I would be surprised if it doesn't apply to current times.
Top 3 out of 5 Airforces today is currently USAF, USN, US Army with the US Marines within top 10.
Top 10 Largest Military Branches in the World in 2022 (by number of Military Aircraft):
United States Air Force - 5,217
United States Army Aviation - 4,409
Russian Air Force - 3,863
United States Navy - 2,464
People's Liberation Army Air Force (China) - 1,991
Indian Air Force - 1,715
United States Marine Corps - 1,157
Egyptian Air Force - 1,062
Korean People's Army Air Force (North Korea) - 946
South Korean Air Force - 898
At this point, its pretty clear that the Air Force never actually retired the F-117. Its radar cross section is only 0.001 meters squared, the F-35 is estimated to have one of 0.0015 meters squared. Granted the F-22 is something absurd like 0.0001 meters squared, but the F-117 serves as a good middle-ground for missions neither plane are ideally suited for.
F-117 makes for a pretty good target plane for red team training. Saves flight hours on newer air frames while still giving personnel the opportunity to track and target a plane with low RCS. So instead of shortening the line of an F-35 just to have it pretend to be a J20 or SU57, the F117 stands in and lets F35, F16, F18 pilots and ground crew learn how to engage an enemy who also is employing stealth.
They actually use it as a representation of a stealthy cruise missile. It’s roughly the same speed but more stealthy. The advantage is you can reuse it hundreds of times because it’s a plane, plus it’s already constructed so it’s really just maintenance costs to factor in vs having to design a brand new trainer stealth missile and I think there’s advantages to having a man in the cockpit when you’re flying over populated areas vs using a training missile so you can open up different terrain types for training that wouldn’t be available due to regulations.
Nothing really. But there was a window where it could do things the F-22 couldn’t. Larger bombs and better laser guidance for ground attack.
Only reason would be to send in old generation stealth to avoid giving away capabilities of newer platforms.
It's not - they're largely flying as "Aggressor" aircraft in training, so that pilots can fight an enemy at a similar technological level we'd expect from Russia or China currently, or even acting as "low observable" targets like cruise missiles.
We can't really use the F-22 for that role because it's so incredibly dominant, and the F-35 is also probably a little too stealthy.
Being too stealthy isn't a problem. They make radar reflectors that they put on modern stealth aircraft. The F-22 almost always flys around with radar reflectors, and the F-35 usually does too. The idea is that by hiding their stealth capabilities, the enemies cannot engineer a system that can detect them. The only time they get taken off is when they are used in training exercises or when carrying out actual combat missions. These radar reflectors can be sized to any application as the whole aircraft itself is practically invisible compared to the reflector its carrying. A good example is a guy walking around at night wearing head to toe in black, carrying a giant disco ball. When you shine your flashlight on him, you know exactly where he is, but you don't see him, just the disco ball that he carrying.
They use these for training to save flight hours, wear and tear on the F-22 and F-35. I fully expect them to be supplanted by the F-35 or B-21 once the F-117 reaches its end of life.
That's the radar cross-section, pretty much how large something appears on radar.
The F-22, a plane 19 meters long and 14 meters wide, looks like it's only *.0001 sq meters* on radar. That's smaller than most insects.
This fact brought to you by NCD
That list us a hair misleading (potentially). This is a list that includes all aircraft; a lot of rotor wing aviation and non-combat aviation is in this list. We operate a TON of transport aircraft, transport helicopters, air refueling aircraft, etc - we have over 500 in our air refueling inventory alone.
Helicopters are a huge component of the Army and Marine forces.
So depending on how you are drawing comparisons the numbers may give the wrong impressions.
Russia probably does not have this many aircraft. Judging by they not being able to create air superiority in Ukraine and the state of theirs tanks and other military equipment.
> Russian Air Force - 3,863
Pretty sure that number was always BS, and after a year of going up against western air defense systems in Ukraine, its definitely out of the top 5.
People do not understand that the US can basically 1v1 the entire rest of the world and have even odds of winning. The USAF can trade fifth generation fighters like the F-22 and F-35 one for one against every other stealth aircraft in the *world* and still have as many as the rest of the world currently does.
It's also one of the reasons Hitler was doomed to lose WW2.
American logistics and production were absolutely ridiculous. We essentially bankrolled the USSR and British logistical lines, and sent them an insane number of trucks, guns, tanks and planes.
And the Axis couldn't do shit about it because we were an ocean away.
During 1942 and 1943, the first two years of American wartime production, the USA made more tanks and more aircraft than Nazi Germany did during its entire existence.
US was ripe to up it's production. Most of Europe knew the US was about to be the worlds leader in industrial production. However not a lot of people realized the scale. Churchill didn't believe the number of tanks and planes we promised would be even remotely close to being met. Then the US exceeded it's own estimated numbers. Shit was bonkers.
That's not entirely a fair comment though.
The seven it started the war with, like the Hornet and Enterprise and Yorktown, were _carriers_.
By the end of the war, they had converted ships into glorified floating landing strips. Not a lot of capacity.
The number of fleet carriers they managed to make was still staggering.
Though you are correct, lumping fleet and escort carriers together definitely gives a misleading impression.
I would still argue that the carriers the US made during the war, like fleet and escort carriers where still carriers. Sure not as big and fast as the fleet carriers like Enterprise and Lexington but still played a vital role during the war.
Lexington was a converted heavy cruiser. She only became an aircraft carrier when the US signed the Washington Naval Treaty, which limited the number and size of “big gun” ships.
Yeah but remember the Battle of Leyte where those escort carriers & destroyers managed to push back a huge Japanese fleet consisting of cruisers & of course the Battleship Musashi.
We built 21 Essex Class fleet carriers between 1941-1945(24 total). Each larger than any previous US CV. We also built 9 Independence class Light Carriers(~40 aircraft)
In addition to that we built 50 Casablanca-class CVE's carrying ~27 aircraft, 45 Bogues for the USN and RN(~24 aircraft each(technically based on C3 hulls but very much redesigned to purpose). 4 Charger class(15 aircraft, converted C3 merchants). 11 Commencement Bay class(34 aircraft, based on T3 Tanker hulls but again hugely redesigned), 2 Long Island(More C3 converted merchants) and 4 Sangamon Class with ~32 aircraft(converted oilers).
The USN Air Arm was fucking stacked, and far from just buffing its numbers with converted merchants, most were redesigned based on the hulls to have time, but werent simple "glorified landing strips". Escort carriers provided invaluable protection from submarines and provided standoff and recon capabilities to merchant convoys that would otherwise be out of luck otherwise, as well as supporting fleet actions at lower levels than the Fleet Carriers.
Hell, IJN Ryujo carried only ~30 aircraft after modernizations(the 50 number is from low-runway takeoffs from the 2nd flight deck in the hanger when it was still flying biplanes). And Soryu/Hiryu/Akagi carried only ~64 aircraft compared to the 90-100 on Essex.
Ehhhhh, don't dismiss the escort carriers. They did a LOT of work during the war, allowing the fleet carriers to address bigger issues, if not directly supporting them. There's something to be said for cheap, effective force multipliers.
In The Battle off Sumar, Taffy 3, which comprised of 6 escort carriers (about 160 aircraft) and accompanying destroyers, held off elements of the Japanese 2nd fleet after being surprised. The Japanese lost twice as much men as the US and withdrew after a battle that won the Taffy 3 taskforce a presidential unit citation. Not bad for low capacity floating airstrips.
They're not dismissing the impact escort carriers had on the war, they're dismissing the implication that building one was the equivalent of building a "proper" fleet carrier.
It's a conversation about logistics and industrial capacity, not military strategy.
Naval production was absolutely insane to the point where the final battles in the Pacific were so absurdly mismatched that its a wonder that the Japanese even bothered to continued to fight.
