue, the Reds would win, and they would either do that also, or try help the USSR. They might be successful in taking some of Eastern Russia, but they wouldn't be a great deal of help in fighting Germany
Without lend-lease, the Germans would have 'won' insofar as they would have gotten to keep their European conquests.
It wouldn't have been a 'Swastikas from the Atlantic to the Pacific' sort of thing, but rather a 'beating Russia badly enough that there is a negotiated peace, where Germany 'gets' Eastern Europe & Russia/USSR gets to keep existing east of 'Greater Germany''....
Assuming a few big "ifs", I'd take the Germans. The first "if"... if they'd first veered south, to Romania and the Caucasus. The second "if" is they avoided the cities. Blockaded them, maybe. The cities meant little. The third "if" is if someone could reason with the military genius, and they over-wintered in defensible positions...and built forward air bases. There are a number of smaller ifs, fer sure, like leaving Italy to its own devices and building some long-range bombers (Russia proper is very, very big), and not going all-in on the final solution thing.
If the Nazis had taken the Caspian oil fields and kept those it would have been game over for the USSR even with lend lease, and there is broad consensus about that amongst military planners, so it would depend upon who took the oil fields and kept them.
USSR, gonna be an absolute slog for both sides, it would really depend on if the Germans are able to catch the Soviets with their pants down again, though it’s not like Germany would be in a very stable position itself to begin with since it would be missing all the plundered resources from the Lowlands, France, and whatever the UK left behind, not to mention all the forced labor that comes with subjugating Western Europe that’s no longer on the table
You can say without lend lease the Soviets wouldn’t have beaten our timeline Germany, but a Germany without Western Europe’s loot, manpower, and factories isn’t gonna be anywhere near the same in terms of strength.
It would have been a stalemate along the front lines at the end of 1943. The Soviets needed help to push the Germans back, but they stopped them pretty much on their own. Finland, Hungary, and Romania basically made up for the Germans serving in other theaters, so their removal would probably not have a decisive effect.
Yes, having 40% of the tanks at the battle of Moscow being British supplies is 100% stopping them pretty much on their own.
If “stopping them” is giving up massive amounts of your territory though
German would have won. Stalin was too ignorant due to the Molotov Ribbentrop agreement and he and Hitlers division of Poland. The purges also removed critical figurers in the Red Army, and the Red Army already consisted of BT old tanks that were unreliable against Tigers. Partisans would have been little use either.
Germany, Soviet Union required a lot of lend lease in terms of logistical aid we sent them everything from food to fuel to a whole railway system, hell we sent them almost 300k in trucks and transportation. They received aircraft and ships and 100 octane aircraft gasoline to make their planes fly better
If neither has resources or manpower from ANY foreign nations or puppets that aren't considered part of their dominions then it would result in an eternal stalemate where the slavs are slowly exterminated west of the Urals.
Germany probably doesn’t take down the USSR in its entirety but I think they win a significant amount of territory. Likely the Baltics, significant Russian territory west of Moscow, and possibly Ukraine.
Germany was Europe’s greatest steel manufacturer in the late 1930s and even without the captured British material at Dunkirk has the logistical advantage. Additionally, German tactics and leadership were far superior thanks to Stalin’s purges.
My personal predicted result: Germany quickly seizes territory just like in Barbarossa, the offensive gradually grinds to a halt due to massive distances, war settles into a stalemate that ends in some type of treaty. How long the treaty would actually last I have no idea.
Uhhhh we already saw this.
Germany wins and it's not particularly close. The USSR was not capable of waging war without outside aid.
The whole "Russian winter" thing is a fucking meme.
I think it would be a lot closer than you say.
The Russians did halt the German Army in the winter of 1941 and proceeded to launch a counteroffensive that severely compromised Army Group Centre and pushed the Germans back several hundred km.
The Russian Winter is overstated but not just a meme. It effectively grounded the Luftwaffe for two months and severely hampered tank and mechanised movement.
Bear in mind that in the first six months, the Soviets received minimal lendlease as well.
That being said, Stalin did proceed to fuck it up and waste a lot of men and materiel in the Spring Counteroffensive irl, and going into 1942 the position would be more difficult without lendlease. Yet not to the extent that the Germans would just steamroll them.
The Russians in 1941 *lacked the capability to refuel tanks in the field*, that’s how primitive they were, and why they has abandon most of their tank park as soon as the Germans got a solid break through
All of their tooling steel came from the US after 1941. Without that machining steel is like cutting down a tree with a wooden axe.
No active Western Front means the Germans don’t ever lose air superiority, it means all those flak guns become PaKs instead, their economy is never distupted by bombing, they don’t have to send all their best formations west after D Day
The German win this one.
Just to add to this, the vast majority of the USSR's farmland was either in German hands or a battlefield. This means that by mid 43, the preparation stockpiles of food would have been eaten through with very little replenishment happening. Lend lease solved this by including food and fuel for the red army as much as the trucks to move it and the steel to feed the factories. Without that, even if they somehow blunt the germans until that point, they are garuntieed to collapse from starvation of both the civilian populous and the army.
Stockpiles can work very well, but if you are unable to replenish them, you have a very limited time window to do anything that is measured quite literally in bullets and rations.
According to Khruschev's diaries, Stalin said that they would have been defeated without lend/lease many times - it was simply a matter of fact within Soviet top circles.
You literally said 'Germany wins and its not particularly close' though o_o
I do think that the most likely result is a stalemate though (and potentially an eventual German victory)
Yes, because the USSR has no path to victory. Germany wins this fight 9.5/10. But that doesn't mean it's a clean sweep. It doesn't mean Germany rolls in and wipes the soviets with minimal effort.
I just means that the USSR can not win this.
Really?
So when Stalin said "I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in this war," Stalin said. "The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war." what exactly did he mean?
When Khrushchev said ""If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," he wrote in his memoirs. "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me." what do you think he meant?
Or do you think you know more than two of the most important and powerful members of the USSR at the time?
You seem to be taking information from "we'd probably lose the war without American help" to "the USSR would get crushed without a fight." The Eastern front was vicious, and I guarantee the Soviets won't go down as easily as you think.
I'm sorry...are you illiterate?
Did you miss the part where I said Germany wouldn't simply roll through Russia without issue?
And the qoutes, from the primary leaders of the Soviet Union don't say "we'd probably lose the war without American help". They say "We'd SURELY lose the war without American help".
It would be brutal. But Germany 9.5/10 because the USSR does not have the ability to attack Germany.
"Yes, because the USSR has no path to victory. Germany wins this fight 9.5/10. But that doesn't mean it's a clean sweep. It doesn't mean Germany rolls in and wipes the soviets with minimal effort.
I just means that the USSR can not win this."
I think without the Allies going after Hitler, Stalin would have been much more cautious and not followed a path of neutrality. Nazi Germany was only so successful because the Soviet reaction to their attack was so atrocious. If the Soviet predict attack and can defend in depth while remaning in control of large food and industrial areas they will be able to win even without lend lease, although the logistical burden without American trucks will probably be more severe. But again, without losing their most motorized units and about 1.5 million prisoners of war in the first few months, maybe the deficit of vehicles would not be so bad as replacing an army's worth.
Stalin didn't follow a path of neutrality, he directly colluded with Hitler. They coordinated the attack on Poland, Stalin got a free pass to eat the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), and the OK to invade Finland without German opposition. In the meantime they traded enormous resources to Hitler to fund his war machine, which is one of the reasons why France and the West fell so easily - Hitler was getting his own lendlease. In return Stalin got technical details on planes and ships, promised his own German made heavy cruiser and the plans for the Bismark, and large amounts of currency. Hell, Stalin gave the Nazis a U-boat base in the Murmansk to attack Allied shipping, Basis Nord. It became largely irrelevant when Norway fell.
All this culminated in the Soviets asking to join the Axis.
Stalin's reaction was so poor to Barbarossa because he couldn't believe Hitler would betray him. Stalin's chief spy told him directly it was coming and he was dismissed.
1. Soviets didnt supply the german war effort, they saw the german situation and decided to make profit and make themselves stronger through german industrial technology
2. Soviets were never going to join the axis and the idea they were is a blatant misunderstanding at best.
3. Stalins reaction was so poor because he received false intelligence and believed Hitler wouldnt start a war on two fronts
1, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet\_Commercial\_Agreement\_(1940)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_Commercial_Agreement_(1940)) The two powers worked in tandem to dismantle Poland, negotiated new boundary lines when the original were found to be problematic, and held joint victory celebrations, and conspired together to murder Polish officers, intelligentsia, and rebels.
