Wednesday Stalin Blogging

It turns out that Megan and I aren't the only Atlantic folks who've taken note of Geoffrey Robert's Stalin’s Wars. Ben Schwartz took it up in the course of a review essay in the May issue, where he makes the very good point that a kind of Allied egomania and preference for neat morality tales leads conventional English language histories to wildly understate the significance of the Eastern Front:

For four years, more than 400 Red Army and German divisions clashed in an unrelenting series of military operations over a front extending more than 1,000 miles. (At its most intense, the war in the West was fought between 15 Allied and 15 Wehr‑ macht divisions.) Eighty-eight percent of the German military dead fell there; in July 1943, in the decisive battle of the war, the Soviets permanently broke the Wehrmacht’s capacity for large-scale attack at Kursk, “the one name,” Davies properly asserts, “which all historians of the Second World War should remember.”

All quite right. Schwartz concludes:

To be sure, part of Stalin’s accomplishment lay in his allowing his most talented subordinates to do their job, an attribute of all great warlords. From late 1942 on, he encouraged greater initiative and flexibility within the high command, and he presided over a military organization that fostered increased operational and tactical dynamism and innovation. But the new accounts—which even draw on transcripts of telephone and telegraphic conversations with his front-line generals—all go further than that, and put Stalin at the center of the Soviets’ awesome military achievement. Davies’s conclusion, that the victory was Stalin’s, would seem inarguable. Roberts’s unpalatable one, which goes one step further, will confound those who like their history neat:

To make so many mistakes and to rise from the depths of such defeat to go on to win the greatest military victory in history was a triumph beyond compare … Stalin … saved the world for democracy.

I kind of like this ironic idea, but I imagine one could wriggle out of it. To say that Stalin "saved the world for democracy" seems to imply that had the Red Army not performed as well as it did in 1943 and '44, that the Allies, too might have perished. But in any counterfactual of the war in Europe, the crucial period is the summer of 1945, when the United States perfected the art of the nuclear bomb. A Nazi triumph at Kursk wouldn't have allowed the Germans to invade the British isles in time to stop the United States from commencing the nuclear destruction of German cities. Now, obviously, the world would have been a very different place in this scenario, but democracy still lives even without Stalin.

Comments

Robert Heinlein's amazing 1940 short story "Solution Unsatisfactory" suggested that WWII would end in 1945 with us dropping atomic weapons on Berlin.

Posted by Steve Sailer | September 5, 2007 2:39 PM

While I recognize the importance that the nuclear bomb might have played in a continuing European campaign, I think you're just about dead wrong. The Soviets did, in fact, save civilization at Stalingrad. If they don't hold out in the face of such enormous casualties, Hitler is fighting a one-front war. Yes, the United States wasn't about to be defeated at any time, really, and I suppose you may be right that the British would have been able to hold out, with their air superiority. But what if the Germans had the ability to fortify France and Italy with the men and resources that they devoted to fighting the Russian flank? I think the outcome may have been that the US would have had to use the nuclear bombs in order to win the European campaign, which to me is almost as bad as losing. A world where significant parts of Europe had been attacked with nuclear weapons would have been a massively different one. And it certainly wouldn't have endeared Western Europeans to America.

Posted by Freddie | September 5, 2007 2:40 PM

"To be sure, part of Stalin’s accomplishment lay in his allowing his most talented subordinates to do their job, an attribute of all great warlords."

I'm not much of a historian, but isn't this totally false? Didn't Stalin execute/fire lots of generals who gave sound policy advice that didn't mesh with his agenda or who weren't personally loyal to Stalin? Or had he stopped doing that by the '40s?

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | September 5, 2007 2:40 PM

For four years, more than 400 Red Army and German divisions clashed in an unrelenting series of military operations over a front extending more than 1,000 miles. (At its most intense, the war in the West was fought between 15 Allied and 15 Wehr‑ macht divisions.)

This is confusing--does he mean that there were only 15 Allied and 15 German divisions fighting each other pre-Normandy? In that case, I guess it might be correct, but it certainly isn't correct post-Normandy; I thought there were something like 120 divisions in the Allied invasion force. On the other hand, the first "for four years" phrase in that paragraph must be referring to the last 4 years of the war, i.e. June 1941-May 1945, since the Germans didn't invade the USSR until June of '41, and that timespan obviously includes Normandy and its aftermath. So it seems badly worded one way or the other.

Posted by Haggai | September 5, 2007 2:42 PM

Stalin, in fact, thoroughly purged the officer corps in the late 30's. One could, I suppose, argue that he did this to allow new talent to rise up and fill the gaps. Cruel but necessary? More likely just nuts-- destroying the USSR's military while faced by a clear danger from Germany.

One could argue that Stalin showed a level of sanity, courage and judgment for two years that hadn't been visible for the previous 25 and then went back to being a psychopath for the following 10. But it seems unlikely.

It seems to me more plausible to say that both Hitler and Stalin overreached-- the crazier one overreached more, and lost.

Posted by MattF | September 5, 2007 2:54 PM

A Nazi triumph at Kursk wouldn't have allowed the Germans to invade the British isles in time to stop the United States from commencing the nuclear destruction of German cities.

Interesting. Even with a German invasion of Britain, the US could have A-bombed Germany from carriers.

But it would very likely have taken far more than the two atomic bombs the US had in summer 1945 to defeat a Germany which had conquered Russia. As we know, the decimation of his cities was no deterrent to Hitler's continuing the fight. The US would have had to crank out a bunch more bombs to crush the Reich.

But yeah, democracy lives on even without the Soviet victory at Kursk. It just has to fight much, much dirtier and probably render much of Europe uninhabitable. So thanks, Red Army.

