these are the kind of people that make these posts
Now normally I’d be satisfied with that and just go back to doing my own gig, but I’m a bit more energetic today so let’s get down to brass tacks. First we’re going to discuss World War II.
Starting in March of 1941 (However proposed in 1940) with the lend lease act, Before the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, the USA started pumping Iron, Steel, Guns, Boots, Food, Fuel, Tanks, Planes, Aircraft into the United Kingdom and other nations that requested foreign aid through military equipment. With the stranglehold that Nazi Germany’s U-boats had on Britain’s Waters We became the life line of the UK, every person on that little stretch of island was on their knees thanking god for the United States of America.
1940 America is much different than our beloved America today, we were isolationist, we did not want to meddle with European affairs, especially after getting out of one of the biggest economical depressions in history. It wasn’t called the Great Depression without reason. After embargoing Japan in July of 1941 for the Occupation of French Indochina (Modern Day Vietnam), Japan was essentially out of luck and unable to continue to feed it’s War Machine.
Japan’s response was to attempt to deliver a knockout blow to the US Navy’s Pacific fleet which at the time was rather small and very differently composed compared to the US Navy in 1946. The Pacific Fleet was formally recreated on 1 February 1941. On that day General Order 143 split the United States Fleet into separate Atlantic, Pacific, and Asiatic Fleets. In December 1941, the fleet consisted of nine battleships, three aircraft carriers, 12 heavy cruisers, eight light cruisers, 50 destroyers, and 33 submarines.
So after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the declaration of war by Germany only mere days after, the US had to start from scratch and prepare for War. While the US licked it’s wound, it planned and began production of what would be come the world’s greatest land, sea, and air armies. Old equipment had to be either upgraded or thrown out, while new equipment had to be developed, tested, produced and send to the front.
The first offensive strike the US made of the war was the next month, January 1942 when the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise attacked Japanese bases in the Marshall Islands. However US Sailors were already in the war months earlier in September of 1941 during the battle of the Atlantic as American Merchant ships were slaughtered by the German underwater menace known as the U-Boat.
Eventually lend least was sent to more and more nations, including the Soviet Union in October of 1941. This is why you see large quantities of M4A2 Shermans in Soviet Service.
Due to the lack of Modern Tanks in early 1941, we gave the soviets the best we had at the time, it might not have been much, but it was better than nothing.
Not only did the US help Russia, but the UK actually send plenty of it’s own Arms and Equipment as well, including Valentine and Matilda Infantry support tanks and aircraft. Below is a Hurricane Fighter/Bomber supplied by the United Kingdom.
From P-39 Airacobras, to M4 Shermans, to M1 Thompsons, to US supplied food, trucks, guns, boots, clothes, by 1943 the majority of the USSR’s logistics had US flags on it.
In a confidential interview with the wartime correspondent Konstantin Simonov, the famous Soviet Marshal G.K. Zhukov is quoted as saying: “Today [1963] some say the Allies didn’t really help us… But listen, one cannot deny that the Americans shipped over to us material without which we could not have equipped our armies held in reserve or been able to continue the war. “
US lend lease amounted to 48,395,000,000~ dollars in sales to other nations. Keep in mind that the number back then, is much bigger today due to inflation.
Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For comparison, a total of 22 million tons landed in Europe to supply American forces from January 1942 to May 1945. It has been estimated that American deliveries to the USSR through the Persian Corridor alone were sufficient, by US Army standards, to maintain sixty combat divisions in the line.
The United States sold to the Soviet Union from October 1, 1941 to May 31, 1945 the following: 427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil) or 57.8 percent of the High-octane aviation fuel, 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc.), 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 Diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. Provided ordnance goods (ammunition, artillery shells, mines, assorted explosives) amounted to 53 percent of total domestic production. One item typical of many was a tire plant that was lifted bodily from the Ford Company’s River Rouge Plant and transferred to the USSR. The 1947 money value of the supplies and services amounted to about eleven billion dollars.Certainly a bit more than Issuing loans, don’t you think?
Even some of the famous Katyusha rocket trucks were based on US models. The one below is based on the Studebaker US6.
The United Kingdom received the majority of the US lend lease, at about ¾ths, however the USSR got most of the rest.
During 1942 alone, the USA was able to shift the tide in the Pacific nearly single handedly and began it’s long bloody battle against the Germans and Italians in Africa, Italy, and Europe.
With the defensive battles at Wake Island, Bataan, and Port Moresby, the US had little to no time to reinforce the fighting positions and bases they had set up in the Pacific which led to most of them being overrun and captured by the Japanese.
