I like the threads. Very good discussion. The author of main article has an agenda, very bold claims. Lend Lease odviously helped, but to say Germany would have won, Im afraid he is not informed.

The bottom line, though, is that the power of the Wehrmacht was broken in Russia, and it happened before the Western Allies engaged the Germans in Europe. Indeed, one could argue that Germany's defeat was probable, if certainly not inevitable, by December, 1941, when the Germans were stopped and rolled back by Zhukov's counterattacks around Moscow. And this was before more than a fraction of the Lend Lease aid had reached the USSR.

This is not to say that the loss of 20 or 30 German divisions in North Africa was not a body blow to the Nazis, or that the resources diverted to contesting the air war were not important, or that the necessity to station troops in Western Europe because of the threat of invasion was not critical to Russia's victory. As one commentator suggests, if most of those divisions had participated in Operation Barbarossa, the outcome of the war would have been different.

Maybe the best way to resolve this debate is to consider that keeping the USSR in the war was the West's number one strategic priority, and that Lend Lease, the air war, the North African campaign, and the threat of invasion, kept the USSR in the war. Although estimates vary, the Red Army may have lost as many as 13 – 14 million killed (not just casualties, but killed, missing forever, or captured, which for Soviet prisoners was pretty much a death sentence). Would the US, which was averse to casualties, or Britain, with the hideous casualties of WWI in mind, have been willing to sustain such carnage? Of course, Western armies were more careful of the lives of their soldiers in any case, and relied more on technology than on human wave attacks, so their casualty rates would surely have been lower than those of the USSR. Nevertheless, I doubt the US and Britain would have been willing or able to defeat the Wehrmacht if the USSR had been knocked out of the war in 1941 or 1942. And given that the bomb was not even tested until July, 1945, my guess is that if the USSR had not continued to fight, there would have been a truce or a peace settlement, and a kind of Cold War between the Western Allies and Germany would have been the result.

One last observation, particularly directed at the Roosevelt haters….FDR got every single one of the fundamental strategic decisions of WWII right. He saw that Germany could not be defeated if the USSR were knocked out, so he did everything he could to keep the Russians in the war. Those who talk about how he appeased Stalin should ask themselves how many of those 13,000,000 dead Soviet soldiers they would be willing to replace with dead Americans and Brits. Roosevelt saw that to engage Germany in the West would take an invasion, and that would in turn require that Britain be preserved as the base for such an invasion, so he did everything he could to save Britain. He forced Churchill to accept an invasion of France, instead of the peripheral operations of which the architect of the Dardanelles campaign was so enamoured. FDR recognized that the US contribution would not be just an enormous army, but a huge Navy and the orderly expansion of American industrial production, and he brought that about. He saw that, however corrupt and worthless the Chinese army was, it helped tie down a million Japanese troops who could otherwise be engaged in killing Americans, so he put up with a lot of crap to keep China in the war. And finally, he bet a gigantic amount of money and scientific, technical, and manufacturing resources on the development of an utterly untested and even unimagined new weapon, the atomic bomb.

Franklin Roosevelt was a strategic genius. We can argue about his post war decisions on another occasion, but no individual contributed as much to America's complete victory in WWII.

In spite of the cost in terms of post-war Communist influence in Asia, it must have seemed like a pretty good deal to Roosevelt and Truman at the time. There were more than a million Japanese troops on the mainland, and if they had been able to return to Japan absent a Soviet threat, they would have made what was shaping up to be a ghastly level of casualties during the invasion of Japan even worse. Of course in hindsight we know that the atomic bomb worked, and relieved us of the need for an invasion (although it should be noted that many historians think the Soviet declaration of war was actually as influential or even more influential in the Japanese decision to surrender than the atom bombs).

By the way, I categorically reject the revisionist notion that the US dropped the bomb not to win the war but to scare the Russians, to position us better in the coming contest with the USSR for superiority. That may have been a peripheral effect, and Truman and his advisers must have been aware of it, but they dropped the bomb to end the war.

Russians refused to help the Allies in Asia when the Allies WANTED the help. They were discouraged from entering only after the theater was all wrapped up.

4924 P-39 used as 'tank busters'
2421 P-63 used as 'tank busters'
2316 P-40 various marks [low level fighter]
376 DB-7 type light bombers
3125 A-20 light bombers
862 B-25 medium bombers
203 P-47 fighters [high altitude fighter]
2952+ Hawker Hurricane fighters dispatched from UK

This is not an immaterial number of combat aircraft!