I'm honestly not sure about this one, but it's all I've got I'm afraid.

08/10/20: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Seelowe

Hello chums! Yesterday, I did a one-shot about a Nazi and Imperial Japanese invasion of the United States. On Deviantart, I got a response commenting on the logistical implausibility of the Imperial Japanese Fleet operating in the Pacific, and I was about to reply by saying 'pretty much all of this requires divine intervention,' and I realised something.

I've shat on the Nazis and their allies time and time again, but I've never really gone into one of the big elephants in the room when it comes to discussing the Axis in World War II, and with this very likely being the last Halloween Unspectacular, well, when am I ever going to get another chance to do this.

Here's the thing about Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the rest; for all the terror and awe and disgust they have inspired in the seventy-odd years since the Second World War, for all the forces they deployed, the tanks, the planes, the ships, the propaganda of the invisible armies and navies, for all of these things…

…the Axis Powers didn't have a hope in hell of winning the war.

Now you might be thinking 'wait, that can't be right? They both had powerful and professional armies, and look at all the victories they won early in the war! Surely it was a bit touch and go, at least!'

Well, let me break this down.

Winning against the B-Team

Imagine you have two teams in the 'based ball' sport that Americans enjoy so much. One of them is the New York Yankees. The other is, let's say, the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant team. When the Yankees steamroll Springfield, you don't say 'oh wow, look at the prowess of the Yankees!' You say, 'well, that was a fairly expected outcome.'

Germany defeated seven countries in between September 1939 and June 1940, and on paper that looks really impressive. But let's dissect that.

One of them was Luxembourg. You don't get points for conquering Luxembourg.

The Dutch hadn't fought a European War since Waterloo in 1815. Denmark was invaded before they had any chance of mobilising and making an effective defence. Poland was massively outclassed by the German Army (but it still took the Soviets hitting their rear to truly knock them out.) Norway and Belgium were outnumbered and outgunned. That leaves France.

You can't really understand why Germany rolled over France unless you think about in the context of the First World War. I don't think a lot of Americans do, which leads to a lot of the hurr hurr France surrenders jokes. France lost an absolutely staggering amount of men in the First World War, around a million, to the point where there was still a demographic gap in their population. The very idea of having to do all of that again was completely unthinkable to the French commanders.

Furthermore, their general officers were, in general, either very old, sympathetic to fascism as a method of fighting the communists, or both. The main French commander, Maurice Gamelin, was suffering from neurosyphilis. The other major military figures, Marshal Petain and General Weygand, were both defeatist. Charles Huntzinger, commanding the French in the critical Ardennes sector, was probably one of the best generals Germany had.

What about the Soviet Union? Germany won a lot there, didn't they? Well, yes they did, but that was against an army that had had all of it's senior officers purged by Stalin, who was constantly meddling with how it fought. Once the Soviets got over the shock of the initial invasion, the Germans were pretty much done.

As for Japan, it's hard to overstate the sheer incompetence of the allied commanders taking on their first attacks into the Pacific region. The defence of Singapore was dogged by idiotic commanders, and the defence of the Philippines by the US was little better. It's worth pointing out that after about June 1942, Japan made no more significant military advances the US for the rest of the war (although it did attempt some against China and Britain in 1944.)

In short, the Axis won against badly lead, badly equipped armies at the start of the war, which looks more impressive than it actually was because of the Goebbels propaganda machine and the amount of on-paper land they took. Which brings me to my next point.

Land isn't actually worth much

In mid-1942, the Axis Powers had control of most of mainland Europe, the Chinese coast, half of North Africa, Southeast Asia and most of the eastern Pacific Ocean. If you look at a map, it looks pretty impressive.

It's worth interrogating how much value all that territory actually was.

Some of it was useful, of course – Norway secured Germany's route to the Swedish iron ore mines, and on paper Japan's conquest of Indonesia should have been enough to provide the resources it needed to hold out. But then you look at Yugoslavia or Greece, which provided nothing for Germany and Italy, and in fact forced them to divert men to deal with partisan activity. In much the same way, all of the territory Germany captured in Eastern Europe and Russia provided very little economic or military benefit (the Soviets had moved what they could and burned what they couldn't) while being hotbeds of resistance activity (something to do with the whole 'we're here to exterminate you' thing. Doesn't win friends, really.)

North Africa? Sometimes you see that justified as being about 'oil' or 'the Suez Canal,' not 'Mussolini's adventures in making the Roman Empire, but shit.' There was no realistic possibility of Rommel breaking through into the Levant or cutting the Suez Canal, for reasons we'll get into in a moment, which effectively meant Germany was fighting a see-saw battle with the British over a massive patch of desert sand.

As for Japan, on paper Indonesia and their other conquests should have supplied them enough to hold off the US and win the war. In actuality, when they were unable to protect their shipping from US submarines, it ended up being a big drain on manpower. The Allies never landed in Indonesia – they never needed to. They could and did bypass all of these high-profile claims and island-hop all the way to Japan, leaving them to wither on the vine.

