agip wrote:
deflatagate wrote:Hitler himself...........you fools!
this is an overlooked answer - Germany lost because Hitler was a Nazi - the Germans had by far the best army, but Hitler made war decisions based on Nazi ideology - again and again. These decisions defeated the Germans more than anything else.
he had his empire by 1940, but then he kept going into Russia, declined to finish off the Brits at Dunkirk out of some sense of racial brotherhood with the English, and stupidly declared war on the US, consistently undermined his generals when they were too pragmatic. etc..
Also, russian bullet catchers (men) and US military supplies.
Yup. Their approach to their multiple fronts made them come out behind on everything. Dunkirk, Operation Sealion (never happened), the Battle of El Alamein, Operation Barbarossa... if the Nazis just focused on concentrating the vast majority to one huge breakthrough and sealed it, the Allies would have been in serious deep sh!t. Then they could engage in multi-front measures at their leisure.
(yes, Operation Barbarossa was the biggest military invasion in world history, but still was affected by dilution on other fronts/previous endeavors).
Thank God they didn't.
Hitler, while a front soldier in the Great War, had no tactical/strategic expertise and failed to defer to his capable generals when necessary. Contrast that with the pinnacle of Mongol conquests and early empire solidarity across vast distances with less advanced communication technology, where competent generals and sub-leaders were chosen for and given trust and independence.
(Thank goodness for that.)
Third Reich ideology?
On the surface, Nazi ideology can clearly be named as detrimental to their war effort: It alienated and sent much of their intellectuals and scientists scrambling, into exodus or, out of tyranny, mum on creativity and innovation. How much resource was squandered on handling "the Jewish question?" How many assimilated Jewish German citizens, many whom had demonstrated loyalty to Germany in the past (WWI), could have been useful to a second war?
But the dawn of the Second world war probably would not have been reached like it had without anti-Semitism and concomitant political demagoguery/fascist populism (blame Internationalism! blame the unpatriotic Capitalists! blame the Communists! blame the non-master race, bal bla). The tools of the Nazi ideology were required to cheat their way to power. Their ascendancy had more than a few mortal crises.
Without such a virulent ideology expressed through tactics devoid of any moral consistency, they would not have been able to divide and conquer all opposing political factions.
Sadly, this virulence probably was a necessary ingredient in invigorating belligerence and soldering a solidarity of iron rage in the populace for a second world war.
Contributions
49% of the wars' casualties were Soviet Union (a number I arrived at over a decade ago, though there is always new information and margins of error). But rhetoric on forum boards about bulk contribution is not the same question as "who won it," and indeed can obscure the important instructive and peculiar circumstances and conditions required to end the second world war nightmare.
"who won it" breaks down into a number of questions, which applies to both major enemies (Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan).
Concentrating on Nazi Germany, you can break down victory to
1. the prevention of the critical Nazi breakthrough (already discussed somewhat)
and
2. the effort to defeat and destroy Nazi Germany.
In both theatres, closing the ring required special circumstances. In Europe, the Anglo Allies and the Russians closing in on "two" sides. In Japan, nuclear weapons.
In both theatres, the voiceless victims of ultimate indignation, deserve credit and mention. Imperial Japan was as vicious as Nazi Germany, with an equally virulent ideology and iron belligerence. The Japanese committed the utmost atrocities in their imperial expansions, including things too terrible to discuss in public. Manchurians, Chinese and Jews: let us remember their sacrifices.
-Shan Jen, the Mongoloid Semite