this article came out in 2016 but your comment reminded me of it. even if you were “hook my private cars up to the railroad” rich, You’d probably still want to stay in 2021. https://cafehayek.com/2016/02/40405.html
Fun fact. These five guys and The Duke of Wellington were the only British participants in The Battle of Waterloo. Im joking obviously but with how British people speak of Waterloo, one would assume they had no allies against Napoleon. Only like a fifth of their own side were actual British soldiers. And even had Napoleon won at Waterloo, The Russians, Austro-Hungarian Empire and Sweden would have made easy work of the remaining forces.
Has anyone of meaningful intelligence ever believed that America beat Nazi Germany on its own? I can see how people with a weak grasp of history might make the Japan claim but it wouldn't be correct.
I’ve never really heard that America beat the axis powers alone. You could argue that America’s entry into the war was the beginning of the end of the axis powers with americas industrial might though. Once America (openly) entered into the war on the allied side, the axis powers were done.
I probably should have phrased it more “the axis would have won without American involvement” which was definitely not a foregone conclusion and almost universally leaves out what the Russians and Chinese were doing until you get to university-level classes.
I've always been curious how differently things would have played out had the axis powers actually communicated with their allies in a strategic manner instead of the "Shock & Awe" both Germany and Japan went with. Keeping both The USSR and USA out of the war before consolidating what they had already gained should have been priority number one for Germany and Japan.
"If the allies had fallen" is an interesting read that you can get for $15 or less. Basically, almost every scenario ends with Axis defeat eventually, though.
Germany, Japan and Italy would have squabbled over where they were in their alliances power pecking order even more so than USA, USSR and GB did.
The Soviets won the European front. Any other argument is purely nationalist and goes against every principle of math
But America deserves all the plaudits for sending them the Dodge Trucks that they used to send those millions of people to the front and tricking the Germans into using up all of their ammunition on them.
Ive read a few sources saying Russia would have struggled to resist Germany without US industrial supplies and manufacturing early on but once they got going they really didn’t need us. The more interesting what-if scenario is what happens if Russia pushes back Germany and America doesn’t get involved. Europe would still likely be under Russian control / proxy control today. Only reason they didn’t push past Germany was the US nuclear shield as Russia was still a few years out from having them. Red Army would have swamped us in a traditional confrontation
Watching WW2 in color on Netflix and one of the most surprising things is how reliant Germany was on horses. Allied forces were shocked as well; they just assumed the Germans were 100% mechanized like we were
the scene in band of brothers where webster taunts them about this after their surrender is pretty funny
World War II is so ubiquitous that I’ve recently decided to put a self-imposed embargo on reading or watching anything to do with it in favor of the rest of history.
The whole inflatable decoy battalion is a great quick dive into the type of planning that was underwent.
Not to belabor the 1978 blizzard, but I also saw these last night. I’ve been in Cincinnati for 18 years and I have never seen the Ohio River freeze once, let alone freeze thick enough to walk across it. The third pick below provides perspective on just how wide the freeze had to cover.
Trash freezes faster than water. As the most polluted river in the country I can see it happening from time to time.
That bottom picture got me curious.....at least 5 people died during the construction of the Empire State Building. I learned also in that article that a B-25 bomber ran into the building at one point, killing numerous people, and causing an elevator (with a 19 yo operator in it) to plummet from the 75th floor to the sub basement. She lived. :themoreyouknow.gif: Spoiler https://www.history.com/news/10-sur...ng was,killed during the construction process.
When my buddy called me nearly twenty years ago to tell me that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, my first reply was So? Some plane in WWII did the same thing at the Empire State Building. Didn't take me long to see that the two events weren't the same....
If Hitler had chosen to stay the fuck out of Russia, most of Europe is Germany today. However, he had a nose full of cocaine and acted accordingly. I am not nearly as informed on the actions of the other allies against Japan. But, I am comfortable thinking that the majority of the heavy lifting was done by the US. Russia was the real MVP in Europe. My FIL and I had an interesting conversation about the holocaust recently. The logistics of moving, killing, and disposing of that many bodies had to seriously tax the German war machine. This leads me to believe that Hitler and at least a lot of his upper management believed the delusions about the Jews being the scourge of their society, If you ever get a chance to go to Auschwitz or Dachau or any other concentration camp, you should go. By a lot the most eye opening trip of my life and I have openly pursued destinations with meaning (like Jerusalem for example).
I'm not. Please elaborate with details. I was hoping someone would blow me out about the inaccuracies of my views on the Japanese portions.
I went to Stutthof on a port visit in poland when I was in the Navy. We were there at the same time a survivor was visiting. Not a dry eye in attendence after he stopped talked to us.
It was breathtaking without a survivor there. Just the scale and the magnitude of killing that many people is crazy. The attitude in Germany even today about the holocaust was really different from what we expected. We will absolutely visit again at some point. We watched everything holocaust related on streaming platforms when we got home. Probably more helpful that we had been to Israel two months before that trip.
Pacific campaign was predominantly a US operation. Britain hemorrhaged territory early and had their hands full back home. But China played an instrumental role tying down Japanese forces. Japan refused to abandon their occupation of China even as US forces neared the Japanese mainland. That fact paired with the island hopping campaign leaving thousands upon thousands of Japanese troops to wither on the vine meant that only a small percentage of Japan's available military resources ever actually engaged US forces in the pacific. Hitler was always invading the USSR unless he was defeated before he got the chance. He writes about it in Mein Kampf. National Socialism and "Jewish" Bolshevism could never be allowed to coexist.
Just the whole way you phrased that second part about the Holocaust. Calling that an interesting conversation and how you both arrived at the conclusion that hitler and co. hated Jewish people is kinda comical. It seems like something someone would say if they only just heard about WW2 and the germans.