People say we came in at the very end of the war and stole the glory from the Soviet Union. This is not true. I’ve done my history. The USA came into the war in 1941, the very middle of the conflict. The war didn’t end until 1945. Furthermore, we did more than just drop bombs on Japan. We also fought the Japanese in the Philippines and on the island of Iwo Jima. Also, we fought the Nazis in France, Italy, Northern Africa and Belgium. General Eisenhower orchestrated major battles in Europe that helped lead to Hitler’s defeat. And the aforementioned atom bombs were how we defeated Japan and ended the war. We didn’t steal anyone’s glory. We are simply having our history rewritten in an anti-American fashion.
Who is saying this?
ILikeForeignLanguages: Virtually no one here reads elementary history textbooks published in Russia, so you will need so give us some cites.
Glory? Is that why were went to war? Let me second Carcasm’s question, who is saying this?
No-one i have ever spoken to says that. Not a single person.
I have heard some Brits and other Allies poke some good-natured fun at America about its somewhat late entry to the war, but anyone who knows anything at all about the war recognizes the significance of the American contribution.
In my experience, you tend to hear such comments in response to “American saved the day” type attitudes. That’s not to suggest Americans are the only ones with unrealistic understandings of other nations’ contributions and efforts in the war.
ETA: Count me as another questioning any claims of glory, especially for the Soviet Union, despite their essential contributions.
I might have heard that about WWI, but not about WWII.
Each of the major Allies contributed to the defeat of the Axis. That defeat would not have happened without everyone on board.
The United States produced half the world’s industrial goods and was invulnerable to air attack. American factories were invaluable in the Allied victory.
I’m not taking anything away from the Soviet Army. Soviet soldiers killed eighty percent of German soldiers who died.
I see it this way. The UK still would have been on the winning side if the USA stayed neutral, but it’d be harder and a lot more painful. The USA appeared to only join in at the end, only because they brought the war to an end in such a short time, without them, Late '42 would be seen as the middle or even the beginning of an 8 or 9 year struggle.
I think we can all agree that the UK and Australia would have been royally buggered if the USA chose to side with the axis.
I think a lot may be that during the Cold War, the Soviet contributions to the war in Europe were downplayed quite a bit for political and propaganda reasons. Now, the Soviet contribution is recognized for what it is- the real heavy lifting in the European theater.
That’s not to say that the US and British forces didn’t face ferocious combat, but that the bulk of the German forces were arrayed against the Soviets in the East, and after the Battle of the Bulge as the Germans started to collapse, an unofficial result was that they didn’t fight the Americans, British and French nearly with as much dogged tenacity as they did the Soviets.
This was partly because they realized that captivity by the US or British wouldn’t be nearly so bad as captivity by the Soviets, and because they realized that it was likely that the Soviets were by far the worse occupiers than the US or British. So they surrendered and didn’t fight for every inch in the West, while fighting like demons in the East so that at war’s end, more would be occupied/conquered by the Western Allies.
This is shown by the maps in Feb 1945 at the Yalta conference- the Soviets were on the Oder river, some 50 miles from Berlin, while the Western Allies were not across the Rhine yet. Yet in 2 months the Russians made it to Berlin, and not much past, and as far as about Vienna. The Western Allies met them on the Elbe at Torgau, which was not much further West than Berlin.
OP, I know people don’t like it when I do this, but it’s quite apt: Who is “we?” Were you involved in the conflict in any way?
The USSR (along with Lithuania and Latvia, which were separate from the USSR at the time) suffered casualties astronomically higher than any of the Western Allies, and it had one of the highest total levels of death per capita, though well behind poor Poland. Belarus lost something like a quarter of its population. (As for the east, consider China’s fate, though their per capita totals were on the low side.)
The American rate was nowhere close. The Normandy invasion was only possible because the German military was already in serious trouble, and was largely committed to trying to stem the Soviet advance. The defenders of the coastline had little to no air cover, little help from the German Navy, and could only move at night.
It is definitely true that the US’s industrial power made an enormous difference to the overall war, however, all the Lend-Lease equipment (which came from Canada and Newfoundland as well, by the way) sent to the USSR still made up a small minority (around fifteen percent?) of the Soviet arsenal. Also, some of the fighter aircraft (for example) didn’t even suit the Soviet needs very well.
Moscow was begging for some kind of separate front to be opened, in order to somehow mitigate the Hell-on-Earth that had descended upon them, and there was much grumbling within the Soviet government that Washington and London were taking their own sweet time quite deliberately.
The US entered the war only after being directly attacked by the Axis at Hawaii, Guam, and Alaska. (Even then, the US notably declared war on the other Axis powers as well, not just Japan, though after all, US ships and German subs had already battled on a few occasions shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor.) This isn’t all that remarkable, as most of the Allies only joined after being attacked by the Axis. Sweden and Switzerland were prepared for war, but were never really attacked to a significant degree.
