Excellent article, thank you. Had no idea of the scale of our Lend Lease to the USSR.
One thing I can't stand (and push back on, hard) is that D-Day is "Antifa invading Europe to defeat fascists" or similar drivel. I just tell these fools that I won't sully the name of the brave troops by equating them with people who had nothing to do with it, esp when the term 'fascist' has been so watered-down now as to be almost meaningless.
The Antifa thing is akin to people trying to equate Jesus to Socialists ..... it's about modern people attempting to make their thing like something from the past that everyone holds in high esteem. Most people see right through such crap.
Glad you enjoyed the article. I expect it won't be the last I write on the topic of WW2, since men of a certain age are known to get into smoking meat or WW2 history :-D
This is a great post, Eric. I always get into WW2 documentary series and books around June, to keep a connection to the experience of my grandparents (grandmother escaped Germany in 1939 and translated for the British, grandfather served in the British army from 1940-1946), and it's always remarkable how the US saved the world through ingenuity, manufacturing capacity, determination, sacrifice, and above all decency. There has never been a power (or superpower) like the US that has done so much good in the world.
Leftists who have been indoctrinated to ‘correct’ us on Uncle Joe ‘liberating’ Europe love to ignore the historical reality that without US Lend-Lease there would be no ability for the Soviet Union to fight the Nazis.
Also, if it wasn’t for Bletchley Park code-breaking informing the Russians about Nazi airfields outside the Kursk salient (via their communism loving British spies), and if it wasn’t for the allied landing in Sicily it’s doubtful the Soviets with their inferior T-34s would have managed to stop the Nazis at Kursk. Only after the Germans pulled back from that engagement did the Soviets start their march west across Europe into Berlin.
On one of my other posts about D-Day, I was informed that D-Day just wasn't a very big deal. Stalingrad was what mattered and the entire war was won by the Soviets. That the Western Allies were just an afterthought. I challenged the commenter to provide a source from a credible and serious military historian who was not Russian. The response: crickets
what's ;your opinion of Adam Tooze's book THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION? His view is rather different than yours, particularly about Soviet war production. So too Richard Overy n his WHY THE ALLIES WON, which is a sober look at the costs of the war and concludes that the real losers of the war were Soviet citizens, who paid a horrifying high price in blood and misery----and got anther 50 years under the Communist yoke for their blood and misery.
I hope you won't brush these two career historians off as crickets. You can, as I do, think the American effort in WW2 was a noble effort without which freedom would have perished worldwide. You can also think that the US got off lightly from the war. The most serious war damage was done to the Philippines, which was not an American state. Compare this to the destruction and deaths in the United Kingdom. Then look farther east to the death and destruction in all of Europe. The US faced a fraction of that price. Not for nothing are Europeans more skeptical about the goodness of WW2. Or try this conundrum: based on the American reaction to the present war in Ukraine, do you think that today's America would be up for another Great Crusade, to use Eisenhower's term? How would China's rulers answer that question about the US capacity for war today?
I’m not sure how you equate “the US didn’t have enough dead” to “the US wasn’t the most important factor for the allies winning the war”. Poland and Ukraine lost an enormous amount of people, but nobody would claim either had a big contribution to winning the war.
Also, do me a favor and consider that Russia worked with Nazi Germany for two whole years to destroy the democratic nations in Europe through invasion. The US would never sign something as immoral as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. It assisted the UK from the very start of the war, and never stood on the side of rapacious totalitarianism.
Sorry, don’t know those historians (or history pundits) and don’t agree with their thesis. The US distinguished itself in WW2 and following it. There has never been a world power who conquered enemy nations and then rebuilt them into prosperous democracies, and the US has done that multiple times over.
Adam Tooze has written a book that disagrees with you THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION. He provides facts based on some years work in archives. You make a flat assertion, with nothing to back it up.
While only tangential to this arsenal, given the focus on manufacturing, it seems pertinent to note that 100% of those countries winning War2 used English (“standard”) measures, while 100% of those countries losing War2 used metric. The largest, most-urgent R&D & manufacturing period in human history won by Standard, lost by metric.
I wonder if Standard measure gives an advantage to engineers and draftsmen working without CAD/CAM software. I learned to bisect angles and line segments in geometry class. Nobody tried to teach us to divide them into tenths.
There’s areas where SAE/Imperial is superior. Human experience of temp for example. Fahrenheit is much more understandable in how I experience air temp than Celsius.
That’s a fact I’d like to shove down the throat of every “the US is so inferior because you don’t use or understand metric” weenie I see on the inner webs
Excellent article, thank you. Had no idea of the scale of our Lend Lease to the USSR.
