[TheNorthman]

Common perception is that the US contributed the most to ending WW2 (Not the opinion at the time)

Common perception is also that the US won the space race (Not the opinion at the time outside the US).

Perhaps "common perception" isn't the right metric to go by.

[jacquesm]

It depends on whose perception. Common as in 'the world' is something that we don't really have so you are always going to have to go by some locally colored version of events.

The US eventually did win the space race, but they lost Rounds 1 and 2 to Russia. The United States getting involved in WW2 when they could no longer ignore it ended up getting the formidable American industrial engine engaged in ways that had Japan been a little bit smarter might have seen a completely different ending to WW2.

The US view is that they did all the heavy lifting, when in fact Canada and the UK did given the relative sizes of their population at the time made a disproportionate difference in Western Europe, but America was definitely very important while in the East Russia made the biggest difference. In the pacific it really was the United States that made the difference.

Perception when simplified to the point where it makes no sense isn't the right metric to go by, but with some nuance it can actually be quite useful.

[TheNorthman]

> The US eventually did win the space race

They did _because they started a new round_. What the US did is equivalent to losing badly and then screaming "Last goal wins" repeatedly until you score the last goal. Yes, US sources claim a US victory. That doesn't mean they actually won.

> The US view is that they did all the heavy lifting,

The Soviet Union was responsible for ~80% of german casualties. The Soviets made a difference in Western Europe by winning in the east. It's what killed the german propaganda machine.

[kortilla]

> They did _because they started a new round_. What the US did is equivalent to losing badly and then screaming "Last goal wins" repeatedly until you score the last goal.

That’s a senseless analogy. There was no game with structured rules about number of rounds, etc.

That’s like claiming someone only won a war because they kept fighting until the other side gave up and didn’t want to fight anymore.

[adventured]

> The Soviet Union was responsible for ~80% of german casualties.

None of which would have been possible without the extraordinary industrial might of the US that kept the USSR supplied. They had no capacity to fight minus being supplied.

Do you know how much territory the European allies had reclaimed in the years of fighting prior to the US invasion of Europe? None. There is no scenario where Nazi Germany gets defeated without the US supplies and invasion and the USSR leadership openly admitted exactly that privately.

Here's a map at the time of Normandy in 1944 (WW2 of course began in 1939):

https://omniatlas.com/assets/img/articles/complete/europe/eu...

Notice anything interesting? The Germans hadn't lost any territory in nearly five years of war.

The US was a liberator of Europe. It didn't keep half of Western Europe for itself. Do you know what the Soviets were by comparison? It was the 1,900,000 US soldiers, backed with US supplies and nukes (to stand off the Soviet conquerors in the East), that enabled Western Europe to become free after the war.

The USSR would not have even been able to keep its trains functioning without the US supplies. The US gave them nearly 2,000 locomotives.

It included 12,000+ airplanes. 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. 400,000 jeeps and cargo trucks. 8,000 tractors. 12,000 armored vehicles, including 7,000 tanks. 35,000 motorcycles. 1.5 million blankets. 15 million pairs of boots. Four million tons of food supplies. And a vast amount of energy supplies.

Between Dec 1941 and August 1945, the allies consumed seven billion barrels of oil. The US supplied six billion of those barrels.

So the US kept the USSR in the war with its industry, while fighting two massive war fronts simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

[TheNorthman]

> and the USSR leadership openly admitted exactly that privately.

This sentence is nonsense. They publicly (not privately) thanked the US for their aid.

Besides, your framing of the war is obviously false. The allies had lost the war up until about ~1943, where they started gaining momentum. A turning point I'd like to point out is the Battle of Kursk, in which the Germans for the first time cancelled a major operation. Sure, the invasion of Sicily played a role in their decision, but the battles weren't even on the same scale (14k casualties vs 370k in Kursk).

Also the lend-lease is a false equivalence. Yes, the "industrial might" played a role, but the US hadn't lost 25 million men to the war. Their capacity for production was higher because they weren't sending everyone to their death. The US even saw population growth during the war. The Soviet Union only saw their loses replaced during the mid-50s.

The US played their part, but make no mistake in the difference between 11 billion USD and 25 million men.

[gmanley]

> Their capacity for production was higher because they weren't sending everyone to their death.

Well of course that's why. I don't thing anyone is arguing otherwise. OP was simply saying, without the US, the allies would likely have lost.

Why the US was able to supply most of the Ally's supplies doesn't take away from the fact that they did. Your not even arguing against anything OP was saying here, other than the "openly private" contradiction, which was right on. Now of course it wasn't just the US that won the war, without the USSR the Allies would almost assuredly have lost.