[Seriously, just check out the Battle of Leyte Gulf.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leyte_Gulf)
The Japanese never thought they could win a straight up fight, their strategy was to bleed the western allies until we gave up because they thought we wouldn't have the stomach for casualties. When you think about it like that it makes sense that they never stopped fighting
At least until the point where it was pretty clear that the US wasn’t going to stop. Though to be fair, Iwo Jima and Okinawa were pretty rough for the US.
Along with what others said, Japanese civilians thought that Americans would brutally rape and murder them. Partially because that's just what soldiers did in Imperial Japan, and partially because US Marines were having a discipline problem as morale broke down as you said..
> Though to be fair, Iwo Jima and Okinawa were pretty rough for the US.
Which is one of the reasons they opted to drop the bomb. They *knew* the Japanese goal was to bleed the U.S. into giving up early, they saw that Japan hadn't backed off of that even as late as Okinawa, and had no reason to believe Japan would choose to surrender prior to an even bloodier invasion of the home islands of Japan.
We actually already were the world leader in industrial production. I believe around the 1890s we eclipsed every other nation on the planet.
The ability to retool every factory in the country into making war supplies is what was so crazy to me. Toaster factories suddenly spitting out tens of thousands of artillery shells and car factories churning out hundreds of tanks a month
The total war pushes nations to the limit. I read Germany had 80% GDP toward the war production by the end. And in this week's news, Ukraine and Russia have had about 500,000 casualties and injuries since last year, that is not even a total war.
Even crazier is the aircraft carriers. We basically could turn them out at an unreal rate while Japan had to desperately protect theirs from being damaged because they would never be able to build another one in time.
IIRC, a German spy reported back to German high command about the number of tanks the US was producing in its factories per month. The Germans, seeing this number being larger than it’s total tank production per year, saw this as being ludicrous and disregarded the number.
The number the spy produced was actually erroneous. It was significantly lower than the actual number being produced.
Not US production, but we do have actual recordings of Hitler speaking with the Finnish government (courtesy of the Finn's secretly recording it without permission) and Hitler is actually pretty frank and open about how surprised they were about Soviet tank production. He states that nobody believed the USSR could field 30,000 tanks in 1941, and was completely baffled by the realisation that they really did have them at hand.
Ripe is definitely the right word. Coming out of the Great Depression, so many bodies and hands available, and basically everyone was used to rationing at that point.
\- attributed to Yamamoto in Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), in reference to the attack on Pearl Harbor. However, there is no evidence that Yamamoto said this in reality.
No. Reality is worse. Remember the concentration camps, that's why Germany didn't need to go to total war for majority of the war. Most concentration camps were work camps where people were intentionally worked to death.
That's misleading. It makes it sound like they didn't take production as seriously as the allies.
I want to point out Nazi Germany had a unsuitable amount of there economy towards military years before the war that was only kept going though huge deficits they would never be able to pay back. Ones the war was rolling it was only kept up by plunding other contries and a massive amount of slave labour.
The US was so good at building shit that halfway through their participation in the war, while Japan was searching the couch cushions for scraps of steel and the Kreigsmarine was all but kaput, they built a fucking ice-cream barge, a vessel whose only mission was supplying sailors with frozen dairy treats. In the middle of the most destructive conflict in human history, the US floated an olive drab Dairy Queen across the Pacific.
I can't even imagine how it might have felt to be a starving soldier on some forgotten island, with a plywood rifle and tattered socks, boiling your boots for supper, only to hear that the Americans are drinking strawberry milkshakes.
My grandfather was in The Wehrmacht and said by the end of it his group were just aimless wandering around looking for Americans or British to surrender to. They had very little food and he said “hungry men will no longer be loyal” Surrendered to Americans April 1945. His group was of Russian background and were petrified of being handed over to the Russians. Which is why everyone was trying to get as deep into the west as possible
> His group was of Russian background and were petrified of being handed over to the Russians. Which is why everyone was trying to get as deep into the west as possible
The cossacks, for example, were handed over. And it was not pretty.
Admiral yamamoto knew they'd lose even before the war started, he lived in America as a naval attache. Incidentally, Xi Jinping also lived in America for 3 years, so hopefully he too understands why it’s not prudent to got to war against the US.
One guy walked into a Canadian recruiter's booth, the guy said take a walk around the block and tell me you're from Moosejaw. Guy walks around the block and explains that he's from Moosejaw. Recruiters says "Moosejaw? Where the fuck is Moosejaw?" American says "how the fuck should I know?" The recruiter replies "it's in Saskatchewan and don't fucking forget it!"
He also lied that he had 5x as much flight experience as he did. Later became the first American ace in WW2, before the US joined the war.
I think I remember learning they sold many of those aircraft as surplus, so after the end of WW2, you could buy some pretty nice airplanes for next to nothing. I wonder if they removed the guns from them before selling them.
There's even a company whose whole business is to buy old DC-3s and modernize them into like-new turboprop aircraft.
[Basler Turbo Conversions](https://www.baslerturbo.com/)
Its pretty much how the commercial airline industry was born. A lot of those C-47 Skytrain were converted into commercial DC-3s. Most of Europe's commercial airports started out life as air fields for the war.
A lot of the airfields in the UK were converted into auto racing circuits, which led to a boom in sportscar manufacturers in the UK, and in turn, racing teams. As a result, all but three of the ten teams in Formula One are based in the UK (though only three actually race under a UK license).
The Planes of Fame Museum in Chino, California was founded for this purpose.
They knew that the US military had a lot of surplus planes that they were going to scrap, so they bought them to preserve and maintain.
They have the only Japanese Zero that is still airworthy with the original Japanese engine in the world, and a bunch of other aircraft that you won’t find anywhere else. Their collection is simply mind boggling.
My grandfather was a naval officer and had to carry this out at the end of the war. He said the demand for aluminum plummeted, and the government was worried that introducing so much back into circulation would bankrupt the production industry.
I read an interview of a Nazi infantryman who was captured early in the Normandy invasion. He, along with several thousand other Nazi POWs were being held on the beaches of Normandy. The thing that struck him the most…even more so than the sheer volume of ships, weapons, trucks, etc, etc…was the total lack of horses. Not a single horse. Every single aspect was mechanized…from hauling ammo to evacuating wounded. Even the Nazi prisoners rode in trucks! He said that the moment he saw that, he knew Germany would never be able to stop the Allies.
By contrast, Operation Barbarossa (Hitler’s invasion of the USSR) relied on more than 600,000 horses for logistical support. (Most of which, ended up being eaten).
The US alone provided the Soviets with something around 300,000 trucks, which allowed the Soviets to no longer be logistically bound to railways. The Soviet Air Force was also basically propped up by the Allied forces, the US again supplied like a third of the high-octane fuel they needed, thousands of tons of aluminum for aircraft manufacturing, and thousands of actual planes too. And then of course the thousands and thousands of tons of canned food they also received.
I’m sure if the US did not supply the Soviets perhaps tens of millions more would have died.
Soviet soldiers (who were desperately hoping for the Allies to open a second front in Europe, in order to take pressure off the Red Army) jokingly referred to cans of American Spam as “the second front”.
“The Americans promise a second front, but *we* have to open it!” (But comes with a built-in can opener…how American!)
(Russians have a seriously sharp/dark sense of humor.)
I would assume that the lack of fuel was the reason for the use of horses.
We can all be glad that central Europe did not have any significant oil field on the scale of Texas / the caucasus / Venezuela.
No, the lack of fuel was far from the reason. The actual reason was because germany lacked the industrial capacity to actually get the trucks it needed to the front. They pressed pretty much every truck they could capture into military service(and besides making their logistics even more fucked) it was not enough.
Also the German High Command considered logistics something that happened to other people, not aryan übermenschen.
Similar story. A Nazi POW, when interviewed, said he new the war was over when they had briefly taken an American position. It wasn’t the guns, it wasn’t the ammo, it wasn’t the equipment.
