Sarah Paine: prediction

Transcript context

…et that going, there's a possibility to do the Normandy landing. So there are four different peripheral operations. Some would argue that the air campaign over Germany was another peripheral campaign. You're bringing the war home to Germans, you're wrecking their productive base. Also it's a major help to the Russians. Why? Because once the British start bombing Berlin, Hitler calls off air squadrons from the Eastern front. These anti-aircraft guns can be used against tanks or aircraft. He pulls those back and that means the Germans no longer own the skies of Russia and you're no longer going to be taking hundreds of thousands of POWs. raft guns can be used against tanks or aircraft. He pulls those back and that means the Germans no longer own the skies of Russia and you're no longer going to be taking hundreds of thousands of POWs. That's how the peripheral strategies worked out, but they're coordinated through allies figuring out how to make all of them work. Here are the stats on allies. Alliances are additive, right? You should ideally add up all the complementary capabilities of you and your friends and then share them, divvy them out in an optimal way to deal with things. Well, the Axis alliance was also additive in the sense that the Germans added to their GDP the GDPs of all the places they occupied. That pretty much accounted for GDP growth in Germany. Except, that whole way of doing things involves big occupation forces which are big overhead for these conquered places. You've also damaged them in the conquest. Whereas the Allies are all game to help each other. Also when Germany took over continental Europe, it's taking the big petroleum deficit zone because Europe doesn't produce petroleum. The North Sea oil, those things hadn't been discovered in those days. Yes, Romania has oil. Yes, Hitler takes Romania. But Romanian pipelines ran to prewar customers. It's very difficult to find the manpower and the steel to reroute all of your pipelines in wartime. That's a whole other part of Hitler's problems. As you're putting together these complementary capabilities, the Russians have a huge army. Most of the fighting takes place between Russia and Germany. The Russians wreck the German army. You know, millions of Russians and Germans are dying here. But if you look at Operation Barbarossa, which is Germany's initial invasion of the Soviet Union, they suffer a nearly 30% casualty rate. That's called catastrophic success. You have too many successes like that, it'll be catastrophic. Here's the mathematics of the main front. Only two countries have really big armies, Germany and Russia. Once the Germans maximize their territorial conquest, they've reduced the Russian population—because they've conquered all these areas—to less than that of the United States. Nevertheless, the Russians mobilize twice the army that the United States does. If you look at the mathematics of munitions, the Russians on their lonesome produce more munitions than did Germany. Once the United States gets in the war, we produce, I think like $100 billion in munitions. In that period the Germans produced less than $40 billion. Bad news for Germany in all of these numbers. The trick is getting the munitions to the men. In World War I that wasn't feasible, but now these railway lines have been completed and it's pouring in. The Lend-Lease aid, you look at it and wow. Britain's getting a lot, Russia quite a bit, but less. China, nothing. What's going on there? You can only get aid in if there are ports and railways. Japan blockaded China. Proof of concept, it can be done. The Japanese did it and you could not get stuff in. What the United States was trying to do... The British thought we were insane. They're probably correct. We were flying things over the Himalayas called the Hump. id it and you could not get stuff in. What the United States was trying to do... The British thought we were insane. They're probably correct. We were flying things over the Himalayas called the Hump. Great, you're going to fly in aviation fuel to land? That's going to be the same aviation fuel that's going to get you back. However many other bombers that you can deal with in China, it's not workable. Russia, even though it got a lot less than Britain because it's not getting ships, is getting equally valuable useful things. For instance, Russia produces a lot of planes, but it doesn't produce adequate high octane aviation fuel. The United States had loads of that. The United States produced all kinds of vehicles, all kinds of rolling stock locomotives. This is what Russia used to transport everything. The United States prevented Russia from going into a famine in the winter of 1942-1943. We fed them with this Spam in a can. This is Hormel Foods' contribution to the war. Everyone had much Spam during the war, they never wanted to see it again. But a little can of pork goes a long way and it doesn't spoil in a can. A quarter of this Lend-Lease aid goes through Murmansk. A lot of it gets sunk up there and not reliable. Quarter of it goes through Persia and then half of it goes over the Trans-Siberian. You go, “Well, what's this Axis alliance about? Why aren't the Japanese sinking any of this?” Talk about a dysfunctional alliance. This is to tell you what happened with those Arctic convoys. You can see in 1942, a tremendous number of them were sunk. These are fully-laden ships with scarce war materiel. We and the British called them off for most of 1942 and most of 1943. Stalin was beside himself. In 1943, he's sending out feelers to Hitler trying to make a separate peace. Luckily Hitler was not interested. Hitler wasn't wasting his time with targeting empty ships on the home voyage. He was only going after the laden ones. What is all this Lend-Lease aid support? What does it add up to? Well, in Barbarossa you got 3+ million Russians going after 3 million Germans. That's a lot of people to supply and tie up. As you watch that go, the Axis is killing Russians or making them POWs by the millions, but it's suffering 15% losses of its forces. It's going to add up. When you get to August 1941, that's when the siege of Leningrad, St. Petersburg begins. By December, the Axis is within 25 miles of Moscow. It’s not looking good at all. But once the United States is in the war, you can start doing peripheral theaters like in North Africa. Then these casualties, while they aren't as significant as what's going on on the main front, it's cumulative. Stalingrad, the largest battle of the war, is going on. You got North Africa. Then when you have Kursk, which is the largest set piece battle of the war, a big tank battle. This is when Sicily's happening and moving up the Italian peninsula. You can see the cumulative effects of these sequential operations and how they’re adding up, both the main theater and the peripheral theater. When you get to Normandy, the Russians are tying up 228 Axis divisions.…

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