Let's be honest, who won WW II for the Allies?

My grandfather hopped islands in the pacific campaign slaughtering japs while his brother bombed nazis in europe and his future wife cared for the injured.

They returned to a major northeastern city and built-out the infrastructure that continues to provide the economic environment on which our country thrives today. They did not have any foolish politicians telling them "you didn't build that".

Anglo-Saxon americans and some jews saved the world from the Nazis and the Japs and then built the foundation of the greatest country in the world.

Liberals resent these fact.

Had the Nazis won, we might be looking like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWXTEuTr7sY

agip wrote:

classic euro snobbery

I'm not European.

agip wrote:

second - clearly it was an allied effort - there was no one country that won. It is silly to say 'the USSR won the war' - they were a big part, as was the US. And anyway, the USSR only got in the war because they had to - they weren't exactly eager to fight Germany. Stalin basically hid for a weak at the start of barbarossa. They would have been fine with a fascist west europe if they could have a communist eastern europe. That is why the uS contribution was so important - it defended W europe from tyranny and laid the basis for the huge post war prosperity. the soviets...would not have taken that route.

The USSR lost over 20 million in WWII. The USA lost 400,000. The USSR were responsible for 80% of German deaths, and the USA only about 20%, if you compare their figures against each other. Nearly all Germans admit that it was the USSR that played the vital part in their own defeat. They have the most objective point of view seeing as they were the ones who were defeated.

I am not minimizing the soviet contribution but I think for some reason you are giving them too much credit.

the 20 million number you cited includes civilians who presumably weren't fighting - hard to give them any credit for defeating germany. They just died - starvation, bullet to the head, whatever - they were not part of the war effort. Many soviets died because the Soviet gov't didn't really want them to live. See Ukraine.

something like 8-10 million soviet soldiers died. Which is a lot.

Anyway, the number of deaths does not mean much in terms of winning wars. You know which country lost the third most? It goes USSR, Germany, then China. China. 2.5 million dead. Does China get credit for defeating Japan because it lost so many people? No. They had little to do with it. China (and the USSR) were just really bad at keeping their people alive.

As for the 80/20 figure you cited - well if the USA had fought germany over several winters in the USSR then the 'credit' would swing the other way. in other words, weather killed a crapload of germans, not soviet bullets. So partial credit.

I can understand why the Germans give more credit to the USSR - for some reasons you cited and also the USSR was brutal in their invasion and occupatio.n

Hingle McCringleberry wrote:

Russia, something like 2/3rds of the German forces were at the eastern front. the western front was the small picture. Only russia can have 20 million casualties for a longer fight and still manage to beat the US who had only fought for a year or so to berlin

Please ignore fake Hingle and his stupidity

Russia just had better farts

also, you have to be careful when citing death figures.

The russians basically killed all their prisoners - true war crimes.

The allies obviously did not do that - so the 'kill' numbers are apples to oranges.

for example, in north africa, the number of German prisoners the allies took was about the same as number of germans who died in stalingrad - in the 400,000-500,000 range. INcluding 275,000 in one day.

So why isn't that considered as important as stalingrad? because capturing troops is far less interesting than something apocalyptic like stalingrad.

runningart2004 wrote:

instead of additional months or years of fighting and bloodshed we dropped the bomb...twice...probably killing less people than the additional fighting to take Japan would have cost.

You can't justify the nukes with a straw-man argument. They could have dropped 20 nukes on Tokyo, if they had that many, and still probably had fewer casualties than an invasion would.

The real crime is that they dropped the bombs on civilians. If they were using the bombs demonstratively, why didn't they drop them on military targets? Annihilating a couple of airbases would have been just as effective a demonstration of their power, maybe even more effective because the Japanese military would have observed it firsthand and quickly informed their government what they were up against.

Instead, they set a precedent that not only is it ok to use nukes in war, but that it's ok to use them as a terror weapon against civilians. For decades afterward, the nuclear arsenals of east and west targeted each others' cities and could easily have annihilated several times the population of Japan in one day. That risk will remain for centuries and is not worth a short-term reduction in casualties.

meaning 275,000 germans were taken prisoner in one day in north africa

Hingle McCringleberry wrote:

Hingle McCringleberry wrote:

Russia, something like 2/3rds of the German forces were at the eastern front. the western front was the small picture. Only russia can have 20 million casualties for a longer fight and still manage to beat the US who had only fought for a year or so to berlin

Please ignore fake Hingle and his stupidity

Russia just had better farts

During the Mongol Hordes' 300 year ethnic re-seeding of the Rus people, the Rus tribes were 100% decimanted. The Rus people sadly became 100% extinct. Some 80% of the original Rus population was completely exterminated by the Mongol Hordes. Yet Russia came back to oust the Mongols. No wonder Russia defeated Germany in WWII.

krispy kremlin wrote:

My grandfather hopped islands in the pacific campaign slaughtering japs while his brother bombed nazis in europe and his future wife cared for the injured.

They returned to a major northeastern city and built-out the infrastructure that continues to provide the economic environment on which our country thrives today. They did not have any foolish politicians telling them "you didn't build that".

Anglo-Saxon americans and some jews saved the world from the Nazis and the Japs and then built the foundation of the greatest country in the world.

Liberals resent these fact.

Not sure why you try to bring Liberal v Conservative into this discussion. If you want to take a political slant, the presidency, the house, and the senate were all Democratic throughout WW2, as probably was the government of that major northeastern city the infrastructure of which your grandfather and granduncle helped to rebuild.

1) are you not aware that bombing targets where civilans would be killed was standard operating procedure in ww2? I don't understand why you focus on the atom bombings out of context. Surely you are aware of other examples of cities being bombed.

2) do you really think that the 'precedent' set by the US means anything? that anyone would use that argumetn?

