“Actions (and inactions) have consequences. If we had kept the Russians out of Berlin, perhaps eastern Germany would have escaped the Iron Curtain fate.”

If we had participated in the conquest of Berlin then the deaths of thousands of American soldiers would have been a certainty. Someone (Harry S. Truman?) bargained that the certainty of letting those soldiers live had more value than the hypothetical advantage of capturing an already bombed-out city. History has shown that Truman made the correct choice.

buddy larsen said:

“Albert Speer could’ve done it –could’ve prevented the Holocaust, could’ve made peace –and likely ultimately deposed the Stalin regime.”

You’re assuming that Albert Speer could have out maneuvered ultra-scumbags like Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler or Martin Bormann. Speer was an urbane technocrat and not a ruthless psychopath. Goebbels, Himmler or Bormann would have made short work out of Speer. Goering on the other hand (assuming he had freed himself of his morphine addiction) could possibly have out maneuvered even Goebbels.

buddy larsen also said:

“a psycho in charge makes psychos of everyone in thrall.”

Unfortunately, this is generally true. A tiny minority of people in Nazi Germany managed to refrain from covering themselves with excrement, i.e. non-Communists who resisted the Nazis. Max Planck was a notable example of an honorable German.

“I should also add that the Western allies showed significant cunning in allowing the Soviets to conquer Berlin. We could have taken that prize but by allowing the Russian’s to take Berlin on their own, we enabled thousands of American soldiers to survive WW-II.”

By this reasoning we would have been even more cunning not to have entered the European theater at all, which would have saved a hundred thousand American lives.

Actions (and inactions) have consequences. If we had kept the Russians out of Berlin, perhaps eastern Germany would have escaped the Iron Curtain fate.

Again, I’m not disagreeing (your facts are correct). It’s scary to think what might have happened if Hitler hadn’t been such an idiot. However if Hitler hadn’t been an idiot then WW-II might never have started. Perhaps the ultimate disaster scenario might have been if Hitler had been assassinated shortly after the invasion of Poland and Goering becoming Fuehrer. Assuming that Goering could have broken free of his morphine addiction. he might have been able to steer Germany into a direction where it survived WW-II, i.e. not break the Molotov-Ribbentoff treaty and/or successfully invade Britain. I put Goering in this role because I can’t imagine any of the other top Nazis succeeding Hitler and not bringing Germany to utter ruin.

It’s true that the Soviets had tremendous casualties. Much of this was in the manner of human wave attacks (Google ‘backing units’). However, their role in the war was greatly aided by Lend-Lease (the U.S.) to the extent that it is very unlikely that they could have waged anything like the campaign they did to plow through Eastern Europe into Germany without it.

For the U.S., the war in Europe was far from an existential one, but it was for the Soviets (along with the rest of Europe), which explains in part the ferocity of their fighting and willingness to take casualties.

Hitler did indeed make horrible errors in tactics (particularly by not developing the Kondor in large numbers as a strategic bomber and in directing the Me 262 program to be for light bombers instead of intercept fighters) and strategy (if he had reversed the order of attacking the UK and the USSR he very well could have closed the deal in Europe). However, it was never a short or long term goal to attack the U.S.

None of which excuses the failure by the education industry to teach American schoolkids about the Pacific theater of WWII.

Which begs an interesting question: in speculating about alternate history, much has been discussed about what the world would have been like had they’re been no WWII, or, more realistically, no WWI (which laid the groundwork for the second war). The problem with the usual speculations is they assume total peace as the alternative. That would be nonsense. In the place of a world war, there would still have been a series of large regional conflicts, since the stresses and strains that led to first one, and then the other war, would still have existed. The U.S. would still have had to fight Japan alongside the British, Australians, New Zealanders, the French, the Dutch, and China. In the absence of WWI, the Austro-Hungarian empire would still have come apart at the seams, and their still would have been upheaval in Russia, but with possibly a different outcome. Russia would likely have fought a second war with Japan over Eastern Siberia (they did, in any case, as Bolsheviks, after the conclusion of their civil war), and would likely have joined the Pacific allies against Japan a decade or so later.

Golly, thanks, NahnCee. I just hope it isn’t a nuke, since I’m in the zone.

Ashen: the WWII vets who’re still alive are in their 80′s and 90′s, and they are the fathers of many of the posters here, including my own (Europe, after D-Day, 99th division attached to Patton’s army).

* * *

Ahhhh, using the same thinking as Al-Queda in Iraq; i.e., if killing 20 women and children in a market bombing isn’t sufficient to prove your dedication to Allah, then surely killing 60 will really impress Allah and guarantee victory.

And it worked out so well for Al-Q in Iraq, and is now working equally as well for the Taliban in Pakistan.

“Three generation of school kids have been exposed to the meme “Nazis bad, Nazis ‘right’, Republicans right, Republicans bad” and at least on an unconscious level this seems to have helped out the Dems, who almost exclusively populate the education industry.”

I don’t disagree with this analysis. It’s all part of the “Gramscian thing”. However it should be pointed out that the threat represented by the Nazis was indeed existencial. Had Hitler played his cards a little bit smarter, he might have been able to take over the world or at least permanently occupy a large piece of it. The Japanese on the other hand had gone nuts over the propaganda of Bushido and bit off more than they could chew. They were way out of their league when they went after China, the European powers and the United States at the same time. The Japanese would have been promptly defeated if the world hadn’t been distracted by the Nazis.