This is the first half of the last part (I, II IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) of our series looking at the vision of history advanced by Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game and one of the most popular strategy games on the market today.
In the last part (split over two posts), we discussed how HoI4 models domestic politics and ideology. In both cases, game design considers – in particular the desire to streamline domestic politics to highlight the military aspects of the game and the desire to simply avoid the topic of crimes against humanity altogether – congealed to create a game that fails to accurately represent the history of the period and worse yet errs in a consistent direction. On the one hand, the simplified political model, combined by a game design ‘need’ to make the Axis powers ahistorically strong, leads to a political system that values state power, is unconcerned with the role of regular people and in which authoritarian government forms offer the player more freedom of decision without any drawbacks. Meanwhile the game actively avoids discussion of any of the real human costs of those ideologies, unintentionally producing a game that functions as a ‘clean Wehrmacht myth’ simulator.
In both cases then, the game – unintentionally, but forcefully – reproduces World War II as authoritarians would like to imagine it, rather than as it actually was, doing some violence to the historical record in a way that is also frankly irresponsible in the present moment as well. To be clear, in these sorts of questions, I believe the truth is an absolute defense – history is often unpleasant to modern eyes (and past ones too) – but this depiction is not accurate.
Now, as the series comes to a close we turn to Hearts of Iron IV‘s industrial model and strategic ends, the former this week and the latter next week. It may seem strange to group these two topics together, but the strategic ends of the aggressor nations were fundamentally rooted in economic objectives. To put it in the classic formulation, World War II was a war for resources. And while the Allies fought to preserve the status quo, rather than obtain new resources, the nautre of their post-war competition, between the western Allies (soon to be NATO) and the Soviet Union, was also fundamentally economic with one of the core ideological bones of contention being whose economic system could better provide prosperity in a post-war world.
Unfortunately, in this realm as well, Hearts of Iron IV stumbles in much the same way it did in the last part: the effort to streamline everything that isn’t the operational simulation means that HoI4 ends up accepting as true many of the fundamental premises of the Axis powers, despite the fact that the rather resounding verdict of the war (and the subsequent Cold War period) was that these assumptions – that centralized state direction was efficient, that autarky was a viable economic strategy, that it was better to dominate than to trade, that highly militarized economies could durably sustain national power – were false.
In an effort to give the Axis a real chance to win the war, HoI4 is forced to assume that Nazi, fascist and militarist theories about the economy were correct – the very thing the war itself so decisively disproved.
But first, if you like what you are reading here, please share it, as I rely on word of mouth to replenish my manpower pool after poorly considered post topics. If you really like it, you can support me, my academic work and my public writing, including this project on Patreon! I can’t promise to use your support to buy a division worth of tanks, but I also will not promise not to do that. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
The Allies were far quicker to do so, with women working in factories in the USA, UK and USSR very early in their involvement in the war and women serving in non-combat roles in the UK and US militaries and even in some combat roles in the Red Army. As far as I can tell, Hearts of Iron IV doesn’t simulate this at all, despite the very clear impact it had on production during the war.
But it gets a neat picture!
Industrial War Industry
We should start by laying out the basics of the game’s economic model. Unlike previous Hearts of Iron games, which represented a country’s industrial might with a single ‘industrial capacity’ number, HoI4 splits industry into civilian factories and military factories.1 Civilian factories build other buildings – infrastructure, railways, ports and other factories (both civilian and military) – and a portion of them are reserved for ‘consumer goods.’ Meanwhile military factories build military equipment: rifles, tanks, aircraft, etc. There is a third category, dockyards, which build ships, but we’ll leave them aside for now except to note that they function more or less exactly like military factories save for what they build.
It is possible to convert factories from one type to another (meant to represent the sort of plowshares-into-swords crash mobilization of the US, UK and USSR’s economy) but almost never worthwhile, to the point that this conversion is almost a dead mechanic.
Unsurprisingly, given the game’s focus, there is quite a lot of granularity in military production. Players set up ‘lines’ of production for specific equipment and then assign a certain number of factories to that equipment. Military factory efficiency (‘production efficiency’) scales up over time as long as they are producing the same thing, to represent process streamlining and impose a penalty for the kind of rapid design switching that, for instance, Germany engaged in. Produced equipment goes into a national stockpile (which exists on a balance sheet, not anywhere in the world). The player then trains division templates which demand the equipment being produced and it is automatically shifted to those divisions (generally during the training process or when they take losses; it is rarely worthwhile to deploy a half-trained, half-equipped division) as needed.
In addition to factories, military production also demands raw materials (aluminum, rubber, tungston, steel and chromium), with sharp speed penalties for missing ingredients. All factories also require coal to operate at full speed (and oil is converted into fuel in a system that we needn’t get into here, though it does matter a lot for operational planning).
Finally, it is worth noting there are two mutually exclusive pathways for industrial technology, which apply significant bonuses; in practice researching these technologies as they become available is effectively mandatory for nearly all countries. Concentrated Industry, representing the approach of the United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union, offers 5% more raw factory output per level, while Dispersed Industry, representing the approach of Germany and Japan, offers better production efficiency and strategic bombing resistance. For quite a while now, dispersed industry has been the ‘meta’ choice, which as discussed below is a bit baffling as it was very clearly the less effective approach during the war itself.
Each equipment type is thus its own individual line which needs unique management. A minimally capable army is likely to need at least production lines for infantry equipment, support equipment, artillery, anti-air, anti-tank, tanks, trucks and at least a few kinds of aircraft so at minimum that is around 10 different production lines, each with its own set of assigned factories, unique resource demands (which may need to be traded for, see below), variable production efficiency and so on.
The military industrial production side is thus a fairly complex game of anticipating equipment needs in advance and assigning factories – allowing due time for them to gain production efficiency – to maximize the production of the equipment that divisions need, in the ratios they need it, when they need it. If I expect, for instance, to be at war by 1939 (as in the Britain playthrough we’ve been doing screenshots of), I am going to workout my intended army size, quickly math out the required amount of equipment on a piece of paper and then proportion my production accordingly.2
Gameplay-wise, it is a neat system which encourages player to think ahead and is, ironically, one of the closest systems to actually force a player to actually think about their doctrine in the real sense of the word: trying to predict how they will need to fight and then building the equipment to create the kind of divisions appropriate for that fight.
Civilian Industry and Civilians
By contrast, the civilian industrial system is extremely simplified – streamlined might be a more generous term.
Civilian factories, as noted, build other factories (including other civilian factories) as well as a number of other buildings (forts, infrastructure, ports, railways, etc.), but our main focus here is on their role building factories. Apart from the coal all factories require to run, civilian factories consume no resources and they require far less management. They do not gain in productivity over time working at the same kind of project, instead always being perfectly interchangeable with each other. In practice, the player merely creates a priority list of projects and the civilian factories get to the job of marching down the priority list in order, one by one, with up to 15 civilian factories per project.
Civilian factories are also responsible for consumer goods production. The number of factories required for this is determined by adding military and civilian factories (but not dockyards) together and then taking a percentage of that total: that number of civilian factories are then removed from use, serving to supply the civilian economy. Unlike in previous Hearts of Iron games, where civilian industry put to civilian use generated money (representing tax revenues), in HoI4, mechanically, consumer goods represent wasted production. We’ll come back to this, but for now mechanically the player cannot allocate more factories than required for consumer goods, nor is there any benefit at all for having more consumer goods producing factories.
In Hearts of Iron IV, consumer goods production has no value: it does not impact stability or war support or politics. Notably, consumer goods production is entirely independent of civilian population: factories do not really consume any labor nor do they actually feed, cloth or house anyone. Instead, consumer goods function as a ‘tax’ to suppress the production of certain countries (the pre-war democracies, generally) and to prevent a player from focusing entirely on military production. In the latter case, as a player builds out a military industrial complex, the number of total factories (and thus the consumer goods requirement) rises, leading to fewer and fewer civilian factories free to build more military factories.
Civilian factories are also ‘spent’ to gain raw resources (for military factories) via trade, essentially transferring one civilian factory per a set number of units of raw resources (usually 8) transferred the other way.
One missing element you may have noticed is labor: labor is barely simulated at all. At most the effect here is expressed through conscription and mobilization laws, in a relatively blunt way. The highest economic mobilization law (‘total mobilization’) reduces the recruitable population (with a 3% modifier), reflecting military-aged men kept in the factories, while the highest conscription laws (‘service by requirement’ ‘all adults serve’ and ‘scraping the barrel’) lower factory output to reflect the labor shortages they generate. Notably, both of these effects happen regardless of the number of people in service or the number of factories: a country with Service by Requirement suffers its 10% penalty to factory output even if it has no army at all and a country on Total Mobilization suffers its 3% penalty to recruitable population even if it has almost no factories to absorb those workers.
As is consistently the case with Hearts of Iron IV‘s design, civilians do not matter very much: not for politics, not for war, not even for industry.
The Implications of the System
Having outlined in a general sense the shape of this system, it is worth going through the way that it generally develops over the course of any given playthrough, because there is a fairly predictable pattern and of course that pattern of mechanics speaks to the vision of history that Hearts of Iron IV is presenting, particularly because it more or less always happens.
One of the first questions is where countries make the shift-over point from focusing primarily on building civilian industry to focusing primarily on military industry. If a country only builds civilian industry, its industrial capacity total grows geometrically, as the more civilian factories are built, the faster new ones are built. However, since the only real product of this system are weapons churned out by military factories, this produces a sort of calculation – the player estimates when they expect to be at war and then initially builds civilian industry (to expand how much military factory they can build in a given unit of time), before shifting over to military factories in an effort to maximize the amount of military factories they’ll have at war’s start. For some countries this ‘turnover’ point is very early, for others it is a few years into the game.
Economic mobilization laws figure highly into this calculation. For the most part, economic mobilization laws do not really represent tradeoffs, but instead escalation: later laws are simply better than earlier ones. Civilian economy and partial mobilization provide maluses to construction speed (you build factories, even civilian factories, slower), while War Economy and Total Economic Mobilization provide bonuses to the same. Earlier laws also require a higher percentage of consumer goods factories, while later laws require less and since consumer goods are represented in game basically as waste (they offer no value whatsoever), this is also just a pure economic malus. There is no benefit to a civilian economy for the player and thus players are strongly incentivized to mobilize as much as their political system will let them and to stay at that maximum mobilization as much as they can. Rising world tension and being at war are generally what unlock the war support necessary for later economic mobilization laws.
As a result, globally, the percentage of industrial production devoted to consumer goods falls over time, which dramatically increases the factories available to expand industry, while construction speed for new factories rises as countries move to more aggressive mobilization laws (technology also pushes in this direction). Consequently, the number of factories globally rises dramatically over the course of the game, with countries often hitting the limits of how many factories can fit in the states they control by the mid-1940s. Thus, for instance, in the current run, the UK starts the game with just 31 factories; by the time I was ready to form the Commonwealth of Nations in 1942, the United Kingdom already had well over three hundred factories. Needless to say, the historical 1930s and 1940s did not witness a 10x growth in global GDP (global production a-little-more-than-doubled between 1930 and 1955).
That runaway factory growth produces systemic absurdities in HoI4‘s economy, because the raw material supply cannot keep up. While there are ways (technology, infrastructure) to realize modest increases in the amount of raw materials available in the game, these are a lot more modest than the order-of-magnitude increase in industrial production and while civilian industry only consumes coal, the churning of many hundreds of military factories begins, by the mid-1940s, to demand more resources than are globally available.
The way trade laws work in this system is that more export-oriented (or trade-friendly) trade laws reserve a percentage of the raw materials a country produces for export regardless of if someone is buying them. Trade-friendly laws also provide modest but significant industrial bonuses, so they make sense to adopt early, however in the long run trade in this system must reduce the overall quantity of resources available, because any resources that are reserved for trade but cannot be traded (because you are at war with the country, for instance) are wasted. Consequently as the major powers build up their industry, they’re pushed towards autarky to ‘unlock’ those trade-reserved resources, which results in the late-game economy fracturing into a set of beggar-thy-neighbor autarkies, which is to put it bluntly, not what happened historically.
The result, paradoxically, is that faced with resource shortages, one by one major powers shift to autarky in their trade laws (‘closed economy’ being the in-game label, though Germany gets a special version of limited exports called ‘autarky’ which replaces some of the penalties with bonuses instead, an absurd bit of design from a historical perspective given how conspicuous the failure of German autarky was). Autarky is an economic system which aims to produce all required goods entirely internally, without any trade (or minimal trade) with the outside world. For both ideological and political control reasons, autarky has often been the cherished goal is totalitarian regimes, both right and left. In particular – and we’ll discuss this more next week – economic autarky was the very specific economic goal that both Germany and Japan pursued in their attempted conquests in World War II. It was the thing they were fighting for (and the thing everyone else was fighting against) in a very real sense.
At this point, I should note, the war is basically decided. After all, I had the offensive superiority in late 1942 to break through and attack and each of my ‘pushes’ gives me more factories and denies them to the Axis. We’re now well past the point of recovery: the only hope of the Axis here would be if I ran out of manpower but I’m still only on Limited Conscription, so there are a few million men sitting behind the 900k currently in my manpower reserves.
Meanwhile, production shortfalls means that German divisions are getting weaker and are increasingly incapable of stopping me. We’re rapidly approaching the point where I can just attack everywhere and win. That said, I am still operating on the assumption I am going to also fight the USSR over Poland’s full territory, so I am not simply attacking everywhere as I need to conserve manpower.
Germany in Hearts of Iron IV
Now, before we get into how all of these mechanics come together to express a coherent – but deeply flawed – theory of history, I want to take a ‘sidebar’ on a topic. You may have noticed something of a trend in some of the design choices we have been discussing, but it is worth pulling them out. The developers want Hearts of Iron IV to simulate a World War II that proceeds roughly along the lines of the original, with France falling in 1940 and the Wehrmacht nearly reaching Moscow in 1941.
The problem, which the developers have discussed in the past, is that those events were fairly unlikely and significantly the part of bad decisions made by the allies (particularly France and the USSR), which left them unprepared and surprised by German attacks. But the developers cannot compel player!France to fail to adequately protect against a push through the Ardennes, nor compel player!United Kingdom to wait too long to rearm, nor compel player!USSR to trust Hitler completely up to – and indeed beyond – the very moment German tanks roll over the border into the Soviet Union. AI controlled countries could be made to make these mistakes, but that too is a poor solution from a game-design standpoint – it isn’t that interesting playing against an AI that is mandated to make specific errors.
The solution was instead to ‘power up’ Germany, making it a-historically powerful. Historically, Germany and the United Kingdom had similar levels out economic output through the war; in-game Germany starts with 73 factories to the United Kingdom’s 31 and gets stronger special laws and focuses that enable it to decisively outproduce the United Kingdom well into the game. Historically, Germany’s policy of autarky was a self-defeating one; in-game it is a special version of trade law that is simply a better form of ‘limited exports’ in every way.
Meanwhile Germany’s opponents are severely weakened. Both Britain and France are saddled with negative ‘national spirits’ that sharply limit their industry, political stability or ability to raise forces (whereas Germany gets bonuses to military organization and somehow the ability to raise air wings with less manpower). The United States is perhaps the worst victim of this, as it alone starts with the ‘Great Depression’ national spirit that pumps the consumer goods ratio (again, remember, purely waste in the game’s system) to 60%, while lowering recruitable manpower by 50% and raw resource production by 20%, as if the Great Depression only happened in one country. In practice, the purpose of the modifiers are to suppress US economic production so that the American industrial juggernaut emerges on schedule in 1942 and not earlier.
From a game design perspective, you can just about understand why all of these decisions were made: the game is more interesting if Germany has a potentially realistic shot at beating the combined efforts of the UK, France, the USSR and the United States. But historically, Germany didn’t have such a realistic shot (and Japan certainly didn’t). One of the facts that emerges quite clearly out of modern historiography on the war3 was that Germany’s often inefficiently-organized economy had little hope of providing a realistic path towards victory. The disparity in industrial capacity, once the allies turned to the task of reducing Germany to rubble, was enormous and unbridgeable.
But the broader problem here is how it fits into an overall trend where the design commitment to having Germany have a realistic shot at winning World War II on the terms the Nazis waged it compels the developers to treat Nazi (economic) ideology as if it were true, when it wasn’t. Fascist claims about the ‘trains running on time’ are effectively treated as accurate in the way HoI4 assigns economic potential, even when ‘the fascists made the trains run on time’ (in Italy) is one of the most persistently debunked historical myths out there. Meanwhile, the the Third Reich, Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction (2006) remains essential reading on the fundamentally hollow nature of Nazi economic propaganda: the Nazis didn’t make the German economy hum either.
Fascist Economics
All of these mechanical simplifications make a kind of sense in getting the player to the ‘fun stuff’ of the war itself (much as with the political mechanics), but collectively they add up to a vision of history which establishes the Axis view of economics as its foundation. In effect, it takes the debate about the nature of economic life in the 1930s and 1940s and grants the conclusion to the fascist ideological assumptions a priori. It begins with the assumption that the Nazis were fundamentally right about how an economic global order would function.
Which is a real problem for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the Nazis were famously wrong about that.
Take the question of concentrated vs. dispersed industry. Industrial dispersion in Germany wasn’t simply a response to strategic bombing, but was also rooted in an ‘artisanal’ approach to production that was both a holdover from earlier German industrialization but also something rooted in Nazi ideology. After all, the Nazi ideology of racial superiority – that German soldiers and workers were Übermenschen who could outproduce racially ‘lesser’ men – didn’t make much sense in a Taylorist or Fordist approach to production, which aimed for efficiency through assembly-line production in massive-scale facilities where workers functioned not as individual artisans but as pieces of a well-oiled machine. The Wehrmacht‘s preference for frequent revisions in design likewise reflected an assumption about war rooted in Nazi race ideology – that racially superior soldiers, equipped with the very best equipment, produced by racially superior craftsmen would be victorious in battle.
And they were very obviously wrong.
To take some figures from Overy (1995), op. cit., in 1942, Germany – controlling at that point most of Europe, mind you – produced 9,200 tanks and 15,409 aircraft. The United Kingdom – despite having its imports choked by submarine warfare all year – produced 8,611 tanks and 23,672 aircraft, exceeding, albeit modestly, German production. The USSR, by contrast, produced 24,446 tanks and 25,436 aircraft – absolutely blowing German production away. And the United States, despite having been on a war footing for less than a month at the start of the year, produced in 1942 some 24,997 tanks and 47,826 aircraft. These differences in production would only grow wider as the war progressed. Worse yet, it was also simply not the case that Germany obtained a technological edge for all of this rapid design shifting – indeed, as the war went on increasingly the best designed equipment was American, British or Soviet.
And while we’re here, Japan – whose approach is also in theory modeled by the ‘dispersed industry’ technology which is (as I noted), the optimal ‘meta’ choice for most HoI4 countries in the current build – produced just 1,191 tanks and 8,861 aircraft in 1942. Utterly unable to compete with even the beleaguered United Kingdom, much less the industrial behemoths of the United States and the USSR.
Meanwhile there is the question of autarky and trade. We’ll come back to this next week as well, but establishing an effective autarky was a core goal – arguably the core goal – behind both Germany and Japan’s program of aggressive warfare and it failed. In both cases, Germany and Japan sought to create extractive empires which would provide sufficient raw materials internally for both countries to no longer be reliant on trade. In the case of the Third Reich, this plan explicitly involved the murder – mostly through intentional starvation via the Hunger Plan – of tens of millions of people to create the ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) for a mass program of German settlement in Eastern Europe that (combined with the use of slave labor) would render a super-sized Third Reich self-sufficient in foodstuffs. Japan envisaged something more akin to the older European colonial empires – an overseas empire based around resource extraction in which the indigenous population were a resource to be extracted as well as a captive market which could be compelled to buy Japanese goods.
There is an irony here that in a sense the Axis powers (we can include Italy here) were trying to build early modern empires of the sort European states had constructed from the 1490s through the 1930s, despite the fact that by the 1930s the failures of that model were already becoming apparent. For one, Germany had demonstrated that with trade, such an empire was unnecessary to emerge as a European Great Power. The Germans had spent four years (1914 to 1918) standing the rest of Europe on its head without any vast colonial empire of note to rely on.
Even more to the point, the major imperial powers (Britain and France, but also to an extent the United States) were already starting to shed their empires. By the 1930s, the British had been compelled to abandon most of Ireland and the writing was clearly already on the wall that the cost of maintaining British rule in India would far outstrip the returns of doing so. The United States was already in the process of transitioning the Philippines to independence. I don’t want to overstate this point: all three of these countries had fought hard and would fight hard to keep their empires and would do many terrible things in that process. All of them still maintained powerful – indeed, dominant – ‘pro-imperial’ constituencies in their politics. Nevertheless it was already becoming apparent, as Germany, Italy and Japan set out to build new empires, that imperialism of that sort was a fading model which had long since become more cost than benefit to the imperial center. Of course we can see, as many in the 1930s and 1940s could not, the final failure and collapse of the empires – but of course the developers of Hearts of Iron IV certainly can and certainly could design their mechanics accordingly!
Moreover, if the 1900s demonstrated anything, they demonstrated that autarky was a losing economic strategy: trade oriented countries soundly and consistently outperformed countries that aimed for autarky. Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) documents quite well the failure of Nazi autarky. Meanwhile, Soviet efforts to limit trade and run a largely internally self-sufficient economy over the course of this period and indeed through much of the rest of the Cold War produced well-known and eventually obvious economic deficiencies compared to more trade-engaged western economies.
We have discussed this before, but trade is good because it is positive sum. Both in the sense that a country trading some raw resource they have in abundance for one they have in scarcity increases the overall utility in the system (everyone has more of what they actually want, even if the amount of stuff has stayed constant), but also because through trade regions and countries can specialize, focusing on the raw resources and products they are best situated to produce. The result is more production overall and thus a higher overall standard of living and – so long as you do not go to war with your trade partners (as Germany did in both 1939 and 1941) – greater capacity for an effective defense industry.
In Hearts of Iron IV, by contrast, taking a trade-orientation to an economy is at best zero-sum: if all of the resources a country has reserved for trade are bought by someone then the number of factories and resources in the system remains constant. However – as is typically the case – if some resources are not being bought at any given moment, they are not returned to the selling country but simply lost, meaning that while trade in the real world is positive-sum, trade in Hearts of Iron IV is negative sum: it reduces the total quantity of goods available.
Meanwhile every country in Hearts of Iron IV runs as a state-controlled command economy. Now it is certainly the case that countries at war tend to see a lot more government control in their economic activity, but there were still radical differences between Nazi and Soviet command economies and American and British market economies during the war. By effectively making every country a command economy, Hearts of Iron IV loses the capacity to simulate differences between these approaches to production. Historically, centrally directed command economies generally performed poorly in the 1900s, while increased market orientation has been fairly strongly correlated with improved economic growth and production.
Hearts of Iron IV reverses this. Instead, because consumer-oriented civilian economies (the ones that most reliably produced economic growth over the historical 1900s) have slower factory construction speed and must devote far more factories to consumer goods, they grow their industrial potential more slowly than highly state controlled countries under a ‘war economy’ or ‘total mobilization’ law. This follows along the line of traditional folk history wherein ‘World War II ended the Great Depression,’ but while WWII did reduce unemployment – by employing men in either the infantry or in graves – it certainly didn’t improve standard of living. To a significant degree, rearmament in WWII acted as a kind of economic stimulus, but it is hard not to notice the world might have been a better place if governments had done the same economic stimulus directed at making automobiles and refrigerators instead of tanks and bombers. In the post-war world – which Hearts of Iron IV declines to simulate economically in any way – it was the countries which shifted back to consumer production the quickest which reaped the rewards of peace.
So Hearts of Iron IV‘s economic model proposes that military mobilization is what produces a-historically extreme amounts of economic growth by suppressing consumer goods (because ‘standard of living’ in HoI4 is – again – just economic waste; the best economy in HoI4 is one that consists entirely of soldiers and starving, overworked peasants), which inexorably pushes major powers towards empire and autarky, the losing economic models in the actual history of this period. As historical simulations go, this is not a very good match for the trends we observe in the 1940s. From a design perspective, I imagine, that is because it isn’t really meant to be. Most Hearts of Iron IV games (both single-player but also, in my understanding, multiplayer as well) are effectively decided by 1942 – the war isn’t over yet, but the outcome is likely clear. Thus from a game-design perspective it doesn’t really matter if the system spirals into nonsensical outcomes in 1945, because by that point the player is probably just wrapping up a ‘run’ whose conclusion has been determined – indeed, overdetermined – for years of in-game time already.
Instead, the economic system: the no-trade-offs escalating set of economic laws and industry growth-curves are really built to simulate rearmament and the economic situation of the late 1930s specifically, to capture the different rates at which the major powers prepared for war and in particular to set conditions whereby Germany is economically in a position to challenge the USSR and the western allies in the 1940s – indeed, to set conditions in which Germany is far more prepared than it historically was to do so, because the design of the game aggressively and intentionally increases German war-making potential at every turn.
The result is a game that constructs a fictional, parallel world in which the failing Nazi, fascist and Japanese-militarist economic vision works. Relentlessly directing an entire economy towards a war-footing even in peacetime isn’t political and economic malpractice (as it is in the real world; note the economic condition of North Korea for a contemporary example of what this does to a country), but rather is the key to boundless economic growth. Trade is a sucker’s bet in Hearts of Iron IV. Slave labor – unmentioned (as we noted last week), yet implied by Germany and Japan’s extraction-empire focus in conquest – also simply works and works better than trade, despite the historical record of the 1900s being about as close to the opposite of this outcome as it is possible to imagine. German-style artisanal production even beats Fordist-style assembly lines, in an astounding historical absurdity that cuts against functionally all of the historical work on the war economies of the 1940s.
In short, Hearts of Iron IV takes a war which in the real world proved the Nazis wrong about the nature of production and instead posits a world in which they were right. It does this out of an understandable desire to make Germany a real competitive foe to the allies, but the result, quite frankly, is historical malpractice. We’ve talked before about the persuasive power of simulation – that in playing a simulation, a player can ‘learn’ how a set of historical interactions work out with far greater clarity and confidence than if those interactions are explained. And if an exercise is carefully designed, this can be a really powerful and useful teaching tool, so long as the simulation accurately represents (to a reasonably degree of simplification) the actual historical interactions being studied.
But simulations are captive to their assumptions and so those assumptions must be made with care. When it comes to industry and production, HoI4‘s assumption may fairly be summed up as, “what if the Nazis were right about everything?” I do not say that approach is irresponsible simply because I do not like Nazis – although I famously do not like Nazis – but as a historian it is irresponsible because it is wrong. And it is wrong – I cannot stress enough the failure of fascist economic thinking is one of the most comprehensively demonstrated facts of the first half of the 1900s: permanent war economies do not work, command economies do not work, autarky does not work, mass forced labor does not work, imperialism as an economic strategy stopped working some time ago. HoI4 takes a war that was fundamentally about a contest of economic systems and – for gameplay reasons – gives the losing economic system all of the advantages and then dresses up the result in all of the persuasive power of simulation, with every ounce of historical verisimilitude that can be mustered.
Hearts of Iron IV‘s economic model thus – and I do not say this lightly – employs all of the persuasive power of simulation to create what is effectively a propaganda tool for fascist economics: it is not intentionally designed to persuade players of the effectiveness of fascist economics, but it is not clear to me what, if any, decisions would have been made differently if it was. If it were not for the catastrophic lack of treatment HoI4 applies to Axis atrocities, this would easily be the most irresponsible set of design decisions, I think, in the modern Paradox library. And it has, in turn, equally dire implications for how Hearts of Iron IV understands strategic ends, which is where we will turn next.
- This seems less true these days, but sometimes these got abbreviated as CIC (‘civilian industrial capacity’) and MIC (‘military industrial capacity’), a holdover from how HoI3 termed them.
- Once division training begins, the ‘days until stockpile shortage is filled’ indicator helps in quickly determining which equipment type is most ‘behind’ the production curve.
- On this, see for instance R. Overy, Why the Allies Won (1995).
Didn’t you discuss in Part III that those strategic ends were largely rooted in social (genocidal) objectives?
Lebensraum is a social objective that doubles as an economic objective via a mistaken understanding of economics.
Less relevantly to this section, so is the rhetoric of economic antisemitism. The genocidal objective, was meant to accomplish (incoherent) economic ends.
They’re effectively intertwined, as we’ll get to in the final part. The genocidal ends and the economic ends are the same ends – the creation of ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) where the local population had been largely murdered so that ethnically German households might be set up on farms (with some amount of slave labor by whatever local population survived) in order to produce enough food to make Germany self-sufficient.
The war, the genocide, the starvation, the economic policies are all bound up together, they’re all one (Hunger) Plan.
Ha! I guess that’s why you’re the educator, and I’m just an internet snarker. Even if I did it quicker, you explained it a lot better.
One of the real lessons of history as a discipline: History consists of the actions of billions of people, and the more compactly you try to explain it, the less accurate it’s going to be. Understanding history takes a lot of words.
I’m not certain how you can separate “Living Space” from being both implicitly social and economic.
Sparta tried to be an autarky as well, didn’t it? IIRC, Popper says something about that in The Open Society and Its Enemies.
I don’t think Autarky even makes sense for that kind of small-scale society, but no. As far as we can tell Sparta traded more or less like a normal polis. (and we know spartiates had a fondness for certain types of luxury imports, like horses)
But that’s up for the entire “Was Sparta Really Weird or just on the “conservative” end of normal greek poleis?” debate.
Sparta operated under a pre-industrial agricultural economy. The economic policy choices and constraining forces are fundamentally different than those of a industrialized polity like those fighting in WWII. So I’m not sure it makes much sense to even talk about Autarky in the context of Sparta – even if we find a way to make the word applicable, it would mean something very different than for modern countries.
What I can for certain believe though is that there are people who are claiming that Sparta was an Autarky for ideological purposes, because that’s what Sparta always ends up as, as the Spartan Mirage used to talk about something completely different while pretending it’s about this ancient polity.
Some of Sparta’s non-Spartiate propagandists from outside claimed that they had abandoned money and trade (I don’t remember who claimed that Spartan had its own currency in the form of iron, was it Xenophon?), but IIRC the actual historical and archeological record shows that was largely wishful thinking.
Autarky was considered an admirable goal in Greek political thinking, since it reinforced the notion of independence against foreign influence and external economic pressure, which is the same thinking that also makes it appealing as a notion to various modern political streams of thought.
The idea that we are forever dependent on other people no matter what we do is terrifying to some.
IIRC Sparta didn’t mint coinage, but that wasn’t really *that* unusual. Coinage was a relatiely newfangled thing anyway, they used stamped pieces of bullion metal. (the romans used something similar until relatively late too, IIRC)
The history of coinage is fascinating. As I understand it, stamped metal–the foundation of coins–originally came into being as a way to make trade faster. Previously trade was conducted by weight of metal, so if you wanted to buy a camel from me I’d weigh out the silver (or gold or copper) and if it was the right weight I’d accept the deal. Coines started when rulers decided to speed up the process by pre-stamping lumps of metal of standard weight. And I do mean lumps–they were just blobs with a stamp (negative relief, as opposed to modern positive relief coins) in them to show they weighed a set amount. Now I could just count out the coins and be pretty sure it was the right weight. Adulteration of coinage becomes a huge issue here.
The funny thing is we can see that the whole “weight of metal” thing is common for a LOOOOONG time after coins started. Government documents discuss pounds of gold in the Middle Ages and beyond, for example. Britian retains this in their use of the term “pound”–it was literally a pound of sterling silver at the start. It’s also why a lot of Medieval jewelers melted down coins. As a standard unit of metal they were pretty easy to work with.
What all this rambling means for Sparta is that they could fairly easily claim to not mint coins while still fundamentally using coins. All a coin was at that time was a standardized weight of metal, after all. It’s like the difference between an automatic transmission vs a standard transmission, they both do fundamentally the same thing. All Sparta would have to do is make the merchants weight the metal instead of the mints.
Well, the origin of coinage is more complex. It’s deeply tied with how money came into being, and the archeological and historical evidence strongly supports the idea that money as a concept is directly a result of the state issuing taxes, and that trade only spread this system, it didn’t originate it.
The first coins seem to be from the Asian Greece, I.E. modern Turkey. However they were based on a preexisting system of weights. The earliest weights are actually based on the weight of seeds. This, through several chains of custody, is the source of all original units of measure used in coins and reaches us even today; pounds libre (roman) is based on Greek mina which is related to the Akaddian manû which was defined as a specific value of šiqlu, or weight, which was defined as 180 uṭṭetu, meaning grains. This unit was what a tenants tax burden to the state was measured in, physical grains of barley or similar foodstuff.
Hence all ancient European units of measurements were ultimately derived from the units of weight used for tax, based on grain weights. This suggests that the coins themselves were also based on this preexisting system of weights.
