Dr. Sarah Paine on Dwarkesh Patel: How Britain Beat Hitler

1. 0:00 – 16:00

   How WW1 shaped WW2

   1. SPSarah Paine0:00

      The Germans almost sank a terminal quantity of British trade. It's close because Britain is dependent not only on oil imports, but about half of its food supply. Malta, Crete, and the Suez Canal lie in the center of Italian ambitions. The Britains are in a world of hurt. Fall of Norway, fall of France, blockade of Malta, fall of Crete. It is really bad news. Germany should have bought a completely different navy, skipped the surface fleet, buy a lot more U-boats. Maybe they would have zapped the British before the United States gets its act together in either world war. If Hitler had just done the Anschluss and maybe done the Sudeten number in Czechoslovakia and quit, he'd be called Bismarck II, a genius. But that's not who he is. It turns out that the possibilities for maritime and continental powers are a little different. Uh, basically, a small subset of countries can defend themselves, but primarily at sea. And that opens certain possibilities and others can't, and that opens and closes certain possibilities. And I'm gonna talk at this, uh, story from Britain's point of view, the country with the 360, you-can't-get-me moat. And it's an, an instructive case for the United States of the possibilities and the perils of having this sort of, uh, position. So that is my game plan today. And you can look at the great peninsula of Europe where Britain is located, and you can see this northern coastline for Britain, where it's uncomfortably close to the continent and its enemies are sitting there. It's an, an, an interesting neighborhood. So here's my plan. I'm gonna took about, talk about these continental problems that Britain has dem- been dealing with. If you think about it, Britain was always fighting France, and then in 1871, Germany reunif- uh, unifies, and then the problem's Germany. And I'm gonna pick up the story in 1939 when things are really bad for Britain. So I'm gonna talk about first these continental problems, and then I'm gonna talk about how Britain tried to deal with it. And first, it has to do with getting sea control, and then once you can do that, finding some peripheral theaters where you might be able to fight and deal with a continental problem, and you probably need allies. And so that, those are the force, uh, the first four topics. Then... So that was then, and now is now. The continental problems now are China and Russia, and to see of what this case study might reveal about the ongoing things. All right, so here's Britain, uncomfortably close to the continent. If it wants to get to Russia, which is its big ally in World War I and World War II, it's either gotta go way up north around the Norwegian coastline, and you get up into places like Murmansk and Archangel, or it's gotta go way around through this very narrow sea, the Mediterranean, through the choke point of choke points, which is at Dardanelles and the Bosporus into the Black Sea, and the main port back in the day was Odessa. And then if you compare French and British access to the high seas, France has got a pretty good coastline that just gets it right into the oceans. But Germany, if it wants to send merchant traffic or naval traffic, it's gotta go through these narrow seas, and then it's gotta get by Britain, which is its b- big enemy in the two world wars, which is the dominant naval power. So that's complicated. For Britain, if it wants to get to its empire back in the day, it wants to go through the Suez Canal. That requires the cooperation of Spain, France, Italy, and if it wants to get to Russia, Turkey as well. Well, Turkey didn't cooperate very well in either war, and if you think in World War II, well, fall of France, fascist sympathies of Spain and then Italy is part of the access. Britain is in real trouble. And what do you do about this? Britain has this big empire that it wants to protect. It's got a massive basing system, more bases than anybody else does in order to protect this empire from this, which is a very resentful Germany, doesn't much like the Versailles settlement of World War I. It's a divided country in that a Polish corridor separates East Prussia, and the Germans start trying to solve this problem. Initially, they're taking Austria, the Sudeten German parts of Czechoslovakia in '38, then they take all of Czechoslovakia in '39, and they've already dealt with the Rhineland, which is supposed to be demilitarized per the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Well, they ignored that, re-militarized in '36. And this is important 'cause there are a lot of industrial, uh, resources and factories and things there. It turns out that Hitler's plans require, it's not optional, it requires the resources not only of the Rhineland, but also Czechoslovakia and Poland and Romania, which is gonna have the oil for them. So when you get to '39, when Russia and Germany are dividing up Poland between them, this is the part of the history that Russians don't like to talk about, but it's exactly what they were doing, this triggers World War II because the French and the British honor their alliance with Poles to help deal with this. All right, so in 1940, Britain's in a world of hurt. It faces this massive blue problem, and then there's this green, growing green disaster. It's facing two continental powers, Germany and Russia, that are both have these expansive empires they wanna create. They wanna divide Europe and then the rest of the world. Bad news for Britain. So, but 1941, when Hitler decides he needs Russia too, (laughs) and then Russia decides, ah, the one that's attacking me is probably the major problem, not the other one. So Stalin is gonna swap sides, and he's gonna be, uh, be coordinating with Britain. So that's better from Britain's point of view than having two continental powers trying to deal with it. So now it's down to one. So once the United States has gotten into the war, this is what the world looks like. You have a big cancer in Europe from the British point of view, but it's all surrounded by oceans that Brit can get to and a lot of allies and neutral states. So Britain has access to those places. And then there's a separate...... cancer in Asia, where Japan's trying to work its magic. And I say separate because the Axis never coordinated these two theaters. So, this is looking at the world from a maritime perspective. What you're looking at is all the oceanic routes that connect everything. So Britain's problem is how to leverage the miracle of sea transport that basically can access you the whole world, versus the logistical nightmare of land transport, where you have to, you can only drive through countries that'll let you drive through. The seas give you mobility, they give you access to theaters, markets, resources, allies, and they also give you sanctuary at home if you're surrounded by them. It makes it harder for people to invade. So Britain's trying to leverage all of that against the armies, uh, of the continental armies by, um, it's gonna try to strangle them economically, diplomatically, and militarily. Now, the generation that led World War II in Britain, and not just Britain but elsewhere, they were the conscripts of World War I, which was supposed to end all wars, and they knew full well as they're in the midst of World War II that it did not remotely achieve that promise. And so, they learned a whole series of lessons, and I'm gonna do a comparison of what was done in World War I versus World War II, and they are the greatest generation, not their children who claimed the title. Lesson number one is don't go beyond the culminating point of attack. What's that? The terminology comes from