Who won WWII?

[Kadagar_AV]

What you're saying is true. Its also laughably incomplete in any academic analysis of Germany's defeat. Your uni points don't even matter except that you keep bringing them up, since calling your argument academic might make even your old professors weep.

I only brought my history points up once, because I was attacked as a "know nothing"... You made a point of it, and I replied.

So you are saying I am right, and then go on saying I am wrong.

Well done you.

You just might want to explain how what I write is "laughably incomplete".

[Kadagar_AV]

Ugh, this is it. I'll try one more time, then I'm not trying any more.

Germany lost the war in 1939, when it invaded Poland after the allies had made a treaty they actually intended on backing. Everything after that was a matter of "How" and "Why." Your OP served only to show that people, when asked on the street, can make a false decision about who contributed more in a war that had more moving parts than any one person can comprehend--certainly at the time, as in 1945! Germany defeated Germany, Russia lost the most men, and the US was by far the most effective force. Any one of those sentences I just typed has more merit than your OP.

Let's agree to disagree, and let others have a weigh in?

[ICantSpellDawg]

Stalingrad was the turning point. It happened in the summer of 1942. The U.S. began direct military assistance to the Allies in the spring of that year.
It followed years of German expansion into the economic and agricultural core of Russia and it's sphere of influence. You take it as a given that Russia would have turned the Germans around and kept pushing forward. I believe that Hitler would have been able to more heavily fortify the East if he didn't have to worry about an impending massive invasion on the Western Front from the U.S. Most likely the Russians would have turned the Germans back into Poland/Belarus/Ukraine/Romania while the Germans re-grouped and began their renewed push, with their greater numerical and technological advantage, plus the fact that their infrastructure had not sustained a massive bombing campaign as the Soviets had.

People call the Battle of Gettysburg the turning point of the American Civil War. It happened after years of successful Southern defense in response to Northern incursion. When the South first made an incursion into the North, they were crushed and routed for the remainder of the war.

Germany was still a spring chicken in 1942, still on the offence and with the logistical boost from a claimed North Africa would have re-grouped and reorganized their expansion. (absent the involvement of the US.)

My money, absent either Soviet OR American opposition is a win for the Axis.

[Beskar]

Germany won WW2.

They got rid of a mad-man and rebuilt themselves as a proud and industrious nation which is a leading example to many others.

[Sarmatian]

[QUOTE=Gelatinous Cube;2053600353 Germany defeated Germany, Russia lost the most men, and the US was by far the most effective force[/QUOTE]

Oh, boy. Where to start, where to start...

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...-%28what-if%29

[Greyblades]

The Soviets broke the Germans, the Americans broke the Japanese and the British kept fighting the good fight while the other two were debating whether or not they should let the nazis win. Anything beyond that is just nitpicking IMO.

[InsaneApache]

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x12...ing_shortfilms

We didn't win that's for sure.

Goto 42.08 on video.

[HoreTore]

Kadagar once again shows his amazing ability to not read his own links and misrepresent what they say.

The 1944 and 1945 questions were not asked to the French population. The 2004 one was.

[Crandar]

France.
Our unexpected surrender ruined the too premeditated plans of Wermacht once and for all.

In what concerns which country has contributed the most to the Bos' defeat, the Soviet Union is undeniably the answer, as they might have also prevailed over Germany, even without the American intervention.
Of course, the U.S.A. gained the most, from Axis' defeat.

[Brenus]

“The only place where Japanese army excelled was fighting British and Dutch colonial troops.” And French in Indochina.

“It was Kursk. In 1943. Where's Panzerjaeger at? He's got all these numbers memorized, he'll set you straight” Yes and no. Pz always over estimated Manstein and trusts him about the possibility of a breakthrough in Kursk, even when the figures show had still more tanks in reserve than the Germans could possibly fight off.

[The Lurker Below]

The point is that the war had its turning points before the US joined. Again, I don't say the US had nothing to do with winning the war, I am saying they only sped up a process that was bound to happen regardless.

Compare these 2:

A) Soviet Union didn't join the war.
B) United States didn't join the war.

What do you think would have the most impact? Again, the allies could have done it without the US, without Soviet and Germany focusing 100% on Britain the war would have been lost no matter how many ship convoys the US sent.

That is an odd comparison to consider. Who joined vs. who was forced to participate? The Soviet Union had no choice but to win. For the U.S. armed action was still a tool of politics rather than necessary for survival. The comparison lacks validity because we don't need to debate such a topic 60 years later? Every source I've ever read has readily acknowledged Soviet victory in Europe.

Kadagar AV, is GC correct regarding why you post this? I rather believe that since you didn't list any other participants, GC is correct.