The basic timeline seems to be that early temples, integrated into early state functions, began to emphasize precious metals as symbols of divine worship primarily through art. They funded the creation of these art objects through specialist economies based on the tax of agricultural labor, which was accounted primarily through the weight of local grain. Coins were originally standardized precious metal weights that were decorated with stamps, which eventually became representations of the value themselves. The issuing authority of the earliest coins was thus a temple or a king. The division between high priest and king is blurry, in part because of precisely the role temples played in tax structure.
The issuing authority almost certainly came first, because the original coins can be tied directly to their tax weights, and the usage of the materials in coinage as religious or imperial art predate their usage in coins.
This can be further proven in that a lot of early economies possess taxes and money without coins, almost universally based on taxes and state issued gifts.
For example China seems to have completely independently invented coins, except their currency was based on cowries, snail shells, which were originally used as grave goods and ornaments. There’s evidence that the early states began issuing cowries as a formal gift as a show of imperial/divine power, before they were then adopted by traders who brought them across steppe trade routes (with uncertain location of origin, might have started in a more central Asian location).
This was followed by metallic imitation cowries being used in addition to shell cowries, which were standardized into the military measurement system used for grain rations, which is where Chinese coins came from.
This is also broadly also how Iroquis and Kongo currency worked, except they weren’t making metallic imitations yet, which is a remarkable convergent independent evolution of the same idea. The artistic usage of the item comes first, and state power through tax and formalized gift giving contemporaneously evolves, followed by trade.
Coins post-date money be a couple of millennia. The first and continuing money was an exchangeable credit note (originally on clay), just as you use a credit card today. Only first issued by Mesopotamian temples and then by private merchants. After a few centuries they settled on a weight of silver as the standard unit of account. This worked (and still works) for trade. Lydia came up with stamped weights as a convenient way to pay people outside the credit networks – primarily mercenaries (who of course wanted to take their pay home to Thrace or Italy or other far foreign parts). From there coins became two-fold – small change for one-off purchases in the market and large denomination silver/gold for state purposes, including propaganda.
My impresion is that fairly consistently, the people who are worst frightened by the idea “we are dependent on others” are those sort of petty-aristocrat types who occupy positions in the top 5% of society and who survive in a position of relative comfort and high status by being, importantly, masters of others. Family patriarchs in a society where that entitles you to dominate your adult relatives, literal slave-owners, property-holders whose income depends on being the boss or employer or landlord of other people.
A man in such a position likes to think of himself as “king of his castle.” His internal monkey-instincts are telling him that while he may not be THE top banana of his area, he is a very important ape indeed, high-status, feared, respected. Sure, there may be a king or CEO or whoever that has power over him, but that’s a specific person he can kiss up to. He still spends most of his time thinking of himself as a Big Man.
The idea that external impersonal forces can change their lives without their permission seems to terrify such people. Much more so than it does the ‘peasants’ who are deeply dependent on others just to survive (either as farm villagers or in a modern society as employees of a larger enterprise), or the truly powerful aristocrats of the top 0.01% who are very comfortable with imported goods and so on because they are in control of their interactions with foreigners, not just with their mostly subordinated countrymen.
‘People who hold a position I disagree with are inherently from a social class I dislike’
I would be careful with this line of thinking, I personally don’t think having key resources like food/oil or industry be dependent on polities who may be friendly one moment and not so the next.
I mean I particularly dislike the outsized influence the Saudis have on our elite due to their importance in oil production. But I must be one of (((them))) or something.
I don’t think that the person you were answering was making any sort of antisemitics remarks so I’m kinda confused by your last sentence.
To Watterson:
“them” in the last comment
To Watterson:
“them” in the last comment foes not seem to be implying Jews, but just a sort of “petty tyrant” described by the Simon_Jester.
I do not think that seeking complete self-sufficiency is a good idea (for I wish I personally could be less at mercy of the others). But even if it is a misguided idea it is not “obviously evil” one
2. Trying to make this factual observation somewhat adjacent to antisemitism is equally idiotic, and also a coward’s move. Goldwin’s law and all that.
3. That’s moving the goalpost from aversion to trade in general to a much more specific position (decoupling *from certain polities* for *certain key resources*). Now, this is unfortunately hardly uncommon: if there is something our (actual) elite love is to give to their base instincts, cheap demagoguery, and oft donations from domestic incumbent to impoverish their own people with trade restrictions, only to retreat to nebulous national security rationales when challenged. But, whether in the condensed form you expound here or in a white paper, it remains a constant motte-and-bailey. It vaguely gestures at Saudi oil (which would matter regardless of how much the US decouples, because it’s a global commodity ffs, learn basic econ) and then proceeds to craft whatever tariff regime allows the uncompetitive businesses large and small to fleece their compatriots the most
“My impresion is that fairly consistently, the people who are worst frightened by the idea “we are dependent on others” are those sort of petty-aristocrat types who occupy positions in the top 5% of society and who survive in a position of relative comfort and high status by being, importantly, masters of others.“
everyone is frightened by that idea. The peasants who are dependent on others’ land, the workers who are dependent on others’ employment, the women who are dependent on their men… for survival. They do not really enjoy these dependencies.
Until we invent replicators and give each household (or each individual?) one, it’s an inescapable fact of life that yes, we depend on someone else.
Of course, a certain kind of person would rather have everyone around them depend on *them, personally*, than on an impersonal, distributed system that, while hardly perfect, always offers some alternative arrangement to the dissatisfied, and which demands legible obligations rather than personal devotion.
Hence why the opposition to women earning their own living but also labor market regulations, financial markets but also the welfare state, international trade but also consumer protection laws. They simply hate the idea that other people’s money, time and affection might not be their birthright, that it might have to be earned, that they might have to live up to some standard and match other available alternatives.
I did some Googling, and a survey from 2017 found that support for free trade agreements was highest at the top and bottom of the income distribution, and lowest in the middle ($50k-$100k income).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/04/25/support-for-free-trade-agreements-rebounds-modestly-but-wide-partisan-differences-remain/
I also found this little tidbit:
“The American Civil War (1861–1865) was fought over the issue of slavery as well as tariff disputes. At the time of independence, the agrarian interests of the South were opposed to any protection, while the manufacturing interests of the North wanted to maintain it.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_States#History
So, I’m not seeing much support for your thesis here.
@golden_feather It sounds like you’re making a somewhat different argument than Mr. Jester’s (he gave “literal slave-holders” as an archetypical example of the class he was talking about). I don’t really disagree with most of what you’re saying here…except for this part:
“The skilled blue collar worker going along with protectionism because something something Art of the Deal matters less than the entire business-owning class pushing it for decades.”
First of all, the former group is much more numerous than the latter, so from a purely electoral standpoint, their opinions do matter a significant amount, although differences in turnout may shrink the difference (i.e., the fact that Democrats have been slowly bleeding support among the groups that have traditionally been their strongest supporters over the last few decades matters quite a bit).
But beyond that, your comment here is pretty reminiscent of an idea I see depressingly often in progressive spaces, which views working-class people as mere passive receptacles for whatever propaganda the evil billionaires put in their heads. I think this view greatly overstates just how easy it is to change people’s minds in general (see Not Born Yesterday by Hugo Mercier), and working-class people’s minds specifically, which betrays a condescending, and almost noble-savage-like view some progressives have of them.
(The other way in which I think that view is wrong is that is understates propagandists’ capacity for drinking their own Kool-Aid, but I suspect you wouldn’t disagree with me there.)
It seems my previous comment wasn’t posted, so I’ll try again without links.
I did some Googling, and a survey from 2017 found that support for free trade agreements was highest at the top and bottom of the income distribution, and lowest in the middle ($50k-$100k income).
(Pew Research: Support for free trade agreements rebounds modestly, but wide partisan differences remain)
I also found this little tidbit:
(Wikipedia: Protectionism in the United States)
So I’m not seeing much support for your thesis here.
The idea that we are forever dependent on other people no matter what we do is terrifying to some.
Personally, I suspect this is part of why a bunch of megarich people were so into AI. When you have that much money, the only thing you feel a lack of is control. And what could give you more control than not needing to deal with messy people anymore and just having obedient robot slaves?
20th-century fascists (and their 21st-century imitators) believed that trade is an inherently demeaning sign of weakness, and a Truly Great Nation ruled by Great Men should be an entirely self-sufficient autarky, even if that is achieved through slavery, murder and exploitation. They also assumed (and assume) that “real” nations must define their citizenship around ancestry and ethnicity.
Spartiates (and their Confederate imitators, after a fashion) believed that labor is an inherently demeaning sign of weakness, and that a Truly Great Nation is governed exclusively by Great Men defined as those whose households are sufficiently wealthy to never require doing it, even if that is achieved through slavery, murder and exploitation. They also insisted that such men have very specific ancestry, though that was typical of Greek poleis.
There’s a definite parallel there in terms of how foundational their scorn for this activity was to their belief system – and the depths to which they were willing to sink to avoid it. But the two resulting (broken, abusive) systems still should be called by different names.
“20th-century fascists (and their 21st-century imitators) believed that trade is an inherently demeaning sign of weakness”
So it disproved that the fascists are capitalists? Because capitalists are basically traders.
Anyway a lot of agrarian societies believed that trade is an inherently demeaning sign of exploitation instead, especially financial trading (loaning, etc…).
Definitions are seldom a matter of proof or disproof. And “fascist” is widely used as a term of abuse, trying to make deductions about someone’s politics based on them being called “fascist” is like trying to make deductions about someone’s parentage based on what they’re called after cutting someone off in traffic.
Hardly, many capitalists did and do support fascist movements. Capitalists also aren’t inherently pro trade and more than socialists are inherently against trade. Capital holders favor whatever system lets them extract the maximum amount of rent from a population, and trade means more economy to extract wealth. However if other relationships are possible which allow for exploitation they’re absolutely fine with that too.
After all many capital holders in the early industrial era were certainly not lassaiz faire advocates, favoring tariffs, mercentalism, state monopolies, treaty enforced sales, etc. as policy items. Our association of capitalists and free trade partially post dates the international system that made all the openly coercive systems gauche and illegal. In that context trade was the only way to extract goods, but prior to that lobbying the British Navy to go seize you some colonies was just as popular.
Plus fascism arose primarily as a way of combating class consciousness with state enforced class relationships. The state acting as an arbitrator of social hierarchy is obviously a better deal than abolishing social hierarchy, if you’re on top of that hierarchy. You might not fully trust the state to honor your ownership, but disbanding ownership altogether does the same thing.
Hence many capitalists support fascism purely to defend their ownership stake with military force, and all other positions follow from that.
They also assumed (and assume) that “real” nations must define their citizenship around ancestry and ethnicity
I mean, that’s an extremely common perspective, among a wide variety of political stripes, left and right, all over the world. So it isn’t really diagnostic of fascists, in particular.
Depends on if you define leftism as being opposed to ethno nationalism, which I think is tautological. Marx was an internationalist for a reason, the fundamental belief in the equality of man underpins all socialist analysis, without it you don’t have an actual reason to be upset over anything Marx concludes about the economy; if some people are superior then why is hierarchy or exploitation bad? The existence of ethnic national identity directly arises from the assertion that one group or another is not equal, but has immutable characteristics that determine their rights and privileges in society.
It’s a short hop from “our nation is defined by equality only within an ethnic group” to “let’s exploit other ethnic groups for our benefit”! It’s an even shorter hop to “…and these members of our ethnic group don’t count”. These are both inherent human psychological flaws; the division of people into identity groups is sufficient to motivate strife without any other cause, and once there’s political foundation to exclude people there’s motive to push that foundation for power. It’s just a new form of rent seeking for a new form of currency.
If someone’s leftist analysis rejects the idealogical foundation of all socialist thought and merely displaces its negative policies outwards I feel confident in saying it’s just not the same thing.
@Terry,
<i>Depends on if you define leftism as being opposed to ethno nationalism</I>
I defnitely don’t, no. Lots of socialist, communist and otherwise left wing political parties and governments were very much ethnic-nationalist, after all.
<i>if some people are superior then why is hierarchy or exploitation bad?</i>
Correct, but I don’t see nationalism as fundamentally about some ethnic groups being superior or inferior. It’s about ethnic groups being <i>different</i>, and entitled (in an ideal world) to their own geographic space for flourishing. I wouldn’t want a ton of white English people moving to my motherland and changing its demographics, not because they’re superior or inferior, but simply because they’re different, and i’m attached to the idea of my homeland and my ethnic group as it exists today, because it’s, you know, mine. Not because it’s good or bad, better or worse than any other.
<i>It’s a short hop from “our nation is defined by equality only within an ethnic group” to “let’s exploit other ethnic groups for our benefit”</i>
All very true, but since I don’t agree wth your premise that ethnic identity and nationalism is essentially about hierarchy, then your conclusion doesnt follow.
“All very true, but since I don’t agree wth your premise that ethnic identity and nationalism is essentially about hierarchy, then your conclusion doesnt follow.”
Then why do all ethnic nationalist groups and nations commit rabid, unapologetic, and brutal crimes against humanity in order to impose an ethnic hierarchy?
Why are ethno nationalists such evil fucking monsters if it’s not because of their idealogy?
I’m obviously being a bit of a bastard in how I word this, but it’s so incredibly obvious that society doesn’t work that way. If you create institutional category differences people exploit others as a result of the material incentives this produces. This is an empirical observation. There are scientific studies on it. It’s part of why, foundationally, capitalist societies oppress others, the wealth divide provides both means and ends. It psychologically divides rich people from the poor which induces them to deny the poor resources, then grants them the right to do so. Capitalism is just the simplest self reinforcing expression of this phenomenon.
It’s not even a leap to understand the fundemental mechanisms this involves. The only way to isolate ethnic groups from natural admixture is to prevent them from migrating, settling down, intermarrying into the group. These are all natural behaviors that people will always engage in. Stoping this can only be manifested with the threat of force backed by the state (or, I guess, paramilitary militias); “we’ll shoot you if you try to come here”. It ends up being a threat. And this creates incentives where people can exploit this legal status to force labor out of people who migrate anyway.
This isn’t speculation, this happens every fucking time. It’s a material result. It’s happened in ancient societies back to the earliest walled cities, it’s happened in early modern societies which created and imposed ethnic divisions over conquered people to control them, and it’s happened and happening with every modern state that has ethnic citizenship rights.
It doesn’t matter if the intent of your ethno state is hierarchy, that’s what it does. Not that I think any intent to create or maintain an ethno state is pure, because the harms supposedly manifested by letting people exist in your presence and believe different things or act differently has always been emphermeral at best while the ability to exploit and oppress is the immediate and natural consequence.
Saying “nuh huh we’re better and won’t do that” is just special pleading and anti empirical. It’s a rejection of material analysis, in addition to breaking with socialist tradition.
Based on my limited understanding, the city-state of Sparta itself was not self-sustaining, due to decreasing population. So they had to rely on enslaved neighbors to grow the food. But that’s not the same thing as “Autarky”, which would presumably equate to self-sufficiency in everything, not just basic necessities.
I agree with much of this, but note that the way the trade system works actually somewhat favors the Allies and free trade because trade is by country. The Allies, because they have the sea lanes, can all stay at Free Trade or Export Focus, get the bonuses from those, and buy resources from each other as needed without losing anything. The Axis cannot do this because Germany’s whole thing is conquering everything around it, which mechanically is then part of German resource production and also produces less due to the non-core penalty and resistance attacks. Hence they’re forced into Limited Exports or Closed Economy which are weaker. Though I think the Reichkommisariats may somewhat mitigate this; I haven’t tried that recently.
The Reichscommisariats are actually not any good at resource extraction (they have no cores) their primary function is reducing the consumer goods demands from Economy of Conquest.
Two notes:
Firstly, a minor issue. Last time I checked, HoI4 actually had a sliver of representation for Soviet women role in the war. Soviet tree have at least one national focus about Night Witches bomber regiment and I think there was another one about female participation in workforce. But I booted up the game last time a very long time ago, so I can be wrong about the second one.
Secondly, a larger point about the essay. Soviet Union military performance in 1941 against Germany had nothing to do with ‘trusting’ Nazis until the last moment. There was no trust. And the whole thing is essentially a myth that was created in a perfect merger of Western anti-Soviet Cold War view (USSR was German ally and was betrayed and stabbed in the back) and Soviet post-Stalin internal politics where a lot of people had to explain their role in failures and defeats of 1941 without putting themselves on a spot by admitting any wrongdoing. So ‘Stalin believed Hitler until the last moment and prevented us from preparing for the war’ spiel was born. Stalin was dead by that point and was in no position to object of course. Honestly, it is eerily similar with how surviving German generals blamed everything they were able to on Hitler. Nobody likes Hitler, so he is a perfect scapegoat.
The core reason behind the Soviet poor performance in 1941 was two-fold.
First half is pretty widely known and usually is mentioned alongside with ‘surprise attack/Stalin trusted Hitler’ reason. Red Army was not in a great shape in 1941 (but not really because of the Purges because reality was much more complex than that) and there was a lot of stuff going on internally – military expansion, rearmament, a lot of effort went into improving military infrastructure in freshly conquered areas to host a hugely enlarged military presence and so on and on. In HoI4 terms, Soviet divisions were permanently locked in a low Organization state even when they had a full strength bar (game even simulates that but again ties it almost entirely to Purges). It is a first part.
Second part is less known because it generally runs counter to ‘Stalin trusted Hitler’ narrative and challenges a lot of other smaller historical myths about WW2. This second component was almost total intelligence failure about German deployment and preparations during 1940-41 period. To put it simply: Soviet intelligence vastly overestimated the total strength of German military (they basically reported that Germany had about two times more divisions and tanks that it had in reality), the amount of forces Germany had deployed on USSR border in 1940 and because of that the rapid buildup of forces that Nazis did during first half of 1941 was essentially missed. Because instead of increase from 20-30 divisions to 130 (out of ~180), Soviet intelligence reported buildup from 80 divisions to 130 (out of almost 260). So to the Soviet leadership situation didn’t look as ‘final moments before the strike’ but ‘there is build up for attack but it is not ready yet’, as Soviets at no point believed that Germany will attack them with just a half of their army. And this was kinda brushed under the rug after the war and especially Stalin’s death. As a lot of Soviet intelligence people went pretty far and didn’t like to talk about how much did they fucked up. ‘It was Stalin’s fault’ was a much more convenient explanation for them.
This myth kinda includes all these infamous ‘Soviets knew the date of German attack beforehand through Zorge’s reports’ and so on. No,they really didn’t because various intelligence operatives (not only Zorge) reported a whole bunch of dates for impending German attack through the first half of 1941. Late June was only one of such dates. Many already passed at that point.
But in the end, Soviet Union was very much in the process of preparation for the German attack. Purposeful specific preparations for that were going on from at least late May 1941. USSR was simply not fast enough both because the scale of effort required was tremendous and they also thought that they had more time.
Firstly, the Red Army most assuredly was affected by The Purges. You can’t kill many hundreds of senior commanders and thousands of junior officers and not severely disrupt the armed forces, even those the size of the Soviet Union. If Germany had managed to do the same during the war, it would have been the most successful military “decapitation” campaign in history.
Secondly, the intelligence failures were in large part because nobody in the Soviet intelligence services dared tell Stalin anything he didn’t want to hear. (At least, not until after the German attack.) As always, this is not unique to the Soviet Union: intelligence services in every nation are under pressure to tell senior government figures that the government is right, not wrong. But authoritarian regimes suffer more than most, because contracting someone like Stalin is all too often literally fatal. Plenty of the lower level Soviet intelligence people would have known the true size of Germany’s armed forces on the border, that they were preparing to attack, etc. Those opinions were dismissed because it wasn’t what the higher levels of Soviet government wanted to be true.
Red Army was effected by the Purges, no doubt. It was just not a universal answer for everything that happened. Generally, there is simply too much attention to the Purge as an explanation in public WW2 discourse. HoI4 is guilty of that too because Purge (especially in earlier version before focus tree expansion) was basically a centerpiece of Soviet unique mechanics.
But the main issue was not the Purge because cadre shortage that was introduced by it was literally dwarfed by what was caused by the Red Army expansion. You can attribute loss of ~40 thousand сommanders to the Purge. Do you know how many officer positions the Red Army was short by June 1941? 140 thousands. Effect of army expansion significantly outstripped the effects of Purge in terms of command and staff shortage.
>Secondly, the intelligence failures were in large part because nobody in the Soviet intelligence services dared tell Stalin anything he didn’t want to hear.
It is simply a piece of historical mythology and ass-covering. People were telling Stalin what he didn’t want to hear all the time. Relevant parts of the Soviet archives were open to the researches for more than 2 decades now. We have transcripts of meetings, we have originals of the reports.
Stalin issue was that he was receiving basically unfiltered intelligence information because Soviet intelligence lacked proper analytics department, so they were feeding higher ups a raw data essentially. And you cannot even attribute it too much to Stalin personality or attitude because amateurish approach to intelligence was pretty common around the world and WW2 was exact point when everyone started to organize proper intelligence gathering apparatus.
>Plenty of the lower level Soviet intelligence people would have known the true size of Germany’s armed forces on the border, that they were preparing to attack, etc.
How would they knew about it? Via Google maybe? Seriously, even British didn’t know in 1941 the size of German military. Like reform of Panzer division organization was literally missed by everyone. Soviets for example got the part that there is now MORE tank divisions in German army but the information about it being achieved by splitting the tank component of each in half didn’t get through until relevant organization documents were captured in combat.
So this presumption that SOMEONE knew all this stuff but nobody listened to them is not supported by anything but sincere belief in a casuation between ‘Stalin was a bad dude’ = ‘He must be at fault’.
The impact of purging 40,000 army officers during a period of several years is disproportionate to the number of officers lost, because officers do not become proficient at higher levels of command by magic, nor do they do so overnight.
When you kill all the generals and most of the colonels and replace them with hastily promoted captains, majors, and a handful of trusted colonels you didn’t shoot, you will get <i>even worse</i> results than would be expected if you say “hm, the Army now has only 90% as many officers as it needs.” Because the newly promoted officers will need time to adjust and to learn on the job, and they are now operating in an environment where being caught making a mistake could easily get them shot.
Moreover, the usual method by which junior and mid-ranking officers acquire experience involves a significant amount of “apprenticeship,” of getting advice and guidance from other, more experienced officers. This chain is broken by purges, both because many of the senioar officers are dead, and because everyone involved is reluctant to take on more apprentices- being apprenticed to the wrong person can get YOU purged, and taking on an apprentice who is ambitious or untrustworthy can get you purged so that he can step into your position.
So while you’re surely right that ongoing expansion and reorganization of the Red Army taking place in parallel with the purges played a huge role, I think the purges may have had an impact out of proportion to the raw numbers of those killed, in a way that the expansion alone would not have replicated.
People were telling Stalin what he didn’t want to hear all the time. Relevant parts of the Soviet archives were open to the researches for more than 2 decades now. We have transcripts of meetings, we have originals of the reports.
@Crueldwarf,
That sounds really interesting, do you have sources I can look at concering internal dissension within the Party, etc. during Stalin’s time? It’s interesting to me because it runs contrary to a common narrative we hear.
Regardless of what happened in Stalin’s heart of hearts, which we will never know, it is factually accurate to say that the Soviet Union supplied Nazi Germany with war critical materials 1939-1941 and did everything to avoid antagonizing Germany even when it became reasonably clear that Germany was shifting forces to the East, until there was no more avoiding when Germany attacked.
It was ironically the expansion of Soviet borders after 1939 that caused some of the issues that caught the Red Army with its pants down in 1941 – they needed to prepare new defensive positions and formations, all while being still in the process of modernizing their equipment and doctrines, all while being busy supplying Germany with critical resources that could have been traded elsewhere if they hadn’t antagonized the UK & US with their open support of the German conquest of Western Europe.
The later Lend Lease deal with the Allies was an enormous boon to the Soviet economy and shows what they could have gained by aligning with the West instead of the Nazis, but then I guess that would have also meant not having a free hand to rearrange Eastern European borders 1939-1941 and post-war.
Here were we have another piece of mythology to examine. Soviet alignment with Nazi Germany in 1939-41 didn’t appear out of thin air.
Soviet Union spent most of the 30s trying to create common security architecture against resurgent Nazi Germany together with UK and France with the last attempt happening right alongside talks with Nazis. But UK and France didn’t want to commit to alliance with the USSR preferring to keep their promises vague and keeping Poland as a primary security partner in the Eastern Europe. At which point, yes, Soviets decided that we throw everyone under the bus to buy a bit more time and maybe making Germans, French and British fight each other.
Soviets did one miscalculation – they didn’t predict that France would fold.
Basically, wringing the hand about bad Soviets getting in bed with Hitler *AFTER* everyone else in Europe did the same is a hypocrisy of the highest degree.
Yes, there is a reality somewhere where USSR didn’t sign the Pact and had a common cause with the Western Allies from the get go. But it didn’t happen because British and French security policy for Europe in the late 30s was inane not because USSR threw their friendship away.
Yeah, Stalin was aware Hitler was a threat, got no buyers for trying to stop him (partially because appeasement, but partially to be fair because people didn’t really trust him for some strange reason!). So instead he sided with him, used that to gobble a bunch of land. If France had held, which it should have, and was the expectation of the time, the Nazis would have been increasingly been dependent on Soviet trade, in no position to invade, and Soviets could have turned the screws. And when the Nazis finally lose, Uncle Stalin can secure the Ribbentrop parts of the Molotov–Ribbentrop deal. Even without hindsight the Soviets were well aware the Fall of France was a strategic disaster. Stalin was actually a fairly cautious guy, he just bet really wrong here. At which point he had to play appeaser because the USSR wasn’t ready for war and time was on their side.
I would argue that it wasn’t really about trusting Stalin or not either. British just considered USSR as a weaker ally than Poland because Soviet Union was viewed as a basket case. Nobody considered Soviets a true treat and USSR as a superpower was a purely Cold War concept that is often ported to interwar period.
But my basic argument against ‘Allies had to give Eastern Europe to Stalin’ to secure early alliance is very simple really. British and French would be in a much better position to keep Uncle Joe honest and ask him to vacate the premises after a relatively quick defeat of Germany. Because Stalin was seemingly willing enough to promise to not to occupy Poland, Romania and Baltics in case of war with Germany.
Free hand to re-arrange borders in the East was not a Soviet prerequisite for an alliance. It was a concession that they extracted from Nazis specifically because they were able to. Their proposed deal to the Allies was not a copy of Molotov-Ribbetrop Pact with names swapped. What Soviets wanted the most from the British and French was written commitment to declare war on Germany in case of any new shenenigans like ‘peaceful’ dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.
This is not really the case: the Soviet demanded in Spring 1939 the right to freely move and base troops inside Baltic countries, Finlandnand Poland. Considering that Soviet Union was also expert in fomenting internal unrest and revolutionary coups (they had, most recently, tried to cause coups in 1923 and 1927 in Poland and Baltic states), the idea of allowing Soviet troops a free rein in these countries was also tantamount of causing their governments to fall to communists. We know that this is what happened in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in Spring 1940, real life.
@Tambourine,
I think they would have gotten a certain amount of freedom to rearrange borders in Eastern Europe, since they did so after the war anyway. Most of the areas they annexed from Poland, as far as I know, were not majority-Polish at least in rural areas, they were Lithuanian, Belarussian or Ukrainian, so they would have some grounds to make those claims even if they’d sided with the Allies from the beginning.
That’s funny because a few weeks ago there was someone here arguing that the 1939 border expansions were a necessary moral compromise to ensure the inevitable war with Nazi Germany would be fought on as favourable ground as possible.
This is what happens when you build a war simulator and ignore the fact that “WAR IS AN EXTENSION OF POLITICS BY OTHER MEANS.”
Or, put another way, that wars are fought and won (or lost or merely survived) by societies and subcultures, nkt by war machines alone.
Did World War II and/or the Cold War really demonstrate the historical superiority or the inevitable victory of liberal democracy? Isn’t it more the case, as Azar Gat argues, that as a matter of historical happenstance there existed a large and rich liberal democracy, the United States? If the US had not existed (extreme historical counterfactual), it seems unlikely that a little liberal democratic island consisting of Britain, France, maybe Scandinavia, and you can add in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, would have triumphed over Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. At best, Britain and some of the white dominions might have endured as political oddities, like Switzerland or Monaco, in a world dominated by authoritarian or totalitarian empires.
Assuming a more reasonable level of French military competence in the Battle of France, wouldn’t the UK + British Empire + France outproduced Germany handily, given the UK + British Empire without France was going toe-to-toe with Germany?
And the Soviets struggled to conquer Finland, which was much smaller and poorer than France or the UK and on the Soviet doorstep.
There is a whole bit of Finnish national mythology about Winter war going on too. Soviets indeed failed to conquer Finland QUICKLY and easily. Mostly because they prepared very poorly for it and allocated not enough forces for the initial attack. People love to cite total size of the Red Army in comparison to Finnish military but tacitly forget about what part of that military was actually deployed for the initial attack.
And still by the time settlement came and Winter war ended, Finland was already on the ropes while Soviets weren’t.
Finland was basically saved by Soviet recognition that army was in a very poor state and further aggravating US and UK by fully conquering Finland would be a very bad move in face of ever growing German threat. So Soviets decided to back off. But realistically, there was nothing that could have stopped fall of Finland no later than April 1940.
I think there was some amount of “we could win, but the costs would exceed the benefits” as well: as you say, the Red Army really was in bad shape, Finnish defensive tactics really were very good (not nearly good enough to defeat the entire Red Army, but they were punching above their weight), and finishing the war would have had real military costs as well as the diplomatic ones. (Plus, of course, you get into what an occupation would have cost…)
“We could win, but the costs would exceed the benefits” is also known as “losing” (see also US involvement in Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc.) Remember, the purpose of military strategy isn’t simply wins wars in the abstract, it’s to attain a political object with acceptable costs. If you can’t do that…that’s a military failure.
I can’t reply directly to Ben L, but the Soviets did actually win the Winter War. They conquered all of the territories that Finland had refused to sell them before the war, and more, without having to make any of the territorial concessions that they originally offered to the Finns before the war in return for the land they wanted. The territories they conquered are still part of Russia today, which is about as clear a sign of victory as you can imagine.
Sure, they didn’t push on to Helsinki in order to impose a Communist government at bayonet point, but they didn’t do that in ’44-’45 either when the Finns were, again, on the losing side of a war., which is very clear evidence that Stalin didn’t want to do it in 1940 either.
@Kevin Walsh
I would like to note that the Soviet behaviour in 1944 is not only explained by “not wanting”. Before Finland made peace in September 1944, the Finnish Army had stopped a major Soviet offensive, and the Soviets had used up about two or three armies’ worth of very good troops, while the Finnish army was undefeated, with our main defense line still without challenge. Conquering Finland had been possible, but it would have required at least half a million troops more.
At the same time, Stalin had other uses for those troops, like conquering Germany. Finland was not, again, the Soviet priority.
When it comes to the Winter War, I would like to note that Stalin had, on November 30th, 1939, founded a puppet regime called “Finnish Democratic Republic”, led by exiled Finnish communists, which they treated as the Finnish government until February. The stated Soviet goal of the war was a complete conquest of Finland, and installation of this government to rule it. In the peace of March 1940, the Soviet Union made the peace with the Republic of Finland, without requiring any changes to our democratic constitution. So, the war objectove of Soviet Union was not just limited territorial changes but the total conquest. This was avoided. Whether you classify this as a loss or victory is immaterial; the main thing for Finland was the preservation of the national independence. It is good to remember that out of the European WWII belligerents, only three capitals were never occupied: London, Moscow and Helsinki.
Like Devin, I would say that there was this cost-benefit calculation in the play. The Soviet leadership was appanrently not quite conscious of the fact that the Finnish Army was on the verge of collapse in March 1940. The current Finnish consensus is that the collapse was imminent: the army was at a breaking point, and the reserves were completely exhausted. However, as the Finnish resistance remained very stiff (at the cost of depleting all reserves for longer run), the Soviet intelligence had an overly positive idea of the Finnish capability, and Stalin made peace.
This is not really a problem for Finnish “national mythology”. Nobody here has believes seriously that Finland would be able to fight continuously, alone and without support, against Russia or Soviet Union. We only aim to have a capability to fight long enough and cause serious enough losses that conquest of Finland is not really worthwhile.
Yes, this is part of why France “Has” to fall, or the war ends very early.