Clausewitz, uh, Carl von Clausewitz, who is the Western guru on conventional land warfare, which means is if you're attacking in a battle, if you go too far, you'll weaken yourself, 'cause the enemy will counterattack, send you further backwards than you would've otherwise. In the case of World War I, you're sending young men over trenches into ongoing machine gun fire. What do you suppose is gonna happen to them? And this profligate waste of life in these, uh, assaults out of trenches, maybe you took a little territory in the first two weeks, but after that, nothing. These offensives will go on for months and months, racking up hundreds of thousands of deaths. Uh, no more doing that in World War II. And you can look, the death figures for World War I and II. So World War I, the British army gets the multi-million man army that they had coveted. They deployed on the main front from start to finish, and they chalk up twice as many deaths as they did in World War II when they have a peripheral strategy. Uh, in World War II, they do make the mistake, is they land the big army on the continent, opening move, but it doesn't do well, and then they reassess and they get that army off the continent immediately. This is what the Dunkirk evacuation is, where the French are covering the British as they're decamping from the continent, saving the British army, and this is why France has such large casualties. It is, it is doing this, even though France isn't, in the war that long. So it's gonna be a long wait before the British get back on the continent again. Long wait also for the United States to get in the war. There's no more going beyond the culminating upon, uh, point of attack. All right, the, the way diplomacy is run is also completely different. In World War I, there are exactly two conferences trying to coordinate things among the Entente powers, and they're the December 1915 and November 1916 Chantilly Conferences, and all they are, are the military heads. Well, the Russian Romanov dynasty is overthrown in early 1917. It is too late. What happened in World War I is the Germans focused on the western front in 1914, eastern front in 1915, back to the western front in 1916. Well, in World War, World War II, the idea is you wanna squeeze them simultaneously from all fronts so they can't, can't divert people back and forth. And if you look at the coordination, it begins even before the United States is in the war with the ABC staff talks, and then the Atlantic, uh, Conference, which yields the Atlantic Charter, which is talking about what war objectives are, unconditional surrender of, uh, Germany, and also what the post-war situation is gonna look like. And there's coordination not only among military leaders, but, uh, uh, civil and military leaders as well. There's a combined command of US and British forces. We have offices in each other's capitals, but we're also coordinating with the Russians so that you're setting up not only, uh... Also, war termination and what, what post-war institutions are gonna be like to hold the peace. It's a completely different event from World War I when Russia falls out of the Entente because there are bread riots in St. Petersburg and Russia could not supply its troops with adequate armaments. Well, that's not gonna happen in World War II. Russia comes with a really large army. Germany has another large army. You've gotta have a big army to deal with Germany's army. So in World War I, there is no Lend-Lease aid. No one would've thought of giving that much stuff to each other. It's like, "Everybody first," and it's like, "Okay, everybody last," doing that one. The railways had not been completed in World War I. The Trans-Siberian doesn't get completed until 1916, and the Murmansk Railway, you can see Murmansk up there, isn't completed until early 1917. The Romanov dynasty is gone. It's too late. In World War II, three quarters of Lend-Lease aid would go over those completed railway systems. Now, to the British credit, they did try to break the blockade on Russia. The way to get into Russia in those days and hook in with the railway system would be to get into the Black Sea in Odessa, 'cause Russia had all the men, but they didn't have all the war material to fight, so this is where the Gallipoli campaign comes in. You could argue about whether you think it is good strategy or not, but it was miserably executed. So first of all, it wasn't a joint operation. What's joint? Joint means you're coordinating your different military services, in this case army and navy. So what goes on? The British Navy tries to run the Dardanelles for two months. That does not work well. Do you suppose the Ottomans might think something was up? Yeah. And when you get up there on the Dardanelles, all the high point, it's a very steep...... place. So the, the Ottomans are all busy sorting that all out, getting troops in place. So two months later, when the c- the British, New Zealand, Australian, and French troops all land on a given day, the Ottomans, uh, are there with a welcome party essentially, a- and that invasion stalemates in three days. But they keep at it for eight months, uh, taking 190,000 casualties, 55,000 of, uh, of whom are dead men, uh, totally, uh, miserably executed. And it comes as collateral damage. As the British are trying to run the Dardanelles with their navy, this is when the Ottomans are terrified of their Christian subjects, Armenians, and they're starting to round them up. They're pulling them out of the army, and then days before the landing, the, the Turkish massacre of the Armenians begin, and between 1915 and 1923, 1.5 million Armenians are killed. That's a lot of collateral damage. All right, the Normandy landings are a completely different event in World War II. This is another, uh, uh, contested landing of trying to get armies in. First of all, the buildup of war material goes on for years to get all the landing vessels in, the equipment, the forces, all ready to go in Britain, and then the disinformation campaign kept the Germans completely disinformed. They're expecting the landing to be at the Pas-de-Calais, which is the shortest place and it's way off in Normandy. That worked, so everybody lands on a day and they're up and over and into places inland. Another lesson learned, the Royal Navy did not think that convoy duty was the manly thing to do. Uh, they would convoy troop transports but they wouldn't deal with the merchant marine until 1918. Well, they, uh, the Germans almost sank a terminal quantity of that stuff, so the Navy is not thinking about the economic dimensions of warfare. They're just focused on all the military things in World War I. In World War II, the British would be convoying even before they got in the war. Another difference of the, between the World War II and World War I, at the end of World War I, if you look at the disposition of German troops, they're abroad. They're occupying Belgium, Luxembourg, parts of France. Nobody's in Germany. Yes, the Germans had really lousy meals during the war, but German civilians did not feel the full brunt of what their goddam government had done. And therefore, uh, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt felt that it was really critical to have boots on the ground in Berlin to let the Germans know exactly what had happened to them and let them feel the war that they'd inflicted on others in order to end it. Even so, the a- the Allies win this thing and they wreck the continental powers, but they almost wreck themselves in the process. It's a Pyrrhic victory for France and Britain. It really weakens them. So World War II is gonna be a different event. So that's the being in this continental situation and the lessons learned from the last time around,

