What if U.S. invaded Soviet Union?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/world-war-2/9022566/For-rent-Hitlers-Wolfs-Lair.html

The defeat of Leningrad would have been easier than Stalingrad.

The loss of Moscow would have been much greater loss than Baku and resulted in a shortening of the front of which a latter southern drive could succeed without fear of getting cut off because at that point all logistical support for Soviets would be coming entirely east of the Don and this country is not too developed. The last Soviet Factories would be in range of Axis bombers and the front would have rolled up more easily, than committing the 6th to Stalingrad with all other Soviet logistical and political objectives are intact allowing easy reinforcement from rail heads running south from Moscow.

@Gargantua:

The question is then,  learning from WWII, is the science of Eugenics WRONG/BAD Science?  Or is the science legitimate, but leads to VERY slippery slopes…  What are your thoughts and experiences?  And lessons learned from your WWII readings…

You’ve raised an interesting topic for discussion. Prior to WWII, the promotion of eugenic programs was considered legitimate and relatively mainstream. Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, was a proponent of eugenics, as were a number of other leading Americans. Before I go any further, I should clarify that by “eugenics” I am not referring to comparisons between different races; but rather to the desire to see the best people within each given race have the most kids. Exactly which traits are most important is, of course, subjective and open to debate.

The arguments made in favor of eugenics were simple and straightforward: we owed it to future generations to give them the best possible inherited traits we reasonably could. As you hinted at in your post, inherited differences are roughly as important for humans as they are for dogs. If we care about dogs’ inherited traits (as shown through dog breeding) it was felt that we should care about the inherited traits of humans even more.

However, viewpoints changed during and after WWII. This was not because of any new scientific evidence that had been brought to light. On the contrary, the subsequent discovery of genes, and studies which show their importance, have made the scientific underpinnings of eugenics stronger than ever. Science has conclusively shown that differences between people are strongly driven by genetic differences, and are not (as is sometimes falsely claimed) merely the result of differences in environment.

Viewpoints about eugenics changed not because of new scientific evidence, but rather because of the wartime and postwar anti-Nazi propaganda effort. The Nazis believed in many things: hard work, a strong military, self-sacrifice for one’s nation, the preservation of their own race, eugenics, anti-Semitism, etc. After the war, some of those beliefs became socially unacceptable, while others remained mainstream. Eugenics happened to fall into the former category.

Possibly that’s because of opposition to the concept from the Nazis’ enemies. Karl Marx believed that differences between people were due wholly to the environment; and that belief found its way into the communist movement. Under Stalin, Soviet scientists who believed in Mendelian inheritance (the mainstream scientific view) were persecuted, and were either shot or sent to gulags. At least to a certain extent, the communist “environment-only” belief has permeated into Western cultures, especially when the subject of discussion is humans. However, there is no scientific support for that communist belief.

As for the large numbers of people who died under Nazi occupation: most of those deaths were the result of the Anglo-American food blockade of Germany, and of the resulting starvation. Occupied Poland is a good case in point. Like most places within 2000 km of Berlin, Poland was a food deficit nation. Early in the German occupation, food was sent from Germany to Poland to help avert outright starvation. However, Hitler’s attempt to get Britain to sign a peace treaty failed, and the war dragged on. Germany’s food reserves ran dangerously low; causing it to have to reevaluate its food policy. To avoid starvation in Germany itself, residents of German-occupied territories would receive less food in the future than they had in the past. Polish Jews were especially hard-hit by these changes: the plan had been to reduce their caloric consumption to zero; which would have meant three million fewer mouths to feed. The next-lowest priority was unskilled Polish workers not directly engaged in helping the war effort. It was expected that millions of people in this category would starve. They avoided starvation, at least for a time, only because the harvest was surprisingly good. Ukrainians received higher priority; and skilled Polish workers had higher priority still. At the top were the Germans occupying Poland: their food rations were almost normal.

If the U.S. was hit by similar famine conditions, I would expect that American citizens would receive a higher ration priority than would the residents of (for example) U.S.-occupied Iraq or Afghanistan. I would also expect those with large amounts of money or good political connections would receive far more food than those who lacked these things. American distribution of scare food resources would likely be about as unequal as the Germans’ had been; except that the inequalities would be based on citizenship and economic status; rather than on ethnicity and contribution to the war effort. More generally, it would be very rare for a nation experiencing famine conditions to distribute food equally to everyone. The fact that Germany used a different basis for that unequal distribution than the U.S. would have does not mean that eugenics is either an intrinsically evil perspective, or that it represents some sort of slippery slope.