[Sarmatian]

Kill ratio is what I meant. More broadly I meant (and continue to mean) the total effect that the US had on creating an outcome. The Soviets lost all those people, only to find themselves on the shorter end of the deal--because we were more effective.

There were geopolitical factors to consider as well.

If we're talking about effort compared to gain, USA's the winner by a mile.

If we're talking about just effort, USSR comes ahead on all counts.

[Kadagar_AV]

Kadagar AV, is GC correct regarding why you post this? I rather believe that since you didn't list any other participants, GC is correct.

I enjoy talking about WWII...

Was interesting numbers in OP, so I thought I would share them.

[Pannonian]

That is all I've been saying! Of course, I'm also saying that any understanding of the war is incomplete without acknowledging both. Not equally for equal reasons, but because the picture is utterly incomplete without both.

I find that the US part in the European theatre in WW2 is like that of the British in the Napoleonic wars. A glamorous intervention right at the end, but which is exaggerated way beyond its worth while the decisive effort was made elsewhere. Your and our contribution was vital mainly in providing money and resources for other players to grind down the enemy. Still key, but not in the way that our historians and storytellers like to tell it. Definitely enough to afford us a place at the bragging table though (Britain in WW2 just about scraped a place at the table, tolerated by the people who matter).

[Sarmatian]

I find that the US part in the European theatre in WW2 is like that of the British in the Napoleonic wars. A glamorous intervention right at the end, but which is exaggerated way beyond its worth while the decisive effort was made elsewhere.

That is a spot on comparison, I believe.

Even if the US stayed out of the war, the outcome would have been the same, but it would have been bloodier.

[Strike For The South]

Germany was liquidating gold reserves of captured terroritoy to keep themselves afloat, house of cards.

All WWII did was speed up the decline of Europe. Maybe gave Russia a bit more influence further into centeral Europe.

Germany lost before they rolled into poland

[Sasaki Kojiro]

There's not much point in talking just about how it happened. The "what-if" is much more relevant, for example, "What if Stalin had not purged the army, engaged in mass executions and genocide in eastern europe, and then signed the nazi soviet pact and twiddled his thumbs while the germans defeated their other enemies?". "What if the germans had worked at being perceived as liberators in eastern europe, and pursued a different strategy in general?"

It's ridiculous to say that CCCP did the "lion's share". They did the totalitarian dictator's share. Meanwhile the western allies did the naive and delusional moron's share.It seems like a bad joke to me to look back at world war two and try to hand out praise and credit, and especially to complain about stalin supposedly not getting enough credit. Which of the major countries can actually pat themselves on the back over their performance in the 1930s? They make the leaders from the world war one era look like geniuses.

[Slyspy]

That's a good comparison, because you slighted the UK as well as the USA! The UK's victory in the napoleonic wars was engineered over a long period of time, was a masterpiece of planning and realpolitik, and led to the British basically ruling the world for 100 years afterward. If that doesn't merit a leading role in the discussion, I don't know what does. The same can be said for the USA in ww2.

The questions of "who won the war?" and "who won from the war?" are not the same of course. In general, though, the nation which does most to win the war is that which acts a paymaster to the rest.

[Papewaio]

Define won.

From a booty point of view the first order summary is who got a veto vote at the UN:
US
USSR
UK
China
France

These were all on the winning side from WWII. The last two definitely benefited from the manpower and logistical support from the three U's

From an effort point of view are we measuring manpower logistics?, manufacturing?, number of bodies fielded?, number of bodies buried? or technology?

Each of these rates the different powers differently. USSR had more manpower as infantry. USA had more manufacturing might due to a combination of manpower and technology.

If we are rating the war as a set of boxers where it is a fight of attrition then US is a standout winner. It's not tiring its getting fitter with each year.

Which year did US get involved in WWII? Do we measure from the declaration of war after Pearl Harbour? Or do we measure when logistical support was given and the convoys were protected across the North Atlantic?

Did the US know Pearl Harbour was about to happen? It is a bit suspicious that all the carriers just happened to be out ferrying aircraft to locations or receiving new ones. It might be that the codes had already been broken, it might just be a bit of serendipity.

As for the importance of reliable intel just read up about the five eyes alliance and how that formed.

tl;dr. The working class soviets provided the soldiers and their superiors and the western capitalists got the booty.

[Husar]

The USSR was also getting fitter with each year during the war.

As for praising Stalin, I don't think that is the point. He was the leader, but a lot of Russian men fought the war for him and put in as much effort as US soldiers and others did if not more. Why can those not be praised? Should they have switched sides to fight Stalin? Would that have helped anyone besides Hitler?

