The Pacific Theater - WW2 (What won the war?)

Dead of winter?

You are aware they invaded in June, are you not? That is only "Dead of winter" if you are living in the Southern Hemisphere.

And if you think they could have invaded any earlier then you do not know or understand Russian climate.

The Russians have a word for it, Rasputitsa, or "Season of Mud". We have all heard of General Winter, but General Mud was just as fierce. This is mud that can stop an army cold. It can sink entire trucks, and collapse any kind of trench system attempted. And it happens 2 times a year, from February through June, and October through November. So any invasion would have to first wait for the roads to dry up enough, then be over with before the winter wet season started.

Plus the Soviets were already prepared for this terrain. Their tracks for armored vehicles were on average 50% wider, because they knew they would have to fight across their own terrain. German tracks were much wider, built for the roads of Europe. This is why German vehicles got bogged down, while Soviet ones could still move.

 

They could not move any sooner. The winter of 1940 was unusually wet, and had a late thaw. The roads were still impassable until the 2nd week of June that year. So at most, they could have started their attack a week earlier.

 

Is there a German source giving that as the reason for delaying the offensive? Most are still giving the Balkan situation as the main reason. A few mention the previous wet winter as a minor reason, swollen rivers and the like. Some book came out in 2011 on Operation Barbarossa, with a new theory about the German failure, dismissing the weather as the deciding factor, but I haven't read it. Maybe somebody here has. Glantz I think is the author.

Yes, Glantz, and here is the Amazon link, with some reviews:

http://www.amazon.com/Operation-Barbarossa-Hitlers-Invasion-Russia/dp/0752460706

I may get around to buying it someday, but I have other books going on other topics besides military history I want to get to. Maybe the Axis History forum has some more detailed discussions on the book; I haven't checked.

 

Was that far from the truth? A lot of Japanese civilians died in Hiroshima in the most horrendous manner. Some even survived to see their skin melt away because of radiation.

 

And that may be, but it is irrelevant. Because even if they had been ready to jump off, they could not have.

The largest factor of the failure of the German attack on the Soviet Union was their complete failure to anticipate the effects of the Rasputitsa upon their military forces. They missed the tail end of the Spring one when they went in, but got smacked hard by the fall one in October.

 

I was asking if there was a German source confirming that Hitler delayed the invasion because of the wet Spring. I can't find one. It may have been a failure, but it doesn't appear to be the reason he delayed the invasion.

 

There is not, and this is exactly my point.

Hitler's forces took almost no consideration of the effects of weather upon their invasion. They did not consider the Spring Rasputitsa, they did not consider the Fall Rasputitsa, they did not consider the extreme Winter. They simply assumed they could have jumped off whenever they wanted and storm their way to Moscow.

None of the Command Staff gave any consideration as to why the land conditions would have been any different in the Soviet Union then they were in Germany. And this is the exact same mistake Napoleon made.

I never made the claim that they did delay because of this, simply that even if they had jumped off 2 or 3 weeks earlier, they would have been bogged down from the tail end of it. And lack of any kind of consideration of this by German Generals is proof that it was not considered at all. A grave mistake as everybody knows.

 

(My bold)

Quite right, the Japanese civilians did not need to die in the numbers they did. The end of the war in the Pacific was in sight from Midway on, & the militarists who had kidnapped the Japanese government refused to communicate that to the people they claimed to be serving/protecting. Whether from misplaced warrior ethos or simple refusal to see the end - they tried to lie to themselves & to the government & to the people of Japan.

The US killed massive numbers of civilians in the firebombing raids on Japan, we sank their commerce transport, cut off their ships from fuel, their troops on deployment in the Pacific from reinforcements & supplies, & isolated their massive military in China/Korea/Manchuria. Japanese civilians paid a terrible price for the intransigence of their military. They should have been angry, certainly - @ their own government & military for their patent inability to match resources to ambition. The vaunted Japanese military conquest of Korea/Manchuria/China never turned a profit, TMK. It ate up more men, money, supplies than it ever delivered to the Japanese treasury. & that was true of the entire Great Eastern Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, from start to finish.

 

Proximity fuse/radar enhanced anti-aircraft artillery, bombs and anti-personal artillery, and of course code breakers and the bomb.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze#World_War_II

 

It's the logistics, people.

The Japanese starved, ran out of ammunition and fuel.

The Americans (after mid-1942) had adequate supplies of supplies.

The IJA scarecrows on Luzon took an epic butt-kicking in early 1945.

For all their tactical and operational prowess, the Germans never really got the knack of huge-scale, very long distance logistics. The Japanese were even worse. The British were generally fairly good until you got more than 50 km from the ports. Not enough trucks to deliver the stuff to the front. Only the US truly mastered the art.

Artifacts of victory: Liberty ships. Deuce-and-a-half trucks. Mechanized construction equipment. Fleet oilers.

Amateurs study tactics. Professionals study logistics.

 

I think geography played a huge roll in the difference between the US and the British. The US is so spread out, just getting raw materials and manufactures together has been an ongoing exercise since in the mid 1800's. So adding another 5000 miles to a journey was a matter adding days to the shipping time.

 

Actually, it has not been that big of an issue. That is why our industry is centered where it is.

In the US, the traditional base of our industry was the area known as the "Rust Belt".



That is because in this small area you have the mining and smelting and refining of both coal and iron, and the main industries that used iron. This was also where the production of automobiles, then later aircraft took off.

The same with oil. Production and refinement all tends to be in the areas where there is oil, at that time Pennsylvania, California and Texas.

The biggest challenge in the US was transportation, but that was solved decades prior to WWII by the railroads. Since 1969 the US rail system was transcontinental, and that had expanded greatly in the 70 years since then. By the time of WWII, freight and passengers could cross the almost 3,000 miles between New York and LA in less then 4 days.

Because our manufacturing was always scattered, it was not a real challenge to simply ramp it up in scale. Today it is known as "Just In Time Inventory", where you only hold enough of a product in inventory for your needs, and have the replacements in the supply line so they arrive when needed. The US had done this for decades prior to the war, because components for automobiles and aircraft were coming from around the world.

 

(My bold)

Nah, that can't be it. Take a look @ the British Empire @ its height in the Victorian period. It spanned the globe, & they quite handily got raw materials in, delivered finished goods, etc. They may have over depended on fleet transport, as Taxcutter noted. Or they may have badly underestimated how much supply it took to maintain expeditionary forces in the field (they should have known better, they'd done it often enough).

The temporal length of WWI & II & the massive level of destruction of crops, buildings, infrastructure & people may also have contributed. Max Hastings in Retribution, noted that one reason so many British POWs died in Japanese captivity was that they started out @ a handicap: many of the enlisted had starved/suffered food deprivation from the Great Depression. They had no fat, they had no bodily reserves. They were the first to die. Our troops tended to be well fed, @ least going in.

 

And the same depression probably helped the US war effort.

During the Great Depression, you had what is probably the largest internal migration in US history, as tens of millions migrated from the Dust Bowl to the West Coast, specifically California. And when the war actually broke out, there were perfectly poised to fill the new factories with employees. Shipyards, aircraft plants, tank factories, they would not have had the workforce needed if not for the mass migrations of the decade prior.

However, the US did not have the extreme shortages of many countries, since most of our raw materials (especially food) are located internal to our country, and not imported. England had been a gross importer of food for a century prior to the outbreak of war. And it remains so to this day, while the US is still the worlds largest exporter of food.