This is the first half of the last part (I, II IIIa, IIIb) 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.
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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.
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.
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’.
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.
@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.
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…)
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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).
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’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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
???
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 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.)
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.