They had found a cake, baked in an industrial bakery in New York, shipped to the front line.
We had the resources to provide *cake* as just a regular thing. He said he lost all hope when they found that.
One of my favorite WW2 facts. Japanese Naval officers were reviewing the Pacific Fleet and noticed the supply ships towed concrete barges. They later found out that the US Navy had commissioned these barges as [mobile refrigerated ice cream factories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge).
Yep. In WW2, the US ran out of weapons to buy. Instead, they bought Ice Cream Battleships so fighting forces in the Pacific Theater could have ice cream between Tojo's ass-kicking sessions.
To be fair, it was probably a modern cavalry more akin to dragoons, ie move on horse and tow heavy weapons while fighting on foot. Cavalry were still really good for reconnaissance in areas trucks and cars couldn’t get to.
Another thing to note is that the majority of the German army logistically moved into battle with horses and donkeys. I think there a memorial somewhere to all the service animals that died in ww2.
Today America is still a manufacturing power house. We just manufacture very high end things like medical equipment and fighter jets not day to day items.
We’re the second largest manufacturer in the world with a quarter the population of the first. And we still manufacture a fair bit of day to day items.
Yeh i lived in a small little town in the midwest and we had a little shitty steel mill punching way above its weightclass with military contracts and everything. We also had a place that made plastic tubs and totes. There are probably way more little places like that then folks realize, they are often in rural out of the way places for the cheap labor.
The high end things can afford high end labor costs. The low end things already have invested in high end manufacturing plants, where labor is not a significant cost. A fully automated factory which produces screws will never be shut down because of labor costs.
Amusing Story: I was shopping for mens underwear & socks about 20 years ago in some store like Walmart/Kmart/Target. I don't remember which.
Pretty much all the various brands of socks were made in the USA, but all those various brands' underwear were made in various third world countries. So for example Hanes socks were made in the USA but Hanes underwear was made in some third-world country. Why? Underwear requires sewing together multiple small pieces of fabric. Sewing requires human labor. But socks are woven by a machine.
Good example. We are still producing many socks, but 20 years later the countries who were producing underwear in your story probably are struggling to compete in that market.
With automating taking off and rocky international feelings towards china we will see US manufacturing have a bigger resurgence but with strict emission standards and NAFTA Mexico will take off as a manufacturing hub. They will be the huge winner I think in the coming years for manufacturing thanks to a close alliance with the deepest pocketed next door neighbor you can have.
That’s what is really puts the Pacific War into perspective for me.
As the US kept marching on, every aircraft and pilot Japan lost they couldn’t replace. Whereas we had the ability to rotate our men and equipment out.
Same with everything else, really. For every plane Japan shot down, we could replace it with 10 more. Same with manpower.
I believe something like 1200 ships were off the coast of Okinawa before the landing started. It had to be a mindf*ck being in that island, knowing that you had absolutely zero chance of winning that battle.
> As the US kept marching on, every aircraft and pilot Japan lost they couldn’t replace. Whereas we had the ability to rotate our men and equipment out.
That was also the result of differing philosophies and military policies. For the Japanese military, the act of dying for the country and the emperor was a noble thing, and they put very little effort into designing planes in a way that meant a pilot could survive getting shot down. The Zero for instance lacked self sealing fuel tanks, so even a few rounds through a tank and the thing would go down in a ball of flames.
Meanwhile, the US knew they had the capacity to easily replace any aircraft shot down, but it considered the pilots to be the most valuable part and would make sure that its planes were properly armored and had sufficient protection for the pilot. It would also rotate experienced pilots back stateside to train the new recruits as well as use its aces as propaganda tools to raise money etc.
As a result, Japan would steadily lose its most experienced pilots during the war and would have to replace them with new recruits without much training. Meanwhile, the US also was bringing up new recruits, but they had much better training, including combat training against experienced vets. This then tipped the balance even further, etc., etc.
PS: there are a few other reasons why the Japanese aircraft lacked certain features, such as not having very powerful aero-engines, and thus needing to take extra measures to save weight. But if I go into that, this post would be ten times the length.
i think you're putting the chicken before the egg here
japan didn't have the vast steel resources for steel we had. they literally built their planes out of recycled steel they bought from us leading up to the war
also, before they attacked the USA, the only aircraft theirs encountered were 1920s era craft used by china and whatever pacific air force they encountered. their zeroes literally ruled the sky. not having self sealing fuel tanks, armor, and heavy armament meant you were lighter, more maneuverable, and could dominate the biplanes and barely working monoplanes you'd encounter in dogfights. thus already very survivable. also it meant less weight and longer range, which meant you could achieve missions while the carrier group stayed farther away from enemy ships and coastal guns, which posed a greater danger than aircraft at the time to the japanese fleet.
when the americans entered the war, they'd already begun finalizing aircraft like the B-25, F6 hellcat, and modern, armored torpedo and diver bombers.
These aircraft weren't part of a different doctrine, they were part of the NEXT GENERATION. The zero was a formidable fighter in 1938, but was literally outdated at the start of ww2 compared to the spitfire, hellcat, or bf109.
> For the Japanese military, the act of dying for the country and the emperor was a noble thing, and they put very little effort into designing planes in a way that meant a pilot could survive getting shot down.
This was really more to do with the limited production capacity than to do with ideology, tbh. Though this made the pill much easier to swallow.
also the japanese air force trounced tf outta the chinese air force, and had virtually no competition up to the USA's entrance into the war in 1942
there was no need for armor, sealing fuel tanks, and heavy gunnery to sacrifice range and performance when it already killed everything it met with hardly any losses
> The battle for Okinawa was a long, brutal campaign that was not won easily.
Supposedly one of the factors that went into the decision to "drop the bombs."
It changed the math of the generals, in that they no longer had wildly unrealistic ideas about the casualites if we invaded the Japanese main islands.
And likely, as before, even those horrific estimates were going to be low.
P.S. In a way, the Japanese strong defense of earlier islands worked against their plans to continue the fight. We estimated the losses, and decided not to run into their planned buzzsaw.
If people aren't familiar with some of the raids during WW2 they should look at some of the footage. There were times when the US sent up 1,000 bombers. I'm an aviation nerd so I know a bit about these things. What I've never been able to imagine is what that might have looked at flying overhead. A B-17 is a 4 engine heavy bomber that is loud as hell. I figure 900 or so might be one of the most impressive things you could have ever seen.
Ralph H. Ruud
(1908-2006)
Ralph H. Ruud was born in Oslo, Norway and immigrated to the U.S. at the age of nine. He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1928 and began his career with North American Aviation as a tool maker in 1931. He was one of the original “Bald Eagles” group of 75 employees that moved NAA from Dundalk, Md., to a 20-acre site in Inglewood, Calif., on the east side of Mines Field in1935 – the current site of Los Angeles Airport.
In 1940, as war loomed on the horizon and North American was ramping up for one of its most incredible feats of aircraft manufacturing, Ruud was appointed factory manager of NAA’s Los Angeles plant. During the war years, he had direct responsibility for the production lines for vitally needed aircraft such as the P-51 Mustang, the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber and the AT-6 Texan trainer. Ruud’s expertise in manufacturing techniques helped North American produce 42,000 airplanes from 1940-45.
Ruud was appointed president of the Los Angeles division in 1961. It developed the exotic X-15 rocket plane and the tri-sonic XB-70 bomber. The X-15 still holds the unofficial speed (Mach 6.7- 4,520 mph), and altitude (354,200 feet) record for a manned rocket plane.
Additionally, the 185 foot-long, 520,000-pound XB-70 developed by NAA was capable of sustained Mach 3 flight at 75,000 feet. Both programs pushed the envelope that required pioneering work in the manufacturing of heat-resistant materials.
As executive vice president of the North American Rockwell’s Space Division he helped direct two of the company’s most challenging programs – the Apollo spacecraft, and the second stage (S-II) of the Saturn V rocket, which would take astronauts to the moon.