Posted by Ryan | September 5, 2007 2:56 PM

Didn't Stalin execute/fire lots of generals who gave sound policy advice that didn't mesh with his agenda or who weren't personally loyal to Stalin? Or had he stopped doing that by the '40s?

Basically, yes, he reversed himself once the consequences of the purge became clear, brought in the best people, and started kicking ass.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | September 5, 2007 3:08 PM

wildly understate the significance of the Eastern Front

Yawn. The Understated Eastern Front is so well-known by now as not to be terribly understated any more. I can believe that a Harvard education leaves one capable of being surprised by the news, however.

As for Kursk, people are kidding themselves. What was the German strategic aim at Kursk? The Germans hardly knew themselves. They were vaguely trying for yet another Decisive Battle that would, somehow, cripple the Russian army for good. That wasn't in the cards in 1943.

Had the Soviets failed to see Kursk coming and had their line broken, they would've fallen back a lot, the Germans would've gotten more territory ... strained their logistics ... run into the recovered Russians ... and achieved, what?

After 1941, Germany had no chance of conquering Russia, or even forcing a military resolution. (1941 itself was dicey, but I'll allow they might have pulled it out, though I suspect otherwise.)

Posted by Anderson | September 5, 2007 3:08 PM

Stalin, in fact, thoroughly purged the officer corps in the late 30's. One could, I suppose, argue that he did this to allow new talent to rise up and fill the gaps. Cruel but necessary? More likely just nuts -- destroying the USSR's military while faced by a clear danger from Germany.

David Glantz has offerred the analysis that the officer purges -- while certainly diminishing the Red Army's military effectiveness -- had the ultimately more important effect of ensuring the Red Army's loyalty to Stalin, who had personal experience of generals switching sides, both in 1917 against the Germans and later in the Russian Civil War. As bad as the encirclement defeats of 1941 were, at least none of the Red Army leadership staged a coup or tried to negotiate a separate peace with the Wehrmacht.

Posted by Eric Scharf | September 5, 2007 3:13 PM

Nicholas,

Stalin was pragmatic enough to stop purging the generals once it became apparent that a war with Germany might be in the offing. And no, he didn't focus on purging only incompetents.

The Russians got a nasty wake up call in their preliminary bout with the Finns, the so-called Winter War of 1939, in which the Soviet Union lost 126,000 dead and over 240,000 wounded (if you can call that a preliminary) to take about 10% of Finnish territory. This is part of what led Hitler to overreach in his invasion plan -- he simply thought the Red Army couldn't fight.

Once Hitler was unable to secure a quick victory on the Russian Front and the US intervened, I don't think there was a way for Germany to prevail. Even a victory at Stalingrad wouldn't have put the Russians away for good and the US war machine was just hitting its full stride in 1944-45. I don't think using atomic weapons would have been necessary to win, although they certainly would have been used.

Posted by Klein's Tiny Left Nut | September 5, 2007 3:15 PM

IIRC, Speer in his memoirs said that if the British had managed to quickly take out five or six more cities in the same manner after their spectacular destruction of Hamburg, Germany would probably have collapsed. So I don't know that it would have required all that many atomic bombs to take the Nazis down. It's not just the damage; it's the shock.

Posted by sunsin | September 5, 2007 3:15 PM

A world where Stalin loses and Hitler can consolidate his gains in Western Europe is also one where Hitler has enough extra years to build nuclear weapons of his own. If the US can drop them from aircraft carriers, Hitler can launch them on V2s over the Channel, and at the US from submarines off the Eastern Seaboard. Even if he doesn't nuke London or New York, it's still the end of the convoy system, Britain's lifeline, and those flimsy American aircraft carriers.

Posted by EthanS | September 5, 2007 3:16 PM

I can believe that a Harvard education leaves one capable of being surprised by the news

Speaking of things that everyone should have figured out long before now: The 'You went to Harvard but you're teh stupid, ha ha!' line is not even close to being a clever or original put-down.

Posted by Ryan | September 5, 2007 3:20 PM

Stalin refused to allow overwhelmed soviet commanders to fall back and was personally responsbile for the massive early numbers of dead-wounded-captured. Before THAT he shot the majority of the officer corps insuring that, when the Germans attacked, his units were lead by inexperienced men promoted over the corpses of their predecessors.

I'm reminded of JFC Fullers description of Julius Cesaer - something along the lines of "In the final analysis, his best performances as a commander always involved getting himself out of a bad spot that he had, through his previous actions, gotten himself into".

Posted by r4d20 | September 5, 2007 3:20 PM

Wasn't the point of Roosevelt's lend/lease program to keep Stalin's Russia fighting Germany to buy time for the US to arrive in force on the Western and Southern fronts.

If I remember correctly, Russian casualties were around 20 million. Ours were significantly less as a result. I always thought we should do something to express our gratitude but the hysteria over the Red Menace precluded that I guess.

Posted by Emma Zahn | September 5, 2007 3:21 PM

The extension of Lend/Lease to the Soviets was one in a series of prescient moves by FDR, who as I argued below, was the real military genius of WWII.

Posted by Klein's Tiny Left Nut | September 5, 2007 3:28 PM

A couple of points -- Not only, as commentators have pointed out, is the "15 divisions in the West" idea seriously wrong (there were about that many allied divisions in Italy), but there are divisions and there are divisions. An American infantry division ca. 1944 was at least twice as powerful as a German or Soviet non-mechanized division, plus its transport was motor vehicles, not horses.

I sympathize with those who complain that the Eastern Front is underestimated, but they need to be careful about the statistics they use. My understanding is that the single most significant thing the Red Army got from the US was a large supply of small radios, which enabled them to coordinate small unit tactics far better than they had previously been able to.