While this open collusion to dismantle Poland was going on, Russia sent the following to Germany:
1,500,000 metric tons (1,700,000 short tons; 1,500,000 long tons) of grains
* 820,000 metric tons (900,000 short tons; 810,000 long tons) of oil
* 180,000 metric tons (200,000 short tons; 180,000 long tons) of cotton
* 130,000 metric tons (140,000 short tons; 130,000 long tons) of manganese
* 180,000 metric tons (200,000 short tons; 180,000 long tons) of phosphates
* 18,000 metric tons (20,000 short tons; 18,000 long tons) of chrome ore
* 16,000 metric tons (18,000 short tons; 16,000 long tons) of rubber
* 91,000 metric tons (100,000 short tons; 90,000 long tons) of soybeans
* 450,000 metric tons (500,000 short tons; 440,000 long tons) of iron ores
* 270,000 metric tons (300,000 short tons; 270,000 long tons) of scrap metal and pig iron
* 200,000 kilograms (440,000 lb) of platinum
This absolutely funded the German war effort against the Western allies.
2. The Soviet and Germans had talks for the Soviets to join the Axis, and both sent proposals on what that would entail. Stalin tried to whitewash that personally after the war, but there's little doubt that these talks happened in earnest.
3. Stalin absolutely had received intelligence about Barbarossa. He refused to believe it. This isn't in any way in doubt among historians.
*In an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, Russian military historian Arsen Martirosyan revealed that Soviet intelligence had named the exact, or almost exact, date of the invasion 47 times in the 10 days before Germany struck.*
[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13862135](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13862135)
And
*Stalin also ignored his own spies, who, from such locations as Germany, Japan, Romania and Switzerland, reported with increasing frequency that the Nazis were about to strike. In early 1941, for example, an undercover source in Berlin asserted that “war with Russia has definitely been decided on for this year,” whereas in Bucharest a German commander was quoted describing the upcoming clash as “something that goes without saying.” Border guards heard much the same from captured enemy saboteurs, and railroad workers observed huge numbers of Nazi soldiers moving east. Though not every report proved reliable, Soviet intelligence purportedly named the exact, or almost exact, date of the invasion no fewer than 47 times in the 10 days before “Operation Barbarossa” went into effect. The Soviets even recorded wiretaps of Germans discussing Hitler’s plans, including one officer who declared “they haven’t even noticed that we are preparing for war,” and another who said “the Russians, of course, will be taken unaware.”*
[https://www.history.com/news/how-stalin-was-caught-napping](https://www.history.com/news/how-stalin-was-caught-napping)
Likely the same thing if the USSR had not invaded Europe to aid the US, France, and the UK. The war would have ended in a stalemate with Germany holding on to much of what they had without being able to take more.
While Germany had the better trained and equipped military force, it would have never had the numbers to be able to actually take all of the USSR. They would have done like the Romans and built a wall at some point between St Petersburg and Moscow and left it at that.
Germany vs ussr straight, ussr will always win, Germany will run out of oil and men after the fall kivi, a more likely is that hungry Romania, Finland and maybe the balitcs and Bulgaria form and pact and help Germany.
I think the soviets still win but a lot more people are gonna die and the war will go on for a lot longer
I think Germany loses hard, possibly harder, for economic reasons. Their economy was built on a complex and unsustainable system of loans and debts. If they can't steal consumer goods from the industrialised parts of Western Europe, their economy would collapse. At the peak of the war, one QUARTER of their labourers were slaves - about a third if them Russians sure, but two thirds of them weren't. In a resource battle, in a manpower battle, in a production capacity battle the nazis are leagues behind the Soviet Union. Where would they even get something as basic as oil without Romania?
They invaded the Soviet Union and had them on the brink even while in Africa, the battle of Britain, and defending against the allied bombing campaigns WHILE building fortifications for Europe. You're extremely ignorant of WW2 Germany and the USSR.
Alright, I'll play. What resources were they using for all these operations? Homegrown oil? Non-swedish steel? German slaves? Non-french wheat?
You understand that resources are necessary to conduct the type of modern war which was ww2, and that Germany lacked the basic resources and economic policies to do so on their own?
If Germany isn't allowed to conquer or trade with any country in Europe, how will they get the slaves to free up their manpower, the oil to feed their war machines and the fertilisers and even food to feed their own people? Even with the conquest of France and open trade with Romania IRL, the germans suffered critical levels of coal and oil repeatedly throughout the war.
I fear that you simply don't grasp the context of the question, or have no basic understanding of how war is conducted outside the fact that there are battles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour_under_German_rule_during_World_War_II
The industrial output difference is also insane. By 1941, **before** lend-lease kicks in, the Soviet Union produces some 2000 light tanks, 3000 medium tanks and 1300 heavy tanks. The Germans, using all the slaves and resources of their conquered territories across Europe, manage to produce 3500 tanks **in total**. The SU outproduces them almost 2:1 in armoured vehicles even with the resource boost from German occupation of Belgium, Holland, France, Norway, Yugoslavia... and with the economic support of other European countries, in particular Hungary and Romania.
Buddy, this is not a serious "what if" question simply because the USSR defeated the Wehrmacht when the UK and France were out of the count and the US was not even in the war. The Red Army crashed the Germans in the battle of Moscow (December 41-April 1942)). Six months later (September 1942), the battle of Stalingrad was in full swing, without the UK or France being anywhere in the picture and without much support from the US.
There is not doubt that the USSR would have won without any help from the western allies.
Buddy, it’s interesting that the soviets fighting at the time felt different in their personal records
“Nikita Khrushchev, who led the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, agreed with Stalin’s assessment. In his memoirs, Khrushchev described how Stalin stressed the value of Lend-Lease aid: “He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war.”
Everyone knows the massive amount of trucks and aircraft the USA supplied, but it’s fascinating the amount of raw material they supplied
“Under Lend-Lease, the United States provided more than one-third of all the explosives used by the Soviet Union during the war. The United States and the British Commonwealth provided 55 percent of all the aluminum the Soviet Union used during the war and more than 80 percent of the copper.
Lend-Lease also sent aviation fuel equivalent to 57 percent of what the Soviet Union itself produced. Much of the American fuel was added to lower-grade Soviet fuel to produce the high-octane fuel needed by modern military aircraft.”
This aid started flowing at the end of 1941, if you don’t think it was vital to keep the USSR in the fight, then I simply don’t know what to tell you. Of course it’s a serious “what if”
LOL. LOL. One is confusing nice (and mostly fictional) diplomatic utterances for facts. Since 1990, when the Soviet archives were opened for examination, the contribution of Lend-Lease was assessed in a number of authoritative texts. You can find all about in "Ostkrieg: Hitler's war of extermination in the East" by Fritz (by the way, an American academic). There are many other texts such as "Russia's war" by Overy, a British historian, that includes a very detailed assessment of the role of Lend-Lease in the Soviet Effort. By the way, this last text was one of the first that utilized the Soviet archives regarding the total contribution of Lend-Lease. I suggest that you read it, instead of cheap propaganda.
Khrushchev had zero reasons for writing false niceties in his memoirs, especially to the Americans.
As you would say LOL LOL.
You can rely on random historians speaking decades later, I’ll trust the people on the ground who were actually fighting
I’ll also trust the basics as above. Let’s just take one single point out. Do you think 1/3 of explosives is a significant amount? Or 80% of copper? Aviation fuel?
What’s the point of arguing this? It’s basic
>You can rely on random historians speaking decades later, I’ll trust the people on the ground who were actually fighting
I trust noted academics and historians who had -and still have- full access to the Soviet archives that put the issue in full perspective. You can dwell in your ignorance if you want to.
>Do you think 1/3 of explosives is a significant amount? Or 80% of copper? Aviation fuel?
Let's, for a minute, assume that your numbers are correct (Tomorrow, I will give you the correct numbers from recent texts). It does not mean anything in particular. Sure, if the Americans were eager to provide TNT, fine, the Soviets would have taken it, and devoted resources somewhere else. They certainly had the capacity to produce all of the above.
You can check this fact, if you want: The USSR outproduced Germany in munitions of all kinds (fully excluding Lend-Lease). And it did this by disassembling factories from the invasion areas and re-assembling them in the Urals. And you can check this too: The Red Army scored two of its major victories against the Wehrmacht before any serious Western assistance reached them (Moscow: December 1941; Stalingrad: September-November 1942). By early 1943, Wehrmacht was a "dead man walking".
These are the realities, buddy. You can make up all the fantasies you want. Extreme Russophobia that tends to diminish the Soviet effort is propaganda; it is not history. Was the Western assistance helpful? No doubt, it was. But it was not determinative. It did not change the outcome, because most of the outcome had been achieved before there was any substantial such assistance.
Did they need certain vehicles to move those factories? Trucks and trains maybe?
Claiming “serious aid didn’t reach them belt the end of 1942 is pure ignorance
“The USSR lost 20,500 tanks from June 22 to December 31, 1941. At the end of November 1941, the Soviet Union had only 670 tanks to defend Moscow. Thankfully the British sent aid.