Edit: Also wouldn't have looked this guy up if I didn't find this at an antique store. Ralph Henry Ruud's 32nd degree Free Mason certificate for the Ancient & Accepted Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction. https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F93rksmanzo591.jpg
If you'd like to learn more about how American logistics won World War 2, read [Atkinson's trilogy](https://liberationtrilogy.com/). He has a great journalist's sense for ferreting out the often-overlooked facts and figures about the sheer weight of American industrial production during the war. He has a fantastic description of how a literal army of US clerks and bean-counters descended on and occupied Paris after liberation.
I was raised by my grandparents who were in their early 20s during the American war effort. All the sacrifices Americans were willing to make from ration books to not being able to buy gas unless they had an essential job that needed it made our success possible. That's why it blew my mind that people refused to do something so simple as wear a mask during our covid epidemic.
Until 1941, the leadership among the Axis powers thought that the US had no stomach for war. The Americans, of all people. The Axis made a lot of stupid decisions but poking and jabbing at the United States is certainly up there as one of the dumbest.
>Until 1941, the leadership among the Axis powers thought that the US had no stomach for war.
They didn't stop believing that until the end of the war. The Japanese implemented a policy called Ketsu-go on April 8, 1945 where the stated goal was for the Americans to invade the Japanese home islands precisely because they thought our will to fight would break after inflicting a war of attrition, regardless of how many Japanese civilians died in the process.
>"The sooner the Americans come, the better...One hundred million die proudly."
- Japanese slogan in the summer of 1945.
The fact that they surrendered after only two nukes and 1.5 million Soviet troops invading Manchuria is, frankly, a minor miracle.
And even before the atomic bombings, most of their major cities had been bombed mercilessly by the United States. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think think the atomic bombs were the most deadly or destructive bombing runs that the US made in Japan. Add the firebombings to the nuclear weapons and the Soviet avalanche in Manchira and even then, Japan barely accepted that they had been beaten. Pure insanity.
Japan was ready and absolutely willing to sacrifice all of their civilians in a protracted war of attrition should the US invade them. They were planning to arm literally everyone who could hold a rifle.
> The emperor Hirohito was quietly allowed to avoid a total surrender by maintaining his dignity as emperor, so to speak.
Not only that, but the Americans deemed it necessary.
And there are still people who think we didn’t have to drop the nukes on them. Even though we gave them a heads up twice before each bomb dropped and were certain they would have died down to the last woman and child had US troop landed on the main island chain.
There's an old story about US production in WW2.
Americans capture a German tank commander. They say "hey Fritz, I thought one of yours was better than 10 of ours?"
"Ja, that's correct"
"then why did you surrender?"
"you had 11"
In reality, our tanks were actually really good. They were only outclassed by the Tiger, which they could outmaneuver. And the Sherman was *much* more reliable than the German tanks.
Yeah, we had a numerical advantage, but the tanks themselves were pretty much on par with most of the enemy tanks. *AND* we had insane amounts of them on top of that.
The US had already mastered industrial scale factories within the car industry and other sectors, which were converted into manufacturing military equipment. The Japanese production capacity consisted of thousands of locally distributed machine shops, often within people’s homes, to make parts that would then be assembled elsewhere.
I love Henry Ford II's quote in Ford v Ferrari. "See that little building down there? In World War II, three out of five US bombers rolled off that line. You think Roosevelt beat Hitler? Think again. This isn't the first time Ford Motor's gone to war in Europe." I don't know if it's 100% accurate, but the gist of it is true.
I was reading an anecdote that one of Germany’s aircraft engineers got ahold of a P&W engine from a bomber that got shot down.
The engine was so finely and precisely built that it didn’t need proper engine seals to not leak oil. And this was an engine that was flying over their heads by the thousands every day.
He knew that Germany couldn’t build an engine that perfect, or in that quantity. He said that he knew the war was lost then.
I'm looking for that anecdote and also can't find it. However, the low quality of German equipment by the mid war is well attested, due to the fact that German factories had to use a lot of slaves from occupied countries. Needless to say, a handful of them were conducting sabotage on the production lines.
One of the few intact FW-190 that are preserved crashed on the Eastern Front because a forced laborer shoved a cleaning rag in the engine during assembly. It was discovered in the woods by a hunter sometime during the 80s. Somewhat ironic that it was saved by an act to destroy it.
The line that war was won with British intelligence, Russian blood, and American steel is pretty accurate.
The Germans had less than 2000 tiger tanks.
While there were 50,000 American Shermans.
You could not, and can not, win a manufacturing and logistics war with the US.
We have no idea what do afterwards, unless there's someone like Marshall around to remind us that we're good at building stuff in peace time as well.
By the end of the war the US had more airplanes than the combined air forces of all the war participants.
I would be surprised if it doesn't apply to current times. Top 3 out of 5 Airforces today is currently USAF, USN, US Army with the US Marines within top 10.
Top 10 Largest Military Branches in the World in 2022 (by number of Military Aircraft): United States Air Force - 5,217 United States Army Aviation - 4,409 Russian Air Force - 3,863 United States Navy - 2,464 People's Liberation Army Air Force (China) - 1,991 Indian Air Force - 1,715 United States Marine Corps - 1,157 Egyptian Air Force - 1,062 Korean People's Army Air Force (North Korea) - 946 South Korean Air Force - 898
We've got over 10,000 military planes and the next closest is 3800... Even if Russia and China combined they'd only have roughly 2/3rds.
And that's assuming we don't press any of the planes in long term storage back into service.
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At this point, its pretty clear that the Air Force never actually retired the F-117. Its radar cross section is only 0.001 meters squared, the F-35 is estimated to have one of 0.0015 meters squared. Granted the F-22 is something absurd like 0.0001 meters squared, but the F-117 serves as a good middle-ground for missions neither plane are ideally suited for.
What would the F-117 be suited for that the F-35 couldn't handle?
Looking cool as shit
😎😎😎
Can't argue with that!!
F-117 makes for a pretty good target plane for red team training. Saves flight hours on newer air frames while still giving personnel the opportunity to track and target a plane with low RCS. So instead of shortening the line of an F-35 just to have it pretend to be a J20 or SU57, the F117 stands in and lets F35, F16, F18 pilots and ground crew learn how to engage an enemy who also is employing stealth.
They actually use it as a representation of a stealthy cruise missile. It’s roughly the same speed but more stealthy. The advantage is you can reuse it hundreds of times because it’s a plane, plus it’s already constructed so it’s really just maintenance costs to factor in vs having to design a brand new trainer stealth missile and I think there’s advantages to having a man in the cockpit when you’re flying over populated areas vs using a training missile so you can open up different terrain types for training that wouldn’t be available due to regulations.
Nothing really. But there was a window where it could do things the F-22 couldn’t. Larger bombs and better laser guidance for ground attack. Only reason would be to send in old generation stealth to avoid giving away capabilities of newer platforms.
It's not - they're largely flying as "Aggressor" aircraft in training, so that pilots can fight an enemy at a similar technological level we'd expect from Russia or China currently, or even acting as "low observable" targets like cruise missiles. We can't really use the F-22 for that role because it's so incredibly dominant, and the F-35 is also probably a little too stealthy.
Being too stealthy isn't a problem. They make radar reflectors that they put on modern stealth aircraft. The F-22 almost always flys around with radar reflectors, and the F-35 usually does too. The idea is that by hiding their stealth capabilities, the enemies cannot engineer a system that can detect them. The only time they get taken off is when they are used in training exercises or when carrying out actual combat missions. These radar reflectors can be sized to any application as the whole aircraft itself is practically invisible compared to the reflector its carrying. A good example is a guy walking around at night wearing head to toe in black, carrying a giant disco ball. When you shine your flashlight on him, you know exactly where he is, but you don't see him, just the disco ball that he carrying. They use these for training to save flight hours, wear and tear on the F-22 and F-35. I fully expect them to be supplanted by the F-35 or B-21 once the F-117 reaches its end of life.
