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Why did the US bother sending troops to Europe during the Second World War? (hexbear.net)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

AFAIK, their war lay primarily in the Pacific, and beyond supporting the Brits and Russians materially, I’m not really sure why the US would want to involve themselves physically in the European theatre. I do feel fear of Germans beating them to the bomb might have something to do with it, but that’s just conjecture.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

that's a really cheap price for beating the nazis and weakening soviet manpower relative to the lives of amerikkkan soldiers. and then you just show up at the end and still get half or more of the bargaining power? why would the us not choose that particular path?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

it'd be cheaper to simply not???

e: to expand, the choice was directly slow and starve the soviets, or to get a "bargain" where the Wallies only got to occupy only what they'd liberated themselves. the US would've gotten more if the USSR had moved slower, no?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

well my point is that then either they'd have to make peace with the nazis or they'd have to fight the nazis themselves. and 80% of the nazi military was engaged on the eastern front. the ussr did 80% of the fighting, countless casualties, fighting back a genocide, and the us gets to have essentially equal say to them in what happens in europe afterwards, doesn't have to actually fight through a nazi occupied eastern europe themselves? if the ussr moved slower then i agree that the us would have gotten more. but then the us would actually have to do more fighting. my suggestion is that the us had the strategic goal of the nazi defeat and was more than willing to let the soviets and them fight a pyrrhic war. why not? to the us, slavs were as pointless fodder then as they are currently.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

but they did fight the nazis themselves anyway? this tunnel vision toward divisions on the ground and dead elides a colossal investment in naval and aerial material. less dudes are on cruisers, destroyers, and air wings than infantry divisions, but their expense and military contribution isn't trivial. i mean we can even say strategic bombing wasn't militarily useful, but it wasn't cheap.

if you could imagine a ww2 where the US was a committed, not perfidious ally, how would they contribute in a way that they'd have comparable casualty figures to the USSR?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

but they did fight the nazis themselves anyway?

i'm not saying they didn't just that they had to fight way fewer than them. if the us were committed to anti-nazi action, they would have actually entered the war before being pressured into. i'm not trying to discount the amount or kind of support the us did give the soviets, i'm just saying that the us had a strategic interest in the soviet union military force being in a state at the end of the war that would be unable to combat the relatively undepleted us allied military force. the us wasn't exactly proactive in combatting nazism...