fastmongrel
1st Sergeant
Erm the USSR didnt attack Japan till Aug 45 and Germany attacked the USSR first.
Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules
In short, if the USSR attacked Japan INSTEAD of Germany, leaving us completely free to help Britain, then yes, the Allies could win the air war.
I think you underestimate the Luftwaffe.
The territories that Germany had conquered in 1940, though they provided substantial booty and a crucial source of labour did not bear comparison with the abundance provided to Britain by America. The aerial arms race was the distinctive Anglo-American contribution to the war and it played directly to America's dominance in manufacturing. But though the disparity in aircraft deliveries was extreme it was not untypical. A similarly vast gulf was also evident in relation to energy supplies, the most basic driver of modern urban and industrial society. Whereas the Anglo-American alliance was energy rich, Germany and its Western European Grossraum were starved of food, coal and oil.The disparity with respect to oil was most serious. Between 1940 and 1943 the mobility of Germany's army, navy and air force, not to mention its domestic economy, depended on annual imports of 1.5 million tonsof oil, mainly from Romania. In addition, German synthetic fuel factories, at huge expense, produced a flow of petrol that rose from 4 million tons in 1940 to a maximum of 6.5 million tons in 1943. Seizing the fuel stocks of France as booty in no way resolved this fundamental dependency. In fact, the victories of 1940 had the reverse effect. They added a number of heavy oil consumers to Germany's own fuel deficit. From its annual fuel flow of at most 8 million tons, Germany now had to supply not only its own needs, but those of the rest of Western Europe as well. Before the war, the French economy had consumed at least 5.4 million tons per annum, at a per capita rate 60 per cent higher than Germany's. The effect of the German occupation was to throw France back into an era before motorization. From the summer of 1940 France was reduced to a mere 8 per cent of its pre-war supply of petrol. In an economy adjusted to a high level of oil consumption the effects were dramatic. To give just one example, thousands of litres of milk went to waste in the French countryside every day, because no petrol was available to ensure regular collections. Of more immediate concern to the military planners in Berlin were the Italian armed forces, which depended entirely on fuel diverted from Germany and Romania. By February 1941, the Italian navy was threatening to halt its operations in the Mediterranean altogether unless Germany supplied at least 250,000 tons of fuel. And the problems were by no means confined to the Reich's satellites. Germany itself coped only by dint of extreme economy. In late May 1941, General Adolf von Schell, the man responsible for the motor vehicle industry, seriously suggested that in light of the chronics hortage of oil it would be advisable to carry out a partial 'demotorization' of the Wehrmacht. It is commonly remarked that the Luftwaffe suffered later in the war because of the inadequate training of its pilots, due in large part to the shortage of air fuel. But in 1941 the petrol shortage was already so severe that the Wehrmacht was licensing its soldiers to drive heavy trucks with less than 15 kilometres of on-road experience, a measure which was blamed for the appalling attrition of motor vehicles during the Russian campaign. Shortages made themselves felt across the German economy. So tight were fuel rations that in November 1941 Opel was forced to shut down production at its Brandenburg plant, Germany's largest truck factory, because it lacked the petrol necessary to check the fuel pumps of vehicles coming off theassembly line. A special allocation of 104 cubic metres of fuel had to bearranged by the Wehrmacht's economic office so as to ensure that there were no further interruptions.
Though the continental bloc could certainly satisfy both 'ideological' and 'pragmatic' criteria, the advocates of a long-term alliance with the Soviet Union were never in a majority in Berlin and this too was as much for pragmatic as for ideological reasons. In the long term a genuine alliance would have involved an unacceptable degree of German dependence on the Soviets. As General Haider noted in his diary in December 1940: 'Every weakness in the position of the Axis brings a push by the Russians. They cannot prescribe the rules for transactions, but they utilize every opportunity to weaken the Axis position.' In a Eurasian continental bloc, it would be the central power, the Soviet Union, not Japan or Germany, that would ultimately occupy the dominant position.The Third Reich had no intention of slipping into the kind of humbling dependence that Britain now occupied in relation to the United States, mortgaging its assets and selling its secrets, simply to sustain the war effort. That this was the direction in which Germany might be headed was evident already in the spring of 1940. Just prior to the German offensive in the West, Moscow demanded as part payment for its raw material deliveries the construction of two chemicals plants in the Soviet Union, one for coal hydrogenation (synthetic fuel), the other to embody IG Farben's revolutionary Buna process (synthetic rubber).