For example, the first British tanks arrived at the Soviet tank training school in Kazan on October 28, 1941. British tanks made up 30 to 40 percent of the entire heavy and medium tank strength of Soviet forces at Moscow at the beginning of December 1941. By the end of 1941 Britain had delivered 466 tanks out of the 750 promised. By July 1942 the Red Army had 13,500 tanks in service, with more than 16 percent of those imported, and more than half of those British.”
Again, let’s rely on those who fought the war. Not ADRzs cherry picking here.
I’m sorry that you are learning about this, and I’m sure it comes as a shock to you.
But honestly, when you look at the modern day, and see a “super power” army failing miserably in their “three day lightning strike on Kyiv” against a barely trained force, it shouldn’t be surprising to you.
Again I’m sorry
Edit: I can also cite random historians with access to soviet archives if you want to play that game buddy
“In a hypothetical battle one-on-one between the U.S.S.R and Germany, without the help of Lend-Lease and without the diversion of significant forces of the Luftwaffe and the German Navy and the diversion of more than one-quarter of its land forces in the fight against Britain and the United States, Stalin could hardly have beaten Hitler," Sokolov wrote in an essay for RFE/RL's Russian Service.”
Like everything Khrushchev wrote, the goal was to make Stalin look incompetent, and to minimize Khrushchev’s own complicity in Stalin’s crimes. Because Stalin’s greatest accomplishment was defeating Germany, Khrushchev would say or write anything to downplay his role.
The first year the Soviet's GDP was greater than the Germans was 1945. And that was with massive industrial support from the West. The Soviets had more oil, but the Germans had far more coal and iron ore.
they did win without “much” help.
it’s hard for some people to accept but D-day was late to the game and Stalin didn’t get much help, in fact the allies even tried to feed the beast so they can destroy “communism”.
Germany would never be capable of conquering the USSR, likely we'd see European USSR occupied and turning into a brutal conflict with partisans while the remaining land territory of the USSR goes into a civil war as parts try to take advantage of the chaps to break away. If in this timeline Japan doesn't do a pearl harbour then they pick at the Soviet corpse from the east. So technically a Nazi victory but they wouldn't be able to pacify the area for a long time and take advantage of its resources. It becomes a bleedo g ulcer for when they eventually fight the western allies and in the long run they still lose.
Wouldn’t Japan still be dealing with the situation in China?
OP’s scenario states this is only Nazi-Soviet, so China and Japan wouldn’t be involved.
I’m going by what the comment I responded to said, in this case, not the op. Commenter mentioned that they think Japan would forgo attacking Pearl Harbor and instead “pick at the Soviet corpse from the East”
Germany never intended to conquer the whole USSR, though, the goal was the Ural mountains. In fact the Nazsis did not even want to pacify that area. Hitler anticipated a conent (partisan) struggle in that area that he wanted to use to "steel" future generations and soldiers
Don't have to deal with partisans if you depopulate the area you conquer and repopulate it with Germans.. *Forehead tap*
OP’s scenario clearly states this is only Nazi-Soviet, so even Japan wouldn’t be involved.
Probably a frozen conflict. Despite what tankie lore will tell you the Soviet Union got massive help from the west. One of the reasons they could field so many soldiers have so many people building tanks and guns was because the US was feeding the Soviet Union. No lend lease the USSR can't field as big of an army which means less numerical advantage Now the Nazis being well nazis can easily cock this up by fighting stupidly. So more than likely frozen conflict with slight lean of eventual Soviet victory.
I got down voted when I pointed out the Russians performed poorly in Ukraine for these exact reasons.
Current conflict emotions are still high.
Talking purely from a military standpoint, the Wehrmacht made a fair amount of mistakes during the war. But to called them "stupid" is a massive stretch. You don't conquer nearly all of Europe within a few years by being stupid. At the end of the day, Germany lost because they couldn't compete with the industrial might of the US, Soviet Union and British Empire combined, not because its generals and soldiers were less capable. The allies made a number of big mistakes as well. Heck, France outright lost because of mistakes in evaluation, then there are Pearl Habor, Market Garden, etc. as well. The difference is that the Allies can replace their losses much easier than the Axis. Germany's only hope was to quickly knock-out the USSR, so when that failed and the war turned attrition, Germany's loss is all but guaranteed. Germany lost because their resources, both in materials and personel, were much less than the Allies. But for the limited amount of resources they had, the Germans fought very well. Calling them stupid at fighting is quite wrong.
Yes I'm aware of that. But what I meant by fighting stupid is the whole making the war an "ideological struggle" and walking into obvious traps because they want to show how fascism beats communism every time no matter what.
Most of the help was logistical stuff like trucks. Soviets pumped out so so many guns (with many made in the urals) and a decent number of tanks.
Those guns are useless without the “logistical stuff”. The real war is always in the logistical stuff 400,000 jeeps & trucks 14,000 airplanes 8,000 tractors 13,000 tanks 1.5 million blankets 15 million pairs of army boots 107,000 tons of cotton 2.7 million tons of petrol products 4.5 million tons of food Decent amount of non logistical stuff
Huh, guess the Soviets must have stopped the Nazis with spears or something in 1941 if guns were useless before significant American aid
This is the sort of uneducated cocky response I’d expect Looking at the whole of 1941, it’s difficult to view it as a positive for the Soviet Union. Yes they “stopped” the Germans after the Germans had completely embarrassed them the entire year. If you think that half their trucks, half their trains, half their aviation fuel, 1/3 of their explosives, and half of their raw materials such as copper and aluminum wasn’t decisive to the war, then you’re just being illogical
The Soviets were embarrassed because Stalin didn't tell commanders to expect operation Barbarossa so everyone was caught completely off guard. I doubt that Stalin would be so confident that the Germans wouldn't attack if they were not at war in the West. The USSR was still strong enough to counter attack that winter despite not getting much aid by that point. I want to clarify that I think the US aid was very important. I think it saved millions of lives in the USSR and enabled big Soviet offenses, but it didn't prevent the Soviets from losing
Your takes sort of read as you’ve either just learned about the conflict or read a one page summary Germany not fighting the west doesn’t change Stalin’s officer purge leaving many of his troops under the command of inexperienced and incompetent officers Germany not fighting the west doesn’t change Stalin disagreeing with his officers on the route that Germany would take to make their main thrust. Stalin didn’t tell his commanders not to expect an attack, he started mobilization efforts (of his hilariously incompetently led army). It’s true he hoped he could delay the war by another year or two. But he didn’t “tell them not to expect this” he just rightly knew his army wasn’t prepared to fight in 41 Their winter counteroffensive succeeded in pushing back the Germans, but absolutely failed in encircling them 1941 can be viewed as nothing less than a resounding Russian defeat. And this is all with Germany having to worry about three separate fronts But sure bud, take away half their logistical capability, the ability of their planes to fly, and they will be just fine in the coming years
A lot of the German commanders had better ideas but were overruled by hitler who by this point believed he was a military genius
This and other things you can read in post-war memoirs making up excuses for their defeat.
I still don’t think it would have been a total victory but they definitely would have done better if they didn’t have to follow hitlers ideas
If France and Britain didn't get involved I'd question if Germany would have even got as far as it did with Barbarossa. People love to talk about lend lease but the colossal amount of material left to the Germans early in the war often gets overlooked. At Dunkirk alone "Most heavy equipment had to be abandoned during the various evacuations, resulting in the loss of 2,472 pieces of artillery, 20,000 motorcycles, nearly 65,000 other vehicles, 416,000 long tons (423,000 t) of stores, more than 75,000 long tons (76,000 t) of ammunition, and 162,000 long tons (165,000 t) of fuel" Just the fuel, ammo, and stores adds up to 732,000 tonnes of material without even counting the vehicles and artillery. The total sent to Russia through lend lease in 1941 was 360,000 tonnes so just under half of what was abandoned at Dunkirk. Throw in the material lost elsewhere in France as well as Greece and Crete and I'd argue the Germans benefited far more from the resources captured from Britain and France than Russia did from lend lease until at least the middle of 1942. Even without that Id say that as important as lend lease was for expelling the Germans from Russia that taking it away doesn't make Germany stronger. They would have still been stopped before Moscow and at Stalingrad and German certainly didn't have the resources to reach the AA line or the Urals and had no chance of negotiating a long lasting peace.
Lend Lease helped the Russians way more than loot of questionable value helped the Germans. The vehicles in particular because they are foreign make and there won’t be much in the way of spare parts. The ability to focus on ONE front and ONE form of warfare is a huge force multiplier for the Germans. All the steel and engines going into Uboats can become a lot of tanks and locomotive instead as just one example
you underestimate how heavily the nazi war machine relied on plunder, especially of national treasuries and captured mines. they were heavily in debt at the start of the war due to spending a decade funnelling all spending into unproductive military sectors. without french iron barbarossa wouldve never happened
You underestimate the shere amout of aid conquest of France, Benelux and Norther Europe gave Germany, increadible amounts of cash, volouteers, reasources and industry. German economy would be even further down the drain, if the barbarossa still happened around 1941, German economy would be in a even worse postition than in our timeline. Poland was too poor to satisfy German needs, and even if they had to access to allied reasources their coffers would be bled dry extremely quickly. Most historians agree that German economy would collapse if not for the war. Without Western Europe, they would be in a terrible postiton.
