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I recently learned about the battle of Midway on one of the recent WWII Netflix docuseries. It was an early battle following Pearl Harbor, and it was Japan’s e

I recently learned about the battle of Midway on one of the recent WWII Netflix docuseries. It was an early battle following Pearl Harbor, and it was Japan’s entire carrier fleet vs US’ entire carrier fleet, and the grand totals were something like 4 carriers vs 3 carriers. At the end of the battle they mention that by the end of the war the US was completing multiple carriers per month, and they were just orders of magnitude ahead of every other country when it came to manufacturing power and steel production. Japans only hope was finishing the us Navy early on at Pearl Harbor and midway but once the US ramped up production the US never lost their military lead (arguably they still have it). Meanwhile at the start of WWII the US wasn’t even top 10 militarily. It’s astounding how much changed in those 5 years.

upon_drumhead 3y ago
One of the things that I always wondered was how much the safety of home allowed that lead to happen. The US never had any real threats to the mainland and so they were able to focus and just execute without distractions. The majority of the rest of the countries in the war had to balance their manufacturing power and steel production with defense.
- canadianfella 3y ago
  [dead]
- eigenket 3y ago
  Other countries also had a much larger proportion of the population off fighting and dying. UK casualties in ww2 were 0.94% of the 1939 population, France's were about 1.44%, the USSR's were about 13.4% (of course the USSR was a wild outlier). The USA lost about 0.3% of its 1939 population, still an appallingly huge number, but smaller. Since the people who were off fighting were predominantly the healthy young men who worked in industry at the time the impact on industry was magnified. The US was able to focus a much greater proportion of its effort on making things.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
  > The US never had any real threats to the mainland Hey, the Japanese destroyed the backstop on the baseball diamond at Fort Stevens in Oregon. They literally threatened America's past time! /s
- epolanski 3y ago
  This. It cannot be understated how blessed geographically the US is. Even today, it is largely too far from anything really happening in the world.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  While this definitely played a factor (I doubt the US would have had over 50% of the global GNP at the end of the war if their factories were getting bombed), the US was a global manufacturing powerhouse in 1937 by any measure; in both raw number of factories, and per-capita productivity the US was far ahead. The US had more manufacturing capacity than Germany and Japan combined before a single bomb was dropped on a German or Japanese factory.
- dirtyid 3y ago
  Homefront serenity is what underpins US military primacy, and to large extent hegemony. But that era will come to end with proliferation of conventional global strike.
asdff 3y ago
It really goes to show what is possible when there is a centrally planned economy vs having the labor tied up serving decentralized market forces without any clear directive. The fact that the U.S. was able to do this at the home front, with some 12 million of its laborers in their prime working years serving overseas instead, is just bewildering. It makes you wonder what the state of our nation and technological progress might have been by today, if we didn't abandon the centrally planned economic system that was established during world war ii and instead shifted it towards peacetime goals.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Central planning is great when you have one clearly defined goal that takes precedence over any other, namely winning a war. It's trash for anything else.
  - raphaelj 3y ago
    It can still work somewhat great for parts of the economy. E.g. healthcare, education, utility...
    - jayd16 3y ago
      I feel like it works out about the same for those. The difference is market forces work much worse in those cases.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - huijzer 3y ago
    After reading many business books: central planning works great as long as the benefits of centralisation outweigh the drawbacks of centralisation. After reading Outsiders by Thorndike, I’m convinced that the drawbacks outweigh the benefits surprisingly rapidly because distributed companies are shown to run much better. Historically, it has been the same with countries/states, according to Taleb. Although large countries had benefits and could stay alive for long times, small city states (e.g., Florence centuries ago or Switzerland today) and decentralized nations (e.g., Habsburg or the EU), run much more better.
huijzer 3y ago
Yes and similarly for airplanes. US’ planes were worse than Japanese at the start of the war but at the end US’ plane manufacturing was much faster and the plane designs had gone through multiple rounds of improvements unlike the Japanese. (Having said that, Japan was never going to win the war if you compared the numbers. It was a long shot right from the start but they felt it was necessary. According to Hardcore History, the decision to enter the war was something that slowly evolved over time starting at the moment they decided to participate on colonisation.) If I remember correctly, the US carriers still had wooden decks though at the end of the war, which is completely nuts because they could be blown up by one airplane. British carriers did have steel decks at the end of the war.
- icegreentea2 3y ago