And what is this with nucear bombs dropped on Germany from aircraft carriers -- not only could a 20,000 ton WWII aircraft carrier not have come close to handling a nuclear bomb carrying aircraft, the bigger ones (FDR, Midway) that came along in 1945-6 couldn't have either -- in fact, the big interservice flareup in 1949 was largely over whether the US Navy could build a hypothetical supercarrier (I think called the America or the United States) that could carry a hypothetical nuclear bomber -- and in not event would that stuff have been operational before the mid-50's.

Not to worry, since a B29 or B36 could have dropped nuclear bombs on Germany from quite a long distance. The B36 maybe could have flown all the way from the US?

Posted by Gene O'Grady | September 5, 2007 3:30 PM

The question is kind of, at what point would the US and Britain have decided to reach an accommodation with Hitler? Would Hitler really not have settled for installing a Vichy-style client regime in Moscow and locking down Fortress Europa?

Still, I find the whole thing tenuous. Germany was trying to conquer too many different countries of nearly its own size or much larger, all of them with economies of comparable development; and then it had the US thrown into the mix. The project just didn't make sense. I still can't really imagine how Germany and Japan win that war, fought at the total-victory level they aspired to.

Posted by brooksfoe | September 5, 2007 3:35 PM

My understanding is that the single most significant thing the Red Army got from the US was a large supply of small radios, which enabled them to coordinate small unit tactics far better than they had previously been able to.

One book I read (don't remember which one) assigned a lot of significance to the more than 15 million pairs of boots that the U.S. supplied to the Soviets...although I guess radios were kind of important too.

Posted by Haggai | September 5, 2007 3:37 PM

There's nothing a bunch of guys like more than kicking around alternate history WWII scenarios.

Posted by Steve Sailer | September 5, 2007 3:40 PM

The 'You went to Harvard but you're teh stupid, ha ha!' line is not even close to being a clever or original put-down

I think most people who went to Harvard are quite amenable to the fact that, while there are a large number of ridiculously brilliant people there, and the overall percentage of the very intelligent at Harvard is quite high, there are indeed some seriously stupid people. That's not a knock, it's just the nature of the college admissions process which, shhhhhh, has little to do with merit.

The dumb thing for a Harvard person to say would be "He went to Harvard, you went to State U, therefore he must be smarter than you." But I've met quite a few people who went to Harvard (and quite a few more at Yale) and I don't know that I've encountered any who have that opinion.

Posted by Freddie | September 5, 2007 3:44 PM

And no, he didn't focus on purging only incompetents.

Unless you define "incompetent" as "not competent enough to avoid Stalins notice".

Court of the Red Tzar has a lot of previously unreleased info including some personal correspondence of Stalin and his top aides. It fills int the picture of "who was Stalin" quite a bit.

Interestingly, his daughter lives currently lives, relatively anonymously, in the USA - I think the midwest somewhere. Can you imagine finding out that the old lady next door was Stalins daughter?

Posted by r4d20 | September 5, 2007 3:44 PM

There's nothing a bunch of guys like more than kicking around alternate history WWII scenarios.

Who doesn't like a good game of "Risk"?

Posted by Freddie | September 5, 2007 3:46 PM

The extension of Lend/Lease to the Soviets was one in a series of prescient moves by FDR, who as I argued below, was the real military genius of WWII.

The Germans won at tactics, the Russians won at strategy, the Americans won at logistics. And the Japanese just lost.

Posted by Senescent | September 5, 2007 3:53 PM

Stalin was considering suing for peace after the initial German invasion, but was talked out of it by the Bulgarian ambassador, according to Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege 1942-1943:

"At half past five -- two hours after the assault began on the western frontiers -- Schulenburg had delivered Nazi Germany's declaration of war to Molotov. According to one person present, the old ambassador had spoken with angry tears in his eyes, adding personally he thought Hitler's decision was madness. Molotov had then hurried to Stalin's office, where the Politburo was assembled. Stalin, on hearing the news, apparently sank into his char and said nothing. His succession of obsessive miscalculations offered much material for bitter reflection. The leader most famed for his ruthless trickery had fallen into a trap which was largely of his own making.

The news from the front was so catastrophic over the next few days that Stalin, whose bullying nature contained a strong streak of cowardice, summoned Beria and Molotov for a secret discussion. Should they make peace with Hitler, whatever the price and humiliation, just like the Brest-Litovsk deal in 1918? They could give up most of the Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic States. The Bulgarian ambassador, Ivan Stamenov, was summoned to the Kremlin. Molotov asked him if he would act as intermediary, but to their astonishment he refused. 'Even if you retreat to the Urals,' he replied, 'you'll still win in the end'."

Posted by Fred | September 5, 2007 4:02 PM

Re: Purge -- I haven't heard anyone bring up the side-switching before, but I get the impression from Glantz and other writers that the Soviets would have had the best war-fighting doctrine from the get-go if the officers hadn't been purged. When some of the officers were brought back from Siberia, that led to the 'deep operations' which helped beat the Germans back.

Re: Lend Lease -- while not discounting radios and boots, the biggest thing was probably the trucks. Studebakers were 1000% better than anything the Soviets made at home, and the Red Army was fully motorized by the end of the war, not counting a few Cossaks riding around here and there. They also got tanks and airplanes, but they liked cranking out their own stuff in the Urals.

Re: Kursk -- it was a 'last-gasp' offensive by the Germans with no clear strategic aims. The Germans feared the entrance of the Western Allies so much that some SS tanks units were pulled from the last phases of the Kursk battle to respond to the Sicily invasion.

Would the Soviets have survived without US & UK help? Probably, because they didn't get much help before their darkest hour. Ultimately, beating the Germans was a team effort, with the Soviets doing a larger part.

