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Flip Yr Wig posted:I feel kinda stupid asking, but is there any point to running counterfactuals that see the Germans developing nuclear weapons? The Nazis were extremely far behind in development, and even by the end of the war were in the theoretical phase. Basically, it might have happened it they had an extra decade or so to work on it.
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Dec 11, 2015 23:47
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Skeesix posted:The question I'd like to debate is, How much pushing was really needed for Franco to stay out of WWII? Was he really always on the brink of giving himself "heart and soul" to the Axis powers or was he really just happy to consolidate power over the Basques and Catalans and many build ties with Vichy France? Honestly, Franco probably never was on a "edge" of joining the Axis, while he was sympathetic ideologically speaking, he had just just won the civil war in 1939 and the country was about as disunited as it could get. The was still an active resistance until the 1950s, and while they never actually threatened the regime, Franco had more than enough cut out for himself back home. Joining the war would have been a giant mistake that not only would have threatened his regime but wouldn't offer any real benefits. It was much smarter to hedge his bets, by being friendly to the Axis (and allowing Spanish volunteers to fight) that put himself at risk for what was ultimately a pointless fight (from his perspective).
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Dec 13, 2015 17:07
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Plan Z posted:Not really. Most of Germany's problems were caused by logistics. They lost a huge number of trucks in Poland and France, so a substantial amount of resupply was done by horse. If they somehow were able to capture Stalingrad and the oil fields, and weren't too battered to keep moving, they didn't have the logistical train or production capacity to make any deep push. The other issue is that even if they took Stalingrad, it doesn't mean they could easily take the Caucasus, especially since German forces were already struggling to even reach them in the first place. The Russians could easily still supply the Caucasus either through Astrakhan or other Caspian Ports, and the Soviets had supply lines through Iran via the British. If anything, the Germans could be facing a long grueling battle through the Caucasus with entrenched resistance, and they didn't have half the men they needed. The Germans if anything were several steps removed from the possibility of victory, the question was the additional amount of lives on both sides wasted and time.
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Jan 3, 2016 23:16
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Effectronica posted:The ability of Japan to defend Hokkaido is always implicitly overstated, however. Ultimately also the central issue would be dislodging the Soviets if they even get a minor foothold on Hokkaido. It wasn't that the Soviets even needed to conquer Hokkaido to a have a part to part to play in the postwar order but that they just needed to be the first ones to accept a surrender from local forces once a general surrender was called. It may have not been success, but also certainly it was a worry for the US especially if the war dragged on long enough for the Soviets to get forces and equipment into position to make some time of landing. That said, I don't know if a Soviet occupation would have been viable even so, but also certainly there would be a great deal of backroom bargaining over the issue. Edit: I also doubt the US would be especially interested in attempting their own landings either all things considered, one thing is that the Western allies did not especially want to push the Soviets too far. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 01:12
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Captain_Maclaine posted:...Well, not counting those exercises and trials carried out quietly in concert with the Soviets during the 20s, but your larger point does stand. Ultimately, it is arguable that the Soviets in the end probably got more out of them, considering the Soviets were starting from near complete scratch in the late 1920s (their first tank was basically a re-designed ft-17) and was still very much an newly industrializing state across the 1930s The Soviets caught up extremely quickly all things considered compared to where they were during the Russian Civil War. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Jan 12, 2016 |
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Jan 12, 2016 01:26
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icantfindaname posted:Part of the issue as I understand it is that a lot of the low level 'recruitment' and coercion was done by Korean collaborators, and guess who ran the South Korean government after the war and runs it to this day? Pro-Japanese collaborators. So it's a very touchy political issue because the Korean right wing is actually partially culpable itself. Not to excuse Japan in any way though It doesn't help that democracy only really stabilized itself during the 90s, and even today, Korean politics seem very "managed, for example, the Progressive Party recently being outlawed. Traditionally though North Korea being a basket-case has largely overshadowed what happens in the south. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Feb 7, 2016 |
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Feb 7, 2016 17:18
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buttcoinbrony posted:Fair enough, I thought they were beyond the strongman days, they just found a more palatable strong(wo)man. Well it is a family business after all.
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Feb 7, 2016 18:38
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It also should be put in context that France itself was extremely politically divided from 1935 to 1938 in part to the Spanish Civil War, and French hesitancy was in part due a sheer lack of political unity. In addition, the British foreign policy toward the continent was always traditionally isolationist and Britain's intervention in WW1 was still seen as an "emergency" measure. Also, in all honesty, much of the elite in both countries saw Hitler as a potential bulwark versus Stalin. Also, while the allies would have probably won a war with Germany, it would have taken quite a while for them to put a reliable invasion force together and even then there was no real plan on how to occupy what would an extremely hostile Western Germany. If anything it could have ended up a mess where the allies had an advantage but not enough to make meaningful progress, and maybe have actually retreated if Stalin start to capitalize on the situation by taking Poland.
