| 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 |