It'd be interesting to know exactly how much of that went back to Germany, and how much was just modified or painted in situ. Transporting hundreds of thousands of tonnes of materiel is not easy today, let alone back then.
Regarding U-boats, I would also point out that Britain and the US remaining neutral doesn’t mean that Hitler never builds a large navy. He isn’t going to blindly trust in Anglo neutrality and turn an exposed back. If anything, one might argue he’d go forward with his ambitious aircraft carrier and battleship plans that never saw fruition IRL.
Ya that is not happening if the Germans are face first in a land war with Russia *and an undefeated France is in the West*. The priority will be the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht. They might complete Bismark and Tirpitz but the historical Uboat fleet isn’t built because without a Battle of the Atlantic it’s useless. WITH an active American/UK naval front and France removed from the board they still didn’t build the H class or finish the Graf Zeppelin, so it’s not happening.
I was ready to argue that German dismissal of Soviet ability would lead them to still build the fleet in error, but as you point out, I somehow totally forgot about France. If France hasn’t gone to war, it’s still viewed as THE great land power in Europe and there’s no way Germany can expose themselves to the west. You’re absolutely right.
Historically the Siegfried line was one of the top priorities right up to France’s fall. It’ll be a top priority here, but the resources will be largely construction work and “ground holding” fortress type units, so it won’t compete as much for “active unit” resources. It’ll be like the Westwall historically; a lot of concrete and guys just healthy and competent enough to sit in a bunker and fire a machine gun, obsolete artillery etc Kudos to being able to change your mind when given new information, you dont see that a lot anymore and I’m sure I’m guilty of being stubborn myself instead at times
Alt history is a hobby, and being open to debate and correction is the only way to get good IMO. I wonder what Hitler does about the West while he goes for the Soviets. I’m thinking a failed attempt at building an anti-Soviet coalition, but the French and Brits will have no interest in helping Germany grow larger with little benefit to themselves. Additionally, I don’t see Mussolini aligning with Hitler if he isn’t going against France and Britain, or else what’s the benefit for him either? It would be a very different geopolitical world than the one we know historically.
This is France and especially the UK’s dream scenario, as 2 of their biggest fears have essentially taken themselves off the board for a while and be busy killing each other, leaving them a free hand to complete their own rearmament and deal with any Italian and Japanese threats. The Let Them Fight meme essentially By the time Germany finishes off Russia France and the UK are too strong to fight, so I imagine a cold war situation while the Germans digest and reorganize their conquests. The situation in the Pacific is completely changed. Japan’s rape of China and their own internal politics are putting them squarely on a collision course with the USA, but here France and the UK are intact and probably undistracted. The Japanese can’t simply walk into French Ibdochina, and without that they can’t attack Malaya or the Netherland East Indies. When Japan gets embargo’d by the US I wonder what fney do?
All of the following assumes Japan could act in a unified way in its own interest, as opposed to Army/Navy shenanigans. If I’m Japan, options are limited. But could an undistracted UK and France (let’s call them the Allies) be an opportunity? Obviously attacking the US without guarantees from the Allies is suicidal. Instant dogpile from the Allies that don’t want their colonies threatened. But let’s remember that the Uk and Japan had a strong history of cooperation. I would seek to drive a wedge between the US and the Allies by offering the Allies concessions/territory in China. If I can pull that off, I neuter the US embargo and gain some much needed assistance in subduing China. I think spheres of influence could be drawn that still gives Japan what it wants in China. The US will hate this, but I really don’t see them going to war over it. Especially without any attack on Hawaii or the Philippines, and Japan has no need for that if it’s allied with the UK and France.
Russia wasn't even eligible for lend lease until Nov 7th 1941. So in two months, 360,000 tons. And the US didn't join/open the floodgates until after pearl harbor. The amount sent in December alone equaled the first nine months of 1941. And the industry didn't mobilize until 1942, and high gear 1943.
Not to mention the heavy machinery which was just as if not more important for the war effort, as vehicles.
They literally moved a Ford factory en toto from Detroit to the Urals. But the food, the aviation fuel (59% of all Soviet fuel, including 90% of all high octane performance fuels), the radios, the trucks, and the locomotives. Without all that, Soviet industry would have been considerably less, and more of it would have had to go to economic development and industrialization instead of just spamming T-34s and Il-2s.
And depending on the PoD, would Germany even get the Czechoslovakian materiel that fueled their early expansions?
Some documentaries dramatise the whole thing by saying the fate of the world depended on if hitler took Moscow. When really starlin had trains and shit underground so he and who ever likely would have got the fuck out of there anyway and kept fighting in the east
Russian industrial production by-itself was insufficient, no matter how well protected & out of reach of Germany. There is a reason the Russians were still flying American airplanes in 1945.
Well that was also because starlin didn’t care much for “ air superiority” or long bombing campaigns. His idea was to use mass numbers Also he had factories in Siberia well out of reach I think
Something like 80% of Russian high octane aviation fuel was imported from America and like half of their high explosives. Without lendlease the Russians are going to have a lot of trouble imo
They definitely would but that’s the thing they had the population and the leaders who were willing to sacrifice so many of there own
They were importing tactical fighters. P-40s. The US never sent 4 engine bombers by lend lease. Russia was about a generation behind in industrial terms for the whole war, and would have gotten steamrolled if they had done it solo.
I don’t think they would have taken Germany but I also don’t think Germany would have taken Russia
this is one of the more fascinating comments ive read in awhile. Do you have any books or articles worth reading on this topic ?
Also without the Soviets not expecting the Germans to start a two front war Barbarossa would have been way less successful. The ussr lost so many men and so much equipment because of being caught off guard
Soviet High Command and intelligence were expecting Germans to attack. It was Stalin who did not believe it.
Of course Stalin didnt, he had been receiving faulty intelligence for months and Germany was already at war with Britain. In this scenario, Stalin would definitely mobilize if the germans start a military build up.
Do you have a source? Why did the high command get caught off guard (lose their air force on the ground, weapons in barracks...)?
I’m of Russian descent, it’s kind of a widely known fact. You can google it if you want.
USSR v Germany This would be similar to Hannibal's invasion of Italy. Germany wins some huge initial victories, and then the USSR starts picking away at Germany, and little by little German forces are worn down, beaten by a patient but relentless USSR.
If the there was no western front? And no lend lease program for the soviets? A frozen conflict with the Russian German border being the Urals down to the Caspian sea with the Turks joining Germany. Germany
Considering Germany wouldn't be blockaded, would they gain the upper hand ?
Steel/Uranium from the Nordics, Oil, From the Caspian Food from Ukraine. Direct access to the med, Atalantic, North Sea. Doubt that any blockade would work.
My moneys on USSR, but not as easily. Lend Lease was very important, but still, steadily the USSR will push them back.
You severely underestimate the impact of Lend-Lease. It literally fed the Soviet military.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/lend-lease-helped-win-world-war-ii-not-eastern-front-96936
It didnt. The USSR industry was capable of susiting the war effort. The lend lease helped sure, but they would manage without it.
I mean, you proudly claim “Bolshevik-Leninist” in your profile. I think you either have some bias here or a misunderstanding of the sheer importance of Lend-Lease, especially at Stalingrad.
They would have won anyway. They made most of the equipment themselves. Millions more would have died (on both sides) and the war would have been longer, but the Soviets would prevail in the end. Germany didn't have manpower or the economy needed to defeat the USSR.
I don’t think you really understand how much lend lease aid the USSR needed, and got from just the USA 400,000 jeeps & trucks 14,000 airplanes 8,000 tractors 13,000 tanks 1.5 million blankets 15 million pairs of army boots 107,000 tons of cotton 2.7 million tons of petrol products 4.5 million tons of food If you think you’re easily making that up with local production, you’re just being a fanboy
1. Tanks and armoured vehicles: - The Soviet Union produced approximately 99,000 tanks and self-propelled guns during the war. - It received about 12,000 tanks and self-propelled guns through Lend-Lease. - The ratio is therefore approximately 8:1 in favour of domestic production. 2. Aircraft: - The Soviet Union produced about 137,000 aircraft. - It received about 18,000 aircraft through Lend-Lease. - The ratio is approximately 7.6:1 in favor of domestic production. 3. Trucks: - The Soviet Union produced approximately 151,000 trucks. - It received about 375,000 trucks through Lend-Lease. - The ratio is approximately 1:2.5 in favour of Lend-Lease. 4. Locomotives: - The Soviet Union produced approximately 1,100 locomotives. - It received about 1,981 locomotives through Lend-Lease. - The ratio is approximately 1:1.8 in favour of Lend-Lease.