  Unarmored flight decks (the wooden flightdecks had a un-armored metal banking behind it) were certainly vulnerable, but you have to consider how long it takes to take a ship from planning into production. The Essex class which formed the backbone of the fleet by '43 onwards was basically design frozen in '40. The Essex had an armored hanger deck (which likely contributed to why none of them were actually ever sunk by kamikazes). Moving the armor layer up to the flight deck had significant weight and balance ramifications (would eat into air wing capacity or fuel/weapons depth) that would make retrofitting existing designs very challenging. British carriers were armored from the beginning of the war. The difference in design philosophy can probably be attributed to the British expecting their carriers to frequently be operating in range of superior numbers of enemy land base aircraft (ie, around Europe), and therefore expected their carriers to be repeatedly engaged. American doctrine assumed fleet action, primarily against enemy carrier aircraft, where air wing size would be more useful. Ultimately in the end, a little bit of both solutions won. The post-war carriers (at least American ones) grew to become large enough to both be armored (by WW2 standards) and have large airwings. But in relative terms... by mid to late Cold War, guided missiles had become large and sophisticated enough that passive defence (armoring) was very much a last chance gamble. Also, at least in terms of aircraft, while some of the aircraft deployed in the Pacific were clearly woefully out-classed (RIP Brewster Buffalo and Devastator), right from the beginning, many other USN aircraft were qualitatively right in the mix. Certainly the F4F had enough good qualities that USN pilots could wield it at an advantage. The final K:D ratio versus zeros is like 5-7:1 or so, which leads positive for the F4F even trying to account for kill over counting.
wyldfire 3y ago
> Japans only hope was finishing the us Navy early on at Pearl Harbor and midway but once the US ramped up production the US never lost their military lead From Admiral Yamamoto's diary: > I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.
- lumost 3y ago
  The biggest lesson of ww2 is that once a major industrial war starts - the only end is mutual exhaustion. Japan would always have needed to defeat the US industrial base. Even if Pearl Harbor had less to an immediate occupation of Hawaii and bombardment of the west coast - the US wasn’t going to forget and go home. A negotiated settlement would have been impossible to enforce until the US was incapable of fighting.
  - hodgesrm 3y ago
    > The biggest lesson of ww2 is that once a major industrial war starts - the only end is mutual exhaustion. How does match the actual outcome? WW II ended in the complete defeat of Germany and Japan and post-war domination by the US and USSR, not least through their industrial capacity as well as possession of nuclear weapons. This does not seem very debatable. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you meant? edit: clarification
  - Someone 3y ago
    > The biggest lesson of ww2 is that once a major industrial war starts - the only end is mutual exhaustion. I don’t see how one would draw that conclusion. The USA were far from exhausted at the end of World War Two, and neither was Russia (but that required help from the USA. World war two was won thanks to American industrial output and Russian blood) I also think the USA would have accepted a Japanese surrender long before its armies and industry were destroyed, if it came with giving up all occupied territory and large parts of its army and navy. Having too few natural resources at home, Japan barely (if at all) was an existential threat to the USA at the start of the war, and certainly wasn’t anymore once they were cut off from the oil fields in what now is Indonesia.
michaelt 3y ago
> At the end of the battle they mention that by the end of the war the US was completing multiple carriers per month, and they were just orders of magnitude ahead of every other country when it came to manufacturing power and steel production. I saw a very interesting video a few years ago [1] - by the end of WW2, tank production figures were: Russia built 106,000 tanks America built 102,000 tanks Germany built 47,000 tanks Britain built 36,000 tanks Needless to say, once you know one side had 5x as many tanks, the outcome becomes something of a foregone conclusion.... [1] https://youtu.be/N6xLMUifbxQ?si=Srf6tPVwrre20d2X&t=1702 https://youtu.be/N6xLMUifbxQ?si=Srf6tPVwrre20d2X&t=1702
hodgesrm 3y ago
The numbers at the end of WW II are even more lopsided if you look at the number of commissioned vessels in the US Navy on VJ day 1945: 7601. [0] I have read elsewhere this included 12 carrier battle groups of which one could deploy about the same firepower as the British Royal Navy. By contrast the US Navy now claims about 280 vessels. [1] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_history_of_World_War_II https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_history_of_World_War_I... [1] https://www.navy.com/life-in-the-navy/vessels https://www.navy.com/life-in-the-navy/vessels
rvba 3y ago
It is sad that you learn basic history (highschool level) via Netflix. Seriously, has public education degraded so much? Extra points if you are from USA and dont know its basic history...
oneTbrain23 3y ago
Same thing happened in China. Just the last 5 years we have seen how incredible productive and industrial China is. Able to completely manufactured their own chips while USA had to rely on external allies. Just on the hypersonic missile production along by on some analysts estimate, China avle to outproduce entire NATO combined by at least 25 to 1 ratio. The same already seen happening today when Russia alone can outproduce artillery shells about 6 to 1 what USA and EU can produce combined. I believe we are in the middle of world event witnessing something like destruction of Spanish armada (or now more aptly to say American armada) being played out in coming years.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  > The same already seen happening today when Russia alone can outproduce artillery shells about 6 to 1 what USA and EU can produce combined. This being counterbalanced quite a bit by range and accuracy advantages on the other side of things.

