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The Allies weren’t exactly sitting on their hands. Just taking the strategy of picking off North Africa and Southern Europe before hitting Western / Central. T

The Allies weren’t exactly sitting on their hands. Just taking the strategy of picking off North Africa and Southern Europe before hitting Western / Central. Trying to reduce the war down to any one side is, IMHO, wrong and suspect.

wtdata 7y ago
> Trying to reduce the war down to any one side is, IMHO, wrong and suspect. Exactly. Just look at how many times Allied victory in WWII in Europe is reduced to D-Day. It's highly wrong and suspicious.
- mieseratte 7y ago
  I don't see anyone in this thread railing about D-Day as the turning point. Please avoid whataboutism.
gumby 7y ago
They were letting the Soviets do the heavy lifting, contributing more materiel than manpower until late in the process. I don’t blame the western allies for the strategy but the soviets don’t get adequate credit for the privation they suffered.
- mieseratte 7y ago
  > soviets don’t get adequate credit for the privation they suffered. According to whom? We certainly learned the human burden the Soviets bore, including their less-than-Western regard for life, as a part of the war in my public school. Perhaps if they hadn't raped, pillaged, and plundered their way through Europe they would've seen a bit more celebration from their erstwhile allies.
  - wtdata 7y ago
    > Perhaps if they hadn't raped, pillaged, and plundered their way through Europe they would've seen a bit more celebration from their erstwhile allies. Makes you wonder why Americans did get that celebration then: "In 1945, after the end of the war in Europe, Le Havre was filled with American servicemen awaiting return to the States. A Le Havre citizen wrote to the mayor that the people of Le Havre were "attacked, robbed, run over both on the street and in our houses" and "This is a regime of terror, imposed by bandits in uniform."[4] A coffeehouse owner from Le Havre testified "We expected friends who would not make us ashamed of our defeat. Instead, there came only incomprehension, arrogance, incredibly bad manners and the swagger of conquerors."[6] Such behavior also was common in Cherbourg. One resident stated that "With the Germans, the men had to camouflage themselves—but with the Americans, we had to hide the women."" [1] I wonder if it had anything to do, with the much better implemented propaganda machine, USA had in Western Europe after WWII. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_liberation_of_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_liberation_of_...
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe is pretty par for the course for a conquering army that isn't re-conquering what it considers home turf. Considering how the Nazis treated the Slavic peoples they conquered and that the Russians got to see all that on their tour of eastern Europe prior to arriving in Germany I think it's a miracle that the soviet army didn't get even.
    - refurb 7y ago
      Are you really equating “incomprehension, arrogance, incredibly bad manners and the swagger of conquerors” to the mass rapes the Russians committed?
      - wtdata 7y ago
        You do understand that the title of the wikipedia article - and its main point - is about the rape of French woman by American soldiers on the aftermath of D-Day, right?
        refurb 7y ago
        Then why did they quote about "bad manners"?
    - perseusmandate 7y ago
      Having studied the Eastern Front extensively, incidents like this would not even have been significant enough to be recorded in the context of the Soviets or Germans. Stalin and Zhukov both actively condoned the rape of women and the atrocities in East Prussia included the rape and crucifixion of women and elderly children and the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff which was equivalent to 5+ Titanics It was a different order of magnitude of brutality on both sides
- kmlx 7y ago
  > soviets don’t get adequate credit for the privation they suffered. this old trope? the soviets were horrible monsters. they killed jews (many pogroms). during peacetime they killed at least as many people as the nazis did. the great trick that the soviets managed is to make us belief they were on the right side of history, when in reality they were on the worst side, every single time. one of the greatest mistakes of WW2 was the US support of the USSR. they should have left the two madmen to kill eachother. the world would have been a much better place. what did we get in return? USSR dominating half of Europe, murdering, scheming, destroying the social fabric of the continent for half a century.
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    Towards the end of the war there clearly wasn't US support for the USSR; we were racing them towards Berlin (and lost) and raced them to get Japan to surrender (won that one). The optics of completely abandoning someone you are ostensible allied with are poor. All of that is orthogonal to the fact that over a third of the people who died in WW2 were Soviets, and many people do not realize it, which is the point the grandparent comment was making.

