Who Was The MVP (Nation) of WW2

'Switzerland, because they conducted a non-interventionist foreign policy even when they had ever incentive in the world not to - they showed that the liberal state can survive even the worst evils.'

And make a tidy profit from stashing all that stolen Nazi loot. Nice, very nice.

 

My list of the top four MVPs are

1. Adolph Hitler

Nobody else could have been a greater asset to the Allies winning the war. He single-handedly defeated his own country, and managed to so completely neutralize some of the best generals of the war generals so completely as to render them utterly useless; his incompetence still inspires awe in me.

2. Great Britain, and not including the rest of the Commonwealth. It managed to hold out against great odds, allowing the U.S. breathing room and then providing a base for air power to operate out of, a Navy second to none in the Med, and some of the best generals of the war, William Slim being probably the best of all. The many, many engineering innovations produced by Great Britain were numerous, and decisive as well, everything from paper fuel tanks to increase bomber ranges to the tweaks that made the P-51 the best fighter of the war, radar, etc., etc.

3. The U.S., mainly under Roosevelt's leadership. Operation Torch is nearly always overlooked in importance, since the Vichy French didn't contest the landings, but this was a singularly risky operation with a very high chance of failure, and it took real balls to organize it and even more to risk it. Also, the decisions to go with small, fast pocket carriers was a crucial choice as well, also Roosevelt's, and then there were the many many people at the operational levels that were truly outstanding, and would require at least a couple of books to list, for both the U.S. and Britain. They could easily tie for 2nd place.

4. Greece. Without the months of delays of the German invasion of the Soviet Union caused by Greek partisans, the Soviets would have lost and been out of the war in 5 months. They could also tie for 1st place, depending on how much importance one wants to attach to the several months they cost Hitler.

The Soviets don't make the Top Four list. They were toast without the second and third fronts, even with the late start Hitler got off to. The U.S. and Britain could have won without the Soviets being in the war at all, while Soviets couldn't have won without the U.S. and Britain

 

Just got to ask who had the most troops, ships and aircraft at Normandy? That's right The Commonwealth.

 

And the toys the British and Canadians brought were heaps cooler...just saying like

 

You know there was a saying about it in Germany. It is better Russian lying on you then American flying over you. Sums it up.
Moreover, taking into account what they have done on our land I woudn't care even if 20 million Germans were killed. So why won't you go and (*)(*)(*)(*) yourself?

Any documentaries about how many luftwaffe planes were on different fronts at different times?

You realise how stupid that sounded? So...we did nothing....except wiping out 1 mil Japaneese troops from China in 2 weeks. There was a threaty to do so after Germany defeated. Obviously nothing to do with Hiroshima.
You need to be...kinda true retard to wish USSR opening second major front, when busy fighting Germany.

Is that scientifically proved or just fanboy wet dreams?
Cuzz all lend-lease scored less 4% of Soviet total indusrtial output during the war. Fact.
And when Americans managed to come and "save" us in 1944 Soviet army was already fighting in Germany (east Prussia). Fact again.

 

I suppose you are proud of the fact that the russian troops were capable of being just as barbaric as the germans. I certainly can appreciate how much hatred the Germans had instilled in the Russians for their actions..
OTOH, facts are facts and the victorious russians indulged themselves in an orgy of rape, plunder and murder, in their march across germany. Unless the history books I read were wrong that is.

 

Silly attempt. 1:0. I win.

 

what do you win? I didn't know it was a contest, I thought it was a discussion.

so, you are proud of the behaviour of the victorious russian army. Nice guy.

 

Two wrongs dont make a right - But remember a nation came at the Soviet Union not to conquer, not to gain additional resources but to exterminate a culture and a people. A pro tip for budding dictators out there - Dont lose a war you start under those circumstances.

 

If the US had not joined the war, Hitler could probably (despite all his mistakes) survived in a "peace of mutual exhaustion." The USSR would have ejected Hitler from their territory but would have run out of manpower and equipment along the Vistula. They were nearly at that point in May 1945.

If the US had not a) carried Britain with Lend-Lease and b) intervened, Britain would have to have made peace with Hitler sometime in 1942.

If Japan had not egregiously provoked the US (Pearl Harbor) into ibntervention, they could have taken Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, and India without too much trouble, and nobody would have dislodged them. How well they could have exploited these territories is another matter.

