Fact Checking Chael: Would Brits Really be "Speaking German" if not for America?

You absolutely were.

As the old saying goes, “World War Two was won with Russian blood, and American dollars.”

The Red Army was appallingly equipped and led at the time of the German invasion. Credit that to Stalin, who killed every good officer in the whole army and let the supply situation totally deteriorate. Good thinking that.

And thanks for reading!

War is heck. I like to think that when it came to Hitler, we weren’t left with any choice but to fight. But who really knows?

Fedor should use a line similar to this if he fights a Brit…

You take that back, damnit!

In before “you mad bro”

I made one little comment about Canada. Seriously, I think you need to switch to decaf because you’ve totally got this post wrong if you think it was a flag waving excersise for Canada.

Yeah, we took Juno Beach on D-Day, which to my understanding was the second most defended beach in terms of German manpower (after Omaha). We also took Vimy Ridge in World War 1, which no other Allied power could take. We were also down for both world wars from day 1 (ok day 3 in the case of WW2), which you guys weren’t.

But I also know that American troops held on on Omaha beach, in a situation that absolutely went to crap, when every odd was against them, on THE MOST defended beach in Normandy. The film “Saving Private Ryan” got alot of this right, except that the battle lasted hours, not 15 minutes. That was badass of you guys to do that.

I also know General McAuliffe, Commander of the 101st Airborne, once sent the word “NUTS” in reply when the German commander, who had his starving and ill-equipped papatroopers surrounded and cut off in Bastogne. He held on until Patton relieved him, and won the day. That’s more than badass – that’s epic on the same scale as Leonidas at Thermopylae and Davy Crockett in the Alamo.

Sure, we can have our little historical squabbles, but at the end of the day no two nations have fought on the same side in the last century more than Canada and the U.S. Every time sh*t was really on the line for you guys – WW1, WW2, Korea, Gulf War, Afganistan – we always fought by your side. We still do: Canadian General Charles Bouchard was in command of the NATO mission in Libya.

So chill dawg.

the irony

Those things are terrifyingly destructive.

You know, insanity and racism and ego aside :P

!!!!!

and raise you a

“If it wasn’t for Miltiades the Younger, we’d all be speaking Persian!”

You don’t mean Carthaginian?

Stalin was convinced Hitler would honor the pact. And honestly the longer Hitler waited, the weaker the USSR would have gotten because the only thing worse than Stalin when he is fighting a war is Stalin when he has tons of free time to be a paranoid freak full time. Stalin was purging the Russian army of officers, and weakening his own military more every year.

I think the Western Allies did play an important role, if not the deciding role in the war. There is no way to determine if 10% more of Hitler’s military might directed towards Ruissa in he early campaign could have tipped the scales when Russia was already reeling. I’ve also seen pretty convincing literature that the Allied bombing campaigns had no impact on war time production in Germany, but I have to imagine having their factories turned to rubble and workers killed on a daily basis had to have some impact on production,

If it wasn’t for Cap the Germans would have used Adhesive X to bond the whole Soviet army and the Japanese "Dragon of Doom’ would have knocked out our whole Pacific fleet. And lets not forget that tunnel the Axis was building to invade Alaska. The man was worth 20 divisions.

to write a history blog on an MMA site, and kick up a little discussion.

“Your job is not to die for your country; your job is to make sure the other poor, dumb bastard dies for HIS country”

Correlating casualties with significance of contribution only works if you’re looking at it in terms of what it COST that participant to contribute; in terms of VALUE, lower casualty to kill ratio is far more indicative. Canada losing fewer troops means their investment was lower, but their return could very well have been higher; you’d need to know how many German troops lost their lives to the Canadians to determine that.

I’m not arguing with you, I’m appending to your argument.

can we stop making this about Canada vs. USA? That was SO not my intention. And just because I’m proud of my country’s military achievements doesn’t demean, in any way, the military achievements of the US. Yes, I associated casualties with significance only to make an easy point for my readers, and to highlight the overall point that Russia really defeated Hitler’s army.

S’all

Still, it’s a far cry from “They’d be speaking German is not for us!”

The funny thing about the whole "Without "Murica, who would protect you Canuckers?: argument is that it ignores geographical reality. We only have a border with 1 nation – you guys – so who is realistically going to attack us outside you? Worse, you guys are lightning rods for (possible) nuclear attacks in the Cold War, and terrorist attacks today. I don’t know if standing next to you has really made us feel safer…

That being said, we’d never dream of forgetting all the times we’ve fought by each others side in the last century, and how much mutual good has come from that.

…

Nor would i hold that anything Chael Sonnen says is the gospel truth, or speaks on behalf of all Americans.

I just wanted an excuse to write a history blog, that’s all. The American soldier still has plenty to be proud of even if he didn’t win WW2 single-handedly.

There isn’t enough room in a Stalin/Hitler relationship for either man’s ego or insanity…as history showed.

Yes.

Harsh though the outcome may’ve been for the defeated nations, I can’t help but think it would’ve been worse if the boot were on the other foot. The ass-kicking boot, that is.