wtdata 7y ago

> Trying to reduce the war down to any one side is, IMHO, wrong and suspect. Exactly. Just look at how many times Allied victory in WWII in Europe is reduced to D-Day. It's highly wrong and suspicious.

mieseratte 7y ago
I don't see anyone in this thread railing about D-Day as the turning point. Please avoid whataboutism.

gumby 7y ago

They were letting the Soviets do the heavy lifting, contributing more materiel than manpower until late in the process. I don’t blame the western allies for the strategy but the soviets don’t get adequate credit for the privation they suffered.

mieseratte 7y ago
> soviets don’t get adequate credit for the privation they suffered. According to whom? We certainly learned the human burden the Soviets bore, including their less-than-Western regard for life, as a part of the war in my public school. Perhaps if they hadn't raped, pillaged, and plundered their way through Europe they would've seen a bit more celebration from their erstwhile allies.
- wtdata 7y ago
  > Perhaps if they hadn't raped, pillaged, and plundered their way through Europe they would've seen a bit more celebration from their erstwhile allies. Makes you wonder why Americans did get that celebration then: "In 1945, after the end of the war in Europe, Le Havre was filled with American servicemen awaiting return to the States. A Le Havre citizen wrote to the mayor that the people of Le Havre were "attacked, robbed, run over both on the street and in our houses" and "This is a regime of terror, imposed by bandits in uniform."[4] A coffeehouse owner from Le Havre testified "We expected friends who would not make us ashamed of our defeat. Instead, there came only incomprehension, arrogance, incredibly bad manners and the swagger of conquerors."[6] Such behavior also was common in Cherbourg. One resident stated that "With the Germans, the men had to camouflage themselves—but with the Americans, we had to hide the women."" [1] I wonder if it had anything to do, with the much better implemented propaganda machine, USA had in Western Europe after WWII. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_liberation_of_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_liberation_of_...
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe is pretty par for the course for a conquering army that isn't re-conquering what it considers home turf. Considering how the Nazis treated the Slavic peoples they conquered and that the Russians got to see all that on their tour of eastern Europe prior to arriving in Germany I think it's a miracle that the soviet army didn't get even.
  - refurb 7y ago
    Are you really equating “incomprehension, arrogance, incredibly bad manners and the swagger of conquerors” to the mass rapes the Russians committed?
    - wtdata 7y ago
      You do understand that the title of the wikipedia article - and its main point - is about the rape of French woman by American soldiers on the aftermath of D-Day, right?
      - refurb 7y ago
        Then why did they quote about "bad manners"?
  - perseusmandate 7y ago
    Having studied the Eastern Front extensively, incidents like this would not even have been significant enough to be recorded in the context of the Soviets or Germans. Stalin and Zhukov both actively condoned the rape of women and the atrocities in East Prussia included the rape and crucifixion of women and elderly children and the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff which was equivalent to 5+ Titanics It was a different order of magnitude of brutality on both sides
kmlx 7y ago
> soviets don’t get adequate credit for the privation they suffered. this old trope? the soviets were horrible monsters. they killed jews (many pogroms). during peacetime they killed at least as many people as the nazis did. the great trick that the soviets managed is to make us belief they were on the right side of history, when in reality they were on the worst side, every single time. one of the greatest mistakes of WW2 was the US support of the USSR. they should have left the two madmen to kill eachother. the world would have been a much better place. what did we get in return? USSR dominating half of Europe, murdering, scheming, destroying the social fabric of the continent for half a century.
- aidenn0 7y ago
  Towards the end of the war there clearly wasn't US support for the USSR; we were racing them towards Berlin (and lost) and raced them to get Japan to surrender (won that one). The optics of completely abandoning someone you are ostensible allied with are poor. All of that is orthogonal to the fact that over a third of the people who died in WW2 were Soviets, and many people do not realize it, which is the point the grandparent comment was making.