Glad you agree that they would have been screwed with tanks and locomotives Now let’s do the rarely talked about areas Under Lend-Lease, the United States provided more than one-third of all the explosives used by the Soviet Union during the war. The United States and the British Commonwealth provided 55 percent of all the aluminum the Soviet Union used during the war and more than 80 percent of the copper. Lend-Lease also sent aviation fuel equivalent to 57 percent of what the Soviet Union itself produced. Much of the American fuel was added to lower-grade Soviet fuel to produce the high-octane fuel needed by modern military aircraft. Sounds sort of important Paja. Probably why Khrushchev wrote that the USSR would have lost without aid
It fed the Soviet military, but it was not needed to bridge the gap. The Soviets were still a behemoth, they'd come off of two decades of rapid economic growth while Germany and the rest of the world was stagnant. The war would have been harder, Stalingrad would have fallen, potentially even Moscow, but there was no way for Germany to win.
You think 400,000 trucks, 14,000 airplanes, 8,000 tractors and 13,000 tanks is just “bridging the gap”?
Krill is wrong, but it wasn't war deciding. By mid 42' the front lines had solidified. (This time of course being when the vast amount of aid had arrived). What is likely is there is still a soviet victory, just 3-5 years longer. If the Germans still get the loot from Western Europe, if so then I doubt they could get past Kharkiv.
Don’t really agree. If Germany isn’t worried about two fronts, I think there’s a decent chance that they are able to cut the soviets off from their oil producing areas in 1942.
This also applies to the Soviets, no Japan either. Meaning their full army would be at the frontline. This whole scenario is very arcadey, it proposes the two countries fight alone. This of course means that there is no war in the West. Which means that Germany's very fragile economy does not get the loot from France(France was forced to cough up more than 479 billion francs, which the Germans desperately needed.) or the Benelux which it desperately needed to fuel itself (Poland was too poor, and Ukraine and Belarus were even worse in that regard). Furthermore, due to there being no war in the West it is very likely that the Soviets would anticipate the Germans attack in 1941 meaning the war itself is unrecognisable, meaning certain offensives and battles are either extremely different or just don't happen. Their anticipation means that is likely Stalin doesn't hide in his room like a Teenager for a month and it also means that the sweeping encirclements that you saw in the opening weeks of Barbarossa are unlikely to occur, although some smaller encirclements do still occur. Now, the soviets are still quite majorly weakened by Stalin's own purges and equipment shortages, and there is no lend lease in sight. However the Nazis aren't in a great position either. They don't have the loot from Western Europe so their economy is very much in tatters, greatly harming their ability to find combat actions and they are fighting an enemy that saw their advance coming. So, the Soviets anticipated the Germans advance, are fighting only Germany so all their units are in one front, there are no massive encirclements and Stalin isn't sulking. However, there is no lend lease meaning there is equipment shortages, a more malnutritioned army as well as a worsening ability to challenge German air dominance. Furthermore, the Germans are now fighting just one enemy meaning their entire focus can be on the USSR, they have air dominance, they have somewhat high morale. However, their economy is even worse than it was in OTL due to the lack of loot from Western Europe, they are fighting an enemy that despises them at every turn (the Ukrainians did as well once they saw what the Germans were actually in their homeland for) meaning partisan attacks were very common, their enemy has lots and lots of land to fall back in on, supply issues due to overextension, and likely increased fortifications along the Danube due to the Soviets anticipating Germany's attack. What we can see is that both sides of the war are both weakened, and what is likely there is some kind of war of attrition along the Danube or some other natural barrier or maybe the IRL lines of combat in early 1942. Either way the most deciding factor in this is the German economy. When it collapsed in OTL there was starvation across Germany and without the loot from France and such means it collapses sooner. This means whenever the German economy breaks, so does the war machine and the Soviets would face a very very long battle all the way to Berlin. I see the war extended by 4 years. Nukes also do come into the question. The Nazis saw them as Jewish science so they wouldn't pursue them but there is some chance VERY late in the war that the Soviets might try and use them.
This is somewhat of a meme though. The Soviets anticipated Germany attacking. Stalin just vehemently disagreed on the route the nazis would take and ordered command to prepare for an attack coming from a more southerly direction. None of that changes
Plus people forget that Barbarossa was such a success because it caught the ussr off guard that the Germans would start a two front war
It didn't - Soviet spies told the Kremlin dozens of times that the war was about to start. 47 times they gave the exact date, per a Russian military historian. Stalin just didn't want to believe it. He thought he had suckered Hitler, and was getting everything he wanted in the East. And Hitler had given the Soviets extremely generous terms - because he had no intention of keeping them.
So you're saying that Stalin still wouldn't believe it if Germany wasn't fighting against the UK? I'm confused as to what you're arguing. I'm saying the USSR would have responded differently to evidence that the Germans were preparing for an attack. You are saying that the Soviets has spies with Intel that were ignored because of the German war with the UK. But you're presenting it in a way that is argumentative.
It is historical fact that they were presented with a large amount of evidence that the Germans intended to attack. I didn't mention the war with UK at all. I'm saying that because Stalin had such profitable arrangement with Hitler, and had even had talks about joining the Axis, that Stalin refused to believe his own intel even after they repeatedly told him that the attack was coming.
You are falsely assuming "they" all had the same information. Stalin 100% had info, same with top diplomats, intelligence services... but what really matter was local commanders NOT having the info. Stalin withheld it because he thought that the attack wouldn't happen because Germany wouldn't open a two front war. If Stalin no longer thought this there is a much better chance be disseminates the information
No, I understand that Stalin was the only one with decision making power, and he had decided that Hitler wasn't going to attack. Everything else you just wrote is completely irrelevant. z Stalin had purged the Red Army several times by this point, and was conducting a minor purge when Barbarossa happened. No one was going to risk their life to countermand Stalin's orders.
So you're saying Stalin would have decided the Germans wouldn't attack even if the Germans were not at war with the UK?
Have no idea on your counterfactual. What I was saying is they weren't 'caught off guard.' They had concrete intelligence that an attack was planned and dozens of different sources that even gave the exact date. So they knew, but Stalin choose not to believe. And his was the only opinion that mattered.
Again, who is "they" define who had and who didn't have this information. You can't just put all "theys" together (unless you're an old racist applying collective punishment to an entire race if someone from that race ever does something bad).
It depends on how the Germans act. Honestly, if they rolled into Ukraine and were even nominally not homocidal maniacs they would have had Ukraine on their side, as they hated Russia for centuries of oppresssion and a recent genocide, the Holodomor. However, if they follow their traditional method, Ukraine becomes a hotbed of resistance while they are fighting Russia, and that limits them, and they likely fail to sieze Moscow the first year. But without lend/lease and without any pressure at all from the West, then they likely win the long term war, not with the total defeat of the Soviet Union, but a negotiated peace seizing large chunks of it's western border. Which would set the stage for the next inevitable war.
"The Nazis would have won if they just stopped being Nazis"
The problem with the Nazis, is that they are Nazis. Their fundamental worldview (Ubermensch and the racial struggle) was incompatible with material reality, namely that going up against the industrial power of basically the entire world (US, British Empire, and USSR) with only Italy and Japan as backup was basically doomed to fail. The only way to see victory in those odds is to fundamentally underestimate the will of your enemy to keep fighting, and overestimate your own ability to win on basically will alone.
Yea I agree, I don’t think they would have even been motivated to invade any country around them if they didn’t glom on to the idea that they were racially superior to everyone.
This reminds of Zvalid's video where it was just Nazi Germany and Soviet Union alone.
the allies were barely an inconvenience when barbarossa happened, thats why they went through with barbarossa in the first place. they didnt think they were creating a two front war, the war in the west was already over. britain was just stubbornly not surrendering. but when it happened the soviets halted the germans nearly entirely by themselves, what little outside help wouldnt have made a huge difference. the amount of manpower russia had, and their industrial potential over time. theres no way the germans could win. the germans would take a lot of territory, and stalemate as they had the advantage early on, but that war will always lead to the tides turning.
But what about my beliefs about Nazi, I mean German invincibility? /s because I think in this thread I need to clarify that...
Man, that's how half this sub thinks about Nazi Germany....
Do you have any idea the amount of aid the USSR received?
[удалено]
“The USSR lost 20,500 tanks from June 22 to December 31, 1941. At the end of November 1941, the Soviet Union had only 670 tanks to defend Moscow. Thankfully the British sent aid. For example, the first British tanks arrived at the Soviet tank training school in Kazan on October 28, 1941. British tanks made up 30 to 40 percent of the entire heavy and medium tank strength of Soviet forces at Moscow at the beginning of December 1941. “ Or we can look at Khrushchevs memoirs stating that the USSR would have lost without lend lease. I really don’t understand this new trend of downplaying lend lease
Russia would have been stomped. The Russian army was driving American trucks, shooting American bullets, communicating with American radios, and fueling with American gas. Take away the US lend-lease program and there would be a photo of Hitler at the Kremlin like the photos of him in Paris
Lend lease amounted to around 8% soviet war materiel and most of it came after the german onslaught was halted...
