They give too much credit to Germany's military potential. The LW for example, it had 2000 planes destroyed in combat during the Barbarossa. By late 1941, the Luftwaffe was scraping the barrel, as we can see here:The nations confronting the Axis powers had few options. Great Britain had to remain on the strategic defensive, concentrating on winning the Battle of the Atlantic and retaining a lodgment in the Middle East. The British faced enormous risk, however, and G-2 analyses could not confidently predict victory of the United Kingdom, even with full American collaboration. British reverses in the Middle East, or a Russian collapse on that front, would enable the Germans to concentrate an overwhelming military force against England. For the British, the situation hinged on three issues: the German ability to win quickly in Russia without suffering excessive losses; the German ability to reconstitute military forces quickly after that victory; and the German ability to control the conquered regions and exploit their resources with the use of minimal forces. Having outlined such grim prospects, Smith concluded that "from a long range viewpoint, the situation is not hopeless for Great Britain, assuming the continuation of Russian resistance and/or full U.S. participation in the war."31
The crucial factor was the state of the Soviet Union. If fortune smiles on Russian arms, Germany might yet be prevented from achieving the early and decisive victory essential to the realization of
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her military and economic objectives. But if Germany decisively defeated Russia, then Germany would extend its control over the vast expanses of central Eurasia. Within that area existed adequate natural resources, foodstuffs, and industrial potential for the Germans to create a strong, centrally planned economy, the beginnings of German domination of Mackinder's "heartland."
Economically and militarily secure within a citadel that possessed immensely strong geographical barriers, Germany could release millions of men to industry and to the exploitation of her conquests. The Axis would be virtually unaffected by even the tightest sea blockade and beyond the range of most of the existing strategic air forces. Such a situation would present the United States with the most difficult military problem imaginable, particularly if it were compounded by the catastrophe of the fall of the British Isles. In that case the nation would have lost the only remaining area in Europe from which it could conduct effective operations against Germany.
The health of Russia was therefore of paramount concern, and the Soviet situation defined the time available for the United States to act against Germany. If Russia lost the war by the end of 1941, the Germans would probably require one full year to reorganize their armed forces to conduct an invasion of the British Isles. Germany would likely also need a full year to bring sufficient order out of the chaos of the conquered territories to be able to benefit militarily and economically from them. The earliest, therefore, that the Axis could mount an invasion of England would be the spring of 1942, with the spring of 1943 a much more likely date. In the meanwhile, the United States needed to provide for the security of the western hemisphere in the event that Russia collapsed and the British suffered invasion or agreed to negotiate a peace.32 Such an estimate coincided with general staff assumptions about the earliest date that the United States would be able to conduct offensive operations outside the western hemisphere. For a variety of reasons, War Plans Division believed that the Army could not implement the provisions of RAINBOW 5 before about July of 1943.33 The United States would not, for example, be able to assemble manpower, organize, and train sufficient forces to an
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adequate standard to fight the Axis before that date. On a basic level, the Army needed time to build training facilities and housing for expansion. Manpower mobilization had to proceed cautiously to avoid calling up the skilled hands necessary to build training facilities before they built those bases. The second major limitation was industrial because, even in the fall of 1941 and even after the expansion of defense industries to support the requirements of Lend Lease, not more than 15 percent of the industrial capacity of the United States was devoted to defense. America needed time to convert industries to defense production.34 Finally, shipping would present problems.
In the middle of 1941 virtually all of the American merchant fleet was in normal commercial service. Around 855,000 gross tons of shipping could be made available to transport an expeditionary force overseas and then sustain it in an overseas theater. The WPD estimated that amount of shipping could move not more than 50,000 men and their equipment and 90 day's supplies to a trans-oceanic theater. That situation would improve significantly throughout 1942. Before the United States could fight outside the hemisphere, more time would be required to assemble the necessary vessels and prepare them for military use; to build the additional shipping that war service would make necessary; and to establish adequate port facilities at points of embarkation and debarkation.35 Wedemeyer later learned that the shipping required to transport the Army and Air Corps overseas amounted to around seven million tons, or one thousand vessels. Maintaining that force in overseas theaters required about ten million tons of shipping, or 1,500 hips. The two years required to build those ships coincided with the time the general staff estimated the Army needed to raise and train the combat divisions.36 It also coincided with the period of maximum risk, the earliest date the general staff estimated that Germany would be able to invade Great Britain and deprive the United States of is European base.