Some major exceptions to this are France and Britain, who had treaty obligations with Poland (Canada also independently declared war in 1939, though only on Germany at first). After their declarations of war, these two countries took very little initiative, resulting in the Phoney War. I give thanks to the editors of Wikipedia for showing the world statements from two German generals to the effect that, in their view, had the French and British taken the initiative around that time, the German military probably would have been completely routed, and the war in Europe would have been mostly over. Historian Michael Parenti describes this very well; in short, the Conservative government in London hoped Hitler would live up to his words and destroy the Soviet Union, and the French government, though leftist, was afraid of the deep divides within French society, such as the strength of the Catholic far-right. Had the Jewish Leon Blum still been in office, perhaps they might have acted differently!
I should add here that some historians have argued that 1941 turned out to be the high tide for the Axis anyway, and inasmuch as the US was already aiding the Allies, continuing on that path would have ended in a (very different looking, and perhaps less bloody) Allied victory all the same.
The feats of American servicemembers, and more than a few civilians, during WWII are humbling, to say the least. Still, when looking at the whole war, let’s keep it in perspective. The war was won by forces not just drafted by, but often politically loyal to, such tyrants as Stalin, Mao, and Chiang Kai-Shek, among others. After the Phoney War, it could not have happened any other way.
You know who really gets short shrift regarding WWII? Canada.
While I’m on the subject, since it’s the centenary of the First World War, if the US had just stayed the hell out, most of the Second World War would never have happened. Similarly, if FDR (or the French, or the British, etc.) had played the “neutral assistant” role for the Spanish Republic in 1936-1939, like they would later play for the Allies, the Republicans could have trounced the Nationalists, leaving all the world’s Fascists in a serious quandary, with highly visible egg on their faces… and perhaps screwed Hitler’s plans. People had this in mind at the time, but, as Orwell noted, not enough people.
A wise man once said when question about the allies:
“Which of the Allies one was the one that one the war?”
His answer:
“Which one of your internal organs keeps you alive?”
Munitions weren’t what the Soviets needed as much, even then 15% is quite a sum. What we sent them that was crucial were things like trucks (which the Soviets couldn’t produce enough of because so many of their factories had been converted to tank production), food (collective farms weren’t efficient even before every able-bodied man went to the fight), fuel (Soviet fuel was notoriously low-octane), telephone wire (yes, wire, Soviets preferred wired communication to radio when possible), radios, and a lot of the other things that make modern war possible. Don’t downplay that contribution - the Soviets would probably have won without it, but they also might have exhausted themselves after chasing Hitler back across the border without that stuff. Tanks just won’t work in a support vacuum.
Uh, you seem to be glossing over the fact that both Germany and Italy declared war on the US first.
In a word: exactly!
“We” is the United States of America, the country which the OP is a citizen of, you goddamned sanctimonious asshole.
So what’s the answer? It’s the heart, isn’t it? No, wait! The liver.
It’s this kind of attitude that leads to things like the Second World War:
“I didn’t vote Nazi in 1933, but I have to serve my country…”
… or perhaps the First World War is an even better example. You get the picture.
Thank you! This is my favorite way to think of the war. With all of the allies kicking serious axis butt, and not arguing over which one of them was the best. They were all on the same side, fighting the same enemy, after all. I wasn’t trying to come off as a “My country won the war singlehandedly!” type butthead; I was just trying to point out that my country was not as half-hearted and lousy in that war as its detractors are now claiming. In fact, I think it’s possible that we were right up there with the Soviets in terms of enemy butt-kicking.
- “We” is the United States, my country. I am speaking for the entire patriotic population, then and now. 2. I never said that the USSR didn’t suffer the most casualties. I believe you wholeheartedly when you say it did. However, suffering fewer casualties doesn’t necessarily mean that the US was weaker; in fact, suffering fewer casualties could** be a sign of greater survival efficiency. 3. I am aware that most people think our country’s greatest contribution was industrial power and weaponry, which we supplied to the other allies; however, I was referring mainly to the actual fighting of physical battles when I first claimed that people underrate the USA’s contributions to the war. That is, of course, with the exception of the atom bomb, which was not a battle but an aerial assault. Regardless, I could still argue that it was the method in which Harry Truman defeated Hideki Tojo and ended the war. 4. Yes, I know there were Canadians in WW2. I think maybe Australians and New Zealanders as well. I respect that, but the three main players on the allied side were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. So the others are usually thought of as little more than honorable mentions.
The American war effort really does need to be divided into 2 distinct area. Europe and the Pacific. In Europe, while the US involvement was vital it was not essential. The war would have played out pretty much the same only on a longer time line, and a different political landscape.
In the Pacific, there is no doubt this was America’s war. Countries such as Australia and New Zealand did play their part but without US follow ups the efforts would have been for nothing.