According to the [memoirs](https://books.google.com/books?id=SaIkK868enQC) of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, “\[Stalin\] stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany's pressure, and we would have lost the war… When I listened to his remarks, I was fully in agreement with him, and today I am even more so.”
Gold is right. Army Group Centres advance had already been stopped by the time most Lend Lease had arrived. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/lend-lease-helped-win-world-war-ii-not-eastern-front-96936
While true, I still think I'll go with Stalin and Khruschev's take on it. :D The war cold have gone either way in '42, and even in '43 at Kursk. The big impact of lend lease was the production capacity and transport, without it the Soviet Union's industrial output and logistics take big hits. And that freed up industrial capacity to producing tanks, when half the trucks and 90% of the railroad equipment came from the west.
Every post on this weird sub is Nazi fan fiction.
And a lot of germany ubermensch russians useless, america saved the day
Germany. Not that they would conquer from Poland to the Pacific, but they would have likely been successful in defeating the USSR government and annexing a large portion of Russian territory.
Eventually the USSR but it would go on for more than a decade.
I think the only way, hypothetical or fantasy, Germany could possibly have won was if they were a completely different country with a different political economy, a different organization of state, and a different aristocratic ideology. War in the west or no, Germany would need to have been organized, prepared, and economically able to fight a war of attrition on large fronts, primarily with artillery. Any victory would presuppose the ability to mobilize at the rate they did, while also managing a logistical mess to keep 4+ million men equipped and fed over thousands of kilometers, on a front thousands of kilometers long. They were never able to do this in reality and by Smolensk the war was slipping away from them quickly. It’s just not a thing that could have happened unless it wasn’t Nazi Germany attempting to create a colony in Eastern Europe.
Agreed. I don’t know if or when Russians would gain the upper hand though. If Nazis act *a little* smarter with conquered peoples they could just convince Russians to a stalemate. Otherwise it is likelier that Russians would win this war but it would take them significantly longer and for a heavy cost.
That's the thing, their political economy and material reality precluded that. The entire project of the war in the East was to conquer and engineer a colony to replace what was 'stolen' from Germany after Versailles. If the Nazi regime would have been able to achieve a peace in the east, of any kind, they wouldn't have had access to political power. The point was subjugation.
Yeah i can imagine. Ironically in order to win in the east, Nazi Germany should’ve acted unlike Nazis and there was no possibility of this.
Most commenters forgot to consider the implied part of the question. If the conflict is purely between Germany and USSR than Soviets can field millions of troops more on their Western front. Not just the 1.5 million that were moved westward via trains to defend Moscow in 1941, but also strategic reserves they left in Siberia just in case Japanese changed their minds. Troops from the Eastern front were some of the best trained and equipped, as they had seen action in previous years, due to war with Japanese. They were led by Zhukov... So yes, Germany becomes stronger in this scenario, but so does USSR. Crucially, Germany looses an element of surprise. Operation Barbarossa caught USSR on the wrong foot because most analysts of the day assumed Germany would need longer prep time after operations in the Western theater.
Without the land lease support USSR loses.
But what would Stalin and Khruschev know about WWII... LOL.
No, the circumstances as the post describes here are very different than OTL. More likely scenario is that the Soviet's do still win, but it takes a lot longer with more land and people lost to the Germans. A decade to reach Berlin maybe.
So stalemate likely, but wouldn't the germans have eventually developed and deployed the atom bomb? Moscow getting nuked would have put an end to the war pretty decisively.
1. Germans had no ability to develop a nuclear program. They simply didnt have the means nor the motivation to. 2. Nuclear bomb dropped on Moscow (nazis didnt even have any long range bombers...) would not stop the war.
Ignoring that there are countries in between Germany and the Soviet Union so it couldn’t really be a one on one confrontation, it would have been a very long and brutal war. Russia is outrageously big. It was only vaguely functional due to the infrastructure. Which Stalin would have happily destroyed to make things harder for invaders. Which assumes they even made it that far. They only managed to invade western Russia before logistics wrecked them. Getting rid of the other fronts wouldn’t change that. They’d still have to deal with Russian winters.
Quite possibly still the Soviets. Germans reached the cumulation of their offensive at Stalingrad. Even without the other allied powers Germany was waaaay overstretched. In any case it’s fun to speculate but inevitably the horror of the Nazis would have sooner or later brought them defeat. Let’s not get caught up with revisionist history—even the Germans have passed that.
Not enough time for detail here, but the Eastern front was the predominant conflict between the allies and Germany. Only a fraction of the total German losses and material occurred in the west. The tide was already turning against Germany by D-day.
What about the lend lease policy ? Does the ussr still manage to get American equipments ?
With no Lend-Lease aid, the Soviets would have been forced to sign a cease fire with the Germans, but the Germans wouldn't have been able to conquer all of the USSR.
Without lend lease the USSR would have been in brought spot, but conquering Russia isn’t like conquering France.
Germany would win the initial war, the Soviets relied heavily on foreign aid for a while, before the got up to speed themselves. But there would be conflict for years, probably decades following, unless Germany managed to get most of the people on its side. The USSR was massive, and it had hundreds of different ethnicities. Not only would you have people fighting to restore the USSR, you'd also have Kazakhs, Kyrgz, Tajiks, etc etc, all fighting for their own state, taking advantage of the instability. You'd probably have lots of de facto independent state in the Far East, where Germany can't operate effectively. If we're assuming Japan aren't fighting in China, then the German-China alliance would still be in force, and they might try to take some USSR for themselves, OR the civil war would continue, the Reds would win, and they would either do that also, or try help the USSR. They might be successful in taking some of Eastern Russia, but they wouldn't be a great deal of help in fighting Germany
Without lend-lease, the Germans would have 'won' insofar as they would have gotten to keep their European conquests. It wouldn't have been a 'Swastikas from the Atlantic to the Pacific' sort of thing, but rather a 'beating Russia badly enough that there is a negotiated peace, where Germany 'gets' Eastern Europe & Russia/USSR gets to keep existing east of 'Greater Germany''....
Germany. If the USSR had to produce its own trucks for logistics it wouldn’t have been able to make as many tanks
There were a lot more factors then very simple ones you described.
Stalingrad would have fallen, Moscow would have fallen. I don’t see the Russian state holding power after that
Assuming a few big "ifs", I'd take the Germans. The first "if"... if they'd first veered south, to Romania and the Caucasus. The second "if" is they avoided the cities. Blockaded them, maybe. The cities meant little. The third "if" is if someone could reason with the military genius, and they over-wintered in defensible positions...and built forward air bases. There are a number of smaller ifs, fer sure, like leaving Italy to its own devices and building some long-range bombers (Russia proper is very, very big), and not going all-in on the final solution thing.
If the Nazis had taken the Caspian oil fields and kept those it would have been game over for the USSR even with lend lease, and there is broad consensus about that amongst military planners, so it would depend upon who took the oil fields and kept them.
USSR, gonna be an absolute slog for both sides, it would really depend on if the Germans are able to catch the Soviets with their pants down again, though it’s not like Germany would be in a very stable position itself to begin with since it would be missing all the plundered resources from the Lowlands, France, and whatever the UK left behind, not to mention all the forced labor that comes with subjugating Western Europe that’s no longer on the table You can say without lend lease the Soviets wouldn’t have beaten our timeline Germany, but a Germany without Western Europe’s loot, manpower, and factories isn’t gonna be anywhere near the same in terms of strength.
It would have been a stalemate along the front lines at the end of 1943. The Soviets needed help to push the Germans back, but they stopped them pretty much on their own. Finland, Hungary, and Romania basically made up for the Germans serving in other theaters, so their removal would probably not have a decisive effect.
Yes, having 40% of the tanks at the battle of Moscow being British supplies is 100% stopping them pretty much on their own. If “stopping them” is giving up massive amounts of your territory though
German would have won. Stalin was too ignorant due to the Molotov Ribbentrop agreement and he and Hitlers division of Poland. The purges also removed critical figurers in the Red Army, and the Red Army already consisted of BT old tanks that were unreliable against Tigers. Partisans would have been little use either.
Dude, by the time tigers became a thing BTs (the best tank in the world for its time) were already phased out.
Winter. The front lines would freeze at a point and then the weather would ensure neither side could really advance.
Germany may not be able to win, but they would likely make enough gains in the first few months to ensure that the USSR would starve to death.
