Who Could Have Won WWII?

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Originally Posted by RN7

I just can't agree with this statement. Germany was by far the most powerful Axis state, and what about the contribution of the Soviets to Allied victory. Also the Soviets didn't have half their army in the Far East for the duration of the war, they only redeployed large forces to Asia after the defeat of Germany.

The Pacific War was a sideshow in WW2 compared with the war in Europe, although it may not have felt that way to those who fought in it. China could barely arm its own army, and it made little headway against Japanese forces who occupied China for the duration of the war. The Japanese Army was also inferior in material, technology and tactics to the German Army, and its largest army in China was simply bulldozed by the Soviets in the last few weeks of the war.

A sideshow that diverted hundreds of ships, thousands of aircraft and tens of thousands of troops away from the ETO with the Chinese resisting the Japanese for eight years suffering something in the order of 10-20 million casualties. When you decide to kill off that many people, it takes a fair bit of your time and your troops to do it.

That Soviet army that bulldozed the Japanese forces in China, the one that had benefited from all those years of fighting the Germans, what did they face? The remnants of a nation on the edge of surrender. And as for half the Soviet army, I never said that half the Soviet army was deployed in Asia. What I said was "Troops that would have been free to tie up half the Soviet forces and keep them from being used against Germany.", it was a generalized statement meaning that the Soviets would have had another Front to fight on.

That poor little Chinese army managed to hold the Japanese up to the point where they both faced stalemate but in the process the Japanese invasion of China held up something like 4 million Japanese personnel. Four million.

The war in Asia began two years before the war in Europe but we're all taught that WW2 didn't start until the Germans invaded Poland.
The fact remains that if the Japanese had been able to overrun China and get to the borders of the Soviet Union in sufficient numbers, the Soviets would have had to divert troops away from the ETO.
The Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation helped to prevent that.
The vast majority of what we are taught about the war in the English speaking world is decidedly Euro- and Americano-centric with even historians paying scant attention to much of the war in Asia and specifically the Japanese campaigns against other Asian nations - as if whatever happened between Asians wasn't really important to anyone or anything.