3) in retrospect it is easy to say the US should have done a demonstration blast instead. But my understanding is that they had 2 bombs and wanted to use them on military targets. Hiroshima was the home of much miiitary, including factories. Same with nagasaki. They were not chosen at random - they were judged critical to the japanese war effort.

Truman had no idea if the Japanese would quit after seeing a remote island blown up. If they had done that and japan had not given up, it would have been a horrible military error.

American bombers were already flying raids over Japan all day long. Tokyo had been firebombed to the ground. Also they didn't have nukes, they were atom bombs. There is a difference.

Your final paragraph does nothing to support your argument because what you describe didn't happen because of the use of the weapons, but simply them being developed and manufactured. People would fear the use of weapons of mass destruction whether that had ever been used or not. We dropped 2 bombs in order to save millions of American and Japanese lives. Had we had to invade mainland Japan, there would be no Japanese culture anymore because they would have forced us to kill them all or committed suicide themselves. There are lots of videos of Japanese parents throwing their children off cliffs before jumping over themselves on Okinawa.

No. Actually after the Civil War, the US didn't have to assault Asia and try and colonize and subjugate the entire Pacific and Asia. The U.S. copied European Empires and tried and failed miserably to enslave Asia. The end came in 1975 when Asia defeated the United States. Now the US is just lame duck, impotent bystander in Asia. But iPhones sell well ;-0)

krispy kremlin wrote:

My grandfather hopped islands in the pacific campaign slaughtering japs while his brother bombed nazis in europe and his future wife cared for the injured.

They returned to a major northeastern city and built-out the infrastructure that continues to provide the economic environment on which our country thrives today. They did not have any foolish politicians telling them "you didn't build that".

Anglo-Saxon americans and some jews saved the world from the Nazis and the Japs and then built the foundation of the greatest country in the world.

Liberals resent these fact.

Had the Nazis won, we might be looking like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWXTEuTr7sY

+1

My father fought in the Pacific islands and his brother kept aircraft in the air over Europe. Mom (future) was at home working, which like most other Americans, kept the war effort fed with cash, food and letters of encouragement.

Also apparent during the massive offensive was the force of matériel supplied by American factories. Countless tons of ammunition, spare parts, vehicles, communications equipment, weapons, and every other conceivable item needed for soldiers in battle arrived in huge quantities. An apocryphal story told of an incident during a German counterattack that had briefly captured an American position. A German intelligence officer inspecting captured material noticed a package containing a birthday cake that had been mailed to a soldier from his family in Boston. Furious at the implication, he demanded to know of his commander how Germany could hope to win a war when they were running short of fuel while the Americans could manage to get a fresh birthday cake to the front lines in a matter of days.

Erfworm wrote:

Your final paragraph does nothing to support your argument because what you describe didn't happen because of the use of the weapons, but simply them being developed and manufactured. People would fear the use of weapons of mass destruction whether that had ever been used or not. We dropped 2 bombs in order to save millions of American and Japanese lives.

That's self-contradictory. You admit the atom bomb is a terror weapon whose very existence creates its effect. How then did using them against civilians save lives, compared to simply telling them, "hey guess what, we've got atom bombs, surrender now?"

Yes, conventional weapons were being used to annihilate cities too, near the end of the war. That's another unpunished war crime. But it was contrary to established precedent and would not become the norm. Whereas nukes were first used against populations, which became and remain the de facto primary target of a nuclear arsenal, and terrorization the primary objective of setting that target.

IF they had been dropped on military targets, that would have set a different precedent, possibly leading to early nuclear treaties and preventing the mad arms race of the cold war. If Truman had got off his high horse about "saving lives" for a minute, and started thinking about what would happen when other countries got the bomb, he might have stayed his hand and saved his country and the world a whole lot of trouble.

And the Japanese would have surrendered anyway, just because the Russians declared war on them. That's what really scared them.

War didn't end with WWII. It took China, Korea, and Vietnam to continue Japan's battle. Ho Chi Minh died before his brave armies finally finished off the US Army on live TV. The world's 1st Imperial Defeat on televised globally LIVE!

If Hitler didn't start with Russia, the allies would have had a much difficult time and the war would have been over before the U.S. could retool. So thankfully Hitler was a mad man and tried too much too soon.

Hollywood did its job wrote:

Here's your answer:

http://i.imgur.com/6eUoctT.png

This is an amazing survey. I had never seen this one. With time, people are thinking more and more that the US was the greater contributor... Obviously, with time, most people that took the survey did not have fist hand knowledge of the war and have to rely on what they learn at school, story books, movies, media... To form an opinion... Super interesting how thinking changed in such a short (in historical perspective) time..

Gyvftvyfvgvy wrote:

Hollywood did its job wrote:

Here's your answer:

http://i.imgur.com/6eUoctT.png

This is an amazing survey. I had never seen this one. With time, people are thinking more and more that the US was the greater contributor... Obviously, with time, most people that took the survey did not have fist hand knowledge of the war and have to rely on what they learn at school, story books, movies, media... To form an opinion... Super interesting how thinking changed in such a short (in historical perspective) time..

+2 cool graph

but keep in mind that judgment at the time is clouded - it's not like in 1945 people had a crystal clear view of history - quite the opposite - we live in a cloud - hard to know what things mean at the time.

agip wrote:

+2 cool graph

but keep in mind that judgment at the time is clouded - it's not like in 1945 people had a crystal clear view of history - quite the opposite - we live in a cloud - hard to know what things mean at the time.

Agreed, this is a survey done in France. Therefore, their views in 1945 was limited to what they lived, news from "local" newspapers and "local" radio... Also probably very centric to what was happening in France (not necessarily in Japan)...

But still it was something real for them. They lived it. They didn't read it in a book...