Posted by American Citizen | September 5, 2007 4:02 PM

I still can't really imagine how Germany and Japan win that war, fought at the total-victory level they aspired to.

Their notion was always that while their enemies might have more troops and weapons, they were going to win due to their superior willpower. The "Triumph of the Will"--kinda like the plan for Iraq . . .

Posted by rea | September 5, 2007 4:05 PM

And what is this with nucear bombs dropped on Germany from aircraft carriers

I'll defer to Gene on this -- as I typed it, I thought, 'Was that actually the case in the '40s?', but unwisely let it stand without checking.

As for this from Freddie:

I think most people who went to Harvard are quite amenable to the fact that ... there are indeed some seriously stupid people.

Exactly. That's why 'You went to Harvard, but you're dumb! Ha!' doesn't work as a put-down to an alum. What Anderson thinks is some clever irony is in fact an utterly banal observation to anyone who went there.

Posted by Ryan | September 5, 2007 4:16 PM

What Anderson said. Kursk just accelerated Germany's defeat, they had no real chance of victory after December 1941 when they failed to take Moscow and the US entered the war.

Posted by James B. Shearer | September 5, 2007 4:19 PM

"but democracy still lives even without Stalin."

What? Who says we even make it to 1945 without Germany having ended the war on its terms already in 1942 (a soviet defeat in early 42 a given).

Posted by Jfd | September 5, 2007 4:34 PM

"But in any counterfactual of the war in Europe, the crucial period is the summer of 1945, when the United States perfected the art of the nuclear bomb. A Nazi triumph at Kursk wouldn't have allowed the Germans to invade the British isles in time to stop the United States from commencing the nuclear destruction of German cities."

Yes, but previous events could have derailed that as well.

Had Hitler provided more support - i.e., tanks, fuel and men - to Rommel in North Africa, as Rommel requested, Rommel could have defeated the British decisively there before the Americans intervened, rolled through Turkey and seized the Caucasus oil fields.

And THAT would have given the Germans the oil reserves they needed to fuel their tanks - and more importantly, the 600 jet fighters they had sitting on the runways with no jet fuel near the end of the war.

Had those jets been able to fly, Germany would have cleaned house of Allied air superiority, and that - along with operations like the Bulge but with adequate fuel for the armor - might have prolonged the war considerably. After all, if you can't get a plane over Berlin without it being shot down, nuclear bombs would have been worthless.

It would have come down to how long it would take for the Allies to duplicate the German jet technology. Eventually, of course, it would have happened and then nuclear weapons would have been feasible again.

But once the Germans KNEW nuclear weapons were feasible, how long would it take for them to steal or develop the technology themselves?

Not to mention that once Hiroshima occurred, if a similar threat were perceived by the Germans to Berlin, German HQ would have relocated to the redoubts built inside mountains in Germany and Austria - a much tougher target to crack since precision bombing and laser-guided bombs didn't exist.

And of course, had Hitler not been influenced to go for a nuclear engine instead of a nuclear bomb, Germany might have had the bomb - and delivery systems like the V2 - long before the Allies.

"What-if" is fun but not really relevant.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | September 5, 2007 6:38 PM

Playing with counterfactuals is always fun........in a geeky kind of way. But I guess one counterfactual is whether Stalin himself played much of a positive role as opposed to other potential GenSecs (General Secretaries of the Communist Party).

Since the eternal Other is Trotsky, it's difficult to make the case that the Soviet Union would have performed worse under Trotsky than under Stalin - Trotsky had a much superior military mind than Stalin did. Trotsky was one of the best military leaders in the early twentieth century, and Stalin had a particularly mediocre (even arguably poor) record. Many early Bolsheviks proved to be far better military commanders than Stalin was, at least in the wars in 1917-1923.

I don't think it's impossible that some other conterfactual GenSec besides Stalin would have done better against the Germans earlier, which would have led to the Soviet Union's conquering even more territory (a positive thing if you're a GenSec of the USSR) and also possibly making North Africa and Italy easier for the Brits and Americans.

Posted by burritoboy | September 5, 2007 6:41 PM

"What? Who says we even make it to 1945 without Germany having ended the war on its terms already in 1942 (a soviet defeat in early 42 a given)."

We'll make it to 1945 as long as the UK holds until then. Will the UK hold from 1942 to 1944? Well, the Americans will likely focus on making sure that the UK holds instead of focusing on Overlord, North Africa and Italy. There's enough American troops even in early 1942 to send 200,000+ Americans to the UK (though they'll be not really well-equipped or organized), and could be sending a lot more (perhaps as many as 5 times more) as 1942 progressed.

Germany was certainly going to turn around and reattempt to take the British Isles, but they probably wouldn't have been ready to do it at the earliest until the very end of 1942 - and most likely summer 1943, by which time the Americans could have had 2-3 million or more troops there.

Posted by burritoboy | September 5, 2007 7:08 PM

Re Richard Steven Hack

1. Mr. Hack is obviously unfamiliar with the German nuclear program, as he is about much else. As detailed in a book by Sir Peter Medawars' widow, the reason the German nuclear program was put on the back burner was because of an erroneous calculation by Werner Heisenberg relative to the amount of U235 it would take to generate a chain reaction. He calculated that it would require 100 kilograms. Since it would have taken the Germans 30 years to manufacture that amount of U235, they concluded that it was not feasible as the war would be over long before 30 years had passed. On the other hand, two men from Mr. Hacks' favorite ethnic group, Leo Szilard and Otto Frisch, both refugees from Nazi Germany, correctly calculated that it would take ~1 kilogram (the actual number is classified but this is probably pretty close) which could be produced in fairly short order.

2. Mr. Hack is greatly overrating the effectiveness of the Messerschmitt 262 fighter. Even before the German air force ran short of fuel, which mostly affected training exercises, the allied air command had developed methods for coping with it.