Wikipedia page for Hotchkiss 35/39 tank gives some idea of how extensive the Franco-British war material manufacturing plans were;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotchkiss_H35#Operational_history
So, to be clear, if we assume for the sake of simplicity that their plan was to attack Germany from France at effective the same time as the OTL Axis began Barbarossa, this would have formed the following force;
And this would have been on top of all the tanks that have already existed at the time of the OTL Battle of France (at least ~3,400 French tanks + several hundred more crappy BEF ones) + an extra 4 months of unimpeded manufacturing (June – September), when the H39 and R40 monthly numbers in particular would have ramped up from their modest OTL levels to this (let’s assume ~1,000 of both for simplicity.) I am honestly not sure how high their heavy B1 production could have gone, as those 9 per month is just what was reserved for the British – but OTL, 9 per month was also the production level just before the Fall of Poland; the output of this overcomplicated thing had a nasty habit of slipping timelines so I don’t see much more than 300-400. Either way – the British would have also continued to manufacture their Matildas (380 by the end of 1940; OTL they produced 1038 by the end of 1941, so we could assume half of that for simplicity by June 1941; i.e. ~900) and perhaps Valentines (depending on whether they considered them “light tanks” or not under the terms of their deal with the French; if not, that’s another 800 or so). Likewise, the Somua 35/40 would have continued production; 823 were ordered OTL (of which ~440 were delivered) so ~400 extra tanks is the minimum bound (there would have likely been more orders still.)
In contrast, Germany would have had approximately as many as tanks as what they committed to OTL Barbarossa (~3,300 – not counting a few hundred French trophies they threw into that invasion for obvious reasons) + ~800 tanks they lost in the OTL Battle of France + some 300 Afrika Korps tanks + then-extant reserves (~1,000, apparently). That’s about 5,500, give or take – whereas there would have been >5,000 of just the H39s and R40s that didn’t exist OTL. Admittedly, all of those were design dead ends with very small turrets and at the absolute end of their modernization potential; but in a head-to-head fight, they would have still been superior to all German tanks besides somewhere around 1,200-1,500 Panzer IVs, StuGs and upgunned Panzer IIIs – and all of those would have been more than matched by perhaps twice as many generally-superior Matilda IIs, B1s and S35s. Add the aforementioned OTL tanks + the expansion in other Allied weaponry that would have been ongoing at the same time and at faster rate than the German one (artillery, armoured cars, trucks, aircraft – even the French submachine gun might have been delivered in respectable numbers by then) – and you can see why the Manstein Plan was so critical.
P.S. Remarkable that the Franco-British tank production plan assumed help from Salazar’s Portugal – and it apparently wasn’t an insane assumption! For that matter, people really forget how close France was to both Mussolini’s Italy and Antonescu’s Romania; the former exported FIAT trucks that were used by the French military in quite a few areas of the front and the latter was one of the only export customers of the Renault 35 tanks and Renault UE Chanilette gun tractors (in addition to a whole lot of more widely exported French artillery and unarmoured truck/half-track tractors with long-forgotten manufacturer names like Latil.) Ironically, one of the domino effects of the Fall of France was dooming both the OG fascism and one of its more determined emulators via their own overreach.
The H series tanks had a 2 man crew. This is a serious deficiency. To be really effective in combat at this point in time you need a tank with a 3 man turret basket. Therefore a 4-5 man crew.
@Mage
You’re right that French tank design and doctrine was quite poor. At the same time, it is striking that they were good faith engaged in a significant military buildup, though the buildup had its own problems connected to inefficient manufacture and political issues tying up production.
It is reasonable to imagine a “competent France” which, in conjunction with Britain, absolutely could have matched and defeated Germany. The material factors allowed for it. Even as the real France made so many interlocking poor collective decisions that they were badly hamstrung even before they left a final fatal gap in their defenses in the Ardennes.
Indeed; if only my comment included some acknowledgement of that like, I don’t know
I have already spent quite a while in the previous threads knowing how difficult it was to aim from all those tanks where the commander also had to fire a gun personally and didn’t feel like setting aside another paragraph to repeat that. However, this can only really be capitalized on if one can actually destroy the tank in the first place; otherwise the commander has more than enough time to eventually respond. Much like what happened at Hannut OTL;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_invasion_of_Belgium_(1940)
In the OTL Battle of France, the modal German tank was Panzer II (955 out of 2,574, according to Guderian’s own Panzer Leader) with over 500 Panzer Is as well. In a scenario where it’s delayed by a year and the Allies strike first, there would be about 100 more Panzer IIs. Either way, about a third of all German armour (~1,600 out of ~5,000) would be totally doomed in a head-to-head engagement with virtually all Allied tanks – and unlike OTL, they would be hard-pressed to avoid them, with so many newly formed, Hotchkiss-equipped “cavalry” divisions pressing ahead. Even if a Panzer I/II squadron somehow managed to bypass them and strike directly at an infantry division, it would just run into its integrated Renault 40 “penny packet” instead. Moreover, the Czech tanks (of which there were nearly 800 during OTL Barbarossa; perhaps up to 1,000 in this scenario, since the OTL 1940 losses do not happen) and the early Panzer IIIs wouldn’t fare much better: the whole reason behind the tiny turret on light Hotchkiss and Renault tanks was to make them largely immune to 37mm guns.
Granted, according to Tank Archives, they could still beat that armor at distances under 300m – however, the main difference between H35 and H39 (and the R40 vs. R35, for that matter) is that they also were finally rearmed with long-barreled 37mm guns more-or-less equivalent to German ones, as opposed to reusing the WWI-era Renault FT guns that were designed to shoot into bunker embrasures, not fight armour, and could at best knock out a Panzer II or an armoured car up close. Hence, OTL engagements of Czech tanks/Panzer IIIs vs. R/H35s (and a small number of gasproof FCM 36s) essentially consisted of the German-piloted tanks getting the first shot, then another and another, discovering their gun does nothing, the French commander finally shooting back, likewise doing nothing, and then the two coming closer until the German crews finally hit them at under 300 meters.
Here, though, we would expect the 35 generation of these tanks to be in the reserve/second echelon, positioned whenever they would be the most likely to mop up infantry or minor emplacements, rather than encounter other tanks. The H39s/R40s, though, would score a fatal hit on the German 37mm-armed tanks well before that. (Unless the latter are all uparmoured from the front to 50mm, the way Battle of France-era Panzer IIIs and Panzer 38(t)s which survived till Barbarossa were; unclear if that would happen by 1941 in the absence of the actual Battle of France demonstrating its necessity, but if it does, their odds in a “duel” get closer to a coin toss.) They would still be at a clear disadvantage vs. an upgunned Panzer III or any Panzer IV or a StuG; but as noted above, the Allies would have at least as many Somua 35/40s, B1s and Matildas in the field (the raw total would be greater, but it regularly took a month or more for a newly produced tank to reach all the logistical steps to be deployed with a combat-ready crew) as all those German tanks/assault guns combined.
Now, in fairness, a Heer which happened to wait for a year wouldn’t just be the sum of OTL Battle of France/Barbarossa/1940 Afrika Korps forces (the former overlaps a lot with the latter two). If we want to make things a bit more interesting, these “buffs” appear plausible (some are even quite likely):
Note that this is quite conservative; i.e. the timelines for larger-caliber weapons aren’t accelerated, we don’t assume extremely early V-1 or Me 262, etc. Germany is still unlikely to fare well to defeat the Allies and counterattack, but the Allied assault actually might get bogged down enough that the Soviet resources do in fact draw out the war for years. There’s also a wild card where the British attempt to bomb Soviet oil at Baku, fail at it (1940-level strategic bombing was this inaccurate) – and could well be “rewarded” with far more intense Soviet participation on the German side.
*Although, it’s hardly inconceivable that a Nazi Germany which doesn’t attack France in 1940 instead opts to occupy Yugoslavia that year (instead of OTL’s April 1941), hoping to grab extra resources that way and figuring the Allies are unlikely to deviate from the preexisting production plan and attack while a portion of the German army is fighting the very limited Yugoslav military. If you know anything about the Yugoslav partisans, that gamble almost certainly backfires and sets them back worse. (OTL, many of the trophy French tanks ended up dumped to intimidate Yugoslav villages, patrol hill trails, guard depots, etc. Here, that would likely take away many of the Panzer I/IIs from the France-facing divisions – though as discussed above, that would only really matter if they would have been upgunned by then.)
**By then, only the ultimate version, Luchs (Lynx) is made; its armour is closer to more akin to the initial Panzer III and it has 1.5X greater speed, but still the same near-useless armament. With such small numbers, some of the only recon formations with it were seen at Kursk. Of course, the total chassis production is way larger, since Marders II and then Wespes keep getting made.
I wrote out a scenario for how they could have had redirected their existing resources to get far better odds of defeating Germany in 1940 outright – even without any change on the operational level.
https://acoup.blog/2026/09/18/teaching-paradox-hearts-of-iron-iv-part-ii-divisions-designers-and-doctrines/#comment-111989
The Soviet Union benefited immensely in its first decade from American enterprises building factories for them. It’s really quite doubtful that in a world without a United States it could have bootstrapped to the degree it did. The counterfactual is thus probably beyond evaluation.
Germany also benefited greatly from US finace, in the interwar period. It was one of the reasons, Germany was so heavily affected by the Great Depression.
In a world with out the economic strengh of the US, the 40ties would have looked a lot differently either way.
I mean, if we want to go that deeply into the counterfactual – a world where “the US had not existed” (whatever that means – does the entire landmass just disappear? Does “North America” just refer to “Canada”, while Coahuila gets an Atlantic Ocean coastline?) is almost certainly one where the German Empire wins World War I. In fact, it very likely wins well before 1918, since not only is there no hope of a possibly-imminent American intervention to sustain the Entente – but there is no seemingly-inexhaustible flow of American credit either.
https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781513511795/ch002.xml
In that case, the entire premise of Hearts of Iron as a series would seem to disappear in the first place.
We must go deeper. Without the US Steve Perrin does not create the “Basic Role-Playing” game. Target Games has nothing to copy and never goes into business and never becomes Paradox, which in turns never develops Hearts of Iron at all.
let’s not forget the American revolution affected the French revolution, which affected German nationalist movements and unification.
Indeed: without the American War of Liberation, the French state finances would not have been desperate, and the Estates would never have assembled.
Eh, with the French crown being what it was, I suspect that even in the total absence of the USA as landmass, it was still perfectly capable of getting into an equivalent debt just to support the Quebecois insurrection instead, so the Revolution could well happen anyway – and then inspire the Germans. Harder to think of a way the German Empire (if it is extant at all) loses WWI in the absence of American intervention on the other side.
P.S. An even more interesting implication of this counterfactual.
https://academic.oup.com/emph/article/2019/1/18/5298310
In other words; just how much could the (European) history have changed by 1939 if there was no “Spanish” flu at all (or at least, if it arrives late) and millions of late-1910s young people grow up to enter middle age and have (more) children?
“The Soviet Union benefited immensely in its first decade from American enterprises building factories for them.”
And also from American charity feeding their children. ARA was feeding eleven million children in Soviet Russia at its peak in summer 1921. Those children would grow up to be soldiers and factory workers in 1941 – if it hadn’t been for American aid, how many would have survived? Enough to still defeat Germany? Because it was touch-and-go as it was.
<i>And also from American charity feeding their children. ARA was feeding eleven million children in Soviet Russia at its peak in summer 1921. Those children would grow up to be soldiers and factory workers in 1941 – if it hadn’t been for American aid, how many would have survived? Enough to still defeat Germany? Because it was touch-and-go as it was.</i>
As a US Citizen who thinks that the US has generally been a net negative on the world stage (more often than not), and has an <i>extremely</i> dim view of most US foreign policy, I definitely agree with you on that. The famine relief during the 1921-1922 Soviet famine specifically (because it was so clearly against US ideological interests), and American foreign aid programs more generally, have been some of our moral high points.
I think the flaw in Azar Gat’s argument is that the existence of a large and wealthy liberal democracy in the US isn’t just a historical happenstance, but that liberalism plays a key role in explaining just why the US economy is so outlandishly large and wealthy. While history is of course contingent, the existence of large and wealthy liberal democracies (and the UK, France etc were also wealthy, just not to quite the same extent as the US) is in a sense what we would understand to be the expected outcome of the events of the 19th century.
OTOH, Germany was about as wealthy as the UK. So it’s not that simple either. Liberal democracies arguably has an advantage (though there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg question, are liberal democracies rich or do rich countries become liberal democracies?)
Germany was, functionally, about as much of a liberal democracy as France or Britain was during most of the period from the time of its founding to the rise of the Nazis. Fascism cannot take credit for German industrialization that took place before Hitler was even born, let alone before he became chancellor.
Not really. Wilhelmine germany was definitely not liberal and (arguably) not a demcracy. In some ways the closest analogy today is the Islamic Republic of Iran: In that it had democratic elements (elections in Iran are neither free nor fair, but neither are they completely pointless like eg. in the USSR) but heavily circumscribed by non-democratic ones. (though Iran is farther on the non-democratic end)
It gets even jankier since Germany was a federal state and a bunch of bits were less democratic than others but “Functionally as democratic as the UK or France” isn’t actually true.
@Arilou,
Perhaps the more important thing than abstract “liberalism” is the nature of German society: Wilhelmine Germany was a <i>Rechtsstaat</i> par excellence. The liberty and property of the individual was secured probably better than anywhere except, perhaps, Britain and Sweden. Both civil authorities and courts were extremely non-corrupt, legislation was modern and contract law extremly clear. Freedom of thought was wide, and in academic circles, almost unlimited.
As much as I love democracy, I think that these aspects are even more important to economic success of a country than its political liberalism.
Germany was probably wealthier than the UK overall, but significantly poorer per capita – David Edgerton points out that this gave the UK an advantage, because it could divert a lot more capacity into military production without living standards dropping unacceptably low.
This is relevant also to Bret’s point about employing women – Germany had more of its women working throughout the war than the UK did, regardless of their supposedly traditional views about women’s work. But they were working on small inefficient farms, not in factories.
Yes, this is a point made by Tooze, though somewhat slighted by Brett: Germany had plenty of women working during the war, but they were mostly driving tractors (or in some cases draft animals) on farms.
If France had held, the Nazis would probably have lost pretty quickly (by 1942 I would guess assuming no coup against Hitler which is fairly likely). They just are substantially outproduced in that scenario completely ignoring the US and in an attritional land conflict. French production would have ramped up *a lot* over the following year and Germany would have had a serious munitions crisis. They depleted that pretty badly even in OTL fighting. By Barbarossa they were good again and production had increased, but continuous campaigning would be a problem.
The Nazi’s exploited major mistakes of their foes and rolled a lot of 6s on top of that. WWI was always likely to be a bloodbath, but WWII in real life is much closer to a worse-case than best-case scenarios.
Also people deeply underestimate how much pressure the Western Allies were putting on the Nazis. Sure the Soviets were doing most of the dying and at the end of the day someone needs to be the infantry on the ground. But in economic terms the Nazis were forced to commit about as much resources to the fight against the Western Allies as the Soviets even before Overlord happened. Its just that fight was higher on tech and lower on manpower.
@ey81,
Wow, this is one of the first comments I remember where we heartily agree! I appreciate you making an “argument aganst interest”, as they say, here.
I would qualify things a bit, though, and say that I think part of the reason why the Cold War ended up the way it did, is probably not unrelated to the fact that the industrial capitalist bloc was led by one of its better performing, economically advanced and arguably culturally “progressive” countrie, while the industrial communist bloc was led by….a country with a lot of longstanding political, economic and cultural pathologies going back centuries. If the most powerful Western country was say a massively scaled-up Spain or Italy, and if communism had first got started in the territories of the Habsburg Empire rather than the Romanov empire (it came close to), I suspect the history of the Cold War might have looked quite a bit different.
For that matter, if America itself had taken a different tack at some points- say if America had shut down the civil rights movement and subsequently ended up with decades of racial civil conflict and cultural conservatism- I suspect things might have ended up quite differently as well.
Marxism is ideologically committed to class warfare and a zero-sum view of the world. Marxists believe economic prosperity comes from colonialism and exploitation. That makes them bad at diplomatic relationships.
I don’t think this is a particularly accurate summary of Marxism. Most Marxist perspectives on history and economic that I’m familiar with do not believe that the world is “zero-sum,” but rather that good things are produced by laborers working to make them. The typical Marxist absolutely believes that the workers can make the world better, and indeed fully expects this to happen in the future, without anyone being robbed!
What the typical Marxist does NOT believe is that any specific individual can become very much richer or more powerful than the average worker, without somehow having some gimmick for depriving others of the fruits of their own labor. Thus, they tend to be hostile to elite power structures of any kind (feudal aristocracy, the business-owning 1%) on the theory that these people only become and remain rich through a systematic robbing of the workers.
Again and again, we see Marxists firmly convinced that various countries can absolutely prosper without colonialism or exploitation of other countries. That’s not how the USSR ended up working, but the USSR’s leadership don’t have a monopoly on the entire concept of “Marxism.” Or if they do, then we have to declare as a corollary that it is literally impossible to be a Marxist without being a member of the Soviet Politburo or something, in which case there are no Marxists anymore and no reason to worry about them, eh?
You claim this about Marxism but I’ve heard Marxists claim multiple times that Western prosperity is from colonialism and exploitation and I’ve *never* heard another Marxist criticise such a claim.
<i>Again and again, we see Marxists firmly convinced that various countries can absolutely prosper without colonialism or exploitation of other countries. That’s not how the USSR ended up working,</i>
I think that the relationship of the Soviet Union (and the United States, for that matter) to the socialist and capitalist blocs respectively, and to subject nations within their own borders, is a little more complex than simple old-style colonialism or exploitation. (It almost had to be more complex, since both countries were ideologically opposed to colonialism, in principle).
Did the Soviets distort economic relationships between COMECON states, and between its national republics? Absolutely. It’s a little more complex than simple exploitation though, when you consider that there were also large scale investment flows to the Central Asian republics, as well as to socialist countries in the developing world.
The Soviets <i>definitely</i> engaged in massive looting of Eastern Germany between 1945-1950, and probably severely set back the GDR’s economy for the next 40 years (i.e. for its entire existence), but I think they justified on the grounds of “these are war reparations, and you know, they’re former *Nazis*”, and it’s not like they were entirely wrong. Though I do think their approach was deeply, deeply counterproductive in the long term.
Well the soviets aren’t the only example we have, China currently is a functioning country but only after having adopted capitalism pretty heavily.
North Korea is North Korea, Cuba is a dictatorship , Venezuala was a dictatorship and Iran is a theocracy.
Also while the Soviets invested in the eastern bloc it was only so they could produce for the Soviet heartland. Similar to the Raj building rails and trains to better extract resources from India, and after the USSR collapsed the soviet satellites find their economies to have been entirely dependent on producing for their soviet masters.
Similar to some post-colonial societies finding their infrastructure having been entirely built to service foreign masters and not being able to function independently.
@Hector, I think the difference is that an American president coming from the liberal tradition can believe, consistently with that tradition, that other countries with different economic and political systems can be useful American allies and trading partners and that the richer they are the better for the USA.
For a Communist to believe that, they would have to ignore most of Marxist ideology and rhetoric. And even if an individual Communist leader manages that, he or she would have to deal with the legacy of that rhetoric on the leaders of other countries and on communist party members.
How about, if people have beef with Marxism, they come up with better arguments than just constantly bringing up the Soviet Union? It’s the rhetorical equivalent to going “Well, you say you like capitalism? That means you looove the Great Depression and want one to happen every week.”
Well, how about if people love Marxism so much, they come up with a RL Marxist state worthy of admiration. (That doesn’t mean Sweden.) Instead, what I always find is (i) a lot of denial, e.g., the Soviet Union wasn’t really Marxist, and (ii) a lot of finger-pointing, e.g., Cuba would do fine if not for the US embargo, or Stalin perverted what Trotsky would have made into a noble endeavor (strangely moralistic and fantastical arguments from purported materialists).
@AlienSystem, you’re saying this on a thread where I’m arguing that Marxist ideology makes Marxists bad at international relations. That’s not specific to the Soviet Union.
“How about, if people have beef with Marxism, they come up with better arguments than just constantly bringing up the Soviet Union?”
I think bringing up the first, largest, longest-lasting, and most influential attempt to do something is fair play when you are discussing whether trying to do that thing is a good idea or not. It’s like, yes, unfortunately, if you want to discuss hydrogen-filled airships, someone is going to mention the Hindenburg at some point.
“I think bringing up the first, largest, longest-lasting, and most influential attempt to do something is fair play when you are discussing whether trying to do that thing is a good idea or not. It’s like, yes, unfortunately, if you want to discuss hydrogen-filled airships, someone is going to mention the Hindenburg at some point”
Aside, but the Hindenburg is a spectacular example of why airships are safer than airplanes. Watch the footage, then remember 2/3 of the people on that flaming wreck survived, about 1/3 with minor injuries. Any comparable disaster that reduces an airplane to a flaming wreck is going to have a nearly 100% fatality rate.
Modern aircraft solved safety by having so many ways to prevent disasters, but they are inherently more dangerous in design than any airship, and fatality rates for airplanes without redundant safety features back this up. Single engine planes and helicopters are quite dangerous.
“I think bringing up the first, largest, longest-lasting, and most influential attempt to do something is fair play when you are discussing whether trying to do that thing is a good idea or not.”
And as pertains to the point, a good analogy is if every discussion about capitalism was reduced to talking about Jamaican slave plantation, as (among) the first, longest-lasting, profitable, and influential examples of pure capitalism driven economics. It really was arguably the ur-example of a venture driven by capital, purely for profit, with nearly modern investment and financing, dependent on international finance and trade. It also formed the foundation of much of the British gentries wealth, forming generational fortunes that persist until today.
And it was one of the worst institutional crimes against humanity in history.
I’m not even saying it’s a bad argument, mind you. But if you want Marxists to talk only about the USSR capitalists should be prepared to only talk about the slave trade. Both sides have valid thought terminating arguments under those rules.
“Well, how about if people love Marxism so much, they come up with a RL Marxist state worthy of admiration. (That doesn’t mean Sweden.) Instead, what I always find is (i) a lot of denial, e.g., the Soviet Union wasn’t really Marxist, and (ii) a lot of finger-pointing, e.g., Cuba would do fine if not for the US embargo, or Stalin perverted what Trotsky would have made into a noble endeavor (strangely moralistic and fantastical arguments from purported materialists).”
The Soviet union wasn’t really Marxist and Cuba was doing pretty okay until the US blockade, though. At the very least you need to argue that point.
Look, saying that Marxism is bad because the USSR betrayed Marxist ideals doesn’t really make sense. It’s be like if I unironically argued liberalism is bad because plantation Jamaica betrayed liberal ideals. I could argue that capitalism betrays liberal ideas, as embodied by Jamaica, but trying to argue the broader point that it was self contradictory opens me to attack on the basis it wasn’t liberal to begin with, obviously.
There are better examples of arguments that use the USSR, and leftists make them all the time, hell they made them during the time the USSR existed. The most popular approach is to say that the existence of a central government was contradictory with socialist ideals, and that leads the more anarchist or libertarian socialist faction.
That leaves the RL Marxist argument, which is basically just arguing for the status quo. That isn’t inherently flawed, just deeply unconvincing. You’re not wrong that no one can point to a Marxist utopia and thereby prove they should have power to copy it, but that uncertainty isn’t proof the current situation is better. That’s rapidly becoming intellectually untenable ground.
I hope i was at least able to explain why these arguments are unconvincing to hear.
“Watch the footage, then remember 2/3 of the people on that flaming wreck survived, about 1/3 with minor injuries. Any comparable disaster that reduces an airplane to a flaming wreck is going to have a nearly 100% fatality rate.”
Fair point, but “if this aircraft catches fire it is safer than the other one” is not the same as “this aircraft is safer than the other one” because, apart from anything else, it very much depends how often each of them is likely to catch fire in the first place.
“if you want Marxists to talk only about the USSR capitalists should be prepared to only talk about the slave trade. Both sides have valid thought terminating arguments under those rules.”
Now, Terry, this is a little dishonest of you, because I didn’t say “Marxists must only talk about the USSR”. That’s a strawman that you have created. I said that Marxists should be prepared for people to bring up the USSR.
Ajay the question was on why people only bring up the USSR instead of arguing against the ideas and you jumped in with a bunch of superlatives about why it’s important to talk about it. In context shutting down non USSR discussion was what your comment did, intentional or not.
Plus, well, there are several answers here addressing the USSR. Marxists are prepared to answer it. It’s still a valid critique of asking that it’s the first reference point that most people know about, and not a substantive critique of Marxism as an idealogy.
<i>Well the soviets aren’t the only example we have, China currently is a functioning country but only after having adopted capitalism pretty heavily.
@Geo,
I absolutely agree the Soviets aren’t the only example we have! That was my point, at its height about a third of the world (I think about 29 countries, though i may be missing a few) were communist or communist aspiring, and then plenty more were some other flavor of socialist. Some of them did quite a bit better than the Soviets, including in the international relations sphere.
It’s strange that you bring up Venezuela or Iran in this context though, since the first isn’t remotely Communist and Iran hasn’t ever even been remotely socialist. The examples I was think of would be more like, the GDR or Hungary or Yugoslavia during the Cold War (depending on how much faith you have in the possibilities of economic planning).
Marxists claim multiple times that Western prosperity is from colonialism and exploitation and I’ve never heard another Marxist criticise such a claim.
Marxists claim that the prosperity of “Western” (not sure what you mean exactly but we’ll go with it) is largely due to things like the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, and also in the case of the US to things like the primitive accumulation made possible by Manifest Destiny. Colonialism may also have helped (there are debates about that), but I’m not aware of any Marxist thinker or government that said that was the primary reason why England is more developed today than South Asia. (The Industrial Revolution after all was one of the things that allowed Britain to conquer South Asia rather than the other way around).
I think bringing up the first, largest, longest-lasting, and most influential attempt to do something is fair play when you are discussing whether trying to do that thing is a good idea or not.
@Ajay,
Completely agree with you here that it’s fair play. And I should say that I’ve never had time for any of the types of people who just want to ignore the Soviet experience, or the experience of the Eastern Bloc in general, and treat it all as a big wrong turn.
What I would say though is that the Soviet Union is a foundation to be improved on, neither a blueprint to be copied or a big detour to be ignored. Not least because as you say, it was the first: I would expect, personally, that any new model for organizing an economy and society should self correct and improve itself over time, learning from both previous successes or failures. Just like modern day capitalist states (even the USA itself) look a lot better than the first states to put capitalism into effect several centuries ago. The Soviet Union can be where the debate begins, but shouldn’t be where it ends (especially when there are like 28 other communist states we could also take into consideration).
For a Communist to believe that, they would have to ignore most of Marxist ideology and rhetoric. And even if an individual Communist leader manages that, he or she would have to deal with the legacy of that rhetoric on the leaders of other countries and on communist party members.
I don’t think that’s true at all. Communist societies have traded with non-communist ones since day one. It’s true that, at least during the Cold War, they hoped that all of the world would eventually be communist, but that’s no different than what Americcan political and economic elites hoped for, they wanted to export the American model and were not all that interested in “peaceful coexistence’ in the long run.
@TracyW,
For a Communist to believe that, they would have to ignore most of Marxist ideology and rhetoric. And even if an individual Communist leader manages that, he or she would have to deal with the legacy of that rhetoric on the leaders of other countries and on communist party members.
I don’t think that’s true at all. Communist societies have traded with non-communist ones since day one. It’s true that, at least during the Cold War, they hoped that all of the world would eventually be communist, but that’s no different than what Americcan political and economic elites hoped for, they wanted to export the American model and were not all that interested in “peaceful coexistence’ in the long run.
@Terry
“I’m not even saying it’s a bad argument, mind you. But if you want Marxists to talk only about the USSR capitalists should be prepared to only talk about the slave trade. Both sides have valid thought terminating arguments under those rules.”
Oh, as someone who generally tries to be a non-Marxist kind of socialist, I’m very much in favor of *both* expecting Marxists to talk a lot about the Soviet Union *and* expecting capitalists to talk a lot about the slave trade.
@Raphael and if you’re capable of displaying the political nuance of “Marxist =/= socialist” there’s room for discussion there.
Although i’d argue for a definition of Marxism that basically means all socialists are Marxists, in that it’s most properly the early idealogical foundation of what would become virtually all socialist thought. Including the foundation of early Soviet idealogy. It diverged (not much) later.
(Not literally all sociakism; Marx had peers that contributed to the synthesis of socialism, but none ended up being more than regionally prominent. Unfortunately.)
Semantic argument aside, if you accept that synthesis of new ideas is the goal then there are pretty clear lessons vis a vis the Soviets that don’t imply socialism itself is wrong. The most basic is that central authority is incompatible with socialism. The state and central parties are materially inclined to produce hierarchical systems and can be prevented from doing this only with constant political oversight at best.
Likewise looking at slave plantations tells you that capitalism is incompatible with liberalism; capitalists are materially inclined to produce compulsory labor systems and can be prevented from doing this only with the threat of law and force at best.
Neither is intellectually onerous, and you can synthesize a way forward. But making every conversation about them ignores that this has already been done; it’s a way to reduce the intellectual breadth of debate.
This is not an accurate summary of marxism. Marxists fundementally believe that economic value is derived by labour, which adds value to the raw materials. That’s fundementally not zero sum. Further they believe that workers should own their own workspaces and the value they derive from them, I.e. the means of production, which directly contradicts colonialism.
There are communist offshoots that stop believing the second part, but that’s a transformational change over Marxism. Leftists generally refer to these idealogies as campist-i.e you’re communist only for your own camp (nation, power bloc) and support exploitation elsewhere, and they’re generally viewed as arch-traitors who foundationally changed Marxism.
I don’t want to start a flame war, but your sources are simplifying things to the point of useless propoganda.
“You claim this about Marxism but I’ve heard Marxists claim multiple times that Western prosperity is from colonialism and exploitation and I’ve *never* heard another Marxist criticise such a claim.”
Relative prosperity. No one really disputes that you can exploit others, but this is inefficient, it damages them more than it enriches you.
The great example of this is India. Under the Raj the British economy grew wealthy based on importing Indian goods like cotton and exporting finished products and machines, but the Indian economy itself was pretty much static for the entire raj, and even contradicted at points in the 19th to 20th century while england grew.
Then India achieved independence and it’s economy started exponentially growing. Immediately.
This critique of colonial rule obviously isn’t a statement that colonialism is necessary, but rather a statement that it’s a bad deal for the exploited. It’s actually incompatible with colonialism being necessary, India didn’t suddenly develop a colonial empire itself.
“II think the difference is that an American president coming from the liberal tradition can believe, consistently with that tradition, that other countries with different economic and political systems can be useful American allies and trading partners and that the richer they are the better for the USA.
For a Communist to believe that, they would have to ignore most of Marxist ideology and rhetoric. And even if an individual Communist leader manages that, he or she would have to deal with the legacy of that rhetoric on the leaders of other countries and on communist party members.”
What you’re describing is being pro trade, not marxist. They’re completely distinct idealogical positions; Marxists don’t have a monolithic view of trade, and even campist marxist traditions engaged in trade.
Of course marxists may believe that trade does not always follow simple comparative advantage principles but also interacts with political capital and power and thus think naively believing trade is always good is silly, but you can reach that conclusion from any perspective. It’s more a refutation of, say, India being poor despite having been forced to engage in trade rather than an idealogical hostility towards trade as a concept.
My point isn’t to deflect, but to point out that everyone
“Under the Raj the British economy grew wealthy based on importing Indian goods like cotton and exporting finished products and machines, but the Indian economy itself was pretty much static for the entire raj, and even contradicted at points in the 19th to 20th century while england grew.”
This isn’t actually true, though. In the late 19th century, as far as we can tell, India experienced faster economic growth than at any previous time in its history. It just looks slow because we are comparing it with the colossally faster and equally unprecedented growth that the industrial economies of Europe and North America were experiencing at the same time. Indian historians generally choose to describe this in terms of “India’s share of world GDP fell”, which is certainly one way of looking at it. But 1% GDP growth per annum is extremely good by the standards of pre-industrial economies. Pre-industrial England grew only 50% in three centuries.
“This isn’t actually true, though. In the late 19th century, as far as we can tell, India experienced faster economic growth than at any previous time in its history. It just looks slow because we are comparing it with the colossally faster and equally unprecedented growth that the industrial economies of Europe and North America were experiencing at the same time. Indian historians generally choose to describe this in terms of “India’s share of world GDP fell”, which is certainly one way of looking at it. But 1% GDP growth per annum is extremely good by the standards of pre-industrial economies. Pre-industrial England grew only 50% in three centuries”
The estimates of gdp growth I’ve seen are around 0.2 percent, which is neatly matched by population growth rates. The doubling rate for an economy like that is approximately 300 years, meaning it was growing only twice as fast as pre industrial england. The 1800’s were also matched by even slower growth, and even decline, during the early 1900’s.
Looking at share of global gdp makes it more obvious, but you can also get to the same conclusion from gdp per capita alone.