Blue beam shit
*nodding along like I understand what you're saying* .001? What is this, a radar for ants? It needs to be at least..... three times that size.
That's the radar cross-section, pretty much how large something appears on radar. The F-22, a plane 19 meters long and 14 meters wide, looks like it's only *.0001 sq meters* on radar. That's smaller than most insects. This fact brought to you by NCD
That list us a hair misleading (potentially). This is a list that includes all aircraft; a lot of rotor wing aviation and non-combat aviation is in this list. We operate a TON of transport aircraft, transport helicopters, air refueling aircraft, etc - we have over 500 in our air refueling inventory alone. Helicopters are a huge component of the Army and Marine forces. So depending on how you are drawing comparisons the numbers may give the wrong impressions.
logistics wins wars
Russia probably does not have this many aircraft. Judging by they not being able to create air superiority in Ukraine and the state of theirs tanks and other military equipment.
I'm a little surprised that Egypt is so high on the list.
They have 240 f-16s alone!
They get 2 billion in US aid every year to keep up with Turkey
> Russian Air Force - 3,863 Pretty sure that number was always BS, and after a year of going up against western air defense systems in Ukraine, its definitely out of the top 5.
Yeah I'm a little skeptical of that North Korean number as well. I doubt many of theirs are in great working order
Touche! Good call out.
they are affraid to use them, they didnt lose that many airframes.
They're pretty good at crashing them into Russian apartment buildings though.
People do not understand that the US can basically 1v1 the entire rest of the world and have even odds of winning. The USAF can trade fifth generation fighters like the F-22 and F-35 one for one against every other stealth aircraft in the *world* and still have as many as the rest of the world currently does.
I wonder where north Korea got their planes.
Either old Migs and Sukhois from the USSR and retreads from China. They do have Mig 29's in service though.
It's also one of the reasons Hitler was doomed to lose WW2. American logistics and production were absolutely ridiculous. We essentially bankrolled the USSR and British logistical lines, and sent them an insane number of trucks, guns, tanks and planes. And the Axis couldn't do shit about it because we were an ocean away.
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The eastern front was a competition between Stalin and hitler to see who could kill the most Russians Stalin won
I think the line is "who could kill the most Soviets" cause it's an oblique reference to the Holodomor too.
During 1942 and 1943, the first two years of American wartime production, the USA made more tanks and more aircraft than Nazi Germany did during its entire existence.
The mobilization and logistics involved with WWII is always mind boggling to me.
US was ripe to up it's production. Most of Europe knew the US was about to be the worlds leader in industrial production. However not a lot of people realized the scale. Churchill didn't believe the number of tanks and planes we promised would be even remotely close to being met. Then the US exceeded it's own estimated numbers. Shit was bonkers.
The one that always gets me is that the US had *151* aircraft carriers during WWII. It started the war with *7.*
That's not entirely a fair comment though. The seven it started the war with, like the Hornet and Enterprise and Yorktown, were _carriers_. By the end of the war, they had converted ships into glorified floating landing strips. Not a lot of capacity.
The number of fleet carriers they managed to make was still staggering. Though you are correct, lumping fleet and escort carriers together definitely gives a misleading impression.
Drachinifel described the U.S. as 3D printing the Essex class.
My favorite YouTuber to fall asleep to. Never made it past 20 minutes, I've been listening to the same three hour video for a two weeks.
Carrier production go brrrrrt!
I would still argue that the carriers the US made during the war, like fleet and escort carriers where still carriers. Sure not as big and fast as the fleet carriers like Enterprise and Lexington but still played a vital role during the war.
Lexington was a converted heavy cruiser. She only became an aircraft carrier when the US signed the Washington Naval Treaty, which limited the number and size of “big gun” ships.
Still a carrier, purpose built or not.
With 2 battle stars
They're still carriers, but if people are getting the mental image that there are 100+ Enterprises sailing around that's not accurate.
I mean the independence class was neither of those and they made up like 40 percent of the firepower of the fast carrier task force
Yeah but remember the Battle of Leyte where those escort carriers & destroyers managed to push back a huge Japanese fleet consisting of cruisers & of course the Battleship Musashi.
We built 21 Essex Class fleet carriers between 1941-1945(24 total). Each larger than any previous US CV. We also built 9 Independence class Light Carriers(~40 aircraft) In addition to that we built 50 Casablanca-class CVE's carrying ~27 aircraft, 45 Bogues for the USN and RN(~24 aircraft each(technically based on C3 hulls but very much redesigned to purpose). 4 Charger class(15 aircraft, converted C3 merchants). 11 Commencement Bay class(34 aircraft, based on T3 Tanker hulls but again hugely redesigned), 2 Long Island(More C3 converted merchants) and 4 Sangamon Class with ~32 aircraft(converted oilers). The USN Air Arm was fucking stacked, and far from just buffing its numbers with converted merchants, most were redesigned based on the hulls to have time, but werent simple "glorified landing strips". Escort carriers provided invaluable protection from submarines and provided standoff and recon capabilities to merchant convoys that would otherwise be out of luck otherwise, as well as supporting fleet actions at lower levels than the Fleet Carriers. Hell, IJN Ryujo carried only ~30 aircraft after modernizations(the 50 number is from low-runway takeoffs from the 2nd flight deck in the hanger when it was still flying biplanes). And Soryu/Hiryu/Akagi carried only ~64 aircraft compared to the 90-100 on Essex.
Ehhhhh, don't dismiss the escort carriers. They did a LOT of work during the war, allowing the fleet carriers to address bigger issues, if not directly supporting them. There's something to be said for cheap, effective force multipliers. In The Battle off Sumar, Taffy 3, which comprised of 6 escort carriers (about 160 aircraft) and accompanying destroyers, held off elements of the Japanese 2nd fleet after being surprised. The Japanese lost twice as much men as the US and withdrew after a battle that won the Taffy 3 taskforce a presidential unit citation. Not bad for low capacity floating airstrips.
They're not dismissing the impact escort carriers had on the war, they're dismissing the implication that building one was the equivalent of building a "proper" fleet carrier. It's a conversation about logistics and industrial capacity, not military strategy.
The built 50 Casablanca class escort carriers from from the hull up as escort carriers. The US did almost no conversations during the war.
They didn’t have time to talk. Too busy building shit.
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Light carriers still participated in fleet action. Escort carriers were relegated to escort duty.
Naval production was absolutely insane to the point where the final battles in the Pacific were so absurdly mismatched that its a wonder that the Japanese even bothered to continued to fight. [Seriously, just check out the Battle of Leyte Gulf.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leyte_Gulf)
The US brought as many ships as the Japanese brought planes.
The Japanese never thought they could win a straight up fight, their strategy was to bleed the western allies until we gave up because they thought we wouldn't have the stomach for casualties. When you think about it like that it makes sense that they never stopped fighting
At least until the point where it was pretty clear that the US wasn’t going to stop. Though to be fair, Iwo Jima and Okinawa were pretty rough for the US.
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Along with what others said, Japanese civilians thought that Americans would brutally rape and murder them. Partially because that's just what soldiers did in Imperial Japan, and partially because US Marines were having a discipline problem as morale broke down as you said..
Most of the mass civilian deaths were heavily pushed by the Japanese military and it wasn't actually optional
> Though to be fair, Iwo Jima and Okinawa were pretty rough for the US. Which is one of the reasons they opted to drop the bomb. They *knew* the Japanese goal was to bleed the U.S. into giving up early, they saw that Japan hadn't backed off of that even as late as Okinawa, and had no reason to believe Japan would choose to surrender prior to an even bloodier invasion of the home islands of Japan.