upon_drumhead 3y ago

One of the things that I always wondered was how much the safety of home allowed that lead to happen. The US never had any real threats to the mainland and so they were able to focus and just execute without distractions. The majority of the rest of the countries in the war had to balance their manufacturing power and steel production with defense.

canadianfella 3y ago
[dead]
eigenket 3y ago
Other countries also had a much larger proportion of the population off fighting and dying. UK casualties in ww2 were 0.94% of the 1939 population, France's were about 1.44%, the USSR's were about 13.4% (of course the USSR was a wild outlier). The USA lost about 0.3% of its 1939 population, still an appallingly huge number, but smaller. Since the people who were off fighting were predominantly the healthy young men who worked in industry at the time the impact on industry was magnified. The US was able to focus a much greater proportion of its effort on making things.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
> The US never had any real threats to the mainland Hey, the Japanese destroyed the backstop on the baseball diamond at Fort Stevens in Oregon. They literally threatened America's past time! /s
epolanski 3y ago
This. It cannot be understated how blessed geographically the US is. Even today, it is largely too far from anything really happening in the world.
aidenn0 3y ago
While this definitely played a factor (I doubt the US would have had over 50% of the global GNP at the end of the war if their factories were getting bombed), the US was a global manufacturing powerhouse in 1937 by any measure; in both raw number of factories, and per-capita productivity the US was far ahead. The US had more manufacturing capacity than Germany and Japan combined before a single bomb was dropped on a German or Japanese factory.
dirtyid 3y ago
Homefront serenity is what underpins US military primacy, and to large extent hegemony. But that era will come to end with proliferation of conventional global strike.

asdff 3y ago

It really goes to show what is possible when there is a centrally planned economy vs having the labor tied up serving decentralized market forces without any clear directive. The fact that the U.S. was able to do this at the home front, with some 12 million of its laborers in their prime working years serving overseas instead, is just bewildering. It makes you wonder what the state of our nation and technological progress might have been by today, if we didn't abandon the centrally planned economic system that was established during world war ii and instead shifted it towards peacetime goals.

mcpackieh 3y ago
Central planning is great when you have one clearly defined goal that takes precedence over any other, namely winning a war. It's trash for anything else.
- raphaelj 3y ago
  It can still work somewhat great for parts of the economy. E.g. healthcare, education, utility...
  - jayd16 3y ago
    I feel like it works out about the same for those. The difference is market forces work much worse in those cases.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- huijzer 3y ago
  After reading many business books: central planning works great as long as the benefits of centralisation outweigh the drawbacks of centralisation. After reading Outsiders by Thorndike, I’m convinced that the drawbacks outweigh the benefits surprisingly rapidly because distributed companies are shown to run much better. Historically, it has been the same with countries/states, according to Taleb. Although large countries had benefits and could stay alive for long times, small city states (e.g., Florence centuries ago or Switzerland today) and decentralized nations (e.g., Habsburg or the EU), run much more better.

huijzer 3y ago

Yes and similarly for airplanes. US’ planes were worse than Japanese at the start of the war but at the end US’ plane manufacturing was much faster and the plane designs had gone through multiple rounds of improvements unlike the Japanese. (Having said that, Japan was never going to win the war if you compared the numbers. It was a long shot right from the start but they felt it was necessary. According to Hardcore History, the decision to enter the war was something that slowly evolved over time starting at the moment they decided to participate on colonisation.) If I remember correctly, the US carriers still had wooden decks though at the end of the war, which is completely nuts because they could be blown up by one airplane. British carriers did have steel decks at the end of the war.