3. Mr. Hack assumes that the nuclear bomb would have been used against Japan first. This assumption is piffle. There is no question that it would have been used first against Germany. Although in August, 1945 the US had only 3 bombs available, the discovery of Plutonium which could be more efficiently manufactured then U235, led to the US having more then a dozen by December, 1945.

4. Mr. Hacks' assumption that Germany could have developed nuclear weapons in short order, after discovering that the US had them, is completely ridiculous. It would have taken them at least as long as it took the US to develop them and by that time, Germany would have ceased to exist.

Posted by SLC | September 5, 2007 7:10 PM

Given SLC's obsession with me, most of his comments are to be expected.

While it may be true that the Germans overestimated the amount of U235 needed for a weapon, there is no doubt that the German interest in a nuclear engine exceeded their interest in a bomb. Had somebody suggested to Hitler that such a bomb would be useful for the "Final Solution", that might have changed. Fortunately, no one did.

As for the so-called "miscalculation", Wikipedia says this:

"Controversy around Nazi development of nuclear weapons places huge reliance upon Heisenberg's inability to identify the average cross section of neutron release in a chain reaction. At the presentation given by Harteck to Nazi leaders in 1942, however, it was correctly identified that one only needed a uranium warhead '"the size of a pineapple.'"

However, it also states: "The German government never did finance a full crash program to develop weapons, as they estimated it could not be completed in time for use in the war, thus the German program was much more limited in capacity and ability when compared to the eventual size and priority of the Manhattan Project."

So part of SLC's comment may be true, due to the limited supplies of U235 - NOT a miscalculation as to the amount of U235 needed.

A possibly related story, which pertains both to the amount of fissionable material needed and also to the speed with which the German scientists could have reacted to the US weapons technology is also revealed:

"After the war, ten German scientists: Erich Bagge, Kurt Diebner, Walther Gerlach, Paul Harteck, Horst Korsching, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Karl Wirtz, Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn (who had co-discovered nuclear fission), and Max von Laue (an ardent anti-Nazi), were taken captive by Allied forces and put under secret watch at Farm Hall, England, as part of Operation Epsilon. Their conversations were recorded as Allied analysts attempted to discover the extent of German knowledge about nuclear weapons. The results were inconclusive, but they allowed them to hear the results of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, which sent Hahn into a near-suicidal despair. By the next morning, Heisenberg claimed to have worked out exactly how the American atomic bomb must have worked, judging from reports of the damage and explosive size, and gave a lecture to the rest of the captive scientists on the effort.

While it is clear that Heisenberg had a firm understanding of the principles involved, he, either consciously or erroneously, greatly overestimated the amount of fissionable material required by several orders of magnitude."

The Wikipedia article is well worth reading to establish that had the Germans put as much effort into the program as the United States did, had the Allies not had spies within the projects enabling them to target the facilities, and had the Germans had enough uranium sources, they might well have had a bomb before the US. Not only that, there are some controversial reports that in fact they may have - and even tested one, although whether it was a "real" fission device or merely a "dirty bomb" as we call them today is not known!

And I'd really like to know what methods the Brits had for dealing with a jet whose top speed was far greater than any aircraft in the theater.

Wikipedia has this to say on the German jet program:

"During March [1945], Me 262 fighter units were thus able, for the first time, to deliver large scale attacks on Allied bomber formations. On 18 March 1945, 37 Me 262s of JG7 intercepted a force of 1,221 bombers and 632 escorting fighters. They managed to shoot down 12 bombers and one fighter for the loss of three Me 262s. Although a four-to-one ratio was exactly what the Luftwaffe would have needed to make an impact on the war, the absolute scale of their success was minor as it represented only one per cent of the attacking force. In 1943 and early 1944, the USAAF had been able to keep up offensive operations though enduring loss ratios of 5% and more, and the few available Me 262s could not inflict sufficient magnitude of losses."

"Eventually new combat tactics were developed to counter the allied bombers' defenses. Me 262s equipped with large numbers of R4M rockets would approach from the side of a bomber formation where their silhouettes were widest and, while still out of range of the .50 caliber guns, fire a salvo of these explosive rockets. The explosive power of only one or two of these rockets was capable of downing even the famously rugged B-17. While this tactic came too late to have a real effect on the war, it was nonetheless effective. This method of combating bombers became the standard until the invention and mass deployment of the guided missile. Some nicknamed this tactic the "Luftwaffe's Wolf Pack" as the fighters would often make runs in groups of two or three, fire their rockets, then return to base.

On 1 September 1944, USAAF General Carl Spaatz expressed the fear that if greater numbers of German jets appeared, they could inflict losses to the USAAF bombers heavy enough to cause cancellation of the Allied daylight bombing offensive.

[NOTE: Exactly as I said - if you can't get a nuclear bomb over Berlin without getting shot down, they're worthless.]

Counter-jet tactics

Tactics against the Me 262 developed quickly to find ways of defeating it despite its great speed advantage. Allied bomber escort fighters would fly high above the bombers— diving from this height gave them extra speed thus reducing the speed advantage of the Me 262. The Me 262 was less maneuverable than the P-51 and trained Allied pilots could catch up to a turning Me 262; but the only reliable way of dealing with the jets was to attack them in the takeoff and landing phase of their flight, and on the ground...

[In other words, no, the tactics were inadequate.]

In the end, slightly over 1,400 Me 262s of all versions were produced. Due to fuel shortages, pilot shortages, and the lack of many airfields that could support the Me 262 (concrete runways were recommended as the jet engines would melt tar runways), as few as 200 Me 262s made it to combat units."

Note: DUE TO FUEL SHORTAGES...exactly as I said.