The battle of Midway rested upon early warning and code breaking. The U.S. had an excellent track record against Japanese codes and ciphers before World War II, and this experience, combined with a variety of other sources of intelligence, helped the U.S. uncover the upcoming attack on Midway Island.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Navy cryptographers, with assistance from both British cryptographers at the Far East Combined Bureau (in Hong Kong, later Singapore, later Ceylon), and Dutch cryptographers (in the Dutch East Indies), combined to break enough JN-25 traffic to provide useful intelligence reports and assessments regarding Japanese force disposition and intentions in early 1942. Naval Officer Joesph Rochefort would often go for days without emerging from his bunker, where he and his staff spent 12 hours a day, or even longer, working to decode Japanese radio traffic. He often wore slippers and a bathrobe with his khaki uniform and sometimes went days without bathing.
Luckily his stubborness paid off. While the majority of the US Command believed the Japanese wanted to attack the Aleutian Islands near Alaska, Rochefort believed an unknown codegroup, AF, referred to Midway. One of the Station HYPO staff, Jasper Holmes, had the idea of faking a water supply failure on Midway Island. He suggested using an unencrypted emergency warning, in the hope of provoking a Japanese response, thus establishing whether Midway was a target. Rochefort took the idea to Layton, who put it to Nimitz. Nimitz approved. The Japanese took the bait and the learned not only of the attack, but what day it was planned to happen.
June 4th, 1942. The battle where the Japanese lost the initiative in the Pacific. Losing four fleet carriers against US carrier based and land based aircraft. While the US only lost one carrier and a destroyer. This shocked the world. Not only did the US win against a superior fleet, but it decimated the Japanese Navy’s ability to strike offensively. It became a huge moral booster for the Americans and a stunning blow to the Japanese. Midway Island remained in US hands while the Japanese retreated to their islands to set up defensively.
On the other side of the world however, The US was making plans to make it’s first strikes at Germany and Italy, producing the equipment, then moving the equipment across the Atlantic Ocean is no easy task, but nobody could have done it like the USA did.
The next major military operation was Operation Torch on November 8, 1942, it was the final nail that sealed the coffin of Rommel’s famed Afrika Korps.
The first Major Defeat of US Forces was at Kasserine Pass in 1943 when 6,500+ US soldiers fell victim to superior tactics and superior enemy firepower.
The battle was the first major engagement between American and Axis forces in World War II in Africa. Inexperienced and poorly led American troops suffered many casualties and were quickly pushed back over 50 miles from their positions west of Faïd Pass. After the early defeat, elements of the U.S. II Corps, with British reinforcements, rallied and held the exits through mountain passes in western Tunisia, defeating the Axis offensive. As a result of the battle, the U.S. Army instituted sweeping changes of unit organization and replaced commanders and some types of equipment. After learning from their mistakes they were ready to continue with the war in Africa.
With the start of the US Island Hopping Campaign and the closing of the Africa Campaign, the War was starting to look a little bit better, however the battles to come would tell that the price for victory, is blood.
While I am leaving out key events such as the doolittle raid and war crimes committed against US soldiers during the Bataan death march, I believe you might be able to understand a bit better that the US did not play around when it came to the early portion of the Second World War.
This next piece was written by @fujisan-ni-noboru-hinode
“First off, let’s just stop right there.
Let us imagine, for a moment, a world where the U.S. was not attacked in the Pacific and was isolationist, and decided that it would not join in on the lend-lease, shall we?
Without the equipment and supplies sent to the USSR, the Red Army wouldn’t have been able to support or maintain itself, not to mention maintain structure or order considering scumfuck Stalin spent the last decade ‘purging’ half of the entire army and officer corps. In our reality, during Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht got stuck outside of Moscow due to resistance and unexpected difficulties with the weather and an under supply of winter gear and equipment. In this alternate reality, given the fact that there’d be much less resistance, the Heer could have just awaited shipments of supplies of their own and then easily made the March on Russia’s capital, crushing the morale of the Soviet Union, and capturing a vast chunk of the USSR as a whole. Are y'all familiar with Stalingrad? The Soviets didn’t have enough weapons for everyone so maybe one in five Red Army soldiers had a rifle and the rest ran towards the Germans in human waves, hoping to reach them and take their weapons. As if those odds weren’t awful enough, their officers set up machine-guns behind them, so if they tried to turn and run from the German guns, they were killed by their own for desertion. Now, imagine that, but on a much larger scale - every city and enemy force the Heer encounter, all sparsely armed at best. Plus, it’s known that something like 80% of the population of Russia live in that small, western portion of the country, so once the Moscow region and what lied so immediately ahead was occupied, it would have been smooth sailing for the Wehrmacht.
