"Hobo" wrote
"Paul F Austin" wrote:

Richard Overy's invaluable "Why the Allies Won" has the data: in
artillery,
the USSR outproduced the US every single year of the war, by close to
2:1.
In tanks, the US outproduced the USSR only in 1943 and the aggregate
production of the USSR is much larger than the US. The US outproduced
the
USSR in aircraft, logistics support and in major naval vessels.

Everything the Russians made they used themselves. US production was
distributed to the Brits and Russians. The Russians helped the Germans
to rearm during the '30s. It was this cooperation which allowed the
Germans to plant false documents implicating Russia's best generals in
an imaginary plot against Stalin, leading to their assasination.
Germany's invasion of Russia was delayed for a week in order to recieve
a shipment of Japanese rubber through the Soviet rail network. The
Russians agreed to carve up Poland with the Germans.

My point is that the Russians were willing to give Nazi Germany all the
help they asked for. Nothing the Russians did was to help anyone else.
Everything the US did was of no direct benefit to the US and was only
done to help the world. The French and Russians can't say that and the
French can't even say that they fought very hard.

That's pretty much true: "Arsenal of Democracy" is a real description of the
US effort. But understand what that means. In the part you snipped, I
compared the number of division sets raised by the US, Britain (and Empire)
and the USSR. We built a great deal of hardware but we didn't (thankfully)
have to fight and bleed on the scale that the Brits did and much much less
than did the Sovs.

Stalin was a paranoid fool and I use both terms precisely. The USSR
didn't_deserve_to survive the catastrophes in 1941-1942. That said,
Churchill and Roosevelt didn't bend over backwards to keep Stalin in the war
because they loved him. Churchill in particular hated and feared the
Bolsheviki. If he could have let Hitler and Stalin consume each other, he
cheerfully would have done so. Churchill and Roosevelt didn't do so because
they_needed_Stalin in the war. For all our war production, it was the Sovs
who broke the teeth of the Wehrmacht. It's also a false description of our
war effort as altruism. We manufactured and supplied tremendous amounts of
hardware to the Brits and the Sovs not out of altruism but in the knowledge
that_our_troops would be dying on a smaller scale than if we had manned all
that production ourselves.

If we had sat out the defeat of Britain and the USSR because Germany wasn't
a direct and current threat to the US, we would likely have had to fight
Germany alone, later. It would be the Germans who had been building
beachheads into the Americas rather than us building them into Europe.