1. And yet, the Nazis were wrong. The Japanese were wrong. Their bet on British and American 'weakness' broke them only a complete destruction of everything they stood for. The Americans not only won WW2, but killed four Japanese soldiers for every American lost on both fronts, then destroyed Japanese industry and merchant fleet, and then nuked Japan. Twice. The people who were actually comitting civilizational suicide were
As kgbs wrote, interesting, but beside the point. But...what is APS for, if not for such digressions?
Yep, we gave much better than we got Loss Exchange Ratio-wise (LER = num_enemy_killed / num_friendly_killed) vs the Japanese.
Not so much vis a vis the
Germans, who had LERs greater than 1.0 vs every other opponent they fought. Luckily, we could equip LOT of Americans to die in numerous Sherman tanks for every Kraut tank and we were able to do the same "favor" for allies to ensure a target-rich environment for the Germans...until they ran out of fuel, ammo, or were just overrun. We were also able to make sure the Russians could fight the war and feed themselves.
Oh, and hte Germans were able to kill more of us than theirs that got killed, even though we had cracked a goodly portion of their encrypted commo. Who knows how many more Americans would have died in Europe without such intel?
And, why don't we toss in the not-so-well known fact that most of the German army was horse-drawn. Ours (American) was unique in that our logistics were entirely mechanized.
I think America was fortunate (Divine Intervention magnitude fortune) that Germany was run by a partially-mad man with a terrible sense of timing for taking on the Russians who foolishly declared war on America when he didn't have to. If Germany had to deal with only one front at a time, I think it would have taken atom bombs to beat them...if they didn't wind up developing them, too, under reduced pressure they'd have with just one front.