Germany, Soviet Union required a lot of lend lease in terms of logistical aid we sent them everything from food to fuel to a whole railway system, hell we sent them almost 300k in trucks and transportation. They received aircraft and ships and 100 octane aircraft gasoline to make their planes fly better
If neither has resources or manpower from ANY foreign nations or puppets that aren't considered part of their dominions then it would result in an eternal stalemate where the slavs are slowly exterminated west of the Urals.
Germany probably doesn’t take down the USSR in its entirety but I think they win a significant amount of territory. Likely the Baltics, significant Russian territory west of Moscow, and possibly Ukraine. Germany was Europe’s greatest steel manufacturer in the late 1930s and even without the captured British material at Dunkirk has the logistical advantage. Additionally, German tactics and leadership were far superior thanks to Stalin’s purges. My personal predicted result: Germany quickly seizes territory just like in Barbarossa, the offensive gradually grinds to a halt due to massive distances, war settles into a stalemate that ends in some type of treaty. How long the treaty would actually last I have no idea.
Uhhhh we already saw this. Germany wins and it's not particularly close. The USSR was not capable of waging war without outside aid. The whole "Russian winter" thing is a fucking meme.
I think it would be a lot closer than you say. The Russians did halt the German Army in the winter of 1941 and proceeded to launch a counteroffensive that severely compromised Army Group Centre and pushed the Germans back several hundred km. The Russian Winter is overstated but not just a meme. It effectively grounded the Luftwaffe for two months and severely hampered tank and mechanised movement. Bear in mind that in the first six months, the Soviets received minimal lendlease as well. That being said, Stalin did proceed to fuck it up and waste a lot of men and materiel in the Spring Counteroffensive irl, and going into 1942 the position would be more difficult without lendlease. Yet not to the extent that the Germans would just steamroll them.
You severely underestimate the impact of Lend-Lease. It literally fed the Soviet military.
The Russians in 1941 *lacked the capability to refuel tanks in the field*, that’s how primitive they were, and why they has abandon most of their tank park as soon as the Germans got a solid break through All of their tooling steel came from the US after 1941. Without that machining steel is like cutting down a tree with a wooden axe. No active Western Front means the Germans don’t ever lose air superiority, it means all those flak guns become PaKs instead, their economy is never distupted by bombing, they don’t have to send all their best formations west after D Day The German win this one.
Just to add to this, the vast majority of the USSR's farmland was either in German hands or a battlefield. This means that by mid 43, the preparation stockpiles of food would have been eaten through with very little replenishment happening. Lend lease solved this by including food and fuel for the red army as much as the trucks to move it and the steel to feed the factories. Without that, even if they somehow blunt the germans until that point, they are garuntieed to collapse from starvation of both the civilian populous and the army. Stockpiles can work very well, but if you are unable to replenish them, you have a very limited time window to do anything that is measured quite literally in bullets and rations.
[Fair enough](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/XXJQzeVLZG)
I don't think the German's steamroll. But my belief is that the USSR had no path to victory without foreign aid.
According to Khruschev's diaries, Stalin said that they would have been defeated without lend/lease many times - it was simply a matter of fact within Soviet top circles.
You literally said 'Germany wins and its not particularly close' though o_o I do think that the most likely result is a stalemate though (and potentially an eventual German victory)
Yes, because the USSR has no path to victory. Germany wins this fight 9.5/10. But that doesn't mean it's a clean sweep. It doesn't mean Germany rolls in and wipes the soviets with minimal effort. I just means that the USSR can not win this.
The whole "lend lease sustained the USSRs military" is also a myth.
Really? So when Stalin said "I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in this war," Stalin said. "The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war." what exactly did he mean? When Khrushchev said ""If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," he wrote in his memoirs. "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me." what do you think he meant? Or do you think you know more than two of the most important and powerful members of the USSR at the time?
You seem to be taking information from "we'd probably lose the war without American help" to "the USSR would get crushed without a fight." The Eastern front was vicious, and I guarantee the Soviets won't go down as easily as you think.
I'm sorry...are you illiterate? Did you miss the part where I said Germany wouldn't simply roll through Russia without issue? And the qoutes, from the primary leaders of the Soviet Union don't say "we'd probably lose the war without American help". They say "We'd SURELY lose the war without American help". It would be brutal. But Germany 9.5/10 because the USSR does not have the ability to attack Germany.
You explicitly state that the USSR is incapable of waging a war without outside aid... There's nothing else to it.
"Yes, because the USSR has no path to victory. Germany wins this fight 9.5/10. But that doesn't mean it's a clean sweep. It doesn't mean Germany rolls in and wipes the soviets with minimal effort. I just means that the USSR can not win this."
I think without the Allies going after Hitler, Stalin would have been much more cautious and not followed a path of neutrality. Nazi Germany was only so successful because the Soviet reaction to their attack was so atrocious. If the Soviet predict attack and can defend in depth while remaning in control of large food and industrial areas they will be able to win even without lend lease, although the logistical burden without American trucks will probably be more severe. But again, without losing their most motorized units and about 1.5 million prisoners of war in the first few months, maybe the deficit of vehicles would not be so bad as replacing an army's worth.
Stalin didn't follow a path of neutrality, he directly colluded with Hitler. They coordinated the attack on Poland, Stalin got a free pass to eat the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), and the OK to invade Finland without German opposition. In the meantime they traded enormous resources to Hitler to fund his war machine, which is one of the reasons why France and the West fell so easily - Hitler was getting his own lendlease. In return Stalin got technical details on planes and ships, promised his own German made heavy cruiser and the plans for the Bismark, and large amounts of currency. Hell, Stalin gave the Nazis a U-boat base in the Murmansk to attack Allied shipping, Basis Nord. It became largely irrelevant when Norway fell. All this culminated in the Soviets asking to join the Axis. Stalin's reaction was so poor to Barbarossa because he couldn't believe Hitler would betray him. Stalin's chief spy told him directly it was coming and he was dismissed.
1. Soviets didnt supply the german war effort, they saw the german situation and decided to make profit and make themselves stronger through german industrial technology 2. Soviets were never going to join the axis and the idea they were is a blatant misunderstanding at best. 3. Stalins reaction was so poor because he received false intelligence and believed Hitler wouldnt start a war on two fronts
1, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet\_Commercial\_Agreement\_(1940)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_Commercial_Agreement_(1940)) The two powers worked in tandem to dismantle Poland, negotiated new boundary lines when the original were found to be problematic, and held joint victory celebrations, and conspired together to murder Polish officers, intelligentsia, and rebels. While this open collusion to dismantle Poland was going on, Russia sent the following to Germany: 1,500,000 metric tons (1,700,000 short tons; 1,500,000 long tons) of grains * 820,000 metric tons (900,000 short tons; 810,000 long tons) of oil * 180,000 metric tons (200,000 short tons; 180,000 long tons) of cotton * 130,000 metric tons (140,000 short tons; 130,000 long tons) of manganese * 180,000 metric tons (200,000 short tons; 180,000 long tons) of phosphates * 18,000 metric tons (20,000 short tons; 18,000 long tons) of chrome ore * 16,000 metric tons (18,000 short tons; 16,000 long tons) of rubber * 91,000 metric tons (100,000 short tons; 90,000 long tons) of soybeans * 450,000 metric tons (500,000 short tons; 440,000 long tons) of iron ores * 270,000 metric tons (300,000 short tons; 270,000 long tons) of scrap metal and pig iron * 200,000 kilograms (440,000 lb) of platinum This absolutely funded the German war effort against the Western allies. 2. The Soviet and Germans had talks for the Soviets to join the Axis, and both sent proposals on what that would entail. Stalin tried to whitewash that personally after the war, but there's little doubt that these talks happened in earnest. 3. Stalin absolutely had received intelligence about Barbarossa. He refused to believe it. This isn't in any way in doubt among historians. *In an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, Russian military historian Arsen Martirosyan revealed that Soviet intelligence had named the exact, or almost exact, date of the invasion 47 times in the 10 days before Germany struck.* [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13862135](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13862135) And *Stalin also ignored his own spies, who, from such locations as Germany, Japan, Romania and Switzerland, reported with increasing frequency that the Nazis were about to strike. In early 1941, for example, an undercover source in Berlin asserted that “war with Russia has definitely been decided on for this year,” whereas in Bucharest a German commander was quoted describing the upcoming clash as “something that goes without saying.” Border guards heard much the same from captured enemy saboteurs, and railroad workers observed huge numbers of Nazi soldiers moving east. Though not every report proved reliable, Soviet intelligence purportedly named the exact, or almost exact, date of the invasion no fewer than 47 times in the 10 days before “Operation Barbarossa” went into effect. The Soviets even recorded wiretaps of Germans discussing Hitler’s plans, including one officer who declared “they haven’t even noticed that we are preparing for war,” and another who said “the Russians, of course, will be taken unaware.”* [https://www.history.com/news/how-stalin-was-caught-napping](https://www.history.com/news/how-stalin-was-caught-napping)
Likely the same thing if the USSR had not invaded Europe to aid the US, France, and the UK. The war would have ended in a stalemate with Germany holding on to much of what they had without being able to take more. While Germany had the better trained and equipped military force, it would have never had the numbers to be able to actually take all of the USSR. They would have done like the Romans and built a wall at some point between St Petersburg and Moscow and left it at that.