2. 16:00 – 31:00

   Hitler and Churchill’s battle to command the Atlantic

   1. SPSarah Paine16:00

      and now for what the, uh, British did in World War II to deal with the continental problem. The opening move of a maritime power in a really high-stakes war like this, uh, is typically blockade. What you wanna do is cut your enemy off from the oceans and force it to cannibalize its own resources and those of occupied areas. And because of the geographic position of a maritime power, you can quite often do this to a continental power on narrow seas. And Britains were well aware that Germany's a trading country. Most of its trade goes by sea, and it's also on these narrow seas, so geographically and economically, it's really vulnerable to blockade. And I get it. Germany gets alternate resources. But they come at a much higher cost, they're much more difficult, and so that you're really putting a stress on the German economy and, and causing inflation and other things. But if you blockade, um, a continental power can't blockade you back. Why? They're on the narrow seas, so they can't deploy a surface fleet. You'll sink it. And also, um, they can't easily blockade a coastline that faces the open seas, the high seas. Yeah, they, it, that you can do other things on narrow seas, but it's pretty tough. So what do you do if you cannot blockade ships in port? Well, then what you're gonna try to do is commerce raiding, to try and, uh, sink things when they're out and about, and that was what Germany did in World War II and why its occupation of France was so important. Because once it took the French coastline, it then set up U-boat pens in Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux, and they're gonna be using these to fight the Battle of the Atlantic. That's the game. So maritime powers do blockade, the response of, um, continental power is commerce raiding, and then the maritime, uh, response to that is gonna be you're gonna convoy your merchant ships. Okay, as the war begins in Europe, the United States is not in, but Roosevelt is coordinating with Latin America to set up a big neutrality zone all around the Americas, 300 nautical miles, and then the Lend Lease Act, also before US belligerency, there's, uh, pieces of it which say the United States is gonna take over British bases in Iceland and set up bases in Greenland. Why do we care about those locations? They're really important if you're gonna send convoys back and forth across the Atlantic, both to attack and to defend, so that's what we're up to. Uh, but even so, uh, the Axis visits a real nightmare in the Battle of the Atlantic. A lot of things are going down. So how does that all work? So before the United States gets in at the very beginning, these U-boats turn the North Sea into a kill zone and then Britain is losing an awful lot of stuff off its shores and also off the shores of Africa, and the Germans get really good at commerce raiding really fast, and there's also the Fall of France, which is a mess, because prior to the Fall of France, Britain is only convoying just beyond Ireland. Once you get the Fall of France and all of those submarines on French territory, then the British have to convoy 400 miles further west and they've lost an awful lot of destroyers between the fall of Norway and then the Dunkirk evacuation, so they haven't got enough ships to convoy properly. And then the Germans are really creative. Admiral Doenitz, who runs the submarine service at this point, he uses wolf pack tactics where you concentrate a whole bunch of submarines on a convoy, attack it at night, and bad things happen to the convoy. Also, the Germans have captured some of the British code so they have a sense of where the convoys are and they're sinking almost a terminal tonnage of this traffic. 850,000 tons of Allied shipping is going down. So this is Hitler's...... happy time, (laughs) when he's sinking an awful lot of stuff. Um, then there's a big Greenland gap. This is where there's a lack of air cover, and so you'll see a lot of things are going down in this Greenland gap. But meanwhile, the British have gotten pretty good at espionage, and they've captured a lot of Enigma machines. Those are what the Germans are using to encrypt their messages. Well, the British capture some machines, some rotors, some codebooks in 1940 and '41. So by the summer of 1941 through February '42, they can actually read the codes, or some of them, s- decrypt them, so that within 36 hours they can get the information out, and this allows convoys to go, "Oh, wolf pack there. We're gonna do evasive routing of the convoys somewhere else." And that may have saved up to a mil- two million tons of Allied shipping. Uh, but meanwhile, for the Germans, General Rommel is in North Africa, and he's having troubles because he's sublied across the Mediterranean, and the British and friends are sinking too many of the, uh, his supplies. So Admiral Doenitz is told to reroute some of the U-boats in the Atlantic to go help General Rommel up in North Africa. The United States isn't in the war, so all quiet on the, uh, on the eastern seaboard. So it- it- it's looking like it might be okay for the British for a while, except Doenitz thinks something's up. And so they add a fourth rotor to the Enigma machine, and so the British are then blind again for most of 1942 until they can, uh, capture a four-rotor Nig machine, all the rotors plus the codebooks. It takes a while. So they're in a world of hurt. The United States enters the war, which you think would be good for Britain, except it produces Hitler's second happy time. Why? Because Admiral King, like his Royal Navy predecessors in the previous war, doesn't think convoying is the manly thing for naval, uh, officers to be up to, so he's not for convoying. Also, Americans don't turn off the lights, and therefore, uh, as merchant ships are going up the east coast of the United States, the lighting is just highlighting their silhouettes, making it much, uh, easier to sink. And, oh, by the way, in those days, Louisiana-Texas oil, which is supplying the East Coast where a lot of American industry is, is coming up by ships on the eastern seaboard, and particularly by Cape Hatteras shoals, which are, like, 30 miles wide and become a total kill zone. So, uh, Admiral King rethinks it after losing more than a million tons of tonnage in the first three months of '42 and goes, "Oh, gee whiz, maybe we should do convoys." Yes. And, uh, the United States does interlocking convoy system by May of 1942, but then Doenitz just starts hunting things a little further south in the Caribbean. So, um, the Brits, uh, get their four-rotor Enigma machine, and they're able to decode things again, but, uh, there's another problem. The British think that there's something up with their Admiralty codes in, in August of, uh, '42, but they don't change them out till June of '43. There was something wrong. The Germans were reading them. So, um, uh, it's this, you can see this back and forth in the Battle of the Atlantic. But eventually, the air cover gap is closed. This makes a tremendous difference. There are new technologies that are introduced that ruin Admiral Doenitz. Here was what happens. The United States had radar. Germans never did. American radar improves so you can see through the fog. Uh, the United States adds hedgehogs. What are they? Not the cute little critters. It's rather if you have a ship and you have hedgehogs, they deliver an elliptical spray of depth charges, so anybody who's anywhere underneath you is in a world of hurt. In addition, the United States introduces two new classes of ships, one auxiliary aircraft carriers, little ones. That means you're gonna have air cover for the entire journey, right? When the, when you get beyond land-based air, then these folks will take over. In addition, uh, small destroyer escorts were introduced instead of the big ones, and these little ships, they've had all sorts of fun things on board, sonar, radar, depth charges, hedgehogs, and so they transform commerce raiding into a low life expectancy profession so that in May of '43, the Germans lose 41 U-boats. That's unsustainable. That's a massive percentage of what they have. And in one of those encounters, I think it's about 25 U-boats going after a convoy of 37 ships, sink nothing, lose three U-boats, plus another one damaged, and on one of these U-boats is Admiral Doenitz's 19-year-old son, Peter, who dies in all of this. So Doenitz, as a result, uh, redeploys the U-boats outta the North Atlantic because it's unsustainable for Germany south of the Azores. And, um, and yet, there are problems going on with the Arctic convoy that takes a quarter of the Lend-Lease aid to Stalin, and it gets called off from much of '42 and much of '43, and I'll get into it. But that problem gets solved, and then you can see where all the kills are, and the Germans are losing, uh, U-boats closer and closer to home shores. So the Battle of the Atlantic is won by the Allies in part by reducing merchantman losses through, um, convoys, evasive convoys, and also increasing, uh, U-boat losses through all these different technologies and also, um, reading their mail, which helps to find them. But one could argue even more important was the civilian side of it, the United States' ability to just overwhelm Germany with the construction of US naval and merchantmen. Here are the stats. Look what happens with naval strength. '43, US Navy hulls and personnel are, uh, tripling. That's quite a lot. And then naval hulls are gonna double in the next year. That's a lot of ships and a lot of people in the Navy. Here's some more fun statistics. So if you look in 1941 and go over, that's a bumper year for U-boat construction in 1941. Going to 1942, really ugly if you're a merchantman.... a crew member, 'cause it's double the number of tonnage of merchant ships that are being sunk. But then keep moving over. Look at merchant hull construction, up by four times. And the next year, that's gonna double. And oh, let's look over for, uh, 1943. Look how many U-boats are being sunk. It goes way up with all those new technologies that I've just told you about. So even though the Germans produce a lot more U-boats, the kill rate is so high that there's hardly any net gain. And then here's some more way, fun ways of looking at it. So you look at new ships. As soon as the United States gets in the war, new ship rates go up, up and away. But the losses are really high through mid-1943. And then it's, it's in, uh, mid-1943 that you can see the big divergence between construction and what's being destroyed. And the Germans just can't keep up with this. Uh, there is just way too much stuff out there for them to sink. All right, so Admiral Doenitz d- uh, did get one thing right. His boss there, Admiral Raeder, who's the head of the navy, had said that pocket battleships were the thing to use for commerce raiding, and Doenitz proves him wrong with, that U-boats are the way to go. And Hitler agrees, so he cashes Raeder, makes Doenitz the head of the, um, uh, the navy. And then S- Hitler goes one step further. He scraps his surface fleet, because it's useless to him in this war. You cannot deploy it in this kinda high-stakes war, something that countries like China with, uh, uh, surrounded by narrow seas oughta think about. All right, so if you look at why the Battle of the Atlantic turned out the way it did, is Germany and Britain have very different geographies. And arguably, Germany bought the wrong navy before the war. It should've bought a lot of U-boats and forget the surface, uh, minimize the surface boats that you're buying. And, uh, so Britain could do things that Germany just plain couldn't. That's just part of the geography. So on the, uh, uh, the effects of the blockade were really significant. You're really straining the German economy. And, but the German commerce raiding was also very effective. The Germans almost sank a terminal quantity of British trade. It's close, because Britain is dependent not only on oil imports, resources, but abou- about half of its food supply. So the Germans tried and came close. And then you go, well, the counter commerce, uh, raiding strategy did work, but it was very, there was touch and go, back and forth, and it required a lot of things that had to be coordinated. You needed the intelligence. It really helps reading other people's mail. You needed a whole set of new ship classes. You need to, um, be able to construct adequate quantities of, uh, naval hulls, merchant hulls. Uh, you need to coordinate with allies. You gotta get food and other things to Britain. There are a lot of things going on here. You need air cover, the planes that are capable of doing it. So there are a lot of things going on. Remove any one of them and the outcome may have been different.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel29:44

