I was doing some casual reading and found that in WWII, 26 million Russians died. What would it have been like for the West if the Russians had not been keeping him busy? What if they had just been neutral like Switzerland, and Sweden?
We hear so much about the 6 million Jews who died in WWII. I read an estimate that 75-80 million people worldwide died.
I know there have been books written about Germany winning WWII. What a chilling thought.
The number of Russians who died doesn't mean much by itself.
One of the errors people make in analyzing the impact of a given country on a war is to look at death counts and assume that every death had the same level of impact on ending the war. That is absolutely not true.
15-20 million Chinese died in WW2, with 3-4 million being military deaths (compared with 400,000 military deaths for the USA) - but China had a negligible impact on the outcome of the war in favor of the allies. Whereas the USA had a decisive impact on the war.
Sometimes a high death count just means your side was horribly outmatched and got slaughtered.
That is the case to a large extent with Russian death statistics.
Over half of the total 10 million Russian military deaths happened before or during Stalingrad, and those could be said to be the deaths that cost the Russians the most but gained the least militarily.
The majority of those pre-Stalingrad deaths were not very productive deaths in terms of combat effectiveness. A lot of them involved simply being slaughtered in the German's opening blitzkrieg as they were surrounded and annihilated. Other large quantities of deaths were the result of desperate attacks across a broad front designed to find whatever weak point they could in the German lines and then start pouring into those gaps. This only happened after the German advance stalled in the winter combined with overstretched Germany logistical lines that couldn't sustain further advance at the pace they had been. These Russian offensives helped regain some ground by forcing the Germans to pull back to more defensible positions, but at a high cost because the Germans were playing a very effective defensive strategy that minimized their losses while holding onto key logistical networks. The Russians were not able to effect a breakthrough on the German line as the Germans had done to them earlier, and their gains were arguably of not much consequence beyond solidifying what was already a stalling German advance.
In contrast, total German military deaths on the eastern front were only 1.1 million, out of a total of 2 million military deaths (Captured and injured are not factored into either side for the sake of simplicity in explanation). They were not operating at the same efficiency level as the Germans were. You cannot compare military deaths with a 1 to 1 parity and assume that just because they died that they had an equal impact on the outcome of the war. The Germans achieved far more impact with less manpower expended to achieve it. You could argue that each German death had a much greater impact on influencing the war than a given Russian death.
There are also many other factors that go into contributing to military victory that can't be expressed in pure death statistics.
For instance:
1. Regardless of numerical superiority on the ground, the side with air superiority always wins. This has been true of war ever since WW2, and arguably was still true even in WW1.
It was the USA that destroyed the Luftwaffe and diverted massive German resources to defending Germany airspace. They forced the Germans to surrender tactical air superiority to the Russians on the eastern front, all but ensuring the Germans were destined to retreat.
2. The USA destroyed German oil supplies, effectively ending the war on that basis alone. German planes sat on the runway without fuel, and German tanks attacking through the Ardennes ground to a halt despite major success because they simply ran out of fuel and couldn't capture the America stockpiles they were hoping to find. German sources say the USA bombing campaign against their oil had effectively stabbed them in the heart. It was, oil, afterall, that was the main strategic objective for hitler in launching his attack against Russia, because at the start of the war Germany had only a few months of oil available for combat operations.
You could argue that each American air force death had more impact on ending the war than most other types of deaths.
3. Economic industry. Russia didn't have the industrial capability to wage war on the scale they did. They would not have been able to field an army as large as they did without massive American economic and military aid. It was American trains, transported to Russia from the USA and given to them for free, that powered the arteries of Russian industry and kept their troops supplied. It has to be remembered that logistics is the real concern of an army, moreso than fighting (As Napolean said, an army marches on it's stomach. And, as Patton said, amateurs talk tactics, experts talk logistics). To say nothing of the raw resources and weapons the USA also sent. The full of extent of the aid Russia received from the USA was so staggering that Soviet archives kept the truth hidden until communism fell, because they wanted to perpetuate the myth that they alone had defeated Germany by their own power. Without that aid perhaps they would have collapsed before Stalingrad. They certainly would not have been able to counter-attack and sustain an advance the way they did after Stalingrad without US resources being poured into their country.
