Sarah Paine: prediction

Transcript context

…First question. The lecture is framed as explaining Britain's strategic wins in how they prosecuted World War II. But it seems like what seems to keep happening is that Germany and Hitler specifically keep making mistakes. In 1940 and 1941, Halifax was saying, "Look, we need to come to a peace with Germany. We've lost the Battle of France. We've had to evacuate Dunkirk." Then Hitler could have done a blockade of Britain and could have just kept prosecuting the war. Instead, he decides to open up a second front against the other biggest army in the entire world, against the Soviet Union. When Japan does Pearl Harbor, again an unforced error, he makes another error on top of that by declaring war on America, which he didn't have to do. It made it much easier for America to lend support in the war against Germany. This seems much more about Hitler continually bungling than about Britain getting the strategic picture right. It's both. I don't know that Germany ever blockaded Britain. It was more that he was planning to invade Britain if he could. He lost so many naval assets doing the Norway campaign, which he really needed to do, that he doesn't have the naval assets that he had at the beginning of the war. That's unlike World War I, where the Germans basically had their whole fleet at the end of the war, and then it got scuttled at the end of the war. This time, Germany did the smart thing, which is to use that fleet to get something. They get Norway, but then they don't have a fleet. Invading is difficult. Then because he's in the big petroleum deficit zone, he's gotta get moving. I'm not clear that he had tons of choices, but he's gotta go for resources. The oceans have been shut off for him. The whole proposition of what he's up to is questionable. But it doesn't mean that it isn't a really bitter struggle and difficult. Even though you go, "Well, Germany's GNP, if you add it up compared to the totality of the Allies vs. Axis, the Allies have much more stuff…" You can go, "I think the Allies are gonna win this thing. " But after how many millions of losses? I showed you the Battle of the Atlantic, it goes this way, it goes that way, it goes this way, it goes that way. A lot of people are dying throughout all this. Yeah, the Germans made errors. The first one is, why even go to war? If you want to dominate Europe and you have a really great growth rate, which in World War I they did, they would have taken over Europe years ago by just growing. Don't do either world war. Just keep growing your economy and then you're going to have all these good business relations. The error is even going to war for these things. But it doesn't mean these wars couldn't have gone the other way. You're right, you look at blunders. But you call it a blunder now because it didn't work out. At the time, you don't know. A lot of people get away with really risky things and then you say they're brilliant. The ones who don't get away with the risky things, you say they're idiots. But it's dicey. I want to go back to the question of, when we're trying to explain who wins a big war like this, how much should we be looking at the specific strategies used in different battles versus just the total tonnage of industrial output that America especially contributed? By 1942, what is the way in which, even if they had a much better strategy, Germany would have won?…

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