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3. 31:00 – 38:03

   Peripheral theaters leading up to Normandy

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel31:00

   2. SPSarah Paine31:00

      All right. So that's, uh, it on the commerce raiding. So once you command the Atlantic or which means that, uh, the, uh, uh, a sustainable, uh, amount of, of traffic is gonna get through from the Allied powers, then you can start thinking about peripheral theaters. Okay, what's a peripheral theater? The main theater is Russia in this war. Not what you think. Why? Because between two-thirds and three-quarters of German ground forces were always fighting Russia. That means these other theaters, which are peripheral to the main theater, take up between one-quarter to, uh, one-third of German forces. That makes them peripheral. Doesn't make them unimportant, but they're not the main theater. And by the way, who would wanna fight on the main theater if there are alternatives? People die in droves in the main theater. So this man, Sir Julian Corbett, very fine naval theorist of Britain who was heartbroken in World War I that Britain ignored his naval strategy, which was don't do the continental commitment and run the war through these peripheral operations, and, uh, it wrecked his health. But here's what-According to Corbitt, are the prerequisites for a theater that makes a really good one for a peripheral operation, one, it has to be overseas so the enemy can't invade you or wreck your, um, productive base. Secondly, you need local sea control to get in there, but that local sea access has gotta be better than the land access, 'cause you wanna have it easier for Britain to get in and out than it is for the enemy, because then attrition rates will favor, uh, Britain. Britain also should deploy a dispose-all force. What's that? It means those forces you have who are in excess of what's necessary for homeland defense. It's not disposable force. It's rather a, a force that if everything goes south, you won't ruin the homeland, but you can afford to risk it on potentially very risky but potentially war-changing operations. In addition, they gotta be joint operations. Joint means cooperation of land and sea in this era. And in order, you're gonna come in by sea, you're gonna supply by sea, but you'll be fighting on land. You better coordinate all that. And there's gotta be combined operations. What does that mean? Coordinating with allies. You need friendly locals who are gonna help you do all of this. And then you need to command your own forces. Why? Because you wanna determine how they come in, how they go out. If you, if it all goes badly, you wanna be able to leave, which is what they did at Dunkirk. As much as a continental power might wanna play this game, they cannot, because they don't have the ac- the requisite sea access to pull it off. All right. Uh, the war winds up with Britain, uh, and the United States going through four phases. Well, Britain in all four, uh, some of the later ones of four peripheral theaters. First, the North Sea. That's essential for British homeland defense, and there are three keys to the North Sea: Scapa Flow, Strait of Dover, coast of Norway. Britain always controlled the Strait of Dover and Scapa Flow, so Germany went after Norway to try and open things up that way, and Norway is not an ideal peripheral theater for Britain because the Germans had better land and sea access to that theater. They take Norway, and then they set up sub-bases at Bergen and Trondheim in addition to the ones they had at Kiel, Hamburg, and the Heligoland Archipelago, and these are the things that are ruining those Arctic convoys. So, that one does not go so well for Britain. It's, winds up facing an incre- uh, a totally hostile, uh, Continental Europe shoreline. The, the Axis has it all. All right, in the Mediterranean, there's certain keys that Britain controlled: Gibraltar, that's access to the Atlantic; Suez Canal, access to the Red Sea; Crete, that's access to the Black Sea; and then the British had a fallback position, a Midway Point at Malta if things went really bad. So, the Germans attacked the fallback position because they're trying to, they're trying to bail out the Italians and try fighting in North Africa, and so they're trying to take Malta because whoever's got planes there can cause convoys all kinds of problems or they can protect their own things. And so Malta is blockaded by the Germans. It's not relieved until, uh, the end of 1942. So that is not great for Britain. It's, uh, threatening, uh, well, its access to the empire, and the problem for Britain is Italian belligerency. Italians had been part of the Entente in World War, uh, I. Well, they were part of the Axis in World War II. And three of these keys, Malta, Crete, and the Suez Canal, lie in the center of Italian ambitions 'cause they want an empire where they go down the Balkan coast and then they're gonna go deep into Libya and Ethiopia to unify their empire around the Red Sea. And so Mussolini kicks this thing off, except then he gets stuck in Greece, and so the Germans have to come and bail him out. They chase the British out of Greece. The Britons are then on Crete, and then that falls to the Germans. So, the Britons are in a w- a world of hurt. The Suez Canal is under threat. Think about it: fall of Norway, fall of France, blockade of Malta, fall of Crete. It is really bad news. However, when the United States gets into the war, uh, the United States can help Britain retake some of these keys to the Mediterranean, and this is what is going on in North Africa. So, Admiral Doenitz had saved it initially, but after the United States is in with more assets, Doenitz's oil, the, the tankers supplying his oil, 60% of them are getting sunk because Malta holds and Malta is supplied and these tankers are getting bombed out of, uh, existence. And so Mo- uh, Rommel loses in North Africa not because he's the inferior general. He's a better general. He's just not supplied, and this is the key. Um, and once you take North Africa, that peripheral operation, it opens the opportunity to go into Sicily and then the rest of Italy, and once you get that going, there's a possibility to do the Normandy landings. So there's four different peripheral operations. Some would argue that the air campaign over Germany was another peripheral campaign. Uh, you're bringing the ho- war home to Germans. You're wrecking their productive base, and also it's a major help to the Russians. Why? Because once the British start bombing Berlin, Hitler calls off air squadrons from the eastern front, and these anti-aircraft guns can be used against tanks or aircraft. He pulls those back, and that means the Germans no longer own the skies of Russia, of Russia and you're no longer gonna be taking hundreds of thousands of POWs.

4. 38:03 – 48:53

   The Eastern front

   1. SPSarah Paine38:03

      Okay. So, that's how the peripheral strategies worked out, but they're coordinated through allies figuring out how to make all of them work, and here-... are the stats on allies. Alliances are additive, right? 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, um, way of doing things involves big occupation for- forces, which are big overhead of these occ- of these, uh, conquered places, and you've also damaged them in the conquest, whereas the Allies are, a- 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, uh, 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, uh, 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, um, here's the mathematics of, uh, the main front. Only two countries have really big armies, Germany and Russia. Uh, once the Germans take, maximize their territorial conquest, they've reduced Russian population, because they've conquered all these areas, to less than that of the United States. Yet, nevertheless, the Russians mobilize twice the army that the United States does. And if you look at the mathematics of munitions, the Russians on their lonesome produce more munitions than did Germany. Once the United States gets in the war, we produce 100 billion in whatever dollars it was in, uh, munitions. And in that period, the Germans produced less than 40 billion. So, bad news for Germany on all of these numbers. The trick is getting the munitions to the men. Whereas in World War I, that wasn't feasible, but now these railway lines have been completed and, uh, it's pouring in. And the Lend-Lease aid, you look at it, wow, Britain's getting a lot, Russia quite a bit but less, China nothing. What's going on there? You can only get aid in if there are ports and railways. Japan blockaded China, proof of concept, it can be done. The Japanese did it, and you could not get stuff in. So, what the United States was trying to do, the British thought we were insane, they're probably correct, uh, we were gonna f- we were flying things in over the Hu- uh, Himalayas, called the Hump. Great, so you're gonna fly in the aviation fuel to land that's gonna be the same aviation fuel that's gonna get you back and however many other bombers that you can deal with in China. It's not workable. And Russia, even though it got a lot less than Britain because it's not getting ships, but it's getting equally valuable, useful things. For instance, Russia produces a lot of planes, but it doesn't produce, didn't produce adequate high-octane aviation fuel. The United States had loads of that. The United States produced all kinds of vehicles, all kinds of rolling stock, locomotives, and this is what, uh, Russia used to transport everything. And the United States prevented Russia from going into a famine in the winter of '42, '43. We fed them. Uh, and this Spam in a can, this is Hormel Innerfood's contribution to the war. Everyone had so much Spam during the war, they never want- it's canned pork. No one ever wanted to see it again, but a little can of pork, uh, it- it- it goes a long way and it doesn't spoil in a can. And this Lend-Lease aid goes, a quarter of it goes up through Murmansk. A lot of it gets sunk up there and not reliable. Quarter of it goes through Persia, and then half of it goes over the Trans-Siberian. And you go, "Well, what's this Axis alliance about? Why aren't the Japanese sinking any of this," right? Uh, talk about a dysfunctional alliance. All right, so this is to tell you what happened with those Arctic convoys. You can see in '42, a tremendous number of them were sunk (bombs exploding) . And this is fully laden ships with scarce war- war material. So we and the British called them off for most of '42 and most of '43, and Stalin was beside himself. And so in '43 he's sending out feelers to Hitler trying to do a separate peace, and luckily, Hitler was not interested. Uh, Hitler wasn't wasting his time with targeting empty ships on the home voyage. He was only going after the laden one. Okay, so what is all this Lend-Lease aid support? What does it add up to? Uh, well, in Barbarossa, you got three million plus Russians going after three million Germans. That's a lot of people to supply and tie up, and as you watch that go, the Axis is killing Russians or making them POWs by the millions. Uh, but it's suffering 15% losses of its forces and it's gonna add up. So that when you get to August '41, that's when the siege of Leningrad, Saint Petersburg begins. By December, the Axis are within 25 miles of Moscow. It is not looking good at all. But once the United States is in the war, uh, you can start doing peripheral theaters like in North Africa. And then these casualties while they aren't as significant as what's going on on the main front, it's cumulative. So Stalingrad, the largest battle of the war is going on. You got North Africa, and then when you have Kursk which is the largest set piece battle of the war, it's big, big tank battle. Uh, this is when Sicily's happening and moving up the Italian peninsula. And you can see the cumulative effects of these sequential operations in adding up both the main theater and the peripheral theater. Uh, so that when you get to Normandy, the-It's- the Russians are tying up 228 Axis divisions. There are only 58 Axis divisions, all in Euro- Western Europe, Italy and everywhere. So that's what makes Normandy possible, is the Russians really holding on to things. But when you start looking at the main front peripheral operations in Italy and then Normandy and then you have additional fronts in France and then the Balkans, this continental cancer is into remission, that the Germans just can't sustain it. Okay, to summarize. Uh, before Britain had allies in this war, it was in a world of h- of hurt. It was just losing one thing after another. But once you get the big continental buddy, don't dismiss the importance of a big continental buddy, that is in the area where the fighting is taking place, not separated by the seas, but there with a big army, that was essential. And then once the United States gets in with its big productive base, then you can really start doing things because if you can command the seas, that's what the Battle of the Atlantic is about, then you can connect the world and get the- uh, connect allies, theaters, resources. So, um, here are the operational effects of these peripheral operations. You start with one where you can. If you win there, it'll open up a menu of more promising locations. All the while you're retreading your enemy's forces. And also, if you're doing it right, you're relieving pressure on the main front wh- for Russia which is doing the heavy lifting. The strategic effects, if you can do this successfully, is you're gonna control resources for yourself, deny them from people you don't like, and this'll help put time on your side. You're strengthening your alliance system bec- because you're essential to each other's survival as you coordinate things and you're dividing your enemy's attentions among multiple theaters, overextending them. So you start by trying to contain the problem and as things go on you try to roll it back and then you go for regime change. So you're producing cumulative effects from these sequential operations. So that's how it works. Um, Churchill, the great wit, uh, talked about the hassles of dealing with allies, right? You're into- these are high stakes discussions. They don't always go pleasantly, but his idea is there's only one thing worse than fighting with allies, that's fighting without them, because they'll be toast. You need these complementary capabilities, different locations, and coordinating it to gang up on your continental problem. Also, if you stick with it, you can help establish, uh, precedents, laws, institutions that'll hold the peace after the war. So that's his take. All right, so I've given you a big exposition on, um, maritime solutions to continental problems, which are in a global war, which is blockade and then countering their commerce raiding, peripheral operations, uh, uh, massive production, and then joint and combined operations.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel47:52

