Hellas: did we change the course of WWII??

[Hound of Ulster]

Don't mind the footy analogy at all, especially as it spot on in this case. Like I said before, every country that fought against the Axis played its part in Hitler's defeat, and lets not forget the Pacific, where the Chinese political factions, the Australians, the Dutch, the Indians, and the New Zealanders all played thier part in the victory over the Axis.

[Furious Mental]

Don't forget the Fuzzy Wuzzies.

It is ironic but not really surprising that Ionis Metaxas opposed Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Fascists view history and human existence as a Darwinian struggle for survival between collective groups, e.g. nation, race, or religion. Even though nationalist fascists from different countries were united by their common ideology (especially hatred of communists) they never trusted each other because their goals were contradictory; they all wanted their own country to be supreme at the expense of others. This is why with a few exceptions Germany and Italy didn't put genuine fascists in charge of conquered and co-opted countries; they preferred malleable figures from the Old Right- generals, bureaucrats, aristocrats, etc. But, in any case, I don't think Metaxas was a fascist anyway. It seems to me that he was put in charge by the monarchy and then imitated genuinely fascist regimes (which were on the ascendancy at that stage), in particular to try to generate mass support for his regime. The regimes of Salazar and Franco were in the same vein. At that time Japan and Nationalist China also experimented with some of the trappings of fascism. It was certainly not national socialist, because that term refers specifically to the variation of fascism developed by Adolph Hitler and the NSDAP.

[Beefy187]

If there is anyone to blame for loss of Axis then it would be Napoleon...

If he didnt exist then Hitler wouldnt have messed up with general winter

[Furious Mental]

One thing which is rarely mentioned in discussions about the reasons for the victory of the Allies is the fact that until the Battle of Stalingrad and the appointment of Speer as Armaments Minister, Germany was actually underspending on the war. People find this unbelievable- that ultra-militaristic Nazi Germany, the expansionist aggressor, could actually have failed to dedicate its national resources to the war until it was half over, but it did. By the end of the war, Germany was probably spending 60% of its GDP on the war, the same as Britain, although probably less than the Soviet Union, but both Britain and the USSR had a head start of several years on Germany. Partly this is because the success of the first Blitzkrieg offensives convinced Hitler that the war would be over quickly and there was no need to put the economy on a total war footing. Research by a historian called Woolf also concluded that it was partly because industrial workers still largely resented Hitler and his war years after he had taken power, and simply weren't enthusiastic about working for either. It did not help that the Nazi state was an extremely dysfunctional polyarchy.