Quote Originally Posted by WTF11 View Post
Agreed, but sadly two full generations who have grown (largely), without the threats that Churchill and others warned of has resulted in the soft, "woke" generation who feel entitled without bearing and sense of responsibility.
My degree programme combined the study of Political history, International relations & Sociology with my main modules focusing on Eastern Europe (part of my genealogical line was of the area). A great course but heavy workload at the time but skimming through some books I own I noticed notes of reference I'd written inside one.

On 18 December 1940 Hitler issued F?hrer Directive 21 an order for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Hitler?s June 1941 advance into the USSR (Operation Barbarossa) was the decisive moment of the war - because there after at unspeakable human cost the Red Army did the heavy lifting first to contain the Germans & finally to defeat them.

It may be argued that American supplies of everything from metals, spam, boots, trucks & telephone cable made an important contribution to Soviet victory but in the crucial first 18 months of the Eastern war, western materials reached the USSR in modest quantities, making only a marginal contribution to the Soviet war effort until 1943, by which time the battle of Stalingrad had been fought & won.

Counterfactuals are foolish because once one variable changes then infinite possibilities are opened up. If Hitler instead of launching "Barbarossa" had reinforced Rommel & completed the conquest of the Med & Middle East then Churchill?s government would not have survived, with any future administration thereafter seeking only a compromise peace with Germany.

That was the "common theory" projected onto my course when on it of which I noted below.

After the experience of the First World War, I don?t think the British people (any more than the French) had the stomach for the ghastly struggle of attrition that proved necessary on the Eastern front before the Germans were driven back.
It is unlikely there was ever any easy route to winning WW2 in whatever extensive reading one might undertake - was also the logic I was tutored to concur, rightly or wrongly.

So I had an opinion, more so discovering what actually happened to my ancestors in WW2 which is for me alone to try & comprehend the sheer brutality such a war offered.

But I will offer that I suppose a scenario can be "pondered" wherein the western Allies dallied until an atomic bomb was built & then to use it against Germany but that'll presuppose US entry into the war.

So i'll rest my case that sadly, an enormous amount of killing & dying had to happen before the Nazis were crushed (though it did not seem so to the western Allies & their peoples at the time) as posterity can see that the Soviets did most of it.