I think the US Government got stuck with a TON of surplus at the end of WWII. When I was a kid, the army-navy stores were full of stuff you couold buy-tents, sleeping bags, mess kits, etc.
Of course, once a war is over, most of this stuff is effectively worthless!
Is there any truth to the stories that, basically, WWII soldiers were using the rations that had been mostly canned for the troops in WWI, then the K rats developed for WWII weren’t really issued until Korea and Vietnam?
My Father recalled having powdered eggs in the Pacific theater, and being willing to kill for the Spam in the European theater. Apparently Spam was first canned in 1937. 
Damn. Another classic WWII cartoon shot to Hell.
Scene: Jungle, GI being faced by two or three very ragged looking Japanese Imperial Army troops.
Caption: “We wish surrender. On condition: Not be made eat American delicacy called as … Spam.”
Maybe they had been in communication with the Germans. 
I think that’s mostly an exaggeration. I did notice that the dates on the C-rations that I was issued in the Army were sometimes pretty old. Korean War soldiers were probably dealing with huge quantities of supplies and weapons left over from World War II.
One might add to that list its national will.
One might, and we could debate that, but the hard facts were that America could field a lot of men and see to it that they were armed absolutely to the teeth on the products of a big industrial base and abundant raw materials all pretty much secure from Axis interference.
and we had Captain America.
what?
Well, yes, but wasn’t the hard part keeping The Human Torch and The Sub-Mariner from their own private quarrels?
[QUOTE=BMalion]
and we had Captain America.
Yeah well we had Colonel Blimp
I dunno. The excellent Ken Burns documentary “The War” portrays the American forces of the first year or two of US involvement as a bunch of ragtag ill-trained misfits with outdated weaponry and little tactical ability. Obviously, they got around to kicking a lot of ass once the nation started taking the concept of total war seriously, but I don’t think it was a given at the time that the US would tip the balance as much as they did. (Or, what Sam Stone said.)
I’m no WWII scholar, but ISTM that D-Day would be a better pick. If American rage were all it took to guarantee victory, the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama Been Hidin’ would have been clinched by 2005. The Allied invasion of France, OTOH, was something of a microcosm for the later events of the European theater: an Allied force with a shot in the arm from enthusiastic American boys overwhelming a Nazi stronghold that should have been easily defensible–but wasn’t, due to Hitler’s megalomaniacal tendencies combined with his awful decision-making and maybe a bit of sagging morale. (If German morale wasn’t on the way down before D-Day, I’m sure it was after.)
Australia, New Zealand, and pretty much all of North, Central and South America plus the Caribbean islands were all fighting for the Allies too. The US was no farther from the Pacific theater at one end than Australia was at the other end. You can certainly argue for the size and manpower of the American production facilities, the natural defensibility of the North American continent, and the ineptitude of the Axis in reaching North America, but it was certainly not far from the war unless you completely discount the Pacific theater. Certainly no more so than other Allied countries like Brazil and Argentina, which AIUI had strong economies at the time.
I think the tradition of giving General Winter the credit for Russia’s legendary successes in defending itself gives the Russians short shrift. The winter of Hitler’s discontent was not a particularly cold one for Russia, and, AIUI, not much harsher than anything the average Western European hiked to school in as a child. When will we drop the racist contention that Slavic countries can’t defend themselves and acknowledge that Russia just had an army that could do the job? You don’t even have to give them that much credit: their sheer numbers alone are enough to justify the futility of an invasion into that country, especially since its supply of ready and willing young men was probably even greater back when Russia owned practically the entire Cyrillic-writing world.
I don’t think it’s so much that they couldn’t think that way, as that it would have killed the point. Hitler didn’t want to grab a little land and come out on top, he wanted to own the world. If possible, he would have kept on fighting until either (a) all the world spoke German or (b) his nation was on the brink of destruction, in which case he probably would’ve pussied out and killed himself just the same. If the Nazi Party had thought differently, there would have been no Nazi Party in the first place and no WWII, at least not as we know it. ISTM that a “victory” that resulted in Germany owning most of Western Europe would’ve been humiliating to Hitler. Even if someone convinced Hitler that having his own corner of the world to burn babies in was good enough, he would have meddled in military matters anyway, because he was freakin’ Hitler and he had to control everything, and since he was a total nutter he would’ve lost all the same. I mean, really, if someone with the same devoted fan club that the Fuhrer had in 1939, who wasn’t a total nutter, had simply decided to let his best and brightest figure out a way to take over the US, it stands to reason that we would be speaking German and heiling like motherfuckers as we speak.
Nitpick: Then as now, the US owned a pretty decent number of Pacific Island territories, some of which were at one point or another seiged by the Japanese. Some Americans in the Pacific territories were killed by Japanese soldiers or starved in Japanese death camps–“The War” tells the story of one white American family that lived a rather Soviet-esque lifestyle of forced labor and teetering on the brink of starvation under the Japanese, through a survivor.
In support of that, although he was not in a combat unit, my Father was given basic training after he returned to the US.
Again from Father, Australia was prepared to evacuate half the country and give it up to a Japanese invasion.
