OT Attack in Paris 60 dead

[Olefin]

Originally Posted by Legbreaker

No they didn't, they assisted.
You've been watching too many American war movies.

They did a lot more than just assist - without the huge amount of supplies we sent the Russians they would have, at best, managed a tie on the Eastern Front - they had the bodies but we put them on wheels and those wheels are what they used for the offensives of 43-45 that destroyed the Germans

As for the Pacifc War - yes we got help from Australia and others but the war against Japan was basically an American show from 1943 on

[Raellus]

WWII was a team effort. Without any one of the Big Three, the Allies couldn't have won.

Originally Posted by Olefin

They did a lot more than just assist - without the huge amount of supplies we sent the Russians they would have, at best, managed a tie on the Eastern Front - they had the bodies but we put them on wheels and those wheels are what they used for the offensives of 43-45 that destroyed the Germans

The amounts of war material shipped by the U.S. to many of its allies during and even before its official entry to the war is simply staggering. If any factor can be singled out for doing the most to win the war, it's allied war production, and the U.S., hands down, produced the most.

Originally Posted by Olefin

As for the Pacifc War - yes we got help from Australia and others but the war against Japan was basically an American show from 1943 on

This is partially valid if you're just looking at offensive operations that regained territory. It ignores the huge role that Chinese, British, and ANZAC forces played in tying down Japanese troops in China, Burma, and New Guinea. If those Japanese troops had been free to deploy elsewhere, the U.S.A.'s island hopping would have taken A LOT longer to reach the Japanese home islands.

[Legbreaker]

Originally Posted by Raellus

WWII was a team effort. Without any one of the Big Three, the Allies couldn't have won.

Absolutely. Boils my blood when Americans (and others) state the US won the war. They didn't even enter it until December 1941, nearly two years after it commenced, and would have been nearly impossible without the use of Australia as a base.
It is in fact rather insulting to the rest of the world.

[aspqrz]

Originally Posted by Legbreaker

Absolutely. Boils my blood when Americans (and others) state the US won the war. They didn't even enter it until December 1941, nearly two years after it commenced, and would have been nearly impossible without the use of Australia as a base.
It is in fact rather insulting to the rest of the world.

Tell it to the Chinese, who had been at war with the Japs since 1937.

As for the US winning the war, well, while the UK probably could have hung on, and probably supported the USSR just enough for it to hang on as well, the reality is that, even as weak as the Germans were (economically speaking), the war would have been much much much longer without the direct involvement of the US ... but the 'allies' would probably have won ... eventually ... think the Napoleonic Wars (1789-1812/15) ... so, 1939-1961 ... or, more likely, the UK would have managed an A Bomb (as they had an actual Atomic program, which the Germans really didn't ... and were on the right track, which the Germans patently weren't) by the late 1940s or early to mid 1950s.

It would have been a much nastier war.

(And, no, it is unlikely that the UK would have been crippled economically any more than she was by the demands of the Napoleonic and earlier World Wars ... historically speaking the Brits have managed to manage the economic side of their wars very well for the last 2-3 centuries at least, including WW1 and WW2)

So, yes, US involvement certainly meant that the war was much shorter, much less nasty (!) and more certain in its outcome, but they were, indeed, an assist rather than the decisive factor.

Of course, I expect US School History Books tell a different story, if they cover WW2 at all. I know Aussie schoolbooks have changed dramatically over my teaching career - when I started teaching in 1977 they covered WW2 in broad worldwide strokes, mentioning Australia peripherally ... when I finished in 2013/4 they covered Australia in New Guinea with peripheral mention of our involvement in Singapore and the Western Desert and even less coverage of the war as a whole.

Phil

[Raellus]

I teach history in an American high school. I make it a point to explain that the U.S.A. did not win WWII on its own, not by a long shot. I show my students how many enemy combatant casualties each of the major allies caused. The Russians destroyed more German divisions and killed/captured more German soldiers than the rest of the Allies combined. I show them how the U.S. could not have participated in the liberation of western Europe without a secure base on Europe's doorstep (i.e. Great Britain). I need to make more of a point of stressing Australia's similar importance in the PTO.

That said, my students also learn that the other Allies could not have won the war without direct U.S. involvement. I show the students production figures from all of the main combatants. I don't need to say much- the numbers tell most of the story. The U.S. out-produced most other combatants combined in ship tonnage (warships and merchant shipping), aircraft, and ammunition. Much of that production went to Great Britain and the U.S.S.R., helping to keep them afloat in their darkest hours. The U.S.A. narrowly beat the Soviets in tank production. The Soviets contributed more manpower than any of the other Allies and they also took far more casualties.

Without USN assistance, the Royal Navy wouldn't have been able to win the Battle of the Atlantic. Cut off from its global empire by German U-Boats, Great Britain would have been in much worse shape, economically, than it was during the Napoleonic Wars. It's unlikely that they could have carried on the war on their own. The German threat to Egypt wasn't truly eliminated until the U.S. contributed to Allied operations in North Africa. Although it's not impossible, it's highly unlikely that an economically isolated Great Britain could have developed and delivered its own atomic weapons before being forced to sue for peace with the Axis.

Guys, the numbers really don't lie. It was a team effort. As I said before, without any one of the Big Three, and arguably China, the Allies could not have won WWII.