Without US intervention in 1942, by January 1 1945. The world would look a lot like this:

1. Germany, and Romania share the borders they had on June 21, 1941. There would be considerable devastation either side of that line.
2. Great Britain would be intact, but would probably lose Egypt.
3. France would have been reduced to an agrarian state. (Morganthau plan?)
4. The Netherlands, Flanders, Denmark and Norway would cease to exist as nations and would have been absorbed into Germany. Wallonia would be cast off into the ashes of France.
5. The Germans would hold all of Egypt, the Levant, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia. The British would hold onto the Persian Gulf region and Arabian peninsula.
6. Italy would hold all of North Africa east of the Egyptian border and Greece.
7. Japan would briefly hold India, but sectarian violence in the wake of the collapse of the raj would make the place untenable.
8. Japan would hold and exploit Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and Hainan island.
9 Japan would abandon China south of the Yellow River. Chiang's China would be a patchwork of warlord fiefdoms.
10. Australia and New Zealand would be left substantively alone.
11. The US would remain in a Depression.
12. The Indian subcontinent would break up into five to nine successor nations - generally at each others' throats.
13. Taiwan would remain in Japanese hands.
14. China would be in a state of low-grade chaos.
15. There would be no nuclear weapons.
16. There would be no Israel and Europe (outside of Britain, Switzerland, and Sweden) would be mostly judenfrei.

Britain, Germany, the USSR, Italy, and Japan would be exhausted and quiescent for at least a generation.

So, given the difference between a (historical) US-intervention vs US isolationist scenarios, you have to allow he US was the MVP of the early 1940s.

 

I agree about two wrongs. But is my understanding that the Germans were interested in exterminating communism and russian jews per se. in addition to expansion of their empire.

Pro tips for budding dictators - who publishes it. gotta get me one.

 

Yea, it's called "Finlandization". As long as they did whatever Germany told them to do, they were allowed to survive. But do not doubt that if they had said "No" more often, they would have been swollowed up like most of the rest of Europe.

When Germany repeatedly violated Swiss airspace in the invasion of France, the Swiss responded by attacking them and shot down many German fighters. Then Hitler gave them an ultimatum, and the attacks on German aircraft stopped.

Switzerland was also the home to large POW camps, holding over 100,000 Allied prisoners. And as a famous "neutral (*)(*)(*)(*)ry", under German pressure tey refused entry of any Jews tryig to flee the rest of Europe, turning them away at their borders.

And of course everybody knows of their trading in plunder from the rest of Europe, giving the Germans needed cash by accepting gold and outer fungible assets plundered not only from the Jews killed throughout Europe, butthe treasuries of occupied nations.

Do not fool yourself that this was them being "non-interventionalist". They knew they had to bend over and kiss the Leader's fanny or else.

 

Not a bad analysis, but I would make a few changes.

11. The US was ou of the Great Depression by 1939, so that part is not true. The US economy was rapidly expanding by mid-1941, and the GDP was already 150% of the levels it was in 1929 ($1 trillion in 1929, $750 billion in 1932, $1.6 trillion in 1941).

15. Not true at all. The famous Einstein Letter was sent to the President in 1939, over 2 years before the US entered the war. And the US, UK, Germany, and Japan all were researching this new weapon. And of these, only Germany was not likely to get it (they were on the wrong track, trying to achieve direct implosive fusion without any kind of fission reaction). Likely Japan would have gotten there first without the Manhattan Project.

And I can't see Japan not attacking the US at the same time it attacked the UK. To put it simply, the US was to large of a potentially hostile force to leave intact across their lines of supply. So it was simply mandatory that they be attacked at the same time, or Japan risked the US stepping in and crippling their shipping at the worst possible time.

 

11. In late 1941 unemployment was still well above 1929 levels. A good solid third of US industrial capacity sat idle.

15. The Manhattan Project was an enormous operation undertaken (a quarter of the war effort in 1944) out of a real fear that a real enemy might come up with a wonder-weapon first. Until Hitler declared war on the US Nazi Germany was not a real enemy. A potential one maybe but not one real enough to justify a Manhattan Project. Without US entry into World War II, maybe you get an atomic bomb by 1960.

Attacking the US was strictly a product of projecting Japanese thinking on the US. A coomon mistake throughout history – thinking the other guys think like you. Throughout the 1930s Roosevelt had thundered against European colonialism. He could hardly drag a country still wedded to the idea of isolationism into war to save European colonies.

 

Too many Americans think that Switzerland is surrounded by mountains and that therefore any German attempt to attack would have been a nightmare. The reality is that the German border with Switzerland is very flat- the borders with France and Italy are mountainous, but Germany could have taken every major Swiss city in a few days of battle.

I have read some very harrowing accounts how some American pilots were treated in Swiss POW camps.

I like Switzerland, and I think they did the best they could in WW2 for Switzerland, but they are no saints.

 

I agree that it is likely that Russia and the allies could not have defeated Germany without the U.S. coming into the war.

However, the reverse is also true- the United States could not have defeated Germany without the Soviet Union.

This is part of why I think this dick measuring is somewhat pointless.

 

It is true that unemployment was still high (8%, as opposed to 5% in 1929). But this was far below the 22%+ in the height of the depression. And industry was rapidly tooling up for new equipment that was both being made to revamp the US armed forces, as well as lend-lease to Europe.

No "1/3 of industrial capacity" was idle by 1941, it was rapidly climbing.

No, more then likely no later then 1947 for Japan, 1950 for the US.

