I got to learn "the other side" of the story, after meeting a few people from nations marketed as our "arch enemies". I became extremely disappointed that history is never a recollection of facts, rather a narrative to cater to national propaganda.
It's super fun living in Sweden for some time, and then living in nearby Russia for some time. You get to hear exactly the same reports of military aggression, but the perpetrators are always the other side.
I agree, I really liked history and the humanities back in school but after traveling and living in different countries I found it extremely repulsive how the humanities are basically getting twisted to fit the local agenda everywhere. So I stuck with STEM and really happy I don't have to deal with this BS at least in my professional life.
History, when I studied it in college, was a collection of opinions, claims of varying veracity, evidence of different strengths, lots of missing information, and attempts to find meaning in it all, usually from some current perspective. History professors these days are more often accused of postmodernism than narrative and more often of Marxism than national propaganda. Those electives in college are supposed to expose people to things like that.
There is something very unlike that taught before college in the US that's more about memorizing than understanding. It's a similar situation to how the math that people have phobias about doesn't resemble undergrad math major math at all.
Isn't the simple answer just Cold War propaganda, especially within education systems in the west? There was a strong incentive to minimize the USSR's accomplishments and sacrifices in the west. Even if for some reason you think that the Soviets didn't have as much impact as people used to believe, it just means their propaganda was more effective earlier on. Either way, I think that's the easiest way to explain the change.
You're getting downvoted by people who don't know shit / never set foot in a Western europe classroom.
This is documented : the role of the USSR in WWII victory was erased from public school programs and constantly downplayed in media.
There are numerous traces of the controversies that arose around this throughout the decades.
Not really. They pretty much stayed on course with both programs throughout the war — and this was true for those in the military just as much as civilians. The policy of shooting anyone who hinted at retreat, combined with treating Soviet POWs as traitors (which encouraged soldiers to fight to the literal death), contributed to both tallies.
Well the even parts of Europe where USSR won those countries lost. Only Europe “won” by US/Britain can be considered free/independent. Those who were on the USSR side were hardly better off under USSR than Nazi Germany.
I think the clear distinction here, is that in absence of a reconstruction effort, you do not have stability, and war continues unabated. Maybe you call it something different or attribute it to different actors, but the true delineation of conflict is a tangible and lasting peace. I think that the US demonstrated its victory as it helped to coordinate and furnish that peace in a manner that supported its own interests at the time.
Definitely, but they were geographically and philosophically isolated from several traditional European power centers, unlike their US capitalist counterparts. So if Europe is the theater and ultimately part of the prize, I think the US was able to flourish in influence from the start given its more advantageous positioning.
I don't know which part of Brazil you're from, or if this is a relatively new development (I've been away for 7 or 8 years now) but in Porto Alegre where I grew up and lived most of my life, I don't recall ever hearing anyone regarding the US as having won the Vietnam invasion.
It was a wildly unpopular war with poor people being sent into a meat grinder.
And its the one with the pervasive urban legend about returning soldiers being spat on.
Vietnam is still a single-party state run by a self titled Communist Party that follows Marxist teachings while adopting the more modern state-capitalist approach. This is the opposite of American values and the exact outcome the Americans were there to prevent. Although the consequences have been largely muted.
I also see memes about it almost every day. I saw a video on instagram about Muhammad Ali talking about the absurdity of people being sent into that war.
You're right that people remember the opposition to the war. But that's exactly why they don't accept that the war is lost.
In American's minds, the war was opposed, and they think that was the reason why it ended. When in fact it was just the opposite. Vietnam won that war of invasion fair and square, with the sacrifice of millions of Vietnamese for their country. Because of that, the American people was unwilling to send more of their children to be killed in Vietnam.
The result of the protests is that the government created the illusion that they were retreating because people didn't want to continue the war, not because they lost.
While they talk about it less now because they’ve got other more current foreign issues for both military chest-thumping and blaming liberals, conservatives used to (at least, IME between about the mid-80s and about 9/11) incessantly talk about the US having won Vietnam “militarily” before political betrayal by the “liberals”.
Not endorsing any part of this view, but I certainly got subjected to it.
Interesting! Thats a view I have not been exposed to!
Just seems that the whole Vietnam having only a communist party with state capital system would make it obvious that we lost. But maybe people dont even know why we were there…
> Just seems that the whole Vietnam having only a communist party with state capital system would make it obvious that we lost.
The alternative explanation is that we won the war, but then handed over South Vietnam anyway.