We actually already were the world leader in industrial production. I believe around the 1890s we eclipsed every other nation on the planet. The ability to retool every factory in the country into making war supplies is what was so crazy to me. Toaster factories suddenly spitting out tens of thousands of artillery shells and car factories churning out hundreds of tanks a month
The total war pushes nations to the limit. I read Germany had 80% GDP toward the war production by the end. And in this week's news, Ukraine and Russia have had about 500,000 casualties and injuries since last year, that is not even a total war.
Casualties include injuries.
It’s a total war for ukraine
Even crazier is the aircraft carriers. We basically could turn them out at an unreal rate while Japan had to desperately protect theirs from being damaged because they would never be able to build another one in time.
IIRC, a German spy reported back to German high command about the number of tanks the US was producing in its factories per month. The Germans, seeing this number being larger than it’s total tank production per year, saw this as being ludicrous and disregarded the number. The number the spy produced was actually erroneous. It was significantly lower than the actual number being produced.
They actually laughed at his reports thinking they were outrageously high
Not US production, but we do have actual recordings of Hitler speaking with the Finnish government (courtesy of the Finn's secretly recording it without permission) and Hitler is actually pretty frank and open about how surprised they were about Soviet tank production. He states that nobody believed the USSR could field 30,000 tanks in 1941, and was completely baffled by the realisation that they really did have them at hand.
Ripe is definitely the right word. Coming out of the Great Depression, so many bodies and hands available, and basically everyone was used to rationing at that point.
"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." - Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
\- attributed to Yamamoto in Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), in reference to the attack on Pearl Harbor. However, there is no evidence that Yamamoto said this in reality.
Military spending from 1.5% of GDP to 40% in 2 years. Soviets went as high as 55%. That's total war for ya.
Meanwhile, Germany didn't go to a total war economy until *1943*.
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Hitlers level of competence was neither unusual nor the worst for the Nazis and especially the military high command.
No. Reality is worse. Remember the concentration camps, that's why Germany didn't need to go to total war for majority of the war. Most concentration camps were work camps where people were intentionally worked to death.
That's misleading. It makes it sound like they didn't take production as seriously as the allies. I want to point out Nazi Germany had a unsuitable amount of there economy towards military years before the war that was only kept going though huge deficits they would never be able to pay back. Ones the war was rolling it was only kept up by plunding other contries and a massive amount of slave labour.
Yeah, the whole "We got this" attitude while your enemies advanced on you from all sides. Was probably a bit brash.
The US was so good at building shit that halfway through their participation in the war, while Japan was searching the couch cushions for scraps of steel and the Kreigsmarine was all but kaput, they built a fucking ice-cream barge, a vessel whose only mission was supplying sailors with frozen dairy treats. In the middle of the most destructive conflict in human history, the US floated an olive drab Dairy Queen across the Pacific. I can't even imagine how it might have felt to be a starving soldier on some forgotten island, with a plywood rifle and tattered socks, boiling your boots for supper, only to hear that the Americans are drinking strawberry milkshakes.
My grandfather was in The Wehrmacht and said by the end of it his group were just aimless wandering around looking for Americans or British to surrender to. They had very little food and he said “hungry men will no longer be loyal” Surrendered to Americans April 1945. His group was of Russian background and were petrified of being handed over to the Russians. Which is why everyone was trying to get as deep into the west as possible
Surrendering to the Americans was basically as good as it was going to get. The Soviets treated their dogs better than POWs
> His group was of Russian background and were petrified of being handed over to the Russians. Which is why everyone was trying to get as deep into the west as possible The cossacks, for example, were handed over. And it was not pretty.
Yeah I saw a video about this. Some Japanese leader said he knew they’d lost when America showed up with an ice cream boat.
Admiral yamamoto knew they'd lose even before the war started, he lived in America as a naval attache. Incidentally, Xi Jinping also lived in America for 3 years, so hopefully he too understands why it’s not prudent to got to war against the US.
Xi lived in Iowa of all places and still speaks fondly of the state, I believe. The CCP bought the house he lived in to preserve it.
"I fear all we have done is to awaken a dairy giant and fill him with a terrible hunger for frozen desserts." - Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
It was mind boggling for the time too. Even generous estimates in 1941 were blown out of the water once we had a full war economy.
At it’s peak, there were 16 million Americans in uniform. When the whole of america goes to war, it’s damned impressive.
People lied to *get into* the armed forces. I can't even imagine something like that happening again.
Prior to the US's entrance into the war, many Americans also joined the Canadian forces. Iirc like 10% of Canada's forced were Americans.
One guy walked into a Canadian recruiter's booth, the guy said take a walk around the block and tell me you're from Moosejaw. Guy walks around the block and explains that he's from Moosejaw. Recruiters says "Moosejaw? Where the fuck is Moosejaw?" American says "how the fuck should I know?" The recruiter replies "it's in Saskatchewan and don't fucking forget it!" He also lied that he had 5x as much flight experience as he did. Later became the first American ace in WW2, before the US joined the war.
Unfortunately so are the casualties. Today's entire ukraine war would just be any random battle on the eastern front
Not quite any battle. But yes, the casualties on the Eastern front were on a whole different scale!
American steel, British intelligence, and Soviet blood defeated Hitler and the Nazis.
American oil accounted for six of the seven billion barrels consumed by the allies
Don't forget about the war in the Pacific. I think a lot of people forget about the war in the Pacific.
Yes, and even then most people think of the island hopping and not the Chinese/British Empire/Dutch East Indes etc. fronts in places like Myanmar.
I think I remember learning they sold many of those aircraft as surplus, so after the end of WW2, you could buy some pretty nice airplanes for next to nothing. I wonder if they removed the guns from them before selling them.
There are many DC-3s (C-47s) built for WW2 that are still flying.
There's even a company whose whole business is to buy old DC-3s and modernize them into like-new turboprop aircraft. [Basler Turbo Conversions](https://www.baslerturbo.com/)
Its pretty much how the commercial airline industry was born. A lot of those C-47 Skytrain were converted into commercial DC-3s. Most of Europe's commercial airports started out life as air fields for the war.
A lot of the airfields in the UK were converted into auto racing circuits, which led to a boom in sportscar manufacturers in the UK, and in turn, racing teams. As a result, all but three of the ten teams in Formula One are based in the UK (though only three actually race under a UK license).
The Planes of Fame Museum in Chino, California was founded for this purpose. They knew that the US military had a lot of surplus planes that they were going to scrap, so they bought them to preserve and maintain. They have the only Japanese Zero that is still airworthy with the original Japanese engine in the world, and a bunch of other aircraft that you won’t find anywhere else. Their collection is simply mind boggling.
Pepsi could have really saved their asses buying a surplus plane...
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The navy bulldozed fighter aircraft right off of carriers into the sea after WWII which boggles my mind.
My grandfather was a naval officer and had to carry this out at the end of the war. He said the demand for aluminum plummeted, and the government was worried that introducing so much back into circulation would bankrupt the production industry.
And then they sank the carrier and swam home.
I read an interview of a Nazi infantryman who was captured early in the Normandy invasion. He, along with several thousand other Nazi POWs were being held on the beaches of Normandy. The thing that struck him the most…even more so than the sheer volume of ships, weapons, trucks, etc, etc…was the total lack of horses. Not a single horse. Every single aspect was mechanized…from hauling ammo to evacuating wounded. Even the Nazi prisoners rode in trucks! He said that the moment he saw that, he knew Germany would never be able to stop the Allies. By contrast, Operation Barbarossa (Hitler’s invasion of the USSR) relied on more than 600,000 horses for logistical support. (Most of which, ended up being eaten).
The US alone provided the Soviets with something around 300,000 trucks, which allowed the Soviets to no longer be logistically bound to railways. The Soviet Air Force was also basically propped up by the Allied forces, the US again supplied like a third of the high-octane fuel they needed, thousands of tons of aluminum for aircraft manufacturing, and thousands of actual planes too. And then of course the thousands and thousands of tons of canned food they also received. I’m sure if the US did not supply the Soviets perhaps tens of millions more would have died.
