Nazi Germany's V1 and V2 programs cost 50% more than the Manhattan project

I have studied these issues carefully and I came to the following conclusions:

1.Economy: The territories under Nazi control after the Fall of France were basically the European Union after Brexit plus Japan and (from the Maddison dataset) they had approximately 80% of the combined pre-war GDP of the Allies (US+UK+USSR+Canada+Australia+Brazil). Also, physical indicators such a railway freight, coal production, sulfuric acid production, suggest that Axis block had approximately 80% of the industrial output of the Allied block (for example, railway freight in Continental Europe + Japan was 1.4 billion tons in 1938, compared to 1.8 billion tons in the US+UK+USSR+Canada+Brazil+Australia).

The Nazis had a pronounced industrial advantage over the Soviet Union, with Germany producing at annual rates 350 million tons of coal and 30 million tons of steel in 1942-1943, compared to 80 million tons of coal and 8.5 million tons of steel for the USSR. They were alone against each other on the European continent for nearly 3 years, yet Germany was unable to conquer the USSR, instead, the USSR had already managed to turn the tide of the war 18 months before D-Day.

So the outcome of WW2 cannot be explained in terms of raw economic potential of the territories controlled by each coalition as the Allied advantage was too modest and it was a severe disadvantage in the European theater as US material help was actually small (less than 10% of USSR’s GDP).

Therefore, the USSR defeated Germany despite being very inferior in industrial and economic terms (it was basically like Russia defeating the whole European Union post-Brexit). The USSR only managed to defeat Germany by sacrificing a much higher percentage of its adult male population than Germany. From 1941 to 1944, German losses against the USSR were 5.6 million soldiers killed, wounded and captured, compared to Soviet losses of 26 million soldiers killed, wounded and captured.

German losses of 5.6 million against the USSR in WW2 up to the end of 1944 were similar to their losses against UK+France+US in the Western Front in WW1, which was around 4.8 to 5.2 million.

2. Strategic Bombing: The Allied effort against Germany was a complete failure, as documented in German data from a sample of 10,500 factories that employed more than half of the industrial workforce. They show that bombing in mid-1944, when the intensity of bombing was at its peak, reduced the number of hours worked in manufacturing by approximately 3.5% which includes the hours lost to cleaning debris and repairs. Strategic bombing was a complete failure in its stated objectives: it did not substantially reduce German industrial production nor it managed to reduce their morale. In the end, trying to bomb Germany killed 120,000 allied aircrews plus 350,000 German civilians without military gains.

By the way, the actual bombing tonnage statistics are as follows:

Germany dropped 740,000 metric tons of bombs on the USSR
Germany dropped 77,000 metric tons of bombs on the UK

USA+UK dropped 1,260,000 metric tons of bombs on Germany
USA dropped 145,000 metric tons of bombs on Japan

The 3.4 million tons of bombs data you cite are in terms of short tons not metric tons and include bombs dropped on tactical engagements all over the European and Pacific theaters.

By comparison, Germany produced from 1940 to 1944, 8.5 million metric tons of artillery shells, which were mostly spent on the USSR and killed and wounded 20 million Soviet soldiers.

3. Technology/Effectiveness: Both sides had access to the same basic set of technologies: Germans, American and British troops had similar types of equipment to each other. Measured in terms of firepower by the projectile weight of all guns their firepower was approximately the same. Gemrans had some toys like V2 and jet fighters but they were strategically irrelevant (their main impact was a contribution to allied victory as it diverted German resources away from the army).

As Trevor Dupuy in 1976 did a study utilizing data from dozens of engagements in Italy and France in 1943 and 1944 and concluded that: Americans and British outnumbered Germans on average 2 to 1, Allied casualties were the same as the Germans (which implies that Germans were 156% as effective as the Americans and British in inflicting casualties, despite Allied air superiority).

4. Horses: It is true the US and UK had fully motorized armies while Germany did not. German armies were about 50% motorized: a German infantry division had 550 trucks plus 2,500 horses, except for the Panzer and armored infantry divisions which were 100% motorized. However, full motorization was only an advantage the US and UK enjoyed, these two powers deployed only 100 divisions in Europe while 90% of the 560 divisions the USSR had deployed in Europe were also horse-drawn. During the war, the Germans were fighting 90% of the time against the horse-drawn Soviet divisions.

5. Japan: Japan was a poor third world country in 1940, compared to Germany it was strategically almost irrelevant: Japan produced 6 million tons of steel and 55 million tons of coal while European steel production capacity under German control was 47 million tons, coal production capacity was 450 million tons. People talk about Japan a lot because the as US fought against it and US’s propaganda focused more on Japan than its actual strategic impact.

6. Serious historians know that the outcome of WW2 hinged on the Germany-USSR conflict. That the USSR won was thanks to an extreme level of civilian sacrifice combined with German arrogance. They attacked the USSR in 1941 based on the assumption that the USSR would be completely defeated in 4 months. The German generals made their war plans based on the assumption that the USSR would be able to mobilize at most 300 divisions during the initial German invasion, instead, the USSR managed to mobilize 550 divisions over these 4 months.

To give the Eastern Front some perspective: During the whole war, USSR mobilized 35 million soldiers, lost 29 million killed, captured and wounded. By the effect of comparison, the USA only managed to land 3 million soldiers and 61 divisions on European soil by the end of the war in May 1945.

The effect of US participation in WW2 was that helped to save a lot of Soviet lives as the war was over a bit more quickly after D-day and it helped to liberate countries from Stalinist oppression but it was the USSR that did 90% of the work in defeating Hitler, despite being the poorest of the 3 major allied powers.

From a Nazi perspective in 1940, after the Fall of France, rational expectations implied that:

(a). US and UK would have to do an amphibious invasion, which would be extremely hard and would certainly fail if they had to engage the whole German army.
(b). The USSR was the last major power in continental Europe opposing them, the USSR was a poor country that had collapsed in WW1 against a portion of the German army, now they could focus most of their resources against them.

So the USSR should have collapsed and the Nazis would be in complete control of continental Europe. It would have been a very difficult proposition for the remaining Allies to try to re-conquer Europe through an amphibious invasion. Therefore, given the information they had available after the fall of France, the Nazis had essentially already won the war.

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