Minister Masket wrote:I am sick of this argument being used against us, because it just isn't true. We have the Russians - funnily enough to thank for that, not you Yanks.
You were too busy fighting Jip Jap over the ruddy Pacific. Sure you donated troops and nosh, but frankly your late entry meant you didn't get to do an awful lot.
To take offense at this thread is not the liability of "MM's Evil Scientist Corporation" or any of their flying monkeys of doom. Batteries not included.
in some ways, i agree with you. i've read
Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-45 by Max Hastings. A historian of huge repute, from your side of the pond.
and so in the grand scope of the war, the Russian contribution played a bigger part in the fall of Germany than did the Western Allies.
however, you cats were getting starved out, before Russia entered the war. and we were sending you much needed food, passing the German U-Boat blockade.
had we not given that support, Britain easily could have fallen. While it is not the practice of historians to ask "what if", it is a safe extrapolation that without US support, Britain would have had to eventually capitulate, or fight to the last starving man, woman and child.
and i'm not one of those to claim that the US won WWII. and clearly SHAEF was a plodding, slow, political machine. without the Russians, the war would probably not have been won by 1945, and would have been cataclysmic in terms of the numbers of Western Allied casualties.
but the US did commit at least twice as many troops to the war as Britain (mostly because our population was just that much larger), and provided the unstopping supply of munitions, armor, artillery, air power, etc.
however, without Britain, the US never could have contributed to the European theater in the first place... there'd have been no staging ground.