DAILY BEAST COLUMN: …These insights – and many more like them – are found in the pages of a truly eye-opening history of the British war effort in World War II: Britain’s War Machine by David Edgerton.
Germany could not afford to build an army to equal France’s and also an air force to equal Britain’s. It lacked oil, rubber, aluminum and other crucial resources. According to Tooze, the United States in its first year of war mobilization, 1942, produced more aircraft than the Nazi regime produced over its entire existence. At its peak in December 1944, the Luftwaffe fielded 5,000 combat aircraft, as compared to 8,300 British planes by that same point. By war’s end, April 1945, the Soviet Union commanded 17,000 planes. The United States stood on a different level again: the US Army Air Force alone tallied 21,000 planes by war’s end, with abundant naval aviation on top of that.
Most fundamentally of all: Germany could not feed itself. Genocide, argues Tooze, was built into the German war plan from the very start. Hitler’s strategic math required him to starve to death millions of urban eastern Europeans in order to extract the grain to feed a war-fighting Germany cut off from world trade. When Hitler failed to destroy the Red Army before winter 1941, he lost his basic economic gamble – and then turned to the systematic mass murder of the Jews as a horrific but simultaneously futile consolation prize. Here was one war he could win: a war against defenseless civilians.
(Tooze makes a point about the German war plan against the Soviet Union that came as news to me, but that – if accurate – makes the operation seem even more hopeless. Russian railways used a different gauge from railways in western Europe. Any heavy goods to support the invading force must therefore have moved either by truck or by horse and cart. This limit had special implications for moving motor fuel. Horse and cart could never move fuel in the quantities needed to sustain a modern mechanized army; and after 500 miles, German trucks burned more fuel than they could carry. Hitler thus not only had to destroy the Red Army before winter set in, but had to perform the destruction within 500 miles of the German jump-off point – or else lose the use of his tanks and planes.)… (more)