Whereas, the reason the jets were not in serice earlier is mainly due to the difficulty in producing the engines, according to the Wikipedia article.

I did not assume the nuclear bomb would be used against Japan first. I merely note that it WAS. Obviously had it been used against Berlin first - assuming the German jets were not available - clearly the war would have been over.

Also, once a technology has been developed, it is easier for an enemy to develop it - especially if you have spies who can steal the research. The Germans would likely have developed the nuclear bomb in LESS time than the US did, IF they had put the necessary resources into it. Whether they would have done so before the US could effectively use the bomb against Germany is unknown.

Also, they could have learned about the bomb via espionage before it was used anywhere. This alone might have convinced them to move Hitler and HQ to the safety of their mountain redoubts - assuming their intelligence could have convinced the senior leaders that such a powerful weapon actually existed in reality.

So much for SLC's "history lessons."

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | September 5, 2007 11:36 PM

developed methods for coping with the jet fighters? what are you basing this on?

Posted by nathan | September 6, 2007 12:28 AM

"developed methods for coping with the jet fighters? what are you basing this on?"

In his autobiography, Chuck Yeager described shooting down a German jet fighter or two. If memory serves, he hit them when they were taking off, before they got anywhere close to full speed.

Posted by Fred | September 6, 2007 2:08 AM

The comments above about a defeat of the USSR seem to seriously underestimate the size of the place. (The collapse of the Soviet Union calved off two countries larger than Germany plus the eighth-largest country in the world, and still left Russia the largest country in the world and nearly double the size of the next-largest.) Even if Moscow and Leningrad had fallen in '41 or early '42, significant amounts of Soviet industry had already been moved back behind the Urals. I think that Yekaterinburg would have been the provisional capital, a city nearly as distant from Moscow as Moscow is from Berlin.

Once Barbarossa commences, unless the Soviet leadership surrenders *and* the German occupation of the conquered territory is competent, Napoleon's fate is the best that the German leadership can hope for.

Posted by Doug | September 6, 2007 5:37 AM

hitting fighters "as they take off" is transparently not a viable strategy

as to the ussr, if moscow had fallen in 1941, i think its likely or at least fairly plausible that the soviet structure would have come apart

stalin, at heart, was an unstable coward -- could the ussr have survived a stalin suicide at that juncture?

Posted by Nathan | September 6, 2007 9:56 AM

Re Richard Steven Hack

1. In response to fascist cocksucker Mr. Hack, I would direct interested readers to Ms. Medawars' book which details how Hitlers antisemitism backfired on him because of the huge number of nuclear scientists who fled Germany and the neighboring countries (just to mention a few names, Szilard, Wigner, Teller, Frisch, Fermi, Pauli, etc). In that book, the entire issue of Heisenbergs' miscalculation is detailed and I would consider her rendition far more reliable then Wikipedias'. However, Mr. Hack is certainly correct that if Heisenberg had correctly calculated the quantity of U235 required, and Germany had launched an effort comparable to the Manhattan project, they probably would have developed a nuclear bomb before the US did as, at the time, they were clearly ahead in nuclear technology. Unfortunately, they would have had a slight problem in that they had no bomber capable of delivering such a bomb. It should be remembered that the B29 that carried the Hiroshima bomb barely got off the runway; the B29 war a far superior bomber to anything the Germans had. In fact, one of Hitlers many strategic errors was failure to develop heavy 4 engine bombers which led to the failure of operation Sealioe because the 2 engine medium bombers he had carried inadequate bomb loads.

2. Mr. Hack claims that German spies could have infiltrated the Manhattan project and used information gathered therein to hasten development of a nuclear weapon capability. Obviously, Mr. Hack is unaware of the incompetence of the Abwehr in their spying activities, in part due to the the double game being played by its head, Admiral Canaris who was busy undermining Hitler whenever the opportunity arose (e.g. his trip to Spain in 1943 when he convinced Franco not to allow German troops to pass through Spain and attack Gibraltar). Seeing as how the German scientists hadn't a clue as to the US progress in nuclear developments and as Mr. Hack correctly describes, their incredulity at being informed of the attack on Hiroshima, totally disposes of the notion of making progress by spying.

3. In assessing the threat posed by the Messerschmidt 262 to allied bombers, it should be pointed out that the most advanced bomber, the B29 was never used in Europe. Information as to how the Germans planes fared against B17s and B24s doesn't help us much in trying to determine how they would have fared against B29s.

In summary, it is certainly possible to make a case that Germany could have won WW2 if they had not made any of the mistakes which have been documented. The trouble is that the other side also made mistakes (e.g. Stalins' refusal to believe British information that the German Army was about to attack in June, 1941, information supplied by Ultra intercepts). Given the disparity in force levels, if both sides had made no mistakes, the Germans would still have lost.

Just as an example of some of the strategic mistakes made by Germany

1. Construction of the battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz at the expense of Uboat construction.

2. Failure to develop a heavy 4 engine bomber.

3. Failure to employ snorkel equipped Uboats in time to win the Battle of the Atlantic.

4. Concentration on development of V1 and V2 rockets at the expense of development of jet engine technology.

5. Development and production of the Tiger and King Tiger tanks at the expense of the Panther tank when diesel engine technology was insufficient to adequately power them (the diesel engine of the 70 ton King Tiger tank put out 700 horsepower; the gas turbine engine of the 70 ton A2 Abrams tank puts out 1800 horsepower).

The bottom line is that for all of Germanys' development of advanced weapon systems, the deployment was too little and too late.

Posted by SLC | September 6, 2007 10:09 AM

The Allies invaded Normandy with 39 divisions. The Germans had 58 divisions in France, Belgium and Holland and 239 divisions on the Eastern Front. (The Afrika Korps had two German divisions and eight Italian divisions. The Germans had 25 divisions in Italy after the Allies invaded in September 1943.)

