I dunno, IL, you’re kind of contemptuously waving away my arguments without really addressing them. If you just wanna say “hurr hurr, Hitler was stupid and his troops were too,” then there’s not much I can do about that. If you want to talk about the facts, please read on.
In 1941, the Allies shipped 360,000 tons of supplies to Russia. Let’s say 5% of that was trucks – that’s still over 12,000 Studebakers in 1941. You put five soldiers in each truck, you bring two fresh truckload of soldiers to a railway junction each month with each truck, and you’ve just mobilized an extra 480,000 troops. That’s about 40% of the Russian army as it stood in front of Moscow in December 1941 – almost double the margin of superiority Stalin had when he launched the Moscow counteroffensive in December 1941. Without those troops, instead of slightly outnumbering Hitler, the Russians would have been somewhat outnumbered. You take those extra Russian troops away, and it’s totally possible the winter counteroffensive would have failed, leaving Germans in place only 15 miles from the Moscow city center.
So I hear you that Stalin’s got his limitless eastern hordes. But the problem is, you can’t get the eastern hordes to Moscow without trucks. They live out in the trackless prairie and the arctic mining towns, a thousand miles from nowhere. And if you don’t get them to the front in time, you lose a major city, and you can’t take that city back without tanks and artillery.
An article in WW2 magazine (http://www.historynet.com/did-russia-really-go-it-alone-how-lend-lease-helped-the-soviets-defeat-the-germans.htm) claims that 30 to 40% of the medium and heavy tanks in front of Moscow in November 1941 were imported from Britain. Having lost 60,000 tanks, Russia was down to its last 600 tanks. Russia’s artillery only had enough ammo to fire two rounds per cannon per day. If America hadn’t been providing its own lend-lease to the UK in the Atlantic, you really think Britain would have found the shipping to spare to get those tanks to Murmansk? Or do you think the Russian infantry could have stood in the snow and held ground against Panzers with virtually no artillery or and virtually no armored support?
After the start of 1942, the Russians quickly set up tank factories and aircraft factories on their rear lines – in part by using imported Allied machine tools to jump start production. A tank factory is a complicated work of art. If you’re missing a key tool, you’ve got to manufacture the tool that makes the tool that makes the tool that finishes your factory. That takes years. The Russians didn’t have years; their tanks were driving out of the factory and into battle. You slow that process down by even a few weeks, and maybe the Germans take Stalingrad, and, with it, shut the Russians out of the entire Caucasus region west of the Volga.
In real life, the Germans made large territorial gains against Russia all through 1942, even though the Allies delivered 14% of their total Lend-Lease that year – the equivalent of 80,000 Studebakers, plus an equivalent number of tanks and aircraft. If you cancel all of that aid, AND you free up half of the 600,000 German combat troops held on the Western Front to repulse the British, AND you reduce Soviet morale, because the Soviets can see that the British are being pushed back on all fronts, the Japanese are advancing, and the Americans still don’t care…
Could Germany have found a way to take this cushy setup and ruin it? Sure. Hitler was insane. He could have made all kinds of mistakes and eventually lost, even without the USA in the war. That’s why I say it was the Axis’s war to lose. But I wouldn’t bet on it.