Did the U.S defeat Hitlers Germany?

reborncareerist wrote:

I'd take that over the entire globe functioning as an Aryan police state.
I know its more complicated than that ... Arguably the Soviets under Stalin were no better than the Nazi party in many ways. Nevertheless, usually people concede that defeating the Nazis was a good thing.

Oh, I agree, it's good that Hitler wasn't successful, I thought you were referring to the events that occured after.

Byrnzie wrote:

I know full well that the Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis with open arms. A lot of Ukrainians made up the death squads in the east whose job it was to hunt and kill jews.

Then you should also know that disease, hunger and climatic conditions were responible for more German deaths in the Russian theater than Russian bullets.

sponger wrote:

If I'm not mistaken, WWII represents the last whites vs. whites war. Every war following WWII was between whites and some other ethnicity, or some other ethnicity vs. some other ethnicity. I'm leaving out the cold war, of course. And you know I don't mean to say that the US is only white or that any army other than the nazis were only white, for that matter.

Not quite, but kinda ... You could say that the Falkland Islands War was between whites, I guess. I think the greater determinant is democracy. There have been few (if any) wars between democratic states in modern history, and most of these states have a predominately white population.

Maybe one major exception would be the civil war in Yugoslavia ... Which wasn't technically a democracy when it broke up, mind you. Anyway, if you want a post-WW-II example of whites killing whites, there you have it.

sponger wrote:

Argentina white?

Are Hispanics technically white? I believe they are, in a strictly racial sense, but of course people make the distinction between Hispanic and white all the time. Not to mention that most people in Central/South America are technically of mixed heritage, I suppose ...

sponger wrote:

oh yeah, forgot about the slavs and their civil war. Argentina white?

Don't forget that NATO carried out some strategic bombing of Serb positions.

How about some of the small wars in the former Soviet areas......in Georgia and Chechnya White on white???

sponger wrote:

yes, the various civil wars, separatist movements, and police actions eluded me. thank you.

We're here to help.

redrock wrote:

A bit more on the role the soviet union had in crushing Hitler's germany...

“Many North Americans and British mistakenly believe their nations defeated National Socialist Germany. While $11 billion of US military and financial aid to the USSR was important, it was Stalin’s Soviet Union, not the western democracies, played the decisive role in defeating Adolf Hitler and his European allies.

While honoring our own heroic veterans, it’s time we also recognize and pay homage to Russia’s dauntless courage, endurance, and suffering.

*The Soviet Union inflicted 75% of all World War II German casualties in titanic battles involving millions of men. Soviet forces killed 3 million German and Axis troops, and lost 11.3 million dead and 18.3 million wounded. Twenty million Russian civilians died.
Britain lost 340,000 men, Canada 43,000, and the US about 150,000 dead in the European Theater. The Red Army lost more men attacking Berlin alone than the US did in its entire European and North African campaigns.

*When Allied forces landed at Normandy, the German Wehrmacht’s `guts had been ripped out by the Soviets,’ said Churchill. Had the Allies met 1940’s strength and quality German troops, with an intact Luftwaffe, instead of understrength units with no air cover, they would have been driven into the Channel. The battered Wehrmacht’s dogged resistance from 1944-45 recalled Churchill’s dictum, `you will never know war until you fight Germans.’

*The Soviet defeat of Japan’s forces in Manchuria has been ignored. In a brilliant, blitzkrieg campaign along a 3,000 km front on 9 Aug, 1945, Soviet Far Eastern armies crushed Japan’s weakened 710,000-man Kwantung Army, killing 80,000 and capturing 594,000."

I found one of my textbooks from high school. Shhhh obviously I never returned it to my high school. The book is called 'A History of Western Society.' It was written by McKay, Hill and Buckler and published by Houghton Mifflin. I looked up WWII and on page 950 it reads:

As of Soviet Russia (yes this is what it says) so great was its strength that it might well have defeated Germany without Western help. In the face of the Germany advance, whole factories and populations were successfully evacuated to eastern Russia and Siberia. There, war production was reorganized and expanded, and the Red Army was increasing well supplied. The Red Army was also well led, for a new generation of talented military leaders quickly arose to replace those so recently purged. Most important of all, Stalin drew on the Soviet people. Broad-based Russian nationalism, as opposed to narrow communist ideology, became the powerful unifying force in what was appropriately called the "Great Patriotic War of the Fatherland."

Now skipping to page 952 as it mentions many other battles with American, British and the Ally forces but I'm only focusing the on Soviets here:

Barely halted at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad in 1941, the Germans renewed their Russian offensive in July 1942. This time they drove toward the southern city of Stalingrad, in an attempt to cripple communications and seize the crucial oil fields of Baku. Reaching Stalingrad, the Germans slowly occupied most of the ruined city in a month of incredibly savage house-to-house fighting.

Then, in November 1942, Soviet armies counterattacked. They rolled over Romanian and Italian troops to the north and south of Stalingrad, quickly closing the trap surrounding the entire German Sixth Army of 300,000 men. The surrounded Germans were systematically destroyed, until the by the end of January 1943 only 123,000 soldiers were left to surrender. Hitler, who had refused to allow a retreat, had suffered a catastrophic defeat. In the summer of 1943, the larger, better-equipped Soviet armies took the offensive and began moving forward.

Skipping to page 953 again focusing on the Soviets:

The Russians, who had been advancing steadily since July 1943, reached the outskirts of Warsaw by August 1944. For the next six months they moved southward into Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. In January 1945 the Red armies again moved westward through Poland, and on April 26 they met American forces on the Elbe River. The Allies had closed their vice on Nazi Germany and overrun Europe. As Soviets forces fought their way into Berlin, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker, and on May 7 the remaining German commanders capitulated. Three month later, the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Mass bombing of cities and civilians, one of the terrible new practices of WWII, had ended in the final nightmare-unprecedented human destruction in a single blinding flash. The Second World War, which had claimed the lives of more than fifty million soldiers and civilians, was over.

These paragraphs basically support what Byrnzie has been saying and yes they are taken directly out of my high school history book. The problem isn’t that we are not provided with the correct information but it’s because we tend to focus on the American roll in history and then stories become twisted to make it more interesting to us. Anyhow, at least we are all getting a history lesson.

sponger wrote:

That's like saying Bobby Boucher won the Bourbon Bowl. The Louisiana Mud Dogs won the Bourbon Bowl, not Bobby Boucher. But without Bobby Boucher, Red Beaulieu and the Cougars would have won. That's what people mean by "Without america, we'd all be speaking german."

The US was the MVP, that's all. If you want, you can say Russia was MVP, but what Russia did for the game of football really kind of cancels out any positive contributions it may have had.

given the number of german casualties in russia, the MVP was russia, and the russian winter.