(“We won the war against the VC, but the cost of doing so and the subsequent full-scale NVA invasion led to a determination to not even try to fight the follow-on war with the NVA” is a somewhat more defensible narrative with a broadly similar shape, so there’s arguably something vaguely resembling a point underneath the nationalistic chest-thumping, though artificially dividing the war that way is still a distortion, IMO.)
> In the sense that communism stopped spreading to new countries, perhaps it was a win of sorts.
South Vietnam falling not leading to a cascade of Communism just proved that not only was the war a loss, but the key premise for fighting it in the first place was false.
> Would the USSR have won against Germany if the US was not involved?
It's impossible to say for sure, but in my opinion, probably not. 1/3 of the trucks in the Red Army were built in America and supplied via lend lease, as were 1/3 of the aircraft in the Soviet Air Force. The trucks, in particular, were of significantly higher quality than native Soviet trucks. The US only provided something like 10% of the fuel used by the USSR during the war, but the fuel it did provide was of significantly higher quality. The USSR had no native production of high octane aviation fuel. All of the high quality fuel was provided by the US. Most (90%) of the tanks and guns were built in the USSR, but much of the tanks that were built were built from US raw materials. The USSR was especially poor in aluminum.
Many people (myself included) are of the opinion that wars are primarily won by logistics-- by having the right people in the right place at the right time with the right stuff. If lend-lease didn't supply the USSR, they wouldn't have had the trucks for rapid mobility, they wouldn't have had the aircraft to contest the Luftwaffe, they wouldn't have had the logistic capability for an offensive war. Could they have forced a WWI Western front style stalemate? Maybe. Hard to say.
> And what if the US joined the Axis powers in the war?
The Axis+US definitely win. Guaranteed. Germany fights a one front war against the USSR, the USSR fights a two front war against Germany in the West and the US in the East. Lots of people have speculated that if the USSR was not able to relocate the forces guarding the East against Japan that the USSR loses the Battle of Moscow. If those Eastern divisions were required to stay in the East to fight against the US, and were additionally diverting resources that would otherwise be used to replace losses against Germany, Germany would probably have taken Moscow.
US naval power by the end of '43 is enough that Britain probably loses command of the sea. Instead of Britain blockading Germany, the US is probably blockading the UK. The blockade would be much more serious for the UK than it was for Germany.
A major part of why Germany lost was that it didn't have enough fuel to fight a mobilized war. Even if the US did literally nothing other than divert lend-lease from providing material to the Allies to providing fuel and trucks to Germany instead, Germany probably wins the war without a single US boot on the ground. (getting that fuel from the US to Germany would require fighting through the aforementioned British blockade)
The lend-lease act was after Stalingrad. And Stalingrad was as much as a founding battle as Boridino (Moscova for French) was against Napoleon. I think the war was won there, and after that it was just a matter of time and Hitler not having the atomic bomb. Without the lend-lease, going on an offensive war would have been harder, but the Soviet tanks were better than their german counterparts (the king tiger was too expensive to produce compared to the IS-2, and while the IS-2M was not really tested in battle, it probably could have faced the king, and the Luftwaffe was tied down trying to capitulate the British.
To me, the Africa campain - pre-torch - and the Stalingrad battle (plus the frontline stabilizing in the East) was enough as long a Japan did not enter the war.
And the British as well as the colonies forces were fundamental at holding Africa, so its not really "USSR won alone", it was more that the US not officially entering the war would not have a huge impact on the final result.
Also the passive resistance and the new management methods, pitting dissociated teams against each other was becoming a serious hindrance on innovation and lost time, as well as flawed design (think USSR quality in the 80s). I think this is inherent to this "natural strength/intuition/cleverness/[insert 'quality' here]" propaganda so used by the far right. If you're taught/led to believe "you're failing because of the jews/tzigans/communists" , when those are not here to take the blame, it become harder on your brain to justify your failures.
Why delaying? USSR has the most powerful army in 1939. USSR could have occupied Ploesti oil fields in 1940 that would effectively stop the war.
Creating a common border with your enemy is not a very effective way to "delay" from my point of view.
This is really absurd. By 1939 the Red Army was massively lacking in tanks, artillery, air power, and logistics. They could not have sustained an expeditionary offensive against Germamy, even in Romania. And while Ploesti had significant oil production, by 1939 Germany had alternatives and a lower oil consumption, so this would not have stalled the offensive.
The pact was hardly a delaying strategy. They had almost 2 years since Poland was invaded to prepare against Blitzkrieg tactics and didn't. Stalin even knew the exact date of Barbarossa but didn't believe it or prepare for it, because for whatever reason one of the most paranoid people ever, trusted Hitler.