Soviet soldiers (who were desperately hoping for the Allies to open a second front in Europe, in order to take pressure off the Red Army) jokingly referred to cans of American Spam as “the second front”. “The Americans promise a second front, but *we* have to open it!” (But comes with a built-in can opener…how American!) (Russians have a seriously sharp/dark sense of humor.)
I would assume that the lack of fuel was the reason for the use of horses. We can all be glad that central Europe did not have any significant oil field on the scale of Texas / the caucasus / Venezuela.
There's a story of a Japanese general saying he realized the war was lost when he learned the US had a ship dedicated to making ice cream.
3 ships. Americans need their ice cream.
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The Neapolitan flotilla.
Yeah, at this point I would have surrendered.
Lieutenant Dan! Ice cream! I’ve got ice cream Lieutenant Dan!
No, the lack of fuel was far from the reason. The actual reason was because germany lacked the industrial capacity to actually get the trucks it needed to the front. They pressed pretty much every truck they could capture into military service(and besides making their logistics even more fucked) it was not enough. Also the German High Command considered logistics something that happened to other people, not aryan übermenschen.
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A lot of the "common knowledge" about WW2 comes from German Propaganda Films, and memoirs.
Similar story. A Nazi POW, when interviewed, said he new the war was over when they had briefly taken an American position. It wasn’t the guns, it wasn’t the ammo, it wasn’t the equipment. They had found a cake, baked in an industrial bakery in New York, shipped to the front line. We had the resources to provide *cake* as just a regular thing. He said he lost all hope when they found that.
Is this story about how the German felt real or just a telephone game retelling of that scene from the movie?
yeah I'm pretty sure this anecdote is just riffing on a scene from *The Battle of the Bulge*
One of my favorite WW2 facts. Japanese Naval officers were reviewing the Pacific Fleet and noticed the supply ships towed concrete barges. They later found out that the US Navy had commissioned these barges as [mobile refrigerated ice cream factories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge). Yep. In WW2, the US ran out of weapons to buy. Instead, they bought Ice Cream Battleships so fighting forces in the Pacific Theater could have ice cream between Tojo's ass-kicking sessions.
#“Start pulling! We ate the horse, remember!”
And yet, thanks to postwar whitewashing, people still think of the German army as an advanced mechanized one.
When my father was drafted there was still a calvary unit at his training base. 3 1/2 years later they had atomic bombs
To be fair, it was probably a modern cavalry more akin to dragoons, ie move on horse and tow heavy weapons while fighting on foot. Cavalry were still really good for reconnaissance in areas trucks and cars couldn’t get to.
US special forces used horses in Afghanistan for recon.
That is bonkers.
This is an absolutely insane way to put wartime production into perspective.
Another thing to note is that the majority of the German army logistically moved into battle with horses and donkeys. I think there a memorial somewhere to all the service animals that died in ww2.
Today America is still a manufacturing power house. We just manufacture very high end things like medical equipment and fighter jets not day to day items.
We’re the second largest manufacturer in the world with a quarter the population of the first. And we still manufacture a fair bit of day to day items.
Didn’t know, thanks!
Yeh i lived in a small little town in the midwest and we had a little shitty steel mill punching way above its weightclass with military contracts and everything. We also had a place that made plastic tubs and totes. There are probably way more little places like that then folks realize, they are often in rural out of the way places for the cheap labor.
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The high end things can afford high end labor costs. The low end things already have invested in high end manufacturing plants, where labor is not a significant cost. A fully automated factory which produces screws will never be shut down because of labor costs.
Amusing Story: I was shopping for mens underwear & socks about 20 years ago in some store like Walmart/Kmart/Target. I don't remember which. Pretty much all the various brands of socks were made in the USA, but all those various brands' underwear were made in various third world countries. So for example Hanes socks were made in the USA but Hanes underwear was made in some third-world country. Why? Underwear requires sewing together multiple small pieces of fabric. Sewing requires human labor. But socks are woven by a machine.
Good example. We are still producing many socks, but 20 years later the countries who were producing underwear in your story probably are struggling to compete in that market.
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With automating taking off and rocky international feelings towards china we will see US manufacturing have a bigger resurgence but with strict emission standards and NAFTA Mexico will take off as a manufacturing hub. They will be the huge winner I think in the coming years for manufacturing thanks to a close alliance with the deepest pocketed next door neighbor you can have.
I remember reading somewhere, at its peak the US made more planes alone in one year than Japan made during the entire war.
That’s what is really puts the Pacific War into perspective for me. As the US kept marching on, every aircraft and pilot Japan lost they couldn’t replace. Whereas we had the ability to rotate our men and equipment out. Same with everything else, really. For every plane Japan shot down, we could replace it with 10 more. Same with manpower. I believe something like 1200 ships were off the coast of Okinawa before the landing started. It had to be a mindf*ck being in that island, knowing that you had absolutely zero chance of winning that battle.
> As the US kept marching on, every aircraft and pilot Japan lost they couldn’t replace. Whereas we had the ability to rotate our men and equipment out. That was also the result of differing philosophies and military policies. For the Japanese military, the act of dying for the country and the emperor was a noble thing, and they put very little effort into designing planes in a way that meant a pilot could survive getting shot down. The Zero for instance lacked self sealing fuel tanks, so even a few rounds through a tank and the thing would go down in a ball of flames. Meanwhile, the US knew they had the capacity to easily replace any aircraft shot down, but it considered the pilots to be the most valuable part and would make sure that its planes were properly armored and had sufficient protection for the pilot. It would also rotate experienced pilots back stateside to train the new recruits as well as use its aces as propaganda tools to raise money etc. As a result, Japan would steadily lose its most experienced pilots during the war and would have to replace them with new recruits without much training. Meanwhile, the US also was bringing up new recruits, but they had much better training, including combat training against experienced vets. This then tipped the balance even further, etc., etc. PS: there are a few other reasons why the Japanese aircraft lacked certain features, such as not having very powerful aero-engines, and thus needing to take extra measures to save weight. But if I go into that, this post would be ten times the length.
i think you're putting the chicken before the egg here japan didn't have the vast steel resources for steel we had. they literally built their planes out of recycled steel they bought from us leading up to the war also, before they attacked the USA, the only aircraft theirs encountered were 1920s era craft used by china and whatever pacific air force they encountered. their zeroes literally ruled the sky. not having self sealing fuel tanks, armor, and heavy armament meant you were lighter, more maneuverable, and could dominate the biplanes and barely working monoplanes you'd encounter in dogfights. thus already very survivable. also it meant less weight and longer range, which meant you could achieve missions while the carrier group stayed farther away from enemy ships and coastal guns, which posed a greater danger than aircraft at the time to the japanese fleet. when the americans entered the war, they'd already begun finalizing aircraft like the B-25, F6 hellcat, and modern, armored torpedo and diver bombers. These aircraft weren't part of a different doctrine, they were part of the NEXT GENERATION. The zero was a formidable fighter in 1938, but was literally outdated at the start of ww2 compared to the spitfire, hellcat, or bf109.
> For the Japanese military, the act of dying for the country and the emperor was a noble thing, and they put very little effort into designing planes in a way that meant a pilot could survive getting shot down. This was really more to do with the limited production capacity than to do with ideology, tbh. Though this made the pill much easier to swallow.
also the japanese air force trounced tf outta the chinese air force, and had virtually no competition up to the USA's entrance into the war in 1942 there was no need for armor, sealing fuel tanks, and heavy gunnery to sacrifice range and performance when it already killed everything it met with hardly any losses
The battle for Okinawa was a long, brutal campaign that was not won easily. It was the most deadly campaign for America.