As Wedemeyer began to plan to meet the crisis, he therefore understood that the earliest date that the United States could go to war in anything other than defense of the hemisphere was July 1943. The excellent prospects for Axis victory in Europe made it
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urgent for American to prepare its defenses as soon as possible. The chance that England would make peace with Germany or, indeed, be defeated, raised the possibility that the United States would have to continue the war alone. Thus he had to plan for a very large, and very well equipped, American army. But before the Army could engage in any decisive combat operations on the continent of Europe, the United States needed to establish certain conditions.
Wedemeyer was acutely conscious that the United States waged any war outside the western hemisphere at a considerable disadvantage. Before the Army could engage the enemy, the Navy had to transport it to the theater of operations. Besides crossing thousands of miles of potentially dangerous ocean, the United States had to establish and maintain an adequate line of supply across the ocean. Thus his first condition was that the Axis navies had to be swept from the seas, particularly from the Atlantic Ocean and those waters contiguous to Europe itself.37 Without the ability to transport military formations in security and to maintain the lines of supply needed to keep them in action, all other propositions became meaningless.
A powerful navy and a substantial merchant fleet were prerequisites, despite the increased fighting potential of the air arm. Air forces did not deprive naval vessels of their vital roles on the seas, but did accelerate the pace of war at sea and necessitate changes in the employment of navies. Neither could air forces effect the economic blockade of the enemy that was the concomitant of keeping sea lanes of communication open for the United States and Allied nations. A powerful navy remained essential, and planning had to allocate industrial potential and manpower with sea power in mind.38
? Air power was equally crucial, a fact Wedemeyer came to understand early in his career. "I was always air minded," Wedemeyer remarked in 1987.39 He was sufficiently taken with aviation to go with Nathan Twining, later a general officer in the Air Force, to take the Air Corps tests early in his career. Although he failed the flight physical, he retained a grasp unusual in a ground officer of the period of the potential for warfare in the third dimension. Both
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from his study of the art of war and from his education in Berlin, Wedemeyer knew that an air force multiplied the value of a smaller ground force by denying mobility to the more numerous enemy. Various memorandums from the Air Corps emphasized this theme, and the language of those documents found its way into the mobilization studies. "The important influence of the air arm in modern combat," Wedemeyer wrote, "has been irrefutably established." He continued to explain that
the degree of success attained by sea and ground forces will be determined by the effective and timely employment of air supporting units and the successful conduct of strategical missions. No major military operation in any theater will succeed without air superiority, or at least air superiority disputed.40
While air operations could not guarantee victory alone, without a powerful air arm defeat was likely. The second condition, as Wedemeyer saw it, was thus that "overwhelming air superiority must be accomplished."41
Air power was the principal weapon with which the United States could accomplish the third condition for successful military operations against the Axis. By strategic aerial bombardment, the Air Corps could attack the German industrial and economic structure and render that structure "ineffective through the continuous disruption and destruction of lines of communication, port and industrial facilities, and by the interception of raw materials."42 Wedemeyer was familiar with the doctrine for strategic bombing as espoused by Giulio Douhet and had been in the Army throughout the debates over air power occasioned by the court-martial of General Billy Mitchell. While he did not agree that air power could single-handedly win the war, a fact recently demonstrated by the failure of the German Douhet-style aerial offensive against England, he nonetheless agreed it was the ideal instrument with which to destroy the German economy.