Just because some specific act tips the scales doesn't make it the sole reason for win. One soldier tipping the battle isn't the (only, or main) winner.
That's not about US involvement, just your specific argument. Coming form Eastern Europe, we were liberated by Soviet army, Americans never touched our soil. But it was a brutal liberation, and what came afterwards was even worse.
Russians bled the most, killed the most. They wouldn't probably win if left on their own though for reasons stated by others. And that's purely Europe. Add Pacific and rest of the world and the role of US is undeniable. How difficult is it to accept that there is no single state who can claim the throne, only a joint force.
More interesting question for me is, if Japanese wouldn't do Pearl Harbor, how long it would take US to engage with Nazi Germany. Maybe far too long, US wasn't very keen to start open war. Maybe a critical window would be missed and invasion could be a failure.
That's a difficult question. Without US involvement the USSR would probably have won but at an even more disastrous cost. And the war would have taken longer.
But ultimately the USSR had more resources and more manpower than the Nazis so the question was moreso about when the Soviet wartime production would have finished building up.
There is also the question that Soviet planning would very probably have been much more urgent if the US kept neutral.
Because it sort of did in that they provided support for UK and even the USSR that might have tipped the balance, not to mention operations in Africa.
But really it's because there was a deliberate and concerted effort to erase the USSR's role in defeating the Nazis in western europe, after say 1960.
Through public education, and general coverage in medias/fil/documentaries. The US cultural hegemony is real :)
It started earlier, but at the time when the Communist Party was at 30% in a lot of countries and 90% of the workers where in unions the disinformation worked very poorly.
Looking back at my childhood growing up in a small NATO country (The Netherlands), it really strikes me. I found a box of my childhood drawings at my parents place. I’d drawn soldiers and fighter jets etcetera and they mostly had US flags. Some kind of militaristic nationalism is common in many places I guess but apparently I had grown up emotionally attached to the US military.
> Through public education, and general coverage in medias/fil/documentaries.
On children’s television, every year I’d see interviews with the American and Canadian soldiers that liberated the Netherlands. Which of course is important but… I watched an item on Auschwitz were they managed to talk about the history and liberation of the camp for twenty minutes without ever mentioning the country that the liberating soldiers came from.
> The US cultural hegemony is real...
> I’d drawn soldiers and fighter jets etcetera and they mostly had US flags...
I think this is the cleverest and most insidious thing the US has managed to do. For some reason, in spite of their appalling record: only nation to use atomic weapons on civilians, practiced apartheid for decades, has been continually at war with 'someeone' since the end of WWII, brutal prison system, death penalty, trigger happy police, etc. etc. so many people all over the world still see the USA as "cool". It's unfathomable to me.
I've said many times that; in a lot of European and west-leaning countries, you could literally sell people dog-shit and they'd chomp it down with relish --as long as you called it "American Style" and put a stars & stripes on the packet.
Not sure why that would be the case. A lot of Brits understand that while Britain survived WW2 it was the US that came out strong and helped to end WW2 compared to any other nation on earth (except Soviet Union) with not only technology dominance but also economic and in many ways cultural.
This also has a personal bias as I want the US to be remembered and not the UK who I think has done so much damage around the world pre WW2 in the name of colonialism including my home country.
While my comment was sarcastic it was still mostly true. The history channel is completely dominated by world war 2 documentaries and they rarely discuss the involvement of other nations.
Some British people will obviously know more, but the vast majority will still believe, as the saying goes, "2 world wars and one world cup"
And if you were Russian you would know that it was the Soviets that defeated the Nazis and won the war.
And if you were Polish you would know that the Soviets were bad for invading originally, and the English were also pretty bad through their initial inactivity. In fact if you look at the death toll by nation, one could argue that the UK barely went to war at all. The UK lost what, 400,000 people? Compared with Poland's 5,000,000? And of course a significant portion of the pilots in the Battle of Britain were Polish, and the Enigma machine was cracked by three Polish mathematicians eight years prior to Alan Turing pushing the work over the line (and subsequently taking all the credit for it, at least in the eyes of the British).
And they'd all be wrong. The Allies won the war. None of them did it on their own. Nor could they had they tried. The UK was going to fall. The USSR was going to fall. It took all of us to destroy the Axis.
My point is that every country teaches their own narrative to its youth, and of course it’s always only the parts of history that don’t make them look bad. English kids aren’t taught that the UK did nothing when Westerplatte was under siege. Swedish kids aren’t taught that Sweden profited and aided the Nazis by selling them natural resources. Australian kids aren’t taught much about WWII relative to Europeans as far as I can gather, as the curriculum centres around the ANZACs and Gallipoli.