icegreentea2 3y ago
Unarmored flight decks (the wooden flightdecks had a un-armored metal banking behind it) were certainly vulnerable, but you have to consider how long it takes to take a ship from planning into production. The Essex class which formed the backbone of the fleet by '43 onwards was basically design frozen in '40. The Essex had an armored hanger deck (which likely contributed to why none of them were actually ever sunk by kamikazes). Moving the armor layer up to the flight deck had significant weight and balance ramifications (would eat into air wing capacity or fuel/weapons depth) that would make retrofitting existing designs very challenging. British carriers were armored from the beginning of the war. The difference in design philosophy can probably be attributed to the British expecting their carriers to frequently be operating in range of superior numbers of enemy land base aircraft (ie, around Europe), and therefore expected their carriers to be repeatedly engaged. American doctrine assumed fleet action, primarily against enemy carrier aircraft, where air wing size would be more useful. Ultimately in the end, a little bit of both solutions won. The post-war carriers (at least American ones) grew to become large enough to both be armored (by WW2 standards) and have large airwings. But in relative terms... by mid to late Cold War, guided missiles had become large and sophisticated enough that passive defence (armoring) was very much a last chance gamble. Also, at least in terms of aircraft, while some of the aircraft deployed in the Pacific were clearly woefully out-classed (RIP Brewster Buffalo and Devastator), right from the beginning, many other USN aircraft were qualitatively right in the mix. Certainly the F4F had enough good qualities that USN pilots could wield it at an advantage. The final K:D ratio versus zeros is like 5-7:1 or so, which leads positive for the F4F even trying to account for kill over counting.

wyldfire 3y ago

> Japans only hope was finishing the us Navy early on at Pearl Harbor and midway but once the US ramped up production the US never lost their military lead From Admiral Yamamoto's diary: > I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

lumost 3y ago
The biggest lesson of ww2 is that once a major industrial war starts - the only end is mutual exhaustion. Japan would always have needed to defeat the US industrial base. Even if Pearl Harbor had less to an immediate occupation of Hawaii and bombardment of the west coast - the US wasn’t going to forget and go home. A negotiated settlement would have been impossible to enforce until the US was incapable of fighting.
- hodgesrm 3y ago
  > The biggest lesson of ww2 is that once a major industrial war starts - the only end is mutual exhaustion. How does match the actual outcome? WW II ended in the complete defeat of Germany and Japan and post-war domination by the US and USSR, not least through their industrial capacity as well as possession of nuclear weapons. This does not seem very debatable. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you meant? edit: clarification
- Someone 3y ago
  > The biggest lesson of ww2 is that once a major industrial war starts - the only end is mutual exhaustion. I don’t see how one would draw that conclusion. The USA were far from exhausted at the end of World War Two, and neither was Russia (but that required help from the USA. World war two was won thanks to American industrial output and Russian blood) I also think the USA would have accepted a Japanese surrender long before its armies and industry were destroyed, if it came with giving up all occupied territory and large parts of its army and navy. Having too few natural resources at home, Japan barely (if at all) was an existential threat to the USA at the start of the war, and certainly wasn’t anymore once they were cut off from the oil fields in what now is Indonesia.

michaelt 3y ago

> At the end of the battle they mention that by the end of the war the US was completing multiple carriers per month, and they were just orders of magnitude ahead of every other country when it came to manufacturing power and steel production. I saw a very interesting video a few years ago [1] - by the end of WW2, tank production figures were: Russia built 106,000 tanks America built 102,000 tanks Germany built 47,000 tanks Britain built 36,000 tanks Needless to say, once you know one side had 5x as many tanks, the outcome becomes something of a foregone conclusion.... [1] https://youtu.be/N6xLMUifbxQ?si=Srf6tPVwrre20d2X&t=1702 https://youtu.be/N6xLMUifbxQ?si=Srf6tPVwrre20d2X&t=1702

hodgesrm 3y ago

The numbers at the end of WW II are even more lopsided if you look at the number of commissioned vessels in the US Navy on VJ day 1945: 7601. [0] I have read elsewhere this included 12 carrier battle groups of which one could deploy about the same firepower as the British Royal Navy. By contrast the US Navy now claims about 280 vessels. [1] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_history_of_World_War_II https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_history_of_World_War_I... [1] https://www.navy.com/life-in-the-navy/vessels https://www.navy.com/life-in-the-navy/vessels

rvba 3y ago

It is sad that you learn basic history (highschool level) via Netflix. Seriously, has public education degraded so much? Extra points if you are from USA and dont know its basic history...

oneTbrain23 3y ago

Same thing happened in China. Just the last 5 years we have seen how incredible productive and industrial China is. Able to completely manufactured their own chips while USA had to rely on external allies. Just on the hypersonic missile production along by on some analysts estimate, China avle to outproduce entire NATO combined by at least 25 to 1 ratio. The same already seen happening today when Russia alone can outproduce artillery shells about 6 to 1 what USA and EU can produce combined. I believe we are in the middle of world event witnessing something like destruction of Spanish armada (or now more aptly to say American armada) being played out in coming years.

ceejayoz 3y ago
> The same already seen happening today when Russia alone can outproduce artillery shells about 6 to 1 what USA and EU can produce combined. This being counterbalanced quite a bit by range and accuracy advantages on the other side of things.