The next condition was physical proximity to the enemy. That meant the United States needed advanced bases from which to
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operate. Not only did the country require the existing Atlantic bases in order to assure the security of the western hemisphere, but it also needed a series of bases to encircle Germany. From these forward bases, air forces could operate against the German industry and economy. Likewise, such bases offered convenient points from which to launch combined arms operations against the German "citadel" in Europe. In creating the necessary overseas stations, however, the Army had to be very careful to build only those bases that it really needed because the country could not afford to disperse its force so greatly that they could not "make timely and effective contributions to the accomplishment of our main task, the defeat of Germany."43 In building such bases, Wedemeyer pointed out that the provisions of RAINBOW 5 would have to govern:
The commitment of our forces must conform to our accepted broad strategic concept of active (offensive) operations in one theater (European), and concurrently, passive (defensive) operations in the other (Pacific).44
Finally, Wedemeyer saw that the United States and the Allies had to weaken the enemy by overextending and dispersing his armies. Concentration of forces brought victory. If the Allies could so threaten the Axis that it had to send reinforcements in many directions, then the eventual decisive attack would inevitably succeed, because the enemy could meet it with only a portion of his total strength. Attacks on enemy supplies of fuel and matériel and, most particularly, his transportation net, contributed to this end. Deterioration of the enemy's national will on the home front might result from propaganda, subversion, deprivation of a reasonable standard of living, destruction of the fabric of the enemy's society, and the chaos and public disorder that accompany such domestic conditions. Strategic bombing, planners expected, would attack the German national will just as it attacked the German industry and economy. Civilian and economic chaos would, in turn, diminish the effectiveness of the German military forces.45
In sum, the United States had to adopt a military strategy that placed the bulk of American combat forces in contact with the enemy in the European theater. In order to accomplish this, the United States had to build and maintain armed forces capable of controlling
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the sea lanes of communications in two oceans; to fight a major land, sea, and air war in one theater; and to be sufficiently strong to deter war in the other. No other nation faced the task of building up its army, navy, and air forces to such standards, to meet such global commitments. Likewise, no other power had to rely upon lines of supply tenuously stretched across oceans, the control of which was still disputed, to bases that had still, in many cases, to be won.
http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/AAF ... ffe-3.htmlFor the second year in a row, the Luftwaffe had lost nearly its entire complement of aircraft. The German air force could not look forward, as it had in 1940 after the Battle of Britain, to a period of recuperation. The failure in front of Moscow meant that the war in the east would continue with its ever-vaster commitments and its interminable distances. In the west, after a year and half of frustration, the British were beginning to acquire the capability needed to savage German cities by night, while the first units of the American Army Air Forces would soon appear over the daytime skies of Western Europe. In the Mediterranean, the Germans had virtually lost control of the skies over the Africa Corps. Thus, everywhere Germany faced increasing commitments with forces that barely reached prewar levels.
The reasons for this dangerous situation are not hard to find. A failure to draw objective conclusions from the attrition rates of 1940, overweening pride and arrogance after the early victories, and a refusal to recognize the fact that modern war ever since the time of the American Civil War has been a struggle of industrial production as well as a conflict on the battlefield all converged to weaken the Luftwaffe fatally. Combined with these failings went a regime, the criminal inclinations of which have rarely been equalled in history. Whatever political opportunities existed in the campaign against Russia which, combined with military success, might have threatened Stalin's government never came to fruition. Germany now faced a worldwide coalition with an army near defeat in Russia and an air force that was already in serious trouble. The fact that the Reich recovered from this situation and managed to hold on for the next three and one-half years is a remarkable comment on the staying power of the German people and their military institutions, if not their good sense. Nevertheless, the defeat in front of Moscow represented the decisive military turning point of World War II. From this point on, Germany had no chance to win the war; and with her inadequate production, she faced enemies who would soon enjoy overwhelming numerical superiority in the air and on the ground.
I will check info for this later, but the aerial defense of Britain improved considerably in '41. If Germany brings the LW back to "play" with Britain in '42, it would not be anything easy. If the USAAF deploys aircraft to help the RAF counter German attacks, than even better for the Allies.
. Anyway, as already stated, the other itens would definately help the Allies to adapt themselfs to the new scenario.