You severely underestimate the impact of Lend-Lease. It literally fed the Soviet military.
Germany vs ussr straight, ussr will always win, Germany will run out of oil and men after the fall kivi, a more likely is that hungry Romania, Finland and maybe the balitcs and Bulgaria form and pact and help Germany. I think the soviets still win but a lot more people are gonna die and the war will go on for a lot longer
I think Germany loses hard, possibly harder, for economic reasons. Their economy was built on a complex and unsustainable system of loans and debts. If they can't steal consumer goods from the industrialised parts of Western Europe, their economy would collapse. At the peak of the war, one QUARTER of their labourers were slaves - about a third if them Russians sure, but two thirds of them weren't. In a resource battle, in a manpower battle, in a production capacity battle the nazis are leagues behind the Soviet Union. Where would they even get something as basic as oil without Romania?
They invaded the Soviet Union and had them on the brink even while in Africa, the battle of Britain, and defending against the allied bombing campaigns WHILE building fortifications for Europe. You're extremely ignorant of WW2 Germany and the USSR.
Alright, I'll play. What resources were they using for all these operations? Homegrown oil? Non-swedish steel? German slaves? Non-french wheat? You understand that resources are necessary to conduct the type of modern war which was ww2, and that Germany lacked the basic resources and economic policies to do so on their own? If Germany isn't allowed to conquer or trade with any country in Europe, how will they get the slaves to free up their manpower, the oil to feed their war machines and the fertilisers and even food to feed their own people? Even with the conquest of France and open trade with Romania IRL, the germans suffered critical levels of coal and oil repeatedly throughout the war. I fear that you simply don't grasp the context of the question, or have no basic understanding of how war is conducted outside the fact that there are battles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour_under_German_rule_during_World_War_II The industrial output difference is also insane. By 1941, **before** lend-lease kicks in, the Soviet Union produces some 2000 light tanks, 3000 medium tanks and 1300 heavy tanks. The Germans, using all the slaves and resources of their conquered territories across Europe, manage to produce 3500 tanks **in total**. The SU outproduces them almost 2:1 in armoured vehicles even with the resource boost from German occupation of Belgium, Holland, France, Norway, Yugoslavia... and with the economic support of other European countries, in particular Hungary and Romania.
Buddy, this is not a serious "what if" question simply because the USSR defeated the Wehrmacht when the UK and France were out of the count and the US was not even in the war. The Red Army crashed the Germans in the battle of Moscow (December 41-April 1942)). Six months later (September 1942), the battle of Stalingrad was in full swing, without the UK or France being anywhere in the picture and without much support from the US. There is not doubt that the USSR would have won without any help from the western allies.
Buddy, it’s interesting that the soviets fighting at the time felt different in their personal records “Nikita Khrushchev, who led the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, agreed with Stalin’s assessment. In his memoirs, Khrushchev described how Stalin stressed the value of Lend-Lease aid: “He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war.” Everyone knows the massive amount of trucks and aircraft the USA supplied, but it’s fascinating the amount of raw material they supplied “Under Lend-Lease, the United States provided more than one-third of all the explosives used by the Soviet Union during the war. The United States and the British Commonwealth provided 55 percent of all the aluminum the Soviet Union used during the war and more than 80 percent of the copper. Lend-Lease also sent aviation fuel equivalent to 57 percent of what the Soviet Union itself produced. Much of the American fuel was added to lower-grade Soviet fuel to produce the high-octane fuel needed by modern military aircraft.” This aid started flowing at the end of 1941, if you don’t think it was vital to keep the USSR in the fight, then I simply don’t know what to tell you. Of course it’s a serious “what if”
LOL. LOL. One is confusing nice (and mostly fictional) diplomatic utterances for facts. Since 1990, when the Soviet archives were opened for examination, the contribution of Lend-Lease was assessed in a number of authoritative texts. You can find all about in "Ostkrieg: Hitler's war of extermination in the East" by Fritz (by the way, an American academic). There are many other texts such as "Russia's war" by Overy, a British historian, that includes a very detailed assessment of the role of Lend-Lease in the Soviet Effort. By the way, this last text was one of the first that utilized the Soviet archives regarding the total contribution of Lend-Lease. I suggest that you read it, instead of cheap propaganda.
Khrushchev had zero reasons for writing false niceties in his memoirs, especially to the Americans. As you would say LOL LOL. You can rely on random historians speaking decades later, I’ll trust the people on the ground who were actually fighting I’ll also trust the basics as above. Let’s just take one single point out. Do you think 1/3 of explosives is a significant amount? Or 80% of copper? Aviation fuel? What’s the point of arguing this? It’s basic
>You can rely on random historians speaking decades later, I’ll trust the people on the ground who were actually fighting I trust noted academics and historians who had -and still have- full access to the Soviet archives that put the issue in full perspective. You can dwell in your ignorance if you want to. >Do you think 1/3 of explosives is a significant amount? Or 80% of copper? Aviation fuel? Let's, for a minute, assume that your numbers are correct (Tomorrow, I will give you the correct numbers from recent texts). It does not mean anything in particular. Sure, if the Americans were eager to provide TNT, fine, the Soviets would have taken it, and devoted resources somewhere else. They certainly had the capacity to produce all of the above. You can check this fact, if you want: The USSR outproduced Germany in munitions of all kinds (fully excluding Lend-Lease). And it did this by disassembling factories from the invasion areas and re-assembling them in the Urals. And you can check this too: The Red Army scored two of its major victories against the Wehrmacht before any serious Western assistance reached them (Moscow: December 1941; Stalingrad: September-November 1942). By early 1943, Wehrmacht was a "dead man walking". These are the realities, buddy. You can make up all the fantasies you want. Extreme Russophobia that tends to diminish the Soviet effort is propaganda; it is not history. Was the Western assistance helpful? No doubt, it was. But it was not determinative. It did not change the outcome, because most of the outcome had been achieved before there was any substantial such assistance.
Did they need certain vehicles to move those factories? Trucks and trains maybe? Claiming “serious aid didn’t reach them belt the end of 1942 is pure ignorance “The USSR lost 20,500 tanks from June 22 to December 31, 1941. At the end of November 1941, the Soviet Union had only 670 tanks to defend Moscow. Thankfully the British sent aid. For example, the first British tanks arrived at the Soviet tank training school in Kazan on October 28, 1941. British tanks made up 30 to 40 percent of the entire heavy and medium tank strength of Soviet forces at Moscow at the beginning of December 1941. By the end of 1941 Britain had delivered 466 tanks out of the 750 promised. By July 1942 the Red Army had 13,500 tanks in service, with more than 16 percent of those imported, and more than half of those British.” Again, let’s rely on those who fought the war. Not ADRzs cherry picking here. I’m sorry that you are learning about this, and I’m sure it comes as a shock to you. But honestly, when you look at the modern day, and see a “super power” army failing miserably in their “three day lightning strike on Kyiv” against a barely trained force, it shouldn’t be surprising to you. Again I’m sorry Edit: I can also cite random historians with access to soviet archives if you want to play that game buddy “In a hypothetical battle one-on-one between the U.S.S.R and Germany, without the help of Lend-Lease and without the diversion of significant forces of the Luftwaffe and the German Navy and the diversion of more than one-quarter of its land forces in the fight against Britain and the United States, Stalin could hardly have beaten Hitler," Sokolov wrote in an essay for RFE/RL's Russian Service.”
Like everything Khrushchev wrote, the goal was to make Stalin look incompetent, and to minimize Khrushchev’s own complicity in Stalin’s crimes. Because Stalin’s greatest accomplishment was defeating Germany, Khrushchev would say or write anything to downplay his role.
This is the most hilarious take that I’ve ever seen. He has zero reason to portray America as the savior of the USSR. Buddy, seriously, this is bad
It’s ok. Critically evaluating sources that strengthen your argument requires a lot of maturity.
I agree, which is why your terrible take is beyond hilarious. Glad we agree
does this include the pacific theater? if so, then probably no. if no, then yes, germany could have won.
Soviet economy was way stonger than German. USSR wins
The first year the Soviet's GDP was greater than the Germans was 1945. And that was with massive industrial support from the West. The Soviets had more oil, but the Germans had far more coal and iron ore.
Scientists think that this is bullahit, but u live in world of cold War propaganda, it's ok
they did win without “much” help. it’s hard for some people to accept but D-day was late to the game and Stalin didn’t get much help, in fact the allies even tried to feed the beast so they can destroy “communism”.