Now certain people may argue that one was more responsible for winning the war than the other. I think that's pretty pointless and we can leave it at them both being critical to winning the war.

[TheNorthman]

I might have lost sight of the forest for the trees there :).

[kortilla]

> The US played their part, but make no mistake in the difference between 11 billion USD and 25 million men

Feeding men into the wood chipper isn’t progress. Fight smarter, not harder.

[ClumsyPilot]

How does it compare with domestic production?

Best I can remember, USSR produced about as many tanks as the rest of the world combined during the period.

[catalogia]

(Numbers from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor...)

Yes, they produced a great many tanks. Of the 270,041 tanks and self-propelled guns made by the Allies, 120,000 of them were made by the Soviets. That's a very impressive number, Russian tanks were pretty good, and tanks in general are impressive machines, so this makes for a very good example if you want to boast about Soviet productivity.

What about other vehicles though? The Soviets got 400,000 good trucks and jeeps from America. Tanks alone won't win a war, you need to move men and supplies too otherwise those tanks won't get very far. Take a look at the "Other Vehicles" column on the land vehicles table.

Take a look at the aircraft table on that same page. The British alone made way more aircraft than the Soviets, and frankly the British aircraft were much better. Particularly the Lancaster, which was superb. The British gave thousands of combat aircraft to the Soviet Union, and trained many Soviet pilots as well.

If you look at the table for production of coal, iron, and oil, you'll find that the Soviet Union was lagging far behind Britain and America. And Canada deserves a special mention for producing most of the aluminum. Of course I don't say any of this to demean the contribution of the Soviet Union to the war effort. It's undeniable that the Soviet Union shed the most blood, paying for the war with tens of millions of lives. How many more would have died had Soviet resources been stretched even thinner? That's not a pleasant thing to consider.

The war was a team effort. That's my point.

[boomboomsubban]

>There is no scenario where Nazi Germany gets defeated without the US supplies and invasion and the USSR leadership openly admitted exactly that privately.

Without the USSR involved in the war, US supplies would be unable to help stop the Germans and the German forces would not be spread thin enough for an invasion to be feasible. Both were necessary, but the Soviets gave up much more to secure the victory.

[adventured]

I fully agree that the Soviets were instrumental in helping to cripple the German war machine, eroding its supplies and manpower. That's not the premise floated by the more recent, popular, anti-US WW2 propaganda however that proclaims the Soviets won WW2 while intentionally ignoring all actual historical facts from WW2.

Normandy was June 1944. The US had nukes by August 1945. The Germans signed their surrender in May of 1945. The Germans were done. Period. The war in Europe was over one way or another and soon.

Within one year of the US invading at Normandy, all that Nazi territory in the prior map I posted was gone, whereas none of it had been reclaimed in the prior five years before the US invasion. It's not a coincidence. Churchill recognized that once the US joined on to invade Europe, the war was won.

There's a reasonable argument that the Soviets helped delay the possibility of the Nazis developing nuclear weapons. Historical evidence suggests the Nazis were nowhere close to developing a nuclear weapon though and they had largely abandoned the project in early 1942. Most likely, with or without the Soviet effort between January 1942 and May 1945, the US was going to bring Nazi Germany to capitulation with nuclear weapons.

There is a big difference in the stakes however: the US didn't need to win the war in Europe to survive. It could have stepped back, relatively safe with its nuclear position. And the Soviets would have treated Western Europe very differently without the US there to safeguard territorial lines from further Soviet expansion and influence west.

[boomboomsubban]

>That's not the premise floated by the more recent, popular, anti-US WW2 propaganda however that proclaims the Soviets won WW2 while intentionally ignoring all actual historical facts from WW2.

The premise floated is that the Soviets paid the most to guarantee victory in WWII, hence "won" the war. US entry in the war may have been a significant turning point, but the Soviet involvement dwarfs the US involvement.

>There's a reasonable argument that the Soviets helped delay the possibility of the Nazis developing nuclear weapons. Historical evidence suggests the Nazis were nowhere close to developing a nuclear weapon though and they had largely abandoned the project in early 1942.

Without the incredibly taxing years of war with the USSR, Germany would have had the resources to all sorts of other things. Not only could they have furthered their own advances, they would have been able to disrupt the UK's assistance and limit US access to necessary resources. You can't simply say the US would have still been able to win that race without the Soviets war.

[YarickR2]

Propaganda at work. USSR didn't _need_ to be supplied; it had resources. Lend lease helped,but wasn't crucial.

[kortilla]

> Propaganda at work

It works better if you don’t announce it in advance.

[brownbat]

I know it's somewhat fashionable to say it was all really just a Russian/German war. You rightly point out the contributions of Canada and the UK relative to population. But I have one defense of the naive "but but the US mattered!" view...