@Ajay,
But 1% GDP growth per annum is extremely good by the standards of pre-industrial economies
It’s terrible by the standards of 20th c economies though! Especially for a *developing country*!
@Terry,
+1000 to all this.
The estimates of gdp growth I’ve seen are around 0.2 percent, which is neatly matched by population growth rates.
Those are growth rates averaged over a much longer period. Looking at the rate decade by decade, you are hitting 0.9-1% in the 1870s, 1880s and subsequently.
The doubling rate for an economy like that is approximately 300 years, meaning it was growing only twice as fast as pre industrial england.
Agreed, a mere doubling of long-run economic growth is nothing special. Who cares about that?
The 1800’s were also matched by even slower growth, and even decline, during the early 1900’s.
Not really decline – you get recessions, but not sustained decline. The real negative shock comes after 1945 for very obvious reasons.
“Those are growth rates averaged over a much longer period. Looking at the rate decade by decade, you are hitting 0.9-1% in the 1870s, 1880s and subsequently.”
Pre-industrial economies can be assumed to exhibit variable growth rates over each decade. Part of the cycle is that you’ll have bursts of growth that then get corrected through famine and plague. This is actually borne out granularly too, basically every region of india suffered at least one famine in that time period, as they grew past their agricultural capacity.
The Indian population was, overall, growing about 0.5 percent over this period. Gdp was growing about 0.9 to 1%. That’s an extremely modest productivity increase. It’s entirely possible that pre industrial techniques can achieve that level of growth, even. The decade or two of recovery after the black death was probably on that level, a 1% per annum increase until it stabilized.
In other words, you need to look at the entire century or your analysis is likely worthless.
“Agreed, a mere doubling of long-run economic growth is nothing special. Who cares about that?”
You’re essentially doubling zero.
Industrialization doesn’t double growth, it transitions it to an exponential formula. The doubling rate didn’t double, it increased by a factor of ten or even twenty.
It’s worth clarifying that the Indian economy probably wasn’t in a truly pre industrial state in this time period, but rather that there are gradients to how industrialization works. The earliest industrialization, circa the 1600-1700’s, was primarily in regional specialization, agricultural techniques, and relatively modest optimizations bought on by scientific approaches to production without new energy exploitation. These did increase gdp per capita growth, reduced famine, and increased population, on the order of a doubling of overall growth.
Just like india. Notably you don’t really need any allocation of industrial capital production to achieve this, it’s primarily a product of technique and incremental improvement.
But the actual industrialization growth and boom was a distinct factor of five to ten on top of that. That’s what was kept from India, intentionally, through the optimization of their economy for exploitation and extraction.
@TracyW,
So a few points (sorry for the elay, I often take a few days before i get the time to respond to something with the attention it deserves).
1) You’re kind of missing my point, which is orthogonal to yours. My point here wasn’t so much about the pros and cons of communism or Marxism, it was about <i>comparing different communist states</i> to each other. Communism in Hungary or the GDR (or even more so, Yugoslavia) looked very different than communism in the Soviet Union- economically, socially, and diplomatically. Just like capitalism in America has looked very different from capitalism in Spain or Greece (or on the other hand, from capitalism in say Switzerland). I was noting the point that unfortunately the communist bloc ended up being led by one of its poorer performing members (which inherited some historical pathologies from the Russian empire), while the capitalist bloc ended up being led by one of its better performing members.
2) I don’t think that is a correct statement about Marxism or communism at all. “Zero sum” to start with, is a strange term in this context since I’ve never come across any Marxist thinker or historical Marxist government talking in those terms. In the most crude Marxist perspective, wealth is generated by human labor, and in a more sophisticated perspective it reflects the interaction of human labor with natural resources or capital goods. The fact that standard of living, productivity etc. improve over time and reflect advancements in science and technology, access to resources etc. pretty clearly demonstrate that they aren’t zero sum processes in the strict sense, and that’s been obvious since the time of Marx.
3) It’s correct that in the communist perspective, the interaction between capitalist and worker (or between lender and borrower, landowner and peasant, etc.) is inherently exploitative (I think that perspective is generally correct). That’s a statement about how profits are distributed not about how they are generated though. Also, it still doesn’t make it *zero sum* necessarily. It means (and I’m borrowing in vague terms from John Roemer here, or at least what I can glean from him without getting into the matrix algebra) that 1) the worker is getting less of a return on ther labor contribution than they would be in a society where shares in capital goods were equally distributed, 2) that the capitalist is getting more of a return on their labor contribution (if any) than they would otherwise get, and 3) that that reflects a relationship of domination. Nothing in that definition requires “zero sum”.
5) Moving on to diplomacy, I don’t think your point is even correct as it stands. I think in many ways the Soviet Union was very good at diplomacy and in particular “soft power”. Americans sometimes miss that b/c a lot of Soviet soft power and diplomacy was directed less towards their allied communist states in Europe, and more towards the developing world. There was a famous book written in I think the late 1950s, in the US, expressing deep alarm about how much better Soviet soft power and diplomacy in the developing world was compared to America’s:
The Ugly American – Wikipedia
6) Regarding Soviet interactions with their Eastern European communist-bloc allies, that’s more complicated. I would definitely agree that the Soviets often acted with a really heavy hand, in ways that were often detrimental to the long term communist/socialist project. One of the best examples, to me, is the way that they crippled the GDR economy by stripping assets and capital goods between 1945-1950 or so. What I would say though, is that that heavy hand wasn’t really reflective of communism as much as it was reflective of A) long standing patterns in Russian history and B) the experience of the Second World War, and the fact that the Soviets felt like after everything they had been through, at the hands of the Germans with assorted Hungarian, Romanian and Slovak support, they were entitled to some payback. (Again, not a perspective I agree with, but one i can certainly understand).
7) All that said, I don’t think Soviet relations with the Eastern European nations uniformly reflected poor diplomacy, especially after Stalin’s death. I can easily accept that in places like Poland and the Baltics Soviet influence or occupation was heartily resented, and continues to be resented today, but my understanding is that in other places (Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hungary, eastern Germany) feelings about the Soviet Union were much warmer, and that continues to be reflected in warmer feelings towards Russia today.
Yeah, I once again find myself mildly confused that our host recommended War in Human Civilization so highly, because Gat is much less convinced of the inherent military and economic weaknesses of fascist states than he is.
There’s also a rather grim irony that at least part of the US’s economic strength comes from the fact that it came into being in a time and place where the ideology of Lebensraum (sorry, “Manifest Destiny”) more or less worked out for it.
@BenL,
Yea, while I like Dr. Deveraux’s blog a lot (not least because all the hard work he puts into it), his stalwart ideological liberalism is the weakest part of it, and often distorts his perspective, I think. Not least because for a lot of very pro-US liberals, they brush off stuff like Manifest Destiny as an unfortunate and tragic distraction from the broader liberal project, and ignore how important it was to making America as powerful as it is today.
I think a better critique is that Deveraux has never really tackled the idealogical contradictions between capitalism and liberalism with any rigor. He’s content confronting specific examples when relevant to his interests, but he’s never really taken time here to communicate his thoughts on the broad topic. It’s not like actual liberalism is contradictory with socialism, much of early socialism (and I’d argue all socialism) was a synthesis of Marx’s critique of capital with the ideals of the enlightenment that are shared with liberalism. They’re related philosophies.
I just don’t think Deveraux has really thought about the topic, either because it’s unpopular and politicized or because it’s just not his primary field, so it’s easier to not form or state strong opinions.
The difference, I think, is that the US was never a command economy, nor ever tried to become an Autarky. The US was a slave- and imperialist-based liberal market economy. When we stopped using slaves, and after we ran out of tribal lands to conquer, one could argue we successfully replaced the British Empire as the world’s hegemonic maritime power (something we just recently walked away from).
None of this remotely strengthens the case for fascist economics, however.
Especially as an academic, you don’t need to agree with every detail of a book to feel it’s a valuable addition to the field – Bret has listed many other books over the years as sources despite also voicing quibbles with them. So it’s possible that he does disagree with Gat on this point but has seen no reason to mention that disagreement.
Also, on the specific points of whether fascism is inherently weaker militarily, I don’t think Bret has actually staked as strong a position as you claim. All his arguments that I recall are output-based: All fascist states we have seen so far have been bad at war and seem to have shown less economic durability than their peers. This does not preclude that there could be a fascist state in the future that does better – it just makes it unlikely in his estimation.
@Alien@System It’s not just that Devereaux and Gat disagree on some minor details. It’s that our host has used Gat’s work to support several of his arguments in the past, so it was a bit jarring to read WiHC and find that Gat has a different position on those arguments.
So, in this case, Devereaux’s argument is that the fascist states were attempting old-school imperial conquest and exploitation at a time where that kind of approach was no longer profitable. However, Gat’s position is that:
“for non-liberal, especially totalitarian great powers of the twentieth century, wide-scale conquest proved tenable in both developed and undeveloped countries, while being highly advantageous in the former.” (WiHC, ch. 15, p. 1247)
“Historical happenstance?” Really? The maritime dominance of the British Empire was an historical accident? As was the build up to the Industrial Revolution (which the US shared)?
Part of the issue is simply a terminology issue: Despite the name Civilian Factories do not represent the actual civilian economy; They represent *military construction capacity*. (which might be tied to actual civilian economy in some abstract way, but that’s not really modelled because the focus is largely on the military-industrial complex) hence why mobilization laws increase the construction speed of civilian factories.
(Also, I should note that some of this is outdated at this point: They’ve redone the coal/energy system for instance)
I do feel that talking about the Autarky spirit kinda needs to also mention the Economy of Conquest law that Germany has. (basically, Germany gets a ticking increase in consumer goods requirements, if this reaches 100% you get hit with a pretty significant prodution efficiency malus, you can reduce this bonus by a few methods, generally framed as looting occupied countries, theoretically you can remove it entirely by acquiring a massive amount of strategic resources (in practice this requires either winning the war with the USSR or the UK at least, possibly both) There is an alternative economic path for germany where you basically crash your economy in 1936 in exchange for a better economy long-term (this is the default route if you go democratic, IIRC) but this is supposed to mean that if you go the historical route you have a lot less materiel to play with in 1939.
Another point is that civs are a lot more expensive than mils, and that one of the differenes between concentrated and dispersed is that concentrated will generally have higher total output but dispersed has high production efficiency growth and retention: Basically it is faster for dispersed to reach its maximum productivity (even though it is generally lower) and if you switch a production line for something else you retain a higher fraction of your production efficiency. In practice this tends to mean that in the later stages of the game (once you’ve got the best kind of weapons) concentrated tends to outpace dispersed. The “meta” tends to be because the game is usually decided at that point (in either way) and that dispersed industry is better for “civ greeding” (since the mils have left time to “rev up”)
(I should also note that the US is far from the only country with a great depression spirit these days, though they’re usually tailored to each individual country)
The blazing question here is, “how did Germany and Japan mismeasure their situation so badly and embark on a totally futile war that they could be predicted to lose?”
Totalitarianism and ideology counts for a lot but this seems like an insufficient explanation.
Were they assuming that there was near zero will to fight in any place they didn’t directly commit atrocities against?
A lot of it comes down to underestimating the will to fight of their opponents, yes. Hitler gambled on France and the UK backing down in ’39 as they had done earlier, they did not. The Fall of France then gave the nazi regime a major boost in confidence: They felt they were invincible. They were wrong. I do think it’s hard to underestimate how much the fall of France buoyed the nazi regime (and tied the military even closer) it seemed like Hitler had pulled off the impossible and could do no wrong.
For Japan the issue was similar. (though AFAIK, with at least somewhat more of an awareness, of the war being a long shot) But they also believed they were backedinto a corner and could not back down (this is where the internal politics comes in, the japanese polity was so radicalized that anyone suggesting backing down would probably be at risk of being assassinated) so they were stuck in an unwinnable war (China) and decided to start another one (against the western allies) in the slim hope that seizing the “Southern Resource Area” would help them win the war in China. This was, to put it midly, a misestimation. (though at least Yamamoto seems to have known it was always a long shot)
Note that Japan had kinda blundered into the war in China in the first place. (not to say they weren’t aggressively provoking the chinese) in that the government in Tokyo found themselves reacting to the actions of local commanders rather than setting out an agenda, and their decision was more “Do we push harder or do we back down?” And as mentioned, backing down was *hard* because of the internal political situation.
The ideology (racial and more general disdain for “soft democracies”) certainly didn’t help them get an accurate picture, but I do think the Hitler was pretty aware that pushing for Poland was a gamble: That he then lost, and then unexpectedly seemingly managed to turn into a win by defeating France. And if he could defeat France why not the USSR? Etc. etc.
Japan was gambling on US war weariness rising with every island they needed to take with significant casualties, and that finally the US would be willing to cut a deal with them. And they were not entirely wrong about the casualties being increasingly hard to stomach for the US. What they were wrong about was that they thought the US would need to take many more islands before reaching Japan and/or have its fleet bleed out while passing by Japanese controlled islands. Island Hopping managed to avoid that by only taking some islands on the way and suppressing the airfields on the other islands in range. It’s still doubtful that Japan’s strategy would have worked out if the US hadn’t used Island Hopping and if – as they had hoped – the Soviet Union would have stayed neutral. Unrestricted submarine warfare would still have hit Japan hard, so its economy might collapse before American will to fight would. But I think they had a strategy that might have worked if multiple things went just right for them.
Pearl Harbor as it went was probably at odds with that strategy, because it left America with a significant thirst for vengeance. However, the Japanese didn’t actually expect Pearl Harbor to be a one-sided massacre, but a costly battle they won (they projected they would lose up to one third of their task force). It might have been perceived differently if that had been the case.
That may have been the strategy developed later, but the pre-war plan was the Kantai Kessen, in which Pearl Harbor was the first step in depleting the US battleship fleet to the point that the Japanese battleships led by Yamato could defeat it in a direct gunnery engagement and Japan would then negotiate from having naval dominance in the Pacific. The island airbases were just a step in inflicting attrition on the fleet prior to the decisive battle. Might have worked with Japan’s limited Pacific-only objectives if they got the fight they were hoping for.
As it turned out, there was no decisive clash of battleships and Japan ended up losing basically all of theirs in battles where they weren’t able to engage the US surface fleet with their guns at all.
Also the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor completely eliminated any willingness of the US to negotiate with Japan.
And in Japan’s case, there also seems to have been some misreading of Allied signals: the US was very concerned about the Japanese attack on China, but would have been entirely happy with a Japanese withdrawal to the 1936 borders (meaning Japan gets to keep Manchuria). However, this wasn’t at all clear in American negotiations, and the Japanese understanding seems to have been that the American demand was a withdrawal at least to the Korean border. That was politically untenable in Japan, leaving them believing they had no choice but war with the US.
There is a counterfactual where the Japanese leadership figures this out and works out a deal with the US, restoration of trade in exchange for returning to the 1936 borders, and in the process manages to hamstring a few of the most aggressive militarists, make an example out of some of those local commanders and reduce the power and independence of the Kwantung Army generally (probably by compromising with and increasing the power of some of the ‘moderate’ militarists).
Tbh, that counterfactual seems awfully farfetched.
Oh, for sure! It’s very much threading a needle, not at all meant to be my guess at the most likely outcome. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s farfetched to say that those negotiations could have had a different outcome.
Japan pretty much was, yes. The plan with Pearl Harbor was to deliver a crippling blow to the US fleet and subsequently defeat it using the Kantai Kessen doctrine of inflicting attrition on the enemy main fleet with submarines, aircraft, and destroyers often in night attacks to enable the battleships to defeat them in a single decisive battle. And as far as I know they never had any plan to invade and occupy the US mainland, just seize most of the US’s Pacific possessions, so figuring the US would surrender on those terms after having the Pacific Fleet wiped out and with everywhere but Hawaii in Japanese hands after assaults launched simultaneously with Pearl Harbor is less insane than it looks on paper.
Unfortunately for them, Pearl Harbor didn’t take out any aircraft carriers and the battleships sunk were often repairable, so it came off as a treacherous assault with no declaration of war* that inflamed will to fight but did not cripple the US Navy nearly as much as hoped. And then Japan was reluctant to risk their own battleships getting lost in minor engagements before the big decisive battle, with the result that they avoided committing them and lost battles the battleships maybe could’ve won, and in the end there was no decisive clash of battleships with them being lost over time mostly to air and submarine attacks far away from the US surface fleet.
*Japan felt it would be dishonorable to attack without having declared war and sent one to be delivered prior to the assault but too late to sortie the Pacific Fleet, but there was a holdup with decoding it and it didn’t arrive until well after the bombing
What was intended to be delivered at the same time as the attack on Pearl Harbor but was actually delivered late was the 14th Part of the 14-Part Message. You can read it here: HyperWar: Japanese “14-Part Message” of 7 December 1941 It does not include a declaration of war, the final sentence is: “The Japanese Government regrets to have to notify hereby the American Government that in view of the attitude of the American Government it cannot but consider that it is impossible to reach an agreement through further negotiations.”
Ending negotiations is not the same as a declaration of war. Basically, the first 13 parts of the 14 Part Message were sent and, on reading them, FDR declared “This Means War” and the war warning messages went out. The 14th part was a bit anti-climatic, failing to declare war and just breaking off negotiations.
You can see the minutes of the meeting that the Japanese held to declare war- that met at 12:40PM, December 7th, Pearl Harbor Time, five hours after the first bombs of the Japanese attack- here: JAPANESE DECLARATION OF WAR AGAINST THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN
Their actual Declaration of War was published 7.5 hours after the Attack on Pearl Harbor, you can read the text here: Japanese declaration of war on the United States and the British Empire – Wikipedia
Ironically, their strategic doctrine continued to constrain them well into the war. During the Battle of Midway, one of the decisions they made was to concentrate their resources toward capturing Midway, and only secondarily engaging the American carriers. This was a bad mistake, but they made it in part because they wanted to use the airfield on Midway to engage the US fleet instead.
Both framed their international situation in apocalyptic terms: ‘win or die’. In Germany’s case, a Darwinian struggle between races, with the losers doomed to extinction. In Japan’s case, win an empire or forever be assigned second-class status. In both cases the more perceptive realised the odds were long, but the alternative was (in their eyes) worse.
It’s instructive to reflect that one of the big common elements of the fascist nations in this period is that they were so hyped-up on the idea of existential threat- that foreign infiltration or being cut off from resources or whatever would “kill” their people- that they got involved in wars that were absolutely ruinous and that got at least some of the people they were fighting to come far, far closer to even wanting to actually destroy them as nations than ever would have happened otherwise.
Germany in 1945 was in far, far more danger of being permanently destroyed as a nation than a hypothetical Germany that had just stayed Weimar could ever have been.
Eco uses “The enemy is always both strong and weak” in his definition of fascism, but the same also holds true for the *own* nation in fascist thought: It is as the same time a reservoir of greatness and constantly under threat.
Wages of Destruction gives a good overview of Germany’s journey on this. My synthesis is that it started with choices like halting WWI reparations payments, that didn’t immediately lead to war but blew up Germany’s trade relations. And they kept ending up with the choice “admit the Nazi program is a failure, or roll the dice with more escalation” and choosing the latter.
Well, a small Greek kingdom conquered the Persian empire, a bunch of nomadic tribes in Mongolia conquered half of the known world.
“Fortune favours the bold” was the Axis mindset. It’s the same as communist rebels today are still trying to topple the capitalist order by street violence inside capitalist countries.
Nazi Germany tried to retake their lost territories and reform their country into a ultranationalist ethnostate. Japan tried to protect their Manchuria colony from China or Soviet invasion and become a colonial empire to expand their capitalist state. Those goals could not be done without them taking every chances they got.
I think the trade problem is exacerbated by single-player. In theory, if the US and UK (say) are both on free trade and just purchase all of the available resources from one another, the total resources and factors available in the US/UK system remain constant, but both get increased economic output and research rate from the Free Trade law.
The problem is that, if it’s an AI playing the US, 1) there’s no way to coordinate trade with them to ensure that all the resources actually get used and 2) resources and factories sent to the AI are used at… like maybe half the effectiveness that a human gets out of them, so any redistribution that moves stuff away from the player to the player’s allies is actively bad.
Likewise, you can’t specialize military production by giving, say, Canada responsibility for designing or building all the Commonwealth’s tactical bombers, even though the game mechanics would make that more efficient, because there’s no way to get the AI to do that, and it would mess up the implementation even if you could.
It’s pretty heinous that unbought resources evaporate into the aether regardless of if a trade policy is contextually valid in game. The core conceit here is leading to absurd outcomes based on nonsense premises, the fact that sometimes they aren’t disastrous is secondary to them existing in the first place. It would also be possible to optimize industrial output in multiplayer using trade if the USA’s excess trade steel was used domestically if no one bought it.
Forgive me if I’m misremembering, but doesn’t Tooze make the point that the portion of women in the workforce in Germany was already high, and that allied efforts to get women into the workface brought that portion closer to that of Germany? So it is not that they failed to mobilize women, but that they were already a major part of the workforce in Germany where they were not in the United States or other countries.
But women didn’t work in heavy Industry in Germany. Since the Germans had no access to eider down, which the Allies got by hiring Icelandic fisherman to club to death millions of eider chicks, they used angora rabbit fur to insulate the flight suits of their high altitude air crews. The SS ran a facility raising thousands of angora rabbits in hutches. You can shave the rabbits and the fur grows back, so there was no need to kill them and they were given plenty of food and water to keep them healthy. This was run by SS women. The facility, incidentally, was on the grounds of the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
I don’t know where you get this from. Tooze certainly does not give this impression. Aside, Germany had a lot of small farms, which produced a lot of key foods (especially pork and milk). Taking women from running these would not have boosted the economy. Forced labour was assigned to these – and female forced labour was prominent in heavy industry.
This is very much an artifact of how to count employment. The vast majority of women counted as “employed” in Germany were not actually employed through the labor market. They were women working for their husbands or fathers, on farms, artisanal workshops or small stores.
Isn’t that also a feature in US statistcs? At least I see the complaint that “working as more or less unpaid labor on a family farm or business” is considered “not unemployed” often.
Or was there a change to US labor statistics after the war.
My point there isn’t so much “This is a difference between Germany and UK/US”, but rather that looking at raw numbers of women employed is not sufficient here – this buffer of women sort-of-employed-but-not-labor-market makes the figures hard to disentangle.
This is then also important when trying to gauge the effect of state intervention meant to drive female employment numbers up – those interventions will focus on getting women into the actual labor market, instead of this informal employment-by-marriage. Which means that even if on paper, the UK “only” got to the same percentage of employed women as Germany, the amount of actually freely available labor differs.
I’m not sure it’s quite the vast majority, but you are right that they are not working the same jobs! From chapter 10, section IV:
I imagine the amount of women working on Britain’s farms increased after 1939, but so did the amount of women working everywhere (esp. heavy industry whereas Tooze describes the Ruhr as “particularly unfavourable to female employment”).
I have to wonder about the numbers and involvement of women there. Were those six million German women “employed in peasant agriculture” working in the fields? Or were they, essentially, the farmwives maintaining the place and the clothes of the farmhands as women on peasant farms have been doing since before the dawn of history?
Because while I don’t have precise demographic statistics, I am absolutely certain that there were millions and millions of American women (and girls below the age of 18) who were ’employed’ performing essential labor in support of farm households in 1939, even if the vast majority of them were not being paid wages to do so.
Germany had a backwards and labor-intensive agricultural sector compared to the US and UK, with smaller, less productive farms- that was the core problem that Lebensraum was supposed to solve, so that German farmers could finally have farms large enough to show benefits from improvements. Because of the small farms, few farmers could afford any mechanization and even animal help was not common, farms relied to a surprisingly large extent on human physical labor.
Then, Germany compounded their problems by drafting a significantly higher percentage of their men than the other Western Allies, making their already backwards agricultural sector even worse performing as only women and old men tried to perform all of that physical labor. They attempted to solve this problem in the most Fascist way possible, by importing huge numbers of foreign labor and stealing food from occupied territories. Both of these actions kickstarted local resistance movements and made the occupation more difficult.
The number of people employed in British farming was so low that being a farmhand was a “reserved occupation” already in WWI. In every other European country, farmwork was the stereotypical unskilled job, but in Britain, this was no longer the case. Instead, the farmhand was a much more critical worker than a factory worker.
Typo:
“aluminum, rubber, tungston, steel and chromium”
ITYM tungsten
Actually tungston and tungstan were critical for war production as well. Really all of the tungs were a problem.
There are definitely large numbers of people who still fall for the myth that fascism is more efficient, even if they think it is evil. This is really dangerous, because it gives people a starting point to consider if fascism is “worth it” when things are worse. Whenever I talk to people about fascism, I always stress that it is not just evil (though that would be enough to discredit it) but also stupid. That it simply does not work as a system of politics and governance in any way.
Things like this in HOI IV are small, but they add up, and it really is bad for media of any kind to do so.
There’s a story Primo Levi wrote (I think it’s in _the Periodic Table_) about his prewar experience working for a German chemist who, for ideological reasons, insisted upon finding some magical properties of phosphorous. And that was before it even got bad! But fascism necessarily puts ideology ahead of objective reality, so gives you garbage like that.
There’s a story by Tom Shippey based in an alternative universe where the Germans won. The story is set in the 1980s and all the characters work in a research project to use psychic dreams to predict whether, in their cold war with the US, they should invest in the space based weapons of the Strategic Defense Iniative.
Well, yes, but Levi was writing about his actual historical experience with a dumbass German chemist.
To be fair, it’s not as if the US wasn’t trying to investigate mind control technologies and killing goats with telekinesis.
There is a star trek episode promoting the idea (“most efficient government old earth ever knew”).
Yes, “Patterns of Force”.
In all fairness it’s easy to interpret the episode as “the guy who introduced Naziism on the Nazi planet was himself some kind of self-gaslighting neo-Nazi, and HE believed the Nazis were efficient, but that doesn’t mean anyone else from the Federation thinks so, and also he was horribly wrong.”
A lot of people adhere to a meta-theory that concentrations of wealth and power should be more efficient than distributed resources. Less innovative, maybe, but more efficient. That this is wrong is really hard to prove to a lot of people (as we see today).
To add to what you said, Germany also produced more consumer goods than the UK until 1943, when it finally transitioned to a war economy after its failure at Stalingrad. This can be viewed as either a failure of fascist ideology, or a failure of Germany specifically.
The issue is that the German military establishment believed in its own stab-in-the-back myth from WW1, in which what failed wasn’t the Reichswehr but the civilians’ will to support it. At any rate, in 1939-40 Germany seemed to be winning easily, and was not planning on a protracted war. Thus, the Nazi state didn’t want to impose too many sacrifices on civilians. As you say, it didn’t bring women into the labor force. It did try encouraging people to eat a bit less meat, trying to create a culture of one meatless day a week, but the factories were still churning out civilian goods, whereas in the UK they stopped doing so in 1939 and in the US they did at the beginning of 1942.
This is also more broadly something fascists do. Italian fascism was influenced by futurism and fascination with cars. Italy was the first country to build motorways, decades before it had any use for those – it had 6 vehicles per 1,000 people after the war, where the US had 187 on the eve of the Great Depression (https://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=1982292&fileOId=1982293). Nazi Germany did the same, using the promise of consumer goods to keep the lower middle and middle classes that underlay its support onside; it set up Volkswagen at Wolfsburg even while preparing for war, and, lacking the consumer credit mechanisms that would underpin the American consumer economy, encouraged families to pay a weekly deposit over years until it accumulated enough for them to get their car. Of course, with the war eventually going sour, the families that did so did not get their cars.
In game mechanics terms, therefore, it would be interesting to interpret the above as a malus for fascist states, requiring them to set aside more resources for (wasted) consumer production, perhaps letting them switch later based on a tech tree or based on the ability to respond to military setbacks.
Germany mobilised earlier and more totally than the UK or the US, so had less room for wartime expansion. For instance, by 1939 a higher percentage of German women were engaged in the labour force than were in the UK in 1945 (and much higher than the US at peak: 34% vs 25%). Consumer demand was heavily repressed from the mid 30s (which caused issues with eg railway performance in the war).
The German military largely created the stab-in-the-back myth, to deliberately shift blame from their own performance (Ludendorff gave it a good push in 1918).
Well yes, exactly- the German military created the backstab myth. And, as is often the case when someone promotes a lie in a fascist system, after ten or fifteen years of the lie sloshing around, the people propagating the lie start to believe it. We can see similar dynamics in modern far-right movements. Where something originates as an obvious and cynical propaganda ploy, it can nonetheless become a genuine and unironic belief about reality for the people participating in the movement ten or twenty years down the road.
Because remembering inside your head that you and your boss are lying to the public, and that the boss is constantly saying things that are not true, and remembering not to act and plan as if the lie is true… Well, that’s not a survival trait in a fascist regime.
The economic benefits of deregulation, esp. on employment, come to mind.
Thank you for pointing that out. Even when I was a sophomore in High School I was engaged in arguments with my history teachers that WWII didn’t end the great depression because it didn’t result in much of a standard of living improvement, instead it was easier for people to stomach having far less because of “rationing” and the “war effort” than because “the economy sucks”.
This was incidentally one of the major themes of Orwells 1984. That a society that is producing war material is essentially producing nothing because almost everything it produces is designed to cease existing as quickly as possible.
Any advice on how to overcome this particular historical inaccuracy people have?
“This was incidentally one of the major themes of Orwells 1984. That a society that is producing war material is essentially producing nothing because almost everything it produces is designed to cease existing as quickly as possible.”
Funnily enough, Eisenhower says the same thing: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
You neglect to consider that past the subsistence level, people enjoy the sense of being productive without regard to their material level. So workers in munitions factories, or soldiers in wartime service, enjoy much higher levels of psychological satisfaction than the unemployed, regardless of the generosity of unemployment allowances, even though both soldiers and the unemployed produce the exact same level of consumer goods, i.e., zero.
The form of the stimulus matters. In the US the war did not just build factories (which were rapidly re-purposed to civilian production post-war). It re-trained millions both in the forces and the factories, shifted production to new sectors, introduced new methods, broke through a lot of institutional barriers (to skilled black and female employment, to union participation, to government capacity). As it did in the other states at war. The political and social obstacles to doing the same in peacetime were/are formidable.
I mean, a lot of the women and black folks were rapidly unemployed again after the war. But I do also agree with the point that the wartime stimulus did provide actual economic expansion.
It should be noted that while those women and blacks were rapidly unemployed again after the war, the fact that they had been employed likely reduced the psychological and cultural barriers to hiring them once again. It is not a coincidence that segregation started to break down within a generation of the end of the war, or that women getting jobs outside the home was far more normative in the 1950s than the 1920s.
It’s also worth noting that the USA didn’t get horribly battered in the war. Outside of Pearl Harbor and a few minor issues, the USA built stuff to send elsewhere to blow up. And that has a profoundly different effect from building stuff while you are blowing up. Once you’ve built the infrastructure to make missiles, tanks, jeeps, and the like, it doesn’t take as much to retool the factories to make civilian stuff as it does to build new factories. Plus you have an industrial base for all those boys coming home with new skills and experiences with industrial machinery. I had a few uncles (well, siblings of grandparents, but in a small village they’re uncles) who went to war and came back with skills in welding, machining, heavy equipment operation, and the like. All of that combined put us in a very good place to take over as an economic power when the war ended–we had the infrastructure, we had the trained people, and we had the factories.
“Any advice on how to overcome this particular historical inaccuracy people have?”
The problem is people aren’t arguing that military spending is economically stimulating because they believe it’s better than civilian stimulus, so there’s no point in arguing the point. If you want to convince people that military spending is a waste of budget today and they throw out the idea that military spending is stimulating to the economy you first need to identify what they actually believe, then decide if it’s worth engaging. If, as is often the case, the reason is emotionally charged or based on selfishness then there’s no point to trying; if someone is pro military spending because they own Boeing stock (being overly simplistic) you can only attack their conflict of interest, not convince them.
Of course to flip it you won’t convince someone who wants to cut European defense spending because “they’re” a phone sitting in a Russian bot farm that even if defense spending is wasteful it’s necessary either. The issue is very generalized vis a vis defense spending; anything politically relevant is inundated with lies, and the correct idealogy is not a static position, but a set of policies directed to contextually valid goals. This basically makes convincing people of anything through generic rhetoric impossible.
Lots of people do believe that. They are called Keynesians. They quote to the effect that “paying people to dig ditches, and then paying them to fill them in” is good economic policy during a depression.
https://www.kermitproject.org/newdeal/defense/DoD_Legacy_Report-4.pdf
Please tell me which entries in Table C-1 were “digging holes and filling them in again”
Okay, let’s talk.
First, that’s not Keynesian economics. Kenysians would much rather people be employed doing productive jobs, which is what they pushed for. Kenysian programs had a purpose, housing or infrastructure being favored if possible.
