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Comment by upon_drumhead | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that I always wondered was how much the safety of home allowed that lead to happen. The US never had any real threats to the mainland and so they were able to focus and just execute without distractions. The majority of the rest of the countries in the war had to balance their manufacturing power and steel production with defense.

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Other countries also had a much larger proportion of the population off fighting and dying. UK casualties in ww2 were 0.94% of the 1939 population, France's were about 1.44%, the USSR's were about 13.4% (of course the USSR was a wild outlier). The USA lost about 0.3% of its 1939 population, still an appallingly huge number, but smaller. Since the people who were off fighting were predominantly the healthy young men who worked in industry at the time the impact on industry was magnified.

The US was able to focus a much greater proportion of its effort on making things.

This. It cannot be understated how blessed geographically the US is.

Even today, it is largely too far from anything really happening in the world.

While this definitely played a factor (I doubt the US would have had over 50% of the global GNP at the end of the war if their factories were getting bombed), the US was a global manufacturing powerhouse in 1937 by any measure; in both raw number of factories, and per-capita productivity the US was far ahead.

The US had more manufacturing capacity than Germany and Japan combined before a single bomb was dropped on a German or Japanese factory.

> The US never had any real threats to the mainland

Hey, the Japanese destroyed the backstop on the baseball diamond at Fort Stevens in Oregon. They literally threatened America's past time! /s

Homefront serenity is what underpins US military primacy, and to large extent hegemony. But that era will come to end with proliferation of conventional global strike.

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