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It would have helped but it wouldn't have changed the basic equation - running out of military age able bodied men for the Wehrmacht and inability to come close to matching the US industrial juggernaut. The US on its own was capable of greater output than Germany, including occupied Europe - and both Britain and the USSR were also quite significant producers of military materiel. In terms of manpower Germany (including Austria and the Sudetenland) had roughly 80 million people - men, women, children, elderly. By the end of the war 2.3 million German soldiers had died in action, another half million of non combat causes, 2 million MIA, 1.7 million crippled. That does not include POW's or those out of action at any given moment due to non-crippling injuries.  It is actually pretty stunning to think that a major factor in both WWI and WWII was running out of people due to the massive casualties.
by MarekNYC on Sat Feb 25th, 2006 at 02:22:52 PM EST
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These numbers are interconnected, not independent.

Both German war production and the battlefield machinery itself could have been ran on a higher gear and with more efficiency had there been more fuel awailable, and the latter would also have meant less deaths for the own soldiers - and more damage to the (bombed) British and Soviet production sites. What's more, the blunder of besieging Stalingrad alone cost a fourth of the German WWII losses - going for Baku wouldn't have had that high a toll.

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.

by DoDo on Mon Feb 27th, 2006 at 04:48:01 AM EST
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