They wouldn't have been able to bounce back as easily, if at all, and any attack they launched would have stalled out earlier. Especially since they had to re-arm themselves after the catastrophic defeats of the first year when the bulk of the soviet army was wiped out and they had to mobilize a new army out of fresh recruits with new gear.
People make these same mistakes when talking about WW1. They fail to realize that you can't always measure a side's contribution to ending the war purely by death counts. Europeans try to discount the impact the USA had on ending the war in the favor of the Entente by citing only death statistics, failing to recognize that war is not a simplistic game of Risk but has many complex indirect factors that determine victory beyond death counts. The fact that the USA was holding about 1/3 of the line by the end of the war is one clue that reveals why the Germans had no choice but to surrender (and the Americans weren't at full strength yet either. Maybe more like half of their potential strength by that point if I recall. They were still in the process of building up! It took time to train and ship over the troops, given the limited transports available). The Americans didn't need to die in the quantity that the French and British had in order to act as a decisive tipping force that gave the Germans no option but to surrender, because what they brought to the table was so overwhelming by that point that the Germans knew resistance was futile. Without the American entry into the war, France and Britain didn't necessary have the wherewithal to go on the offensive and drive Germany out of France. They were too battered and beaten, their morale too low, and Germany had just defeated Russia, already defeated Romania, and almost knocked Italy out of the war too. Troops were going to pour into the west from the east, and Germany was going to start relieving it's food crisis by robbing from Russian territory under their control. Germany wasn't in a good position to outright knock France/Britain out of the war either - But all Germany needed to do to win was stalemate things to the point where France and Britain would be open to a negotiated peace whereby Germany got to keep most of their territory gains. Germany held all the cards as long as they could prevent themselves from being starved out by the British blockade using captured eastern resources. It was the American entry to the war that forced the hand of the Germans, forced them to mount a suicidal last ditch 1918 spring offensive that ended in defeat, and with the rising numbers of American divisions every month the Germans were not in a position to stalemate the front in defensive warfare as they could if they had continued to only face the British and French. Germany no longer held all the cards when America entered the war. America put an entirely new set of cards into play that trumped what was in Germany's hand. Germany knew they couldn't play for very long before they would be forced to fold.
Another example of how people misinterpret simple data points and miss the full picture: Territorial gains in 1918. They look at how much territory Britain and France gained offensively in terms of kilometers squared and scoff at the relatively minor gains made by the American's in the same time. However, they fail to recognize that the Germans purposely conducted an orderly withdrawl in the northern sectors so they could throw more forces into defending against the American offensive in the middle/south sectors. The reason? The Americans were a short distance away from cutting off the main railway arteries from Germany into Belgium and France. If the Germans lost that link then their positions in the north would be untennable anyway because all major rail lines to the northern sectors had to first pass through the area the Americans were trying to capture. The American plan, after severing the rail lines out of Germany, was to stab at the heart of the German industrial ruhr just across the border with France. That would have effectively knocked Germany out of the war if captured. Germany understood all this, which is why they ceded ground in the more northern sectors to defend against the American offensive at all costs. It was actually a brilliant strategic decision by Pershing. In hindsight it seems so obvious it makes you wonder why the French and British never tried it.
The biggest problem with typical European perspectives on WW1 is that they hold to the mistaken belief that they didn't actually need the USA to defeat Germany. Death counts and yardage gained in 1918 are incomplete and out of context statistics that are used to bolster that myth. However, the truth is the could not have expected to defeat Germany without US intervention. A stalemate resulting in armistice favorable to Germany was likely to be the result.
