Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Did the Allied policy of ‘unconditional surrender’ prolong WW2?" video.

@matthiuskoenig3378 Lincoln died before the war ended, and when his successor, Johnson, tried to institute his lenient policies, he was strenuously opposed, sidelined, and eventually replaced by the hard-line radical Republicans, to the point where he became the only American president impeached by the House of Representatives in the first 200 years of the nation's existence. What prevented a second civil war was that the issues that caused the first one became irrelevant. Slavery was gone and was never coming back, but after a decade or so of Reconstruction the southern states were allowed to institute Jim Crow policies that prevented the former slaves from having any part in governing the southern states or the US as a whole, while the sharecropping system as well as the massive employment of convict labor kept them exploited economically far more efficiently than slavery had. At the same time, the south was so economically devastated and essentially colonized by northern moneyed interests that former system in which tariffs that fell chiefly on the south were the main source of revenue for the federal government no longer functioned - the south didn't shoulder the burden of supporting the federal government because there was little wealth left to be extracted from the southern economy. Along with this the economic and political power of the planter class who had brought the war on was broken. What put Reconstruction to its final end was one of the most corrupt political bargains in US history in 1877, in which the southern states agreed to let the blatantly fraudulent election of Rutherford Hayes stand in return for a Republican promise to withdraw all remaining troops from the south and cede control of the southern states to the exclusively white southern Democrats.
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@louisgiokas2206 Patton knew a lot more about tanks than about politics. The people of the US and UK would never have stood for a war of aggression in 1945 against the country that their own governments' propaganda had been telling them for four years was an ally in the fight for freedom.
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@insideoutsideupsidedown2218 The UK and France declared war on Germany as a response to years of aggression against its neighbors and broken promises about preserving the peace. It wasn't about protecting Poland, Poland was just the ultimate line the UK and France drew against German aggression. The pact didn't require the UK and France to go to war with anyone who attacked Poland, only Germany. The UK had never declared preservation of the 1920s borders in all of Europe as a vital national interest, but it did regard preventing Germany from overrunning all of central and eastern Europe as a vital strategic interest, as did France.
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Grant did not have the authority to address the political issues of the war. When he demanded unconditional surrender, it meant something entirely different from what we're talking about here: that the military forces - not the government behind them - he had defeated would have to surrender and become prisoners of war rather than being granted terms that would allow them to leave their hopeless position and either rejoin the enemy army or be allowed to return to their homes on parole. That practice - the offering of terms to surrounded garrisons that would allow them to return to their own side - had ended by the time of WW2. Interestingly, Lee's surrender at Appomattox - which was a surrender of his army, not an end to the war or a surrender of all Confederate forces - was NOT unconditional. Lee's soldiers were allowed to return to their homes after giving their parole not to engage in further rebellion, they were not required to take an oath of loyalty to the Union at that time, and officers were allowed to keep their sidearms and personal baggage. At that point Grant realized the war was effectively over and there was little practical threat of the soldiers rejoining the Confederate forces, so there was no point to marching them into prison camps. But those terms applied only to soldiers who were still with Lee's army at the end. Two of my great-great-grandfathers who had been captured earlier (but after the prisoner exchange system had broken down) were held for several months after the war, one at Fort Delaware and one at Libbie Prison in Richmond, which had formerly been used to house Union officer prisoners. The latter's family lived in Richmond (where I grew up) and my mother told me her grandmother had told her stories about trying to throw bread to her father through the upper story windows along with other children because the Federals were still starving the prisoners in revenge for the treatment of Union prisoners at Andersonville.
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@tancreddehauteville764 Many other wars of independence were ended that way. The Americans agreed to give up any claim to Canada in return for UK recognition of their independence, and the UK agreed to let most of Ireland become independent while retaining the six northern counties (which promptly caused a civil war in Ireland over whether to accept the treaty). The difference in the American Civil War was due to Union success on the battlefield, not the lack of political divisions on the issue of peace in the North - indeed, as late as November, 1864 the northern Democrats had an election platform based on a compromise peace with the Confederacy, and they were doing well until Sherman took Atlanta and more northerners began feeling that the war could be won in the near future.
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Ludendorff said different things at different times. After the war, he was one of the main authors of the stab in the back legend.
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What Grant was doing was something very different, though. The terms that were being requested had nothing to do with a political settlement of the war, it was a matter of whether the soldiers themselves would be taken into captivity (usually to be exchanged at a later date, at least for the first few years of the war) or whether they would be allowed to go home on parole or even to leave and rejoin their army as a unit (the so-called "honors of war"). AFAIK terms of that sort were never offered by any of the warring nations in WW2 - for example, when Wainwright was arguing over the terms of his surrender on Corregidor, the question was whether he'd be required to order every Allied soldier in the Philippines to surrender or whether he and his men would be allowed to surrender on their own, and the alternative was massacre - there was no question about whether the men would become POWs if they surrendered and no thought in anyone's mind on either side that they might be allowed to return to the US under any circumstances before the end of the war. What Roosevelt was demanding was something completely different - not just that the soldiers give themselves up into the enemy's hands, but that the entire nation do so. Grant had no authority to negotiate anything at that level.
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@torindechoza7266 America was at war with Germany 5 1/2 months after the USSR was, and while we know with hindsight that the failure of Barbarossa doomed Germany's war effort, pretty much everyone at the time outside the German high command thought that Germany was still winning the war in December 1941. The USSR declared war on Japan nearly four years after the US and UK did, and only after it was obvious to everyone on the planet that Japan had utterly lost the war - the only question was what would be required to get them to accept the inevitable.
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@torindechoza7266 You know there might have been some slight military action on the part of the US before D-Day. It might have even involved members of my family. If you want to know more, I suggest you check out the World War Two channel with Indy Neidell.
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