reply to
post by punkinworks09
People don’t want to know how close we came to not winning, if it weren’t for A Hitler being insane, the Axis would have quietly built up a vastly
superior force and I’d be speaking Japanese right now. WW2 was not supposed to happen for another 5-6 years, but Hitler jumped the gun by attacking
Poland.
I can’t accept that the US of A was ever even close to losing WW2. In 1941 we had 4 aircraft carriers. In 1945 we had 80. In that same interval we
built the 4 Iowa class battleships - the WMDs of the world prior to WW2 - while Japan built NONE. We started the war with P38, P39 and P40 fighters.
We ended with P47s and P51s. Japan started the war with Zeros and ended with Zeros. Germany started with Me109 and FW 190 and ended with those along
with a few Me262 jet fighters. Neither Germany nor Japan had a 4 engine bomber of long range. We built 20,000 B17 and 15,000 B24 bombers. Not to
mention our 2 engine B25s and B26s. And then the 1,000s of B29s that rained havoc on Japan.
We sent the Soviets 9,000 P39 and P63 planes as well as several 1,000s of C47s. The Germans had vastly superior tanks but they built fewer than 5,000
of them while we built over 50,000 of the M4 Sherman tanks. 50,000 mediocre tanks will beat 5,000 great tanks almost every time! The Germans used
horses to pull some of their artillery into Poland but over the war years we built over 300,000 of the famed “six-by.” GMC 2.5 ton 6 X 6 trucks.
I’m not even counting the 5 ton trucks built by Studebaker and other makers. Or the 500,000 Jeeps built by Willys and Ford (but developed by the
Austin Bantam Co.).
German soldiers used the hand operated bolt action 1893 Mauser rifle from the start of the war to the end of the war. As did also the Japanese
soldier. We started the war with the 1903 Springfield Armory copy of the Mauser action but we soon furnished every soldier and marine with the M1 gas
operated semi-auto Garand rifle, which Gen. Patton said was the single best improvement in warfare in his lifetime.
The M1 rifle could fire 8 rounds as fast as you could squeeze the trigger. And reload it off a 8 round strip in 5 seconds! Call it a stroke of genius
but the M1 used the same .30-06 cartridge as did our .30 cal Browning air cooled light machine gun and the famous BAR rifle also of .30 cal. Browning
Automatic Rifle. The water cooled with barrel tank .30 cal heavy machine gun also used the same rounds.
We waged the war with .30-06 and .45 ACP ammo while the Germans and Japanese had a whole range of cartridges for their various weapons. Late in the
war the M1 Carbine replaced the .45 ACP pistol and used a much smaller .30 cal. round. We shipped 10s of millions of rounds to the Soviets over the
course of the war. This listing could go on for a week, but one more item - we shipped over 1 million pairs of GI combat boots to the USSR, the best
footwear of the war. The infantryman’s best friend.
I haven’t even mentioned the Higgins landing craft that took 150,000 men to Normandy in one day! We had enough of those to land 1,000,000 men on the
2 islands of Japan we had selected to invade. At the same time.
We had just peaked our industrial productivity in 1945 as the war ended. All of that was done after December, 1941. Well, actually, we started
planning for the war in 1940 when we initiated the Army draft. We could see “war clouds on the horizon” as it was described.
Not for us to win? No, victory was never in doubt. Only when, not if.
The British government was afraid that the US would use her newfound international leverage to force the UK to give up her empire, something we did
indeed do.
Winston Churchill. (1874-1965). The central figure in the English speaking world for the first half of the 20th century. A youthful war
correspondent in South Africa when the British defeated the Dutch in the late 1890s Boer Wars. Captured by the Boers, he managed to escape and became
a hero in England. By the 1914 start of WW1, he was made First Lord of the Admiralty, a post equal to our Secretary of the Navy. In WW2, in 1940, he
became the compromise choice for Prime Minister in the War Cabinet without standing for an election.
Churchill was an EMPIRE man. He did not want to see the Empire disintegrate on his watch. He lost the election in 1945 because he refused to accept
national health service. He was re-elected to PM in 1951, but by that time, India, the jewel in the British crown, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma were
gone. 1947. (Churchill was knighted in April, 1953 by Queen Elizabeth II). See below.
Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia joined the British Commonwealth of Nations. Kenya and Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe - were the last two
British colonies in Africa to gain independence in the 1960s. Egypt was a special case. GB had a special treaty giving them exclusive control over the
Suez Canal and the right to keep armed forces in Egypt to protect the Canal.
Their goal was never a long term shooting war, but only to neutralize our pacific fleet and force a political settlement
Yes. That was Yamamoto’s promise to the Emperor. That he could give Japan 6 months to rampage across the western end of the Pacific. He was
prescient! The Battle of Midway took place on June 4 to June 7. Exactly 6 months! We regard that battle as the turning point of the Pacific War. For
Japan it was all downhill from there.
We would never had made a political settlement with Japan. There was too much blood on their hands. And their sense of honor would not allow them to
make peace with us. Before the atom bomb. OTOH, Germany was the bigger threat to Western Civilization. But the two had united by treaty so we opted to
put most of our effort into Europe then to deal with Japan at our leisure. It was a plan and it worked.
Trinity was the first test of the technology for a nuclear weapon. [As opposed to a nuclear device!] It was conducted by the United
States on July 16, 1945, at the White Sands Proving Ground, headquartered near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Trinity was the first test of an
implosion-design plutonium bomb. Using the same conceptual design the Fat Man device was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9. The Trinity
detonation was equivalent to the explosion of around 20 kilotons of TNT and is usually considered the beginning of the Atomic Age.
en.wikipedia.org...
Aside from receiving the great honor of a state funeral, Churchill also received numerous awards and honors, including being made the first
Honorary Citizen of the United States. Churchill received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 for his numerous published works, especially his
six-volume set The Second World War. In a 2002 BBC poll of the "100 Greatest Britons" he was proclaimed "The Greatest of Them All" based on
approximately a million votes from viewers. Churchill was also rated as one of the most influential leaders in all of history by Time magazine.
Churchill College, Cambridge was founded in 1958 on his behalf. library.thinkquest.org...
[edit on 4/20/2009 by donwhite]