One big lesson from Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany is that the Germans went to war prematurely. They had a potentially devastating and insurmountable technological lead in ballistic missiles (e.g., the V-2 rocket) and the first practical jet fighter aircraft. If the Germans had spent another four years perfecting and stockpiling these weapons before attacking neighbors they could probably have won World War II. (The author notes that Germany actually did plan to wait until the mid-1940s before fighting a Total War but that a stronger-than-expected response to the invasion of Poland forced an accelerated schedule of world domination.)
The American and British bomber war against Germany is portrayed as ineffective until roughly mid-1944 and then highly effective for the last year of the war. American military leaders worked under a flawed doctrine of sending unescorted bombers over Germany and thus did not develop a long-range fighter aircraft to go with the B-17s until near the end of the war. Once the P-51 Mustang (originally designed for the British) entered the war, the bombers had a much higher survival rate. Due to intelligence failures and misguided analysis, the Americans spent years trying to damage the German war industry with little effect. Only towards the end of the war did they figure out that almost everything could be crippled by targeting the railroads and canals, so as to prevent the transportation of coal, and the synthetic fuel industry, so as to prevent the Germans from using tanks and aircraft. Civilian planners had told the generals to bomb electricity plants and grid, but the generals ignored them, thus ignoring another way that the synthetic fuel industry could have been shut down.
With the benefit of hindsight, in other words, either side could easily have won World War II. But perhaps one can say that about nearly any war.
“Once the P-51 Mustang (originally a British design) ”
It seems more correct to say the P-51 was an American designed plane made originally for the British.
The famous saying is “Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics.” Ultimately, whoever has better logistics wins the war.
Once the US converted its vast manufacturing base from making millions of Oldsmobiles and toasters to making millions of tanks and bombers and bombs, the Germans were cooked.
Also, Hitler (by his own confession – see his famous recorded phone call with the Finnish general Mannerheim (the only recording of Hitler in non-ranting mode) ) misunderestimated the extent to which the entire Soviet economy had been devoted to war production even before the war started (right up until the last days of the Soviet Union, military production always had first claim on resources, even for dual use technology such as electronic chips, timekeeping devices, etc.).
The Germans had better weapons but the Allies had MORE weapons. Maybe one ME-262 can bring down 1 piston plane but can it bring down 10 at once? To this day, a BMW is a nicer car than a Ford, but Ford makes a LOT more cars than BMW.
Hitler tried to fight the war at first on a guns and butter basis and did not terminate production of civilian goods until late in the war. If anything the Allies did him a favor because while military production was moved literally underground (my father was a concentration camp prisoner working on digging an Me-262 factory into the side of a mountain https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/KZ-Au%C3%9Fenlager_Vaihingen ) the Allied bombers took out all the cuckoo clock factories and freed up their workforces to do military production.
reha – it was an American design but it wasn’t worth a damn at altitude until they started putting British (Rolls Royce) engines in them (or later license built copies of same) because the original American Allison engines lacked a 2 stage supercharger.
Ironically, the American (especially GE) work on turbosuperchargers (even though they were not very good for their original intended purpose) paved the way for American jet engine design. A jet engine is essentially a turbo-supercharger where you skip the piston engine in the middle and just burn the gas in an open flame.
Thank you, Jackie, for setting the score straight (and I couldn’t believe that Philip could be so gullible on account of reading a single aircraft-war-centric book). Logistics it is, and the size of the economy. I was going to post “take a look at the map,” but you beat me to it.
BTW. one other WWII factor that needs to be kept in mind is that Hitler essentially went to war in 1939 to assure future generations of (imaginary) willingly mass-breeding “Aryan” Germans their breadbasket on the rich fields of flatland Poland and Ukraïne. He was following what can only be called a XIXth century empire-building scenario (on adjoining European lands rather than on other continents, as with the British and French, etc. once-empires). That, and optimistic projections that total fertility rate would soar once the war was over, and Reconstruction begun. Fat chance.
If History is viewed as sequences in specific cultures that are less dependent on their rulers du jour, more on collective and cumulative interest, and morals of its subjects (just as, say, the history of Russia in the past 250+ years can only be described as a string of despotic regimes accepted by the population), then, in the case of Hitler’s goal of a Europe “unified” under German rule, he went to war for a “Lebensraum” mere 4 decades before the (post-war rebuilding) EEC started to pay off its farmers NOT to cultivate more crops; not to create bigger “butter mountains;” greater “wine lakes,” etc. So war logistics first and foremost, and then we’re back to the old “it’s the economy, stupid” (present company excepted).
The past is a different country, but it’s not clear to me why Hitler (and Tojo) thought that in order for Germans (and Japanese) to eat they had to OWN the wheatfields (rice paddies). I eat all the bread that I want even though I don’t own a single hectare of Ukrainian farmland. I do something productive (or at least what the market considers productive) and people send me this thing called “money” in exchange for my production and with that money I can buy all the Bauernbrot and wurst I can eat without having to commit even small scale genocide. This seems to work pretty well for modern Germany – one Mercedes S-class buys a whole Ukrainian village’s worth of wheat (or Kansas wheat or Argentine wheat, etc – there’s alway someone who will sell it to you). Why didn’t this occur to Herr Hitler?
If you buy the Suvorov stuff WWII started when it did because the Germans knew the Soviets would be invading and would be unstoppable soon.
With the benefit of hindsight, the US could have won Vietnam by not getting involved in the first place.
My opinion is that we was more than ready. Thankfully he was not a military leader. His army was supposed to attack Soviet Union in March 1941. His ally Mussolini though sidetracked him to Greece and Yugoslavia. The attack on Soviet Union did happen in June 1941, but instead of going directly to Moscow German army wasted time in the southern part of USSR, hunting for oil fields. In the end Russian winter caught his armies on route to Moscow.
Then his army was not prepared for the Russian winter because German soldiers were superhuman and they didn’t need to dress warmly for the winter. Conquering Russia would have given Hitler enough resources to win the war.
Also,this delay (from March to June) was important for Stalin, because Soviet spies informed him mid September, 1941 (3 months later instead of 6 months later) that Japan is not going to attack USSR, so all the Soviet divisions stationed in Siberia and Far East were moved to European front.
Two more things:
1. Messerschmitt Me 262 was ready since 1942 but Hitler wanted a bomber and not a jet fighter so it started to be produced only in April 1944 when it was too late to have an impact.
2. Very interesting that the authors of the book state that American and British bombing started to be effective mid 1944 and that was at a time when German defense resources were quite exhausted after the battles against Soviet Union drained the German resources. If you read Cornelius Ryan book about D-Day it will show you a picture not very rosy of the capabilities of German forces stationed in the Western Europe.