Kenyes core assertion was that private enterprise doesn’t always meet demand because of how people make decisions regarding saving, investing, and holding money, which can cause unemployment to rise. Kenyes pointed out private capital manifestly does not maximize the meeting of demand in crises, and can get stuck in any number of destructive loops that choke markets that stop the circulation of money increasing unemployment. Most of these ultimately derive from the fact money is both a store of value and a medium of exchange, but you can read him or a commentary on him to untangle why this happens if you wish.
For a variety of reasons the solution to this was government spending. He was particularly right in this regard during the great depression. But Kenyes was hardly advocating for make work except as a last resort.
Second, artificial work actually is better than the alternative during depressions, which was to do nothing. This was an actual approach that was tried, the idea being that the economy would naturally reach full employment in time.
It didn’t. Or rather, if it was ever going to even reach acceptable employment levels it was going to involve millions starving to death, and massive sustained debt slavery as money hoarders bought up private property and imposed rents on it. This was where society was heading under Hoover, that or a complete collapse of economic and political order vis a vis popular revolution.
If you have a choice between permanent economic damage in the form of deaths or pointless make work spending you always pick make work. The dead have no demands and produce no supply. The economy is permanently weakened, and every death is a tremendous sunk cost of child rearing and education resources. You don’t have to be a socialist to see that it’s a bad deal. You just have to actually care about the economy.
All this to say that not only is that a straw man of Kenysian economics, it’s also silly even if you accept the straw man.
Here’s the actual quote that sources this phrase.
“If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again… there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.”
The 1939 unemployment rate was 17.2%. The 1943 unemployment rate was 4.7%. The 1945 unemployment rate was 1.9%. And this stuck. Unemployment was 4% in 1948. US unemployment has never come close to depression rates since WWII. And this wasn’t just spreading poverty around; US GDP per capita in 1939 was $9,987. It grew to over $18,000 by 1944. And per capita GDP declined in the post-war recession, hovering around $15,000 for the late 1940’s, but it never came close to declining to the per capita GDP of the Great Depression. WW II did something to substantially benefit the US economy. I am sure spending at WWII levels on something with more lasting benefit that war would have had much better economic benefits that spending on war, but the US of 1939 would never have spent at WWII levels on anything but war.
Yes; it absolutely wrecked the economy of every other major industrialized nation, to one degree or another. As a result, the US ended up exporting to most of the world, and it’s not a coincidence that the US’s postwar economic model started to fray as Germany and Japan recovered and started actually competing with the US.
But the us economic model didn’t start to fray when it had competition, the US was growing commandingly throughout the Cold war in part because of trade with the growing Japanese and German economies that were competing with it. The few exceptions such as stagflation were a result of clear policy failures and supply shocks; they had nothing to do with not holding relative global monopolies in industry, but with a cessation of trade. It certainly had very little to nothing to do with Germany or Japan, as they were largely involved in the middle eastern crises that were the primary instigating incidents.
And, again, growth resumed afterwards.
The timing just doesn’t work for the reconstruction of Germany or Japan to be causal.
Not quite true. During the early stages of the Cold War, while the German and Japanese economies were growing, they weren’t really competing with the United States on the world stage, particularly exports. And while growth did resume after the shocks of the 1970s, it was not on the same basis as the economic growth immediately following WWII.
The growth rate seems to have fallen about a percentage point comparing 1940-1960 with 1970-2000, with several shocks representing spoilers to any robust analysis; it’s very vulnerable to p selection in terms of dates and what you determine are significant cut off points.
There’s some real change here, but it’s relatively small, so it’s important to separate it from the much larger collapse after 2008 and the volatile economic situation of the past two decades.
There’s also that the friction that existed wasn’t purely the result of Germany and Japan engaging in competition with the US, but the US deciding the German and Japanese exports were a threat to domestic production. It’s a valid interpretation that the US didn’t suddenly face hostile competition which stifled GDP growth, but rather that the US leadership decided it faced hostile competition and partially cut off the trade fueling GDP growth.
In other words how much was actual competition impacting growth and how much was the US engaging in damaging anti-competition practices?
Modern economics understanding about the Great Depression is that it was so bad in the USA because the US Federal Reserve effectively cut the money supply several times in the 1930s (not that they understood it in those terms at the time). When they stopped doing that, the economy started to recover. Then the Fed would do something else that cut the money supply and the economy would seize up again.
The underlying causes of the strong recovery looks to have been the ongoing adoption of the various inventions of the Second Industrial Revolution, the US economy in the 1930s was getting significantly more productive per employee. Said inventions also helped enable the US war production miracle because electrification and the internal combustion engine meant upper body strength wasn’t so critical for so many heavy manufacturing jobs.
The money supply theory is contested. The point about the Second Industrial Revolution is well made, but actually adopting it near universally required forceful state direction, massive expenditure, a colossal training effort. An economy of patchwork adoption (as in eg most of Latin America) would not have produced the same results.
Well, it’s mostly debated in terms of analysis, not core facts. The core facts are that deflationary pressures were at fault, exasperated by the gold standard and protectionist tariffs. How you describe this-a money supply problem causing investment collapse or an investment collapse causing a money supply problem- is more or less a moot point, as these influences reinforced each other. Early government policy was atrocious regardless.
Sure, you can’t make a copy of the 1930s US economy on a breadboard and subject it to different monetary policies to prove the hypothesis. So these theories will always be contested. But the explanation makes sense in the context of economic scale.
What’s the evidence for your belief about the necessity of forceful state direction? Are you thinking of building transmission grids and national motorways?
Complex industrial societies function very much more efficiently when the underlying grids (transport/education/transmission etc) are near universal – when highways are not half paved, half dirt, or electricity reaches nearly everywhere, or transport is not half trucks, half ox-cart). Purely private incentives do not provide this – they stop when it ceases to be profitable (see, eg the TVA – the private providers wired only the richer bits of the valley). Hence forceful state direction.
The 1930s German economy/military is a good case in point – along with the advanced sectors it had large ‘backward’ areas – lots of small farms, poor rural areas etc reliant on manual labour). Hence its army was half mechanised, its ability to pull labour rapidly into high-tech sectors much less than say the UK.
Hmmm I’m skeptical – I’m not saying that public provision of such infrastructure is a bad thing, I’m just skeptical that they result in a huge increase in output compared to coverage of say 90%.
@Tracy W, we have examples of the necessity of forceful state direction from the sewer systems underneath most European and North American cities, to the “Silk Road” trade routes established under the Mongols in the medieval period, to the Roman road network. None of those required technological leaps, they just required social organisation. Private enterprise / small community funding wouldn’t have got to even 90% coverage.
Here in the 21st C there’s a good test case: Somalia. For the past three decades Somalia has had a largely powerless central government and no external country cares enough to invest in it. Somalia is not noted for its electrical distribution network, healthcare system, etc, etc.
Well, Somalia is a particular case because it’s not merely that there’s no central authority guiding development, it’s that there’s no central authority at all. That doesn’t so much prove that forceful state direction is necessary, so much as a state is necessary. The lack of investment isn’t just because there’s no local infrastructure, but that you might get kidnapped, ransomed, and your shit stolen.
(Stateless societies are not necessarily all violent chaos driven war zones, but Somalia is)
The problem with argument via national example here is that there aren’t many good examples of developing countries which engaged in directed economies whose success over non-directed economies can’t be explained by unique local circumstances.
Yes, a lot of Latin America and Africa are significantly worse off than, say, China and Vietnam, and yes there is a trend where there was more direction of the Chinese and Vietnamese economies than other less successful developing countries, but there’s a lot of confounding variables here, including vast geographical distances, significantly different “starting” economies, and significant foreign meddling.
You can also make the other point via pointing at the Asian Tigers and Japan, and saying they were relatively less centrally planned than China or Vietnam and have a higher GDP per Capita now, but that also ignores the effects of literal barrels of American investment cash being funneled into the Asian tigers (and Japan). Which also ignores the Soviet aid to China and Vietnam. There’s no way to disentangle variables here.
This isn’t even just a problem with proving the thesis but a complication of the thesis itself. Singapore and Hong Kong are incredibly prosperous and have minimal state direction of their economy, but they’re entreport city states. They’re fundamentally different beasts to other economies, and what works there won’t work elsewhere.
The best argument here is probably the TVA one-I.E. point at situations where an authority had to come in and shove people around to unscrew a situation that private enterprise clearly screwed.
@Terry, agree that economies as a whole are complicated with lots of factors. Underlying infrastructure, sewers and electrical grids and public education, though, is a function of the state. And the state has to be able to do things like take people’s land away from them, or otherwise inconvenience them. This can be done more nicely or less so depending on the state, but it’s not going to happen just from individual actions.
@scifihughf: I’m not arguing that the state making sure some infrastructure is universally provided is bad, I’m just skeptical that universal adoption of said infrastructure was necessary for the massive boosts in productive capacity that the inventions of the Second Industrial Revolution drove.Also, Somalia’s lack of government means lack of rule of law and protection against violence. (There is no reason to assume that a single institution can solve every economic problem a society might face, be that institution markets or government or civil society).@Terry, the thing about modern economics is that they’re huge. And here I’m using “modern” in the sense of post-1492. Literal barrels of American cash might sound very impressive in abstract, that doesn’t mean that said barrels were significant as a share of national income for the Asian Tigers or Japan during their growth years. In Japan in particular, the economic miracle of 1955-73 in Japan was primarily domestically financed (see pages 19 and 20 in https://sspj.ier.hit-u.ac.jp/English/research-results/DP19-002.pdf).I also don’t know why you believe that Singapore and HK are fundamentally different because they’re entrepot city states. People are people regardless of the geographical size of an economy, markets are efficient ways of uncovering comparative advantages and coordinating diverse economic activity across large numbers of people (both Singapore and Hong Kong in 1960 had populations of over 1m).
Re; Signapore and Hong Kong.
Because they have economic niches they occupy which let them offload costs and reap benefits.
Cities, worldwide, are significantly richer than the surrounding landscape. In fact they account for approximately 80% or so of global gdp and yet compromise only 60% or so of global population. Cities are, comparatively, economically prosperous. They’re also smaller and more concentrated.
This all manifests in significantly easier budgetary challenges than rural areas. Yes, it might seem that cities are complex beasts with unmanageable problems, but this is actually the inverse of reality; it’s the vast rural stretches that hemorrhage the state resources in terms of budget and personal.
This has let Hong Kong and Signapore make due with significantly lower budgets and more efficient welfare and infrastructure expenses. Try to do the same thing in a major US state and you’d make the place unlivable.
They are also incredibly immigration dense locations, with very low birth rates versus immigration rates. Children are expensive, raising and teaching them is a drain on finances, so taking grown people from elsewhere is simply economically better. However even a country fully open to immigration can’t maintain a 40% immigration rate, it’s nearly physically impossible. Even at it’s height the USA only had 15% foreign born citizens. City states can.
Also immigrants come from somewhere. Largely the places we want to stabilize and build up. As more nations stabilize fewer will be emigrant sources. Hopefully.
Finally, a lot of their initial growth was fueled by being legally distinct points of entry for various economies. This is to say that you stopped in Signapore or Hong Kong because they let you get local goods you might not legally be able to buy elsewhere, or sell things you couldn’t sell elsewhere. This only works when they’re legally distinct, so it’s not a method you can mimic nationally. Hong Kong got rich selling opium from all of Asia into China, bypassing restrictions, but opening China to opium wouldn’t make China rich, and would in fact be very obviously counterproductive.
For all these reasons they don’t have very many lessons. Oh there are some, immigration is good, trade is good, but neither can be relied on to be as impactful as it was in building their economy.
Singapore is hardly a good example of the light touch state. It’s practically a corporate enterprise – strong state control of housing, transport, state ownership of key industries (Changi, the Port), state directed investment (see Temasek Holdings), direct state management of the labour force, with policies directed to building up the value chain, in part by discouraging initial lower value-added sectors …
That speaks more to the fact that “lassaiz-faire capitalism has never been tried” than anything else. It’s actually really hard to come up with examples that are clearly light touch states and aren’t just failed states.
In Signapore the corporate state arises naturally from the state basically acting like an investment fund with territory. The total assets held by Signapores investment funds are something like three times the GDP of Signapore; this isn’t an apples to apples comparison (investment fund assets are not the same as the product made year-by-year) but it gives some sense of scale to the incentive structures here and how they influence governance.
This breaks basically all conventional analysis of what the political situation there is, but it arises naturally as a result of capitalistic market forces.
As others have pointed out in comments, American living standards improved throughout the war.
Orwell was writing from the context of having seen British wartime rationing, which was more severe than anything the US experienced (pairing with a far milder Great Depression than the US had), and the beginnings of postwar austerity to pay down the wartime debt, but not the massive prosperity that would be unleashed in the next decade. It’s notably not how anyone who actually experienced Soviet-style communism wrote, because they either wrote about the gulags or about intellectual repression and not about 1940s wartime living standards forever because that wasn’t a thing.
Keynes, 1931
Well, it’s not entirely wrong. What the war did do was provide a sense of employment, and therefore economic and financial, stability (even if this effect was mostly psychological). In the 1930’s, people weren’t sure if they would have a job in a year. During the war, not so much.
And the psychological dimension of public opinion is important. It determines political decisions in more ways than one.
Food for thought. Again dragging analogies into my experience with Stellaris, I instinctively tend towards autarky in my space economics because the consequences of a resource shortage are harsh – such a crash being caused because my external trading has been destroyed by my trading partners getting turned into catfood by the Grey Tempest or an inimical Fallen Empire, seems avoidable with a little xenophobia.
That being said though, the trading system is a highly useful tool for making friends and crippling ai-civ economies (dumping excess resources into the galactic market to crash those pesky megacorps, or if I’m rich enough, buying all the alloys so no one can afford to build a navy any more). …Are these tactics akin to any of the economic reasons the Axis nations felt they were being forced into war, to prevent being turned into colonies?
Germany and Japan didn’t actually have the
Note that Stellaris is a game where, by design, entire species and major regions of the populated galaxy are getting torn apart and depopulated by killer robots or ghosts from the gap between dimensions or whatever. Despite the very considerable history of disasters and upheavals that occur in real life, that sort of total annihilation is rare in our historic experience. Thus, real world countries on Earth are much less likely to be subjected to total economic disaster by the sudden, irreversible, total destruction of their trading partners than would be likely in Stellaris.
The closest real world analogy is what happened to North Korea and Cuba in the 1990s, and happened to Cuba again earlier this year – the total evaporation of their trading partners followed by a blockade imposed by essentially the entire world (broken for Cuba by Hugo Chavez and for North Korea by the Russia-Ukraine war). This is framed in Bret’s piece as a voluntary adoption of autarky by misguided authoritarians.
The other way around. After pre-WW1 Germany chose to antagonize Britain (as a long-running policy, and an unforced error), and drew it into a war against itself (by invading Belgium), Germany’s oceanic trade, including food imports, was blockaded, leading to a shortage (“turnip winter”).
Sane person lesson: trade is good, don’t start wars or antagonize countries for no reason.
Nazi lesson: when (not if) we start the next war, our trade is going to get blockaded again, therefore autarky in general and Lebensraum in particular.
There is a decision to employ women in the workforce, which is easier for both democratic and communist countries to implement and gives 3% extra recruitable pop. It does, however, require the total mobilization law which gives you -3% recruitable pop. The issue is outside certain circumstances/countries Total mob is hard to get and only rarely better than war economy. IMO war economy and conscription should have more maluses.
In practice, what the women in the workforce does is cancel out the malus for Total Mobilization.
To be fair to the developers, that’s pretty much how the policy makers allowing women into the factories thought about it.
I know nothing about this game. As far as I can read the maps of our hosts playthrough, however, France isn’t in the war. So I’d like to know how, at an operational level, the German army did not destroy the BEF hold up in the Netherlands? How did they go over to the offensive and conquer northern Germany with 30+ divisions vs. 100+ divisions?
No, France is in the war, it’s just run by the incompetent AI and is ahistorically weak. The BEF is much larger than historical because our host knew WW2 and the Battle of France in particular were coming and committed to building up the military a lot with additional forces spread across the French-German border to help. The shots in this post are from much later in the war when Britain has reinforced heavily and France never fell and is presumably contributing to the South.
Doesn’t seem like much of a game.
One of the fundamental problems with WWII strategy games is that the start of the war has a lot of unlikely events. That is, if you imagine rerunning Fall Gelb/the Battle of France in Western Europe a hundred times, with slight perturbations to the historical events each time – you would expect that in most of those the German invasion is unsuccessful.
This causes a bunch of problems for the designers, since if you just set up a reasonable simulation and set it going from 1935 or whatever you’ll usually not see something that reflects history. That problem is exacerbated by your player of course knowing what did happen in real history, meaning they can plan for it much more decisively than any real government did.
One option to solve this is just to start the game later. If you pick sometime between mid 1940 and late 1941, when most of the key unlikely events have happened, then you can use more reasonable simulation mechanics from that point on. But that in turn means you can’t offer the player the opportunity to try their hand at handling 1939 or 1940 differently than it happened historically.
So instead HoI has taken the other common approach, of skewing the simulation to make the unlikely historical events much more likely. And thus we get to this series.
Ironically, Paradox has had a “baked-in” solution to this since some of their earliest games back in the early 2000s: multiple start times!
There was really nothing stopping them from a 1936-start scenario where France usually doesn’t fall or doesn’t fall easily because they don’t mess up as badly as in real life, and another scenario that starts on, say, January 1 1939 where France is more or less “locked into” being at much higher risk of falling due to a series of very bad choices that a human player would not have made, and which a human player would struggle to reverse within the 16 or so months of game time available to them.
Technically there is a 1939 start date. Basically no one plays it.
‘only play one start date’ is actually why paradox stopped bookmarking so heavily. Even CK2 it’s basically just ‘battle for stamford bridge’ or ‘the earliest bookmark available’, nothing else. People weren’t doing it. I think Total War Rot3K actually saw some success with it, mind, but paradox did not (And Rot3K sold those bookmarks as DLC with bespoke content, ultimately intended for specific majors)
As others already discussed, the start dates kinda works in theory but is not really that useful in practice, since players want to do stuff earlier.
If I were a Paradox designer, I would probably handle these weird, unlikely situations (see also: 1066 in Crusader Kings) as more temporary local bonuses plus an “AI Poker” event chain – each involved party gets a couple of independent decisions and at the end the game reads the combination and routes it to a temporary bonus representing the unique contingencies that made the weird real-life outcome possible (for example, a huge malus to organization for France for a couple of months).
That would mean Germany would not get an ahistorical general boost, just a laser-guided surgical one, and it largely recycles mechanisms Paradox already has, while also being less prescriptive than older-gen games.
Oh, it’s a game, our host is just very good at it. When someone is very experienced in a specific game or its genre, they can make it look easy. The roguelike Social Democracy (https://red-autumn.itch.io/social-democracy) is infamously difficult, and if you try playing it a few times, Hitler will take over in most of them and maybe once or twice you’ll get a civil war without end. I’ve played it enough times and learned the mechanics that I can, on the hardest difficulty (historic mode), get SPD to crush the Great Depression in the first half of 1930 and cruise to either a Reichstag majority or something close to it. Does it mean it’s not a game? Or does it mean the mechanics in the game are very hard but can be learned?
RE: dispersed vs concentrated industry
Let’s take a look at the Willow Run bomber plant, a 3.5 million square foot factory with an assembly line a mile long. Even if they’d wanted to, the Germans or Japanese couldn’t build such a thing because even B-17s and Lancasters dropping bombs from 10,000 feet were almost guaranteed to be able to hit a target that size. Between September 1942 and May 1945, it produced nearly 7,000 B-24 Liberators out of the 18,000 the US produced over the course of the war.
Well, the Japanese were in a much better position to do that than the Germans, because “B-17s and Lancasters” (or Liberators, for that matter) could not reach them! Only B-29s could, which arrived quite late (and whose development famously cost about 1.5X as much as the Manhattan Project did) – and even then, their raids could not really begin in earnest until Japan lost enough of the Pacific islands!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_raids_on_Japan
Yeah, I meant to pull the Japanese part, but forgot I’d left it in there.
The really sad thing about the utter failure of the China-based strategic bombing plan is that thanks to the logistical issues of getting supplies to China, the US had a choice–either try and get strategic bombers operating out of China, or get the Nationalist Chinese army more equipment and better training. Well, they chose the former, and so when the Japanese attacked in 1944, partially due to the strategic bombing campaign, the Chinese got hammered, again.
Of course, even with more and better equipment, the Nationalists still would have had their usual command and control issues, but it might not have been as one-sided as it was.
I mean, the basic rule is to reinforce success, right? By which metric supporting the nationalists is a poor idea.
Thing is, the Nationalists were successful in terms of what the Allies wanted out of them, namely tying down large numbers of Japanese troops and keeping them from being deployed elsewhere.
In terms of human cost the Chinese-Japanese war was nearly comparable to the eastern front, that is to say they dwarfed all other theatres. The nationalists might not have had the material, but they were willing and able to pay a cost in human capital that matches anyone else. The most critical effect of this was that Japanense troops were completely occupied in china, as guilders says.
This meant Japan was completely incapable of an invasion of the soviets, despite being very hostile to them in theory, which meant that the lend lease corridors through Alaska and Vladivostok were never threatened. Given that these corridors represent a strict majority of all lend lease to the soviets and included vast quantities of oil, trucks, and airplanes, all vital components of the Soviet counter attacks that crippled Germany, we should not discount how important the nationalists were to the overall war.
There are other effects like the fact that Japanese attacks into India and Australia were stalled, which significantly impacted the resources available to Britain, too.
This is the development and production cost, not just development.
Yeah. SecDef Rock’s piece “The Myth of Allied Technological Inferiority” https://secretaryrofdefenserock.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-allied-technological is a good companion to this one.
I actually got the B-29/Manhattan comparison from there!
Having said that, while he can be an insightful writer, that piece (debunking Eliot Ackerman’s contemporary article in The Free Press (sigh) article) is altogether far from his best. For one, far too much of it is devoted to Ackerman’s astonishingly silly assertion that the Tiger was a counterpart to the Sherman. The wiser approach would have been to remark that given the production numbers – “German industry produced fewer than 1,400 Tigers; the Allies produced over 50,000 Shermans”* – the actual counterpart to the Sherman was the StuG III (10k), or, generously, Panzer IV (8.5k); and move on to more important aspects of the war. Instead, he ends up making so many outright inaccuracies and flawed arguments, I’ll have to devote a full comment just to those before even getting to his core argument.
*Technically not quite accurate, since it’s reasonable to read “the Tiger tank” as referring to both Tiger I and II; with the latter, the numbers get closer to 1,750; including the tank destroyer versions of either (Ferdinant/Elefant and Jagdtiger) brings it to about 1,900.
**Literal Wikipedia again;
***As in;
https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/articles/tactics/tank-busting-ww2.php
****Though, while the T-34 had notoriously suffered from a 4-man crew with a two-man turret, the final production versions with an 85mm gun have resolved that issue – i.e. when the Shermans and T-34s were deployed on opposite sides in Korea, both had the same crew layout. (Of course, at that point, the American air supremacy outside of the “MiG Alley” made it hard to even supply Korean tanks for long enough to get them into a tank battle, and there was a significant number of post-Sherman tanks present on the “UN” side as well.)
******Although, where shells hitting early Shermans or many other tanks would have hit ammo racks, on T-34 they were instead liable to go through auxiliary fuel tanks. This wasn’t considered to be an issue because diesel is practically inflammable outside of fuel chamber conditions – and shells passing through completely fuelled tanks indeed did nothing. Unfortunately, when a T-34 had been on the march for a while, those would obviously drain down, leaving behind fumes. A fuel-air mix would form and eventually become flammable. In extremis (roughly 20:80 fuel-air ratio) the auxiliary tank would instantly detonate catastrophically.
I was hoping to get done with the tank comparison in the comment above and move on to contemporary stuff, but the point below is so hypocritical, my response ran on for way too long, so, here.
Now, I am not an American. I live in Australia, and in fact, the polls here suggest quite a number of us wouldn’t especially care if the PRC does in fact claim such superiority and/or have resigned ourselves to it taking place. The latest poll shows a slim majority do not want to strengthen regional alliances and the like to help deter/contain China and would rather deepen our ties with them instead.****
https://poll.lowyinstitute.org/charts/managing-the-australia-china-relationship/
It is however understandable why an American might reach for half-baked historical analogies to advocate for any alternative that might alter the present course. (Why one might hope drones to a stealth fighter would be as ICBMs were to a strategic bomber, so to speak.) Yet, much like the piece does everything to obfuscate the true scale of Shermans’ losses, it focuses on just about everything but the actual situation vis-a-vis American vs. Chinese military technology (or indeed, to quote him, the relative “alignment of political purpose, economic organization, and military means” on either side. This makes the closer – “….requires intellectual honesty, a willingness to think historically rather than merely to quote history” all the more ironic.
*“Cooper’s background as an ordnance officer, rather than a combat tanker, limited his perspective” happens to be a very polite way to say that he was in charge of Sherman salvage, and thus he had to see destroyed and damaged tanks (that 13.5/day number does not even account for the tanks which got repaired and put back into service!), often with dead bodies still inside them, more-or-less day-in/day-out. Once the US gave up on trying to effectively protect its tank crews from anti-tank guns, a mentally scarred man like Cooper writing this kind of a book was a statistical inevitability.
**Which happened to get simultaneously yet separately discovered in the British Commonwealth, the US and the USSR; remarkably, the Soviet discovery was done by two women, Ermol’eva and Balezina.
***While the J-20s are still usually assumed to be somewhat easier to detect/track with very high-end radar than F-35s, it’s unclear if the difference is truly significant in the real-world conditions – or if it more significant than the hypothesis about the superiority of their onboard radars, or the recent India-Pakistan engagement gesturing towards the superiority of Chinese air-to-air missiles.
**** Of course, it must be read in the context of broadly and fairly consistently unfavorable attitudes towards both titans here – I don’t think China had an above-water approval rating in Pew polls taken here in a long time, if ever, and this year’s results are still 2/3rds negative. However, even Biden’s America was only 5 points above water here in 2023, which flipped to 20 points underwater (60/40) after October 7 and “the bear hug”. (Trump’s America, of course, is at 3/4th negative nowadays.)
I haven’t looked hard at HoI-4 since around when it came out but this series is doing an excellent job of convincing me I am still right that the Arsenal of Democracy mod of HoI-2 is still the best HoI.
Thanks for the post. Just one pair of typos I’ll point out: “a-historically” doesn’t need that hyphen in it (and you do get this right in the second paragraph).
And your quick bit of competitive industrial output still managed to understate how badly Germany and Japan were outmatched!
First because not all airplanes are equal, and the US and UK were spending some of their aircraft production on large complex 4-engines bombers, while the Soviets, Germans, and Japanese produced barely any and also IIRC produced fewer 2-engine aircraft. An early-war 4-engine heavy bomber requires 4 or 5 times the industrial output than a (relatively) small single engine fighter or dive bomber.
Second because the US and UK were also simultaneously building more warships (even if many of them didn’t complete until after 1942) so applied less of their military industrial output to tanks and planes than Germany and Japan.
Third because the US famously also simultaneously spent vastly more industrial might on logistics vehicles (jeeps, trucks, trains, freighters) than Germany or Japan. Or the Soviets, for that matter (thanks to the massive numbers of trucks and trains the US supplied them, the Soviets could switch factories from making those to making weapons, artillery, and combat vehicles).
On the other hand, the strategic bombing that heavy bombers were used for has historically produced very little value for the cost.
Oh yeah, the strategic bombing results in WW2 probably weren’t worth the cost of the bombers.
Fortunately for the allies, the big bombers turned out to be very useful as maritime patrol aircraft, hunting submarines in the Atlantic; as operational level support aircraft flattening German railway stations and logistics centres during the Normandy invasion; and for dropping mines around Japanese ports in 1945, a blockade that was so successful the US military kept it classified for many years afterwards lest other people get ideas.
Part of the point is of course that the allies had a sufficient advantage that tehy didn’t *have* to go for optimal returns: They could waste a ton of money and materiel on relatiely inefficient strategic bombing and still come out ahead just beacuse there pockets were that much deeper.
From what I recall, the main strategic value that heavy bomber provided to the Allies was that it forced the Nazis to divert massive numbers of weapons and fighters to home defense. Every 88mm flak gun and fighter plane trying to stop bombers was one less available to defend against Soviet forces. Once Allied fighters had the range to escort bombers all the way to Germany and back the strategic role of bombers was to serve as bait, to force the Luftwaffe into battle until they were bled dry, and they worked exceedingly well at that role. It’s just not the role they would’ve liked to play.
Later assessments, drawing on German industrial records at firm level, are that the bombing did have quite a large effect – and more so as the war went on and it improved in weight and accuracy. Hamburg was, after all, a major industrial city, the Ruhr the key steel producing centre, later transport disruptions prevented considerable amounts of war materiel from being delivered or, in many cases, reaching final production (stuck three-quarters complete). It also forced factory dispersion just when large pre-war investments in inputs and centralised production were coming on stream.
It did consume enormous resources, so the balance is hard to judge.
In fairness, at least against the Germans, the strategic bomber force did compel them to manufacture very large numbers of AA guns and ammunition for them (cutting into artillery and shell production available for land warfare) as well as fighters, defensive radar systems, and so on. To an extent this represents “virtual attrition.” The price the enemy pays to prevent you from just effortlessly flying in bombers at 5-10 thousand feet and leveling their industrial complexes easily is still a price, even if at the end of the war you find that your bombers never actually did destroy their industrial complexes.
When finally used against the Japanese homeland, though, strategic bombers significantly reduced its industrial capacity; the (mostly wooden) cities of Japan were horrifically vulnerable to incendiaries and AA efforts were pitiful compared to Germany’s. if I recall correctly, it was necessary to reserve a few cities for a planned nuclear strike because otherwise there would have been no cities left to strike. Of course, by then there was almost no merchant marine to import resources for any putative undamaged factories; it had all been sunk by Allied submarines, aircraft, or mines. The US Navy pointed out in 1945 that just continuing the blockade would have forced Japan to surrender to avoid mass starvation.
Yes, Grave of the Fireflies is not my favorite anime movie.
???
Japan famously prioritized IJN over IJA – especially as soon as they gave up on fighting the USSR due to the failure at Khalkin Gol and refocused on the “Southern Resource Area”. While I don’t think the set of tables in the article below (for 1939-1945 production only, so excluding the prewar inventory) is perfect*, it nevertheless gives you the rough idea that whereas the Japanese produced about a tenth as many tanks/self-propelled guns or unarmoured military vehicles (i.e. trucks and staff cars) as the British Empire** (comparing them to the USA or the USSR is just too unfair) and a third of the British aircraft (a small gap with fighters – ~33k vs. 39k – but 2:1 in recon, 3:1 in bombers/attack aircraft and a massive 12:1 in transport and trainer aircraft), it built nearly as many aircraft carriers (14/15; ironically, the British actually built more battleships than Japan during the war itself, at 5/2) and the overall gap in “large ships” (everything from the frigate and above) was 2:1, at 278 vs. 558.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#Naval_forces
I suspect one reason the above didn’t include naval production is because it’s much harder to compare “like-for-like” navally than with the aircraft or ground vehicles. A 4-engine bomber might require 4/5X the output, sure;*** but now consider that the median US destroyer, the legendary Fletcher, wasn’t just built as a larger series than anything else, at 175 vessels – at 2 tonnes, it also weighted twice as much as the typical German or Soviet destroyer. (In fairness, those had to operate in the stormier Atlantic, where the Fletcher had limited seaworthiness as opposed to the Pacific.) This is even before considering it carried two radars (early-warning and gun-laying), placing it (and the British ships) so far ahead of anything any other WWII nation called a destroyer (even the German destroyers only had the early-warning radars, AFAIR). Trying to account for the differences in size and equipment between all the other ship classes of the war would probably take up half the blog post.