And after Dunkirk, England and her commonwealth were in no position to make any offensive plays against the mainland of the European continent, even the commando raids wouldn’t have been possible. Without American supply, and a Japanese seizure of her Far Eastern colonies like Singapore and Hong Kong, chances are she’d have been käput. Not to mention the fact that without American lend-and-lease to China’s nationalist forces, combined with the fact that the Soviets would be occupied if not obliterated, the Japanese Army would have swept right through the Chinese mainland, South through Vietnam and Burma, and North through Mongolia, probably right into the Soviet Union itself, meaning the already stunted Red Army would now be fighting a two-front conflict.
Also, in terms of British colonies, the Japanese would have eventually moved Westward, onto India and Pakistan and so-on. In real life, the Japanese formed the Indian National Army, which was a volunteer force of Indians who vowed to ally with the Japanese Army to fight British imperialism and remove them from India. Imagine such an army gaining a strong headwind in this alternate reality of ours. If the force swelled substantially, the Japanese might have even offered their German allies to let the Indian force assist in an invasion force during Operation Sea lion, the Nazi invasion of England, which thank God never occurred.
It takes a lot of gall to even consider saying the US did little to nothing in the Pacific and that the battle for Okinawa was insubstantial. The force “tenth the size” of the one on the Asian mainland was like that for a reason, ya dingleberry. By 1945 the US Asiatic force of my beloved Marines, sailors, coastguardsmen, and to a somewhat lesser extent, soldiers, had spent about 4 years draining Japanese resources and manpower. Because of the reallocation of troops and supplies from the Asia front to the Pacific theatre by the Japanese command, combined with American lend-lease to China’s forces, (who were, at the time, on the losing end of the battle) the Chinese, both communist in the north and nationalist in the south, were resupplied, and by 1944, assisted by American troops on the ground, and were able to change the momentum of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Suddenly the Japanese were on the defensive in the Chinese mainland. The “largest army that was defeated in a week” was an irregular force of multiple divisions made up of smaller disbanded companies, more than half replacements, who were cut off and undersupplied, and because of American lend-lease to the Soviet Union and the true reestablishment of the Red Army, combined with the draining to the Pacific mentioned earlier, and the fact that the USSR decided to declare war on Japan the day after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the Soviets were easily able to steamroll into Manchuria and most of the Japanese they encountered surrendered without a fight. Funnily enough the Soviet ‘liberators’ were arguably worse than the Japanese, establishing North Korea and in doing so the Korean War a few years later. Not to mention the Soviets took all the Japanese prisoners of war, and instead of sending them home after the war ended, sent them by rail to gulags and labor camps in the Soviet union to work as slave laborers, where roughly half of them died over just 3 years, but that’s another story for another time.
In the Pacific, the USMC liberated island after island, one by one, from Wake Atoll, to Vella La Vella, to Guam. Even those that were not American territories, and therefore not our problem, like New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies. Meanwhile, the US Army fought through the Philippines. The U.S. in the Pacific were fighting hard as hell, but we were making great progress. We were cruising on the way to Japan like:
(I’d like to add in here on a personal note, that although we, the US, were fighting to dismantle Japanese imperialism, the US had no legitimate claim to these territories either, and were pretty hypocritical, being imperialists ourselves. Don’t get me started on the UK!)
Now, the “starving” Japanese troops you speak of are a different story. Those on floating bloodbaths like Pelelieu were not only well supplied, but extremely dug in and awaiting our arrival. As a matter-of-fact, I believe it was at Pelelieu that the Japanese had actually stationed a division of Manchukuo troops, from China, alongside regular Japanese infantry, so that’s a perfect example of the aforementioned ‘drainage’ from the Asia front. What you’re referencing about the starvation didn’t occur until 1945. After 3 going on 4 years of dismantling the Japanese war machine, several islands of Japanese troops were left isolated and because of such immense American presence and anti-shipping attacks in the region, places like Truk were unable to be resupplied by the Japanese Merchant Fleet, so yes there were islands of “starving Japanese”, but instead of invading them, we skipped over them and let them starve while the US simply moved on, closing in on the Japanese home islands. I’m not saying that was ok, it’s terrible that at times men had to resort to literally eating their prisoners and civilians to survive, but they were our enemy and we gave them the choice to surrender. Now, again, the “small force” that the USMC, US Army, and USN fought and died to defeat on Okinawa (the force was not small by any means btw) was the size it was as a direct result of American efforts in the Pacific, and equally importantly American lend-lease to China which lead to an ever crumbling Japanese Army. The battle raged so hard because, as the Japanese knew, this was their last stand before the Americans reached the Japanese mainland. They were shook, and pissed!