Posted by kirkaracha | September 6, 2007 12:02 PM

On June 22, 1944, just over two weeks after the Allies invaded Normandy with 160,000 troops, the Soviet Union launched an offensive across a 450-mile front "involving 1,245,000 men, 14 combined-army armies, one tank army, 124 out of 168 rifle divisions committed to the attack, 2,175 tanks supported by 1,355 self-propelled guns, 24,000 guns and mortars, four 'air armies' with 5,327 aircraft, plus a further 700 heavy bombers of Long-Range Aviation."

Posted by kirkaracha | September 6, 2007 12:11 PM

But it would very likely have taken far more than the two atomic bombs the US had in summer 1945 to defeat a Germany which had conquered Russia.

This is the key point matt forgets. As of 1945, we had enough fissile material for 2 plutonium bombs and 1 uranium bomb. we didn't get more until much later. Further, the plutonium bomb design (Fat Man) was a complex design involving explosive lenses and implosion, and needed a test. (The uranium bomb was a simple "gun" design that they knew would work.) Thus, we had one uranium bomb and one plutonium bomb, each with 20-40 kilotons of potential yield. And we were fighting a two front war.

Perhaps Germany would have surrendered after 2 bombs. Perhaps not. And what would have happened in the Pacific if we hadn't used the two bombs there? I still say the Soviets were pretty crucial.

Posted by Dilan Esper | September 6, 2007 12:44 PM

"Perhaps Germany would have surrendered after 2 bombs. Perhaps not. And what would have happened in the Pacific if we hadn't used the two bombs there? I still say the Soviets were pretty crucial."

But the Germans (and, obviously, the Japanese) didn't know how many nukes we actually had, or were going to have in the near-term. By the end of 1946 in real-life, the US had 11 theoretically functioning nuclear weapons. By the end of 1947, the US had 32. By 1947, Germany is pretty much glass if they don't surrender before then.

Posted by burritoboy | September 6, 2007 1:12 PM

Is is just me, or is SLC going off the rails a bit? I didn't know "fascist cocksucker" was the sort of epithet we toss around on this blog.

@ kirkaracha: that 160,000 troops wasn't the total size of Allied forces in Normandy, it was just the number of troops landed on the first day of the operation. Are you deliberately trying to be misleading?

Posted by AlanC9 | September 6, 2007 1:34 PM

"Perhaps Germany would have surrendered after 2 bombs."

Or perhaps they would have loaded the nerve gas onto the rockets and plastered Britain with them.

And of course with more resources available it's likely they'll be more numerous and more advanced rockets than in our timeline.

Posted by kb | September 6, 2007 1:53 PM

burrito:

That's a long time to continue the war to get to 11 bombs! I thought I made a balanced post-- it's entirely plausible to me that the Germans WOULD have surrendered after 2 bombs. But it's not a certainty. Remember, the Japanese didn't just have the 2 bombs, but also knew that the Allies had defeated Germany and were going to point their full firepower on Japan. Plus, the Soviets had just invaded! So I don't think you can necessarily infer what the Germans would have done from what the Japanese did.

(I should add that you would have had months of additional warfare in Germany just to get to the point where we HAD atomic bombs, in August, not the Spring, of 1945.)

And you didn't answer my point as to what happens in the Pacific theater if we don't have the bombs to drop there for another year?

Again, the Soviets were crucial. Not saying that the atomic bomb argument is completely without merit, but the Soviets made our job much easier.

Posted by Dilan Esper | September 6, 2007 3:12 PM

I'd have to say that in a counterfactual history of the Second World War in Europe, the crucial period isn’t the summer of 1945 (the war in Europe, remember, was won in May, when the Red Army took the Nazi capital), but rather June-December 1941 and January-February 1943. Had Germany's Operation Barbarossa succeeded in knocking the USSR out of the war, or had the Red Army not parried the Wehrmacht’s strategic offensive at Stalingrad, Germany would have been free to concentrate all its resources on subjugating Britain--and it would then have consolidated its vast continental empire and devoted its enormous resources to developing its own “wonder weapons.” (After all, Hitler's purpose in launching a war against the USSR was to eliminate the one power that could have taken the pressure off Britain in anything like the near term--remember that the US didn't mobilize a military force adequate to play an even ancillary role in fighting Germany on the continent until the summer of 1944. With the Soviets knocked out of the war, Germany would have been able to intensify greatly its U-Boat strangulation of Britain--recall that even while fighting the Soviets, German U Boats came perilously close to bringing Britain to its knees. Germany would then have been able to dictate a settlement on its terms.) The United States would then have faced a German European empire alone, deprived of an island base from which to launch an amphibious invasion of or a strategic bombing campaign against the continent. In this situation America would have been in a struggle for survival, a kind of war that in fact it has never had to wage. It may have emerged triumphant in such a contest, but it’s doubtful that it would—could—have successfully fought that existential conflict as a liberal democracy (we forget too easily that western democracy seemed finished in the 1930s and early 1940s). Roberts is a relatively obscure historian of the Soviet Union, and so some western commentators (but few western historians) have greeted his conclusions with some skepticism. In fact, though, Richard Overy--probably the best and most highly regarded historian of the Anglo-American war effort in Europe--reached the same verdict in his book *Why the Allies Won*, a work generally praised as the most judicious analysis of these matters: “The great paradox of the Second World War is that democracy was saved by the exertions of communism.”

Posted by ben | September 6, 2007 4:20 PM

We would have entered into a cold war with Nazi Germany rather than the USSR. Except that Nazi Germany was far, far less rational and predictable than the USSR. And far more murderous -- the elimination of the Slavic peoples was on Hitler's plate.