Even so, there probably ought to be a footnote referring to the naval side of things. Likewise, at least a footnote acknowledging that not just the plane (as you have noted), but even the tank numbers aren’t like-for-like. That is, at first glance the Soviet and the American tank production in 1942 look almost identical to each other (24,446 vs. 24,997) and far ahead of the German 9,200. However, a much smaller fraction of 1942 German tank output was light: only 367 Panzer IIs and 203 Panzer 38(t)s from the Czech factories. (590/9,200, or ~6.4%). In contrast, the US produced some 10,697 M3 and M5 Light tanks (both called “Stuart”, after a Confederate Cavalry General, as there wasn’t too much difference in practice) that year, and the USSR 4244 T-60s and 4883 T-70s – i.e. ~43.8% and ~37.3%, respectively. In fairness, those light tanks also were far from equal even relative to each other; i.e. a typical Stuart weighted more than the others (30% more than Pz. 38(t) or T-70; nearly twice as much as a T-60; yet still less than half of most contemporary medium tanks) and had a comparable disparity in horsepower (220-250 HP vs. 180 HP on the final Pz. II models, 140 HP on T-70, 125 HP on Pz. 38 (t) and 70 HP on T-60).****
On the other hand, the comparison gets worse for the Germans once you recognize that once the light tanks are subtracted from the count, either the USSR or the USA still produced ~1.5X more that year than the entire German tank output – and generally better tanks, too! That is, the only German medium tanks which could be said to be out-and-out superior to 1942’s T-34 (12521 models) and the Sherman (8017 – though very few got to see combat that year) were the long-barrel Panzer IV (mostly due to significantly superior penetration power of its gun relative to early Shermans and T-34s) – only 870 of which were made that year. That is, about half as many as the 1904 KV-1s the USSR produced that year; though a long-barrel Panzer IV could still defeat at KV-1 at about the same range the latter would destroy it, it was at best a coin toss, and the KV-1 had been far more survivable vs. so many other threats. To be fair, Germany actually produced Tigers in 1942…all 88 of them. (Yet they still shipped some of them into combat that year…to Leningrad’s outskirts, where a number of them infamously broke their transmissions while disembarking from a train car.)
Meanwhile, none of 124 short-barrel Panzer IVs and 2325 Panzer IIIs (three different gun models!) could be reasonably said to be superior to a Sherman in any way, and their only real advantage over that year’s T-34 was due to a larger turret (which forced the tank commander to also operate the gun, overloading him and making the aiming much, much slower – so a lucky crew of those late Panzer IIIs/early Panzer IVs could semi-reliably close in to a range where they were still effective before the T-34 could react; an unlucky one would get destroyed from afar. A KV-1, though equipped with the same gun as a T-34, had a “full” turret complement and so did not have this issue.)
And now…I have to be honest, I’m really unsure how Overy even gets to 9,200 in 1942. Adding all of the aforementioned tanks above still leaves us with 5,291 of his figure unaccounted for. (While I’m using Wikipedia figures across multiple articles, I don’t think its numbers, which include literal monthly breakdowns, would be off by this much, especially relative to a 30-year old source.) Remarkably, even assuming he counts the tank-derived vehicles doesn’t quite get there: you might have heard StuG III was produced more widely than any German tank, but its output really ramped in from 1943 onwards, while only 792 were made in 1942 (slightly fewer than 863 in the last few months of 1945, before its factory was finally captured in early April!) Then, for the tank destroyers converted from aforementioned light tanks, there are 477 Marder IIs derived from Marder IIs and 454 Czech-chassis-based Marder IIIs (remarkably, about 3/4th of 1942’s Marder IIIs were fitted with the captured prewar Soviet “universal” 76mm guns, vs. their own PaK 40 – this ratio is inverted for that year’s Marder IIs.)
This still leaves 3,568 tanks unaccounted for – which forces me to wonder if this counts all of the captured French tanks that got their turrets torn off to mount artillery pieces on them (only done in the occupied France in preparation for Normandy) and all of the French and Soviet light armoured gun tractors that got anti-tank guns welded directly onto them. There really were thousands of the latter, and I guess a T-20 Komsomolets with a PaK 36 atop it is superior to a Panzer I – but it’s a very strange definition of production.
P.S. As for the Japanese 1,191 tanks – let’s just say that their best model, Type 97 Chi-Ha Kai, which only represented a minority of 1942’s output, was like a late-model Panzer III with Stuart’s armour. The default Chi-Ha had a worse gun, and there were still quite a number of light Ha-Gos produced that year. (Inferior even to a T-26 in a head-to-head engagement – though narrow jungle trails on all those islands did a lot to minimize their disadvantages.) Even the couple thousand M3 Lees/Grants the US produced that year (the total was 6,258, but much of that was made in 1941) were by-and-superior; while their massive size made them very vulnerable to heavy anti-tank guns, their combined firepower was larger than of earlier German medium tanks, never mind the Japanese one. (Hence they were much less popular in the USSR than in North Africa or Burma – where the opposition was less heavily-armed and their two guns allowed them to shoot at dug-in emplacements and sweep the treetops of snipers at the same time.)
* i.e. the Wikipedia table in that article implies the USSR produced very few trainers during the war, but in practice the initially-agricultural Po-2 biplane, which the table appears to count as “Other”, was primarily used as a basic trainer, in the same way as e.g. the American Piper Cub and Stearman Kaydet. (Even if the most famous WWII use of that plane was as the “nuisance” bomber of the Night Witches – which eventually inspired the Germans to devote some of their own trainers to the same, which probably wasn’t the best idea given their strategic situation.) Likewise, its list of submarines implies that the Japanese built more of them during the war (867) then all of the Allies combined (577) – but it believe it counts the suicide torpedoes, and taking them out would shrink the Japanese total by about half. Admittedly, the Japanese count also includes “underwater aircraft carriers”, which were by far the largest submarines of the war (and were also some of the most wasteful things built in the entire war, perhaps second only to battleships, requiring massive resource expenditures for a chance to bomb the American mainland with a handful of small planes.)
**And for the non-tank/SPG armoured vehicles, the gap is closer to 20:1; I believe primarily due to the very light Universal Carrier – but also a dizzying array of armoured cars produced all across the British Empire, since they required much less industry than the tanks. I.e. Canada exported about a thousand “Otters” (in addition to a number of armoured trucks – on top of a much greater quantity of the conventional “Canadian Pattern” supply trucks) and for much of the North Africa campaign, a remarkable fraction of Desert Rats’ armoured support came from the South Africa-produced Marmon-Herrington armoured cars (those really weren’t great until their final iteration, which only arrived by the time of the Italy campaign, but were of course better than nothing, and the desert was a lot kinder to armoured cars than the Eastern Front) and the sadly underrated Indian-Pattern armoured cars (“Tatanagars”, which were about as good as they could realistically be for a 2.5 ton vehicle, and largely comparable to the Soviet BA-64.)
***Which makes it all the more remarkable that the first Soviet jet bomber, Il-28 (entered service in 1950), actually cost slightly less than the MiG-15 or 17 (never mind the subsequent fighters) did! Admittedly, Il-28 was a light bomber by jet era’s standards (i.e. a fully-loaded F-15 or an F-35 weighs almost twice as much), with “only” 2 engines and a 3-ton payload (which still placed it well ahead of just about every non-B-29 WWII bomber, including the Flying Fortresses) – but that still meant its payload alone weighted almost as much as an entire MiG-15 did! Moreover, its payload could well have been increased by another ton or so by taking out its armour and the rear turret.
Doing that ought to have made it into an extremely cost-efficient platform for launching cruise missiles at stand-off ranges – which is essentially the only thing bombers can do in the face of effective air defences anyway (as proven not just by contemporary Ukraine but even as early as the Yom Kippur War). Fortunately for the opponents of the Warsaw Pact, Khruschev and his successors were obsessed with supersonic speeds, so massive resources were instead poured into making supersonic counterparts to Stalin-era jet bombers (Yak-28, which had the same payload and range as Il-28, and ended up doing nothing at all, and the notorious Tu-22, which was meant to replace the 70-ton (9 ton payload) Tu-16 but had such a terrible safety record it had to be replaced with an all-new swing-plane bomber that kept the same designation (Tu-22M – which still does nothing besides launching cruise missiles from ranges at which supersonic speeds are irrelevant) and a large number of Il-28s (over 6,000 were produced as they were so cheap) were scrapped as “obsolete”.
****It really ought to be emphasized that if even half of those Stuarts were present in the France of 1940, they would have literally stopped the Fall of France cold. They were literally only slightly inferior to even the contemporary Panzer III (armour 5mm thinner, but their gun was somewhat more accurate due to stabilization), somewhat superior to Czech tanks in German service and far superior to Panzer IIs and Panzer Is which actually made up the bulk of the invasion force (as well as nearly all of BEF’s tanks, for that matter). Throw in their numerical superiority (even half of 10,697 is still double the 2,445 tanks Germany invaded France with) and strategic flexibility (far greater speed/operational range/responsiveness due to radios relative to virtually all contemporary French tanks, even if they generally had better armour and sometimes better guns), and fuel supply becomes the only question. For that matter, Barbarossa where the USSR has those 4883 T-70s deployed is…interesting. While 1941’s Panzer III, Panzer IVs and StuGs would all have a distinct advantage over them individually, those made up a little over a third of tracked armour used in Barbarossa (~1,300 out of ~3,500) and they would be clearly superior to the rest – in addition to being comparatively reliable and much easier to fuel (even the T-26 required higher-octane petrol vs. the truck one used by T-70s). A lot depends of how exactly they get distributed, but the additional casualties and friction the Axis are forced to sustain in this scenario still ought to be remarkable.
By 1942, though, the Germans were the first to recognize light tanks got destroyed too quickly by not just other tanks, but also infantry’s anti-tank guns and increasingly anti-tank rifles (never mind soon-to-be-introduced bazookas/panzerfausts), so as the potential for light tanks to duel each other shrunk quickly, they were all primarily useful only as scouts (the T-60, redesigned from a former amphibious tank in desperation to give Moscow’s truck factories something to do as the Army Group Center was closing in, wasn’t even good at that due to a lack of a radio) or vs. totally unsupported infantry or unarmoured/lightly armoured scouts. In those circumstances, T-70, though on paper inferior to a Stuart, was actually somewhat more useful since the larger HE round on its gun was more capable of suppressing light fortifications (and it had enough front armour to withstand the light anti-tank guns at range); of course, the SU-76 on the same chassis was far better at that, hence it totally replaced this tank in production.
The British alone managed twice as many large ships as Japan, but the margin is even greater on the small ships that were less resource intensive and easier to build. WW2 Japan was really bad at building the navy they needed.
Same Wikipedia table shows Britain alone out-building Japan 3:1 in frigates, destroyer escorts, and corvettes. These are the ships that protect civilian ships from submarines. Imperial Japan went to war to obtain access to oil and other resources in other countries, but hadn’t really thought through the bit about getting those resources back to Japan. By 1944 Japan had a great deal of trouble manufacturing anything, because US submarines were wiping out the Japanese transports.
Imperial Japan paid way too much attention to Mahan’s ideas about decisive battle, hence the aircraft carriers and battleships. Should have read more Corbett about the not at all glorious and frequently boring work of moving people and stuff from A to B.
The ability to ‘switch factories’ between different production tends to be vastly overstated in people’s understanding of WW2 production. The Germans, with their artisinal production, could do this to an extent but they paid for that capability with vastly inferior production as noted in the blog post. The Soviets could switch some lines for tractors to primitive light tanks, but you can’t switch a factory from making a truck to a T-34 or artillery piece in real life, they don’t have much tooling in common and the tooling is most of the cost of the factory.
Soviet truck production was bad because the Soviets didn’t prioritize truck production in the 5 years leading up to the war, not because they made a conscious decision to depriorizing trucks for tanks during the war.
Not true. Soviet truck production capacity by 1941 was actually greater than British or German (they had manufactured 140K trucks in 1940 and were on track to getting something like 160K based on their production in the first half of the year, compared to a British figure of around 100K). The problem was the establishment of that capacity was only a few years old, meaning stocks were still building up, whereas the British and Germans had their automobile industries producing on these scales for decades at this point. Then during the war they suffered massive devastation and dislocation from not just mobilization but even physical destruction (they flat out lost a bunch of major motor vehicle factories in Ukraine and the evacuation of the Moscow factory cost it years of production) which caused production to tumble down to only 20% of that in 1942.
“The United States is perhaps the worst victim of this, as it alone starts with the ‘Great Depression’ national spirit that pumps the consumer goods ratio”
Of the major nations, minor nations like Australia and I think the Philippines have similar national spirits. Same difference, only the allied democracies deal with it, and Axis nations get out of any vague equivalent idea by being right about economics (i.e Japan removes it’s early industrialization modifier by establishing Autarky.)
The United States suffered a “Great Depression”; most other countries suffered a depression.
Hoover made things worse by stupidity. FDR made things worse *on purpose*, blamed Republicans, and built a loyal power base that lasted for decades.
The New Deal worked. The US entered recovery as it was enacted, and the core thesis (stimulus spending) is foundationally correct for dealing with deflationary economics.
FDR didn’t blame Republicans for his policies because they solved the problem. As everyone knew at the time. The New Deal was incredibly popular because the economy improved.
What you’re saying is nonsense.
In contrast you can actually argue Hoover intentionally made the depression worse, in that his liquidationist advisors were actively callous towards the suffering and economic damage bought on by lassaiz faire policies, believing instead that the “optimal” economy would arise from letting everyone default until the economy was bought up for a pittance by money hoarders. It was an incredibly unpopular, elitist position, and it was despised and killed Republican electoral prospects for a generation because it was despised.
But this is immaterial to your point because Hoover certainly made the depression worse and FDR certainly made it better.
And a lot of countries, such as Australia, actually suffered worse than the US on many major metrics like unemployment.
As I said in the previous post, I think one of the solutions to Hearts of Iron‘s issue, along with more popular representation, would be to broaden the scope of the game beyond World War Two.
There really isn’t any way to properly simulate the infamous head-in-the-sand attitude of Great Britain and France towards Germany without showcasing their own political resistance, both from leaders and voters, to anything that could bring them back to the World War One grinder.
Likewise, the game can’t show the German miracle without actually including the Weimar Republic proper and the role its institutions and the budget cuts imposed on the military by Versailles helped Germany recover.
Starting in say 1924 could also open up more interesting political outcomes in places like Eastern Europe and Japan too, since that’s right around when their inter-war democracies collapse.
Was colonialism, in the sense that Europeans did it after 1492, ever an economic benefit? Back in the 18th century Adam Smith argued the European colonies of his time, were a net negative compared to if Europe had just traded peacefully with the America’s. From memory he argued so on both theoretical and empirical grounds.
My understanding is it’s a disputed point. I was raised up by economists who were educated under the neoliberal paradigm, so I don’t really know the counterargument, but there was significant wealth transfer from the colonies to the metropoles in the era. We have reason to believe that wealth transfer didn’t actually benefit the metropoles in toto, but just a few elites, but it is disputed, and a lot of the argument rests on arcana of inflation and such.
Right but Smith’s argument was that there would be a lot more wealth transfer to the metropole under free trade. And notably, in the 19th century the UK was importing far more goods from the by-then independent USA than it was from India.
Depends what you mean by “Economic benefit”. (and honestly, it varies) In the purely fiscal sense *most* colonies were net drain (IE: the treasury spent more money on administering than they got out in taxes, etc.) there were exceptions though (like some of the carribean islands, IIRC) at least at some points in time. But *overall* colonies were a net drain on the treasury.
In the case of overall economic growth it’s a bit more unclear, and it runs into questions about accumulation of capital etc. (in the sense that the various colonial projects gave european investors a significant boost of readily availible capital that could be reinvested in toher projects) there’s also a pretty significant influence from colonial project on various financial developments (insurance, etc.) I’ve seen claims to both sides on this one.
Of course partof it is that it doesen’t really matter because colonies were absolutely good at making certain people within european society very rich (and quite a few people at least a bit of money) there’s an argument that 19th century high imperialism was really more ofa jobs employment programme for a certain kind of european men.
They gradually became a drain from 1850 on, when the imperial states started investing more heavily in administration and development. Before then? Absolutely a considerable benefit. The sugar, Indian textiles etc trades produced cash wealth on a large scale, much invested at home. Of course, the benefit to the imperialists came at greater cost to the populations of Africa, the Caribbean and India – in that sense they were a net negative, just as say similar extractive arrangements are today.
But hold on, if there was no colonialism, then wouldn’t the locals in the Americas mass produce sugar and cotton to sell to the Europeans? Hopefully without the slavery?
And how did this trade generate cash wealth in Europe? My understanding was that most of the sugar and cotton clothing was sold to Europeans, so it was just a transfer of cash from some Europeans to other Europeans. (If the sugar and etc was being produced without European colonisation, the Caribbean locals would have had the wealth to invest in European manufacturing.)
It would be very unlikely that you’d see mass sugar/cotton production at prices suitable for export to Europe via intercontinental sailing ship without massive populations of slave laborers (or populations in a condition hardly better than slavery, such as extreme forms of serfdom). This has a lot to do with the conditions under which it is possible to grow those crops. And the fact that under subsistence agriculture, it is actually rather hard to get the farmers to grow much in the way of crops for export!
As Dr. Devereaux’s recent series on peasant lifestyles illustrated, a typical family of subsistence farmers must actually work quite hard just to support their own survival. That’s especially true in typical realistic conditions in an un-disrupted agricultural society where a significant slice of the agricultural surplus is being diverted to pay rents or taxes to the local magnates. Thus, getting the peasants to grow large amounts of anything they can’t eat themselves (or spin into cloth to wear themselves) is difficult.
When your peasants are working 100-hour weeks of muscle-cracking labor in the tropical sun and still barely have enough to eat (such that in bad years the children starve), you are likely to wind up on the receiving end of a peasant uprising in short order, unless the peasants are so comprehensively oppressed that your social system can best be described as “like slavery with a few extra steps.”
This means that in practice, it would have been much harder for the Native American societies in the Caribbean (to take one example) to mass-produce sugar for export to Europe even if they wanted to, in some collective sense.
Moreover, from the European point of view, much of the profit in such a system of free trade would become the property of the Native Americans. Whereas by conquering the islands, enslaving the population, shipping in more slaves, and setting up plantations, they created a situation where all those profits wound up in the hands of assorted second sons of the nobility and other types who were running those plantations, slave trades, and mercantile operations.
@Simon_Jester, but we still have sugar now, ages after slavery was abolished. And Europe was quite good at funding capital intensive projects before colonialism, after all it first needed to fund building ships capable of crossing the Atlantic in order to do colonialism.
So one scenario – an adventurous early European trader discovers the potential for sugar production, raises capital from the City of London, builds a sugar farm (feeding the workers with purchased food), makes a fortune. The local merchants say “wow this looks awesome” and borrow some money from London themselves. (And presumably they could have raised capital locally – lots of big cities in the Americas pre-1492).
Like this is basically Japan after the USA forced it to open to trade, and NZ Māori between Captain Cook and 1840. Different crops obviously as neither Japan or NZ are suitable for sugar or cotton, and with a number of home-grown horrors and atrocities, but if those two places could start exporting to Europeans without colonialism, why not the Americas?
We do, but that’s partially because of scientific advances that made it easier (including alternative sources, like sugar beets) and partially because well… Conditions are still often pretty darn awful for sugar production. Sugar, like mining, almost always involved some degree of coercion, even if not actual slavery.
We do actually kinda see that kind of thing in Africa between the decline of the slave trade and actual high colonization, but that mainly involves local african rulers starting slave plantations on their own turf rather than exporting slaves elsewhere.
Indeed. Even nowadays, tens of thousands of workers in Central America die of kidney disease on those plantations.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/14/kidney-disease-killing-sugar-cane-workers-central-america
The above is from 2012 – yet according to a Dec 15, 2025 article in El Salvador Now, El Salvador Faces Epidemic of Chronic Kidney Disease, things didn’t get any better since then (in fact, it suggests they somehow got even worse).
They gradually became a drain from 1850 on, when the imperial states started investing more heavily in administration and development. Before then? Absolutely a considerable benefit. The sugar, Indian textiles etc trades produced cash wealth on a large scale, much invested at home. Of course, the benefit to the imperialists came at greater cost to the populations of Africa, the Caribbean and India – in that sense they were a net negative, just as say similar extractive arrangements are today.
There was a notorious situation the other week when an X poll asking if 1939 Europe would be able to defeat 2026 Africa went viral: over there, over 2/3rds voted for 1939 Europe, which says a lot about who is still using that platform nowadays. Predictably, it had been mercilessly mocked by our host and many others on Bluesky.
The absurdity of the situation aside*, it got me to discover that, amongst the other things, the contemporary Africa is capable of refining more oil in a week than the entire Reich could produce in a whole year even at its peak expansion (i.e. some domestic oil, its synthetic (“coal-to-chemicals”) oil, then-large Romanian deposits, Hungary, Poland, and the briefly captured outlying areas of the Soviet Caucasus). Conversely, I found out that the Middle Eastern oil was not yet a major factor back then.
https://warhistory.org/article/oil-in-wwii
This does get one to wonder; would colonialism have had much more of a future if WWII did not happen in the 1940s? How much of a deterrent would there have been to occupying all of the oilfield countries in the region for however many decades? With millions of European young men not dying and often proceeding to have children who haven’t existed OTL, and with the continent not having to lick its wounds and rebuild so much destroyed infrastructure, would the occupying European countries have simply shrugged off inevitable casualties to partisan/terror attacks as the cost of doing business, rather than treating them as the reason to leave?
Moreover, in a scenario where World War I either does not occur at all, or ends in a way which does not lead to the formation of the Soviet Union, who would even be sufficiently invested to support all those anticolonial movements? Occupying countries nowadays is extremely difficult in large part because there are so many AK-47s and RPG-7 warheads floating around (there’s a possibly-apocryphal story about a village market in some African country in the 1990s where neighbouring stalls sold chickens and AK-47s – and the chickens cost more!), and schematics to building the former are so widely known. Does anyone really think that either the Russian Empire which avoided WWI or just about any alternative to the Soviet Union with no ideological commitment to a global revolution/anticolonialism would have shared this technical knowledge so widely? And if not them, who would?
Come to think of it, Hearts of Iron with the flexibility to explore this kind of a scenario rather than loading the dice to ensure there is always a WWII in more-or-less the ways we can imagine (according to past threads, apparently going to such silliness as ensuring a Germany that overthrows Hitler somehow always inspires France to go “full Communist” and start a European World War alongside the USSR?!) would actually be worthwhile.
*I.e. just the assumption either continent could have been united into a neat block in the first place. Further, a lot of people who have correctly noted it’s ludicrous to believe 1939 Europe could occupy a united Africa that is both so much more populous and so far ahead technologically (even assuming that e.g. Africa sent back into time would be cut off from the global internet, the local cellphone networks still ought to work, which is already a barely-conceivable revolution by 1940s standards) have flipped too far the other way into assuming a few hundred modern-ish jet fighters possessed by present-day African countries (primarily Egypt and Algeria) would allow them to finally make strategic bombing work against a whole continent. (The total amount of bombing all those F-16s, MiG-29s and Su-30s could do would still be a small fraction of what the 1960s US threw against Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia – even accounting for the greater precision of modern weapons and the likelihood of turning hundreds of jet air liners into ersatz bombers.)
Moreover, the assumption Pan-Africa could have won from afar, via a combination of bombing and simply beating back any attempted landings from Pan-Europe (and/or reviving the South African nuclear program), ignores that if we assume time travel of today’s Africa to 1939, it would immediately be under massive time pressure to occupy European agricultural regions, as the pre-Green Revolution world of 1939 simply does not have the agricultural surplus to support the African population of 2026. A united African continent could conceivably avoid truly massive famine in the short term without immediately going to such occupation via measures like a massive cull of grain-fed livestock, torching massive tracts of Congolese rainforest like what’s been happening in the Amazon and using its massive post-2000s vessels to fish in everyone else’s waters, relying on 1939’s ocean being much less exploited than the contemporary one.
Even if such measures work, though, they would be painful and unpleasant, and the temptation to do Hunger Plan to however much of 1939 Pan-Europe their logistics would allow (especially if we assume it’s already united under Hitler, like many on X surely do) while the continent still has an incredible edge in technology would become overwhelming. In all, a seemingly simple hypothetical which goes incredibly dark (yet fascinatingly complex) the more you think about it.
(Tbf, that goes for a lot of these speculations: i.e. a long-held truism is that if the Japanese speculative fiction is about “truck-kun” sending one into isekai (literally “another world”) that’s a fantasy realm which often works just like an MMO, Russian one is about being warped into a WWII period (popadanets – i.e. literally “happened to end up there”) and “doing it right”. To the best of my knowledge, they rarely feature rounds and rounds of interrogation by the NKVD that would virtually certain befall anyone getting spotting with objects as banal as clothing makes that haven’t yet existed in that period.)
<i>Does anyone really think that either the Russian Empire which avoided WWI or just about any alternative to the Soviet Union with no ideological commitment to a global revolution/anticolonialism would have shared this technical knowledge so widely? And if not them, who would?</i>
@YARD,
I have a hard time imagining that some other state or states wouldn’t have given communism a try- if it wasn’t the Bolsheviks in the Russian Empire it would have been someone else. My bet would be on the Habsburg Empire and its successor states (after all, in our timeline Hungary did briefly end up as the world’s <i>second</i> socialist state).
The economic and moral challenges that communism sought to address were real, the ideas it offered were compelling, WWI had produced enough of a power vacuum and there were significant communist movements all over the world, so it was certainly going to happen <i>somewhere</i>. And wherever it happened, communists would by nature and core conviction support the anticolonial movements in Africa and Asia.
<i>when an X poll asking if 1939 Europe would be able to defeat 2026 Africa went viral: over there, over 2/3rds voted for 1939 Europe, which says a lot about who is still using that platform nowadays</i>
A lot of people have frankly delusional views about how developed Africa and South Asia are today (and on the flip side, how *underdeveloped* they were at the time of independence). India had a 12% literacy rate at independence, and a country like Burkina Faso didn’t have a single university until 14 years after independence, for all that the British and French liked to brag about their “civilizing mission”.
My guess would be that the UK would eventually elect a Labour government headed by Clement Attlee, or someone else as equally anti-colonialism, and he’d grant independence to the British colonies that wanted it, which would put the UK into opposition with France, its old enemy, and without the USSR around as a common enemy the Brits would start supplying anti-colonial movements in French colonies.
@Hector is right, somebody would have tried an alternative.
Although we think of the Victorian era as static and conservative, the last two decades of the 19th C and the first of the 20th were very dynamic, lots of social (and technological) change. Barbara Tuchman wrote a book “The Proud Tower” about this time. IIRC, “Europe”, from England to the western edge of Russia, was awash with anarchists, socialists, and communists. (Or at least the ruling classes believed it.) Marx’s own theories predicted that the communist revolution would occur first in the most industrialised countries such as England and Germany. And indeed, in 1918 the crews of the Imperial German Navy mutinied against their aristocratic officers and some of the captured German dreadnoughts at Scapa Flow were controlled by workers collectives, not captains.
And trying not to be too Eurocentric, the years leading up to WW1 are also when the positions of Ottoman Sultan, Persian (Iranian) Shah, and Chinese Emperor were abolished. Not as in the current incumbent was overthrown and replaced, but that a (more or less) popular uprising announced “f*** divine right” and that henceforth there would be no more Sultans, Shahs, Emperors. (In the Iranian case it didn’t stick on the first attempt.)
@scifihughf,
I think that Marx was wrong about socialism happening in the most advanced economies (which is to say, I think that history demonstrated there’s a point at which workers in countries like England and America decided they would have too much to lose by rocking the boat too much, and that their best bet was sticking with capitalism). That’s why i think the Habsburg territories, specifically, were at the “sweet spot” of development where circumstances could have been optional for socialism, if things had turned out a little different.
The notion Attlee was ideologically committed to anti-colonialism, rather than having his hand forced by the circumstances of post-war Britain is…debatable at best.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/britains-declining-empire/british-imperialism-is-dead-the-attlee-government-and-the-end-of-empire-19451951/2B1C0DB0F4FEC53AA55B6D74F63674FD
Even with the British postwar situation, he still chose to hold onto Kenya, for one – while the Mau Mau rebellion had only erupted in full after Churchill’s return to power*, it’s implausible there wasn’t already pro-independence pressure Attlee could have responded to, yet ultimately hadn’t.
Yes – and that “briefly” is because Romania had defeated it almost immediately, forcing the leaders into exile.** I guess you presume that even after that, others would try and try again – but even a success at forming such a state would have been very unlikely to be even remotely as effective at supporting anticolonialists as the USSR was. Consider just the disparity in raw resources between the USSR and this hypothetical state; the former has the world’s 2nd-largest oil deposits of the 1930s and the 1940s; the latter is most likely limited to Hungarian oil and/or coal-to-chemicals from the Austrian/Czechoslovak deposits.*** Admittedly, the pre-WWI Austro-Hungarian Empire actually had about 50% more per capita industrialization than the Russian one (still only about half the total output due to a substantially lower population) – but if the hypothetical state fails to include Czechoslovakia, most of that goes away, and it also loses the bulk of the arms industry in the process.
Most importantly; even if we assume that a Communist state on some configuration of a former Habsburg territory avoids getting destroyed in a land war by the colonial powers once it begins to interfere too much with their possessions – if that state fails to include Slovenia, then it’s landlocked and cannot really supply anyone on other continents against the colonial powers’ wishes in the first place. Even if it does include Slovenia – the Adriatic Sea is very small (71th on Earth; smaller than a median Chinese province/slightly larger than Greece/slightly smaller than North Carolina), so the Entente blockade of it during WWI went in place immediately and never came close to being broken. If the colonial powers just place ~200 ships at the mouth of the Adriatic again (though they would need anti-submarine protections and air cover this time), they could simply force inspections of every “post-Habsburg” merchant vessel.
The one way this could get broken is if this state becomes the first to reach the atomic bomb. This notion is hardly implausible, as the uranium mining literally originated in Czech territory and OTL nuclear scientists’ well-known political leanings increase the likelihood they would all congregate there – but even then, the path from this to forcing Western powers into decolonization is…not straightforward. (Does the bomb retain its unparalleled geopolitical power without everyone witnessing a Hiroshima? Can this state “do a Hiroshima” and use it to achieve those political outcomes, rather than becoming hostis humani generis in the eyes of all colonial powers?)
A fair point – though I would think China is the only one of these which could have been strong enough to replace the USSR’s role – and even then, almost certainly on a substantially delayed schedule, simply because it started from a much lower industrial baseline.**** As in, only 3.6% of the global manufacturing output in 1913, vs. 8.6% from the Russian Empire or 4.4% from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (Per capita Chinese industrialization in 1913 was 3% of the British one in 1900 – for the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, it was 20% and 32% of the 1900 British levels.) Turkey and Iran are not even counted in that pre-WWI industrial output table – and the history of OTL Iran in 1942 and 1953 shows how easy it was for industrial powers to deal with it.
P.S. Interestingly, Mexico and Brazil are counted in that 1982 study of industrial outputs I linked on here three weeks ago. By 1913, both have over twice as much per capita industrialization as China and over three times as much as the present-day Indian territory – so perhaps there’s more of a chance one of them becomes the predominant Communist/anti-colonial player in this timeline.
*And the response of the British state had notoriously been so far-reaching that even Barack Obama’s grandfather had been tortured with genital shocks. Perhaps more notoriously; when Obama himself noted in early 2016 that the US would likely place post-Brexit UK “in the back of the queue” for trade negotiations and the like, Boris Johnson chose to respond with “Half-Kenyan Obama has an ancestral dislike of the British Empire”. This was actually a genuine fissure during the brief period Johnson and Biden were in power at the same time – at least before 24/2 took the front row.
**The leader, Bela Kun, had notoriously ended up as the leading figure of the Red Terror in Crimea, which was so brutal it nearly ended up executing Sergeev-Tsensky – now largely forgotten, but at the time considered second only to Gorky as far as the revolutionary writers went. (I.e. he wrote a lot about labour conditions in the Belgian-owned mines in the Russian Empire, operated at borderline-colonial principles.)
***Admittedly, the Austrian and Czechoslovak deposits in the (early) 20th century actually produced as much or at times even more coal than the Russian/Soviet ones – but still only 10-20% of the German ones. We know that the German war machine was fuel-starved once reduced to its coal-to-chemicals + Hungarian oil in the OTL late 1944-early 1945. Even if the hypothetical state does not go to the point of open war, it would still have much less total available energy than that, crippling its ability to compete economically. (Though maybe it has a chance if it manages to develop wind turbines well ahead of schedule and/or if its uranium fuels power plants well before anyone else figures out the technology.)
****This assumes the conflict with Japan does not go worse than it did historically – i.e. it’s entirely possible that a more right-wing Russian state which arises instead of the USSR “forgets” Port Arthur and Tsushima the way Mussolini’s Italy “forgot” Isonzo and sides with Japan to suppress a China that’s more ideologically threatening to them both. Russian troops do not even have to fight alongside the Japanese ones – just pumping oil into Manchukuo makes the occupation go so much smoother. Thus, this timeline avoids Pearl Harbor simply because the American blockade is borderline-irrelevant.
so perhaps there’s more of a chance one of them becomes the predominant Communist/anti-colonial player in this timeline.
@YARD,
Not that inconceivable, as far as Mexico goes! They had their own revolution during the 1910s, and while it’s not easy to place ideologically (since what emerged was a big tent party with both right and left wings), even the right wing of it was liberal in the traditional sense, modernist, and “progressive”, so it might well have emerged as a major anticolonialist power if it hadn’t been eclipsed by the Soviet role.
