Why the Allies won WW2

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The Allies had better Boffins than did the Germans. Also the U.S. had better Jewish physicists than did the Germans which is why we got the A-bomb and the Narzis did not.

ruveyn

There is a book with the same name as the title of this thread.

Three main reasons
1) Geographic advantage that the industrial base in US cannot be threatened
2) The Allies managed their industrial production better
3) The Allies control almost all the oil and many rare metals.

The allies would have won without nuclear weapons. All that happened was that the war in Japan ended quicker than it otherwise would have.

"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63

Okay, maybe the nuclear attack was unnecessary after all.

But, the war would have been lost if the government had not engaged in deficit spending.

Ruve, as much as I respect your opinions, I have to question the relevance of retro-analysis when applied to historical events.

I mean, WWII was over 66 years ago. I know you were a child during that time, and that the events of WWII are likely still sharp in your memory.

But consider the fact that the youngest WWII combat veteran is about 80 years old (~14 in 1945). How many of them are active in determining current American policies? How many contribute to our economy? How many are passing down their wisdom and knowledge to current and future policy-makers?

I know that the Allied WWII veterans deserve our respect, but the war is over, and for the vast majority of people who make political decisions, WWII may as well have never happened. It's a sad fact, but there it is.

Fnord, is history only relevant so long as there are those who are alive to remember it? If so, then "natural history" would be totally irrelevant.

Natural history is still being made; WWII isn't.

WWII isn't being made still, but neither are the wars of Babylon, Persia, Greece, or Rome, and yet they still have an effect upon this world. WWII is over, but the technologies developed for it are still present. The historical precedents made and examples not to follow serve as lessons for the future regardless of whether or not anyone remains who was a witness. Ruveyn and a few others do remember, but if the attitude towards history is that it is only relevant so long as there are witnesses, I hate to think what will happen once the witnesses are no longer here. That will truly suck. With the technologies now, I would rather not be on this planet when history repeats itself due to people not learning from the errors of the past even though now more power is possessed than ever before.

WW2 was won, in my opinion, for one because of the size of the allies: Compare Italy to China or Japan to the USSR. The Axis Powers simply did not have enough people and resources to defeat 3 of the 4 main Allied powers (save tiny Britain), even with their huge militaries and clever technological innovation.

The other major factor was the ideologies of the 3 main Axis belligerents: Nazism could only be appealing to "white" people and not even Slavs or Jews for that matter. And Italy cooperated with Germany, which made them disliked for many of the reasons the latter were. The Japanese were somewhat less ridiculously racist but their ideology was still mostly appealing to Japanese People; even the Chinese were subject to wickedness, as exemplified in the famous Nanjing Massacre and the "Comfort Women." Their ideas, unlike republicanism or communism, could not get a universal appeal or sympathy outside their home countries.

The Japanese treated the Chinese as sub-human. The Rape of Nanjing makes the Russians seem almost civilized.

ruveyn

Then do you think there is validity in the claim that "Those who disregard history are bound to repeat it"?*

(*Variants: "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it"; "The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again"; "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it"; "Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it"; et cetera)

Cuz, Hitler was a cretin and his plans were impossible even if he was not incompetent.
Every good move the Allies made where just shortening the war.

Last edited by JakobVirgil on 30 Sep 2011, 3:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's 'cos of the Soviets that the Allies won.

And what Jakob just said about Hitler.

^ This ^

For as the Bard of Aaron once wrote:

In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice, Hitlers, and men
Go often askew,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

The truth I wont deny- Im old enough to rememember the original Sputnik era joke that the op is recycling: "The reason we russians beat you americans into space is that our German Scientists are better than your German scientists."

+++++++

In 1944 a british sonar buoy in the atlantic detected a sub aproaching the Bay of Biscay in France. The RAF promptly responded with an air strike that sank what they assumed was a German U boat returning to its base in Nazi occupied France.

It turned out that the Sub was actually JAPANESE! It had sailed around the planet- all the way from East Asia to almost the coast of europe before it was sunk with its cargo of aluminum ore bound for Japan's ally. That sub's desperate voyage speaks volumes.

Location is everything.

The both the Germans and the Japanese had conquered vast chunks of the world- each had enslaved a continental sized part of the world. But the two axis empires were far from and isolated from each other.

The British Empire, the United States, and Soviet Russia, all had sea lanes to connect each other (although trade to russia did have to go through the difficult murnmask route), so the big three allied powers could trade finnish goods, raw materials, and ideas and technologies with ease. For example virtually the moment the Brits perfected radar in the early days of the Battle of Britain the US had it too- and were using it in the Pacific war against Japan.
The Germans and the Japanese had to reinvent radar not only seperately from the allies, but seperately from each other.

There were other factors ofcourse as well.