However, I’d argue the Russian decision to turn a back on Japan and send the Siberian divisions to relieve Moscow was based less on Pearl Harbor and more on

1) The fact that Russia had only recently (1937) whipped Japan’s ass in Manchuria was fresh on everyone’s mind – Russian and Japanese generals especially. No one realistically believed Japan’s success in a land war against Russia was a likely possibility.

2) Richard Sorge, a high-level Soviet spy in the Japanese government, who pretty much told them that Japan wasn’t planning to attack.

rarely have trouble finding work and the most accepted undergrad degrees at Law Schools

I’m not responding to Sonnen here.

His “Berlin: 1945” remains the most disturbing work – fiction or nonfiction – I’ve ever read.

No, a Germanic tribe called the Anglo-Saxons conquered “England” (as it then became known). It has nothing to do with today’s ethnic Germans, and the language the Anglos brought with them was the earliest version of English. Come on now.

Because it doesn’t directly relate to Chael’s “speaking German” comment. But no historian, armed with the facts, can deny America didn’t shoulder the lion’s share of the burden of fighting Japan – at sea, in the air, and on land. And anyone who says America can’t fight a jungle war hasn’t read their history…

I see a “Semper Fi” in your sig, so if that’s true – here’s the thanks of a grateful Canuck for being such unstoppable badasses in the Pacific.

Absolutely not. Or at least, there would have been ZERO prospect of a return to the continent, or any counter-attack at Hitler’s Europe, without that support. England may have been able to hang on on their island but even then, the supply situaton might have left them no choice but to surrender. The U-Boat campaign had Churchill worried about this possibility as late as 1943, when American supplies were POURING into England and the U.S Navy actively fighting the U-boats in the Atlantic. So yeah.

1) yeah, but i didn’t have the time, space and inclination to go into a more nuanced analysis of the Eastern front. Casualties paint an easy to understand picture in the mind of the reader that the real lion’s share of beating Hitler was carried by the Russians. Yeah, lots of that was because of the incompotence of Soviet leadership – and poor equipment, poor supplies, and the general contempt Russian leaders always seem to have for their masses of peasant conscript troops.

But you could easily say that German casualties were a result of Hitler’s dumb decisions (which they were), or that American casualties in the Pacific were only because of Japan’s stupid ideas (fanatically holding every island without being able to relieve them by sea) or even America’s (MacArthur’s decision to retake the Philippines, mostly to assuage his ego then to gain a strategic advantage over the japanese). These sort of historical debates are endlessly cyclical.

2) No actually, a great many Canadians are pretty “meh” when it comes to Canadian history (which explains why the state of our armed forces has deteriorated over the last 30 years, but that’s another thing). For me, it’s because I feel there are things in our history that we can legitimately be proud of, that can be held up to the achievements of any “power” like the US or UK. You’re right, it’s likely because we live next to America, and few nations like to butcher history and shout about it like the Yanks do.

I agree that WWII was won off the sweat and blood of Stalin’s army,

The war in Europe was won by the blood of the Soviet army, they never even declared war on Japan until the last 2 weeks of the
war.
It was a world war, not a Europe war.

Hell, I quoted FDR’s “Arsenal of Democracy” speech, which was said right when Lend-Lease was being debated. I also strove to mention America’s materiel contributions at length – perhaps I should have mentioned it began before America was actually at war, but that seems immaterial to my point. I still think Amercan production power was a decisive factor (perhaps THE decisive factor) in the Allied victory in WW2.

And I thought of including my sources, but then I thought “What the hell? This is just my blog, not an essay I have to defend at a conference. If someone wants to call me on my facts, so what – maybe they’ll change my mind.”

nothing is off limits.

The Soviets and all the countries that would join the Warsaw Pact were offered the Marshall Plan in 1947 with the proviso of free elections must be allowed. Stalin wouldn’t allow it, and instead continued to take over countries for his Iron Curtain to protect against what he saw was imperialist aggression. It was a sound military strategy, to be sure, but it also doomed two generations of Eastern Europeans to totalitarian governments. The Soviet Union was not “cut off” from the rest in the world since it took over and installed proxy governments in Eastern Europe and allied itself with totalitarian governments in Africa, Asia and Central America.

by not being nice enough to the Soviet Union, you’re as clueless as the average American you describe in closing. The Soviet people’s struggles were, in the main, their own government’s doing, the same government that worked with the Nazis to brutalize Poland when it was to their advantage, whose atrocities outweigh Hitler’s by a substantial margin, and then sued for our help against a common enemy they had done everything in their power to assist until it was their own ass on the line. Once the A-Bomb came online, the Russians drew their own lines in the sand against us, and they never did go home, as they were busy enslaving Eastern Europe to a far worse degree than Germany ever managed. So spare us this ignorant nonsense. The average Russian hasn’t seen war up close, and hasn’t the first clue about being invaded. You do realize World War II ended 66 years ago, yes? Their only real enemy has been themselves, and the few Russians I talk to here, would say you don’t know what you’re talking about it the slightest.

no.

I didn’t read what you wrote, but I saw that you included Russia in your signature, so I’m pretty sure I didn’t like it.