I think people having pride (or indeed shame) in their own nation — whichever nation that may be — for historic military engagements is misplaced, and is really an example of exceptionalism. It’s not a small thing either; I think this sentiment significantly aided Vote Leave’s Brexit campaign. As another commenter pointed out — British people know that we won “two world wars and one World Cup”.
...and American kids aren't taught that the US was selling oil and equipment to the Japanese so they could attack China...the cabinet cutting off these supplies while the US President was away at a secret meeting with Churchill in Alaska triggered the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Both Churchill and Roosevelt had planned to continue supplying Japan so they could destroy China, the supplies were cutoff without their knowledge.
Once promised US oil was cutoff and the secret treaty signed in 1905 by Teddy and Japan was reneged on, the Japanese needed to invade the rest of Asia (starting with Indonesia) to keep their war machine fueled, bombing Pearl Harbor ensured they could do this with less US resistance in the Pacific.
Both by Antony Beevor. After reading these books, it really convinced me how much undue credit the US gets for "winning" WW2 (in Europe) when its pretty clear the Soviets did the large majority of actually doing the costly dirty work in Europe.
People like to point out the obvious propaganda of other countries, but are fairly oblivious to the USA's own very strong propaganda and cultural influence.
The US was a smart, well organized, helpful 3rd party entering the war from another side of the map. I'm spitballing highly here, but it feels to me like it changed the conflict from a side vs side attrition to something more dynamic & much harder to fight. The size & scale of that change doesn't necessarily have to mean that the US did most of the fighting, did the most to "win" the war, but it's substantial presence was key to changing the nature of the conflict & bringing it to a close.
Another key point to me about the US's importance in the war is something I've only heard in the last decade, from The Secret History of Silicon Valley[1][2][3]. The US's technological work in trying to learn & counter advanced German war machines seems like a crucial contribution to the war. Foiling Germany's impervious air defenses (& thwarting their bombing campaigns) is one example of the advanced signals & intelligence role that the US contributed to the war effort against the Nazis.
As the linked Quora answer points out though, the US was also making colossal material contributions to the Soviet war effort, while also running their own invasion in parallel. While also working enormously hard to keep England fighting too. In the earlier days of the ar, denying German's free reign over the Atlantic required not nearly as many lives as a ground war (but still a horrific death toll), but gracious were a lot of ships ever lost trying to bring food & supplies under the Lend Lease program, & created the war-time industry needed to eventually enter the war in full.
The Headline misses the second half of the question, "because the USSR killed 75% of German Soldiers in WW2".
KIA/Casualties are just one metric. You would expect the long war of attrition and many Pyrrhic victories on the Eastern front to have a high cost of human life, that doesn't necessarily equate to strategic impact.
The saying is... Churchill gave the time, Roosevelt gave the money and Stalin gave the Blood.
Casualties are a metric, but not the be all end of war. Indeed the USSR was victorious despite having more deaths then every other participant put together... Obviously there are other things that matter.
When you account for PoWs, the numbers are more equitable. Approximately 4 and 1 million German fatalities occurred on the eastern and western fronts respectively. The USSR took a further 3m PoWs, while the US, UK, and France captured 7.6m between them according to Overmans. Along similar lines, troop distributions again reinforce that both fronts were critically important to Germany. I'm sure many people will be happy to point out the issues with both of these metrics, but the different fronts were clearly very different places.
It's funny, when I studied abroad in Russia people of all ages asked me this question incessantly and indignantly. It was almost like an article of faith for many people I met there that America has always denied the USSR's role in beating the Nazis. Never quite understood why so many Russians think this, but my guess is that it comes from watching state TV.
And it was not just German women. Similar things happened in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania (http://www.globeatwar.com/article/red-armys-rape-europe) These reports would filter into diplomats in the West and they were so shocking no one believed it at first, and it was downplayed in the West but citizens from these countries remember. In addition to the scale ("almost no woman in Hungary was spared") is the blindness of the attacks. Everyone was a target. Especially shocking were the rapes of emaciated concentration camp survivors -- who had just been liberated by the Red Army! Often after the rape the women were shot and many committed suicides. Russian prisoners freed from German PoW camps were raped by Red Army units they encountered as they made their way back to Russia.
There was also extensive looting -- organized, systematic looting of people's household treasures, watches, clothes, shoes, etc. Soldiers breaking into homes, raping the women, stealing any currency or valuables. Then moving onto the next home. Block by block, city by city, across all europe. The native population quickly learned it was not safe to leave your home wearing a watch.