      I've been wanting a custom research tool that I can use to prep for upcoming interviews, something that will summarize papers that I need to read and generate flash cards and suggest questions that I can ask the guest. So I decided to try just building it myself using Warp. And honestly, I just really love the experience of working with it. The way I would describe Warp is that it's like Cloud Code, but with a much nicer UI. I got most of the application working after just the one shot and then Warp made it really easy to iterate with the agent to fix minor bugs and to improve the UI. I can see exactly how the edits were being made in the text files themselves just by clicking the expand icon. And if I needed to change a variable or something, I could just do it through the inline editor. The navigation is way nicer than if it was a native terminal based tool. It's much easier to scroll through everything and understand all of the model's actions. It's exactly the right interface for coding with agents. You can try Warp today by going to warp.dev/dwarkesh and with the code DWARKESH, you can get the Warp pro plan for only five dollars. Okay,

5. 48:53 – 1:01:21

   Russia’s & China’s geographic prisons

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel48:53

      back to Sarah.

   2. SPSarah Paine48:54

      So that was then. How about now? Okay, this is what NATO looks like. And you can look at the United States with our western and eastern coasts that are unencumbered. You wouldn't be able to blockade those. The two narrow seas are the Sea of Labrador and the Caribbean. But basically, hard to imagine that the United States Navy wouldn't be able to deploy in wartime with a c- and the same thing true on the big peninsula of Europe. Yeah, I get it, uh, Turkey may not be able to deploy, but Spain, France, and, uh, Norway, uh, they're there, these unencumbered coastlines. They'll probably get their navies out. Eurasia is a completely different story. This is where China and Russia live. No one's done this to them. This is just the way it is. It's all of these narrow seas that become kill zones in wartime. I've described it to you how it works. And I get it, there's the Arctic up there, but there's no economic activity or population, so, uh, being able to run things in the Art- Arctic doesn't do you very good, do you very much good. So nature naturally contains both Russia and China. It's just the way it is. So let's start with Putin here, Vlad the Bad, on his little Mongol pony, uh, continental mode of transport. If you live there, what can you get out of it? Uh, it's a long horse ride if you're gonna do it that way. So, um, whom can he blockade? Well, he's got one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, which has been, um, under repair since 2018. A long time to be in the shop. It, uh, uh, it required the largest, um, dry dock that Russia has to repair it, and then it flipped the dry dock which then gashed the hull and there's been all sorts of charges of embezzlement, various fires on board. It's not getting repaired any time fast. And it's just like an occupational hazard.... problem, so that one's not doing him any good. He's got, um, Putin has got two, uh, liquid playgrounds that he likes. One's the Black Sea. Uh, before he got involved with Ukraine, in theory, he could have blockaded, I guess, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Georgia if he wanted to. That was why he's so interested in the Kerch Strait, which would blockade the Sea of Azov, 'cause he wanted to take Ukraine from east to west. That was part of the plan. Oh, yeah, and he used to have, or maybe still does, unknown, one overseas base, Tartus, Syria. Talk about a garden spot. And I guess if you want to go bomb civilians, that would be a location for you. Um, but now that Bashar al-Assad has moved to Moscow, it's un- (laughs) unclear how that works. But in any case, it's a useless base, 'cause in wartime, no one gets through the Dardanelles. That place can be shut down for, um... with mines. And, uh, the Ukrainians have shown that you don't even need a navy to stop a navy in narrow seas. It should be a real wake-up call to anyone on a narrow sea that just by using drones and, uh, shore, shore or- ordnance and planes and things, uh, that you can wreck navies. And in fact, the Russian naval base used to be at Sevastopol on Crimea. Putin's had to move it to Novorossiysk. Uh, great, so he can't do too much there. Have fun with that one. So, there are many fewer possibilities for him nowadays. His second f- uh, favorite liquid playground's the Baltic. Kaliningrad is sovereign Russian territory. So back in the day, I guess, if they wanted to blockade the Baltic states, they could try it, but after the latest iteration of the Ukraine war, Sweden and Finland have ditched neutrality. They're part of NATO. Baltic states are also NATO. So the Baltic is really a NATO lake. There's not too much Putin can do there, so his latest gig is cutting underseas cables. That's about where he's at. I mean, look at trying to leave the Baltic. It's, uh, it- it doesn't happen in wartime. You're stuck in there. So, it turns out that Putin... Russia is much more vulnerable to blockade than the other way around, 'cause it's very easy to close up the Baltic and Black Seas. Uh, you look out on what's going on, and (sighs) uh, they're, uh, they're hemmed in, and, uh, it's all way up north. Uh, Russia has two really big naval bases, one on the Bering Sea and one on the Barents Sea, but the problem is when they deploy out of those bases, they have to go by NATO territory. So if they're in the Barents Sea, you can see why Greenland and Iceland are so strategic, 'cause for Russia to deploy, it's gotta go in between those places. And then on the Bering Sea, the more promising one for Russia, it has to go by the United States, and... But the problem is, how do you supply the thing on the Bering Sea? It's just a long way from any industrial base. So, uh, another part of s- Putin's, uh, sad story has to do with NATO. So if you look at NATO, you can look at its accession in arcs. Initially, e- in the Cold War, the early Cold War, it's all these smaller European nations, and everybody's smaller than Russia. It's by far the biggest country on the planet, and why they need more territory remains a mystery. But, uh, initially, it's the smaller places joining NATO to protect themselves, and then at the implosion of the Soviet Union, it's all its former satellites fleeing at the first possible moment and saying, "NATO, NATO, let me in." And then, uh, with the Ukraine, 2022, uh, part of the Ukraine war, Sweden and Finland, which long had preferred neutrality said, "Whoa, no, no, we're gonna join NATO." Now, the Russians look at this, and they go, "Well, this is NATO coming at us in arcs." They're ignoring their complicity in all of this. If you occupy places and brutalize them for generations, uh, this is what you get. So, here is, um, Putin's muse, or I don't know if it's his muse, but it's a guy who expresses a lot of ideas like Putin's, Alexander Dugin. Here's his view of how the world should be. It's not over a universal rules-based order where we all trade with each other. Uh, it's rather we're gonna divide it up into these spheres of influence where each is a world into itself. Dugin's worked it out for all of us, (laughs) uh, but here are the places that, uh, Russia's actually taken lately. At the end of the Cold War, it took Transnistria from Moldova. Uh, in 2008, uh, it took Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia, and then 2014, uh, it's taking Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk from Ukraine, and then look how it really works. This is a continental view. You wanna color it all in. That's what the 2022 invasion of Ukraine is. It's the way a continental power looks at territory. All right, the United States thinks that Putin is just all worried about us and NATO. Actually, Putin's problem is China. NATO doesn't want Russian territory. Who would want it? It's full of Russians. Um, (laughs) stay at home, please. Don't... Just don't leave. (laughs) But China might want, and also, Putin has said, you know, if you really feel deeply about a place, forget about boundary treat- treaties, you should be able to take it. Well, Czarist Russia took a lot of places from China that the Chinese might feel deeply about that have precisely the resources that China needs, not only energy and all those sorts of things out in Siberia but water. Lake Baikal holds 20% of the world's surface freshwater, and China's been blowing through its water table in North China. And that one, I think the topography works that you could do a fairly, uh... you could pipe it all in. So, here's Putin dumping his ordinance on Ukraine, that never wanted to invade, uh, while he's letting this problem mis-hyesticize. Oh, and speaking of the problem, here he is. Um, what are Xi Jinping's possibility? You like the little natty upgraded mouse suit? Here's his world. Welcome to it. And what he's got are 20 neighbors, 13 by land, seven by sea, many of which despise China for excellent reasons, not all of them, but some of them. And if you look at it, it's all of these narrow seas. If Xi Jinping wanted to blockade somebody, I guess you could try Korea, 'cause you got the Yellow Sea and then the...... Sea of Japan, except Japan sits out there. That's a complicating factor. Uh, better bets in the South China Sea because Vietnam, Brunei, and Cambodia, they don't have alternate coastlines. If they wanna reach the open oceans, they've gotta transit the South China Sea. However, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan all have other coastlines, uh, that face the high seas. And remember, I've just given you a whole discussion about the Battle of the Atlantic where, um, when people get the... have a high-seas access, it's really difficult to shut them down, 'cause China would have to go all the way around to be on the far side to shut everything down on the other side, or maybe they're just gonna obliterate it. I don't know. But anyway, the South China Sea is such a legal mess. No, no one knows who owns what and in any kind of war, you're gonna have all these neutrals who might suddenly join sides if they don't like what's happening. But you can get a sense of what the possibilities are there. It's very difficult. Usually, uh, in a war, we've already done narrow seas, right? The North Sea, the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, they shut down in wartime to commercial traffic. It simply can't make it through and surface fleets have great difficulty. And if the neighbors, as Ukraine has shown, just buy the right drones and, uh, since the sea is a little bigger, buy some submarines, uh, some planes, shore artillery, that might be enough to just, uh, close down China's merchant marine, uh, certainly the merchant marine but also its navy. So if you wanna go the other way of, well, okay, what about Xi Jinping doing a surprise visit on the West Coast? There's a lot of open ocean. Hawaii would be the nearest big island, and it's a long way away, and Hawaii's dependent on imports for everything. It's not very useful. But for the United States going the other way, uh, the islands get bigger and better the closer to China that you get. So to, uh, leave you with Alfred Thayer Mahan, captain and later admiral, by far the most famous person ever associated with the US Naval War College, where I spent my career, uh, here are his prerequisites for playing the maritime game. One, you need a moat. You've gotta have insulation from attack if you wanna play this game. You need a dense internal transportation grid to get the goods out in peacetime, reliable egress by sea to get the navy out in wartime, a dense coastal population that's gonna be running all the trade, commerce-driven economy, and then you need a government that's stable, that is gonna support funding a navy and supporting commerce. Okay, let's line up Russia and China with these prerequisites. Well, neither one's got a moat. Uh, they got more ni- neighbors than any other two other countries on the planet. So definitely not that. Uh, internal transportation grid, Russia's remains lamentable, China's is getting better. Uh, neither one has reliable egress by sea with these narrow seas. Sure, Russia's got the Arctic but there's nothing up there. I mean, there are polar bears. Great, ge- go get bitten. Uh, and as for dense coastal population, yes, China has a dense coastal population but Russia doesn't, way up north. Uh, Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China was more so under Deng Xiaoping but under Xi Jinping he is privileging the crony sector over the private sector, and neither one has stable government institutions. The litmus test of that one is whether you have transparent regular transfers of power, usually through elections, and dictator for life does not remotely qualify. So sure, China and Russia remain continental problems but I don't think they understand the maritime limitations of where they're at. And of course, peace would be the better thing. Keep compounding, uh, growth, and war as, uh, the Ukrainian sh- uh, war shows, uh, daily, uh, what a waste of Russian assets. But sadly, the enemy gets a vote. All right, that's what I had to say for you this evening, and thank you so much for coming and being such a wonderful audience. Thank you. (audience clapping)

