[tater]

Originally Posted by MaddogK

From what I understand logistics is an interchangeable term with supply, and tho USA was a unrivaled manufacturing machine at the time transport of all those materials 1000's of miles over open ocean kept the delivery numbers lower than than the production numbers. I would think the British had a better logistical system in place as the production was closer to the delivery location than the Americans, so a british unit could be on the front in days as opposed to weeks or months for the American unit.

US logistics and supply (the mechanism for moving men and materiel to the front) was unrivaled. No one was in the same league, not by a wide margin.

Now as R&D goes I feel the Germans were unrivaled at the time, true the Allies had the bomb earlier but I understand the Germans had started earlier developing the weapon and were closer to fielding it but the research wasn't a top priority for the Germans unlike the Allies. The Germans also didn't prioritize the ME 262 or the rocket programs like they should've, and I believe either one of those would've would've changed the outcome of the war if they were ready 6-18 months earlier.

One, the Germans were not even close to an atomic bomb. Not remotely close, and from captured records their weak research was going the wrong direction anyway.

I say that German R&D was in fact negative, not positive. The wasted resources experimenting instead of producing. Engineering is not just building stuff, it's building stuff efficiently, and in a cost-effective way. Having limited industrial capacity, then sending it running in 100 different directions is just dumb. In addition, like their tank, their jets, etc, were not ready for operational prime time in terms of keeping them flying (not to mention having fuel to fly them). The Germans in fact had large numbers of Me262s constructed, but they never managed to fly more than a small number of sorties per day—a tiny fraction of the number of planes theoretically available.

As far as the Soviets winning the Eastern front single-handedly I'd have to point out 1 important factor that hasn't been mentioned yet- weather. The German army was crippled by the Russian winter. All those magnificent German open field tanks got bogged down in the soft Russian mud and broke down or froze. The much lighter and nimbler T-34 remained mobile and made short work of the heavier german armour and disrupted the German supply lines to the front leaving the troops to starve and freeze. The Germans made the same mistake in Europe, those open field tanks were easy targets once they were trapped in the narrow roads and hills of France. The Germans has a much better tank program than anyone in the war but they were too specialized and proved vulnerable once out of their element. It would be a disservice to the russians to say the weather saved their bacon, but TBH if the winter wasn't as harsh as it was the Germans would've destroyed the Soviets on the eastern front with ease.

Yeah, General Winter surely played a role.

In addition, they won at great cost. Even in victory their K/D vs the Germans was not good. The sheer death toll on the part of the CCCP is often used to show they did the heavy lifting, but instead to me it shows that they won in spite of being a bad force that cared nothing for their own troops. They fought more germans in the East, but they lost more for each German they killed/captured by a wide margin than the US and UK did in the west.

Lend-lease was not the majority of Russian arms, but it played a critical role that cannot be ignored. Note also that in the absence of US aid to the CCCP, they might have been forced to move even more troops from the far east. This, combined with increased German victory (many early battles where the CCCP held back or slowed down German advances were very near-run things, after all) might have encouraged the Japanese to move (they were held back due to fear of another drubbing at the hands of the Soviets).