Khrushchev and Stalin readily admitted that they would have been quickly overrun by the Germans without the US basically flooding the Eastern front with fuel, trucks, munitions and other support. US readymade military support to Russia amounted to something like a seventh of Russia's GDP.

Between 1943 and 1945, the United States built more ships than had existed in the world before 1939. The US built and crewed more aircraft than the rest of the world combined. The US provided a third of the raw materials, tools, and transport the Soviet Army used. It was the industrial backbone of all of the Allied armies. It brought the Allied to Axis GDP ratio to 5/1 by the end of the war.

Which is just a mere footnote, if your model of warfare completely discounts the importance of logistics and materiel. Or if you believe that the industrial warmaking capacity of your opponent is irrelevant to whether or not you sue for peace.

I know it's tempting to say that contributions don't "count" unless they involve deaths, but, as one notable WWII participant once said, "No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country."

Stalin put it this way: the British bought time, the Americans brought gold, and Russians provided blood.

To be fair, it would be distortative to diminish any of those contributions.

With apologies to: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066206/ and https://www.quora.com/How-was-the-American-contribution-in-W...

People should learn more about lend lease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

[jacobush]

Everything else aside, the German industry must have been incredibly strong to withstand the rest of the world against it for so long. Such a double tragedy it was wasted on a horrible war effort in instead of furthering humanity.

[int_19h]

It wasn't that strong, though. That's precisely why there's a popular opinion that Germany was done by 1943, pretty much regardless of anything else - they've spent their own industry while failing to sufficiently cripple the Soviet one. The question then wasn't about who'd win the war, but how long it would take, how many more casualties, and what the map of Europe would be after.

[CamperBob2]

Exactly, which is why this argument is so stupid. The evil posed by the Axis was of such a magnitude that it took everyone else working together, all over the world, to end it.

Arguing over who did the most good in WWII is as pointless as arguing over whether Hiroshima or Dresden or Bataan or Unit 731 was the greater atrocity. The only lesson that endures is that humanity shouldn't do any of this stuff again, ever.

[billfruit]

The two countries with the most casualties in the world war 2, were the Soviet Union and China, and their numbers dwarf that of all other combatants.

[CamperBob2]

Some things aren't a matter of opinion. Look at Buran, for instance [1]. (This is why it's so frustrating as an American to acknowledge that we can't even put humans in space anymore.)

Another good example is Ken Shirriff's recent blog entry, which includes some notes comparing the degree of IC technology in US versus Soviet space hardware of similar vintage: http://www.righto.com/2020/01/inside-digital-clock-from-soyu...

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/38kfhn/new_photos_of...

[rimliu]

The other side: in USSR we were not even taught about WWII. It was "The Great Patriotic War". And it was all Red Army vs. Germans.

[ClumsyPilot]

I was taught in the Russian school system, and while it's true that main emphasis is on the eastern front, but the rest of the world is broadly represented.

I have never meant a person that was not aware of the other fronts, and did not know at least the broad strokes of France/normandy/etc.

[rimliu]

Well, the time I am talking about was the last decade of the USSR. Access to information was way more limited then.

[pintxo]

Given that the US currently I has no vehicle to bring people to the ISS, it look like they lost in the long(er) term. /s

[billfruit]

There was almost 10 year gap I think from the last SkyLab mission to the first flight of the shuttle,when Americans had no capsule available for manned missions.

[chucksmash]

It has been nearly nine years since the US lost the capacity for manned space flight so there's a kernel of truth, /s or not.

This is an interesting time to be following along, as SpaceX just completed an in-flight abort test last weekend which was - by all appearances - a success.

According to spaceflightnow.com, the manned follow-up mission which will launch astronauts to the ISS on a Crew Dragon capsule, DM2, could happen within the next 50-100 days[1]:

> The schedule for the Demo-2 launch with Hurley and Behnken will partly be determined by a NASA decision in the coming weeks on whether to extend the length of their mission at the space station from a short-duration stay of about a week to an expedition that might last as long as several months.

> Bridenstine said the Demo-2 crew will have to undergo additional training to perform duties on the space station if NASA extends Hurley and Behnken’s mission.

> Kathy Lueders, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, suggested Friday that the Demo-2 mission might be ready for launch as soon as the first half of March.

> But it’s more likely to happen in April — at the soonest — when the space station’s crew is downsized to three people through October, assuming no U.S. crew launches in that period.

For those who missed it, the in-flight abort test itself was interesting[2].

[1]: https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/01/19/spacex-aces-final-majo...

[2]: https://youtu.be/mu5Ydz34oVc