I think the end of civilization is a plausible consequence of the fall of Moscow in 1941.

Posted by Nathan | September 6, 2007 4:59 PM

"That's a long time to continue the war to get to 11 bombs!"

Those 11 bombs didn't appear as a group all on December 31, 1946. I don't have an accurate production schedule, but some of them were available earlier in 1946. We're talking about roughly an extra year's time-frame, which isn't long enough for the Germans to build nukes of their own (assuming in the alternative time line that Germany's nuclear program is roughly where it was in actual history).

Posted by burritoboy | September 6, 2007 6:15 PM

burritoboy:

You are forgetting that we would be in a costly and difficult conventional war during that time period-- and without the Soviets fighting a second front. Plus the Pacific theater, which you have now ignored twice.

Posted by Dilan Esper | September 6, 2007 7:00 PM

"hose 11 bombs didn't appear as a group all on December 31, 1946. I don't have an accurate production schedule, but some of them were available earlier in 1946."

But of course the early nukes weren't that powerful.

The Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombs if dropped on a major german city would have caused far less damage due to the buildings being made of stone rather than wood.

Berlin was both much larger than H&N and the buildings were stone rather than wood. It's very likely than the US could have dropped all of it's nukes on berlin up to dec 1946 without seriously damaging the reichs warmaking capacity. Meanwhile the Nazi's are firing nerve gas missiles on the UK, (and given the extra resources) who knows, across the atlantic.

Posted by kb | September 6, 2007 7:28 PM

Across the atlantic? Now you are operating in true fantasyland.

Posted by Nathan | September 6, 2007 7:39 PM

"cross the atlantic? Now you are operating in true fantasyland."

2 or 3 years of increased resources ?And with the russians knocked out of the war ?

The germans in our time line had started on experimental rockets in 42 designed to do just that.

The kreigsmarine had in 1942 (again our time line)
fitted a submarine (u-511) to test out rocket launches from under the surface. In 1944 3 U-boats 15m under the surface in the black sea launched rockets against russian shore facilities.

Again with the russians knocked out and a long term intercontinental war on the cards these are precisely the tech that jerry would have focused on.

Posted by kb | September 6, 2007 8:00 PM

"Information as to how the Germans planes fared against B17s and B24s doesn't help us much in trying to determine how they would have fared against B29s."

Irrelevant to the point - and more importantly, the tactics used by the German jets, as the Wikipedia article pointed out, remained STANDARD tactics until the development of air-to-air missiles.

So the B-29 would have had the same problems the B-17 did - unless it was sufficiently sturdy to continue its mission after being hit by multiple explosive rockets.

Where I did go wrong, according to Wikipedia, is that I thought the Germans only had around 600 jets they couldn't use - Wikipedia says over twice that!

As for not having a bomber able to deliver a nuke, well, I'm sure German engineering would have figured out a way to deal with that pretty damn quick, so it's a minor quibble.

As for German spying, that was a hypothetical. While German intelligence was generally operating at cross purposes - spying more on each other than on the Allies - it is still feasible that the Germans could have learned enough about the US projects to be useful to them. That Heisenberg could figure out the principles of the bomb within 24 hours of merely hearing about its capabilities doesn't indicate to me that the Germans would have any trouble extrapolating from any information they might have gleaned from espionage.

And, yes, SLC is off the rails, as usual.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | September 6, 2007 8:08 PM

The other WW2 point worth recalling was the desire of some conservatives to 'defeat' Germany by going to war with the USSR over Finland. Up there with winning the war on terror by invading Iran?

Posted by Geoff Robinson | September 6, 2007 11:20 PM

Nuclear hysteria

We only attach such importance to nukes out of a morbid fear that we will one day suffer the fate we meted out to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as Dresden and Hamburg. Of course it was a crime to kill civilians in terror bombings, so we are irrationally fearful of attack by "WMD" because we suspect that some sort of cosmic justice requires that payback. And of course the terror bombings in WWII, both nuke and conventional, were competeley ineffective, counter-productive in fact, but the criminality, a criminality not even defensible as necessary to achieve victory, makes us attribute an outsized effectiveness to these weapons, in order to justify our crime.

We know that dropping a few dozen nukes on Germany, even if that had been doable 2-3 years after a hypothetical 1942 German victory over the SU, would have done nothing but make them more determined than ever to never surrender, because we actually dropped the conventional equivalent of several dozen nukes on them, and it only made them determined to back Hitler to the bitter end. Threaten genocide, actually start to perform genocide, on a people, and of course they will fight to the bitter end, because you have given them no alternative. Our genocidal bombing actually made Hitler's paranoia seem reasonable to most Germans. Publication of the Morgenthau Plan didn't help in that respect.

Perhaps I missed it in hastily reviewing the discussion above, but one practical consideration that people tend to overlook in their irrational hyping of nukes, is that even on their own terms, these weapons are only as "good" as their delivery systems. And the Germans led us in the developement of potential intercontinental delivery systems, jets (the "New York Bomber") and rocketry, by as much as we led them in nukes. They could have responded to what few nukes we had, and what even fewer it is reasonable to think we might have delivered in a 1945 in which the SU had fallen in 1942, by dropping nerve agent on US cities using intercontinental jets and rockets launched from Europe. Yes, it would have taken several plane or rocket loads of nerve agent to deliver the same amount of genocide as a single nuke, but at least they would have had the unanswered capability to deliver any such loads over intercontinental distances.

Not that dropping nerve agent on New York would have done them any more good than all the Germans and Japanese civilians we killed in that war, or would have added by nuking Germany in this hypothetical scenario. But had that happened, at least we might today be less burdened by the irrational notion that "WMD" are some sort of wonder weaponry.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | September 7, 2007 12:02 AM