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Apr 10, 2016 21:59
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Captain_Maclaine posted:It should also be pointed out that most of the major air power theorists between the wars, Douhet being the prime example, were predicting that future war would be mostly/entirely carried out by vast bomber fleets attacking industry and civilian populations, often with chemical weapons being the expected munition. "The bomber will always get through" was the prevailing attitude for many, until WWII proved that, no, they don't always, and even when they do, it's a lot harder to actually knock out industrial targets than you'd think. Admittedly the firebombing of Japan on its own was a rather impressive defeat of death and destruction, and it did kill hundreds of thousands. It just took the dismantling of Japan's ability to defend its airspace.
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Apr 15, 2016 22:20
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Rosscifer posted:Unlike Trump who wants to "bomb them and take their oil," Hitler's plan was to bomb them and take their soil. Because he thought agriculture would be the most important industry due to population growth. His obsession with agriculture was most likely attributed to Germany's food shortages in the First World War and the belief that if Germany had vast arable lands like the US, it could also compete with it militarily. Granted, a similar line of thinking motivated Stalin to push for collectivization. In both cases the priority was put on agricultural autarky with the expectation that trade would be unworkable during war-time, especially with enemies and potential enemies. Also, to bring up Hitler's policies versus the US, the amount of death the Nazis wished to accomplish in the east was always to a higher degree both numerically and proportionally. Roughly, 65-80% of Slavs to be starved or murdered straight away (at least 100+ million people) while the rest were either shipped off to the wilderness, enslaved or under go "germanization" (most likely collaborators). The American West was won by murder and conquest but just not to that extent.
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Aug 24, 2016 10:31
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vyelkin posted:This is a bit of a misconception. Reparations were big enough to be noteworthy but not big enough to actually severely affect the German economy. The enormous numbers of reparations that the Allies calculated as the cost of the war that Germany should be liable for were for show, the actual numbers Germany was expected to pay were much smaller. In real terms, the actual reparations Germany paid between 1920 and 1931 were 20 billion gold marks (which apparently translates to about $20 billion 2016 US dollars according to an uncited source I saw, so take that with a grain of salt), of which 12.5 billion were cash, and most of that cash came from loans from the United States. In essence the United States was paying back its own loans to the Allies: France and Britain paid back war loans from America by getting reparations from Germany, which were paid using loans from American banks, set up under the 1924 Dawes Plan and the 1929 Young Plan, both of which reduced the amount Germany was required to pay per year. As for the hyperinflation that gets brought up a lot, that was actually a deliberate attempt by the German government to get out of paying their reparations by devaluing their currency and it didn't work. After they stopped printing money and reparations were stabilized under the Dawes Plan, Weimar actually enjoyed a period of economic stability in the latter half of the 1920s. I think a 1:1 exchange rate between 2016 dollars and Goldmarks is throwing off your analysis. A mark was 5 grams of Silver and comparable US dollar was 25.7 grams which means an effective exchange rate of 5.5 . There has been 1200% worth of inflation since 1920, which means 12:1 inflation ratio between 1920:2016 dollars. 1 / 5.5 x 12 = 2.18. The equivalent was 43.6 billion dollars,, the German economy was about 392 billion dollars (2016) in 1925 which means the reparations were a little over 10% of GDP. That isn't insignificant, it would be roughly 1.8-1.9 trillion for the current US economy. Also, a key part your missing here was that France and Britain were occurring the Rhur-Rhine industrial area in Germany ie its industrial heart, which was seriously effecting output and which pushed the Germans to print in the first place. It is also why re-militarizing the Rhineland was such a big deal for the Nazis. The reparations were theoretically payable if Germany was functional, but it wasn't during during 1923-1924. quote:The big problem with the German economy wasn't the reparations themselves, which weren't especially arduous for an economy the size of Germany's. The problem was that the mechanisms by which the reparations were being paid, i.e. the fact that the German economy was heavily supported by US banking loans, meant they were extremely exposed when the Great Depression hit and US banks withdrew their foreign loans. Germany was one of the worst affected countries in the world by the Great Depression, and traditional economic tools were insufficient to remedy the situation because a) they no longer had access to the US banks that had been supporting the economy before; and b) macroeconomic policy at the time was completely focused on austerity, which only made the Depression worse. It was the resulting economic and political chaos as Germany's political elites discredited themselves one by one, by entering power to try and fix the economic chaos and failing since they were unwilling to break with economic orthodoxy, that led to the rise of the Nazis, but that had very little to do with the size of reparations payments themselves. The Great Depression was in the big nail in the coffin for the Weimar Republic but ultimately it was built on anger and distrust that had building across the 1920s and deep political divisions in German society which were readily apparent by 1918-1920. While the Versailles Treaty wasn't wholly the issue, it put additional pressure on a society that was already bitter and disunited and the few years of stability in the mid-1920s didn't really didn't fix this. I think there is way too much of a desire to wipe away the issue under the rug, but the combination of the occupation of the Rhur-Rhine, the reparations and eventually hyperinflation which cause long-lasting bitterness in German society that helped set the stage. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Sep 7, 2016 |