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel1:01:18

      Okay, first question.

6. 1:01:21 – 1:15:53

   Hitler’s blunders & America’s industrial might

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel1:01:21

      Um, the lecture is framed as explaining Britain's, uh, strategic wins a- in how they prosecuted World War II. But if... It seems like we really have to explain, um... What, what seems to be happening is that Germany and Hitler specifically keep making mistakes. So, um, 1940, 1941, Halifax is saying, "Look, we need to come to a peace with Germany. We've lost the Battle of France. We've had to evacuate Dunkirk." And then Hitler could have done a blockade of Britain and could have just kept prosecuting the war but instead he decides to open up a second front against the other biggest army in the entire world, against the Soviet Union. And then when Japan does Pearl Harbor, which again was a unforced error, he makes another error on top of that of declaring war on America, which he didn't have to do, and which made it much easier for America to lend support against the, on the war against Germany. So this seems much more about Hitler continually bungling than about Britain getting the strategic picture right.

   2. SPSarah Paine1:02:28

      It's both, um, but I don't know that Germany ever, uh, blockading Britain. It was more he was planning to invade Britain if he could and then, um, he lost so many naval assets doing the Norway campaign, which he really needed to do, uh, that he doesn't have the naval assets that he had at the beginning of the war. That's unlike World War I where the Germans basically... They had their whole fleet, most of it, at the end of the war and then it gets scuttled at the end of the war. This time, uh, Germany did the, the smart thing which is to use that fleet, get something. They get Norway but then they don't have a fleet so I don't think invading... Uh, it's-... un- it's difficult. Uh, and then I think because he's in the big petroleum deficit zone, he's gotta get moving. Uh, I don't... um, I'm not clear that he had tons of choices. About... He's gotta go for resources, right? The oceans have been shut off for him. Uh, the whole proposition of what he's up to is questionable, right? But it doesn't mean that it isn't a really bitter struggle and difficult. And even though you go, "Well, Germany's GNP, if- if you add it up compared to the totality of the Allies' access, the Allies have so much more stuff." Yeah, I mean, uh, you can go, "Well, I th- I think the Allies are gonna win this thing," but after how many millions of losses? And I showed you the Battle of the Atlantic. It- it goes this way, it goes that way, it goes this way, it goes that way. A lot of people are dying all- all this. So yeah, the Germans made errors. This fir- first one is, why even go to war? If you wanna dominate Europe and you have a really, uh, uh, great, uh, growth rates, which World- in World War I, they did, uh, they would have taken over Europe years ago by just growing, right? Now, don't- don't do either world war. Just keep growing your economy and then you're gonna have all these good business relations. So, uh, the- the- the ultimate... also, the error is even going to war for these things, but it doesn't mean these wars, uh, couldn't have gone the other way. And you're right. Uh, you look at blunders, uh, but you call it a blunder now, because it didn't work out. At the time, you don't know, right? Uh, a lot of people, uh, get away with really, uh, risky things and then you say they're brilliant, and then the ones who- who don't get away with the risky things, you say they're idiots. But it's dicey.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:48

      Mm. But I- I wanna come back to the question of how much... W- when we're trying to explain who wins a big war like this, how much should we be looking at the specific strategies used in different battles, versus just the total tonnage of industrial output that America es- especially contributed? And so by 1942, what is the way... even if they had much better strategy, what is the way in which Germany would have won?

   4. SPSarah Paine1:05:10

      Define win. Right? What- uh, what is wi- win? If Germany's win means controlling the entire continent plus Britain plus Russia, you come up with one answer.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:21

      Mm.