Now, nobody is denying the blood spilled by the Soviet Red Army or the British Commonwealth, or the Chinese, or anyone. But to even consider the allies winning the war without America is farfetched, and quite frankly, intellectually dishonest. We realistically could have wound up in a Man in The High Castle world, simply because of America deciding not to supply the allies. An American isolationist policy of literal non-involvement could really have been that detrimental.
So yes, in WW2, America was the deciding factor, like it or not. And I’d like to add in, death to all fascists, and commies, too! As well as historical revisionists!“
I love that lad, he’s always on point, but let’s talk postwar.
After September of 1945 the US found it’s self at number one on the global stage, with both Europe and the USSR in shambles from the sheer destruction that the Second World War had brought. The US became the number one economic and military power in the world. In it’s arsenal featured the World’s most powerful Land, Sea and Air forces and with the newest Nuclear and Jet technologies there was very little that could stand in the way of the US.
The next major war would be the Korean War which started in 1950 and would end in 1953. In the beginning the South Koreans were caught off guard and were crushed during the opening phases of the war. UN and US forces were rushed to what would be called the Pusan Pocket or Pusan Perimeter.
By the later part of September the US and UN had finally finished shipping enough men and equipment in to launch an assault to not only Liberate the south but also invade the North. The chart below shows the difference in front lines in only a matter of about 2 months of battle.
While the most of the Allied forces pushed out of the Pusan pocket, the US initiated the Invasion of Inchon which would help open a second front and relieve pressure on the southern front.
In this picture below US marines are pushing up during the Invasion of Inchon, the one moving over the top is Lieutenant Baldomero Lopez, minutes after this photo was taken he was killed while covering a live grenade to protect his squad, he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
In 1951 the US had what people called a “Tank Crisis”. Due to the peaceful nature of the US in the late 1940s there was no real modernization of US ground forces or ground vehicles. This means when we started operations in Korea we were still using M4A3E8 Shermans backed with M26 Pershings.
The result of the Tank Crisis was the M46, M47, and M48 patton series tanks, they would eventually come into play during the later stages of the conflict. Here is a North Korean refugee moving southwards past an American M46 Patton.
At the same time the US had to modernize it’s Air Force, but due to knowing better than letting our air force become outdated we were much more prepared for that. The North American F-86 Sabre proved it’s worth over the skies of Korea and became known as a MiG killer. This is the guncam of an F-86 Shooting down a MiG-15.
Korea eventually became a Military stalemate (Due to the US not willing to risk a full scale war against China and the USSR), however they were able to somewhat resolve the situation politically. Today, the Korean war is over with the North Koreans and South Koreans peacefully coming to terms with the help of the USA.
The next major military conflict (That the US was involved in) was arguably Vietnam. Now of course most people see Vietnam as a loss overall, but I see it as a Military Victory and a Political Defeat.
Firstly this war wasn’t like World War Two or the Korean War which were based off gained land and specific goals. This war was all about body count and judging by the loss of US soldiers compared to North Vietnamese Personnel the US won that portion with flying colors.
The truth is that the US didn’t lose a single battle during the Vietnam War, they had operational failures, sure. But the real reason the North Vietnamese won in 1975 was due to the political turmoil in the USA. It wasn’t because of the lack of military power or know how, but because of the spinlessness of the US politicians that were running the war in the background.
In 1973 the US pulled out after signing the Paris Peace Accords which was expected to end the conflict in a similar fashion to the Korean War. But as we all know this didn’t happen. If the North attacked again Congress was supposed to help the South Vietnamese defend themselves this again didn’t happen.
In 1975 the NVA launched a spring offensive which swiftly ended the war, below are fatigues, uniforms and other articles of clothing that were shed by ARVN soldiers who ran and surrendered rather that fight the incoming invaders.
At that point it’s easy to say the US lost the Vietnam War, but if you look at the finer points of the conflict you’ll see that not only was the US not present during the 1975 Spring Offensive, but we were providing almost minimal help to the ARVN forces.
After the Vietnam War there was the 1990 Gulf War and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq which were both US victories. I don’t exactly have to spell this one out.
But if you have any questions feel free to send me them!
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