@YARD,
Thanks for that really interesting speculation about the economic and industrial prospect of an alternate-history “Alliance of Alpine-Balkan-Carpathian Socialist Republics” or whatever. That was really interesting, especially your points about nuclear development and industrialization.
But colonialism also destroyed a lot of wealth, including healthy young men from the colonising country who died in foreign lands (often from disease), so 15-20 years of feeding and childcare written off. And ships and canons and muskets and ammunition expended in colonial wars, including wars with other European powers.
And ships of a scale to cross oceans were really expensive since the masts needed to be made from a single tree trunk.
And that’s just the direct costs, the ongoing loss of potential production as a result of colonialism meant less imports available for the home country. (India’s GDP per capita is widely agreed to have fallen under British rule).
Well, the whole point of British colonial efforts in India was to reduce the local industry to force British goods into the Indian market. They did the same with China but had to fight a few wars to achieve that.
British didn’t want India to be a productive economy. They wanted India to be a source of cotton for the British textile industry first and foremost. And they achieved that and definitely profited from that.
The whole spiel about ‘colonialism was not profitable’ is mishandling of statistics by using arbitrary cut off points about what counts as ‘colonialism’ and which period we are using to prove a point. And secondary thing is that it is essentially an oblique way to deflect the guilt from colonial exploitation by framing it as ‘Europe didn’t profit from it, so we cannot be THAT guilty, it was a honest mistake.”.
So, by your reading, the UK rather than extracting resources from its colonies to make itself richer, it was sending British resources to India and China, while undermining the ability of the Indians and the Chinese to pay for them?
And whatever profits the Brits made from Indian cotton imports, wouldn’t they have made even more if they’d made them do the spinning and weaving too?
It doesn’t matter if British were able to profit more if they had more humane approach to their colonial empire. It is literally non-argument.
The fact that a robber would be able to steal a 1000$ from their home if they charmed their victim first but they beat the victim bloody on the spot and took only 100$ from the body doesn’t make ‘robbery is unprofitable’. Expenditure is still minimal in comparison to the gain.
I now that modern economists are obsessed with the concept of lost profit as modern business is all about infinite growth but this obsession is stupid. The wealth that nobody actually had and exist only theoretically doesn’t matter.
@Crueldwarf: the argument I’m responding to claims that the Brits sent market goods to the Indians and Chinese while harming their ability to pay for them. If I break into your house, beat you senseless and leave $100 with you, I’ve made myself worse off by $100+ my bruised knuckles.
And maybe I’m too pessimistic about human nature, but the willingness of many academics to assert that colonialism created western prosperity scares me because I think a significant number of western voters will regard that as an argument for colonialism (as long as it’s done to other people).
It is objective reality. Colonialism funded European prosperity. Even if after a certain point (more to the tail end of XIX century), it lost most of its benefits. Denying that to create a politically correct image for voters will not do anyone any good in a long run. Denying reality never helps.
> the argument I’m responding to claims that the Brits sent market goods to the Indians and Chinese while harming their ability to pay for them. If I break into your house, beat you senseless and leave $100 with you, I’ve made myself worse off by $100+ my bruised knuckles.
If it worked that way racketeering wouldn’t exist. And taxes wouldn’t work. Also British invested pretty much fuck all into India for the majority of their rule.
And if the argument is that system of colonial oppression was more more expensive than any profits extracted from colonies, it is also factually untrue. Military is inherently unprofitable but UK would need military regardless of the specifics of their economic relationship with India. Because if British didn’t exploit Indians directly, they would need to use military force there anyway to stop French from doing so. Or anyone else. S
So even if someone somehow made a calculation ‘cost of British overseas presence – revenue from British colonial possessions’ and achieved a negative number somehow, it wouldn’t mean unprofitability because military costs would exist regardless of colonialism. Like look at modern US, they do not have any colonies and yet they have to pay ungodly amounts of money for their military because they need this military to beat up on the competition.
This reads the late C19 backwards. In 1800 India was the world leader in textile production (not just raw material but weaving, printing, dyeing), and well up there in some other fields (metalwork, chemicals). The profit was in buying these and shipping to Europe, where demand was high. Or buying lower grade cloth as the staple for trade with West Africa, exchange for slaves, ship these to the Caribbean, work to death to produce sugar for Europe. In both cases very high mark-up (an Indiaman – a very expensive investment – was expected to pay for itself in 3-4 voyages).
The colonial trades were absolutely a source of wealth.
@cruel dwarf, how can colonialism funded European prosperity? It took European resources to do colonisation. Wood, flax, skilled labour for the ships, iron and more skilled labour to arm them, capital to pay the shipwrights and the captain and crew and to wait months or years for a return. The same resources that were needed to build 18th and 19th century factories back in Europe. Except the shipwreck rate was something like 1 in every 200 voyages so a substantial risk.
And why would the UK need to defend militarily India against the French? The UK didn’t defend South America against the Spanish and the Portuguese and yet had the first industrial revolution regardless. And the South Americas were a lot closer to the UK than India was before the Suez canal.
You keep claiming that it’s reality that European prosperity depended on colonialism but you’ve got really flimsy reasoning. I’ll note that both racketeering and taxes operate on the idea that the entity doing the racketeering or taxing transfers the resources to themself, which is the opposite of England sending valuable manufactured goods to its colonies.
You have absolutely insane view of economics. Selling luxury items and highly manufactured goods is more profitable than selling processed materials and simple finished products which in turn more profitable than selling raw materials.
Selling manufactured goods to someone is not charity. It is a best way to create lopsided trade balance. Because you are paying peanuts for the raw materials while selling back manufactured goods at premium rates (and because India was a captive British market through XIX century, it was unable to defend from that by levying tariffs on European trade).
For example. tThe whole thing with China and Opium wars was about China being unwilling to trade with Europe for anything but silver, so it created a situation when demand for Chinese goods (tea, silks, porcelain and so on) was draining European states off coinage. So British started to sell (illegally) opium to China (opium that was grown in British India predominately) and when Chinese authorities tried to stop it, British waged a war against them. And another one soon after.
@Peter T: but the same trade was also profitable in 1700, before the EIC made its first land conquests in 1757. Indeed, after the EIC became a colonial power, it went bankrupt. Got bailed out by the British Crown.
And in the 19th century, British trade with the now-independent USA was much larger than its trade with India.
EIC went bankrupt, yes. Owners in EIC became some of the richest people in United Kingdom on the same time.
EIC went bankrupt not because it was unprofitable, but because company leadership was corrupt as fuck and when corruption became too big to ignore used their money and influence to organize a bailout for themselves.
@Crueldwarf, so you think it’s absolutely insane to think that Saudi Arabia got rich by selling raw materials? You believe that there’s minimal profits in say oil fracking, or Australian mining?
And colonial companies failing because of massive corruption is the failure mode that Adam Smith predicted for them.
@Tracy
Saudi Arabia is a terrible example. They get rich selling raw materials because they have a very small fraction of the world’s population, but are sitting on top of some of the world’s largest and most accessible deposits of a resource everyone in the world needs. There has been almost nothing else like the global oil trade for “opportunities for small or undeveloped nations to profit by raw materials sales” in all of history.
The underlying point here is very simple. European colonizers, the actual humans who were personally involved in imperialism, grew very rich, wildly rich. This is not a matter for debate- you can still go to the palaces they built with all that money. You can still see some of the fortresses Spain built with the money it gained from the New World. And so on.
Whether some abstract metric of national GDP went up or down, a metric that barely even makes sense in the context of a pre-industrial society where most of the population barely even participates in the monetized economy, is beside the point.
@Simon_Jester, I agree with you about Saudi Arabia’s economy in general. I maintain however that Saudi Arabia is an excellent counter response to an argument that “Selling luxury items and highly manufactured goods is more profitable than selling processed materials and simple finished products which in turn more profitable than selling raw materials.”I disagree with your claim that: “There has been almost nothing else like the global oil trade for “opportunities for small or undeveloped nations to profit by raw materials sales” in all of history.” Australia makes substantial profits off its mining exports (despite needing to operate mines in remote areas in the Outback and pay even unskilled labour 6 figure wages to work there.) NZ used to make a lot of export money from wool and frozen lamb (now it makes a lot of export money from dairy, but raw milk gets processed before export because the market for spoiled milk is tiny.)“European colonizers, the actual humans who were personally involved in imperialism …” … died a lot. The richest Brits in the 18th century mainly made their money from land, e.g. the various ducal families, or from finance. Robert Clive brought back only £300k from India, and he was wildly successful by the standards of colonisers. Compare him to the (fictional) Darcy with his £10k a year, implying a wealth of £200k-£250k, while the ducal families had much higher incomes than that. And, in London, Sir Frances Baring, a banker, left an estate of £625k in 1810. As for GDP, GDP is simply a measure of what is produced within a given area over a given period of time (note the word “a”, there are other measures). It’s calculated in $ (or € or ¥ or whatever) because that’s the only way we have of aggregating everything from wheat and oats and cheese and houses and military defence services. Therefore GDP per capita is absolutely relevant when assessing the lives of people living at, or near, the subsistence line.
It’s a bit more complicated and depends on time: Early on a lot of the profits weren’t about exporting stuff to europe or exporting european stuff (asian goods had fantastic profit marigins but volumes were relatiely small) but by taking over the intra-asian trade (usually via, essentially, large scale piracy) the real money wasn’t in shipping stuff to europe but from India to Indonesia, etc. That’s how the Portugeuse, dutch and early british made their money.
This changes by the 1700’s when the EIC starts acquiring actual land, at that point the income basically comes from taxation and monopolies rather than trade per se.
“. And secondary thing is that it is essentially an oblique way to deflect the guilt from colonial exploitation”
Just historically, this isn’t the case: Other than Smith one of the more influential advocates of the thesis (whose name I can’t remember) was a late 19th/early 20th century economist who was advocating for decolonization. The argument was very much something that started *during* colonialism as an argument against it.
@TracyW
My understanding is that GDP/capita in S. Asia under the British was stagnant (i.e. 0% growth, maybe a bit more like 0.5%). So, not technically a decline, but considering much of the rest of the world was industrializing and entering modernity during that time period, it’s really damning with faint praise.
Thanks!
The good doctor’s discussion of this game’s failure as a simulation, has a very long history within the wargaming community. I can remember some in the Avalon Hill house magazine in the early ’60’s in reference to some of their wargames.
Other Paradox games have much better examples of learning historical lessons with emergent gameplay. Eu3 and its sliders did a great job of showing the great benefits of free trade and free subjects, even while it did offer gameplay benefits for pursuing mercantalism and serfdom, after a game you realized which alternative was far stronger. Vicky has so, so many emergent lessons on how you want to educate your pops, how you want to encourage immigration and how you want to avoid fighting World War I. The Crusader Kings games do a great job of teaching how putting power into families/clans can have all sorts of distortions as the family pursues policies that benefits the family instead of the populace. Paradox knows how to teach lessons to players. I guess it is hard to teach the lesson that Fascism sucks over a short time period while still having a playable game. But it is easy to teach that the Golden Horde and the Timurids have horrible governments that are just so hard to survive a generation because their governments are so horrible.
I’ve never played HOI4 but I had no idea Germany also had a sort of dispersed industry model like Japan, that’s really wild
I think it’s worth briefly detouring into Victoria 3 here, because it explains in part why the economic autarkic model is so broken in hoi4.
See in Victoria 3 it’s not actually as simple as free trade good. There are absolutely ways in which free trade is good, and as a default it’s superior. However the games economic system is complex enough with sufficient tools and components that there are situations where protectionist policies are better. As a non exhaustive list:
A. Extremely limited industrial goods as part of a global crunch; it often makes sense to limit export of your domestic production via tariffs.
B. You are trading limited resources with a strategic enemy, I.e. diplomatic concerns.
C. You are dependent on limited resources from a strategic enemy who is undercutting domestic production, and you need to cut off their goods to encourage domestic production.
D. You control a limited global resource and want to corner the market or are the only nation able to produce it period, like oil or rubber.
E. Your production is owned by foreigners and you need to reestablish domestic ownership for political equality reasons, I.e. colonialism.
F. Political inequality is high so property redistribution is favored.
All of these systems have at least some justification in historical or modern economics, and there are situations where specific protectionist policies are justified by the political and economic needs of the population…
And hoi4 models precisely zero of these circumstances and instead models trade and civilian economies as furnaces that destroy military industrial capacity.
There’s nuance to this debate, and hoi4 captures none of it, a flaw not shares by other paradox titles. It’s a choice of this game in particular.
I think it’s also worth noting that previous iteration of the series weren’t this terrible at modeling foreign trade and the benefits of a civilian economy. I remember in HoI2 there was a definite benefit to trading away your resources as an authoritarian regime, and running democracy and free trade together was a real money machine with some real diplomatic and research benefits.
The current iteration made the deliberate choice to remove those strategic choice in order to laser focus on the operational, clean Wehrmacht aspect of its simulation.
One of the big differences is that at some point they changed from resources being stockpiled and consumed to bein basically a flow state (IE: if you have 8 tungsten it can cover 8 tungstens worth of production, but it’s not really consumed, as opposed to “building a tank costs 250 tungsten”)
So keeping with my theme of Alternate Visions: if total mobilization needs to be worse for growth or stability or come with tradeoffs, you basically gave away the solution to the game’s crisis at the start of the essay. The autocracies are trying to obtain autarky, democracies to stop them.
And that’s it. Make civilian economies *better* for well-respected integrated nations, but once scorned and disrespected nations not well integrated into the world system because they’re politically captured by aggressive autarkists start seeking alternatives to trade to shore up political clout, stealing land and closing off markets and creating global humanitarian and economic emergencies, democracies are forced into crisis mobilizations that slow growth but improve defense short term. Their goal? To stop the madness enough to return to civilian economy. The US especially still could start in a slump and want to stay on consumer economy as long as possible to complete its recovery to prevent the US mobilizing too early.
Japan’s new focus tree, i don’t wish to praise too much as it suffers all the limits inherent to the model, but as a japanophile I’ve been impressed with the teams making japan content for these games lately, vic3 and hoi4 alike. It works as well as i think it can work without major core gameplay overhauls to actually sort of capture this. Japan’s “goal” (the game doesn’t do enough to make this look like the end goal, sadly, the semiotics of the game remain geared towards victory points and map painting) is to remove its Meiji Restoration national spirit and replace it with an Economic Miracle. It can do this by fascist autarky, or democratic trade and development, depending on the outcome of Japan’s dying democracy power struggle. Historically, the autarky plan trapped japan in a cascading ponzi scheme of new campaigns to fund the previous campaigns until outside intervention forced japan back into a globally integrated democracy…. which in game results in the economic miracle….
I do note that trade *when it actually happens* is actually more than zero sum: The player who trades gets the bonuses from being on a more open economy, and gets to reduce the production malus, and then country you’re trading with gets the civilian factories. For the cost of one civilian factor you get eight resources+trade law boni+1 civilian factory within the “system”.
This dynamic (and that the allies have generally more trade partners) is part of why the allied economies, while ahistorically nerfed, still are stronger than the axis ones. (there are many others)
In general the HOI4 model as so many things buts the cart before the horse: IE: it wants to roughly simulate the way the war ended up happening, but in doing so it has to make completely ahistorical mechanisms for *why* because the actual reasons are actually kinda long shots.
The general vibe of the system is less that “axis strong, allies weak” (though the allies *are* ahistorically weak) so much as “Axis strong early, allies takes time to ramp up, so Axis has to win before that happens”. Which *kinda* tries to create a “how the war happened effect” IE: The axis makes big gains in ’39 – ’41 and will then stall out and eventually be defeated. While it’s not guaranteed this is also, AFAIK *how most games tends to go* when played hands off on historical. (though there are some oddities, the allies tends to defeat Japan way quicker than historically, for instance) a competent player on etiher side can break this over their knees of course, and IIRC, most MP games actually have to put house rules in play to prevent the allies from winning way earlier.
An example is that while Germany does have more military factories than the UK, and an overall stronger economy (45 vs. 63, though if you count naval dockyards it gets a bit closer) which is ahistorical the countries *do have about the same number of civilian factories (Germany has a slight edge 35 vs. 31 for the UK) why thatis important is not just because civilian factories build both civilian factories and military factories but also because *military factories are much quicker to build than civilian ones*) (and even faster if you convert, though that tends to be less useful) the end result is that Germany’s advantage to a large extent is building up a bigger stockpile of war materiel before the war, but will get drowned out by the allies if the war goes long. Now a lot of that is due to the US and the USSR (both of which have massive economies that need time to get up to speed) and if France survives (as it does in Brets game) that tipping point comes way earlier (France actually has a fairly strong tree, it just that it tends to come online too late for the Battle of France)
It feels like HoI is one of the games most impacted by Paradox’s “Perfect Information” approach, because the war as happened historically is heavily dependent on the lack of information. Both military intel (the fall of France and the lack of Soviet preparedness in the face of Barbarossa kind of depend on decisions being made on false information) but also economic and scientific predictions. The Nazis thought their economic model was working – partly because they caught the rebound after the Great Depression, partly because they juked the stats in such a way as to exaggerate the effects of the economic policies and partly because as hamfisted as their economic policies were, the previous chancellors had set the bar very low by also being not very good at it – and thus did not see that long-term, they were setting themselves up for failure.
I’m not sure how to model this “Your country has deluded itself into thinking the numbers are good when they’re not” information environment in a game in a way that’s fun and not easily gamed by hindsight, but it’s pretty clear that trying to model WWII without it is not a good idea.
To be fair, the game actually to *some* extent models this: How much information you have on your enemies is based on your intelligence scores and given as estimates which can be wildly off base.
The problem is that it’s kinda irrelevant because players come in with basic knowledge so they still hae a basic idea of the range of numbers they’re dealing with.
And secondarily of course in a “realistic” game you’d also have only vague information about your *own* resources.
Think the only games I’ve seen that do well at deluding you as to your own numbers are King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages, where you never see the math behind whether a choice succeeds and must intuit it from a combination of displayed numbers, skill levels of your nobles, and advice from the seven nobles on the Clan Ring, with the usefulness of the latter impacted by god, personality, and level in relevant skills. And there’s various pressures to not just stack the seven most skilled nobles, like you want seven distinct gods with reasons to favor specific gods, particularly the trickster god whose representative often doesn’t have anything useful to say but unlocks some really good options and gives a boost to how much magic you can invest in making prayers and rituals work better.
The makers of Six Ages have a new game out called Thousand Hells where you see the odds of a roll after it is rolled but not before and have to guess whether a descriptive piece of text matches the description of a challenge. Only done one playthrough so far, blew a lot of challenges but we made it out of the Nightmare hell.
I think the way to delude the player would be to deliberately mess with the interface so as to keep a causal player from realizing what they are doing until it’s too late to know they are losing.
The general solution would be to tie this delusion mechanic with the ideology of a country, so while every country has to deal with it, a country that’s more democratic will have an easier time getting accurate information than one that’s authoritarian since their ideology allows for their nations to accept mistakes and fauxpasses without it being a losing game.
Of course, this means that fascistic countries (not just the axis, but anyone that enters that path) would have this delusion mechanic ramped up to eleven and be generally a difficult to play as the game won’t tell you if you have been defeated, but you have to carefully look at the numbers to know if that’s the case, especially the more losses keep ratching up.
This can also better simulate the last moments of Hitler’s rule during the siege of Berlin, when he kept trying to manuever corps and armies that had long since ceased to exist or were unable to do what he wanted, culminating in the infamous Steiner rant that’s depicted in the film “Der Untergang”.
Similar problems in many sims and 4X games that want players to be able to embrace historical dead ends — e.g. Civ games that boost the effectiveness of fascism and communism to keep them on par with industrial democracies.
A couple early typos: “game design considers” should be considerations
“nautre” for nature
In fairness to the Civ series, it did give me one of my earliest “Are we the baddies?” gaming moments. In one of my first games of Civ 5 when I was 12 or so (playing as Denmark IIRC), I was going for a military victory, and so was picking social policies on the “autocracy” tree (sort of a mix of fascism and colonialism), as that was what the game seemed to imply was best for military civs. However, when I actually opened the Civilopedia and read the descriptions of some of the policies I’d been taking, I was so horrified that I stopped going down that tree, and switched to the science victory. To this day, I don’t think I’ve completed a single game with autocracy.
Now, our host would no doubt object to the idea that fascism should be the best option for military victories (or rather, that military should be a viable strategy at all past a certain point), but if the autocracy tree had just been obviously mechanically inferior, it never would have been able to pull off that moment.
So to try and come up with solutions to the problem laid out in the post I have come up with two.
*Deepen the political simulation such that the democratic powers (and to an extent the USSR) are basically playing a different game for the early years. You make it so the default path for democratic powers is the same stupid decisions made in history not because the player is stupid but because allowing/making the decisions is to way to survive politically.
*Stick a giant warning label on the landing screen when you boot the game. Just honestly state that to allow a competitive gameplay expeirance the game has been designed to give non-factual boosts and benefits to the axis nations.
Reminds me of the old joke “We didn’t need to be told not to imitate Wile E. Coyote!”
More seriously, I’m not sure how much good it would do. While constant exposure to something incorrect will inevitably taint our understanding of it (see the Clinician’s Bias), anyone thinking they’re learning history from a game is beyond hope. Unless the game is both explicit that it is trying to teach you something (like “Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego”) AND you can verify it actually is (so, not a propaganda game), games should be treated as artistic endeavors that will, inevitably and properly, sacrifice realism for the message.
In other words: If your level of media literacy is so bad that you need such a label, I doubt the label will actually work.
Games, and other media, can work at a subliminal level. People aren’t consciously thinking about history while playing the game, they’re just having fun. But in some later context, (say, reacting to a piece of propaganda), the vibes they picked up in the games and other media they have consumed may be the only intuitions they have. This then affects which facts they accept, or which arguments they find reasonable.
Remember, propaganda isn’t successful because it’s rational, it’s successful because it isn’t.
Agreed, and I don’t dispute this. My argument is related to the warnings proposed. I just don’t think that the warning would do any good. The people that fall for the more obvious propaganda won’t be swayed by the warning, and the more subtle issues will continue regardless of the warnings.
Re: the Rosie the Riveter caption about women not having any representation in HOI4’s industry, they actually do have a highlight. Note the singular form of the word, there.
When a country is at Total Mobilization, they gain access to a Decision (hidden away in the Decisions menu off to the side) called “Women in the Workforce” which grants them a +3% Recruitable Population bonus for as long as they’re at Total Mobilization, effectively matching the -3% penalty for being at Total Mobilization in the first place. This costs 100 political power and gives a -5% stability modifier, both of which are very minor costs for countries in 1941 or 1942, and are costs pretty clearly worth taking in the face of the enormous industrial bonuses of Total Mobilization.
Moreover, according to the wiki this decision is actually more difficult for fascists to achieve: not only do they need a higher ‘War Support’ stat (in practice, this is meaningless: once the shooting match is well and truly on everyone tends to stay locked at 100% war support until they begin losing badly), they also need to have more that 0% surrender progress, which is clearly intended to make Women in the Workforce a boost for the Democratic and Communist powers throughout the war which the fascists can only emulate once it is far too late. Practically speaking I think this is pretty easy to ‘cheese’, and obviously it’s a very minimal mechanic for representing 50% of the population being involved in some of the largest economic mobilizations ever, but it does exist.
There’s actually a few other bits stuck here and there. The generic “Women in the Workforce” decision, but there’s also a couple of nation-specific focuses, the Soviets have a few, for instance. (Women in Aviation, Raskova’s Aviation Group, The New Soviet Woman) the USA has the Women’s Armed Service Integration Act focus (gives additional recruitable pop) etc.
This is one of the things they’ve clearly been thinking about since they’ve been adding focuses referring to women’s role in the war a bit here and there. (I know one country has a focus about women’s observation corps adding naval/air spotting, but can’t recall which one)
The approach to the Economy seems to me as a lost opportunity to make the game overall more agile. The obvious problem of any such WW2 simulator is the fact, that every player can expect when the war outbreaks and can prepare. I did not play HoI 4 but did play a lot of HoI2, and almost at every run Germany invades Poland on September 1. Allied polititians and military leaders could not predict this date in advance. Instead of preparing themaelvs for the inevitable (as any player playing an allied country can do), they had to carefully manage their countries and constantly trade off military spending against normal, peaceful purposes.
Now, it is known that huge advantage of aggressive countries like Germany, USSR and Japan was their handsight. They KNEW there will be a war and it makes sense to heavily invest in their military capacity instead of, say, schools or hospitals. Allies did not. As an example, given the handsight, Poland could mobilize its army fully in July 1939 and start massive public works diggong trenches all over the country. This would help massively in September (without changing the overall outcome, though), as in reality the mobilization had to be postponed, reducing the organization of an army, and in many cases trenches were not dug and minefields were not preparwd in order not to lose the yield from fields. The reason was simple – war is TERRIBLE for the normal economy and millions of men in the uniforms means millions of men who need to be fed and clothed and supplied by an economy ahort of just as many men. Mobilizing too soon could easily mean starting strong economic and political crisis and reducing preparadness for war in a long term. German economy was close to a huge crisis at the beginning of the war. Similarly, Poland invested a lot into new production capacity, and even in 1938 invested a lot into factories that would not be ready by 1940+, all of that with a very modest use of existing industrial capacity. Knowing that invations is9 imminent, it would be wiser to spend all effort on producing “stuff” instead of on investments.
I think that modelling this aspects could be used neatly to model German successess at the beginning of the war and could introduce uncertainty to a player. The aggressive side can start preparation for war at any time, but as an allied country you dont know if and when it will happen. If you start mobilizing the economy too soon, you hurt your economy and decrease your chances in the long run if Germans are still “peaceful”. On the other hand, if you start preparing too late, Germany may or may not have an ability to blitz you before you get ready. This way, economy makes more sense (peaceful – Good, wartime – pretty Bad) and as a bonus it can give more uncertainty regarding the moment of the outbreak and make player trade off their choices at the beginning of the game (should I build more factories, or is it too late and it is time for squeezing as much equipment out of current capacity before it is too late?).
Of course, this could lead to having no war at all. And I like the idea of winning by having no war at all!
This is a very good approach, for a game set in a vaguely specified time period, facing a generic Enemistan. (Well, this game doesn’t really have the diplomacy to prevent war by deterrence, but I think you might like it anyway.) In a way, Paradox has made similar scenarios before, e.g. Europa Universalis with randomized Americas, so the player doesn’t have foreknowledge of what landmasses are hiding in the dark. However, HoI is probably even more rooted in the exact historical events than other Paradox titles. If what happens in the game fails to eclipse The Great War, if the events would not “earn” in their timeline the title of “WW2”, then in a relevant sense it isn’t a simulation of WW2.
Hey Bret, long time reader/subscriber, first time commenter.
One thing I would like to disagree with you on is the “autarky is the better law”. The reason why “Free trade is bad” is that the AI is grossly incompetent, and factories given to them might as well have vanished into thin air. In multiplayer where your peers and your allies are played by more competent humans, a traded factory to your allies is not lost unlike Single player, and friendly humans players have much higher demand for your resources. Free Trade in a multiplayer situation is the preferred meta, since free trade essentially gives bonuses for no cost. Conversely, going closed economy and preventing your allies from buying your resources is throwing the game for your team since it can cause shortages in allied production.
A mistake I have noticed is that the UK starts with 66 factories (62 if you discount subject relationships). While still ~10% or 15% lower than the Germans 73 factories, it’s a lot more comparable than the 31 claimed here.
Wow. It really does seem like HOI4 would have been better off cutting the civilian/political side entirely, be purely a smashing-divisions-together game with an economics simulation limited to “blowing up factories reduces production, occupying them increases it (but not by as much it used to produce)”. They seem remarkably short of the in-depth omni-simulators their other games are described as. (I’ve only played like half an hour of CK2, which proved far undertutorialized for my tastes.)
What *would* you need, in order to fix this? A political system that can represent the instability of France, the impact of morale on democracies, the fragility of autocracies, officer corp purges, the massive role of propaganda including the value of perceived victories. An economic system that reasonably models both command economies and state interaction with capitalist economies, and interacts with the political side enough that consumer goods are a decision one has to make with civilian morale/approval in mind.
I think the game needs to start early enough that the historical 1939 start of the war in Europe marks a median start point for Germany/Italy, with more aggressive players starting even earlier to catch Allied countries unaware and still in their build-up-infrastructure-to-build-up-military phase, and more cunning players postponing their invasion, catching Allies that rush into mobilization in a “Bore War” political trap. Playing Germany ought to give you choices not just of when to invade Czechoslovakia, but when to annex Austria and occupy the Sudetenland.
A Japanese naval sneak attack should be a good strategy but not a forced one, and it should have variety. US keeps its fleets out of harbor? Now you’re prey for IJN submarines, any ships sunk are gone for good instead of sitting in the very harbor meant to repair them, and your operating costs are higher at the very point you most want to be investing in infrastructure. And what if a Japan player never attacks the US at all? Seize Dutch and British holdings, does that give America enough provocation to declare war? Maybe if they spent enough on propaganda – either the US or the UK player, actually. Or if the Atlantic war drags the US into Europe, and Japan is forced to war by alliance…
From what I’ve described, I suppose the game should *allow* for matches where WW2 just does not happen. Where Japan confines itself to a war with China, evading foreign entanglement, where Germany gains territory via diplomacy but stops there, or maybe manages to weaken UK/France government enough to not declare war after invading Poland. I doubt such matches would be satisfactory for most players, but a simulation accurate enough to model WW2 needs to be robust enough to model the lack of WW2. The big strategic choice for Axis players has now become when you have a WW2, and “never” is technically a “when”.
(And then to satisfy the smash-armies-together players, make some precanned saves at September 1939, Germany having just declared war on Poland and the Allies having just declared war on the Axis, or various interesting counterfactuals. Or if you’re really clever, have the game AI simulate a playthrough up to the outbreak of war, to randomize things a bit.)
IMO, fix for that issue is relatively simple and doesn’t involve creation of deep economic-political simulation on top of war simulation that HoI focuses on. Game just needs a honest admission that playing Axis powers should be a hard mode and not ‘you can win WW2 as Germany by booting the game for the first time if you are have even passing familiarity with strategic genre’.
Playing as Nazis or Japanese should be a solid middle ground between ‘play as USA’ and ‘world conquest as Paraguay’ extremes on the difficulty scale. But for nebulous reason Germany was always one of the easiest countries to play in all HoI games.
Then you basically need to keep ‘Historical mode’ that forces ‘France falls’ outcome when player plays as anything but France (because a game as let’s say USSR would be a lot more straightforward and easy if Germany fails to conquer France 9 out of 10 playthroughs)
It is a reasonable intermediate solution in my opinion. But Paradox cannot do that because a solid chunk of audience will whine to high heavens if winning as Germany would become almost impossible for an average player.
Case in point, Paradox making a minor adjustment that made pulling of Sealion slightly harder (the AI would actually pull divisions back from the Empire to try to defend if you landed troops) made some people whine to the high heavens. And this is with sealion being *incredibly* ahistorically easy in the first place and *still* something a lot of players an pull off without even building a navy.
Perhaps, but I thought what Paradox players liked about Paradox games was the incredible depth of the simulation. And every other Paradox game I’ve heard of has a significant political side, often more so than the purely military side (I dunno, does Imperator also eschew everything except smashing cohorts together?). And in a period as dominated by industrial, economic warfare and by mass media propaganda, one would think an integrated simulation of economics and politics would go hand-in-hand. How, exactly, is submarine warfare or strategic bombing supposed to work, if the game doesn’t simulate economics? How is terror-bombing supposed to work, if the game doesn’t simulate democracy well enough for civilian morale to matter? I would think even the poorly-disguised nazis would be angry that they can’t do The Blitz But It Works This Time.
Every Paradox game has things it focuses on and things it doesn’t, creating their own issues. Hearts of Iron is a very constrained period of time defined by a very specific cataclysmic gl0bal war so the focus is operational and generally military.
Victoria 3 is about the Industrial Revolution so it thoroughly simulates trade, economy, and the political forces limiting or created by both, but its operational side is extremely weak. Basically you appoint generals out of a pool of three at a time, then assign them regiments of cavalry, infantry, or artillery, set how well-supplied and advanced those regiments are, and assign them to fronts created wherever you have adjacent territory or where someone has ordered a naval invasion or assault through the territory of a non-belligerent that has granted or been forced to allow military access. And a timer runs for each side and when it does a general assigned to the front and set to attack launches an assault somewhere along the line with some number of regiments from his army and possibly other armies depending on settings and is countered by a defending general with some number of regiments, and honestly it feels like a very long check of who has the bigger military-industrial complex, recruiting base, and luck with generals. The only things you can do outside of building and supplying a military are decide who goes to which front, decide if they’re attacking or defending, set a province they’re targeting and thus where they tend to advance after a victory, and open new fronts with a naval invasion.