[aspqrz]

Originally Posted by Raellus

Without USN assistance, the Royal Navy wouldn't have been able to win the Battle of the Atlantic. Cut off from its global empire by German U-Boats, Great Britain would have been in much worse shape, economically, than it was during the Napoleonic Wars. It's unlikely that they could have carried on the war on their own. The German threat to Egypt wasn't truly eliminated until the U.S. contributed to Allied operations in North Africa. Although it's not impossible, it's highly unlikely that an economically isolated Great Britain could have developed and delivered its own atomic weapons before being forced to sue for peace with the Axis.

Guys, the numbers really don't lie. It was a team effort. As I said before, without any one of the Big Three, and arguably China, the Allies could not have won WWII.

Could the Germans have won the Battle of the Atlantic?

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: They could (and did) do a lot of damage, but even before the US involvement they weren't winning it. In fact, US involvement (and idiots like Adm. King) meant that the Germans actually sank more shipping after the US became involved than before.

The things that put the final nail in the coffin of the U-Boat threat, such as that threat was, was the allocation of about 50 Long Range Bombers to close the Mid-Atlantic gap ... something the UK could have done at any time, if it had been rammed home to them that it was needful. As it was, they figured it out eventually, and did so by themselves.

Could (indeed, would!) the Germans have done more damage if there had been no direct US assistance?

Sure, but they never had the resources to expand their U-Boat fleet enough to keep ahead of their losses and ramp up numbers to the point where, overall, they were winning.

As for North Africa - it was a peripheral theater of no real importance. Rommel had no real chance of doing more than he actually managed - it was just a resource sink that made German efforts on the East Front more difficult (the DAK had the truck-borne logistics element of an entire Army Group, like Army Group Center, for example).

The best the Germans had hoped for was that they could delay an inevitable Allied victory (aka British Commonwealth victory) of materiel superiority ... Rommel was a flash in the pan who dazzled Hitler into committing forces that could have been better used elsewhere.

Phil

[Olefin]

Sorry guys but without the US being involved in the war the Allies lose or best case fight the Germans and Italians to a tie in Europe as Japan takes what it wants in Asia and get the resources she needs to go from just dangerous to very very dangerous - especially considering that there is no way the UK alone had the resources to take on the Italian Fleet, the Germans and the Japanese - and the Soviet navy was a joke

As Churchill said the moment he knew they had won the war was when Hitler declared war on the US - up until then it was a fight for national survival - after that he knew it was just a matter of time.

Keep in mind that what stopped Rommel in the end was the fact that the US entering the war allowed the British to be able to commit troops and resources that they couldn't have otherwise.

As for Australia - yes we needed them as a base as we needed the UK as well - but if the US hadn't entered the war Australia and New Zealand would have had no choice but to evacuate everything they had back home to defend themselves against Japan - take the New Zealanders and the 9th division out of the line for the British in 1942 and Rommel ends up in Cairo and Alexandria, let alone the almost 400 US tanks that got there in time that would never have been shipped if we weren't in the war

Yes we didn't win it on our own - but without us being in it I highly doubt you would have ever seen an Allied victory of any sort where Germany, Italy and Japan surrender - the more likely situation would have been a very long and drawn out war ending with both sides becoming too exhausted to fight any longer and mutually deciding to end it

[Legbreaker]

And the Germans were only in Africa because the Italian "brilliance" of Mussolini. Attacking Egypt in 1940 and failing miserably forced the Germans to help out if only to stop their ally from collapsing. Even then the Italians developed a reputation of surrendering en masse whenever faced with stiff opposition. Of course being issued with obsolescent WWI equipment certainly didn't help their cause...

[Raellus]

You assume that the UK, ON ITS OWN, could have inflicted enough casualties on the German U-Boat fleet to stay ahead of U-Boat production AND keep enough of its own merchant tonnage at sea to support its own domestic needs and defend its global empire. I'd like to see credible numbers to back that assertion. You also assume that the UK's military production could have covered its own losses on land, at sea, and in the air, let alone create a materiel advantage versus the Axis. No, it could not. Production figures back that up. If you look at the correlation of forces, simply based on domestic production during 1939-1945, the Germans were beating the British in most key categories. This also takes into account any curtailment of Axis production caused by Allied strategic bombing operations (which included tens of thousands of U.S. made and/or operated aircraft). Add in the other European Axis powers, and the divide widens. Look at the populations of the UK and the Greater German Reich. Once again, Germany had a significant numerical advantage. I don't think any serious professional historian on either side of the Atlantic would stake his/her reputation on the assertion that the UK could have beaten the Axis, or even just the European Axis Powers, without substantial U.S. assistance.

Second, although North Africa was a peripheral theatre, it was as mush a resource sink for the UK as it was for Germany. Furthermore, if the Germans hadn't had to worry about a possible invasion of western Europe, they would have been free to send more troops and tanks to Rommel. They also could have covered their transportation across the Med with fighters. It's entirely within the realm of possibility that, thus reinforced, the Germans could have defeated the Commonwealth forces in North Africa, thus taking control of the Suez Canal and thereby complicating things even further for the UK.

Anyway, if you believe that the UK could have done it alone, then there's probably nothing I can present that will change your mind.