We got off light.
Yes, I know over 400,000 American servicemen were killed in the war. Our industrial base was effectively nationalized. Some staples, clothing and gasoline were rationed. Twelve million or so Americans were in uniform atone time or another.
But still. There was no sustained attack on American soil. American cities were not bombed. Armies did not fight to any significant degree on American soil. There were no famines in the US (there was a nearly global famine immediately after the war), no rampant starvation.
What brought this musing on was the "mental health break" from yesterday. It doesn't take long to find casualty figures from the war that show that of the major combatants in the war, our losses were the lightest. The United Kingdom had almost as many combat casualties as the United States, but the UK had less than 40% of the population of the US, not to mention the Blitz, the near destruction of the Royal Army as a fighting force in France in 1940 and the U-boat siege.
And no other nation came near the Soviet Union for suffering the effects of the war.
We got off light.
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Friday, August 14, 2009
4 comments:
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At the end of The World At War, several historians were asked who won the Second World War. They unanimously said the U.S. did. We were the only ones with our industrial base undamaged, our population not in danger, and our armed forces were everywhere.
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty obvious, really. Got off easy? I wouldn't go that far. Maybe it could have been worse for us. It was certainly worse for everyone else.
We also pretty much had the resources of the entire planet at our disposal. Once the American and British navies were able to persuade their air forces to hand over some four-engined bombers, the Allies had air control over 95% of the Atlantic and that, more than any other single factor, broke the back of the U-boat siege.
ReplyDeleteMost of the Third World was still nominally colonial and their colonial masters were on our side, so if the Axis didn't have troops there, we got what we needed.
Rubber was the sore point, since the Japanese controlled Southeast Asia, but we built a bunch of synthetic rubber factories and a little over two years after we entered the war, we were making more synthetic rubber than the prewar world production of natural rubber. (The German synthetic rubber plants were priority bombing targets.)
We won the war by logistics. That's the professional way to do it.
Perhaps the fact that the the U.S. has little group memory of war's effects relates to how readily we allow our "leaders" to involve us in conflicts overseas. We can't seem to go much past fifty years without getting in another bloody conflict some damn place.
ReplyDeleteYou damn betcha we go off easy. It is interesting to speculate about what our attitude toward war would be if the carriers had been at anchor at Pearl that December Sunday - and the Japanese fleet had then continued to our west coast and bombed hell out of military bases and population centers there - or even if one aggressively determined U-boat captain had slipped into NY harbor to torpedo multiple ships at dock and shelled the city at random with some good old wp . . .
The Soviet Union inflicted 3/4ths of the casualties inflicted upon Axis powers in WWII. By the time the U.S. forces landed at Normandy, the Soviets were already in East Prussia and were only a few miles from the border of Germany itself, and had pretty much whipped every major German army, the only thing that kept them from marching onto Berlin right then and there was logistics -- they were out of food, fuel, and ammo and the supply lines were way long because the Germans of course had ripped out the rail lines while retreating, meaning everything had to be hauled over muddy dirt roads via trucks that spent as much time bogged down as moving. Yet Americans seem to somehow believe that they defeated Nazi Germany, despite the clear evidence that Germany was already defeated (i.e., it was clear that it was just a matter of time because the Germans were out of men and strategic materials and the Red Army was basically crushing any German forces it encountered) by the time the U.S. hit the beach at Normandy.
ReplyDeleteI guess it's that whole American exceptionalism thingy. Sort of like Americans thinking America is a hotbed of medical innovation, when 2/3rds of all new drugs and new medical procedures were developed in Europe by Europeans over the past decade. It is to laugh.
- Badtux the "Yes, Americans are idiots" Penguin