Yes, you make many excellent observations, and certainly there's some merit to the argument that the Nazi wonder weapons might have turned the tide against the Allies had the US been watching from the sidelines.

On the ground, however, the Wermacht stood no chance against the Red Army.

Most of the early losses were as much due to Soviet blundering as to the vaunted Blitzkrieg tactics of the Nazis. Stalin turned a blind eye to obvious Wermacht perparations for the attack which became operation Barbarossa on June 6, 1941, deployed his forces in vulnerable positions, and prevented his commanders from taking sensible defensive actions, in order to avoid provoking the Nazis.

Once the Russians got their act together, the Wermacht's fate was sealed. The Red Army's heavy and medium tanks were superior to their Wermach counterparts, were available in substantially greater numbers, and this latter tank, the T-34, was arguably the decisive weapon in the European theatre.

For all its Teutonic engineering brilliance, German weapons system design of the period is often marked by baffling oversights, flaws, or shortcomings.

In many ways, the Wermacht marched off to do battle with the Russians without the proper equipment, and certainly with no where near the necessary numbers of men, weapons, or transport to even think of conquering a country so vast, so rich in mineral wealth, so populous as was Soviet Russia.

The Russians, meanwhile, had recognized a decade or two before the outbreak of WWII that the Germans would be a likely enemy once again, and so they began a strategic move of heavy industry to the new industrial regions of the Urals and Siberia. After the outbreak of war, this movement was greatly accelerated. Entire vulnerable factories were torn down and moved - lock, stock and barrel - to Siberia or other remote industrial concentrations, sometimes with the railroad sidings under seige as the equipment was loaded aboard the trains.

So it was with the T-34 factory at Kharkov, which was torn down and moved out in September, 1941.

Instructors, students and various other personnel were scraped together with the remaining T-34s at Kharkov to form a Tank Brigade under Colonel Katukov, and it was this formation - the last Soviet armor standing between Moscow and Heinz Guderian's 2nd Panzer Army - which finally brought Guderian's panzers to a halt on October 11th with the destruction of his lead formation, the 4th panzer division, at Mtensk.

The clear superiority of the T-34 had been established, and the panzer General recorded "This was the first occasion on which the vast superiority of the T 34 to our own tanks became plainly apparent."

The Russians did not want - and for the most part did not need - our weapons. Lend Lease contributions of the greatest benefit to the Soviets and the Red Army were probably the motorized transport and raw materials which we game them, and these did play an enormously important role in the great improvement in the fighting ability of the Red Army as the war progressed, and especially its mobility.

But Russian armor was the best in world throughout the war. Every time the Wermacht introduced new tanks - and they were very good tanks - the Russian tank men trumped them, both in quality and quantity. After the political hacks were purged from the Soviet general staff, Soviet generals like Zukhov, Konev, Malinovsky and others restored some measure of competency and finesse to the Soviet formations, and they had a awful lot of tanks, artillary, katyushas, and the ubiquitous 76mm guns.

In the air, the Russians had gained rough parity with the Luftwaffe by the time of the Battle of Stalingrad. The SAF did use some American aircraft, most notably the peculiar Bell Airacobra in which one Russian pilot recorded 50+ kills, possibly Ivan Kozhedub, but I can't check that right now.

It is also a little-known fact that the SAF bombed Berlin throughout the war, and there's no denying the obvious fact that American and British strategic/carpet bombing of German cities had an enormous impact on German production capacity.

For their part, in the 30's, the Germans inexplicably rejected designs for two long range bombers (The Ural Bomber), and so squandered any chance of striking at Soviet industrial capacity deep within Mother Russia.

As for the Japanese, they'd already had their taste of General Zhukov at Kalkin Gal before hositilities broke out in Europe, and were badly mauled by the Soviets, who had gained some experience using precursor models to the T-34. In any event, the Soviets retained adequate forces in the Far East to discourage any thoughts of further Japanese adventures there, and when the Soviets did return their attention to the Manchurian Army after the German surrender - as Stalin had promised at Yalta - it was a rout.

Stalin next set his eyes on Hokkaido, and some think that these latter events contributed to President Truman's decision to nuke Hiroshima and Nakasaki - a message as much for Stalin as for Hirohito.

sp