How the War Was Won

Re:How the War Was Won by helloworld11 on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @02:29AM (#33606308)

By late 1944, U.S war production was so absurdly huge that Hitler (admittedly, hardly a man known by that point for a realistic worldview or an open mind) was flatly unable to believe it when told that the best estimates of U.S military aircraft production were somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 planes of all types for the year.

Also, I strongly recommend a couple books here: First: "The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy" by Adam Tooze

Second (truly a unique book that looks at the world's biggest war with a focus entirely on how people in different parts of the fighting countries ate and avoided starvation) "The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food " by Lizzie Collingham.

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Re:How the War Was Won by nicbou on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @05:14AM (#33607352)

I second that first book recommendation. It made me feel like I was missing half of the picture for all of these years.

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Re:How the War Was Won by helloworld11 on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @08:30AM (#33622577)

If you liked the first book for that reason in particular, I truly recommend the second title I also mentioned (The Taste of War). Collingham shows a completely new side of the war with enormous detail that's livened up by many, many fascinating personal narratives from different people in different belligerent countries during WWII. I almost can't recommend the book enough to anyone who wants to dig into WWII history from entirely new angles.

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Re:How the War Was Won by yourapostasy on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @09:21AM (#33609460)

> ...U.S war production was so absurdly huge...

Even today common US citizens themselves cannot comprehend the scale involved. There are some interesting YouTube videos on the bonkers production efforts [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] that give some other angles of perceiving the scale. By 1944, fully 44% of the US GDP was devoted to wartime production, starting from an already-formidable economic base that many already recognized back in the 1930's despite the US' comparatively feeble industrial showing in WW1. Among the more famous leaders who recognized this massive industrial potential before WW2 even started were Yamamoto and Churchill.

Just as astonishing as the scale was the rapidity. The US military before WW2 was objectively not a top 10 rank by nearly any metric one cared to employ. This shifted practically overnight with substantive progress measured in months.

To really geek out over some of the critical numbers, check out this page [6].

Looking back, it gave me an intuitive grasp of just how much of the manufacturing sector the US bled out to the PRC, and even then, US manufacturing is still no slouch on the world stage.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfMrqOdrCidQ2gpuSIxW0...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncgQ33yu7Cc

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6at-eJfJOgI

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BExMOol11LA

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTtR1hqpnwU

[6] https://www.ww2-weapons.com/military-expenditures-strategic-...

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Re:How the War Was Won by helloworld11 on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @08:37AM (#33622658)

Thanks for all of these. Will be exploring each of them. Your mention of Churchill's grasp of how huge potential U.S power was reminded me of a supposed quote by the prime minister in which he said something like "So it turns out that we do win the war then", on the day that he learned the U.S was now formally entering on the allied side after the Pearl Harbor attack.

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