And I maintain that we won, we screwed out more than in WW1 but got out better I would say if you ignore all the dead people both wars produced. We're now a stable democracy where the (the vast majority of) constituents have finally understood how valuable peace and democracy are. We got built up by the US, were given a huge army again a few years after the war ended and finally got a reunification as well. We recovered so well that we are now seen as the mighty European oppressor of smaller nations again. We didn't achieve that in a glorious way and certainly profited from the circumstances but as I said earlier, we created these circumstances ourselves towards the end of the war when we decided to delay the soviets more than the US troops.

[Fragony]

Nazi's won. Russians and Allies won some battles but we got the international-soccialim and royal families back regardless. World War two isn't over everybody is still in place. Small trip to South-America, and back again. The EU is worse, just more subtle when it comes to ensuring royals and capital gets everything they don't really need. The EU is inherintaly deeply undemocratic and even deeply fascist, that's Europe's reality today. No democracy, ultra totalitarian.

Before you see I am full of it, ALL european royal families had ties with the nazi's.

And they are all still in place.

[Greyblades]

Before you see I am full of it, ALL european royal families had ties with the nazi's.

And they are all still in place.

You might have a point (here anyway, the rest of your post is conspiracy hick 101) if they kept those ties after the nazis showed how big bastards they really were, plus condemming an entire family for some of the actions of the individuals is kinda fascist in itself.

[Kadagar_AV]

You might have a point (here anyway, the rest of your post is conspiracy hick 101) if they kept those ties after the nazis showed how big bastards they really were, plus condemming an entire family for some of the actions of the individuals is kinda fascist in itself.

Swedens royal family sure had nazi ties...

[Fragony]

Swedens royal family sure had nazi ties...

All royalty had, no different for us. The Agertinia connection between the nazis's flleing out of Europe to Argentina and KLM (royal dutch aircompany )has yet to be investigated. Our 'queens's' name isn't really Maxima Zorregueta, her real name is von Herzog, daughter of one of the nazi key figures that got flown out of Zurich to Argegentinia by the royal dutch airforce company.

[Kadagar_AV]

All royalty had, no different for us. The Agertinia connection between the nazis's flleing out of Europe to Argentina and KLM (royal dutch aircompany )has yet to be investigated. Our 'queens's' name isn't really Maxima Zorregueta, her real name is von Herzog, daughter of one of the nazi key figures that got flown out of Zurich to Argegentinia by the royal dutch airforce company.

Yeah... You don't have to go into conspiracy territory to state that the royalties of Europe sure was Nazi friendly...



When we talk about countrys benefiting from the war though, Sweden surely must rank high, along with Switzerland... The war was great business for us, and we got to stab Norway in the back to boot...

Jolly good times, we were set for being rich the next 50 years or so, my grandparents generation had gold as candy.

[Fragony]

No need for considerations, it's no secret that the Dutch royal family were SS, same for Sweden and Norway. And there are still idiots who wave flags at them, they couldn't be more on the wrong side of history for doing that. So who won WW2 really. A lot of people got killed, that's for sure. Smartest queen ever, queen Juliana, two great statements 'it would be a a dire mistake to think the nazi's are gone', and my favorite 'if I weren't queen I would be a repuplican'.

[Husar]

First off, I totally agree about your assessment of Germany. They've certainly made the best of the last 60 years, and that's a good thing.

However, Russia was not getting fitter with each year. To this day, the Russian population is still absorbing the aftershocks of ww2. The US could have sustained the war indefinitely, the USSR could not. This has nothing to do with economy and everything to do with people. Russian manpower was legendary, but not infinite.

I understood that in a purely military context and wanted to say that the Red Army was not getting really exhausted towards the end of the war. Instead it grew more and more overwhelming and became one of the largest and scariest armies in the world, even continuing this trend in the years following the war.

[Viking]

No need for considerations, it's no secret that the Dutch royal family were SS, same for [...] Norway.

If only it were true. It would have made things a lot easier for the republican cause.

Instead, the monarchists keep blabbering on about the king's refusal to surrender to the invading nazis, as if it actually mattered for the monarchy as a principle.

[ReluctantSamurai]

God I always swear that I won't ever make comments on revisionist history topics like this, but there are some glaring mis-understandings about LL here that need some clarification...

First...the "only" 4% contribution to Soviet domestic production is often used in such discussions (usually quoting Soviet sources), and always mis-represented and worse, mis-understood. Most folks who bandy such numbers around show an obvious lack of understanding as to how economies, particularly war economies, work. It is not simply an additive "building block" arrangement where you just count "beans and bullets." When considering LL, one has to consider what this aid allowed the Soviets to do and accomplish when Gosplan (essentially the war-time planning board) sat down at the beginning of each fiscal year to decide how to allocate the budget.