This is pretty accurate, AIUI. It was the action of US, and Dutch (again, IIRC) naval forces that kept the IJN from continuing south. Most of Austrailia’s manpower had been drawn back to the European front.
FTM, one of the reasons for the still controversial loss of the HMAS Sydney (the only major combatant vessel to have been lost with all hands by any nation during WWII.) was because of the push to get at least some of the Austrailian forces back to defend Austrailia from the Japanese.
The thing is though, that while it may not have been a particularly harsh winter for Russia, it was still much worse than a lot of what the Germans were used to.
Russian Doctrine has been, and probably still is, predicated on retreating and trading land for time. Russia can do this, because it’s F’ing HUGE. And the Winter is only part of that equation. For crying out loud, the Russians have a word in their language that is specifically used to describe a time of year when the roads turn to knee deep mud-bogs! (Rasputitsa)
And while they were able to stop, and then roll back the German war machine, the truth is that only the ability to gain time by giving up land, and the winter slow-down of ALL offensives that have attacked Russia is what enabled them to ramp up their production and training.
The Red Army that existed in June of 1941 was absolutely no match for the German army. The didn’t have the ability to defend themselves, not yet. They got it, but it took them time.
Nobody doubts that the Russians (or other Slavic peoples) can defend themselves, we are usually just stating that the typical Scorched Earth policy of the Russian Military is part of that, and always has been.
I thought that was mostly due to self-inflicted wounds, Stalin’s purges of the officer corps. A small army can destroy a large army if the large army is poorly led.
Were huge factors in the German defeat. First, the autumn rains made the Russian roads into quagmires-and the German horse-drawn transport bogged down. Then, in November, General Winter took over-I read that the German tank engines had to be kept running at night-otherwise they could not have been restarted in the mornings. Later, as Germany depended more on synthetic diesel fuel, the situation was worse-the synthetic fuel separated into two components, one of which turned to a gel below -4 C. That stopped tha panzers cold-just as surely as if the Red Army had a new anti tank weapon.
Sure, General Zhukov was brilliant-but he had a lot of help from the two generals.
The germans also never equipped their soldiers properly-they issued their soldiers leather boots, which lead to frostbitten feet. The russian soldiers had oversized felt boots (valenki) which could be stuffed with grass and straw-which kept their feet warm.
Exactly–only part. Why do you think Russia can afford to trade land for time? Because they own A LOT OF FREAKING LAND. They’ve defended unbelievably massive tracts of land through several of the worst economic, political and military disasters of recent history despite having, at times, enemies knocking on the door from several sides at once. The whole “Hitler and Napoleon had nothing on Russian cold” thing is funny the first 7,000 times you hear it, but it’s also incredibly unfair to a people who have suffered A LOT and still kept marching on every time. I mean, shit, what kind of incredible combination of patriotism, bravery, foolhardiness, ideological dedication and pure get-over-itness would the average Russian solder have to have had during WWII? Giving the Russian winter all the credit is like saying that the USS Arizona won the war in the Pacific.
English has a word specifically used to describe a time of year when the streets of Tucson flood (typhoon), not to mention at least a dozen common words for precipitation. The argument-from-dictionary technique will not get you far, I’m afraid.
I’m gonna go with December 7 as the day Japan’s fate was sealed. Yes they had some successes after that date, but the national will to kick ass and take names was set in stone when Pearl Harbor was attacked before a formal declaration of war. It took a while to build the ships, planes, and train the guys that were going to do the ass kicking, but the will was there from December 7.
If you want to go with a battle that changed the face of the conflict and showed the future, I will either take the Battle of the Coral Sea, or Midway.
The Battle of the Coral Sea was a strategic victory for the US and pointed out what the future held.
The battle of Midway marked the beginning of the end for IJN
Oh, it was absolutely and completely a given. The US was the worlds largest, wealthiest and most diverse economy, with its industrial heartland separated from the nearest enemy by at least 3000 miles of empty ocean, and even two years before entering the war Roosevelt was talking defensive procurement in terms of 50,000 aircraft - can you imagine any other world leader at the time being able to say with a straight face “we’re going to need to buy some aircraft to deter attackers. Twice as many as exist on the planet at the moment should be about right.” Lend-Lease was already providing a large proportion of British and Soviet equipment needs. There was just no way the Axis could go head-to-head with US manufacturing capacity, and similarly no way that they could do more than break a few windows on the US mainland. The fact that existing US colonial forces outside the CONUS were ill-prepared and ill-equipped after the Depression was pretty much irrelevant - if they had been wiped out in their totality to the last man, ship and aircraft it probably wouldn’t have done more than drag out the war by a couple of years. Even the Japanese were well aware that they only had about 18 months maximum to persuade the US to come to terms before they would begin to be overwhelmed.
Yes, Russian military strenght has always been built on the basis of vast manpower that is treated as disposable by the autocrat of the day, and the space and determination to use that manpower to grind invaders to dust. Anyone who wants to defeat russia needs to have a rock-solid plan for crossing thousands of miles of emptiness which alternates between baking hot and freezing cold (with quagmires in between) while chin-deep in corpses, and then to fight it out there until there are no Russians left, or hell freezes over.