The Soviet Union was to have full access to both the blueprints and the complex instrumentation necessary to monitor the high-pressure reactions. Not surprisingly, IG Farben balked and with the support of the German military the deal was blocked. But the fact that the Soviets could even make such demands indicates the seriousness of the German dilemma. The hugely increased volume of trade needed to sustain Germany's blockaded Grossraum was bound to give the Soviet Union ever-increasing leverage. By the autumn of 1940, Germany's dependence on deliveries of raw materials, fuel and food from the Soviet Union was creating a positively schizophrenic situation. In trade negotiations, German machine tools
were one of the means of settlement prized most highly by the Soviets. Such exports, however, were in direct conflict with the preparations of Germany's own armed forces for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Astonishingly, rather than interrupting the Soviet deliveries to prioritize the Luftwaffe, Göring in early October 1940 ordered that, at least until 11 May 1941, deliveries to the Soviet Union, and thus to the Red Army, should have equal priority with the demands of the Wehrmacht. Even in the immediate prelude to operation Barbarossa, Germany could not afford to do without Soviet deliveries of oil, grain and alloy metals.The willingness to engage in such bizarre compromises reflected the increasing concern in Berlin over the precarious situation of Germany'sraw material supplies.
As the military-economic office of the Wehr-macht concluded at the end of October 1940: 'Current favourable raw material situation (improved by stocks captured in enemy territory) will,in case of prolonged war and after consumption of existing stocks,re-emerge as bottleneck. From summer 1941 this is to be expected incase of fuel oil as well as industrial fats and oils.
Christos military and intelligence corner: Eastern Front Aircraft Strength and Losses 1941-45
The LW fighter strenght in the East doesn't look very impressive.
The Wages of Destruction, Adam Tooze, page 410:
Page 450:
There's a difference between a Germany that has defeated the USSR according to the Barbarossa planning, and hence acquired significative resources, and a Germany that doesn't attack the USSR at all (the case proposed in this thread).
Remember, air power only, no U-boats. Theyd have to get some planes past the Wildcats to destroy a Carrier (carriers are allowed as they are just mobile runways)
But DonL, I repeat, the Allies would have 5.5 million extra men avaliable. It's out of my knowledge, however, how many of them in both sides could become pilots. The Allies also would have all the Lend-Lease that did not went to the USSR. I don't know, but the impression I have is that it would be a bloody air war, but one that the Allies still could win. Of course, then you have to considerate the oil coming from the USSR, which was also a factor.
but the casualtys to the RAF and USAAF would be extreme especially at 1942 and 1943, when the LW was technical equal to it's enemys.
Again, never said it was single sided, but Germany is much smaller industrywise, manpowerwise, not to mention the US had the UK, Canada, and LE FRENCH RESISTAAANCE on their side even without counting Russia.
I think that it would be possible to take on Germany on air power alone (w/o USSR) if the US didn't have to divert forces to the PTO and CBI. If our carriers had been parked in the Atlantic/Mediterranean instead of the Pacific, then all those Wildcats, Warhawks, Liberators, Corsairs, Hellcats and all the other aircraft that became famous in the Pacific would be in the ETO and MTO, bringing all their famous hurt with them. The pilots that became famous in the AVG would be raining pain on the Luftwaffe instead of the IJAAF, and the Black Sheep's Corsairs would be flying over pine trees and snow instead of Palm trees and sand. In short, if the USSR attacked Japan INSTEAD of Germany, leaving us completely free to help Britain, then yes, the Allies could win the air war.
How those extreme casualities would occur?
With the loss of every single air craft carrier that would try to attack european homeland through the Atlantic, Mediterranean or Norway (1942/43) and countless of fighter a/c's which would try to fight the LW near at their bases.