Sarah Paine

You should ideally add up all the complementary capabilities of you and your friends and then share them, divvy them out in an optimal way to deal with things.

Well, the Axis alliance was also additive in the sense that the Germans added to their GDP, the GDPs of all the places they occupied that pretty much accounted for GDP growth in Germany, except

That whole way of doing things involves big occupation forces, which are big overhead of these conquered places, and you've also damaged them in the conquest, whereas the Allies are all game to help each other.

And also, when Germany took over continental Europe,

It's taking the big petroleum deficit zone because Europe doesn't produce petroleum.

The North Sea oil, those things hadn't been discovered in those days.

Yes, Romania has oil.

Yes, Hitler takes Romania.

But Romanian pipelines ran to pre-war customers.

And it's very difficult to find the manpower and the steel to reroute all of your pipelines in wartime.

So that's a whole other part of Hitler's problems.

So as we're putting together these complementary capabilities, the Russians have a huge army.

Most of the fighting takes place between Russia and Germany.

The Russians wreck the German army.

You know, millions of Russians and Germans are dying here.

But if you look at Operation Barbarossa, which is Germany's initial invasion of the Soviet Union, they suffer a nearly 30% casualty rate.

That's called catastrophic success.

You have too many successes like that, it'll be catastrophic.

And here's the mathematics of the main front.

Only two countries have really big armies, Germany and Russia.