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Sep 7, 2016 20:18
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vyelkin posted:Well I'm happy to see someone actually do the math on the exchange rate, as I said that came from a random uncited source so I'm unsurprised it was wrong. That being said, even based on your own math I would dispute the centrality of reparations. The total reparations paid from 1920-1931 was 20 billion goldmarks or 43.6 billion dollars according to your calculations, but that's total reparations, not annual. Reparations changed from year to year based on which plan Germany was currently following (under the terms of the Dawes plan annual payments were supposed to annually increase from one billion marks to 2.5 billion over five years, while under the Young Plan they were set at two billion marks per year), but if we average out the total over 11 years it's roughly 4 billion 2016 dollars per year from an economy of 392 billion 2016 dollars (your figure), which is around 1% of GDP. Again, big enough to be noteworthy but not big enough to mean "that huge amounts of the German economy were being siphoned off" as the poster I was responding to said. You have to remember though that the allies were demanding additional resources on top of simply monetary reparations, at one point 26% of German exports. Furthermore, the economic damage from the occupation of the Rhur-Rhine region is certainly more than 1% of German GDP. The baseline reparations weren't enough to cause a meltdown, especially after 1925, but the much of the additional demands surrounding them were. I would say this is very much a part of the aftermath of the Versailles Treaty. quote:I don't disagree at all with your analysis of the social and cultural factors stemming from Versailles or the lingering societal trauma from the war itself or from the postwar years of civil war, occupation of the Ruhr-Rhine, hyperinflation, and so on. It would take a lot more than five years of relative economic stability to mend those wounds. But I absolutely don't think you can really point to reparations as a major economic cause of Weimar's collapse, Hitler's rise, and the leadup to WWII except insofar as they contributed to the German economy's reliance on foreign capital and therefore exposure to the Depression. As a social-cultural cause, absolutely, the humiliation of paying reparations was significantly greater than the actual economic burden of the reparations themselves. I would say it is a major indirect cause, the direct economic cause being the Great Depression itself. However, societies usually meltdown in stages and the events of 1921-1925 was one of those stages in German society. I think it is an important different in understanding history, and ultimately also why events like the modern-day Eurocrisis shouldn't be swept under the rug. According to most statistics the Eurozone has improved in the first few years, but the scars of the 2009-2014 period are clearly evident and has put new pressures on European political culture which very well may erupt again if the right bank isn't able to pay its creditors.
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Sep 7, 2016 20:59
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Kemper Boyd posted:The whole thing about the Soviets pushing to the Channel if not for the Western Allies getting in the way thing seems to be a myth. The Soviets really didn't have the resources to garrison all of Europe, and I don't think anyone has ever discovered anything indicating that Stalin would have even wanted to do so. He probably would have occupied Germany and Austria and leveraged further support to Communist Parties in France and Italy (both of which in our time came pretty close to coming to power). The Soviets may have not had the manpower to garrison all of Europe, but they also had quite a bit of local support they could have used to their advantage. Either way, even if the allies were only delayed a few months, it would have probably gave the Soviets a much more significant edge in Central Europe at least. The big issue would be that the Soviets would also have access to full access to German research and industry which would have probably balanced how the Cold War quite a bit (the US would still have a massive economic and trade advantage).
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Sep 21, 2016 11:17
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Minor quibble: He got gassed, not shot. But to answer the larger question, it's hard really to overstate how Hitler as a person was just a really weird guy. His time in the Imperial Army was, by his own account, one of the best times of his life, and looked at externally it's hard not to see it also as a formative experience. Prior to joining up in 1914 he really never had any direction in life, his abortive attempts to get into the Vienna Academy of Fine Art being the closest he got, and he found he was one of those guys who just really thrives in regimented army life, and developed the first elements of what eventually became his larger ideas on Germany's national destiny while in the ranks (ie: Germany is destined to defeat the Entente and carve out a great empire in the East). He wasn't immune to the horrible parts of trench life, but seems to have considered them secondary, perhaps even necessary, elements of this transformative period of his personal development. I think a missing part of the typical narrative of Hitler's life was that from 1907 to 1913 not only was he was an art school reject, he was basically homeless. He spent his time in Vienna living moving from flop house to flop house (if not on the street at some point). That type of experience was not only humiliating but probably traumatizing. The German army gave him a job, a purpose and 3 square meals. From the his perspective, the hell of war was worth moving up from what was basically "gutter trash." Hell, he even got an Iron Cross out of it. I know it is a pretty unpopular opinion, but Adolf at the end of the day was actually still a human being even if he was a very hosed up one. (Stalin didn't have too dissimilar of a story, he grew up in poverty in Gori, Georgia and most of his early life was pretty hosed up until he joined up with the Bolsheviks just before the 1905 revolution.) Ardennes fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Oct 13, 2016 |
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Oct 13, 2016 01:19
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