Mark Harrison (an accomplished and world renown economist of the WW 2 Soviet economy) in his book Accounting for War (highly recommended for anyone serious about gaining a true picture of the effects of LL) states:

For the record, it is worth noting that 'only 4%', although probably not an outright lie, certainly presented a misleading view of the real volume of Allied aid to the USSR. [...]....by 1943, Allied aid was contributing one tenth of overall resources available to the Soviet economy.

10% vs 4% doesn't seem like much of a difference, but what it allowed Soviet planners to do was. By mid-1942, the Soviet economy was on the verge of collapse just like happened in WW 1. So many men had been conscripted into the army or into the factories, and so much resources, both stockpiled and current were being fed into the war effort, that the agricultural/rural sector of the Soviet economy was ready to collapse. Out in the countryside, near-starvation was the norm, and the lack of services such as medical treatment, availability of parts for farm machinery, etc, was causing a loss of the will to fight and certain rebellion if not remedied.

Equipment from LL such as tanks, aircraft, trucks, etc, etc, etc, would have little direct impact on such a situation. But......if the Soviets don't have to produce as much, or any, of the items received from LL, then they can devote resources elsewhere and starting in 1943, they did just that. Gross investment in their economy showed a positive number for the first time since the war began, and public outlays (money devoted to non-military areas of the economy) rose dramatically. It's quite possible that Stalin would've been on the receiving end of an October Revolution had things continued the way they were headed....

Without going into an endless diatribe about a complete inventory of what was sent, several items stand out as being crucial.

We are all used to reading the accounts of the Soviet juggernaut rolling across the frozen steppes of the Ukraine and Byelorussia, and finally Operation Bagration pushing the Nazis back into Germany, but how was this accomplished? There are several reasons, none of which are more important than the Soviet will to defeat the Germans, but that might not have been enough.

The first singular item is the GMC "deuce-and-a-half"...tens of thousands of them. Soviets continued to produce their own trucks right up to the end of the war, and certainly could have built enough trucks to satisfy army use. However, in doing so, how many less tanks and other equipment would the Soviet army had to do without? Lots. US trucks were plentiful, ruggedly built, and without them I seriously doubt we would have seen too much Soviet 'blitzkreig' overrunning thousands of sq. kilometers of German-occupied territory in stunningly short amounts of time.

Second singular item is canned food, popularly known as Spam. Given that the Soviet agricultural system had taken the largest hit from the war, both in terms of workers and lost productive farmland, having readily available food that the army could consume 'on the march', should not be under-estimated. Even Soviet soldiers had to stop to eat

Third singular item is radios. What contributed greatly to better Soviet tactics concerning armor and aircraft? The fact that 'tankers' could actually talk to each other on the battlefield, or fighter aircraft vectored to areas under threat from the Luftwaffe, cannot be brushed off as simply accumulated experience, although that's certainly a very important factor. It was the widespread availability of radios that allowed Soviet formations to react quicker to German moves, and those formations to operate more cohesively when in combat.

Fourth singular item is aluminum. One can add non-ferrous alloys to that. In 1941, Soviet imports of non-ferrous metals amounted to 4.7 million dollars US (corrected in terms of 1940 values from Accounting for War Table J2). In 1942, that amount went to 60.4 million; in 1943 125.3 million; and in 1944 it was 178.8 million dollars....a simply huge increase. Now harkening back to all those sweeping Soviet offensives of 1943-45, another vision we all have seen is the hordes of Il's accompanied by an even bigger horde of Yak 9's dominating the battlefield. So what, right? A tribute to Soviet industrial effort, and ingenuity.

Nyet.

Ask yourself this question: Where did the Soviets come up with all the aluminum for the engine blocks and other lightweight portions of their aircraft that allowed them to fly further, faster, and stay in the air for longer periods of time? Yep.....good old Lend Lease.

I'll get off my soapbox for now, but before you folks start throwing around numbers and all kinds of other information about Lend Lease, I highly recommend you read any of Mark Harrison's books on the subject and learn a few things beyond the usual fluff....like I did.

Oh, and as to who "won" WW 2? If neither the US nor Russia had been involved, short of atomics, many of us would be speaking German right now.

[Husar]

So we can basically agree that Germany won while the USA sent lots of stuff to Russia that helped greatly with keeping Stalin in power and enabling the Cold War that followed. Yet another case of the US creating its own enemy? How did the USSR continue to maintain and upgrade the large army once LL ended if LL was crucial to its survival as a state?