   6. SPSarah Paine1:05:22

      Right? If Hitler had just done the Anschluss, right? That's Austria joins, and maybe done the Ser- Sudetenland, which is a large German population in Czechoslovakia, and quit, he'd be called Bismarck II, a genius. Like, no losses, gets to keep that bigger area. But that's not who he is. So you need to define what win is for both the Germans and then both for the Allies to determine what's feasible and what's not feasible. Germany is- is... potentially can be invaded over land everywhere, whereas Britain can't. And then, uh, Germany just cannot deploy a navy the way Britain can. It's just geography. And therefore, Germany should have bought a completely different navy to skip the surface fleet, buy a lot more U-boats. Maybe they would have zapped, uh, the British before the United States gets its act together in either world war. Right? Do it fast, then do it.

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel1:06:18

      Um, I- I- I found your thesis that Britain fought this very effective maritime strategy really interesting, but let me just try out a different- different theory for you and make sure it rings true.

   8. SPSarah Paine1:06:26

      All right, counterargument, here we go. Yes.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel1:06:28

      So, um, after the fall of France in June 1940, Germany has all these U-boats and they're actually, themselves, running a very effective maritime strategy. They're not... In the Atlantic, they're not- not in the narrow seas, right? They can actually-

   10. SPSarah Paine1:06:40

       Yeah.

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel1:06:41

       ... go through the ocean and cut off British trade through the Atlantic. Uh, in October, I think... uh, October of 1940, I think they sink, like, close to 400 or 500,000 tons-

   12. SPSarah Paine1:06:51

       It's huge.

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel1:06:52

       ... of, um, of British shipping. So, you know, the Br- Germans are running this, like, very effective blockade of Britain, and the reason it fails is just that the Americans eventually can just produce many more ships than the Germans could even sink. And so ultimately, it wasn't a matter of who ran the better maritime strategy. It was just that who could keep up the industrial output to sustain this strategy. So it co- it comes back to industry and not strategy-

   14. SPSarah Paine1:07:21

       Uh, well-

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel1:07:22

       ... even- even for these maritime operations. I'm curious what you think.

   16. SPSarah Paine1:07:24

       Well, A, it's not... they're not blockading Britain. Britain's getting all its- uh, its stuff out, but then they get sunk somewhere else. Blockade is when you're actually keeping things in.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel1:07:33

       Mm.

   18. SPSarah Paine1:07:33

       So Germany has exactly zero merchant marine going anywhere, right? The stuff that you're talking about being sunk, most- they're naval ships, but a lot of it is merchant marine, because the British are getting things out. Tremendous amounts of it are getting out. So, um, that's just a difference, and then, uh, you're correct about the importance of productive bases. Britain's problem in World War II that's different from the Napoleonic Wars, uh, is when you change to oil as what's powering your sh- uh, your ships and things, Britain doesn't have that at home, whereas coal, it does, uh, some A-list coal. And so when you're doing age of sail and coal, the British are okay, but then when you're changing energy sources, they're definitely not okay. So, uh, there are other factors that are going in with them. But you're right about- uh, the productive base, but then there's another game to play, which I think is worth playing. It's the game of Takeaway. So you're telling me...There's this factor which is economic size and it's decisive, that this will determine the outcome of wars. And you're absolutely right that it's important. Air power enthusiasts will say, "No, no, no, that's nonsense." It's all about controlling the sky, so when you control the air and you got air cover for your convoys, that- that's what do, does it. So let's talk about why the Battle of the Atlantic turns out the way it is. Um, if I take away, uh, cryptography, would it have turned out the same way? Negative. Um, if I take away not just sheer amount of technology, um, but certain key pieces like radar and those things, what happens? Does it change? Yes, it does. Do, uh... What happens if the United States just doesn't like alliances, that you don't coordinate things par- particularly well, does it change things? Yes, it does. You can go through a list of this, um, of different people are designing different types of ships, uh, and o- are also determining that you're gonna share things with Britain. Uh, Britain's providing a lot of free stuff. So if you play, remove any one of these things, that Battle of the Atlantic turns out differently. So the story is, um, it's probably a package of many things. And this whole game of take away, um, when you have people who will come up with a mono-causal explanation for you and they'll go one cause, and they'll probably be right that th- their one cause is really important, but then they're just ignoring all these other things.

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel1:10:07

       Hmm.

   20. SPSarah Paine1:10:07

       So that's the more important thing in strategy. So your, your thing is it's truly important.

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel1:10:13

       Hmm. I, I guess the question then is w- what does changing things mean? Does it mean that the war could have gone on longer or shorter, et cetera? Yes, of course, anything would have changed that. There's another question of would it have changed who won the war? And I claim that cryptography, radar, even oil, even if, like r- even if Germany had a huge reserve of oil, maybe it would have len- lengthened the length at which Germany could have sustained itself. But, um, if you change the fact that the Axis had one fourth of the GDP of the Allies combined, I think that, it's true that that genuinely changes who wins the war, whereas these other things actually wouldn't change who won the war.

   22. SPSarah Paine1:10:52

       Well, it depends whether the war is a war for limited or unlimited objectives, because you can play that game with the Russo-Japanese War. Japan... All the data you talk about Japan, it's a fraction of Russia. And Russia gets trounced in the Russo-Japanese War. So there's something up, uh, what's going on, whereas Japan is having a very limited objective and Russia has other problems at home and is willing to bail, that's one thing. But there's another thing. If Germany had simply never bought a surface fleet, if they'd been sensible... Surface fleet, yeah, it's great Britain's got one, but it can always deploy that thing. Germany will never deploy its surface fleet. I- it'll get it sunk, which is what happened in the Norwegian campaign. At least they... The... From the German point of view, they got Norwa- Norway out of it. Um, but if they had simply bought U-boats instead, I don't know whether it would've... You'd have to do the math and I haven't done that, of their... What their goal would need to be is, uh, to knock Britain out before the United States ever gets into the war.

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel1:11:52

       Right.

   24. SPSarah Paine1:11:52

       Oh, definitely do not declare war (laughs) on the United States, 'cause maybe if you can keep the commerce rating going for another six months, maybe Britain falls, maybe that, maybe that's the pivotal error. It has nothing to do with what you're talking about, it's simply Hitler shouldn't have declared war. I don't know, but there, there are many factors that go into these things. And that's why it's... Uh, it's, it's a reason why you should listen to people who disagree with you, that they may see some of these other factors, right? Um, we all have blind spots and we rely on other people to find them, but then you have to be receptive to listening.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel1:12:30

       Hmm. When Germany and the Soviet Union split up Poland, there's this just 2,000 kilometer border from the Baltics to the Black Sea that they signed themselves up for, for sharing with the other largest army that has ever been assembled.

   26. SPSarah Paine1:12:44

       Mm-hmm.

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel1:12:45

       Did the Soviet Union think that-

   28. SPSarah Paine1:12:47

       No.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel1:12:47

       ... in the long run that this was a sustainable proposition or did they just think that we could, um, we could wait Hitler out or in the long run, you know, we'd, we'd be in a better position to wage war against him? Like did, did people think that this was a sustainable arrangement?

   30. SPSarah Paine1:13:00

       Oh, I don't think S- uh, Hitler was about sustaining any arrangement.
7. 1:15:53 – 1:25:54

   Bismarck’s limited wars vs Hitler’s total war

   1. SPSarah Paine1:15:53

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:15:53

      Um, you described Hitler's strategy as pursuing a continental strategy, and that was sort of his undoing. Um, but it seems like there's many other wars where a more reasonable person can pursue a continental strategy and do just fine. So Bismarck, uh, m- does multiple continental wars, Franco-Prussian War, Austro-Prussian War.

   3. SPSarah Paine1:16:13

      Yeah, yeah.

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel1:16:13

      And achieves his objectives. And Hitler's just freaking crazy. Like he continuously does things, um, he knows that going to war with Poland in 1939, France and Britain will join. He's like, "I, I will fight both of them for Poland," for some reason.

   5. SPSarah Paine1:16:26

      Resources, big resources.

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel1:16:28

      Somehow that works. Then he gets, uh, somehow he fa- France falls in a few weeks. Instead of stopping there, he decides, "Now I'm gonna go to war with the whole of the Soviet Union." He decides... Well, and, uh, in what way is it a continental strategy to then declare war on America, which is an ocean away? It's not even an adjacent continental power. So it seems, uh, it just like, him being crazy explains more than him pursuing-

   7. SPSarah Paine1:16:49

      Let's talk about-

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel1:16:50

      ... a continental strategy.