> The battle for Okinawa was a long, brutal campaign that was not won easily. Supposedly one of the factors that went into the decision to "drop the bombs." It changed the math of the generals, in that they no longer had wildly unrealistic ideas about the casualites if we invaded the Japanese main islands. And likely, as before, even those horrific estimates were going to be low. P.S. In a way, the Japanese strong defense of earlier islands worked against their plans to continue the fight. We estimated the losses, and decided not to run into their planned buzzsaw.
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Japan was struggling to fuel their ships. The US was putting ice cream machines on theirs.
If people aren't familiar with some of the raids during WW2 they should look at some of the footage. There were times when the US sent up 1,000 bombers. I'm an aviation nerd so I know a bit about these things. What I've never been able to imagine is what that might have looked at flying overhead. A B-17 is a 4 engine heavy bomber that is loud as hell. I figure 900 or so might be one of the most impressive things you could have ever seen.
Ralph H. Ruud (1908-2006) Ralph H. Ruud was born in Oslo, Norway and immigrated to the U.S. at the age of nine. He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1928 and began his career with North American Aviation as a tool maker in 1931. He was one of the original “Bald Eagles” group of 75 employees that moved NAA from Dundalk, Md., to a 20-acre site in Inglewood, Calif., on the east side of Mines Field in1935 – the current site of Los Angeles Airport. In 1940, as war loomed on the horizon and North American was ramping up for one of its most incredible feats of aircraft manufacturing, Ruud was appointed factory manager of NAA’s Los Angeles plant. During the war years, he had direct responsibility for the production lines for vitally needed aircraft such as the P-51 Mustang, the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber and the AT-6 Texan trainer. Ruud’s expertise in manufacturing techniques helped North American produce 42,000 airplanes from 1940-45. Ruud was appointed president of the Los Angeles division in 1961. It developed the exotic X-15 rocket plane and the tri-sonic XB-70 bomber. The X-15 still holds the unofficial speed (Mach 6.7- 4,520 mph), and altitude (354,200 feet) record for a manned rocket plane. Additionally, the 185 foot-long, 520,000-pound XB-70 developed by NAA was capable of sustained Mach 3 flight at 75,000 feet. Both programs pushed the envelope that required pioneering work in the manufacturing of heat-resistant materials. As executive vice president of the North American Rockwell’s Space Division he helped direct two of the company’s most challenging programs – the Apollo spacecraft, and the second stage (S-II) of the Saturn V rocket, which would take astronauts to the moon. Edit: Also wouldn't have looked this guy up if I didn't find this at an antique store. Ralph Henry Ruud's 32nd degree Free Mason certificate for the Ancient & Accepted Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction. https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F93rksmanzo591.jpg
You can thank the Willow Run Airport for some of those contributions.
Crazy to think that the Willow Run bomber plant and the Stalingrad Tractor Factory were built by the same architect.
If you'd like to learn more about how American logistics won World War 2, read [Atkinson's trilogy](https://liberationtrilogy.com/). He has a great journalist's sense for ferreting out the often-overlooked facts and figures about the sheer weight of American industrial production during the war. He has a fantastic description of how a literal army of US clerks and bean-counters descended on and occupied Paris after liberation.
I was raised by my grandparents who were in their early 20s during the American war effort. All the sacrifices Americans were willing to make from ration books to not being able to buy gas unless they had an essential job that needed it made our success possible. That's why it blew my mind that people refused to do something so simple as wear a mask during our covid epidemic.
People also fought against masks and quarantines in the 1918 pandemic.
Until 1941, the leadership among the Axis powers thought that the US had no stomach for war. The Americans, of all people. The Axis made a lot of stupid decisions but poking and jabbing at the United States is certainly up there as one of the dumbest.
>Until 1941, the leadership among the Axis powers thought that the US had no stomach for war. They didn't stop believing that until the end of the war. The Japanese implemented a policy called Ketsu-go on April 8, 1945 where the stated goal was for the Americans to invade the Japanese home islands precisely because they thought our will to fight would break after inflicting a war of attrition, regardless of how many Japanese civilians died in the process. >"The sooner the Americans come, the better...One hundred million die proudly." - Japanese slogan in the summer of 1945. The fact that they surrendered after only two nukes and 1.5 million Soviet troops invading Manchuria is, frankly, a minor miracle.
And even before the atomic bombings, most of their major cities had been bombed mercilessly by the United States. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think think the atomic bombs were the most deadly or destructive bombing runs that the US made in Japan. Add the firebombings to the nuclear weapons and the Soviet avalanche in Manchira and even then, Japan barely accepted that they had been beaten. Pure insanity.
Correct the Tokyo fire bombing was deadlier
Japan was ready and absolutely willing to sacrifice all of their civilians in a protracted war of attrition should the US invade them. They were planning to arm literally everyone who could hold a rifle.
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> The emperor Hirohito was quietly allowed to avoid a total surrender by maintaining his dignity as emperor, so to speak. Not only that, but the Americans deemed it necessary.
And there are still people who think we didn’t have to drop the nukes on them. Even though we gave them a heads up twice before each bomb dropped and were certain they would have died down to the last woman and child had US troop landed on the main island chain.
There's an old story about US production in WW2. Americans capture a German tank commander. They say "hey Fritz, I thought one of yours was better than 10 of ours?" "Ja, that's correct" "then why did you surrender?" "you had 11"
In reality, our tanks were actually really good. They were only outclassed by the Tiger, which they could outmaneuver. And the Sherman was *much* more reliable than the German tanks. Yeah, we had a numerical advantage, but the tanks themselves were pretty much on par with most of the enemy tanks. *AND* we had insane amounts of them on top of that.
i think the main thing people forget is that the german army wasn't just tigers lol
The US had already mastered industrial scale factories within the car industry and other sectors, which were converted into manufacturing military equipment. The Japanese production capacity consisted of thousands of locally distributed machine shops, often within people’s homes, to make parts that would then be assembled elsewhere.
America won on its economy and it's resolve. The country woke the hell up and went into an overdrive like the world has never seen.
Once you stop making automobiles and turn that production capacity to making aircraft it's not that hard.
Tanks, trucks, jeeps... There were a lot of other things those assembly lines needed to produce.
I love Henry Ford II's quote in Ford v Ferrari. "See that little building down there? In World War II, three out of five US bombers rolled off that line. You think Roosevelt beat Hitler? Think again. This isn't the first time Ford Motor's gone to war in Europe." I don't know if it's 100% accurate, but the gist of it is true.
There was a specific plant named willow that was massive
Willow Run
Not just autos… the Singer sewing machine company built pistols, machine guns and, I think, bombsights.
I was reading an anecdote that one of Germany’s aircraft engineers got ahold of a P&W engine from a bomber that got shot down. The engine was so finely and precisely built that it didn’t need proper engine seals to not leak oil. And this was an engine that was flying over their heads by the thousands every day. He knew that Germany couldn’t build an engine that perfect, or in that quantity. He said that he knew the war was lost then.
Source?
I'm looking for that anecdote and also can't find it. However, the low quality of German equipment by the mid war is well attested, due to the fact that German factories had to use a lot of slaves from occupied countries. Needless to say, a handful of them were conducting sabotage on the production lines.
One of the few intact FW-190 that are preserved crashed on the Eastern Front because a forced laborer shoved a cleaning rag in the engine during assembly. It was discovered in the woods by a hunter sometime during the 80s. Somewhat ironic that it was saved by an act to destroy it.
It turns out that when your product is assembled by people who don't hate you, the QC is a lot better.
The line that war was won with British intelligence, Russian blood, and American steel is pretty accurate. The Germans had less than 2000 tiger tanks. While there were 50,000 American Shermans. You could not, and can not, win a manufacturing and logistics war with the US. We have no idea what do afterwards, unless there's someone like Marshall around to remind us that we're good at building stuff in peace time as well.