Soviet
Dependencies on Western Aid in World War II
The Soviets have long downplayed the role of American and British aid, but it filled some very vital gaps. The Soviets gained mobility through hundreds of thousands of US-built trucks. The Soviets could have built those trucks themselves, but only at the cost of tank or aircraft production. US aluminum played a major role in making production of huge numbers of T34 tank engines possible. Aviation gas refined in the US made Russian aircraft more competitive. US-built radios made it possible for the Russians to coordinate their offensives. US food helped keep Russian troops from starving to death after the Russians lost their breadbasket in the Ukraine. US-built locomotives kept the Soviet railroad infrastructure going after the panic industrial movements of 1941/42 almost wore it out. US and British tanks sent to the Soviet Union were not that huge in number compared to Soviet production, but compare them to German production in 1942 and 1943, and they’ll look pretty substantial. Also, those tanks filled in a crucial gap during late 1941 and early 1942, when Soviet tank production was very low because most of the factories were being moved, and most of the Soviet prewar production had been lost in battle. The Soviets had to keep armies in the field until their production could get back up to par, and the British and US aid in late 1941 and 1942 made that possible.
Also, even as early as 1942, US and British military actions were tying up crucial German assets. To support the German response to Operation Torch (invasion of North Africa), the Germans moved 400 transport planes from Russia and Norway to Italy. According to my back-of-the envelope calculations, those planes moved on average around 130 tons of supplies a day, plus thousands of troops, across the Mediterranean during the time the German troops at Stalingrad were surrounded and could be supplied with no more than around 100 tons (one source says 200) per day. Some of those planes did move back to Russia for part of the airlift, but the North African front had to keep being supplied, so they couldn’t strip all of them away. Torch also forced the Germans to occupy Vichy France, which tied up something like ten divisions (3 panzer, I believe) at a crucial time. The Germans could have found a use for ten divisions in the Stalingrad area.
There were probably other dependencies. If Japan seized Malaysia with over 90 percent of world rubber production (as in my ‘Dunkirk Weather’ scenario), and the US wasn’t gearing up synthetic rubber production at wartime speed, where would the Soviet Union get rubber, for example?
Germany
Versus The Soviets - 1939
Last issue, Ian Montgomerie took issue with the degree of success I have the Germans enjoying in fighting between them and the Soviets in late 1939. I understand the skepticism, but there are several countervailing factors involved:
1. The Soviet Army would have a year and a half less time to recover from the loss of personnel from Stalin’s purges.
2. They would not have had the Winter War under their belt to get rid of the worst of their misconceptions and bad commanders, while getting combat experience.
3. They would not have the buffer of eastern Poland to add miles between the Germans and the Soviet heartland.
4. They would not have been able to pull trained divisions off of the Japanese Front because the Japanese and Soviets were actually involved in a medium-sized war as late as Mid-September 1939.
5. They would have initially been on the offensive, on enemy territory, which would have a major morale consequence. They would be fighting to prevent a Ukranian state, not fighting to defend Mother Russia. There were a lot of Ukranians in that army. Also, Russian armies have historically been much more effective at defensive than at offensive operations.
6. Once they lost the initial battles, they would have much less to build back up with. The British and Americans would not be sending them thousands of tanks, for example, nor would the Urals industries be in a position to help as much. Much of the Urals industry was built in 1940 and early 1941.
7. The Soviets in this time-line would have no basis for understanding the power of the Panzer divisions, without the examples of Poland, France, and the Balkans to warn them. They would be even less prepared than they were for the pace of modern warfare.
8. As the book The Stumbling Colossus points out, the Soviets built up their army tremendously in size between late 1939 and mid-1941. At least some of that buildup was actually counter-productive because it spread trained manpower and equipment too thinly among partially trained men and weakened unit cohesion, but in 1939 a smaller German army would face a smaller Soviet army, with less industry to back it up. The Soviet army really got bigger between September 1939 and June 1941. The Red Army’s active strength went from 1.5 million to just under 5.4 million men. They went from 96 rifle divisions to 196. They went from 1 motorized rifle or mechanized division to 31 such divisions. They went from 4 tank corps (roughly 8 divisions I think), to 61 tank divisions. Cavalry divisions shrank from 30 to 13 as they were transformed to tank divisions That huge buildup was just the active army. The Soviets also built up huge reserves—a manpower reserve of 14 million men. (By the way, the Soviets began a partial mobilization of those reserves several months before the Germans attacked)
9. In 1939, the Soviets did not have the new tanks or planes starting to come off the assembly lines that they did in mid-1941. For example, they had a large collection of tanks, but the KV-1 and the T34 were not even designed yet, much less in production. Many of their tanks were wheel-and-track designs with bad transmissions like the BT-7, or multi-turreted monstrosities.
10. Hitler and the German have not had a year and a half of easy victories to give them the illusion of invincibility, and to make more of them actually believe the nutsoid racial theories that spawned such destructive policies in the occupied parts of the Soviet Union.
11. The Germans would still have to worry about western public opinion, so they would be forced to treat Soviet prisoners of war with less obvious brutality. That would have some impact how hard the Soviet troops fought. (Formula for making an enemy fight harder: make it obvious that if he surrenders he will be executed or starved to death.) In our time-line the Germans accomplished the difficult feat of making Stalin look like the lesser of two evils to millions of Soviets who had seen the full impact of Stalin’s purges. Given even a little effort to cover up their motives and brutality, the Germans could have had a major impact on the average Soviet soldier’s reaction when faced with a choice of surrendering or trying to fight his way back to Soviet lines.
Given those considerations, I felt that what I had the Germans doing was not totally unreasonable. Reasonable people can and obviously do disagree with me on that.
What do you think of these essays? Do you like this sort of thing, or do you prefer more conventional scenarios? Comments are very welcome.Return to Main World War II Alternate History Menu
Copyright 1999 By Dale R. Cozort