In the mid-1930's, some of the best physicists were Japanese. And they had among the most advanced applied research centers in the world (including the world's largesy cyclotron).

They had 2 seperate projects, Ni-Go and F-Go, both were producing U-238. In fact, they were so short of uranium for testing and refining that a German sub was sent to them with uranium (U-234) which surrendered to the US enroute after the surrender of Germany.

So I have little doubt that the 2 Japanese projects would have produced a working bomb. And the UK program was pretty well along when it was combined with the US project.

No, attacking the US made strategic sense. What the Japanese blew was the reaction of the US and how well they would fight.

Japan needed to make a move on East Asia, and that meant taking on the UK. The UK had colonies all over the area, as well as Australia.

However, they could not go after these, while the US Territory of the Philippines was heavily armed and sitting right across the middle of what would be their new shipping lanes. If they tried to attack UK interests and left the US alone, they ran the real risk of getting their back broken by a fast US attack right in the middle. This is why they had to attack the US and take out the Philippines before they could advance south.

It always puzzles me when people talk about the opening of WWII in the Pacific, and always concentrate on Pearl Harbor. To me that was really just a minor side-show and distraction. The real goal and important target was always the Philippines.

What they did not expect is that the US really did care about their "primitive islander colony". They really expected the US to take a good pounding against them in the first 2 years, then agree to a cease fire and a status quo ante bellum - minus any territory they had West of Hawaii.

They certainly did not expect a nation without Bushido to fight the way they did, ignoring losses and refuse anything but unconditional surrender.

 

'You know there was a saying about it in Germany. It is better Russian lying on you then American flying over you.'

That why all your erstwhile clients in Eastern Europe were lining up to join NATO as soon as your 'workers paradise' went down the toilet?

'So...we did nothing....except wiping out 1 mil Japaneese troops from China in 2 weeks.'

That's right. You wiped out 1 million Japanese troops IN MANCHURIA. When Hirohito addressed his cabinet on August 9 and ordered them to accept the Allied terms, he specificly mentioned the American atomic weapons as a reason for surrendering. He said nothing about the war in Manchuria.

'You need to be...kinda true retard to wish USSR opening second major front, when busy fighting Germany.'

We did.

'Is that scientifically proved or just fanboy wet dreams?'

How about some “scientific proof” of your claim that Britain was 'Trying to make war happen between USSR ang Germany and finish the survivour later'?

'And when Americans managed to come and "save" us in 1944 Soviet army was already fighting in Germany (east Prussia)'

If you look back at my very first post on this thread, I said that Russia 'would have eventually defeated Germany with or without our help'. You have a really, really short attention span, don't you.

 

More than that, it was an economic imparative. The US embargoes on oil and iron exports to Japan were badly hurting the Japanese economy and threatening to bring the military to a grinding halt.

 

The Eastern Front was a meat ginder. Conscripts into the Red Army faced German MG42s at the front and
Soviet DPMs if they retreated...

A total bloodbath for both personnel and civilians alike.

The fiercest fighting in human history.

On that level, the Soviets, or more specifically the Russians as a citizenry...endured and turned the tide against the Germans.

Other than Pearl Harbor and a few isolated incidents, the average American on the homefront was not directly threatened.

You can't disregard what the Russians sacrificed for victory..

10-fold what America went through in it's bloodiest conflict, our Civil War.

Imagine Gettysburg...a battle that is almost deified here in America...imagine that carnage...quadrupled...dare I say...octupled...
that's just the Battle of Stalingrad.

The Russians endured, and deserve recognition for that.

 

List of Nations That Weren't the MVP of WWII.

1. France

 

Just because I get tired of the rather flippant insults of the French- I will point out:

a) French citizens suffered more than Americans from the war.
b) The French resistance saved hundreds of American pilots from capture or worse.
c) The Free French troops fought very bravely in the Allied effort.

 

All true.

But de Gaulle was an a**hole.

 

I'd just like to add...to my previous comment.

Stalingrad, Russia...850,000 residents in 1940. It isn't known how many of them may have escaped the carnage and vanished into the interior of Russia. But after 1945, a census showed only 1500 of these people.

Americans, have a disconnect as to the level of destruction on the Eastern Front...official casualty figures have never been released by the former..Soviet Union...conservative estimates that 1 in 10 Russians perished...
either through disease, starvation or combat itself.

10,000,000 lives...extinguished.

We may have epic ideological differences...but Stalin was not elected...there were anti-Communist sentiments in Russia.
Did they not have hopes and dreams? Were their lives less valuable to our Creator...?

10 million human beings.

It's a disconnect...
less than 3,000 Americans perished at Pearl Harbor...yet again...the day is sanctified. That was a good day on the Eastern Front, to have casualty figures so low.

Of course there is tragedy in the loss of even a single human life...but we, as Americans were spared the level of bloodletting others were not so lucky to avoid. So it's understandable the Russians view American hubris as victors over the Third Reich as somewhat annoying.