   9. SPSarah Paine1:16:52

      ... Bismarck. Bismarck did not, it, this is the difference between limited and unlimited objectives. And these concepts which I've tried to, uh, transmit in these lectures I think are useful, and you apply them to other things. So an unlimited objective means the state in question is not gonna exist at the end of the war. And if it's really unlimited, and Hitler does the most unlimited variant, he's gonna kill all the people, like, uh, Slavs, he's gonna literally butcher them all. So that's one kind of war. A limited war means you want maybe a hunk of territory, something less, the opposing government's gonna live. So Bismarck runs three wars. One is the Danish War, then there's the Austro-Prussian War, and then there's the Franco-Prussian War. In the Danish War, it's about a couple of provinces in the far south of Denmark that, uh, Bismarck covets, 'cause he wants to reunify, uh, well, unify for the first time all these Germanic states. So for, and he trounces Denmark in that war. Does he go for regime change in Copenhagen? No way. He just says, "Cede this place that you shouldn't have had anyway 'cause it's got a bunch of Germans in it." And so if you think about va- this is another concept, value of the object. How much is victory worth to you versus the other guy? For Denmark, of just making Bismarck go away, and this little state, um, the value of the object's lower to them, 'cause they aren't thinking in terms of creating a greater Germany, which Bismarck is. So you have two things going on. You're not, you g- you're giving the Danes, given how much the Prussians trounced them, a generous peace. You're saying, "Just get rid of this Germanic part that you don't really much care about." So he gets away with that one. Then in the Austrian, the war against Austria, he just slams them. He's got this railway system that allows him to deploy, where the Austrians can't. And there are all these little Germanic states watching all this going on, and they're starting to confederate sort of with Prussia, um, because they're scared of all of this. And so, um, instead of doing re- regime change in Vienna, it's just saying, "Hey, um, let's cede a few more of these things to Germany." And it was a big empire where you have pieces, you own pieces, you lose pieces, you lose pieces, you own pieces. So for the Austrians, the value of the object, again, is much lower. Given how they were slammed in the war, it seems to be a generous peace. And then when he gets into the Franco-Prussian War, all these little Germanic states are joining with, um, Prussia, and that's gonna create unified Germany, and then he takes a bite too far when he takes Alsace-Lorraine, which the French are totally upset about and becomes, they never give up on that one. But all of these objectives are limited objectives. He's not overthrowing the Danish government, the Austrian government, or the French government, and the value for Prussians of unifying the Germanic states is far greater than the places that are losing, these itty-bitty places. Also, they don't get the big picture. They don't see it 'til it's done that, whoops, um, by doing all of this, Prussia has transformed itself from the weakest of the five great powers of Europe to second only to Britain. And that's ex post facto, and it's the real reason why you don't want royalty running stuff. You want people who get their jobs based on merit rather than who their dad was, 'cause it's, and the world that Bismarck's dealing with is kings, who are just clueless what they're up to.

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:23

       I, I interviewed last year, Daniel Yergin, who wrote this big history of-

   11. SPSarah Paine1:20:28

       Oil?

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:28

       ... oil. And he has like 300 pages in his book about World War II.

   13. SPSarah Paine1:20:33

       Uh-huh.

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:33

       And specifically that, h- his claim is Barbarossa was motivated by Hitler's desire to get the oil fields of Baku.

   15. SPSarah Paine1:20:38

       Yes, yeah, he needed it, because he had this big, uh, petroleum deficit zone.

   16. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:42

       Right.

   17. SPSarah Paine1:20:42

       And so, uh, when you say, "Stupid to invade Russia," probably it's, once you've done this number, you have to go into Russia, 'cause you've gotta take those oil fields. Then you can go, "Buddy, don't go for Moscow. Forget those people. Just go straight for the oil fields. Take that only." That would be, uh, that would be more of the blunder.

   18. DPDwarkesh Patel1:21:01

       Hmm.Um, i- is there any world in which Hitler w- would have surrendered by 1943 when it was clear that the war was gonna go the other way?

   19. SPSarah Paine1:21:11

       Uh, dictators don't. They just double down. This is the beauty of, uh, of elections. I get it, it's a mess with a multi, uh, party system and with all the crazy politics that come and go with it, but elections are our moment to reassess. When the party in power sufficiently screws things up, the, where people finally go, "Ew, this is a mess," the elections... The party in power isn't reassessing, the election is reassessing for them. You know human beings. You've, we've all met many. Um, most human beings (laughs) don't like to change their mind. I think it's a terrible mistake and that's why I like the argument, as you know, counterargument structure to try to take some of the sting out of changing our minds. 'Cause double down, doubling down on bad decisions, it's a mistake, but we human beings do it. And then if you have a dictator, you're guaranteed. Putin is not gonna dict-, uh, is not going to, uh, back down in Ukraine. Uh, he's gonna be going after it from now until doomsday. And then if he wins there, he's gonna then go after the Baltic states. It's not gonna end. So sadly, the enemy gets a vote and you may go, "Well, these are idiot decisions." Yeah, but they're very dangerous ones, so you have to do things to counter them.

   20. DPDwarkesh Patel1:22:25

       Hmm. I mean, in World War I, you do have a lot of powers which have at least some amount of franchise.

   21. SPSarah Paine1:22:30

       Oh, yeah.

   22. DPDwarkesh Patel1:22:30

       And in that war, I think people should've just ba- i- it would have been much better to lose the war in 1914 or '15 than to continue waging it until 1917. But no, even the demok- even Britain doesn't back down-

   23. SPSarah Paine1:22:41

       Oh, it-

   24. DPDwarkesh Patel1:22:41

       ... or France doesn't back down.

   25. SPSarah Paine1:22:42

       Well, the problem in that war... This is another thing that I think's really helpful to do, is, to the best of your abilities, write down primary adversary, secondary adversary, tertiary adversary. So take all the powers in World War I and, uh, both sides and do their primary enemy, secondary, third, and you find out it is a mess. Nothing aligns, so that if you try to get out of that war, somebody's not gonna like it because that's their primary objective. And there's al- a lot of, um, bad overlaps and who's gonna get whatever parts of the Balkans, they think, at the end of this war. And so in a way, you have World War I, um, you really have to sit down and look at it. I mean, if I were doing a lecture on that, I have a whole, uh, other slides that would show you this, where they're fighting parallel wars. And, uh, it's really not a good idea to either have royalty running the show or the... Uh, World War I is the war where militaries on all sides are running the show and civilians are doing the back seat saying, "Well, I don't really understand military operations. We're gonna let you boys do it." Disaster. That war sets communism and fascism, it puts them on steroids. And you can argue, um, we've been dealing with that mismanagement in one way or another ever since, because, uh, for most of my life, I thought we had put fascism back in its box and so we were down to dealing with communism. But now it seems that, uh, this very authoritarian vision, which seems to rhyme with fascism, and then you can get in a big argument what, what precisely is fascism and you try to define it, but it seems like we've come full circle, uh, in the collective West, uh, and it's, um, uh, toxic in, in, in a way, uh, dealing with all of this. So World War I is the absolutely mismanaged war, and then the people who lived through that, uh, set up these institutions that have held the peace until the present day when, uh, irresponsible leaders across the globe, um, are not cautious enough, and here we are. And then there's a price to pay if you, if th- the, there, if you have a bunch of reckless drivers on the road trying to play chicken with each other, uh, how this will all end, and I don't know the answer.

   26. DPDwarkesh Patel1:25:01

       Hmm.

   27. SPSarah Paine1:25:01

       So anyway, that's my reason for doing lectures on strategy, is I'm gonna give you, uh, concepts, uh, some data to think about, 'cause you're gonna have to form your own opinions and your own conclusions, but try to make it evidence-based and think about things. I recommend reading things more deeply. Don't take what any one person has to say. Come to your own terms. That's the reason for doing all this. We're living in really portentous times where, uh, people are, may make decisions where there's no going back. I mean, if we blow our alliance system, we're gonna be dealing with China alone. That won't go well. Particularly if we think we're gonna s- uh, corner them in some way, gonna go corner a great power like China and think that'll go well for us. It won't.

   28. DPDwarkesh Patel1:25:45

       Hmm. The reason I brought up earlier the primacy of, uh, industrial output and population size in determining who wins a war-

Episode duration: 1:36:07