And of course that was followed by systematic political oppression, arrest of political enemies or those who were "tainted" by the West, including ordinary soldiers or aviators who committed the crime of flying with the RAF or with free French forces (https://www.wingsinexile.co.uk/clanky/return-communist-perse...) -- these were all jailed, de-personed, and hounded by authorities for the rest of their lives as being politically tainted. Remember some of these were national heroes. And that was followed by a series of coups in which the communist parties assassinated their opponents and seized power.
Bottom line, Eastern Europe has very mixed feelings about being "liberated" by the USSR, whereas Western Europe has much more positive memories of being liberated by the West, and so it's more a matter of one side celebrating while the other would prefer to not remember those events at all.
My grandmother also. It's amazing how many in the US not only don't know about this, but become angry when you tell them.
Yet for the generation that lived through WW2, you can talk to anyone who was on the wrong side of the iron curtain and they will tell you what it was like.
"Female deaths in connection with the rapes in Germany, overall, are estimated at 240,000.[2][17] Antony Beevor describes it as the "greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history", and has concluded that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone.[18]"
In Hungary:
"According to Skrabski, it’s possible that as many as 800,000 Hungarian women were raped, and the violence included gang rape and sexual torture. Pregnancy resulting from rape was so widespread that the government suspended its ban on abortions for several months during 1945, offering abortion and STD treatment services free of charge." https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/...
There are many well documented stories of these atrocities in all the areas occupied by the Red Army, most too gruesome to include here. Anyone can do their own research, the information is out there, even if many don't want to hear it. When you want to understand why Eastern Europe is falling over itself (foolishly, IMO) to join NATO and integrate into the West, these types of things need to be understood as being in the background.
This is a bit of a facile analysis. The germans killed out of a desire to kill -- e.g. to exterminate undesireable elements, primarily jews, gypsies, gays, jehovah's witnesses, and mentally ill, plus of course political resisters.
The Russians killed in order to terrorize the domestic populations. They terrorized everyone.
When you see public displays like the husband of a farm impaled on his front porch and all the women raped and murdered inside, that is a very public act of terrorism meant to frighten the general population and let them know that their lives had zero value to the new occupying forces. When you see that happen in every single village, in every neighborhood, it spreads terror across the entire nation. It was not violence focused at undesirable groups, it was violence focused at anyone, arbitrarily, and very publicly. E.g. 20% of Hungary's female population was raped, and many were murdered afterwards. That touches basically everyone in society, to let them know that no one is safe, and that anyone can be gotten at any time and for arbitrary reasons, and if you had 5 women in your extended family, odds are the Russians raped one of them. That is something that terrorizes the entire nation. Things like the repeated public gangrape of nuns in Poland, a very catholic country, that terrorizes a large proportion of the population, as does the execution of random ordinary villagers in gruesome spectacles.
Is it so surprising that a policy of terrorism succeeds in terrorizing the population? Do you really think it's just about numbers?
I'm not telling you about some people, but about very specific person with specific experiences - my grandmother. The war period did not look the same to everyone.
And yes, I'm telling you that my grandmother herself has better memories of Germans than Red Army soldiers. She was a nice blond girl who knew a bit of German and that was according to her helping her a lot with Germans. But she had to hide from front line Red Army soldiers because everyone knew that they were mass raping women.
The worst direct story about about Germans in my family is that one of my great grandfathers was forced as a recruit into Wehrmacht. Germans threatened to kill the whole family if we would not agree. He probably died somewhere on front lines, but nobody knows what exactly happened to him.
You can’t really trust these videos, because you could do this in any country. Interview 100 people and choose the dumbest 5 and selectively air those clips... It’s fun entertainment, but not much more.
I thought of this one from the Friends sitcom. Feels a bit more real than asking actual people, even though it's been written by comedy writers. https://youtu.be/1aX12xGM7GQ
well, this makes me think hmm, I know all the answers to those questions, but I've never been asked in one of those surveys of people walking on the street when living in the U.S - but if I had been.... would I have been put on this funny TV segment?
Yeah, I think that "what's the religion of Israel" - "Islamic" is indistinguishable from entry level trolling, and maybe given the short pause before saying it this guy was thinking "how do I get on the news but in a defensible way I can tell my friends yeah I was trolling bro" or maybe he's really stupid.
But as a stupidity test there must be some false positives in there - so the rule is, in funny TV segments never ascribe to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by maliciousness.
on edit: of course maliciousness used for wordplay purposes, but maybe should be replaced with mischievousness which nowadays is interpreted as meaning less than malicious.