Thanks for sharing and posting a link to the article.

And it is a big difference if those German ships are new (build in 1939, or something), because a lot of British ships were older then that.

Cool!!!  Wow, I wonder what kind of damage the Abrams could do going that fast!!!

@Upside-down_Turtle:

Yeah, I saw that show.  It’s partially what inspired this thread.

Tom Clancy said the Abrams can go 70+mph w/o a governor.  Is that really true?  It’s a lot higher than the “official” stats.

Man, 70+ tons going 70+mph…that’s a load going fast!  It’s faster than the Leopard’s “official” top speed.  However, it’s suposidly ad risk of destroying the drive train, but if that’s true, couldn’t you just somehow make it stronger?  I’m no mechanic, but I’m sure it could be done.

A 70 mph tank would kick @$$!  :-D

No, The back half of russia is much like Alaska, a frozen wasteland. It would take them forever to get troops north of manchuria, and supplying them would be nearly impossible. There werent any natural resource up there so the japanese had no interest in “capturing” (if you can even call it that) north russia. It would be smarter to send troops into china or inda, where the resources were.

In some of my other posts on this forum, I’ve described how even in 1940 (when the U.S. was still technically at peace with Germany), it had devoted a significant amount of industrial potential toward winning the air war against Germany; with plans to considerably expand the effort over the next several years. America’s strongest single asset was her industrial potential, as Hitler clearly understood. But that potential was going to be increasingly turned against Germany, whether the U.S. was technically at war or not.

Hitler’s plan to counter this was to expand Germany’s industrial output over the short-term, so that he could at least keep pace with the air war over Germany in the long haul. His method of expanding Germany’s output included industrialization and conquest. The industrialization aspect of his plan meant that instead of putting everything he had into weapons output for 1941 or 1942–in a massive effort to crush the Soviet Union–he had to divide his nation’s economic activity between short-term military production and long-term output increases. The result of all that industrial investment was that Germany increased its aircraft output from 16,000 planes per year in 1941 to over 40,000 planes per year by 1944. It also increased its military production in other categories, such as tanks and V2 rockets.

In late 1941, Hitler knew that his window of opportunity to win the war was relatively slim; and that 1942 would be critical. Germany had to win a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in that year, both to take pressure off its eastern front, and to provide it with the raw materials and manpower it needed to hold its own in the air war over the long haul. Hitler believed that the overwhelming majority of America’s naval strength would be needed in the Pacific to counter the Japanese; at least until the end of 1943. That gave him what he believed was a two year window with which he could sink the American Lend-Lease Aid pouring into Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Sinking those ships would increase Germany’s chances of obtaining the victory over the Soviet Union it desperately needed.

However, the Japanese Navy proved less adept than Hitler had hoped. The Battle of Midway occurred six months after Pearl Harbor. That battle took the naval pressure off the U.S. in the Pacific, and allowed it to focus more of its efforts on convoy protection in the Atlantic. More generally, the failure of the Japanese military meant that Japan would be far less successful in taking military pressure off of Germany than Hitler had hoped.

In 1942, the Soviet Union outproduced Germany 3:1 - 4:1 in tanks, artillery, and other land combat categories, and even 2:1 in military aircraft. It also fielded a much larger army than Germany. Thus evaporated Hitler’s hope of a decisive victory on his eastern front.

Had Hitler not declared war against the U.S., large amounts of American Lend-Lease aid would still have flowed to his enemies in Europe. Over the long-term, he still would have needed to devote a significant portion of his military production to defending German skies and German cities against American-made bombers. He would have lost out on the Second Happy Time (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Happy_Time ), which would have resulted in a stronger Soviet war effort for 1942. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have had to deal with the U.S. invasion of Algeria in 1942, its invasion of Sicily and Italy in 1943, or the Normandy invasion of '44. It’s easy to say in hindsight that the harm of the American invasions exceeded the benefit of sinking that Lend-Lease shipping in '42. But that distinction was less obvious at the time.