One thing I can't stand (and push back on, hard) is that D-Day is "Antifa invading Europe to defeat fascists" or similar drivel. I just tell these fools that I won't sully the name of the brave troops by equating them with people who had nothing to do with it, esp when the term 'fascist' has been so watered-down now as to be almost meaningless.
The Antifa thing is akin to people trying to equate Jesus to Socialists ..... it's about modern people attempting to make their thing like something from the past that everyone holds in high esteem. Most people see right through such crap.
Glad you enjoyed the article. I expect it won't be the last I write on the topic of WW2, since men of a certain age are known to get into smoking meat or WW2 history :-D
This is a great post, Eric. I always get into WW2 documentary series and books around June, to keep a connection to the experience of my grandparents (grandmother escaped Germany in 1939 and translated for the British, grandfather served in the British army from 1940-1946), and it's always remarkable how the US saved the world through ingenuity, manufacturing capacity, determination, sacrifice, and above all decency. There has never been a power (or superpower) like the US that has done so much good in the world.
Thank you
Leftists who have been indoctrinated to ‘correct’ us on Uncle Joe ‘liberating’ Europe love to ignore the historical reality that without US Lend-Lease there would be no ability for the Soviet Union to fight the Nazis.
Also, if it wasn’t for Bletchley Park code-breaking informing the Russians about Nazi airfields outside the Kursk salient (via their communism loving British spies), and if it wasn’t for the allied landing in Sicily it’s doubtful the Soviets with their inferior T-34s would have managed to stop the Nazis at Kursk. Only after the Germans pulled back from that engagement did the Soviets start their march west across Europe into Berlin.
On one of my other posts about D-Day, I was informed that D-Day just wasn't a very big deal. Stalingrad was what mattered and the entire war was won by the Soviets. That the Western Allies were just an afterthought. I challenged the commenter to provide a source from a credible and serious military historian who was not Russian. The response: crickets
what's ;your opinion of Adam Tooze's book THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION? His view is rather different than yours, particularly about Soviet war production. So too Richard Overy n his WHY THE ALLIES WON, which is a sober look at the costs of the war and concludes that the real losers of the war were Soviet citizens, who paid a horrifying high price in blood and misery----and got anther 50 years under the Communist yoke for their blood and misery.
I hope you won't brush these two career historians off as crickets. You can, as I do, think the American effort in WW2 was a noble effort without which freedom would have perished worldwide. You can also think that the US got off lightly from the war. The most serious war damage was done to the Philippines, which was not an American state. Compare this to the destruction and deaths in the United Kingdom. Then look farther east to the death and destruction in all of Europe. The US faced a fraction of that price. Not for nothing are Europeans more skeptical about the goodness of WW2. Or try this conundrum: based on the American reaction to the present war in Ukraine, do you think that today's America would be up for another Great Crusade, to use Eisenhower's term? How would China's rulers answer that question about the US capacity for war today?
Many thanks for your time.
I’m not sure how you equate “the US didn’t have enough dead” to “the US wasn’t the most important factor for the allies winning the war”. Poland and Ukraine lost an enormous amount of people, but nobody would claim either had a big contribution to winning the war.
Also, do me a favor and consider that Russia worked with Nazi Germany for two whole years to destroy the democratic nations in Europe through invasion. The US would never sign something as immoral as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. It assisted the UK from the very start of the war, and never stood on the side of rapacious totalitarianism.
Sorry, don’t know those historians (or history pundits) and don’t agree with their thesis. The US distinguished itself in WW2 and following it. There has never been a world power who conquered enemy nations and then rebuilt them into prosperous democracies, and the US has done that multiple times over.
Glad you responded more eloquently than my planned “what idiocy is this”
If the US did not enter the war, the Soviet Union would be done for, end of story.
Adam Tooze has written a book that disagrees with you THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION. He provides facts based on some years work in archives. You make a flat assertion, with nothing to back it up.
While only tangential to this arsenal, given the focus on manufacturing, it seems pertinent to note that 100% of those countries winning War2 used English (“standard”) measures, while 100% of those countries losing War2 used metric. The largest, most-urgent R&D & manufacturing period in human history won by Standard, lost by metric.
I wonder if Standard measure gives an advantage to engineers and draftsmen working without CAD/CAM software. I learned to bisect angles and line segments in geometry class. Nobody tried to teach us to divide them into tenths.
There’s areas where SAE/Imperial is superior. Human experience of temp for example. Fahrenheit is much more understandable in how I experience air temp than Celsius.
That’s a fact I’d like to shove down the throat of every “the US is so inferior because you don’t use or understand metric” weenie I see on the inner webs
Fun point. And it shows that culture, commitment, resources, people count for far more than arbitrary systems of measurement.