But hey, they could paint the map their colour, right? That's how you win in the video games, right?

I accidentally my supply lines is that bad?

Wars aren't won on battlefields these days. They're won in factories and farms and on roads and railway lines and in big cargo ships and planes. You can have the biggest army in the world, and it doesn't mean a thing if they have to resort to cannibalism because you can't send them food. That's not a joke, that's what Japanese forces were doing on those islands that got bypassed.

(That's a bit of a dark factoid for comedy day.)

Forget all the images of the German Army as some ultra-mechanised war machine. For the entire war, the primary method of transportation in the German forces was the horse. They had hundreds of thousands of 'em. The thing about horses is that they're not very fast when they're pulling a cart. And the thing about tanks is that they are fast – at least compared to a horse.

The inevitable result is that your ultra-modern tanks have to stop because they ran out of petrol and the horse-and-cart that will resupply them is two hundred miles behind you. If you're Rommel, you have the secondary problems of a) being on the wrong side of the Mediterranean and having to wait for tankers to get to Tripoli and b) being a gibbon who doesn't understand that his tanks need petrol to run.

On top of that, you need to make sure your supply lines are protected. For example, convoys of ships at sea need to be guarded, so they don't all get sunk by submarines. The British and Americans could do this, but as Japan's fleet was chipped away, it found that it very much could not.

On top of that, everything you use to supply your army is finite. That's not so bad if you have all of the United States, or the entire British Empire, or all of Siberia behind you, but it's a big problem if all you have are some Romanian oil wells and you can't buy any more oil because literally everybody else on Earth hates you for some reason.

And it's not just petrol. You need steel to build tanks, aluminium for planes, nitrates for your explosives, rubber for the tires and tracks, food for your soldiers and population, coal to power your factories, and more besides. If you go to war, you need to be absolutely sure you can both access them and supply them to where they are needed.

Or I guess you could just Leeroy Jenkins your way into Russia and see how that works out for you. You do you, Dolfy.

Insert Raymond Scott's Powerhouse here

Let us assume the Axis can do that. Let's assume they can supply all their doods. Let us assume they can arm and equip all their armies and fleets and air forces to the best of their abilities.

It doesn't matter.

Let me give you some statistics to put things into perspective. The total production of German tanks of all types in World War II was just under fifty thousand. That's every kind of tank, including variants like tank destroyers and self-propelled guns. Seems impressive?

The United States built, between 1942 and 1945, forty-nine thousand, two hundred and thirty-four M4 Sherman tanks. Not tanks as a whole – just the Shermans. On top of that were six thousand M3 Lee tanks, and twenty-three thousand Stuart light tanks. In the USSR, they built fifty-seven thousand T-34s, with about twenty thousand built in 1944 alone.

In 1945 the Soviets had armies manned by millions of men, and the US Army had five full armies in the field in Europe, alongside two British, a Canadian and a French Army. At that point, Germany was sending retirees and children to the front, because they were completely out of men.

At sea, the United States was building a carrier a month, and famously built a transport ship in a single week. Japan struggled to replace any of their lost ships at all.

When it came right down to it, the Axis lost World War II because the Soviets and the Americans could not only outman them, they could outproduce them, and they could outproduce them with higher quality equipment. (Sherman tanks didn't randomly catch fire like their German counterparts.)

And it's worth remembering, the Allies didn't just decide to gang up on poor widdle Germany. Germany declared war on both of the world's biggest industrial powers, after spending a year fighting Britain, a country which also outproduced it (albeit by a less dramatic margin.)

Here's the final point of this rambling little essay of mine. Why couldn't the fascists win?

Because they were idiots. Hitler was a tinpot dictator with delusions of grandeur and an incapability to acknowledge obvious realities. Towards the end of the war, I'm fairly certain he lacked object permanence. Meanwhile Japan was ruled by a junta of wannabe Napoleons who, when faced with a crisis, took literally the worst possible route they could have pursued.

So if the Axis were so bumbling, inept and incompetent, why do we still fear them? Why was it so important that we defeat them, and defeat them thoroughly?

No matter how much of a blithering idiot Adolf Hitler was, the fact remained that every week, every day, every hour the Nazi regime still held, that was another atrocity that could be committed, another prisoner shot or starved, another child sent to fight tanks on a bicycle, another peasant shot out of hand in Ukraine, and another human being murdered in an industrial machine. Every day the war continued, be it in Europe or Africa or Asia, someone, somewhere suffered.

It's not about whether the fascists can win. It never has been. It's about how much damage they're able to do before they collapse.

Shit, that's a bit heavy. We need a joke to wrap this one up.

Wait, I've got one! It's a good one too.

Herman Goring.

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Okay, bye!