Meanwhile Crusader Kings and earlier EU entries have simpler economies than HoI4 where you build buildings in slots and they provide fixed benefits, supplemented in EU with a trade system where you pretty much just get money.
EU V tried to do everything and had a Victoria-level economic system with more complex trade and significant depth to operations and politics, with the result that I tried playing the Netherlands and my economy crashed because the price of my main export fell drastically in the early game and I didn’t understand why or what I could do to get it into markets that weren’t Britain and didn’t have enough money to try to diversify.
It’s not ‘operationally weak’. It’s made a deliberate decision not to let you micromanage the military tactically like you usually do (And I chose my words carefully, in practical terms paradox games’ unit micromanagement _is_ functionally a series of tactical decisions, just on a scale that nominally should obviate tactics). In victoria 3 you have limited avenues to abuse specific flaws in the simulation to run roughshod over the AI’s military and economy. This time you’re all operating on the same core military playground, left only with the flaws in the simulation leading to economic abuse. Which still biases against military solutions!
That is the story paradox gamers tell themselves the other 90% of the time yes. It has some fragment of truth in it, because some friction really does help make you feel smart or skilled when you get it. But the deeper truth is, perhaps, that gamers broadly want the easy win and to feel like it was easy. Reference the Elden Ring DLC and how many gamers absolutely flipped their shit about it after bragging about how easy Malenia was (Because the standard build for ~cool people~ could stun lock her.)
I’m pretty sure I’m built different, and arguably worse, here, but then maybe I just say that because everyone says that. Either way, I know most are lying to themselves first.
I would say that any statement “Most gamers do X” is going to be very incorrect. Some gamers will love the struggle–see “I Wanna Be the Guy”, Nethack, and the like. Some want to run around as essentially gods–see any late-game RPG. Some want life simulators–see “The Sims” and role-playing playthroughs. And it’s not consistent over time. Sometimes I want to really push myself, and other times I want something nice and relaxing. It’s why Skyrim made it so you can adjust the difficulty on the fly.
It’s also worth noting that the perception of gamers and the actual demographics have diverged significantly. Last time I checked most gamers are like me–somewhere around middle-aged, with jobs and kids and responsibilities. The gaming industry still hasn’t figured out how to deal with that. Since we don’t have days on end to play games like we did as kids we are starting to favor shorter games, or games that can be played in shorter bursts, for example. This is relevant because it casts doubt onto most if not all online articles on the topic.
I think it’s also important to not confuse noise level with majority. Most noise online is made by a minority. Look at what happened with Firefly. Folks made a lot of noise about wanting it back, but when they made the movie it didn’t make nearly as much at the box office as they hoped. So the most dominant voices aren’t necessarily the most commonly held opinions.
So short version is, I don’t believe ANY statement about what most gamers do. It’s very much like saying what most music listeners do, or most readers do, or most eaters do. There’s so much variety that even a plurality is only going to ever be a minority. About the best a game studio can do is to pick an audience and try to make a game they like.
Ah yeah, that famous mainstream game. Nethack. Definitely an equivalent number of folks playing that, my statement of ‘most’ is undone.
We are already talking about a game broadly conceptualized as being for complexity sickos, I will note. It is easier to complain when operation sealion adds a bit of Friction then to actually work on through it
“Ah yeah, that famous mainstream game. Nethack.”
Ah yeah, that famous internet argument “Find the one thing I can twist into a counter-argument and ignore the rest”……
Even if we ignore Nethack (and, to be fair to you, its ilk, which I should have specified earlier–“I Wanna Be The Guy”, Meatboy, Cuphead, and a few others), and the rise in classic gaming (which necessarily includes embracing the “Nintendo Hard” concept), your entire argument is built on completely false premises.
For example, you’re treating this as broadly either/or–you cite examples of people choosing easier gameplay as evidence that they don’t like more difficult gaming experiences. That evidence IN NO WAY supports your conclusion. There is a huge variety of reasons why someone may want to play a game on an easier mode that do not negate the idea that they enjoy a more difficult experience–for example, maybe they defeated the game already and wanted to explore some aspect of it (you cite Elen Ring, and the Souls games are basically built for that). And player tastes are not internally consistent, meaning they’ll choose different levels of difficulty at different times, a fact that your analysis is incapable of capturing.
In other words: EVEN IF we accept that your data are correct–which I do not–it’s not sufficient to support your conclusion. I can enjoy a harder version of the game on Monday, an easier version on Tuesday and Thursday, let my kid play on my account Friday, and spend Saturday on an even harder version. That’s 3 instances of easier play and 2 of harder, one of which isn’t even ME, but fundamentally it still shows that harder versions have appeal. All of this would be completely invisible to your analysis, despite the fact that it’s extremely common in gaming.
The open contempt (seriously, sickos?!) and hostility to counter-arguments pretty clearly show that this is not an issue of fact for you, or of accurately depicting gamers (something that’s nearly impossible anyway since this group includes almost the entire population of the industrialized world at this point). I’d guess it’s based on cherry-picked data to support conclusions drawn more on prejudices against gamers than any actual data.
Most of what you said doesn’t really interface with your point to start with; if anything, “lots of gamers are middle aged and busy” is bad for the idea that they’re consistently seeking mastery. Sustained long term employment and family matters consume time, reducing availability for that time sink. Also, you appear to have misunderstood the word ‘most’; a niche market does not in fact undercut the idea of a mainstream one. And, well, hypothetically, we are talking about the people who should most be thrilled by a challenge, and they are instead complaining about a small increase in friction. My thesis also accounts for some measure of friction existing. It does help to have some (and the challenge is finding out where and what types.) And some (seemingly small) percentage of gamers do like it hot (and foolishly, and possibly incorrectly, I do think that I do.)
It’s honestly mildly ridiculous to take the tack you are; I’m functionally stating you’re lying to yourself (and by extension, me) about wanting it hard. If you already admit half the time you want it easier, how much are you sure is left? Surely you’d rather argue you know yourself better than I? If you’re angry I’m not conceding that people want to lock in sometimes and consciously relax others, the n chill; that is actually true, I agree. But it’s not actually opposed to people usually wanting it easier. The more specific and precise formulation is that, relative to their own skill, gamers want at most a moderate challenge most of the time, and balk at friction past a certain point. That point is fluid based on skill; more skilled people within a genre do generally want a higher level of friction, growing unengaged at the perceived lack of challenge. But ultimately, they’re not actually much more tolerant of failure. They tolerate more friction because they can mostly succeed through it anyway. Lose a couple of times to the caldera demon, get it down and clear. Maybe bash your head into the furnace knight for a few days, sure, but mostly it’s not to bad for you. Which is why a group of complexity sickos will nonetheless complain about how an ahistorical and doomed plan is too hard (to be fair, not having seen it myself, maybe they just thought it was easy but annoying or similar.) They can (and will) crash out over a loss in ranked rather than generally accepting with grace that the system is meant to see them lose roughly half the time.
And frankly none of that matters to my off the cuff statement. If, hypothetically, 40% of the gaming world seeks nonstop brutal play all the time (lol), and 60% will explicitly err on the side of an easier time… then most gamers (usually) want it easier. 40% is a real number that demonstrates real commercial viability, yadayadayada, but it’s still not, yanno, most. You’ve confused being a viable and real market with being a simple majority. Those are different, unopposed claims.
“Then you basically need to keep ‘Historical mode’ that forces ‘France falls’ outcome when player plays as anything but France (because a game as let’s say USSR would be a lot more straightforward and easy if Germany fails to conquer France 9 out of 10 playthroughs)”
Then a France playthrough will be boring instead.
Huh? “when player plays as anything but France”
“Game just needs a honest admission that playing Axis powers should be a hard mode and not ‘you can win WW2 as Germany by booting the game for the first time if you are have even passing familiarity with strategic genre’.”
weak Germany = boring France
Not if the French player’s ultimate goal is not to defeat Germany but to at the very least expel the USSR from Eastern Poland/Western Belarus and probably the Baltics* and/or Finland, too. And given the way war goals tend to balloon once nationalist fervor takes over, “we’ll succeed where Napoleon failed because we are eliminating monstrous communism” might yet become the ultimate playthrough goal, especially for the more right-wing political configurations of France. (Even if it would likely involve suppressing some sort of a mutiny/uprising in process.)
Remember, this is what Maurice Gamelin, the literal commander in chief of the joint Franco-British forces in 1940, actually believed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pike
And this was not an idle thought:
Now, do you think this kind of a commander would respond to a rapid defeat of Germany with “Whew, we have done enough, time to go home!” or “Time to kick out the Soviet foundations while our society is enjoying its victory high and the war economy is humming at full speed?” Likewise, if the German part of “a possible German-Soviet alliance” is no longer a factor, are the British more or less likely to hold back?
Here, I should note that the “Focus” system, as described two posts earlier, does not seem like a good idea at all to me, for many of the same reasons already elaborated on here**. In a version of a game where it still exists, though, it would seem very reasonable to me if the branches that involve fighting Germany eventually force you to authorize the raid on Baku (which would have almost certainly done at most 5% of what Gamelin expected it to achieve) and you have to very carefully and consistently take focuses that are often less efficient for fighting Germany if you want to avoid being steered into fighting the USSR.
Personally, I think the far better approach is the “stress” system suggestion made by at least one other commenter earlier. Apparently, “national spirits” already involve something like this, but it ought to go a lot further. I.e. in this scenario, if you keep slapping Gamelin’s hand whenever he pipes up “Bombing Baku is a cheat code to win”, he’ll eventually resign and perhaps take some like-minded officers with him, inflicting hefty (even if temporary) penalties to morale and coordination. Likewise, the welling public pressure to attack Soviet Union to reunite Poland would become harder to ignore the better the war with Germany goes.***
* OTL, “reintegrated” into the USSR right as the ink was drying on Petain’s signature surrendering France; while I guess it’s conceivable for the Western Allies to deal with Germany so quickly and decisively that Stalin is deterred, it seems more likely Stalin’s original calculation works and the German defeat drags on for long enough that he still feels comfortable moving in and entrenching in preparation for a French-led counterattack.)
**I remember hearing someone ended up making a Crusades mod for it – even though the literal Crusader Kings exist. Apparently, it’s because under the latter’s systems, holding onto “the Holy Land” is in fact very difficult (if perhaps still not quite as difficult as it ought to have been.) Under the HOI mechanics, a Crusader state could just have a Focus like “Enslave Infidel” and it just works and gives them the bonuses they need to fight comfortably.
***Just thought of a real Watchmen-style plot where the French player in these circumstances might actually end up tempted to “throw a battle” and allow some divisions to get horribly and avoidably massacred just so that the public, while horrified and incandescent at its leadership, would no longer support going into a war with the USSR that is certain to be many times more devastating than the loss of those divisions.
I will go ahead and say, almost every modern paradox grand strategy game has at least some iteration on the idea of focuses. Unique content for given major (usually) playables that incentivizes particular ahistorical but at least vaguely plausible goals, providing bonuses in the process. Focus trees are just the least historically based and the most prone to outright fiat. Mission Trees are popular in EU4 (to a point that a significant part of the meta for optimal nonsense is learning how to daisy chain them to retain the largest bonuses), decisions in nearly all of them…
Focus Trees also invert the relationship a bit, where you get the bonus to help you do the thing, rather than rewarding you for having made progress on the thing, granted. But the core idea is in most of them, focus trees are just the most obvious.
Maybe the eventual Hearts of Iron V could fix this approach by giving the player a lot less political and economic agency. Rather than being a vaugely defined government/spirit of the nation/command economy, the player could be framed as a vaugely defined supreme military commander with significant but not total control over military production priorities. Make the historical economic and political policies of countries part of the challenge rather than something the player controls. Even with all the debuffs, playing as France is very easy in HoI4 because you can just make better choices— but what if the challenge of the game was succeeding military while under the constraints imposed by political leadership? Similar to how they’ve approached Mussolini and Stalin’s regimes in dlc, but taken much further. Of course, alt history is one of the big draws of the game, but you could have it was a feature of game setup, similar to how you can specify what focus trees each AI country will pick before you start the game. Some of the most fun countries to play in Victoria 3 largely revolve around managing the demands of politically powerful entrenched interests whose outdated economic and military thinking makes your country significantly weaker, so I think that making a game that plays like this engaging is certainly possible.
The US, with what I would describe as fairly competent leadership and a powerful network of nominal allies, would still be playing on “Easy Mode”, but you could always challenge yourself by choosing a setup where the US is run by madmen wirh no understanding of the value of international trade or alliances, forcing you to try and manage the Pacific War while also being bogged down in pointless wars against Mexico and Canada, without access to trade with democratic nations. Sort of a “what if the US of the 1930s had the political leadership class of the US in 2026?” scenario.
I think a game that is primarily focused on operational concerns is a fine choice for a grand strategy game, but abstracting away the entire policy making, consensus building, and detailed civilian economic management while letting the player control all of it completely will inevitably create historical distortions. Sometimes less player control actually leads to more engaging gameplay. I’m slightly optimistic that a future hearts of iron game could be designed in a way that is both far more historically responsible and still fun to play.
normally i don’t post comments here because english isn’t my first language, but rather spanish and thus i don’t feel like i can really do much justice to just show my support/agreement to the stuff you are saying, but something very fun just occurred on the hoi4 reddit, where this post got put in
someone from the studio actually wrote down a response to what your said, it short but i think you might find it interesting, so wanted to share it for you
Neat! I had a chance to meet some of the developers a few years back and I am told that more than a few still read my writing.
Image link is dead.
Germany experienced starvation and serious resource shortages in the First World War. The British blockade had not shown that overseas colonies were unnecessary, but that they were irrelevant in wartime. To prepare for the next war, autarky needed to be thought about, and so did the question of how to feed Germany’s population.
Why would you need to prepare for the next war though?
Because Great Power wars were, at the time, normal, and while everyone talked about “The War to End All Wars,” everyone also kind of figured that another one would happen eventually. The past eighty years of no direct conflict between the big boys has been a welcome historical aberration.
Arilou still makes a very good point here.
Perhaps the remainder of the series will yet prove me wrong, but for all the “strategy includes the decision not to have a war”, mentioned on the blog in so many other contexts, I have been surprised that there has not really been an explicit exploration that the very notion a Second World War had to take the place in this period (the outcome the game is apparently hardcoded to produce) is itself a core piece of fascist apologia. In fact, when A. J. P. Taylor made a less explicit version of this argument in 1961’s The Origins of the Second World War, his book became a Nazi sensation overnight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_the_Second_World_War#Reception
This was the literal Hitler’s bodyguard’s reaction to the following thesis:
Now imagine how that bodyguard would have responded to a game where literally any kind of a German government, with any kind of an economy, will inevitably find itself taking part in a World War.
Oof, that’s bleak. I don’t know how A.J.P. Ward argues it in the actual book, but at least the summary you’re quoting reads like a series of unconnected statements that don’t actually come together to a full thesis – they just all poke holes into the maximalist version of the opposing view.
Which I suppose is fair enough for internal academic debate, but certainly not good to have out in the general public where it immediately gets turned into “Hitler was blameless”.
Thing is, Taylor was…well, right. WWI hadn’t solved the German problem, which was that Germany was too small to be a hegemon but too big for anyone to be comfortable with having them as a neighbor, Hitler did have at least the tacit support of the German people, and Germany had viewed the Eastern lands as a place to expand into for decades if not centuries.
There was probably going to be another war over whether Germany would dominate Europe sometime in the generation after WWI–what Hitler did was shift that war to being something genocidal, rather than another ordinary land grab a la Frederick the Great snagging Silesia and Wilhelm I picking up Alsace-Lorraine or Germany essentially turning Poland, the Baltic coast, Ukraine, and Belorussia into vassal states.
The point is, that was a choice the germans made. They didn’t have to go to war.
The more I consider it, the more chickenshit the argument of A.J.P. Taylor becomes.
Regarding “Hitler had the support of the German people”, it’s easy to portray this as just something passive, but the reason why people were happy to go along with such an aggressive foreign policy was propaganda. The “Stab in the Back” myth proclaimed that the German army had been on the verge of victory when the revolution forced it to surrender (total bunk, but it’s hard to prove a counterfactual) – thus, the Germans believed that a “Round Two” might go different this time. And who started that myth? Right-wing veterans like those who then also flocked to the Nazi party.
And what’s “necessity of reacting to foreign threats” supposed to be in the context of Nazi Germany? The previous Entente, soon to be Allies powers France and Britain were not consciously threatening Germany. They in fact did their very best to try and prevent another war, even if it meant giving in to unreasonable irredentist claims.
@Alien@System: Sorry, that won’t wash. The history of German foreign policy, both during the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic (Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, anyone?) makes it very clear that Hitler’s foreign policy goals weren’t something foisted upon Germany out of his own head, but were essentially an absolutely bonkers and up-to-eleven version of Germany’s previously existing ambitions.
@60guilders That’s pretty weak as a counterargument. Because you’re assuming that “policy wishes” automatically translate to “strategic execution” and that the Means by which that strategy is executed are of secondary concern.
Even if any alternate-timeline German government wishes to stop paying the reparations and get Poland back doesn’t mean they’ll start a war to do so. They might attempt other approaches (which might or might not fail), or even before that might look at the strategic situation and decide that they can’t see a Mean to reach that end without side effects that make it not worthwhile. Case in point: None of the many other chancellors of the Weimar Republic dismantled its parliamentary system and took the country to war.
Which means this is a point where people have agency, and therefore moral culpability.
To reach the conclusion that war was inevitable and therefore Hitler was morally not culpable, you’d need to show that the external forces that pushed that outcome were considerably stronger than the agency of the chancellor.
And even if you did that, that Hitler envisioned a genocidal cleansing of the entirety of the eastern Europe as the strategic means to reach that policy is not some footnote. If my kid is like “Can we have a larger lawn?” and my decision is to kill my neighbours, raze their houses to the ground and declare their properties now part of my lawn, then I am morally culpable for that insane interpretation of the wish.
@60guilders
“Sorry, that won’t wash. The history of German foreign policy, both during the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic (Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, anyone?) makes it very clear that Hitler’s foreign policy goals weren’t something foisted upon Germany out of his own head, but were essentially an absolutely bonkers and up-to-eleven version of Germany’s previously existing ambitions.”
Agree about the Second Reich, but what’s the Weimar Republic doing in there? Did you get the timeline of the Founding of the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk mixed up?
I’ll go out on a limb and say Guilders probably meant to use the treaty as an example of public sentiment and associated policy, not saying it happened during two different governments.
In terms of what the Weiner Republic is doing there, it was absolutely hostile to poland. There were multiple trade wars that, due to geopolitics, were just short of a blockade; the polish corridor was utterly insufficient and closing German export routes was very damaging to poland.
Poland retaliated by seizing German landlords property for redistribution and state development in the corridor, something it had started earlier and which was a partial cause of tensions but which escalated. Weimer Germany had many pro war voices but it’s political forces widely restrained them in favor of economic pressure and a complaint writing campaign to the league of nations on behalf of the German citizens in poland, which was wildly successful and also did nothing because the league of nations was basically a joke.
Note that several german political newspapers framed this trade war as heralding the end of polish independence; the government was restrained, but even in 1925 significant portions of the population wanted to annex poland.
All this meant that Germany never acknowledged polish ownership of the corridor, including rejecting the independence of Danzig. But Poland wasn’t innocent either.
The situation with Danzig is unarguably one of the most shit decisions out of the league. There was no reality where a big German political exclave was a good idea, nor where an ethnic corridor that didn’t really follow ethnic lines would be stabilizing. The economic rationale only makes sense if you have no alternatives, but they had those, they just failed.
A much better idea that was considered was uniting Poland and Lithuania like the Commonwealth of old, but then Poland invaded Lithuania in 1920 and any hope of a reunited Commonwealth collapsed fatally. Which was entirely the fault of everyone involved being fucking ethno nationalists and the league failing to arbitrate. That would have been the ideal resolution to this mess, no corridor, stronger more independent border state between Russia and Germany, but nooo everyone had to fucking shoot each other to establish their precious goddamn ethno states.
All this to say the interwar situation with Poland was complicated, at least partially Polands own damn fault, and the Weimer government wasn’t precisely peaceful but neither were they utterly bellicose. The tensions there were quite real but also not just a result of German race based ambitions. I’m also not getting into the few years where things were almost normal before discussions collapsed, which everyone was to blame for.
None of this excuses what Hitler would do at all in the absolute slightest, but Weimer Germany was not the sole antagonist here. So I disagree with Guilders that the Weimer government policy resembles the bracketing Reichs and assert it should be separated but agree that public hostility and tensions were absolutely part of the whole… situation. There was probably always going to be a border conflict there in the middle 20th century. Nazism turned that into a genocide.
@Terry: Other than your unfortunate and repeated misspelling of “Weimar”, this was some great context!
I’ll only add that perhaps 60guilders might have meant the military cooperation between the Weimar Republic and the USSR. While the major driver of that relationship was the lack of other military partners of remotely-similar capability for extremely obvious ideological reasons, an additional one was the mutual perception their national interests would be improved by ending the Second Polish Republic in one way or another. (Recall that besides the Danzig tensions, summarized above, the Polish-Soviet War initially had the war aims of absorbing Belarus into the Polish state – before that went so badly, turning the Soviet armies back at Warsaw and going back to status quo ante got reinterpreted as a victory.)
You might have heard of the Kama tank school (near Kazan’, present-day Tatarstan) which allowed the future Panzer commanders (though apparently not Guderian, who only visited it once) to train outside of the prying eyes of the Franco-British intelligence. Likewise, there was a school for fighter pilots in Lipetsk, and even for gas warfare. I believe that this is by far the most interesting part, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/37_mm_anti-tank_gun_M1930_(1-K)
The main Soviet anti-aircraft autocannon, the 37mm 61-K, was finalized a whole decade later (only entering production in 1940), and ended up as a derivative of Bofors, rather than the German FlaK. A scaled-down 25mm derivative of that weapon entered service right after Barbarossa. In general, an internal Red Army assessment in early 1941 had concluded its divisions only had about a quarter of AA autocannons they ought to have for reliable-ish air defence, and this had cost dearly in the first years of the war. (Given the combined production rates of the two autocannons, this gap would have likely been all-but-eliminated by spring 1942 – in yet another example of just “how many 6s” Hitler rolled with his timing.)
On the other hand, the heavy (non-automatic) 76mm AA gun actually worked – although, while it was still used fairly extensively during the Winter War, it was largely phased out of the Army service by Barbarossa and shunted to city defence in favour of the 85mm one (nearly as capable as an anti-tank weapon as the 88mm, so its derivative eventually armed the final production models of the T-34.) Similarly, that 37mm PaK clone was rebarrelled and reworked into the altogether far more capable 45mm 19-K within 2 years. (Although its ballistics were substantially worse than of the subsequent French/Czech 47mm AT guns.)
P.S. Over on Bluesky at least, I have at times encountered what I can only describe as a “Clean Weimar” myth – the notion that the Weimar civilian leadership had no knowledge of any of this cooperation (aided by some very convenient destruction of the archives), and that the USSR was cooperating with the military alone, while knowing they would all turn Nazi in the near future. (Yet somehow suspending virtually all of the aforementioned cooperation as soon as Hitler became Chancellor.) Ideological blinkers lead to strange places indeed!
Interesting additional information about the military and foreign policy of the Weimar Republic. I don’t think I’ve ever come across any kind of “Clean Weimar” myth, but at least in my history class, everything except its instability got the short shrift – which, to be fair, is kind of the important part of its legacy, but of course can make it look like it’s entirely passive in world politics when it wasn’t.
@Aliean@System: At what point did I say that Hitler bore no responsibility for how things went? I seem to recall explicitly stating that he was why the war ended up being genocidal.
@Yard and @Terry: correct on both counts.
@YARD Autocorrect is the devil and does the devils work.
@Alien@System there’s an instinct to point to Hitler as the root of all evil, and the Weimer Republic is one of the beneficiaries of this. It doesn’t help that the Weimer government had several different leaders with wildly different personalities, political fragmentation and all, and had several distinct phases of relations with its peers that could change yearly.
This was hardly new and Imperial Germany was almost as bad here; as an example the league of three emperors lasted like five years, was revived, lasted another five years, terminally ended. Alliances in eastern Europe were not terribly stable period, but Weimer alliances varied quickly enough that you can change your conclusion about who was an antagonist yearly. Before 1923 polish relations were pretty good, tolerable at least, but by 1925 Russian relations were decent and Polish relations rocky enough that prominent diplomatic voices in both Germany and Poland were rattling their sabres and saying they should just settling the issue with a war to get it over with.
Point is that you can point at different periods and use them to argue for any conclusion you want, changing almost yearly. The situation was foundationally unstable.
I specifically italicized the goddamn spelling so it wouldn’t autocorrect and it still did why! Why does my autocorrect not understand that Weim ar is correct! Why! Am I being pranked?!?
A big problem with HoI4, apart from the really bad design decisions baked into its 2016 core (national focuses that fully isolate countires from each other, the bad economy discussed here, tanks running on pixie dust), the playerbase has massively shifted form the type of people who, to stereotype, played a Paradox game to relax in between runs of Slytherine games, to people who’s only metric of a game is “fun”, and to whom “fun” is “win faster”.
Audience capture happens to everyone. But some key factors, like the economic representation of non-warfighting production, or the representation of partisans, have taken clear steps back between HoI2 (and its published mod-games, AoD and DH2) and HoI4.
In internet-speak, the chuds have taken over.
I’ll be fair, I haven’t played Slitherine’s entire ouvre, but I must admit, it’s bizarre to hear it phrased that way. I remember being told how incredibly realistic their space game is because it has any concept of a private sector at all, when they mostly just exist to automate tasks beneath a player’s attention, in comparison to the private sector in Victoria 2, which dominates the economy in actual fact. I like a lot of the ideas in Shadow Empire, but so much of the top level numbers just come down to putting happy people in charge of things. Politics was driven more by whether I chose to assign mascots or master sgts. to the 6 7 ass scratching rifle platoon rather than how I responded to political crises among my cabinet. It was legitimately absurd in an unsatisfying way (And a brief dip in after the latest dlc doesn’t seem to have changed that part enough.) The exact numbers in the military simulation may very well be more complicated and accurate than paradox, but so much of the actual game is straightforwardly easier and less complex.
…though on consideration I’d say that specifically for shadow empire, the simulation of military units as military units is just straightforwardly less complex than HoI4. You can compare medics to medics to really lay it down; in one of these games, when the medics save someone’s life, you still have to bring fresh fighters in. Shadow Empire complicates the logistics, and the simulation of actually ideating new units and models, rather than the military units. Which is a pretty niche ask alongside a simpler economy even comparing to the simple economy of HoI4 (Though to its credit, it’s also more concerned with civilian qol).
“The exact numbers in the military simulation may very well be more complicated and accurate than paradox, but so much of the actual game is straightforwardly easier and less complex.”
They do tend to be realistic in the sense that victory can be overdetermined before the first shot is fired, unlike in HOI4.
Perhaps I should have been more specific. I was thinking of games like ToaW, War in the East, Operation Barbarossa (which, admittedly, are Matrix games, though the two publishers did merge), Harpoon, .
Not sure what you mean by “their space game”, can you specify?
Ay any rate, what I mean to imply was that the playerbase originally consisted of people who wanted at least some simulation with some granularity, whereas HoI4 is automated to such a degree that the player need not be involved in the war in a war game. in other words, it went from people who sought out hard games, to people who play lolrandom ahistorical paths and/or TNO.
I’m pretty sure most of the engaged playerbase (regrettably) skips the automation. I may be offbase there.
The space game is Distant Worlds (and the sequel, which I believe is subtitled Universes). To their credit the ship design is considerably more complex than Stellaris, but I don’t think I could countenance diplomacy, economy, or even politics as being such.
I think the Axis powers didn’t worry about the long-term economic production effects turning the tide of war because they either felt these things would take care of themselves as they (Axis) overran so much territory and absorbed those resources and production centers. Japan did this to a degree, as did Germany, and Germany at least ruthlessly exploited its conquests to boost its war effort. Had Germany overrun European Russia completely in 1941-42, and the UK in 1940, that balance might have shifted decisively in the favor of the Axis. But I believe that the Axis leaders based their faith on winning the war on the Allies throwing in the towel rather than stubbornly hanging on and fighting on. And the Axis might have been successful but for the leadership of Churchill, Roosevelt, and (gulp) Stalin, none of whom sought a negotiated peace despite the early reverses they all endured.
It’s not hard to conceive of a UK government that gives up in May or June 1940 and sues for peace rather than face invasion or a protracted war. Or rump successor state of the USSR reduced to west of the Urals by 1943 . Or , following signal victories at sea by Japan in 1942 , the US entering into peace talks that recognized a fait accompli in the Pacific, at least in the near term.
This ignores the issue of the atomic bomb project, obviously. But I think we overlook the importance of Allied leadership and its determination to persevere thru difficulties and setbacks that might have overwhelmed more timid spirits. Britain exiting the war in 1940 would have had dire consequences — and it’s not as if there weren’t appeasers and “realists” at high levels in London who preferred coming to an “arrangement” with Herr Hitler rather than a total war to the death. Churchill was the man of the hour.
Bravo on this series. I’ve never played the game and have no interest in the genre, but this is captivating as a way to explore history and how it gets remembered in the popular imagination. Been seriously enjoying it!
The failure of games like HOI4 to depict the genuine strengths of the Allies has long made me think that games need to treat the real challenge to overcome as the organization and logistics not the German armed forces. If military high command was just deciding where to commit their troops and trying to out think their opponent like a game of chess then they would all be done with work by 9:30 AM and militaries wouldn’t need complex hierarchies. The worst case scenario for something like playing the Allies in WW2 or the US in the Civil War should be that you plan the wrong operation. In HOI4 that’s NBD, you just adjust your lines and go ahead with the last minute adjustment (assuming you haven’t just disabled AI automation entirely in which case you can skip adjusting the lines.) A realistic game could be possible if the consequence isn’t the Axis magically lapping the US economically but rather the danger of getting a lot of men killed unnecessarily.
Sure, but a game in which “Wages of Destruction” is handled as a sacred text is a game with a foregone conclusion. Games, however simulationist they want to be, are fundamentally about player agency, and there is no player agency to be had if we go “the Allies/the Union/the Glabrflargian Confederated Stars win by default because economy”.
That’s a misread of the proposed game. If anything, it proposes making the game harder for the Allies players despite their better economic situation. Because it wants the players to have to face an underdeveloped part of HOI’s simulation: Even if you can crank out close to infinite amounts of tanks back in Texas, how do you get them to Europe and onto the right battlefield with the right amount of fuel? And what is the human cost of you messing that up and having under-supplied or ill-planned operations?
Most games, ultimately, have a foregone conclusion; The player will win, eventually. The question is if they will feel some sort of thrill in the process (and what kind of time frame we envision their wins on. The number of potential avenues for that thrill are absolutely legion. People will also, at least some of the time, play games that resemble Busman’s Holidays, so ‘looking too much like work’ is not even an impediment. I don’t know that ‘WWII Logistics Simulator’ could succeed commercially, and it’s certainly incapable of hitting the mass market as HoI4 has, but it can easily be a good, successful, and playable game. And I think it’s fair to say that HoI4 should actually take a hit to its commercial success metrics to inject some accuracy back into the proceedings, if indeed it must.
That’s because part of the real challenge should be also getting people invested in war rather than just leaving stuff at the operational and tactical level.
Using the Usonian Civil War as an example for a game, while the Confederates would have the issue of the economic mismatch between North and South, they also should have overwhelming support of all classes of white people because everyone was invested in keeping slavery around.
By contrast, the Union should have the economic advantage in the war but need to build up the political capital to keep itself in the fight, which can lead to stuff like the New York draft riots while working up the support for abolition.
I find it generally fascinating how military campaigns and political campaigns influenced each other during that war.
“they also should have overwhelming support of all classes of white people because everyone was invested in keeping slavery around.”
The problem is that that isn’t quite historically accurate. Pro-Union sentiment was very strong in certain areas of the South–it’s estimated that of the 130,000 white Tennesseeans who fought in the war, 30,000 of them wore blue, to say nothing of the whole West Virginia incident.
Reminds me of how apparently, much of Appalachia was pro-Union during the war and then got buyer’s remorse afterwards. Didn’t some people quip that “Kentucky joined the Confederacy in 1866”?
BTW rereading this it’s extremely funny to see Brett specifically citing the historiography that supports the idea that the axis was never, ever going to win. He clearly saw the comments sniping at that. I’m not a historian, so I don’t have an independent opinion on that, and my wife doesn’t focus on this so she takes the relevant scholarly consensus, but I know who’s preliminarily coming off more convincing on the topic.